by Robert Gott
Joe went back inside. Tom looked at him, and with sudden recognition said, ‘Joe — he was here. Fred was here — out there.’
‘I searched, Tom. I couldn’t find him.’ He was reluctant to suggest that Tom might have been mistaken. Tom looked at Joe quizzically, and was about to speak when something in him seemed to collapse. The animation that appeared briefly in his face vanished. He stood up and returned to his bedroom. Joe, unable to hide his distress, said, ‘He thinks I don’t believe him.’
‘And do you believe him?’
‘I don’t want to believe him.’
‘Because that would mean you brought him here.’
‘Yes.’
‘Sit down, Joe. Nothing’s changed. This Fred, or George Starling, or whatever he calls himself — maybe he was here, and maybe he wasn’t. If he was here, he followed you. That doesn’t mean you brought him here.’
For Joe, this was precisely what it meant. Inspector Lambert would think so, and so would Helen Lord.
‘Titus won’t be here for a couple of hours. I’m afraid there’s no spare bed, just a fold-down camp bed in Tom’s room.’
‘I don’t think I should …’
‘No, of course. I was intending to bring it up here.’
‘I’m just as happy to sleep sitting up in one of these armchairs, Mrs Lambert, although I don’t imagine I’ll sleep at all tonight.’
‘I’ll get you some pillows when you’re ready.’
‘Does your back gate lock?’
‘There’s a bolt that goes across it. I’ll make a fresh pot of tea if you go out and bolt it.’
When Joe bolted the gate he shook it to test its strength, and then unbolted it and stepped again into the laneway. He was afraid as he stood there in the darkness. He had to force himself to stay there. If Starling was nearby, with his eyes accustomed to the night, he could take Joe easily. He swallowed, exquisitely aware that his heart was pounding and that at any moment it might miss a beat. He breathed deeply, concentrating on its rhythm; as he did so, it began to slow. He listened intently. There was a skittering nearby — a possum, or a rat. There were no other sounds. The air was still; so still that not even leaves rubbed together. He began to hear low sounds that must have been in the background always — a late tram rattling down Sydney Road, and, far in the distance, a car’s horn. There was, too, the sound of a motorcycle, faint and nowhere near Bishop Street. He was suddenly aware of the sound of breathing, and it took a moment for Joe to realise that it was his own. He went back into the yard, locked the gate, and returned to the living room.
‘I checked the lane again. Nothing. I think you should lock the back door. It wouldn’t hurt to take precautions, just in case …’
‘Just in case Starling really was here.’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me about him, Joe.’
Joe hesitated.
‘Titus has told me a good deal. I’m under no illusions about the type of person Starling is, but he’s never met him. You have. Tell me why my brother is so afraid of him. He’s never been afraid of anyone before.’
‘It wasn’t Starling who tortured Tom.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘In some ways, though, he’s even worse than the man who did.’
‘Is he a Nazi, do you think?’
‘He could probably spout a few bits of National Socialist philosophy, but I think he’s attracted to its ugliness, to the licence it gives him to be violent — not to anything else about it. It’s a way to express his hatreds.’
‘Titus thinks he’ll lose interest in it now that his leader is dead. Would you say that was likely?’
‘He’s a follower — I know that much.’
‘Yes, but will he find someone else to follow?’
‘I don’t think he will. None of the other people I met — the other sympathisers, those Australia First people — are candidates. Starling had nothing but contempt for them. He thought they were soft, effete little dandies.’
‘So politics won’t be driving Starling. That leaves what? Grief?’
Joe looked at Maude Lambert, and found that she’d been watching him closely.
‘Grief?’ he asked.
‘Yes. How close was Starling to Ptolemy Jones?’
‘Are you asking if Starling is queer? Nazis hate queers almost as much as they hate us. Jews, I mean. I’m Jewish. Did you know that?’
He hadn’t meant there to be, but there was a sharpness in the question that somehow implied that he needed to express this fact defiantly.
‘Yes, Joe, I knew that,’ she said quietly, and was offended that Joe thought he needed to be defiant with her. She wanted to say something, but held fire.
‘I was wondering if there’d been some element of homo-eroticism in the relationship between Starling and Jones. It would probably never have been acknowledged, maybe not even recognised as that. That isn’t really what I meant, though. What did Jones offer Starling? Just a political direction, or something more?’
Joe felt out of his depth, and was suddenly conscious of how young and inexperienced he was. Homo-eroticism. He wasn’t absolutely certain what that was, although he was pretty sure that there weren’t many women in Melbourne who could introduce it into a conversation with Maude Lambert’s unembarrassed ease.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Lambert. I’m not sure I understand what you mean by Starling feeling grief.’
‘His emotions may seem crude to you, Joe. The only emotion you’ve ascribed to him is hatred.’
‘That’s the only emotion I saw.’
‘Is that what you saw when Starling spoke to Jones, or looked at him?’
‘No.’
‘So what was that emotion?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Was it indifference?’
‘No.’
‘Annoyance? Anger?’
‘No. You want me to say “love”, Mrs Lambert, but it didn’t look like that either. If you ever met Starling, you wouldn’t believe he was capable of love. A shared passion for cruelty isn’t love.’
‘A shared passion for anything can sometimes feel like love. I don’t think George Starling needs National Socialism to feed his anger. I really do think it’s fed by grief, and I think that puts him beyond the reach of reason.’
‘So, revenge?’
‘Revenge, pure and simple. I remember, years ago, probably before you were born, Titus worked on a murder case that just seemed senseless. He couldn’t find a motive until he discovered that this was the second victim, not the first. The first had been killed in a fit of vengefulness. I can’t recall the details, but I do recall that after the first murder, the killer didn’t feel that his thirst for revenge had been satisfied, and so he looked around for people who’d only been peripherally involved in whatever the dispute had been. Titus was convinced that he wouldn’t have stopped at two. He would have moved out in widening circles from the centre, finding reasons to punish people.’
Maude paused. Joe understood that she was equating Starling with this earlier killer, and that she could only have formed this view from a close reading of the case notes.
‘We don’t have evidence that directly implicates Starling in any murders,’ Joe said.
‘Yes, it’s strange, isn’t it?’
‘Strange?’
‘Yes. Because your sense of him, and our sense of him, is that he’s at least as violent as Jones was. He’s a frightening figure.’
Joe thought about that.
‘Is it weak to be afraid of him, Mrs Lambert?’
‘It would be foolish not to be. I don’t think we’re inventing a bogey man, and this might be a bit forthright for you, but I believe that if he gets to you, he won’t stop at you.’
‘He won’t get to
me, Mrs Lambert. And I promise you, he won’t get to Tom either.’
IT WAS 3.00 am when Inspector Lambert made it home to Bishop Street. He’d dropped Helen Lord and David Reilly at their respective houses first. (The first thing Reilly said to his wife on waking her was, ‘You should see the house that Helen Lord lives in. It’s a mansion. She shouldn’t be taking a bloke’s job.’)
Joe and Maude were still awake when Titus entered the house. Before he’d spoken a word, Joe told him about Tom’s encounter, real or imagined, with George Starling. He spoke calmly, but there was a desperate edge to his voice that Titus couldn’t miss. It was a strange relief to Joe when Titus suggested that they should proceed on the assumption that Tom had, in fact, seen George Starling. To do otherwise was folly. There must have been some silent exchange between Titus and Maude, Joe thought, because Titus hurried to assure Joe that Starling’s being in the backyard didn’t represent a failure on his part. Rather, it provided further proof that the man they were dealing with was not to be underestimated. He briefly outlined what they’d learned in Warrnambool, and included the hideous cruelty meted out to John Starling’s animals.
‘Do you think he killed his father, sir?’
‘It doesn’t look like it, but I don’t think he’ll waste time weeping over him. He burned his house to the ground. I presume he would have inherited it. Clearly, he’s not the sentimental type.’
Titus suggested that they try to get some sleep. When Maude fetched a couple of pillows for Joe, he assured her again that he could sleep comfortably sitting up.
In the bedroom, Titus held Maude to him, despite the heat. He needed to feel her body against his skin. They spoke softly, conscious of Joe just a few feet from them in the living room.
‘Joe is sure he wasn’t followed,’ Maude said.
‘Joe wants to believe that.’
‘He shouldn’t be back at work, Titus. As soon as I saw him, I wanted to cry.’
‘At least if he’s at work we can keep an eye on him.’
‘How can you do that after hours?’
‘We don’t have the manpower to post someone at his flat around the clock, and we can’t do that here, either.’
‘You really believe that this Starling creature was here, don’t you?’
‘I’m certain of it. However alert Joe thinks he is, he’s injured, he’s scared, and he’s not himself. On top of that, he’s inexperienced, and he can’t get past feeling guilty about Tom.’
‘I didn’t help him, did I?’
‘Please, darling, don’t you start feeling guilty, too.’
‘I don’t feel guilty. I’m just angry with myself.’
‘You and Tom — well, all of us — need to move somewhere safer. I can’t protect us here; not now.’
Maude knew that he was right, although her fears were for Tom, not for herself.
‘We can stay at Tom’s house. It’ll be messy, but it’s got two bedrooms. What about Joe?’
‘He won’t like it, but he can’t stay at his flat. I’m not giving him a choice. I’m billeting him with Helen Lord.’
‘Does she know this?’
‘Not yet, and neither does Joe. I knew she and her mother lived with her uncle in Kew. What I didn’t know until this evening is that the house is huge. It’s a proper Victorian pile. There must be half-a-dozen bedrooms; more, probably. It’s the kind of place that would have a butler’s pantry — whatever that is.’
‘How did Helen Lord go in Warrnambool?’
Titus elaborated on the sketch he’d given earlier of their investigations. He expressed reservations about David Reilly — reservations he’d spoken of to no one else. As they both began to drift into sleep, Titus said, ‘There’s something eating away at Joe. Something apart from this case.’
‘I think it’s Europe,’ Maude said, but Titus’s breathing had deepened, and he didn’t hear her.
–6–
WHEN MATTHEW TODD looked at his sister, Rose, he wondered, just as his Aunt Aggie did, why she didn’t take more trouble with her appearance. She was a looker, but everything about her was practical. She had a practical haircut, wore practical clothes and shoes, and never wore make-up. Matthew didn’t understand people who took no pride in their appearance, unless there was nothing about them that was worthy of pride — and, God knew, there were legions of people like that. Rose’s choice of husband had done nothing to raise Matthew’s opinion of her. She’d married beneath her; beneath all of them. John Abbot was stocky, stolid and, yes, practical. He was plain as a pikestaff, and when Matthew visited, Abbot thought the occasion was so inconsequential that he wore his singlet indoors. In fact, he’d been known to sit down to lunch in a singlet, and Matthew found his hairy shoulders an affront to etiquette. It didn’t seem to bother Rose in the least, which was proof enough for Matthew of how far she’d fallen.
The Abbots ran dairy cattle on a large property outside Port Fairy, on the Portland side. John Abbot had been raised by his father, his mother having died when John was ten years old (‘Sensibly died,’ Aunt Aggie had said). This explained his staggeringly awful uncouthness, Matthew supposed. Old Mr Abbot had died at the age of just 55. He’d never looked youthful, and most of the mourners at St Patrick’s — and the church had been full — were surprised to learn that he was so young. He’d always been referred to in the parish as ‘old Mr Abbot’. Father Brennan knew that Abbot could be relied on to leave £5 on the plate each Sunday — a donation that hadn’t been continued by his son. John Abbot’s view was that you paid money to go to the pictures, but that being bored numb every Sunday should be free.
There was a reason Matthew had taken to visiting his sister. His reason had a name: Johanna Scotney. She wasn’t officially a Land Army placement on the Abbot farm, but her employment protected her from being put somewhere out of the district.
Johanna Scotney was 18 years old, the daughter of a fisher-man in Port Fairy — not one of Matthew’s clients — and she was pretty. Matthew hadn’t settled yet as to whom she most closely resembled. He judged all women against their resemblance to someone he’d seen at the pictures. It didn’t matter how faint the resemblance, he saw the actress first and the real woman second. Rather than wrestle with a woman’s personality, he found it simpler to ascribe to her the traits of the carefully scripted and directed character played by her vague shadow in some film or other. His Aunt Aggie was Judith Anderson — not the severe lesbian, Mrs Danvers, in Rebecca, but the less off-putting Ann Treadwell in Laura. Rose was Ann Sheridan, stripped back to basics, unmade-up and poorly lit. For Johanna Scotney, Matthew was tossing up between Deanna Durbin and Ann Baxter. Either way, she needed deflowering, and he’d begun his campaign by making what he believed to be the occasional erotic remark to her. So far, she’d met him with stony, disapproving silence.
ROSE ABBOT SUSPECTED that her brother’s visits, and his willingness to stay for lunch, had to do with Johanna Scotney, rather than with his having any interest in her, her husband, or the farm. The potatoes and eggs he took away with him weren’t sufficient to encourage grateful lingering. She’d watched him follow Johanna with his eyes, and she’d noted with abhorrence the lewd set of his mouth when he did so.
He’d arrived earlier than usual this morning, and Rose hoped he wasn’t intending to stretch his stay until lunch. It was just after nine when she heard his bicycle clatter against the front door. She and Johanna were in the kitchen, talking about the boy in Port Fairy who was tentatively courting her. It had become a ritual after the morning milking for Rose and Johanna to repair to the kitchen while John Abbot checked fences and did running repairs on machinery. The intimacy between them was easy, sisterly, but wasn’t so deep that Johanna felt able to raise her feelings about Rose’s husband or her brother. When she’d first come to the farm, in June the previous year, John Abbot had been cool to her, resentful of her femaleness, beca
use the person he’d wanted was a male. Farm work was for wives and blokes, not young sheilas — especially young sheilas who looked like Johanna Scotney. She pulled her weight, though, so his resentment subsided, and he stopped minding paying her the 40 shillings a week that Rose insisted was fair. After all, the going rate was 30 shillings, and that included food and board. Johanna didn’t need three meals provided — lunch was all — and she went home at the end of each day.
Johanna had disliked John Abbot on sight. He was short, and she didn’t like short men, and he could only be bothered shaving a couple of times a week, so his already ugly face was made uglier by dark bristles. Still, Rose and John Abbot seemed solid, reliable, and hardworking, so she didn’t mind that her feelings for John were unpleasant. They would gradually calm into indifference, or they might have done if, about three months after her arrival, John Abbot hadn’t made an obscene remark to her. They’d been repairing a fence, refitting a strainer, when Abbot had said, out of the blue, ‘You’ve got a bloody good set of breasts on you. Anyone ever tell you that before?’
Johanna hadn’t known what to say. She blushed and turned away from him.