by Robert Gott
‘Your friend looks nice, sweet Stevie. Does he have a name?’
‘The name’s George,’ Starling said. He smiled up at the barman, who took the smile at face value, and put his hand on Starling’s shoulder. He squeezed it. Starling was careful not to flinch. He couldn’t afford to drag this out for too long. It was early, and doubtless more punters would begin arriving soon. He’d already decided to kill Steven McNamara. He’d have to do the barman as well now. He didn’t want a witness.
‘What can I get you to drink?’
‘You don’t have any beer, I suppose?’
‘No, love. The hidden miseries of war. We’ve got champagne, can you believe it? It’s not cheap, but you don’t look like a man who scrimps on anything.’
‘Champagne all right with you, Steven?’
‘That would be lovely.’
Steven relaxed completely. He felt safe here, safer than anywhere else in the world. He leaned back in the chair and put his hands in his pockets.
‘What’s your story, George?’
The barman brought a bottle of champagne to the table.
‘We don’t have a chiller, so it might froth when you open it. But that’s festive, don’t you think? Or would you rather I opened it?’
‘I’ll do it,’ Starling said. He held the bottle and made to open it.
‘You tell me your story first, Steven.’
‘All right. Well, I’m 22 years old — I know, I look younger. Everyone says so — and I live with my mother-in—’
Starling swung the bottle by its neck, and hit the side of Steven McNamara’s head with such force that the glass shattered, leaving Starling with the jagged shank. The barman had no time to register what had happened before Starling was on him, twisting the bottle’s neck into his throat. He pushed so hard that it stuck there. Starling stepped back, well out of range of the spray of blood that gushed when the barman pulled the weapon away in horror. He didn’t utter a sound as he first sat heavily, and then fell on his side. The astonishing volume of blood reassured Starling that he’d hit an artery. He checked Steven McNamara’s body. There was a deep depression above his left eye, which was open and unseeing.
Starling took McNamara’s identity card, and, very carefully avoiding the blood, took the barman’s card as well. Starling checked his clothes. He was clean. He left, taking one more look at his handiwork, and quickly scanned the staircase. No one was coming up. He went back into the room, took each of the hurricane lamps, and threw them against the wall. A dribble of blue fire crawled down the wall, pooled on the floor, and looked as if it might take hold. Starling didn’t stay around to make sure. If it didn’t catch, it didn’t matter — he’d made a good start to his evening. There was no one in the alley when he reached it, and he joined the throng of people in Little Bourke Street. He raised his hat to an elderly lady, and she smiled appreciatively. It was nice, she thought, that there were still some men with manners.
–9–
MARTIN SERONG, WHOM INSPECTOR LAMBERT considered the most compassionate and most accomplished of crime-scene photographers, had not yet finished his task when Lambert and Senior Sergeant Bob O’Dowd arrived. It was just after eight o’clock on Saturday evening, and Inspector Lambert had elected not to bring Sergeant Reilly or Constable Lord to the scene of this double murder. Each of them would benefit from a rest. He’d felt guilty about leaving Maude to make Tom Mackenzie’s house in South Melbourne habitable, but Maude knew, and accepted without rancour, that victims of violence would call her husband away at all hours of the day and night. Sergeant O’Dowd’s wife hadn’t been so understanding, and had complained bitterly that she’d now have to entertain his parents on her own.
Nevertheless, when he and Lambert walked into the dingy upstairs room, laughably described as a club, thoughts of his small, domestic ruckus vanished. The intermittent glare of Serong’s camera revealed two bodies and a great deal of blood. A single, electric bulb provided the only constant illumination. Three other detectives and the police doctor, who’d arrived ahead of Lambert and O’Dowd, were dusting and using torches to scour the room for evidence. They were experienced men, and Inspector Lambert knew that their practised eyes would settle on anything that seemed anomalous. O’Dowd placed his murder bag on the floor, and joined his colleagues. One of these, Detective Ron Dunnart, was Lambert’s age. He came across to him.
‘What do we know, Ron?’ Lambert said quietly.
‘The call was made to D24 anonymously. This salubrious establishment is apparently a private club — a private gentlemen’s club where only gentlemen are welcome, which is why the informant didn’t stick around. The bloke on the floor has had the business end of a broken champagne bottle rammed into his throat, and the bloke at the table has a crushed skull, the result of being hit with the same bottle when it was full. There’s champagne all over the place. There are no signs of a struggle. This was done quickly and efficiently. I suspect both victims were taken by surprise. Our killer is a cool customer. The doc thinks they’ve been dead for no more than a couple of hours. The killer tried to burn the place down on his way out. Two hurricane lamps were thrown against the wall, but the flames went out.’
‘So what do you think happened here?’
‘I think one of these blokes — the one at the table, I’d say — brought someone here who didn’t realise what kind of place it was until a hand went down his pants, and then he went berserk.’
‘Berserk?’
‘Wrong word. It’s too controlled to be the result of someone going berserk. Still, I think he did this when he found out what sort of place it was.’
‘Did you know the club was here?’
‘No. I’ll check with the CIB. Neither of the victims has any sort of identification on him. Maybe they got what was coming to them.’
‘Do you really think that, Ron?’
Ron Dunnart shrugged.
‘Well, Titus, some people don’t like being felt up by perverts. I can’t say I’d care for it myself.’
‘And this is how you’d react?’
‘I’d settle for a good punch.’
Martin Serong, who’d taken the last of his photographs, joined Ron Dunnart and Inspector Lambert.
‘What do you think, Martin?’
‘I’d say Ron’s right about the killer having a cool head, but I don’t think the place took him by surprise. He killed both these men within seconds of each other, which means both of them were relaxed at the time. If one of them had made an unexpected move on the killer, his shocked reaction, if he was going to have one, would have been impossible to control. That would have alerted one, or both, of his victims. The man at the table didn’t know what hit him, and the man in the make-up would have had no more than a couple of seconds to comprehend what had happened.’
‘Ron?’
‘Sure. That makes sense. Maybe our killer hates queers, let himself be picked up, and then chose his moment.’
‘I think that’s what happened,’ Serong said.
‘Okay. Ron, I want you and O’Dowd to work this one. The CIB might know who the regulars here are, and I want you to be discreet. This isn’t a witch hunt for homosexual men.’
He spoke briefly to the other detectives in the room, and before leaving he took Ron Dunnart aside.
‘We’ve known each other a long time, Ron.’
Ron became immediately defensive. ‘I’m not sure I like where this is going, Titus.’
‘If I hear, Ron, that any member of my squad uses information about the men who use this place to blackmail them, I’ll make bloody sure that that man gets a posting to Murray Bridge. Is that understood?’
‘Loud and clear, sir.’
Titus ignored the sneering edge to the ‘sir’.
‘Good. Keep me fully informed. I’ll leave you to it.’
‘We might learn something useful, though,’ Dunnart said.
‘Meaning?’
‘You never know who you’re going to find when you look under a rock, and you just never know how much they’re willing to pay to stay under it.’
O’Dowd smiled. ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Interesting.’
ON SATURDAY MORNING, Peter Lillee drove Joe Sable into Russell Street. There, Joe spent the next three hours dealing with the consequences of having been the victim of arson. There were forms to fill in, statements to be clarified, insurance claims to prepare, and myriad bureaucratic impedimenta that seemed designed to punish him further. He knew he ought to make contact with the other residents, but he didn’t feel up to accommodating their suspicion and blame. He looked briefly at the report that had been prepared on the dead neighbour, and noted the address of the next of kin. Would some form of condolence from him be appropriate, or even welcome?
He pushed the question to one side and walked up to the gymnasium on the fourth floor. It was only when he opened the doors and entered the impressive space — the ceiling here was two stories high — that he remembered he had no clothes to exercise in. As for many policemen — and the gymnasium was the exclusive preserve of men — the punching bags, rings, bars, and rowing machines offered Joe a release. He hadn’t been able to exercise properly since he’d been stabbed, but just being in the gymnasium, among the echoes of grunts, slaps, and thwacks, and even breathing in the smell of sweat, lineament, metal, and leather, calmed him. In some ways this was odd, because he never felt part of the camaraderie and crude banter of the place. He didn’t particularly like the men who exercised here. He understood, of course, that the culture of which he was a part was predicated on the ideal that one policeman would always support another. Society at large didn’t much like them, except when it needed to call on them in an emergency, so the only people they could really depend on were other policemen. Only a policeman understood the peculiar stresses and demands of the job.
And yet Joe could see that the ideal, if not false, was more honoured in the breach than the observance. There were tensions at Russell Street between the Masons and the Catholics. Most people stayed well out of it, but it was a conflict that created divided loyalties, even among those who were neither Catholic nor Mason. The cause of the trouble between the two groups was a mystery to Joe. He thought them both secretive and ridiculous, and it was in the gymnasium that he’d occasionally overhear a derogatory remark made by someone about one or the other. The vitriol between several of the officers was so fierce that Joe was shocked by it. He’d never heard anyone of his acquaintance, either inside or outside the force, speak so savagely against Jews, although he’d become increasingly aware of simmering anti-Semitism in some sections of Melbourne society. Masons and Catholics — what was the difference between them anyway? Joe had spent most of his life thinking they were the same thing, but clearly he’d been wrong. The incomprehensible allegiances of each group were as closed to him as the arcane and excluding sects within Judaism.
There were several men in the gymnasium. Joe knew all of them by sight, but only a couple of them by name. One of these was a man attached to the arson squad, and although he wasn’t assigned to the ‘Rosh Pinah’ fire, Joe assumed he might know something about the case.
Sergeant Prentiss was doing bicep curls with a dumbbell when Joe approached him.
‘Sergeant Prentiss?’
Prentiss, who was short sighted, but who never wore his spectacles in the gym, squinted to identify the speaker.
‘Sable.’ He put the dumbbell down. ‘I heard about your flat. Bastard of a thing to have happened. I heard you’ve got some lunatic after you. Is that true?’
‘You’re not doing your job properly if you haven’t made a few enemies.’ Joe said this automatically, without conviction.
‘Too right,’ Prentiss said.
‘You haven’t heard anything, I suppose.’
‘I know the boys are working overtime on it, but it only happened yesterday, mate. They’re doing their best.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Joe said quickly. The last thing he wanted was for Prentiss to report to his colleagues that Sable wasn’t happy with the progress they were making. Homicide had already acquired a reputation for being up itself.
‘I’m just checking. I think the Americans call it “touching base”.’
‘No worries. As soon as they’ve got anything, you’ll be the first to know.’
There was nothing unpleasant in Prentiss’s tone. It was just a statement of fact.
‘Thank you,’ Joe said. ‘I appreciate it.’
Prentiss picked up his dumbbells.
‘No worries,’ he said again.
In the afternoon, Joe met Peter Lillee and Ros and Helen Lord at the Hoyts Plaza Theatre. They’d planned to see The Moon and Sixpence, but the session was full. Instead they found themselves at the Hoyts Regent watching Sonja Henie in Marriage on Ice. No one really wanted to see this, and Joe had agreed to go to the cinema anyway, simply because it seemed a better alternative than sitting in the Kew house on his own. Opinions on the film were divided. Helen and Peter thought it was dreadful, an insult to a person’s intelligence. Joe and Ros quite liked it. It was inoffensive, Joe said.
‘Which essentially means it was pointless,’ Helen said, and wished she hadn’t. So what if Joe liked the stupid movie? Maybe it was a brief distraction from his troubles. To make up for the sharpness of her comment, and in the hope that she might repair any damage she might have done — she didn’t want to slip into fawning over Joe Sable, but she didn’t want to antagonise him with contrariness either — she allowed that John Payne was good in his role and that his performance was probably worth the price of admission. The business on the ice was quite well done, too. Joe, who hadn’t felt that Helen’s difference of opinion about Marriage on Ice was of any consequence, was oblivious to the small torment she was putting herself through.
After the film, the quartet returned to Kew, and Joe went upstairs. He ran himself a bath, taking Peter Lillee at his word and filling it well above the Plimsoll line. His bath at home had been too small to stretch out in, and this one was generous. The hot water relaxed his body, but his mind was a circus of disconnected thoughts. He’d never before been the focus of another person’s hatred, and it was both disconcerting and strangely exhilarating. He couldn’t account for the exhilaration. He’d always thought he’d feel something like this when he knew for certain that the woman he loved loved him and him alone. Here, dozing fitfully in slowly cooling water, he found that George Starling’s fierce, violent, and psychopathic loathing of him was thrilling. If he could go back into the Lamberts’ backyard, he wouldn’t now be afraid.
When Joe returned to the bedroom, he looked at his discarded clothes and decided they needed to be washed before he wore them again. He laid out a complete set of Peter Lillee’s clothes and stared down at them for a minute before putting them on. It felt strange. Although these were casual in style, he’d never before worn anything of this quality. The cotton shirt must have been bought before the war, the fine material having been woven in England. Nothing like this could be produced in Australia. His first thought was how he could stop himself sweating in the clothes, or getting them dirty.
When he went downstairs, he found Helen alone in the library, reading. She looked up, and whistled. He was embarrassed.
‘I feel a bit, I don’t know, odd, wearing someone else’s clothes.’
‘If it’s any consolation, you don’t look odd.’
‘Your uncle has expensive tastes in clothes.’
‘Uncle Peter has expensive tastes in everything.’
‘What does your
uncle do for a living?’
‘It’s a mouthful. He’s a banker, of sorts. He’s on the Commonwealth Bank board. He advises the Capital Issues Advisory Committee on controlling private investment. The government wants to restrict investment to projects associated with the war effort. That’s the limit of my knowledge about his job, and I’m not even sure I understand what I just said.’
‘Very impressive. Where are they, Peter and Ros?’
‘In the kitchen. Dinner on a Saturday night is always a decent one. Uncle Peter likes to help prepare it. It’s become a sort of tradition with us. I stay out of the kitchen. I think they like that time together. They were pretty close when they were children.’
Joe sat opposite Helen, and for the first time felt truly comfortable in her presence. Perhaps it was the soothing influence of the long bath, and the softly diffused light in the library. There was still bright sunlight outside, but it was tamed by filtering trees and dusty windows. Helen had seen him at his most vulnerable, weakened by his unreliable heart, and wounded in a hospital bed, and he felt no awkwardness about this. Nevertheless, from their first acquaintance the previous December, there’d been a stubborn distance between them. He knew that Inspector Lambert thought she was a better detective than he was, and he couldn’t shake how this galled him, even though he’d acknowledged to himself that it was true.
‘I really appreciate …’
Helen stopped him.
‘We could hardly say no to Inspector Lambert.’
Joe looked stricken, and Helen realised with dismay that the joke had fallen flat.
‘I didn’t mean that, Joe. It was supposed to be funny. We didn’t have to have our arms twisted to have you billeted here. If Inspector Lambert had had some other idea, we’d have insisted that you come here. I mean, imagine ending up in the Reilly household.’
‘You don’t like him much, do you?’