by Robert Gott
Starling loved everything about the City Baths. The gymnasium wasn’t crowded, and it smelled of sweat and lineament. The pool at this hour had only three men in it — two American soldiers, by their accents, and a flabby office worker. He had a lane to himself, and he swam ten laps. He was self-conscious about the clumsiness of his stroke, having learned it from observation and not instruction, so he was very pleased not to be looked at. He showered, and spent ten minutes in a deep, hot bath. It had been a long time since he’d felt something that came this close to contentment.
He changed into the second suit he’d bought. It was a dark, charcoal-grey number that had cost more than Peter Hurley paid him in a week. At 5.00 pm he was standing opposite police headquarters in Russell Street. With unusual patience, he waited for half an hour, and was rewarded when David Reilly stepped down into Russell Street. He wasn’t alone: there were two other detectives with him. One of them was the man Starling had seen at the private club. The other was familiar, too. He’d seen him in the yard of his father’s house in Mepunga. They were moving quickly. Starling followed them to Collins Street, and then realised where they were headed. Outside the Australia Hotel, three uniformed men were waiting for them. The man he’d seen in Mepunga gave them instructions, and they all went inside. Starling crossed to the southern side of Collins Street, put his suitcase down, and waited.
After a few minutes, two of the detectives emerged. The man named Reilly sat on a bench near the tram stop to the right of the hotel’s entrance. The other man leaned against a shop window on the other side of the entrance. Starling knew that they were waiting for him. They’d identified the bodies, and they’d made a connection between him and Steven McNamara. They must have seen his name in the Windsor Hotel’s register. One of them was smart, and had figured out that he might use Sturt Menadue’s identity papers to register at another hotel. Well, he’d saved himself some money. He hadn’t paid for his room in advance. He had his suitcase; he hadn’t left anything in the room, except his fingerprints. They were welcome to those — much good it would do them. They would have checked all the hotels in town for George Starling and Sturt Menadue, so he’d have to postpone his meeting with the Reilly bloke. That was fine. He’d do that tomorrow. For now, he’d take a tram up to Carlton, where his motorcycle was parked near the cemetery, its spare fuel hidden nearby. There were plenty of hotels in the northern suburbs where no one would think of asking for identification papers, and where rooms were cheap. It’d be a bit of a comedown. Still, it pleased him to know that he was one step ahead of the coppers. Finding Sable was, however, more urgent now. He would take Reilly in the morning, and he had a whole night to think about how.
‘DO YOU THINK the air will ever stop smelling of smoke?’ Maude asked.
Maude Lambert and her brother, Tom Mackenzie, were sitting in his small back garden. It was late, well after ten, and Titus hadn’t yet arrived from work.
‘It’s not an unpleasant smell, is it?’ Tom said.
It was a simple-enough reply, but everything he said made Maude’s heart sing. He was recovering at an astonishing rate, or he seemed to be. His physical injuries troubled him badly, but his mental state had improved so dramatically that it was as if someone had turned a switch in his head from ‘off’ to ‘on’.
‘I suppose it is quite nice,’ Maude said. ‘Aromatic. It represents such loss, though, doesn’t it?’
‘Titus works long hours. Is it always like this?’
‘Not always. Unfortunately, people don’t kill each other only during business hours.’
‘I didn’t imagine George Starling, Maudie. He was there.’
‘The reason we’re here at your house, Tom, is because Titus knows that you weren’t just having a waking nightmare.’
‘So he doesn’t think I’m crazy.’
‘No one thinks that.’
‘I sometimes think it.’
By the time Titus made it to Tom’s house, Tom had gone to bed. Maude had tried to keep a meal of cold lamb and salad palatable by putting it in the icebox. Titus, indifferent as always to the quality of the food he ate, cleared his plate. He was reluctant to join Maude in bed because he’d heard nothing from Port Fairy. He knew there would have been good reasons for this, and when the telephone call finally came through at 1.00 am, it took all his powers of concentration to overcome his exhausted mind and follow the complicated sequence of events. The suicide of Agnes Todd was particularly frustrating, and the consequences for Selwyn Todd troubled him. He’d speak to Greg Halloran in the morning and get his advice on whether or not he should come down to Port Fairy. He woke Maude when he got into bed. She’d have been furious if he hadn’t done so. She saw immediately that a great injustice seemed inevitable, and saw too that finding a solution to the murder of Matthew Todd might resist all the skills that the police had to offer. Short of a confession, the investigation looked depressingly as if it had been snookered. Having talked it through, at least Titus was able to sleep.
‘I’m glad anyway,’ he said, before dropping off, ‘that Joe is out of harm’s way in Port Fairy. George Starling is still in Melbourne. We know that for certain.’
THE LORD LUTTERAL Hotel in Coburg, a suburb about three miles to the north of Melbourne’s city centre, wasn’t a dive. It wasn’t grand either. At least Starling didn’t have to share a room; and the linen, although it smelled damp, looked clean. The proprietor was surprised that a man as expensively dressed as Starling would request a room there. He told his wife later that the suitcase probably meant that he’d been thrown out of the house by his wife, that this sort of thing was none of his business, and that asking about it was a recipe for being shirt-fronted. He’d managed to avoid being worked over by his patrons by not asking them too many questions. If they wanted to talk, they’d do it at the bar after a few drinks.
On Tuesday morning, Starling rose early. He hadn’t yet bought a razor, and he didn’t much care for the beard-shadowed face that met him in the bathroom mirror. He went downstairs to pay the bill, and had to wake the hotel owner to do so. The man came to the bar in pyjama bottoms and no top — a sight that Starling found unappealing.
‘Is there a barber around here?’
‘There’s a Greek bloke up the road. He opens at eight.’
‘How far is it up the road?’
‘About a ten-minute walk.’
Starling paid and left. By the time he got to the barber it would be eight o’clock, so Starling decided to walk instead of wasting petrol. He was the first customer. The barber was a bad advertisement for his own business: he could have done with a shave himself. As Starling waited for him to strop the razor and prepare the shaving cream, he flicked through that week’s copy of Truth. It was a rag, but it was good for the stories that The Age and The Argus wouldn’t touch. Divorce, rape, murder, and adultery were its bread and butter. Truth knew its patriotic duty, and reported war news on its front page. Beyond that, it was business as usual. Starling sat bolt upright in the chair, just as the barber was about to apply the cream. On page three, a headline screamed: ‘Port Fairy Murders Rock Town. Village Idiot Main Suspect. Police Tight-lipped.’ There was a photograph of two detectives and a woman coming out of a house. They weren’t identified, but they didn’t need to be. George Starling would have recognised Joe Sable anywhere, and he’d seen that woman in Mepunga.
‘You ready?’ the barber asked.
‘Quick as you can,’ Starling said.
Thirty-five minutes later, Starling was on his motorcycle and on his way to Port Fairy.
THE BELFAST CAFÉ in Bank Street served eggs from its owners’ chooks, chokoes from the garden, and scones instead of toast. It was an unexpectedly satisfying breakfast. Also unexpected was the photograph in that morning’s Port Fairy Gazette. It was similar to the one that had been flown to Melbourne the previous evening in time to make it into Truth. The headline in the Gaz
ette was less lurid, more sensitive perhaps to local sensitivities: ‘Todd Family Tragedy’. The story, cobbled together from neighbours’ comments, speculation, and gossip, offered nothing of interest to Joe or Helen. No one from the press had approached them.
‘Someone must have collared Paddy Filan or Inspector Halloran. They must have given them nothing,’ Joe said.
‘The parents are coming today. I can’t imagine how they’ll cope with this.’
The waitress, who was no more than 16, refilled the teapot.
‘That’s you in the paper, isn’t it?’ she said, and looked awestruck, as if a movie star had dropped into the Belfast café.
‘What’s your name?’ Helen asked.
‘Elizabeth, but Betty’s what I’m called.’
‘Did you know the Todd family, Betty?’
‘Too grand to talk to me. I seen them at church and that. Rose was all right. I didn’t like the way her husband gawked at me but. She was good. She come in here once or twice, for a malted milk. That Matthew wouldn’t be seen dead in here. Pardon me. He was stuck up, walking around with his nose in the air. Thought he was it and a bit.’
‘Did you know Miss Todd?’
‘Saw her at church, too. Never spoke to her. There’s the subo brother too. Selwyn. The paper reckons he went troppo and done it. Is that right? Is he locked up?’
Helen ignored the question.
‘What about Matthew’s fiancée, Dorothy? Do you know her?’
‘She’s all right. She works in the draper’s. She’s a bit stuck up, but not like the Todds. Don’t know what she sees in Matthew.’
‘Was he a bit of a gawker?’
Betty sniffed.
‘They’re all gawkers.’
‘Thanks Betty, you’ve been most helpful.’
Betty took the hint.
‘Happy to help, I’m sure,’ she said and went back behind the counter. Another customer came in. Betty said something to her, and she turned to stare at Joe and Helen.
‘The town’s had 24 hours to talk about Rose and Matthew,’ Joe said. ‘Imagine the shock when they find out about Miss Todd.’
‘Things like this can tear a small town apart. We need to find out who killed Matthew Todd before the rumour mill starts condemning innocent people.’
‘Do you want to talk to Dorothy Shipman, or should we both do it?’
‘I’ll do it.’
‘I’ll talk to the priest, and see what he can tell me about the Todds. There must be someone lurking in this town who hated Matthew Todd enough to kill him.’
‘And who doesn’t have a bloody alibi.’
HELEN AND JOE checked in at the police station before beginning their interviews. Inspector Halloran and Constable Manton had arrived, but Constable Adams had been left behind in Warrnambool. Aggie Todd’s death and its implications were discussed briefly. Manton was to visit the wharf and talk to the fishermen, if they weren’t all out in the Southern Ocean. Aggie Todd had mentioned, probably mischievously, that there were men in the Co-op who didn’t like Matthew Todd. Joe would join Manton after speaking to the priest. Inspector Halloran said that Inspector Lambert had asked whether he ought to come to Port Fairy, just as an extra pair of hands.
‘I don’t think he needs to come,’ Helen said. ‘We’re scheduled to leave on Thursday as it is.’
Feeling that she sounded miffed, she added, ‘What do you think, sir?’
‘I agree with you, Constable.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve already told him that he’d be in the way. Are you happy with that, Sergeant?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Any thoughts before we go our separate ways?’
‘Mr and Mrs Todd, sir,’ Joe said.
‘They’ll be here at lunchtime. I’ll talk to them. I’m not looking forward to it. Anything else?’
‘This case, sir,’ Helen said. ‘It seems so contained. It should solve itself, yet the closer we look at it, the more elusive it gets. There’s so much physical evidence, but it’s so confounding that we’re forced to work from assumptions. And what if every one of those assumptions is wrong?’
‘What are our assumptions, Constable?’
‘We’re assuming that the person who killed Rose Abbot isn’t the same person who killed Matthew Todd.’
‘Because of Agnes Todd’s evidence,’ Halloran said.
‘We’re assuming that she was lying, in which case we’re assuming she killed Rose.’
‘We do know that Matthew died hours earlier than Rose, and that he died somewhere else. That’s not an assumption.’
‘But assumptions flow from it. We’re still assuming it implies a different perpetrator. We’re assuming that all the alibis are solid.’
‘We’re not assuming that at all. However, I agree with you that none of our assumptions are safe. My own assumption is that we’re all proceeding on that basis.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Thank you for reminding us of that, and I mean it. It’s a timely reminder.’
SHIPMAN’S DRAPERY WAS closed.
‘They’re at home, love,’ a woman said. She’d seen Helen peering through the window. ‘There’s been a tragedy in the family.’
‘Yes. Can you tell me their home address?’
‘Are you a friend of the family? I haven’t seen you in town before.’
‘Yes. I’m a friend from out of town.’ This seemed easier than declaring that she was that freakish object, a policewoman.
The Shipman house was busy with people. Women were bringing pots of food, and men were standing outside, smoking. The door was open, so Helen walked into the house uninvited. Tragedy brought strangers along, so no one challenged her. For all anyone knew, she was a cousin of Dorothy’s.
Dorothy was in the living room. She was seated, and people were moving around her. She, however, was perfectly still. She wasn’t crying. Her face looked gaunt, as if tears already shed had drained it. Helen had never seen anyone so ruined by grief. She felt nervous about talking to her, but reminded herself that Dorothy Shipman might well have had a reason to kill Matthew Todd. Had she discovered that her fiancé had tried to rape Johanna Scotney? The emotionally eviscerated woman who sat before her seemed an unlikely suspect, but questions needed to be asked. Helen knelt down in front of Dorothy and took a limp hand in hers.
‘Miss Shipman, I’m a policewoman from Melbourne. My name is Constable Helen Lord, and I know this is a very difficult time, but I wonder if I could speak to you in private.’
Dorothy looked at Helen in stupefied wonder.
‘A policewoman?’
‘Yes. I’m here to help investigate the tragic death of your fiancé, and of his sister. Is there somewhere we could talk?’
Dorothy nodded. She wasn’t quite the comatose person she appeared to be. She stood up, waved away anxious, fluttering hands that reached out to support her, and led Helen into the privacy of her bedroom. She sat on the bed, and Helen sat at her vanity.
‘Please understand, Miss Shipman, that the questions I must ask are not intended to upset you.’
‘Of course, I understand. You’ll want to know if I had any reason to murder my fiancé, and you’ll want to know where I was on Sunday night.’
‘Thank you for making this easier for me.’
‘I’m a practical person, Constable. It seems funny to be calling a woman “Constable”. I had no reason to kill Matthew. I loved him. I loved him completely. I wasn’t blind to his faults. I knew that I could fix those after we were married. Oh, they were small things.’
‘Did you see Matthew on Sunday?’
‘I saw Matthew every day. On Sunday, we went to Mass with Miss Todd, Matthew’s aunt.’ She stopped suddenly. ‘Oh, poor Miss Todd. She doted on Matthew. This must be so terrible for her. I haven’t even spoken t
o her yet. She must feel so terribly alone. She must come here. She must come here now.’
Helen couldn’t withhold the truth about Aggie Todd from Dorothy, although she knew the blow would land with terrible force.
‘Miss Shipman, I’m very sorry, but Miss Todd is dead.’ She almost said ‘has passed away’. This seemed ludicrously passive when applied to a suicide.
Dorothy’s mouth opened in a silent gawp, and she fell back on the bed in a faint. Helen hurried to find her father, and he returned with her to the bedroom. They found Dorothy, white as a sheet, sweat running down her face, trying to stand. They sat her back down. Helen closed the bedroom door.
‘Miss Shipman has had a shock.’
‘What do you mean?’ Mr Shipman asked.
Helen showed Mr Shipman her credentials.
‘I’m afraid Miss Agnes Todd took her own life last night.’
‘That’s not possible,’ Mr Shipman said firmly. ‘Agnes Todd wouldn’t endanger her immortal soul by taking her own life.’
‘No, no, no,’ Dorothy said. She began to tear at her hair. ‘No! No! No!’ Her screams brought people running to the bedroom. Dorothy, in the grip of wild hysteria, began to thrash and beat at her face. Two women restrained her. They looked appalled, and admonished her not to carry on so. Dorothy began to convulse alarmingly.
‘Put her on her side,’ another woman said, ‘on the floor. We don’t want her biting her tongue.’
Mr Shipman was rigid with horror at the sight of his daughter, her dress dragged up over her thighs, her mouth flecked with saliva, and her limbs jolting grotesquely. The woman who issued the instruction to put Dorothy on her side took Mr Shipman by the arm and ushered him out of the room. This was no place for a man.