by Robert Gott
‘That’s not a good idea,’ Joe said. ‘If you do find him and start asking questions about his tattoo, he’ll know where you got your information. He’ll put two and two together, and know I’m a copper. That would ruin any chance of Tom or me being able to look further into Our Nation. Even if I did find him, I wouldn’t talk to him, not on my own. Anyway, you said you were through with Intelligence.’
‘You said you were through with Intelligence.’
‘I think I am, but I suspect you’re never through with them once you’ve worked for them. Besides, I don’t think Chafer and Goad would appreciate Our Nation being alerted to their interest in them. It would drive them further underground.’
Helen immediately saw that Joe was right, and told him so. On the other hand, as she took her seat on the tram, she wondered why she shouldn’t find this Mr Jones on her own. That would be a feather in her cap. She was smarter than a Nazi thug who couldn’t spell ‘argument’. Jones seemed to her more comical than dangerous, despite Joe’s assurance that he was a nasty piece of work. If she couldn’t outwit a pantomime Nazi, what kind of police officer was she?
When Joe returned to his flat, he went straight to bed. He hadn’t mentioned the vandalism in the cemetery. Had he been afraid to test Helen Lord’s reaction? That was the most likely reason, and the thought depressed him.
Clarry Brown stayed in his café until very late. It was preferable to going home, and maybe Jones would drop in. By ten o’clock he’d given up on that notion, and was about to leave. He’d been rehearsing what he’d say about the Jew he’d killed, and with each silent rehearsal he’d made an elaboration — nothing big, nothing too far from what had actually happened. He’d added a brief conversation. He thought Jones would like the story better if the Jew knew in his dying moments that this was retribution, that none of his kind was safe anymore. Should he give him some last words? Yes. The Jew should beg for his life so that Clarry could demonstrate the Jew’s cowardice and his own implacability. He wasn’t the kind of man who could be weakened by pity. Having settled on a final version, he went over it in his head again and again. When he finally got to say it, he wanted it to sound like the truth.
Jones arrived just as Clarry was on his way out. He was alone, and smelled of perfume. He seemed unsurprised to find Clarry still there, and also seemed tenser than usual — almost agitated. His mood constrained Clarry from launching into his story. Jones sat at a table and asked for a glass of water. Clarry brought him one, checking it out before he put it down. Jones didn’t like smeared glasses.
‘I killed a Jew last night,’ Clarry said.
‘What?’
‘I killed a Jew in Toorak. It’ll be in all the papers tomorrow. I killed him. Just like that.’
Jones didn’t react the way that Clarry had expected. He’d been hoping for a slap on the back. Instead, Jones got to his feet and grabbed Clarry’s shirt front.
‘Who saw you?’ he asked.
‘No one. It was dark. Really dark. There was no one around.’
‘Did the Jew see your face?’
At this point, Clarry decided not to go on with his elaborated version of events.
‘No. He didn’t even know what had hit him, and no one heard anything, either. He didn’t make a sound. I hit him from behind, hard.’
Jones pushed Clarry away from him.
‘You’re a bloody fool. You could lead the coppers right here.’
‘What about with Fred the other night?’
‘Fred was there. I trust Fred to get it right.’
Clarry became sulky.
‘I did a good job. It was clean, and now there’s one less Jew. You should be happy about that.’
‘Did anything fall out of your pocket — a handkerchief, a key, anything?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure? What about fingerprints, a button, a hair, footprints?’
Clarry tried to remain confident.
‘Of course not. The footpath was concrete.’
Clarry wasn’t really sure if this was true, but Jones began to calm down.
‘You don’t do anything, Clarry, unless I authorise it. We don’t want wallopers sniffing around just because you’ve been careless.’
‘There’ll be no coppers.’
Jones sat down again, and indicated that Clarry should join him.
‘You’ll have to close this place tomorrow and the next day, which is New Year’s Day anyway.’
‘I’ve got to make a living.’
‘You call this dump a living? Your wife must have some money.’
Clarry’s silence indicated the truth of this assumption.
‘We might need to meet here, and I don’t want any nosey customers hanging about.’
‘What’s up?’
‘Nothing you need to know about. Just be here, and put the “Closed” sign on the door.’
Clarry’s sulkiness was obvious. As Jones stood up and walked out the door, he added, ‘You did all right killing that Jew, Clarry.’
Not for the first time, Clarry was amazed by how good he felt when Jones praised him. He’d do a lot for the party to feel more of this.
New Year’s Eve
-19-
Constance Thorpe rang Inspector Lambert at 11.00am on New Year’s Eve. Mary Quinn had failed to show up for that day’s recording. She was now three hours late, and there was no answer from her room at the Windsor Hotel. She’d never been this late before. The staff at the hotel were reluctant to enter her room because she’d issued strict instructions the previous evening that she wasn’t to be disturbed under any circumstances.
Inspector Lambert and Constable Lord were at the Windsor fifteen minutes later. This time, the concierge offered no resistance to Titus’s demand to be let into the room. Titus had been dreading what he might find there, and had already begun to feel desperate about his inability to protect Mary Quinn.
The room was empty, and there were no dramatic signs of disturbance. The bed was unmade, and a pillow had fallen to the floor. The only other object in the room that was out of place was an overturned chair. It struck an odd note.
‘I want every inch of this room searched,’ Titus said, and Helen could hear the frustration in his voice. ‘And, Constable, I want you to squeeze as much as you can out of that officious little concierge. If Mary Quinn left under duress, how did it happen without somebody seeing something?’
Within a few hours, certain facts had been established. Joe Sable had interviewed the cast at the 3UZ studio, and confirmed that Jack Ables had been with Mary Quinn the previous evening, and had seen her going into the Windsor at about 6.30.
Helen had given the concierge the rounds of the kitchen, but he’d been adamant that he’d seen no one dragging Mary through the foyer. Indeed, he’d seen neither hide nor hair of her after she came into the foyer at 6.30, which confirmed Jack’s story.
There was nothing in the room, besides the upturned chair, to indicate that violence had been used. There were clothes still in the wardrobe, and several changes of underwear in a drawer. These items alone seemed to indicate that either Mary was intending to return or that she’d left against her will. All they could do was wait.
Jack Ables had told Sergeant Sable that he hadn’t seen anyone or anything unusual when he’d said goodbye to Mary Quinn. As this wasn’t quite true, he began to worry about it. Should he have mentioned the man who’d propositioned him from across the street? What would have been the point? He didn’t want to alert the police to his own proclivities, and he wasn’t sure how to explain his noticing the man without giving himself away.
Jack had never discussed his dalliances with anyone. He supposed that some people suspected the truth, but no one had ever been so vulgar as to question him about his sex life. The acting profession was an unusually tol
erant one. Constance Thorpe’s living arrangements were well known, for example, but Jack had never heard the word ‘lesbian’ used in relation to her. Jack didn’t know Constance particularly well. The Red Mask was the first time he’d worked with her professionally, although they’d met several times when she was a lowly producer’s assistant. The war had elevated her to the role of producer, and the success of The Red Mask would probably secure that position for her when the war ended. Jack Ables decided that he could safely be frank with Constance and ask her what she’d do in his position.
Constance listened to Jack’s story without a hint of disapproval, which didn’t mean she didn’t feel any. Constance was conservative about sex — other people’s sex. She certainly didn’t approve of the casual couplings of homosexuals, any more than she approved of the casual couplings of heterosexuals. She advised Jack to certainly talk to Homicide about the man he’d seen, but stress that his attention had been caught by the man’s strange stillness as pedestrians flowed around him. He didn’t need to mention his frotting gesture. Jack Ables was the heroic Red Mask, after all, and the Red Mask did not have sex with strange men. That wouldn’t go down well with 3UZ listeners.
Jack Ables was sent by a constable to the Homicide office on the fourth floor, where Helen Lord met him and took his statement. To her surprise, Jack also showed her his drawing of the mystery man he’d seen. In the time it had taken between talking to Constance and walking to Russell Street, he’d drawn a small picture of the man. Jack was technically proficient with a pencil, and had always thought he might have succeeded as an artist if he’d put his mind to it. The drawing showed no detailed features, but Jack was happy with the way he’d captured the general air of the man. It was a likeness without being a portrait. When Jack looked away from the sketch, and then looked quickly back at it, he was confident that he’d made the figure recognisable to anyone who’d seen him before. He was so happy with it that he’d jauntily appended his initials to it.
Helen thought the sketch was too impressionistic to be of much use. Nevertheless, when Joe Sable came out of Inspector Lambert’s office, she showed it to him.
‘Ptolemy Jones,’ he said immediately. ‘That’s incredible.’
Jack Ables was chuffed. He was less chuffed when, under further questioning, he almost gave away his reason for having such a clear recollection of the man. Having established that this was the first and only time that Jack had seen the man, and that he’d never heard Mary Quinn mention anyone named Ptolemy Jones — Jack was certain he would have remembered such a bizarre juxtaposition of the odd and the banal — Joe thanked him and said that he’d been most helpful.
As soon as Jack left, Joe and Helen went in to see Titus. This was the first real break they’d had in the investigation, although the nature of the revelation wasn’t absolutely clear. As Titus reminded Joe, a pencil sketch wasn’t a photograph, and his wishful thinking might have transformed a vague resemblance into a positive identification. Joe bridled slightly at this suggestion.
‘I don’t think so, sir. As soon as I saw that drawing, I knew who it was. That sketch is as good as a photograph.’
‘No it isn’t, Sergeant. Let’s assume for the moment that we can make some sort of connection between Jones and Mary Quinn. Where does that lead us?’
‘At its crudest,’ Helen said, ‘it could mean that Jones has some sort of vendetta against the Quinn family and that he wants to kill them all.’
‘We know he’s a Nazi, sir,’ Joe said, ‘and we know that John Quinn was keeping tabs on Australia First. Maybe Jones found out about this, and thought he’d punish him and his family.’
‘You said in your notes, Sergeant, that Jones didn’t meet the Australia First people until Christmas Day. The Quinns were murdered on Christmas Eve.’
‘John Quinn must have met Jones before Magill did. I don’t know how or where.’
‘That’s the problem. You can see how easily this sketch could lead us in the wrong direction. And even if the man in the sketch was Ptolemy Jones, no one saw him enter the Windsor, and no one saw him leave with Mary Quinn over his shoulder.’
There was a disappointed silence.
‘It would, of course, be very helpful if we could place Jones as having been anywhere near the Quinn family in the recent past,’ Inspector Lambert said. ‘I’m happy to bring him in as an incidental person of interest.’
‘I won’t be able to question him, sir,’ Joe said. ‘If he finds out I’m a policeman, the Intelligence investigation will be compromised.’
‘We have to find him first,’ Helen said. ‘He’s no longer at Candlebark Hill if he’s hanging around the Windsor. Does Intelligence have an address for him?’
‘No. He’s unknown to them. Magill might have one, though.’
‘But if we go to Magill, he’ll know we got onto him through you.’
Joe thought for a moment, and contradicted what he’d said just moments earlier.
‘Mary Quinn’s life is more important than any of us tracking a few lunatic extremists. I think blowing my cover with Magill is a risk we have to take. I’ll go to Magill and tell him I have to see Jones pronto. If Jones is back in Melbourne, we can assume they all are. I’ll drive out to Hawthorn now.’
‘Are you sure about this, Sergeant? If Intelligence believes they’re dealing with some sort of fifth column in Australia First, alerting Magill might be a bad idea, and you might compromise both investigations — and all on the basis of that sketch. No, I don’t want you to go to Hawthorn. I want you to go downstairs and get as good a likeness as you can of Jones from the police artist. We can start showing that around. We might get lucky. We’ll take the line that this man was seen near the Windsor Hotel, and so forth. That way, there’s no connection to you, and no connection to Intelligence’s investigation.’
Joe could see the sense in this, and could see, too, the way in which he’d be able to get to Magill with a convincing story about his urgent need to find Jones. He’d turn up in Hawthorn waving the police sketch and fabricating a good dose of outrage that Jones had somehow got himself into trouble and that his likeness was all over town. He needed to find Jones and clear this up. He needed an assurance from him that whatever it was the police wanted to talk to him about wouldn’t expose all of them to unwarranted scrutiny, and wouldn’t threaten the plans they’d begun to make at Candlebark Hill. As Joe turned this scenario over in his mind, he was satisfied that it was convincing and that he could carry it off. He’d check with Chafer and Goad first, just in case they’d located Jones. It would save everyone a lot of trouble if they had.
The police artist took less than half an hour to produce an image of Jones that Joe was happy with. It wasn’t a vague likeness; it was close to being a portrait. Getting printed copies would only take a couple of hours, and Joe was confident that, once it was distributed, anyone who knew Jones couldn’t help but recognise him.
Meanwhile, Joe telephoned Tom Chafer, who told him that they hadn’t unearthed any information on a Ptolemy Jones, which made him suspect that it wasn’t his real name. It was highly unlikely that such an active National Socialist had escaped their surveillance completely.
‘As I told you, the Nazis used to meet at a house at Belgrave back in the Thirties,’ he said. ‘We know all of them, and we’ve got photographs of the main players. If Jones was one of them, he’d only have been a teenager. There’s one picture, not a very good one, of a group of them leaving the house. I suggest you come in and see if you can identify him in that group. If we can connect him to someone else in the photograph, someone we know, there’s a chance we can oblige that person to give us his name — his real name.’
Even over the telephone, Chafer’s tone was objectionable. When he said, ‘his real name’, there was a pointless, groundless implication that Joe was somehow responsible for ‘Ptolemy Jones’ being an alias. But finding Jones was more
important than scoring points over Chafer, so Joe simply agreed to go down to Victoria Barracks.
Joe went to tell Inspector Lambert that this was his intention. Afterwards, as he was leaving, Titus issued an invitation to him and to Helen Lord.
‘We have a small get-together every New Year’s Eve, at our place. Nothing fancy — just a few friends and family. If neither of you is doing anything, you’d be most welcome. Tom will be there, Sergeant, and you’ve met him, so not everyone will be a stranger.’
‘You’ve spoken to Tom, sir?’
Titus looked puzzled.
‘No, I haven’t. He always comes. It’s a standing invitation. What do you mean, have I spoken to him? Why would I have spoken to him — or, more to the point, why wouldn’t I have spoken to him?’
Joe’s confusion was obvious to both Titus and Helen, and he covered it badly by saying that Tom hadn’t struck him as the party type. Titus, who was now aware that something was up, let it go. But when Joe had left, he said to Helen, ‘Do you know anything about Sergeant Sable and my brother-in-law, Constable?’
Helen, who was a more accomplished liar than Joe, said, ‘I didn’t even know you had a brother-in-law, sir.’
The photograph that Tom Chafer pushed across the desk to Joe was of half-a-dozen men standing at the front steps of a weatherboard house. It wasn’t a good photograph. None of the faces was crisp and in focus, but a teenage boy at the edge of the group was unmistakeably Ptolemy Jones. He was tall for his age, and his narrow, vulpine features had already settled into their adult shape.
‘Well, well, well,’ Chafer said. ‘How very interesting.’
‘Don’t tell me he’s one of yours.’
Chafer laughed.
‘No, Sergeant, he’s not one of ours. He’s the one person in that picture we’ve never identified. I suppose the fact that he was a child made it seem unimportant. However, we know the others, and it shouldn’t be difficult to track down a couple of them, and make it clear that it would be in their best interests to give us the name of their little acolyte. I think we’re making progress, Sergeant.’