A new and dramatic element had entered the story. It was printed in a separate ‘box’ under the heading Call-box Riddle:
Burlington, under police interrogation, continued this morning to maintain that Jessica had telephoned him from a public call-box in St Kilda at 12.35 a.m.
Detective-Inspector Graham Craik, of the CIB, who is in charge of the police investigations, revealed today, however, that for the past six weeks, in the St Kilda area, as a check on larrikinism, gang operations, and housebreaking, all telephone calls made after midnight from public call-boxes in the district, have been monitored at the exchange.
There was no record, he added, of any call having been made to Burlington’s number from any public telephone in the municipality.
It is believed that police may ask for Burlington’s remand in custody at the City Court on Monday morning, pending the coroner’s inquiry at the City Morgue, to where Jessica’s body has been moved.
Investigations continue meanwhile at the scene of the tragedy.
Even with this, the storm did not burst in its full fury until the Monday.
Melbourne then had no Sunday newspapers, and I was trapped in the terrible hiatus of waiting and not knowing. I spent as much time as possible away from home, for I was frightened that Dad or Mother would ask me questions. I must have spent hours and hours in aimless walking; or perhaps subconsciously there was a kind of guidance in it, a sort of symbolic ‘night journey’, for I remember standing alone on the end of the jetty at Point Ormond, from where Jack and I had watched the cyclone approaching, and crossing the vacant allotment where we had sheltered in the cement pipes, and walking up past the new concrete café that had replaced the old kiosk, and then along through endless blocks of dreary streets to the golf links where we had climbed the little knoll and tobogganed down the onion-grass and talked of Everest, and where, eleven years later I was to see Cressida for the first time in my life, cleaning 3.7 shells in a gunpit.
I kept assuring myself that I was safe enough from any possibility of involvement. I had never told my parents anything about Sam Burlington or the studio in Spring Street. And journalistic colour had begun to move the picture away from mere art students into a presumably more depraved world of ‘nude models’ and ‘bohemian painters’. There was no reason for alarm. There was nothing that could affect me.
What I failed to take into account was the effect of the story on the staid, stiff attitudes of conservative Melbourne. It was as if a vent had opened in the very structure of society, out of which suddenly exploded the violent antagonisms and resentments and prejudices which had smouldered and intermittently spluttered for almost a decade. The whole rebelliousness of youth in conflict with the embitteredness of an older generation was only, I think, a part of it. There was also, I believe, something faintly hysterical in the indignation of the worthy and the virtuous, as if by the very loudness of their cries they might silence their own guilts and conscience in the matter; as if by concentrating their angers on this target suddenly exposed in all its brazen implications they might find in a clamour of self-righteousness some substitute for lost values and discarded standards. And they resented the intrusion of ugliness into the long, golden afternoon that was to continue forever.
Exposed suddenly before their outraged eyes was the whole inimical world of ‘young bohemia’. Here was the obscene graffiti of the Jazz Age scrawled all over the solid, dignified grey stones of ‘Australia’s proudest city’. Here, in shameful exposure, were naked girls posing for depraved young men not even old enough to vote. Here were barefaced admissions of sexual intimacies, of almost Parisian immorality and profligacy and decadence, culminating, as if God had shown his righteous wrath, in the raw brutalities of rape and murder.
In the newspaper of that Monday there was very little that was new to add to the case, but the headlines were inflammatory, and every newspaper fulminated in editorials against youth’s lascivious betrayal of its responsibilities. With sickening bad taste, one of the more sensational weeklies devoted half its front page to a reproduction of Sam’s painting of Jess naked, giving the last loathsome touch of obscenity by masking out the pubic area of the picture.
Curiously enough, the police, at the formal hearing, asked for an adjournment but no remand in custody, and Sam Burlington was allowed to go home. I stayed away from Life Class that night, but I heard later that Sam did not attend either – nor ever did again. He must have spent the night in his studio, because somebody told me next day that for half the night there were press photographers waiting in cars all the way along Spring Street.
At supper my father was strongly aligned with the virtuous accusers. Sam Burlington, as far as he was concerned, was already convicted. ‘That vile murderous young brute’ was the way he referred to him, and he fed his misogynism on Jess as a ‘loose dirty little trollop who deserved everything she got’. I pushed my plate back and began to leave the table, but he fixed me with a hard, suspicious look.
‘You’re not mixed up with that sort, are you?’
‘For heaven’s sake, do I act as if I am?’ I said.
‘You better not be, that’s all. It’ll be the end of you if you get yourself mixed up in disgusting carryings-on of that sort.’
‘I’m not getting mixed up in anything.’
‘Didn’t one of the papers say this young brute goes to the same art school you go to? The girl was there, too, wasn’t she?’
‘I think so.’
‘What do you mean, you think? You either know or you don’t.’ He glared at me. ‘Do you know this Burlington?’
‘No. Oh, I’ve seen him occasionally in the classes. He’s in his final year. The seniors don’t mix much with us.’
‘What about that girl?’
I just shook my head and turned away, but as I went out the door he called after me: ‘You stay right away from that sort. Touch pitch, you’ll be defiled, remember that!’
Nothing was said about it at breakfast. The alarm clock, set as always at twenty minutes fast, ticked along among the canisters and knitted tea-cosies on the kitchen shelf; Mother, round as a ball in her shabby red dressing-gown and with her greying hair loosely pinned up, looked sleepily dishevelled as she pottered around the stove in a reek of frying bread; a crusty tin loaf and the bone-handled bread knife were on the oil-cloth in a scatter of crumbs: a fly delicately trod the beaded doily that veiled the big brown milk jug; Dad, morose and taciturn as on any other morning, sat in his braces and his grey flannel undershirt, noisily sipping, as he always did, his second cup of tea from the saucer, champed on his food, looked up resentfully, growled, ‘Get a move on, Min, for God’s sake!’ and Mother said, as she had said on every morning I could remember, ‘You’re all right, that clock’s twenty minutes fast.’ She forked the bread, clattered plates in the sink, moved over to the boot-box to polish Marj’s school shoes. A blowfly, activated by the kitchen warmth, buzzed and pinged at the window-screen, and Dad rose with a scowl and pulled down the blind and with his thumb against the stiff material crushed the insect’s life out against the wire, and the dead fly dropped to the window-sill and lay on its back with its legs stiff. Dad knocked it along the sill and on to the floor with the handle of the bread knife. The certitudes of another morning surrounded me, definite and unchanging and reassuring.
It was about ten o’clock when old Klebendorf came up to the studio. ‘De boy iss being vanted,’ he said to old Joe Denton in his thick, gruff German accent, and turned to me with a heavy sad face and said, ‘Come. Dere iss somebody vants to see you.’
I was aware of all the others looking at me curiously as I followed him from the studio, for it was seldom that any of us was summoned down below. The ancient lift in its battered iron cage came clanking up like a ghost dragging its chains; the old man, standing beside the shuddering wire cables, did not speak to me as we descended through the roar and clatter of machines. He took me past the business office and along the corridor to the travellers’ sample-room, op
ened the door and motioned me to enter. ‘Dey vill speak to you,’ he said, and shuffled back along the corridor grunting to himself.
There were two men in the room, both wearing belted gaberdine raincoats. One was a middle-aged, thickset man with a brown snap-brim hat; his teeth were clenched on a stubby, diamond-stemmed bulldog pipe and the heel of his right hand was grinding plug tobacco in the cupped palm of his left, and he was looking around with a kind of dull curiosity at the display of posters and showcards and cut-outs and labels and Steiner’s calendars. His companion wore no hat. He had thin receding black hair slicked back like a shining caul against his skull. He was tall and thin and youngish and he was staring out at the lane through the barred, sooty windows. At my appearance he half turned his head, gave me one long up-and-down look from a hard brown face, then turned his eyes back to the window. He said nothing then nor at any time later, and I don’t think he even looked at me again.
The older man had the big reddish nose of a vaudeville comedian and a heavy but good-natured face, although his very light-coloured eyes gave him a kind of hard, intense look with it.
‘Ah, Meredith, is it?’ he said amiably, and nodded at me and began filling his pipe.
I waited with an anxious expectancy, but he tamped away at the bowl very carefully, and took two matches to light up properly, and said nothing until the pipe was drawing to his satisfaction. His companion went on staring moodily into the lane.
‘This is – not – in any – sense’ – the older man spaced the words jerkily through puffs of blue smoke – ‘an official call. We are from Russell Street,’ he said without any emphasis. ‘I am Detective-Inspector Craik. Criminal Investigation Branch.’
He paused there, as if for effect, and the effect on me was to keep the words echoing in some dark area of desolation that was cold and treacherous and hostile.
‘You’ll probably guess what this is about,’ he went on calmly. ‘You’ve been reading the newspapers. Pretty rotten business, eh? That poor wretched girl! You knew her, didn’t you? And this chap Burlington, you’re a friend of his. Right?’
I tried to say something but my mouth had gone dry and I could only stare at him.
‘Don’t be frightened, son,’ he said soothingly. ‘You mustn’t get worried. I said this wasn’t in any way official. We aren’t involving you, or trying to implicate you in any way, in what is, after all, a thoroughly unpleasant business. You don’t even have to answer any questions if you don’t feel like it. But there are certain things we’re trying to find out, see, and it’s just possible you may be able to help us a little. Do you follow me? What do you say, Meredith?’
‘I … well, yes, of course. I mean, I’ll help, sir … if I can. But – but he isn’t really a friend of mine. And I – I hardly … well, I hardly even knew – er …’
‘Jessica Wray?’ he prompted me gently.
‘I hardly knew her at all, sir.’
‘We are given to understand, though, that you stayed for quite a few weeks with Burlington. You lived in his studio, didn’t you?’
‘Well, I didn’t … I mean, it wasn’t exactly staying with him, sir. It was —’
‘Now, wait a minute, son.’ His smile was kindly, his voice reassuring. ‘You’re getting yourself all worked up over nothing. Let me repeat that we’re not trying to involve you in this. But you see, my lad, you seem to be the only person who has spent any time at all with Burlington in that Spring Street studio place of his, and so —’
‘I’m only saying I didn’t really stay there, sir,’ I cut in desperately.
‘Hold on a sec. Just let me finish what I wanted to say. We thought you might be able to give us some sort of picture of what went on up there. What was your impression of the place? For example, was this chap Burlington in the habit of throwing lots of wild parties?’
‘I don’t know, sir. I don’t remember any.’
‘Were you ever in the place when Burlington and Jessica were there together?’
‘I … think I was once, sir. I’m not sure.’
He smiled at me. ‘Oh, come on now,’ he said. ‘You would have remembered that, I think. She was a very pretty girl, wasn’t she? Did you find yourself attracted to her?’
I flushed and shook my head.
‘It seems there were a number of young chaps who were,’ he said and smiled faintly at his pipe. ‘You say you slept there, but … Well, let’s put it this way: you haven’t really made it clear how it was that you were staying there and yet you were not staying there.’
‘Well, I mean if they had parties or —’
‘You said you didn’t remember any parties.’
‘I – I mean if there was company, or she was there with him, I … well, I’d be sent away, you see, and —’
‘Kicked out, sort of? Eh? Well, then where would you go?’
I looked at him blankly.
‘I mean where did you stay on these occasions? Did you go home? Or to a hotel?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Well, what?’
‘I – I used to sleep in the Fitzroy Gardens, usually.’
‘You used to sleep where?’ He glanced at me sharply.
‘Fitzroy Gardens. Oh, and the YMCA I went there a few times, too … when the weather was bad.’
‘But otherwise the Fitzroy Gardens? On a park bench, do you mean?’
I nodded miserably.
‘But that’s where all the down-and-outs go, and the metho drinkers. Didn’t it strike you as a funny sort of place for a youngster like you to be? You could have been picked up there, and charged as a vagrant, do you realize that?’
I mumbled something.
He moved his shoulders beneath his overcoat, then turned his back on me. He seemed engrossed suddenly in a mounted display of canned fruit labels. ‘Did you resent this?’ he asked, without looking at me; he was running his forefinger over a Del Monte pineapple label to feel the gold embossing.
‘Resent what?’
‘Well, being kicked out and made to sleep on a park bench while this very pretty girl and this friend of yours were canoodling up there.’ He turned slowly and stared at me and his face was no longer amiable. ‘Didn’t you ever wish it was you doing the canoodling and not Burlington? That the positions were reversed, so to speak?’
I opened my mouth to protest, but his eyes were pale and frosty and hard and he went on talking at me:
‘Listen, son, we have to look for motives in a crime like this, and in the case of this chap Burlington there’s a bit of a snag about the motive. You see – now I’m only trying to explain something, do you understand? – you see, in your case we could find a kind of motive. If you were secretly in love, say, with this girl and she kept stalling you off, and if on this particular night you were resentful that you’d been kicked out again and made to sleep on a park bench with the drunks and dead-beats, well what would there be to stop you hanging around in Spring Street until the girl came out, then following her home, and taking your revenge?’
‘But – but it’s months and months since I was there!’ I gasped in horror. ‘At the studio or Fitzroy Gardens or anywhere! It’s almost —’
‘Calm down, son, calm down!’ He chuckled. His eyes were twinkling and his face was good-humoured again. ‘I used that as an explanation, that’s all. What I’m trying to point out is that in your case there would be a motive for the rape as well as for the killing. Do you follow me? Now Burlington’s a slightly different matter. It’s possible that if the quarrel they’d had had been a really passionate one he might have followed her down to St Kilda, and maybe resumed the quarrel, and then in a fit of blind rage he might have strangled her. Would that sort of violence be compatible with his character, do you think?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But then that wouldn’t really explain the rape, would it? It seems to me that a chap who’s getting all the skirt he wants from his girl-friend, and has been getting it for a year or eighteen months, is hardly likely to
think in terms of rape – well, not so far as that particular girl is concerned, anyway. Unless, I suppose, there was something very peculiar in their relationship, or this quarrel they had was a specially violent one. Tell me, Meredith, what did you really feel about this relationship they had? Did you feel that they got on well? Or did they quarrel a good deal? Try to remember, son. Did you ever hear them squabbling together? Any threats? Physical violence? Or would you say that they struck you as being genuinely in love with one another?’
‘But I can’t answer these questions, sir!’ I said wildly. He had me almost at the point of tears. ‘I – I just don’t know. I tell you he wasn’t really a friend of mine. This is the truth! Look, sir,’ I said desperately, ‘the other apprentice here, Joe Denton … he knows Sam Burlington much better than I do … they’re in the same class and —’
‘Is that so? Well, we may want to have a word or two with him as well later. Did he stay with Burlington too?’
‘Well … no, I don’t think so. But —’
‘Ah, well that’s really the point we’re interested in, isn’t it?’ He sighed. ‘I’m sorry you can’t help us more. You seem to have got it into your mind, somehow, that we’re trying to tangle you up in this. Well, tell me just one thing more, though, Meredith, and then I think we can call it a day. What is your own personal opinion of Burlington. Be frank about it, son. Don’t be afraid. What I’m driving at is this … would you consider him the sort of person who would follow a girl into a deserted park in the middle of the night, criminally assault her, and then murder her in cold blood?’
‘No, sir … well, I don’t know … I mean, if I don’t know him really well how is it possible for me to say? I honestly wasn’t as friendly with him as lots of others and —’
‘All right, son.’ He cut me short with a wave of his stubby pipe. ‘You don’t have to get upset about this. You’re not involved. If the necessity arises we can get in touch with you again, but I shouldn’t think that will happen. You can trot along back to your work now. Off you go, son.’
My Brother Jack Page 16