A Thing of Blood

by Robert Gott

  ‘Your brother hasn’t been formally charged as yet,’ Radcliff said. ‘I’ll leave you alone — apart from the officer there.’

  Brian’s face was puffy from crying, and from fear, and from the devastation wrought by the internal bomb blast of having his life brutally altered. I knew as soon as I saw him that the police story was absurd. Brian simply didn’t possess the qualities required for serial adultery, murder and concealment. He breathed shakily.

  ‘You know what they think?’ he said, and his voice was thin, stripped of its confidence by the humiliation he was suffering.

  ‘Yes, but they don’t actually have a case, just a theory, and it’s all based on the word of a madwoman.’

  ‘How could they think these things?’

  ‘I understand what it feels like to be where you are now.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Now listen to me, Brian. If I’m going to help you I need to know everything there is to know.’

  ‘How can you help me? What do you mean? You’re an actor.’

  ‘I’m not just an actor anymore. I’m a private inquiry agent, too.’

  This was meant to reassure him; instead, even through the fog of his now thoroughly obscured normal life, he laughed.

  ‘You’re kidding me.’

  ‘No Brian, I’m not kidding you, and you’re not my first job either. As a matter of fact I’m working on a couple of things.’

  ‘But Will, you couldn’t detect your arse if it wasn’t always in the same place.’

  ‘Only last year they hanged someone in Victoria for murder. Now probably isn’t the time for smart-aleck remarks. Whatever you think of my skills, I don’t see a queue of people lining up to defend you.’

  ‘Mother will get a good lawyer.’

  ‘Lawyers don’t investigate. I don’t care how good he is, if this goes the wrong way the best he might be able to do is get your sentence commuted.’

  A new wave of fear broke over Brian, and he was immediately more compliant.

  ‘All right. All right.’

  ‘You have to tell me everything, however sordid.’

  He inclined his head.

  ‘Was Sarah Goodenough really the first woman you cheated with, or were there others here in Melbourne?’

  The look on his face was one of disbelief that such a question needed to be asked. He calmly said, ‘Sarah Goodenough was the first and only one. There was nobody in Melbourne. Nobody.’

  ‘So everything that Sarah told the police is a frighteningly convincing lie?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘There’s no one I need to speak to? No one who can provide me with any information?’

  Rallying for a moment, Brain declared angrily, ‘Will, there is no information to provide.’

  All I could offer at this point was an assurance that I would do my best to find Darlene’s kidnappers.

  ‘I’m not going to spend the night in jail, am I?’

  ‘I don’t see how that can be avoided, but you’ll be out tomorrow, I promise you.’

  The look of unmitigated horror that flooded Brian’s face as he suddenly realised that he would be spending at least one night in a cell was heartbreaking. As I left I told Radcliff that Brian had emphatically denied all allegations against him, and that they would be hearing from our lawyer almost immediately.

  ‘We’ve already heard from him,’ Radcliff said, ‘while you were in with your brother. Your mother organised it.’

  I had no idea who Mother had hired or how she even knew who to ring. As I walked down the steps of the police headquarters in Russell Street I thought that there was a great deal about my mother that I didn’t know.

  Chapter Six

  by george

  IT WAS SEVEN-THIRTY by the time I had crossed Russell Street and walked past the lumpish conglomerate of the Magistrates’ Court. The picture was due to start in twenty minutes, so I could easily make it to the Regent Theatre in Collins Street in time. There were a lot of people on the streets, most of them American servicemen squiring women to the lounges of hotels.

  The local boys couldn’t afford to do this. Bars, many of which ran out of beer regularly, were obliged to close at five-thirty and thereafter alcohol could only be bought in the lounge — and the prices in the lounge were prohibitively high. A beer that cost seven pence in the bar at twenty-five minutes past five cost one shilling in the lounge ten minutes later. The price of spirits was even more inflated. This didn’t put too much pressure on the doughboys’ pay packets, and for underpaid shop girls or exploited WAAFs turning down the offer of a few two- shilling gins was a sacrifice they weren’t prepared to make. I can’t say I blamed them, returning as they would be to unheated houses and five lousy inches of tepid bathwater. I wondered if the emperor of Japan had any idea of the effect his belligerent expansionism was having on the sex and social lives of Melbourne’s bourgeoisie.

  Very quickly I found myself in Little Collins Street passing the Petrushka café. It was open and busy, and I decided, on the spur of the moment, to duck in and make an enquiry about George, the fellow who could possibly tell me something about Gretel Beech. I pushed open the door and was hit by a fug of human heat and cigarette smoke. Melbourne’s bearded, corduroy crowd was here in force. Surprisingly, there were a couple of Yanks as well. At the counter I raised my voice above the surrounding babble, and asked whether a man named George was in the café tonight. The woman shrugged. ‘George who?’

  ‘I don’t know his last name,’ I said, and summoned the courage to nonchalantly add, ‘All I know is that he’s very well endowed.’

  ‘You’re a pervert,’ she said. ‘Get out before I get someone to throw you out.’

  Mr Wilks had overstated the laissez-faire virtues of the Petrushka café. Anything did not go, after all.

  I turned away from the counter and was preparing to move among the tables, to ask discreetly whether this or that person was George, when four policemen burst through the door and began blowing their whistles hysterically. Three of them hurried to the rear of the café and the fourth stood by the entrance. Two suited men, who had come in after them, surveyed the crowd, who had gone quiet, and one of them said loudly: ‘Everyone stay where you are. We’re Manpower officials and we’re here to check your papers. Please get them ready and we’ll get this over with as quickly as possible.’

  I found this an extraordinary situation, but the patrons of the Petrushka seemed resigned to the interruption — so obedient were they that this couldn’t have been the first time a Manpower raid had been conducted on the premises. I’d heard about them and thought it bizarre. A Manpower official had the authority to redirect anyone not working in a designated war job into such a job. If you had the misfortune to be scratching a living in an inessential industry, such as hairdressing or shop assisting, or any of the thousands of other occupations deemed frivolous, you might find yourself ordered to report for work at a munitions factory. We were all supposed to carry ID cards showing the name and address of our employer. If you weren’t employed, someone from Manpower would helpfully find you something ghastly to do. I was in the fortunate position of holding a card that indicated that I was in a reserved occupation — entertainers being regarded as essential to the morale of the general populace — so I had nothing to fear from the little Napoleons of the Manpower unit. When my papers were examined the odious man looked down his vein-webbed nose at me, as if I was one of the loathsome deserters on the home front who was not pulling his weight, but there was nothing he could do. He made no attempt to hide his disappointment at his inability to transfer me to a dully repetitive factory job.

  The raid was over in a few minutes. I don’t know if any orders were issued. I’d be surprised if everyone in the Petrushka that night was making a critical contribution to defeating Japan, but perhaps many of them w
ere sufficiently well connected to carry convincing, if not necessarily accurate, identification papers. The patrons of the café didn’t strike me as being members of an underclass. Their politics were, I suspected, as susceptible to fashion as their outfits.

  The arrival of the Manpower people had distracted the woman behind the counter from her intention of having me thrown out. The clamour of conversation reasserted itself as I began to look for George. I approached table after table and said, ‘I’m looking for a man named George. I know this sounds odd, but I have a message for him from Gretel.’ I didn’t risk mentioning George’s most distinguishing feature again. At a table of four men, carefully, artfully shabby in their attire, I interrupted a boisterous argument about the merits of an artist whose name was unfamiliar to me. It didn’t appear to be a particularly friendly exchange of views, and when I asked my question a dark-haired young man said, ‘Yeah. I’m George. What’s she want?’

  He didn’t look at me when he spoke, his attention still commanded by the man opposite him, and his mind yet engaged on some combustible point about modernism.

  ‘It’s a private matter,’ I said. ‘Could we speak outside?’

  ‘Nothing’s private here, mate. If Gretel’s got something to tell me, she should tell me herself, not send a message boy. So what is it?’

  He looked at me finally, and in his pale, Irish face I read that the dominant emotion in his life would be anger. He was handsome enough to draw a woman like Gretel Beech to him, but there wasn’t a skerrick of humour in his eyes. Life, for George, was a very serious business indeed.

  His three companions were now waiting for me to deliver Gretel’s nonexistent message. It occurred to me suddenly that any one of them could be Gretel’s killer. It’s a rare victim who doesn’t know her murderer, and the way to find this culprit was to assemble those people who knew Gretel and eliminate them as suspects by careful questioning and intelligent reasoning. I’d eliminated Clutterbuck already — I’d been with him the night Gretel died — and I now had in front of me several people who might move my inquiries forward. I didn’’t think Detectives Strachan and Radcliff could have done any better, and I certainly couldn’t see either of them being prepared to stand naked in a roomful of women in the service of an investigation.

  ‘The first thing I need to know,’ I said, ‘is if you’re the right George.’

  ‘I’m George Beech. Gretel’s husband. How many other Georges would Gretel be sending a message to? Who the hell are you anyway, and where’s Gretel? Is she shacked up with you or what?’

  The ugly tone of these questions was no different from the ugly tone of all George Beech’s utterances, and it wasn’t driven by anger particular to the possibility that I was sleeping with his wife. Uxoriousness was not a quality George Beech could be congratulated upon possessing. They had, I surmised, an open marriage. I thought I’d show him how open I could be, too.

  ‘You’re the George I’m looking for only if you have a larger-than-average penis.’

  This was met with silence, until George Beech stood up, said, ‘You tell me,’ undid his flies and produced what any sensible person would describe as a larger-than-average penis. This didn’t go unnoticed by people at other tables, but it happened so quickly that there wasn’t time for anyone to register a shocked response before the impressive appendage had been re-housed.

  The three other men with George turned to me, and one of them, a slightly overweight, sandy-haired chap with ink-stained fingers asked, ‘Right George do you think?’

  ‘The evidence for that seems pretty good,’ I said.

  ‘So what’s the message?’ George asked.

  How was I going to play this? I had to assume, until proven otherwise, that Gretel’s death was unknown to her husband. What was the etiquette?

  ‘May I join you?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘You may not. Just tell me the message and piss off back to Gretel with a message from me. My message is, “Fuck you”. Got that? “Fuck you”.’

  I wasn’t going to tell him that Gretel was past caring about her estranged husband’s obscenities — a fact, I had to remind myself, that he may already have known. With little else to go on, I would have to accept that the obvious rift between them might be a motive for murder.

  ‘To tell you the truth, George, there is no message. I haven’t seen Gretel for quite a while, and I can assure you that there was nothing at all between us. I didn’t even know she was married. A Mr Wilks, who teaches drawing, suggested you might know where she was because you modelled for him a few weeks ago when Gretel couldn’t make it. This is embarrassing, but she owes me some money, just a couple of pounds, and I’m a bit short and need it. And that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘Let me tell you something Mr whoever-you-are. I wouldn’t care if Gretel owed you several million pounds. If you’re silly enough to lend her money, that’s your lookout. I suppose you were hoping for other favours.’

  I didn’t much like being portrayed as a fool who has been parted from his money, especially as the story was spurious.

  ‘I just need to find her,’ I said, and tried to inject a little note of desperation, designed to elicit sympathy, into my voice.

  One of his companions jumped in at this point.

  ‘Why don’t you quit while you’re ahead, mate? You can see George isn’t interested in answering your bloody questions, so maybe now would be a good time to piss off.’

  The hostility around the table was palpable and I saw no advantage to myself in pursuing the matter any further, so I decided that I would wait outside and follow George Beech home. I would have to forgo meeting Nigella and Clutterbuck and not see Katharine Hepburn. The latter was hardly a sacrifice. As an actress I had always found her so unappealingly equine that I suspected a centaur in her family tree.

  Outside the Petrushka there was nowhere close by that was suitable for dawdling unseen. I found a doorway on the opposite side of the street, and some way up from the café, and leaned in it as inconspicuously as I could. An American soldier, slightly drunk, passed, returned and passed again, before stopping and making an obscene inquiry as to what I charged. He was disgruntled when I set him straight. I thought perhaps Manpower needed to do a sweep of Melbourne’s doorways, unless of course the government considered prostitution an essential service. After half an hour and another approach — I could have earned a few quid that night — I was so catatonically bored and uncomfortable that I abandoned my plan to wait for George Beech to emerge. The fact that Mother was alone at home, and no doubt anxious to hear how my meeting had gone with Brian, began to nag at me. I would return to the Petrushka in a few hours when there was a chance that I would find Beech still ensconced there, a good deal drunker and less guarded.

  I had never seen my mother so frantic. She’d always been dependably unruffleable, almost unshakeably languid. To find her distracted and agitated was shocking to me.

  ‘We will have to get Brian out of there,’ she said. ‘He won’t manage. He isn’t strong enough for all this.’

  ‘He’s doing all right, Mother. Really.’

  ‘Oh, Will, you don’t know your brother very well. He’s much more highly strung than you think, and he’s fragile and naïve and lovely, and this shouldn’t be happening to him.’

  She broke into tears. I wasn’t quite sure how Brian’s lurid affair with Sarah Goodenough might be accommodated into his fragility, naivety and loveliness, but it wasn’t the moment to make inquiries on that point.

  ‘I was told that you’ve hired a lawyer.’

  ‘Peter Gilbert. Yes. He was an associate of your father’s and he’s a good man. We’ve been friends for many years.’

  When Mother had calmed down she told me that this Gilbert fellow would go through the coppers like a dose of salts, and that he would have Brian home as soon as was legally possi
ble — even if it meant posting a large bail. I wondered how Brian’s arrest would affect his job. Would the Ministry of Education approve of bailed murder suspects teaching the nation’s youth, even in this time of severe teacher shortage?

  I made a cup of tea and outlined the police case against Brian. Mother listened and, unexpectedly, acknowledged its awful plausibility — from the police point of view. But she insisted it wouldn’t be sustained among people who knew Brian. While we were discussing these matters, Peter Gilbert arrived. He was a man in his early sixties; neat, almost dapper, and with a build still sufficiently athletic to ensure that his face had not begun its melt into jowliness. He was uncommonly solicitous, I thought, of Mother’s welfare and sat close by her, holding her hand in startling intimacy and paying scant attention to my presence. After the briefest of introductions his concern was entirely for Mother.

  I was clearly supernumerary to Mother’s immediate needs, so I made my farewells and headed for Royal Parade, where I caught a tram into the city. Having been away from Melbourne for a while, the sight of a female conductor was still disconcerting, although this one wasn’t the best advertisement for the innovation. She was a surly hulk of barely contained rage, and she seemed to hold each of the passengers personally responsible for whatever grim depths to which her life had descended. She took my money and issued the ticket and the change with such ill-grace that you’d think I had just confiscated her soul.

  I disembarked at Collins Street and walked quickly in the direction of the Regent Theatre. By now the picture would be over, and before returning to the Petrushka I might be lucky and catch Clutterbuck and Nigella as they came out. I could make some excuse for missing the movie, but it wouldn’t involve telling them about my brother’s incarceration. I identified this reluctance to tell the truth with an unsettling swelling in my attraction to Nigella Fowler. When I thought of her I considered what it might be like to be alone with her, and more and more I thought it incumbent upon me to step between her and Clutterbuck. I knew that relationship could only end in tears, and the tears would be Nigella’s. I hadn’t seen much evidence of Clutterbuck’s lachrymose leanings.