A Thing of Blood
Page 13
The decision about what to do next was taken out of my hands by James Fowler, who tapped me on the shoulder and asked, ‘How was confession?’
‘I wasn’t at confession. Not that it’s any of your business, I’m not a Catholic. You’ve been following me.’ I thought it best to avoid obfuscation.
‘Well, Will, I was always told at school that I was more likely to follow than lead, so I guess old Mr Pyers was quite a perceptive fellow after all.’
‘So you don’t deny it.’
‘No.’
He stood grinning, as if he was acknowledging nothing more controversial than that it was an overcast day.
‘Why? Why would you want to follow me?’
‘I have your best interests at heart, believe me.’
I scoffed theatrically.
‘You’re being drawn into things,’ he said, ‘that are unpleasant and dangerous. If I were you I’d move back to your mother’s house and leave Clutterbuck to his own devices.’
There was a lot to digest in this brief riposte. How did Fowler know about my mother? What ‘things’ were dangerous?
‘You know a lot about me for a person who met me only yesterday.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’
‘You’re barking up the wrong tree if you think you’ll scuttle Clutterbuck’s marriage plans by tailing me. Is that what it’s all about?’
‘No, Will, that’s not what it’s all about, although I’ll be frank and admit that Nigella could do better. Don’t you think so?’
James Fowler couldn’t have detected my inclinations towards his sister. I wasn’t fully aware of them myself during yesterday’s afternoon tea. I felt, though, that he was offering a kind of mild imprimatur to me as a suitor, and my feelings towards him shifted accordingly. It was with a jolt that I remembered that he may well have ransacked Clutterbuck’s room, and worse, that he may have murdered Gretel Beech.
‘I’ve only known Paul Clutterbuck for a few days,’ I said. ‘Your sister’s attraction to him is understandable, but …’
‘But his to her is less comprehensible? I quite agree, Will. I think you and I both know that Paul Clutterbuck is not a respectable man, and that he thinks he can marry and change that.’
Our conversation was interrupted when a car pulled up at the kerb and a man got out and hurried over to where we were standing. He drew James Fowler away, and the two of them spoke briefly. Fowler came back to me and said that he’d been called to his office. He didn’t elaborate, but I found it hard to believe that there’d been a sudden crisis in the area of native policy. Before getting into the car he asked if I’d have dinner with him that night, at the Menzies Hotel. He’d pay, he said, and he’d explain to me then why he’d been following me, and a few other things besides. I agreed, believing that I would learn much that was useful about James Fowler and his family.
I was now at something of a loose end, and I needed time to think. As I passed the Australia Cinema the poster for Romeo and Juliet caught my eye. I couldn’t quite see Leslie Howard as Romeo, and the idea of Norma Shearer as Juliet was grotesque. Nevertheless, it might fulfil my craving for a bit of the bard, so I bought a ticket and went in just as the morning session was beginning. ‘Advance Australia Fair’ (which had recently supplanted ‘God Save the King) was played and people dutifully stood. It was followed by ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ and several patrons sat down before it had concluded. After this, an amateurish bit of propaganda thundered at us from the screen. I hoped this wasn’t one of Nigella’s efforts. Fields of rippling wheat and pastures of grazing sheep flickered behind an insistent, almost hysterical voice, decrying: Australia. To the Japanese Australia has always meant room to live in. It has long been eyed with malicious envy by Japanese jingoists. In Australia just beyond their reach are many of the strategic minerals of warfare — wealth that would make Japan one of the world’s most powerful nations. They believe that once they have Australia and its seven million people to work for them as slaves, their position will be impregnable.
Here images of serried ranks of Japanese soldiers marching before Hirohito, seated grandly on a horse, reinforced the fact that we were in terrible peril of being over-run. No one in the theatre uttered a sound during the short. The idea of enslavement made whistles and cat calls die in the throats of the usual wags who might have been tempted to make them.
Romeo and Juliet surprised me. I’d expected it to be laughable. Instead it was lavish and not at all silly. Someone had coached Norma Shearer well enough to enable her to speak the verse adequately. Leslie Howard I never could abide, and it was a bit of a stretch to imagine two middle-aged people as teenagers, but I’ve always been willing to suspend disbelief when occasion demanded.
Looking back on it, I calculated that it was while I was watching Romeo and Juliet that Anna Capshaw was murdered.
Chapter Eight
shining knights
I EMERGED FROM THE AUSTRALIA CINEMA into the lunchtime crowd. There was no point remaining in town, so I braved a tram and headed back to Carlton. I arrived at Clutterbuck’s house just as he was letting himself in. He was wearing his American army uniform again. I felt sure that there was more to this deception than the acquisition of sex and pantry items.
‘Were we running low on cream?’ I asked.
He made a small noise of assent and said, ‘I wasn’t expecting you.’ His words were slightly slurred, as if he’d been drinking. ‘Still, I’m glad you’re here.’
Once inside, Clutterbuck went upstairs to change and told me to help myself to a whisky. I don’t usually drink at lunchtime, but Clutterbuck’s whisky was first rate and a single malt at any time of the day isn’t to be declined.
When he came downstairs he was wearing a thick woollen shirt and baggy, casual trousers. I’d never seen him so dressed down.
‘There are some people I want you to meet,’ he said, and brooking no opposition propelled me to his car. ‘We won’t be long and you can tell me how you’ve been earning your money on the way.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Never mind. You’ll see. Now, tell.’
The car headed up Sydney Road and Clutterbuck wasn’t driving as carefully as he might have. He impatiently blew his horn at a horse and cart, spooking the horse and infuriating the cart’s driver.
‘I’ve met with Trezise,’ I said.
I thought he might react badly to this, but his response was muted.
‘Oh, yes?’
‘You have nothing to worry about there. He’s not a lawyer, and he thought Anna was a widow. He didn’t know you existed.’
‘But he does now.’
‘Well, yes, but it’s not information he can do anything with, and besides, he’s not interested in you or your engagement at all. You got the wrong end of the stick with Trezise. He’s just a sad, lonely bloke who’s eaten up by guilt because he was intimate with someone outside the sacred bonds of marriage. You don’t have to worry about him at all.’
Clutterbuck leaned towards his open window and yelled an obscenity at another horse-drawn cart, this one with the name of a grocer printed on its side.
‘You should be interned, you Italian bastard!’
I’d never seen Clutterbuck like this.
‘You seem a bit rattled. Trezise isn’t a problem, believe me.’
‘I’m not worried about Trezise. Not at all.’
Having said this he assumed his usual demeanour and even managed a small smile. We drove deep into Brunswick, an area of Melbourne with which I was unfamiliar. We turned right into Albion Street and a few streets along, left. Here there were rows of workers’ cottages which might have been pretty in their day but which were now showing the neglect that poverty and indifference promoted. I could see why Clutterbuck had changed his clothes.
I felt grimy just looking at these houses. He parked the car — it was the only car in the street — and knocked on the door of a residence with a small, riotously overgrown patch of garden. This was no Victory Garden bursting with healthful vegetables. It was a tangle of thistles, milkweed and dandelions. There could have been splendid rows of produce in the backyard, but I doubted it.
‘Who is it?’
The voice, though muffled by the door, was suspicious and uninviting.
‘Paul.’
The door opened to reveal a short, misshapen man. The air that escaped was stale and smelled of dripping and unwashed bodies. We walked down a corridor to a small, dark living room. There was only one bedroom, as far as I could tell, and in this living room the tumble of malodorous bedclothes in the corner suggested that it doubled as a second bedroom.
‘This is Mr William Power,’ Clutterbuck said. ‘And Will, this is Mr Ronnie Oakpate.’
I looked at this strange creature closely. He walked with a pronounced limp and his shoulders were so rounded that I suspected an incipient hump beneath his filthy shirt. He was bald with dark hair growing in a half circle above his ears. It didn’t end at the nape of his neck but grew abundantly down beyond his collar and crept round his throat to meet a black puff of it emerging from his shirt. His appearance was so simian that it would shake the faith of the most committed opponents of Darwinism. I couldn’t tell his age, unused as I was to estimating the lifespan of gorillas. When he spoke he showed a mouthful of yellow teeth and emitted a powerful and penetrating exhalation of halitotic breath.
‘What’s he want?’ he asked.
‘It’s not what he wants, Ronnie, it’s what we want that counts, and Will here can help us.’
‘He doesn’t look too flash,’ said the hunched and hirsute Mr Oakpate. Given that he looked more like he’d climbed down from a tree than a pedestal, this was rather a nerve.
‘I fell over,’ I said, my indignation obscuring my curiosity about our reason for being there.
A noise from the next room, a kitchen I surmised from the intensity of the odour of things greasy wafting through the door, indicated the presence of another person.
‘Mary Rose!’ Clutterbuck called. ‘Come here and meet Mr Power.’
A woman in her mid-twenties came into the living room. She was dressed severely, almost institutionally, and her lank hair, the colour of fouled straw, had the appearance of having been styled by a blind man in a deep cellar. With the greatest will in the world I could not describe her as pretty and her plainness was exacerbated by a slackness of muscle that caused her to look simple.
‘This is Mary Rose Shingle,’ Clutterbuck said, ‘and ironically, considering her name, she is, I’m afraid, a shingle short.’
Miss Shingle didn’t react to this callous assessment of her mental capacity, thereby, I suppose, confirming his diagnosis. She may have smiled, but it may have been nothing more than a spasm pulling her mouth upward.
‘Where’s his nibs?’ asked Ronnie, and he leaned his hunched body against the doorframe. Before Clutterbuck could answer, there was a knock at the front door and Oakpate detached himself from his support and scuttled down the corridor with the awkward dexterity of a mandrill. He returned with a man whose remarkably small head sat atop a broad, thick torso. The initial impression was that he was fat; he would certainly have been expensive to feed. There was nothing flabby about him however. His first words were, ‘Who’s this?’ and he pointed at me with a stubby, dirty thumb.
‘This is Will,’ Clutterbuck said. ‘He’s useful. And Will, this man-mountain is Crocker.’
Handshakes were clearly not among Mr Crocker’s repertoire of social niceties so he merely grunted. I returned the compliment.
The room was now crowded. Clutterbuck sat in a filthy armchair, its antimacassar stained beyond hope of cleaning. He didn’t lean back. Crocker folded his bulk on to a lounge that had long ago ceased to invite lounging, and Oakpate prodded me into sitting beside him — Crocker that is. Oakpate remained standing. He shooed Miss Shingle into the kitchen and resumed his position leaning in the doorway. This was strange company for Clutterbuck to keep, and it was stranger still that he should bring me here. I presumed his purpose was about to be revealed though it wasn’t Clutterbuck who spoke first. It was Oakpate.
‘I sacked the last of those bastards today,’ he said.
‘Good,’ said Crocker. ‘They’re like a fucking cancer.’
‘Will might be wondering whom you’re talking about,’ said Clutterbuck. ‘I haven’t filled him in properly yet about our organisation.’
At this point I began to feel uneasy. It was the word ‘organisation’. I remembered Clutterbuck’s dismissive reference to ‘Jews and communists’. Was this dingy, little house in Brunswick a fascist cell, a bolt-hole for fifth columnists?
‘Well, what’s he doing here then?’ asked Crocker, and turned his blunt, thuggish gaze upon me.
‘He’s on our side, aren’t you, Will?’ Clutterbuck smiled encouragingly at me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Oakpate put his hand down the front of his trousers and scratch at his crotch.
‘Which side are we talking about?’ I asked.
‘The right side,’ said Oakpate, and came into the centre of the room. He stood close to Clutterbuck and his malignant, ugly face became suffused with blood pumped in anger from that organ which in anybody else would have been identified as the heart.
‘Why’d you bring a stranger here?’ he hissed.
‘Will’s not a stranger,’ Clutterbuck said calmly. ‘He’s a private detective.’
Both Oakpate and Crocker snapped their heads in my direction and Crocker’s fists clenched.
‘He’s employed by me, and he’s good, but even he would be having trouble putting all this together, and neither of you is creating a very nice first impression. What must Will be thinking?’ He paused as if he thought I might reveal the answer to his question. Frankly, I was all at sea, horrified and paralysed by the thought that Clutterbuck was an Axis sympathiser, and that I’d been caught in his orbit.
‘I can tell from the look on your face, Will, that you’ve jumped to the wrong conclusion. You think we’re the enemy within, don’t you. Nothing could be further from the truth. Mr Oakpate and Mr Crocker are captains of industry. They may look like stokers, but they’re captains. Mr Oakpate here owns this lovely house, which he shares with the delicious Miss Shingle.’
This ludicrous assessment of his common-law wife made Oakpate smile.
‘Mr Oakpate also owns and runs a factory here in Brunswick. I’ve never been sure what he manufactures but I’m sure it’s something terribly dull and metallic. Mr Crocker is the proprietor of a dark, satanic mill as well, and like every other factory owner in this city they’re sick to death of unions and of strikes.’
‘It’s the bloody Catholics in the bloody unions,’ said Crocker. ‘They’re everywhere — and it’s up to us to stop them.’
I found my voice.
‘Stop them?’
‘That’s right,’ said Oakpate. ‘Stop them.’ These last words were loaded with menace, as if stopping them meant much more than sacking a few troublesome workers.
‘So now we’ve all met,’ said Clutterbuck. ‘This isn’t going to be a full meeting. I just wanted to bring Will here so that we could get acquainted.’
Crocker was about to say something but Clutterbuck silenced him with a hand motion. There was no further discussion. We said our farewells and returned to the car.
On the way home I didn’t feel much wiser about what had just taken place.
‘You said something about an organisation back there.’
‘Ah, yes. The clubhouse isn’t very salubrious I grant you, but we’re doing good work, Will.’
‘Who’s “we” and what’s the work?’
‘We are a group of like-minded people who believe that the Catholic Church is determined to undermine the war effort by infiltrating the union movement, and our “work” is to stop that from happening.’
It took a moment for this extraordinary declaration to sink in.
‘You can’t be serious,’ I said.
‘Like most people, Will, you don’t know how influential and destructive a man like Mannix is.’
‘Are you a communist?’
‘Now it’s you who can’t be serious. Do I look like a communist? No. Do I live like a communist? I hate communists, Will. The papists and I agree on that, but the Catholics are worse than the communists and they’re infiltrating every level of government.’
He must have realised that his voice was betraying him in some way because he took his eyes off the road and looked at me.
‘I’m not a fanatic, Will. If you knew the stuff I know, you’d want to be a part of it. It’s just politics.’
‘Politics can hurt people.’
‘That’s why it’s important that only the right people get hurt.’
This chilling little policy statement transformed Paul Clutterbuck on the spot from harmless dilettante to frightening fanatic, despite his protestations to the contrary.
‘I’m not really interested in politics,’ I said.
‘Interested or not, Will, you’re involved. You’ve been to Oakpate’s house, you’ve met Crocker. You’re one of the few people I’ve introduced to the members of the Order.’
‘What are you talking about, Paul? What Order?’
‘The Order of the Shining Knights.’
‘Is that like the Round Table? Are you serious?’
Clutterbuck wasn’t amused.