by Robert Gott
‘It sounds to me like they’re a bunch of Don Quixotes, more dotty than dangerous.’
The Scotch broth was excellent and afterwards Mother produced some first class brandy that had escaped use in Darlene’s Comfort Fund fruitcakes. At nine-thirty Brian said he was going for a walk around the park while Mother and I chatted about Fulton and what he might be up to in Darwin. This was a topic that she could both happily and unhappily speculate upon for hours at a time, and in so doing she was not as likely to stray into one of her incidental analyses of my character. She went to bed finally, and felt less concerned I think about the danger Fulton was in for having spoken about it at uninterrupted length.
I intended to wait up until Brian returned from Clutterbuck’s meeting, but when he still hadn’t shown up at 2.00 a.m., I surrendered to sleep.
When I woke at seven, Brian had still not returned. I wasn’t concerned, but I knew Mother would be, and as she’d retired last night in an almost euphorically exhausted state, induced by her unimpeded monologue about Fulton, it seemed a shame to wake her with worrying news. Her Fulton monologues didn’t bother me at all, but her claim that her affection for her children was evenly distributed was patently untrue. I couldn’t imagine her falling into a blissful sleep with my name on her lips.
I left her a note explaining that Brian and I had decided to go to the Melbourne Baths for an early morning swim. As this was something Brian did from time to time, she would be unsuspicious and remain pleasantly combobulated. I hurried across the park to Clutterbuck’s house and found Brian asleep in my bed. The air was positively vaporous with whisky fumes. He’d obviously made a night of it. I shook him awake and the groans that issued from him were painful to hear. We went downstairs and I made him a cup of Clutterbuck’s purloined coffee with cream. I told Brian that he should appreciate the fact that the entire American military establishment was now being used to cure his hangover. Before he could reply, Clutterbuck joined us, and, as usual, he showed no ill-effects from the previous night’s drinking. I watched him closely, looking for any sign that Brian in his drunkenness had given us away. Clutterbuck seemed inordinately pleased with himself and, from the manner in which he put his arm around Brian’s shoulder, clearly he thought he’d found in my brother a fellow fanatic. God knows what vile rubbish they’d spent the evening discussing.
‘Your brother,’ Clutterbuck said to me, ‘is a good man.’
‘By good, I presume you mean that his unsavoury views mesh with yours.’
‘Get fucked, Will,’ Brian said, with a completely convincing edge of detestation in his voice.
He pushed past me into the living room. Clutterbuck followed him and I stayed where I was. I’d find out soon enough from Brian what had transpired the night before. For now, he and Clutterbuck could continue to strengthen the bond between them under more sober conditions. I went up to my room and very carefully shaved. I took an unpatriotically deep bath, luxuriating in being able to put both arms under water. Perhaps it was the warmth of the water, or the freedom from that wretched plaster cast, or the pleasing knowledge that the Shining Knights had been infiltrated, but I felt for the first time in a very long time indeed, that God was in his Heaven and all was right with the world. By this hour the following morning God had changed his address, and chaos had been unleashed in my world.
Chapter Eleven
pieces of brisket
I DIDN’T SEE BRIAN for the remainder of that Tuesday. He and Clutterbuck went off somewhere together — probably, I thought, to that dank little Camelot up in Brunswick where they could hatch some vile plan in an appropriately vile atmosphere. Clutterbuck hadn’t asked for any details about Trezise’s movements, which surprised me, and the only way to account for it was the probability that something big was afoot.
Brian’s absence meant that I didn’t yet know what anti-Catholic outrages had been planned. When I was in possession of pertinent information I’d have to pass it on, of course, to James Fowler. Would I then tell him about Brian’s unsanctioned role? I thought not. Having found in the past that the truth is more of an impediment than a lubricant to good relations, I opted for avoiding James Fowler altogether.
I spent the day wandering about the city, checking the theatres and despairing that the people of Melbourne were turning out in large numbers to hear Gladys Moncrieff sing, or queuing to see barely dressed showgirls stand stock still at the Tivoli (the rule being that any movement would transform an artistic tableau into something of interest to the police). I noticed in that day’s Age that a production of Othello was being mounted by a group called the Art Theatre Players, but it had the air of amateur theatricals about it, and there are few things more dispiriting than Shakespeare’s lines flattened, mangled and stuttered in characterless suburban vowels. Whenever my thoughts turned to such matters I felt a profound longing to get back on stage to reveal the exquisite beauty of properly read verse.
I returned to Mother’s house at six o’clock and she told me that a man I assumed to be James Fowler had telephoned for me. I needed to catch up with Brian, who was having a bath, before talking to Fowler. As there was little chance of Mother hearing, or intruding upon, our conversation while he was in the bathroom, I sat on a chair over which his clothes were draped, and listened as he told me the Order of the Shining Knights’ extraordinary plans.
‘There seem to be only about eight of them,’ he said. ‘Last night that Oakpate bloke got hot under the collar about some other bloke’s incompetent arson attempt near Ballarat. The arsonist then started yelling about second-rate equipment, and Clutterbuck had to come between them. Talk about a bunch of misfits. I’m surprised someone like Clutterbuck has anything to do with them.’
‘I showed you his underwear drawer. He’s a different kind of misfit — but he’s a misfit, all right.’
I didn’t want to give Brian the impression that I lacked confidence in him, but I needed to know if he’d been indiscreet under the influence of what had been rather a lot of alcohol. When I asked him he accepted the question without rancour, although he shifted uncomfortably in his shallow, tepid bath.
‘I told Clutterbuck about Darlene and Captain Spangler Brisket, and I added for good measure that I thought Brisket was a Catholic. I think that was a good lie to tell. It certainly gave him the impression that I had good personal as well as professional reasons for hating popery.’
‘So you didn’t let anything slip?’
‘Of course not. He trusts my hatred. No one held back at the meeting. They spoke openly in front of me about attacking St Patrick’s, and today, Will, at Oakpate’s house, Clutterbuck and a bloke called Crocker decided that what they’d do instead of blowing anything up was assassinate Archbishop Mannix.’
He delivered this plum with the enthusiasm of a little boy who knew he was pleasing an elder whose good opinion he craved. I couldn’t wait to pass it on to James Fowler.
‘Assassination is a more manageable abomination. How and when?’
‘They haven’t worked that out yet. They think he’s the most dangerous man in Australia. They really do. Mannix is the face of everything they despise.’
I told Brian that I thought he’d done a good job and that I had to inform Fowler immediately.
Although it was close to six-thirty, Fowler answered the phone. Did he have a home to go to? I told him what I’d learned — withholding, of course, Brian’s role in the collecting of information. He was disappointed that the details were vague, but I assured him that Archbishop Mannix’s life was now officially in danger. Would he be told? Fowler thought not; at any rate, not yet. There was no point agitating the Catholic hierarchy until something more definite was known.
‘The last thing we need,’ he said, ‘is priests thundering from pulpits about persecution.’
I returned to Clutterbuck’s house just as he was cutting slices from a nut of corned beef. He
offered me some and I took it, not having eaten. It was quite good, although Mrs Castleton — for it was she who had made it — had been too generous with the cloves and this is a flavour of which I’ve never been particularly fond. The meat itself was excellent, of a quality that was unobtainable except from the black market. We put the beef between buttered slices of good bread — Clutterbuck wouldn’t stoop to using dripping — and washed it down with Ballarat Bitter — another commodity that was getting harder and harder to buy legally.
Nigella arrived soon afterwards and I went up to my room to read Timon of Athens, a play I’d long dreamt of producing. I had no desire to sit and watch Nigella and Clutterbuck bill and coo, knowing that for every coo there was a corresponding bill of a very different kind. I fell asleep in my clothes and didn’t wake until the clanging of the telephone downstairs demanded to be picked up. It was 7.00 a.m., and the horrifying Wednesday was about to get underway.
I answered the telephone. It was Brian, and the fear and panic in his voice tumbled into my ear in an incoherent demand that I get over to Mother’s house immediately.
‘What’s happened?’ I asked, my own voice now taut with the contagion of alarm.
‘Just get here,’ he cried, and hung up.
I was already dressed, so I left Clutterbuck’s at once and ran almost the full distance to Garton Street.
Mother was on the porch, wrapped in her nightgown and with an expression on her face that I’d never seen before. She was speechless, her eyes wide, but dulled by shock. I don’t think she saw me, and didn’t respond when I asked her if she was all right. I went into the house and found Brian pressed against the wall of the corridor leading to the kitchen. It was a strange and disconcerting attitude to strike, and it filled me with a kind of terror. I tried to speak but had to swallow first.
‘What? What’s happened here?’
Brian stared through me, and with a jolt was suddenly aware of my presence. He pulled himself together and led me into the kitchen. At first I saw nothing amiss. Then I saw them — four severed fingers and a thumb, lying on the bench.
‘They were in the cutlery drawer,’ Brian said. ‘Mother found them.’
I walked over to the bench and looked down at them. They’d been severed cleanly. I noticed that the nails were well manicured.
‘They’re not Darlene’s, are they?’ Brian asked.
‘Not unless she had hairy knuckles.’
Even in this bizarre situation I couldn’t stop myself from suggesting that this didn’t necessarily rule her out.
‘Have you checked anywhere else in the house?’
Brian looked even more stricken; I don’t think the possibility that other parts of this person might be scattered around had occurred to him. I pulled open the drawer under the cutlery drawer, expecting to find something grisly, but it contained nothing out of the ordinary.
It was Brian who found the next body part. In a saucepan on the stove top someone’s right foot sat as if waiting for water and a mire poix to make a stock. A rapid search of cupboards turned up a left hand, and in the refrigerator, bloodied, unidentifiable viscera wrapped in yesterday’s copy of the Truth newspaper.
Neither Brian nor I were capable of making any sense of this. We had no idea whose body this was. All we could surmise was that sometime in the night, someone had come into Mother’s house and planted the butchered remains of an adult male. In a fog of revulsion and dread we left the kitchen to look in all the downstairs rooms. Brian went into the living room and I, having caught sight of something in the umbrella stand near the front door, approached this receptacle. Rammed among the brollies, and poised in a ghastly parody of them, was an entire left leg — from the hip bone down — the remainder of a right leg, and two, handless arms. I touched nothing, of course, and through my disbelief and dreamlike state of disconnection, I noticed principally that the cuts were clean, precise and surgical. Whoever had done this hadn’t attacked the corpse in a frenzy. There was skill and deliberation in this dismemberment. The deliberation extended, I was certain, to the choice of Mother’s house in which to distribute the carcass.
I was on the point of joining Brian when the front door flew open and detectives Strachan and Radcliff burst in, followed by three uniformed policemen. The umbrella stand immediately commanded their attention.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Strachan said, and one of the uniformed officers visibly blanched and hurriedly went outside, presumably to be ill. My eyes darted to the living room door, and this didn’t escape the notice of Messrs Strachan and Radcliff. They pushed it open and there, in the middle of the room, stood Brian, a look of uncomprehending surprise on his face — a look that was mirrored on the startled face of Captain Spangler Brisket, whose severed head Brian held by his side.
‘It fell out of the cupboard,’ he said, as if this explained everything. This was entirely the wrong moment for Mother to push her way to the front, but she was a mistress of the wrong moment. She uttered a peculiar little cry and collapsed into a nearby chair. The remaining policemen were at Brian’s side in a moment, and Radcliff took Brisket’s head by the hair and lowered it to the floor, where it lay like a discarded stage prop. Strangely, nothing was said. We simply left the living room in a group, a policeman was stationed outside its door, I took Mother upstairs, and Brian was taken away.
I sat with Mother in silence. For the moment, words couldn’t convey the enormity of what had happened downstairs. The house had been turned into an abattoir. Detective Strachan intruded upon our dumb contemplation by telling us that we were to remain where we were, and that a contingent of coppers would go over the house and try to locate all of Spangler Brisket’s body parts.
‘Like humpty dumpty,’ I said. Strachan looked at me with distaste, as if this harmless remark were the most vulgar thing he’d ever heard. ‘You’ve arrested Brian,’ I added flatly.
‘We’ve taken him in for questioning. He hasn’t been arrested.’
‘Do you really think he’d do this in his own house?’
Strachan sighed wearily and gave a surprising answer.
‘No. For the moment though, he’s our best bet. Unless you’d like to put your hand up.’
I looked at him with an unmistakable expression of utter contempt for his deductive abilities.
‘Your arrival was very convenient,’ I said.
‘We were tipped off by an anonymous American serviceman who said we’d find the body of a Captain Spangler Brisket at this address. He also said that this Brisket had been having an affair with your brother’s wife. Turns out Brian had threatened Brisket’s life just the other day.’
‘That could only have come from Darlene.’
Strachan gave a noncommittal shrug.
‘We’re keeping an open mind. We do seem to be spending a lot of time at this house.’
Mother suddenly found her voice.
‘Brian couldn’t …’
‘If you want my opinion, Mrs Power, I agree with you. This is the work of a deranged and violent person and your son just doesn’t strike me that way. You’d have to agree, though, that we found him in something of a compromising position.’
‘So ridiculously compromising,’ I said, ‘as to be almost a proof of his innocence.’
Strachan produced an insultingly pitying expression and wondered aloud if I mightn’t like to keep quiet.
‘An American army officer has been murdered and violated. The Americans aren’t going to be too happy about that, and they’re going to want a culprit, and they’re going to want him now. They dealt with Leonski with ruthless speed, knowing full well what a disaster that was for relations with the Australians. They appeased the locals and they’re going to demand a bit of quid pro quo on this one. I guarantee it.’
‘They wouldn’t sacrifice an innocent man,’ I said.
‘Leonski�
�s going to hang in a few weeks time. It doesn’t bother them that the man is insane. He’s been killing Australian women and that’s what matters. He has to die and the legal niceties of his mental state are ignored. Now, Brian had motive and opportunity, and issued a threat. They might be tempted to run with that. Tensions are pretty high between the Yanks and our soldiers. They’re going to want to douse this before it really catches fire.’
Strachan made mollifying mutterings to the effect that he’d try to ensure that the investigation stayed out of American hands as much as possible, and he reassured Mother that this time they’d be working to prove that Brian was innocent. I said nothing, believing it to be unwise to remind Strachan of his recent errors of judgement. I wanted to ask him if John Trezise had confessed to Anna Capshaw’s murder, but I restrained myself, realising just in time that it would be foolish to establish a link between Trezise and me.
Mother and I sat in her small study for three hours while police downstairs put Spangler Brisket’s body back together again, piece by bloody piece. Eventually detective Strachan told us that they’d found all of him.
‘His torso was in the vegetable garden.’
We were told that it wouldn’t be possible for us to remain in the house that night. It was a crime scene and we would have to vacate until it had been thoroughly investigated.
‘That’s fine,’ Mother said. She’d reclaimed her verve. ‘I can stay with Will, at least for tonight. I’m sure he’ll find room.’
‘There’s plenty of room,’ I said without thinking. I’d never expected Mother and Paul Clutterbuck would ever meet, and there was something perilous about this.
As we walked across the park — I was lugging a suitcase that Mother insisted contained only the bare essentials for a one night stay, but the weight of which suggested that the bare essentials included several bricks — I gave Mother a brief account of how things stood with Paul Clutterbuck. I left out any details that were pertinent to Army Intelligence’s interest in him. I did hint that his politics weren’t quite as liberal as her own and that politics wouldn’t be a fruitful conversation starter.