A Thing of Blood

by Robert Gott

  MacGregor stepped forward and punched the priest first in the groin and then in the side of the head. He fell unconscious to the ground.

  ‘Time to leave,’ Clutterbuck said. ‘Our work here is done.’

  Clutterbuck had gone upstairs to change. Oakpate and Crocker had gone home, citing early starts the next morning. MacGregor sat with Brian and me, his face flushed either with whisky or with the almost post-coital heat of lust satisfied.

  ‘Serves him right,’ he said. ‘A good punch in the balls isn’t going to matter to someone like him, is it?’

  Clutterbuck returned, his face washed and his hair neatly combed. He was wearing a bathrobe over his pyjamas. Once I might have thought this elegant. Now I thought he looked like a pale, pale imitation of Noël Coward.

  ‘Shall I explain?’ he asked me.

  ‘Attempted murder doesn’t really require much in the way of explanation.’

  ‘You have a tendency to exaggerate, Will. No one was in any danger of dying tonight.’

  I spluttered my disbelief.

  ‘Only because your fuel wasn’t good enough.’

  Clutterbuck laughed.

  ‘The fuel was perfect.’ He paused to let that sink in. ‘I’m not a murderer, Will.’

  ‘You’re not seriously going to rationalise what happened tonight.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake. The priest was roughed up a bit, that’s all. He can offer it up to the suffering souls in Purgatory, so a good time was had by all. He’ll have a few bruises and a story to tell, and by the time he’s finished telling it he’ll be the hero who wrestled some Yankee anti-Christ and won.’

  ‘So it was all just a bit of fun, was it? Scaring someone witless and beating him up is your idea of a good night’s entertainment.’

  ‘It’s a bit like high melodrama, Will. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it isn’t without a point.’

  ‘And the point is?’

  Clutterbuck settled into a chair and swung one knee over the other.

  ‘The point is that Brian proved himself a worthy member of the Order tonight. We needed to know where his loyalties lay, and as he was prepared, without argument, to drop a lighted match onto what he thought was a highly inflammable priest, I think his loyalty’s been well proven. From the priest’s point of view, and maybe even from Brian’s, I suppose you could argue that it was attempted murder. Neither of them knew that the liquid was pure alcohol or that it would burn itself out without doing too much damage. More of a flambé than anything else. I was careful not to get it on the priest’s skin, although I don’t deny I was tempted. We had you there for security, Will. My fellow Knights argued that because I’d introduced you to them you might at some stage decide to talk to the wrong people about us. We thought you’d be less likely to do this if it meant implicating your brother in something which an unsympathetic policeman might construe as violence with menaces, or worse, and as you were present and did nothing, I don’t think young Father Arsehole, or whatever he’s called, will be offering you absolution if it ever came to a prosecution.’

  ‘You already knew I wouldn’t say anything.’

  ‘It’s always good to make assurance doubly sure, and now that both you and Brian are nicely woven into the fabric of our little group we can all rest peacefully.’

  Brian, who’d been grinning in an effective rendition of a well-stroked and well-pleased village idiot, suddenly dropped his carefully managed persona and asked with real concern, ‘What do you mean, Will? How does Paul know that you’ll say nothing?’

  Fortunately, neither MacGregor nor Clutterbuck noticed the shift in his demeanour.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Just that I’d already told Paul that I wasn’t interested in what his group did, and that I certainly wasn’t interested in reporting their activities to the police.’

  Clutterbuck could have chosen this moment to tell Brian about Gretel Beech, but he settled for saying, ‘Will and I have an understanding. And now I think we should discuss how and when Brian and Will are going to kill Archbishop Daniel Mannix.’

  Chapter Twelve

  the unexpected visitor

  IT WAS MACGREGOR’S VOICE that intruded upon the silent world into which I’d fallen. I think the shock of Clutterbuck’s casual confidence that we’d do as instructed had the physical effect of briefly cutting off my air, and I must have blacked out. MacGregor was on his feet and patting Brian’s shoulder, when a few seconds ago he’d been sitting exhibiting the odd, rodent-like twitch that jumped around his mouth and making regular infinitesimal adjustments to his hair.

  ‘All the honour will be yours,’ MacGregor was saying.

  ‘Well then, I don’t want to share it with Will.’

  He managed to sound both surly and proud of the honour being accorded him. It was a remarkable performance, and one which even I would have had difficulty carrying off. The more Brian said, the more certain I was that he’d make a very fine actor indeed.

  ‘You can do the deed, Brian, but we’ll need Will there to support you and to help you get away safely,’ Clutterbuck said. ‘You won’t have to get your hands dirty, Will.’

  ‘You know, Paul, you have a very strange moral sense. Just because I don’t have to pull the trigger doesn’t mean I’m not implicated.’

  ‘Now you’re getting into philosophy. We’ll be here all night if we go down that path.’

  In an effort to elicit more information, I decided to play along.

  ‘And while we’re busy assassinating the most famous cleric in Australia, where will the brave members of your Order be?’

  ‘Now you’re sounding snippy. We will, of course, be in church that day, praying hard for your success — the same church where Mannix will go to his eternal reward.’

  ‘You want Brian to kill Mannix in St Patrick’s Cathedral?’

  ‘Can you think of a more appropriate place?’

  ‘He stood up and sonorously declaimed, ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’

  MacGregor laughed sycophantically.

  ‘It’s been an exciting night,’ said Clutterbuck. ‘I think we should all go to bed now and think about Sunday’s assassination.’

  ‘Sunday?’

  ‘No time like the present, Will. Nine o’clock mass. The main attraction. Mannix will be there, the choir will be yodelling away. It will be beautiful. He’s a very tall man and he’ll fall very picturesquely at the altar, all those expensive robes flowing around him. Very Thomas à Becket.’

  ‘I’m going home,’ said Brian. MacGregor said the same and they both got up to leave.

  ‘I’d drive you to your respective homes,’ Clutterbuck said, ‘but I don’t want to. Too tired.’

  ‘I’ll walk with you,’ I said to Brian. ‘I think Mother would appreciate having us both in the house tonight.’

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ said Clutterbuck. ‘You have much to discuss.’

  As I passed him on my way out he put his hand on my forearm and said, ‘Don’t imagine you can stop this from happening, Will. If you did manage to get Brian to change his mind, I’m afraid I’d have to call on you to deal with Mannix, and the body of a young woman currently resting peacefully in the Carlton Cemetery might make an awkward reappearance if you refused.’

  I didn’t disabuse Clutterbuck of his belief that he had me over a barrel by telling him that Gretel’s killer was already in custody, and his confession was inevitable. I manufactured fearful resignation and simply said that Brian was sufficiently deranged to render him unreachable, and that Clutterbuck could have every confidence in his insane willingness to murder an innocent man.

  ‘If you knew anything at all about the extent of Catholic espionage in this country you couldn’t possibly accept that Mannix is anything other than a criminal and a traitor. He is the
worst of men; a boil that has to be lanced.’

  His grip on my arm tightened as he spoke, and his face reddened. I caught a glimpse then of the man he truly was, and I knew without a doubt that no amount of money would protect Nigella from the rages he’d express in private. I must have felt an overwhelming need for a small victory over him because I suddenly told him that Anna Capshaw was dead and that John Trezise had been arrested for her murder. He relaxed his grip on my arm, and said, ‘You were saving that up, were you, for just the right moment?’

  ‘No time like the present, Paul.’

  I could tell that the news had shocked him. His face became blank, in readiness, I think, for an upsurge of emotion. Whether Anna Capshaw was his ex-wife or not, clearly he was attached to her in some profound way. I couldn’t allow myself to feel any sympathy for him. If I stayed to watch him fill up with grief, it would blunt the edge of my detestation of him and of all that he stood for. I coldly left him to wrestle with his feelings alone.

  Brian was waiting for me in Bayles Street. MacGregor had scuttled off to whatever rat’s nest he called home.

  ‘These are bad, bad people, Will.’

  ‘You did very well in there, Brian. You almost convinced me that you were crazy enough to assassinate someone.’

  ‘I was shitting myself, Will, absolutely shitting myself.’

  As we walked I assured him that neither he nor Archbishop Mannix would be in any danger on Sunday, that the cathedral would be crawling with Army Intelligence personnel, and that the Order of the Shining Knights would be rounded up and charged with enough offences to put them away for a very long time.

  ‘That priest saw our faces you know,’ he said.

  ‘Yes I know, but I don’t see how it matters unless he sees us again, and I’ll be staying well away from St Carthage’s, I can tell you.’

  ‘Listen Will, I didn’t actually put the boot into him, not like the others.’

  ‘I know that. There wasn’t a thud.’

  We were silent for a minute or so. With time to reflect on the attack on the young priest, one moment among all the frightful moments reared up and demanded to be spoken of.

  ‘I have to ask you this, Brian. What made you drop that match onto the priest’s clothes?’

  He stopped and had to make an obvious effort to control his temper.

  ‘Do you really think, Will, that I’d be prepared to set someone on fire just to protect my cover and prove my loyalty to a group of lunatics? Do you really think I’m capable of that?’

  ‘Well,’ I said reasonably, ‘You did drop the match, Brian, and you did know that his clothes were wet with some highly inflammable liquid. It could have been petrol.’

  ‘You’re not a very good PI are you. I knew it wasn’t petrol. There was no smell, so I also guessed what it was, and any schoolboy will tell you that pure alcohol burns at a much lower heat than petrol. I also noticed that Clutterbuck was very careful to keep it off the bloke’s face and any exposed skin. I knew he was testing me, and I knew that he wouldn’t want a full scale murder investigation on his doorstep when he had much bigger plans.’

  He paused for breath.

  ‘You know, Will, one thing about you, you never disappoint when it comes to disappointing.’

  ‘All right, Brian. You’re wound up, and no wonder, but I had to ask the question.’

  ‘That’s what’s so disappointing. You didn’t have to ask the question. You shouldn’t have asked the question.’

  He was wrong, of course. It’s a PI’s job to ask questions, but I attempted to mollify him by apologising and pointing out that this was not the time to be arguing. We were in the middle of the most dreadful and dangerous situation of our lives, and we couldn’t afford to allow personal antipathies, many of them spawned in childhood, to interfere with our thinking. It was also essential that Brian not pull out of his commitment to model for Mr Wilks the next morning. Fortunately, as he explained when he’d calmed down, his experience in St Carthage’s had made him immovably determined to bring fifth columnists and their ilk to justice. If Lady Bailey was a Nazi spy, and Brian intended to find out whether she was (a statement that troubled me somewhat), he would unflinchingly condemn her to a traitor’s fate. I was troubled because all I wanted him to do was strike a few attitudes, not wrestle a patriotic, elderly and titled lady to the ground, especially if he was naked at the time.

  I didn’t try to dissuade him from taking any inappropriate action because his current moodiness precluded his accepting such advice calmly. I supposed that there wasn’t much he could really do in the nude, although his admittedly clever handling of tonight’s crisis made me wary of underestimating him. He was capable of great courage, or maybe foolhardiness, with or without clothes. I’d have to trust that Lady Bailey’s positively über-banality would immediately convince him that I had, once again, made a mistake — a mistake he’d be more than happy to uncritically accept.

  Mother was still awake when we reached Garton Street. She was on her hands and knees in the living room scrubbing at the spot where Spangler Brisket’s severed head had inconsiderately dripped blood.

  ‘This is the last of it,’ she said, ‘and the most stubborn. There was surprisingly little blood anywhere else, given how widely distributed he was. The umbrella stand was unpleasant, of course.’

  She chatted to Brian about how very charming Paul Clutterbuck was, and she was pleased that I’d neglected to tell Brian about Clutterbuck’s theory regarding Darlene because it meant that she was now able to produce it with an unspoken ‘Ta da!’, like the surprise lurking on the last page of a whodunit. When Brian failed to express any excitement, she enlisted my support by saying that I fully endorsed the Clutterbuck version.

  ‘I know Darlene better than anyone — recent surprises notwithstanding — and I can’t see her taking time off from her Herbs for Victory commitments to have affairs with two men and oversee the killing of one of them.’

  Where Brian saw a mermaid, I saw a dugong. Our widely differing views of Darlene meant that further speculation was a waste of time and I announced that as I had a film to shoot the next morning I would go up to bed. On the way up I ran into Peter Gilbert on his way down. I’d forgotten that he was going to spend the night. My natural inclination was to resent his presence. It wasn’t anything personal, unless you consider that the deliberately clandestine nature of his affair with my mother strays into the realm of the personal.

  ‘I’m glad that business in Maryborough sorted itself out for you,’ he said. ‘I was ready to go up there if necessary.’

  I dismissed this as inconsequential small talk.

  ‘How long have you been having an affair with my mother?’

  ‘Four years.’ He thought for a moment.

  ‘Let me expand on that. When I say four years, I really mean twenty years. I was only having an affair for the four years that coincided with your father being alive. After his death, for the next sixteen years, we were involved in what is rightly called a relationship. We were, of course, discreet. Even so, it is astonishing that you never noticed — or perhaps not so astonishing after all.’

  He said all this with the clipped confidence of the practised solicitor, as if he was laying before me the irrefutable evidence in an open and shut case. How I might feel about such a revelation was of no interest to him. In fact, I felt nothing in particular, except perhaps the slightly distressing realisation for a man my age, that my mother was a stranger. Not wishing to hear any more from him, I said, ‘Good night’, and went to my old room where I re-read Nigella’s dreadful script. I allowed myself to contemplate Peter Gilbert’s assertion that he and my mother had begun an adulterous liaison when I was barely twelve years old, and had continued it even through what ought to have been a period of decent mourning for a dead husband, in Mother’s case, and close friend in Gilbert’s. I fell
asleep musing on the inconstancy of human emotion.

  Thursday morning was grey and wet — one of those slate-coloured Melbourne days that make you feel like your spirit is being tamped down by a celestial thumb. At breakfast, which was just a cup of tea, Brian asked if there was any heating in Lady Bailey’s drawing room. I lied and said that, of course, there was; when, in truth, I had no idea. I’d been so surprised to find myself naked that the air temperature hadn’t registered. I do know that there’d been no alarming shrinkage in response to a sudden chill so it was safe to presume that the room was heated.

  ‘When I’m there, Will, what exactly should I be on the lookout for?’

  ‘Nothing in particular. She’s not going to give herself away by suddenly leaping to her feet and giving a Nazi salute. All I want you to do is see if you can find out the names of any of the other women. You might overhear one talking to another. This is low level surveillance, Brian. Even if you come away with nothing, it’s all right.’

  I hoped that Brian would heed my words and not do anything embarrassing. If he could obtain a few pointless names at least he’d feel that he’d done something worthwhile.

  ‘How long have you known about Mother and Peter Gilbert?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Years.’

  ‘Years!’

  ‘It was pretty obvious, Will. They spent a lot of time together after Dad died.’

  ‘They spent a lot of time together before he died as well. Did you know about that?’

  ‘No, but it doesn’t surprise me. Dad was hardly ever home if you remember, and when he was he wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs.’

  I didn’t press Brian any further, conscious as I was that the conversation would inevitably decline into an accusation that my ignorance of Mother’s private life had more to do with my supposed self-absorption than with her and Gilbert’s subterfuge. With the greatest reluctance I had to inwardly acknowledge that there might be a grain of truth in this. It wasn’t, however, something that warranted being spoken out loud.