A Thing of Blood
Page 25
I thought it best not to mention Army Intelligence at this point — I didn’t want to run the risk of Clutterbuck changing his plans. I wasn’t, however, going to accept the role of assassin, even though I knew it would never come to that. I’d allow Clutterbuck to push me sufficiently hard to give him a guarantee that I’d be there in the cathedral on Sunday, but he’d have to get one of his goons to hold the gun. I didn’t care for being the centre of attention in a situation where anything might go awry.
‘The police have George Beech and he’ll confess to Gretel’s murder.’
Things began to go awry much sooner than I’d expected. Clutterbuck said, ‘George Beech didn’t kill Gretel, Will. I did.’
‘That’s impossible.’
My mind raced back to the night of Gretel’s death. We’d watched her sing and we’d come home so that she could rest and take a bath before her next performance. Clutterbuck and I had had a drink downstairs and then decided to return to the speakeasy before Gretel. As we were leaving, Paul had called up to Gretel to tell her that we were going out. She’d replied that she was due to go on at 12.30, and that she’d meet us there. Paul was never out of my sight for more than a few minutes after that, and yet Gretel was dead when we came back home.
‘You mean, I presume, that you had Gretel killed.’
‘No, Will, I don’t. I mean that I put my hands around that lovely throat, and wrung it. And I can’t believe that you still don’t know how I did it, or rather I can believe it because you’re not a very good detective, although to give you your due, you did much better than I thought you’d do.’
‘All right, Paul, I’ll bite. If you really did kill Gretel, how did you do it, and why?’
‘I confess I had a little help, Will, but not with the deed, just with the misdirection. When the three of us came home here, Gretel and I went upstairs. I was only gone for a few moments. Long enough to kill poor Gretel. It was quick, and so completely surprising for her that she really didn’t have a chance to be frightened or distressed. I wasn’t the only person upstairs with her at the time — Anna Capshaw was waiting there. She ran the bath, and it was her voice you heard. You assumed, quite reasonably, that it was Gretel’s; the tap was running at the time, so any differences in their voices would have been hard to pick. She also put your tie around Gretel’s neck. And why? It was for your benefit, Will. Well, it was to make sure that you’d be useful to us. I couldn’t believe my luck when you agreed to help me bury her. I thought I was going to have to work much harder on you, really scare you with the implications of that tie of yours. Your experiences up in Maryborough must have made you very jumpy about the police.’
‘And how was I going to be useful to you?’
‘Our work is important, Will, and everyone in the Order is essential. What we needed was a person who’d carry out our most ambitious plan, but who we could then afford to lose. As soon as I met you I knew you were our man — the perfect mix of gullibility and misplaced self-assurance.’
I tried to interrupt him, but he stopped me.
‘Let me finish, Will. I’ll lay everything out before you. Everything.’
‘What more could there possibly be?’
He smiled.
‘Let’s start with Trezise. I’m afraid he didn’t kill Anna Capshaw in a fit of jealousy or rage. I killed Anna and, believe me, it broke my heart. It was possibly the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do, although I don’t expect your sympathy. I don’t think you know the first thing about sacrifice. You see, Will, we weren’t really sure what we were going to do to strike at the fucking Catholics. Trezise was a target, but the more I thought about him, the more I realised we needed to go after a much bigger fish, so I settled for setting him up for Anna’s murder. I think I loved her, Will, I really do, but she wasn’t going to stand quietly aside for Nigella. She just couldn’t see the bigger picture, and in the end I couldn’t trust her to keep quiet about Gretel.
‘Trezise’ll never prove his innocence. I made sure there was plenty of evidence linking him to the crime, so that gives me pleasure. Even if they don’t hang him, he’ll spend the rest of his life in prison wondering how his Catholic god could have deserted him. Things were going along swimmingly until your brother turned up, and it was transparently clear that the two of you were up to something. I thought you’d been through my drawers, so I did a more thorough job of it to confuse you. That was a painful thing to do, I can tell you.
‘I wasn’t convinced by Brian, Will. He’s almost as bad an actor as you are. I think you’d got it into your head that you could break up the Knights and establish yourself as some sort of brilliant investigator. It’s the kind of thing that’d appeal to your vanity. The thing about vanity, Will, is that you spend too much time staring at yourself in the mirror and not enough time looking over your shoulder.’
He paused, just to let that jibe sink in.
‘Brian is a bit different from you, though. He’s smarter and therefore more dangerous. I humbly admit that my attempt to get rid of him was a bit of a miscalculation. When he told me about his wife and her American lover, I thought I’d been handed a gift-wrapped opportunity. Spangler was easy to find and even easier to kill. MacGregor did the butchery, out the back of Ronnie Oakpate’s factory. It was amazing to watch, Will. Very skilful. When you take a man apart like that, he’s remarkably easy to transport — a few burlap sacks is all you need. I planted him around your mother’s house, and I am sorry if she found it distressing. I like your mother. I’d hoped that the coppers would arrest Brian as a matter of course and take him out of circulation. It had been such a successful strategy with Trezise. What I hadn’t counted on was their immediate and accurate assessment that if Brian was the killer he’d be unlikely to foul his own nest in that way. I got carried away with the drama of it all. It was about that time that we decided to execute Mannix. I can’t think why we hadn’t thought of it earlier. He’s the public and ugly face of Catholicism in this country after all. Strike at the head and the body’s bound to falter. It was Crocker who suggested that Brian be given the task of shooting Mannix.’
‘But if you knew that he wasn’t really one of you, how were you going to get him to pull the trigger?’
‘We were going to give him a choice — he shoots Mannix, or we shoot you. I was counting on him making the right choice. Now I have to count on you making the right choice.’
I knew what was coming.
‘You shoot Mannix, Will, or we shoot your mother.’
It was said very simply, very matter-of-factly, as if he was trying to minimise giving offence. He looked at his watch.
‘She should be having a not very nice cup of tea with Mary Rose Shingle right about now. I’m not sure that they’ll find very much to talk about, Miss Shingle being a couple of coupons short of a pullover.’
‘You don’t need me to shoot Mannix.’
‘Well, I suppose it’s partly personal now, although the reasons I stated earlier still hold. I confess it will give me a great deal of pleasure to watch you do something that goes against your nature and that you’re going to find difficult to live with afterwards. I do like actions that lead to a lifetime of punishment. They play in my head like favourite tunes. Ten years from now I’ll think of John Trezise languishing in jail, and it will give my day a lift.’
‘I’ve never fired a gun in my life,’ I said.
MacGregor and Crocker, who must have been listening at the door, took this as their cue to enter. MacGregor was holding a large hand gun, a Colt 45.
‘Mr MacGregor will be pleased to instruct you. He’s a man of many talents, our Mr MacGregor. You’ll be staying here with us today and tonight, Will, and I’m sorry but you’ll be confined to barracks. At least you’ll get in one more bath.’
MacGregor showed me how to fire the Colt, but we didn’t fire off any live ammunition.
‘You’ll be in the front pew, so you can hardly miss, but I think you should try to get two or three shots off. He’s a big target. Aim for the centre of the back. Don’t try for a head shot. You’ll miss.’
I had plenty of time that afternoon and evening to think about what Clutterbuck had said. For all his murderousness and duplicity, his view of the world was essentially a simple one, and the field of his vision was narrow — so narrow that James Fowler had gone undetected by him. This wasn’t really surprising; he’d gone undetected by his sister as well.
It had been decided that Mannix would be shot at the moment in the Mass when he consecrated the host. He would have his back to the congregation, most of whom would have their heads bowed in prayer. I was to stand in the pew and fire, then drop the gun and leave by a side entrance. A car would be waiting and I would be taken to Oakpate’s house in Brunswick where I’d have the opportunity to see that Mother was alive and well, and then I’d be driven to Ballarat, where a safe house had been organised. It all sounded neat, and I knew it was all bullshit.
At some point in the afternoon I heard Nigella’s voice. Almost immediately Crocker let himself into my bedroom, presumably to prevent me going downstairs and causing some sort of scene. Crocker said that Nigella and Clutterbuck were going to the pictures. He left me alone when he was sure they’d departed. Nigella would be giving Clutterbuck the answer to his proposal for a quick, post-assassination wedding. It was too bizarre to comprehend.
I insisted that I be allowed to speak by telephone to Mother. This, I was told, was impossible. I was assured that she was quite comfortable and being treated with the utmost respect.
The afternoon darkened into evening, and Sunday morning arrived with all its callous and disinterested regularity. There were no portents in the weather. It promised to be fine and sunny — a day for lounging in parks, not a day for shooting archbishops dead.
MacGregor took me to St Patrick’s Cathedral early, so that we could claim a seat in the front pew. The great, cavernous, and ribbed interior, designed to make the spirit fly upwards, had no such effect upon me. I experienced no glorious ascension, only a terrifying and crushing sense of impending havoc. What if Nigella hadn’t passed my message on? What if there wasn’t a single person who’d been deputised to rescue me?
The cathedral began to fill with people. The front pew was soon fully occupied, with one man giving a little sniff of displeasure at finding two unfamiliar people in what he obviously considered his seats. Before long a low murmur rolled from the congregation towards the altar, and it indicated what in a theatre would have been a full house. My legs had turned to jelly, and when Archbishop Mannix entered and blessed the congregation, the effort required to stand was monumental. I had to clutch at the side of the pew to maintain my balance.
Almost everything from this point on remains a jumble of images and sounds. Mannix was a tall man, and seemed taller than he was because he was so ramrod straight. He looked magnificent in a glittering, gold chasuble that hung about his shoulders like a shield. I could discern his Irish accent through his carefully enunciated Latin. The Vienna Boys’ Choir sang, and the congregation stood, knelt and sat, and responded as one with the practised precision of well-drilled church goers, familiar with the arcane demands of the Roman liturgy. I stole a glance to the left and right, but couldn’t see Clutterbuck anywhere, and I couldn’t see, either, anybody who looked as if he could have been from Army Intelligence.
I don’t recall a word of Mannix’s sermon. My head was fizzing and pinging with fear. I could hear, or fancied I could hear, the blood rushing up my carotid artery into my head — and for a while, this was all I could hear. This was nothing like stage fright. This was naked terror, primal and unstoppable. I heard myself making small, simpering and gasping sounds and felt tears running down my face. MacGregor nudged me sharply in the ribs. I buried my face in a handkerchief to disguise my distress from those near me.
I’d been told to ready myself when the altar boy tinkled a bell three times and the words ‘Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus,’ rang out. I missed the bell and the words, but MacGregor was there to warn me that the time was imminent. We were all kneeling, and I looked up and saw that Mannix had faced the altar and was uttering words, audible but not intelligible, and anyway in Latin. He then genuflected and raised a host above his head. The bell rang three times again and I heard Lady Macbeth’s bell tolling in my fevered brain. MacGregor rammed his fingers sharply into my armpit and I stood up — for what else could I do?
But where were they? Where were the people who would prevent this from happening? Out of the corner of my eye I saw a movement, in the shadow of a chapel off to the side. A priest in a black cassock stepped forward — only it wasn’t a priest, it was Clutterbuck. He raised a rifle to his shoulder, the familiar .30 calibre, semi-automatic, M1 Garand rifle that the Americans favoured. Of course, he wasn’t going to leave this up to me. Of course, he wanted the thrill of executing the man he believed was the incarnation of evil. At the end of the pew, a nun rose to her feet and from within the folds of her voluminous habit she produced a pistol, aimed it with absolute assurance, and fired a single shot. Clutterbuck fell to the ground, the clatter of his rifle lost in the echo of the gunshot.
On the other side of MacGregor the man who’d sniffed his displeasure had pressed a pistol to MacGregor’s head and slipped a handcuff around one of his wrists. I have to presume that what happened next was chaotic, but my mind and body had by this time had enough, and I slipped into a blessed faint. In keeping with the pattern of my life, at a moment of supreme stress I’d retreated into the relative safety of unconsciousness.
When I woke I found I’d been carried into the small room where I’d met with Trezise and his priest in what now seemed like another life. As the room and the people in it resolved themselves I could make no connections that made sense. There was a flurry of activity in the crowded space and a nun was bending down and asking me if I was all right. She looked vaguely familiar, but the veil and wimple framed her face so closely that I couldn’t be sure. I sat up and said, ‘I saw a nun shoot Clutterbuck. Nuns don’t shoot people, do they?’
‘No, Will,’ said the nun, ‘nuns don’t shoot people, but I’m not a nun.’
She turned away and removed her wimple, and when she faced me again I was staring, open-mouthed, at Nigella Fowler.
‘Paul Clutterbuck is dead,’ she said, ‘and all his cronies have been rounded up.’
‘But you were going to marry him this afternoon.’
‘Unfortunately, I had to kill him this morning. I’m glad it wasn’t the other way around, or now I’d be a widow.’
In a fog of bewilderment I heard myself saying, ‘I know nothing.’
Nigella leaned down to my ear and whispered, ‘Ain’t that the truth, Will Power, ain’t that the truth.’
I was sitting in Mother’s dining room that Sunday afternoon, drinking tea with Nigella Fowler and listening with a mixture of awe and something like love to her telling me that both she and her brother were with Army Intelligence. Mother was upstairs soaking off what she called the ‘filth of a filthy home.’ She was unharmed, although she complained that conversation with Mary Rose Shingle was more than was required of most in a time of war.
‘Paul Clutterbuck wasn’t really such a very smart man, Will,’ Nigella said. ‘His mind wasn’t a subtle instrument, which is why I could get so close to him without him suspecting that I was anything more than a potential source of income for him. He believed absolutely in his own magnetism. He believed in the gratitude of a plain girl for the attentions of a handsome man. In many ways he was a dangerous fool.’
‘You were magnificent,’ I said, and was unashamed of the tears that blurr
ed my vision.
‘I was terrified, Will. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that, but when James was called away I had to take charge. It was never our intention that I’d be anywhere near the cathedral.’
‘Where is James?’
She waggled her finger at me.
‘Clutterbuck’s group isn’t the only one of its kind in the country, Will. More than that, I can’t say.’
‘There’s a man named John Trezise and he’s been charged with the murder of a woman named Anna Capshaw. He’s innocent.’
All that I knew about Paul Clutterbuck tumbled out in a rush, including the fact that he’d killed Gretel Beech. I saw no reason, however, to reveal that I knew the whereabouts of the body. I judged that there was nothing to be gained by so doing. When I’d finished, Nigella said that John Trezise would be released as soon as was practicable, given that the police would have to be convinced that I was telling the truth. Similarly, the murder investigation against George Beech wouldn’t be pursued.
I was conscious of the fact that Nigella must be experiencing strong and confusing emotions, having shot and killed a man, even one as fundamentally loathsome as Paul Clutterbuck. She agreed that the reality of having taken a life hadn’t yet hit her, and as soon as she said these words she went quiet and then began to sob. She tried valiantly to control herself, but failed, and when I reached for her she fell into my arms and wept and wept until my shirt front was wet with her tears.
This was how Brian found us when he entered the dining room. He moved stiffly and I could see through his half-buttoned shirt that his abdomen was tightly bandaged.
‘Mother’s just told me what happened this morning,’ he said. ‘Christ Almighty.’
Nigella turned her tearful face towards Brian, and in a wild change of emotional gear she threw her head back and laughed.
‘You! Ziggy what’s-his-name. You’re Will’s brother! Now I’ve seen everything, and I mean that literally.’