As I was making my way carefully along the sandy path through the bush to the highway I saw Stan and Jimmy McLean pulling a little cart filled with kindling. Taking it home to their mother, I supposed, and perhaps to my mother also – the boys kept us supplied with wood scraps for our chip heater. I got the usual beaming smile from Stan, who I suspected had a bit of a crush on me. Jimmy looked ill. His face was thin and pale and drawn, and the usual cheeky grin was absent. I remembered that his brothers had told me he hadn’t been well.
‘G’day, Meg,’ Stan said. ‘Mr Luca’s done a bunk. Do you think he did it? Dad reckons he did.’
They were both looking at me closely.
‘I know as much as you do. It is odd that Mr Luca has disappeared, but who knows? Let’s wait and see, shall we? I’m sure the police will soon discover what happened.’
‘Doreen had a lot of fellows hanging about her. Lots of Yanks.’ Jimmy’s voice sounded raspy. ‘Maybe it was one of them. Maybe Mr Luca didn’t do it. Did the detective tell you anything?’
‘No. He didn’t tell me anything.’
‘What if Mr Luca didn’t do it?’ There was a surprisingly urgent note in his voice. ‘Dad says they’ll hang him because he’s an Eyetie. But what if he didn’t do it?’
‘They won’t hang him because his parents are Italian,’ I said. ‘He won’t hang unless there is good evidence that he killed Doreen. And even if they do convict him, he might not be hanged.’
Jimmy looked unconvinced. Grabbing the handle of the little cart from his brother he started to pull it away. I put a light restraining hand on his arm.
‘What, no joke, Jimmy?’
‘I’m not in a joking mood today,’ he said. ‘Sorry, Meg. Maybe tomorrow.’
He turned and pulled free from me, heading down the path. Stan threw me a worried smile and followed his brother.
I stood watching them walk away, feeling concerned. Jimmy always had a joke for me. It was a tradition between us. They were always very bad jokes and I always laughed as if they were very good jokes. I made a mental note to speak to Marie about him – find out if he had seen a doctor. I was very fond of Jimmy, and it was awful to see him so down.
Mr Goodley had a great deal of dictation that morning, and I spent an hour just taking shorthand. Before leaving the room I cleared my throat to catch his attention.
‘Is there any news on the Doreen Luca murder?’ I asked.
‘There’s nothing on the husband’s whereabouts yet. Munsie is putting out a warrant for his arrest. We suspect he’s in hiding somewhere – probably in the Italian community. They look after their own. Mind you, remember Reggie Woodham?’
‘Vaguely. The name sounds familiar.’
‘You might be a bit young to remember that one. Woodham killed his wife in ’35 and disappeared. They found his body in Kings Park three weeks later, hanging from a tree. Luca may have done the same.’
I shuddered. ‘I hope not. The whole thing’s horrible enough as it is.’
His face was impassive as he picked up one of the papers on his desk and began to peruse it.
‘I’ve got the autopsy report here. Doreen Luca was stabbed. Well, no surprises there. There was one single-edged stab wound that penetrated the right ventricle of the heart. There’s no evidence of, er, intimacy with a man prior to death. She was also bashed on the head, it seems.’
‘Bashed and stabbed?’ I felt a bit weak at hearing so much detail. Mr Goodley did that to me sometimes, read from autopsy reports so that I could ‘toughen up’. He said that the secretary to the Crown Prosecutor had to get used to blood and gore. But the cases had never involved someone I knew before.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But the stab wound caused her death. She definitely died in the shelter, they can tell by the post-mortem blood pooling.’
Mr Goodley was being remarkably forthcoming with the information this morning. ‘Do they know what time she died?’ I asked.
He read from the sheet of paper. ‘Between midnight and six on Sunday morning.’
It was when the muscles in my neck relaxed that I realised how tense I had been, how important it was to me that Peter’s brother couldn’t have been involved in Doreen’s murder.
‘Have they found the murder weapon?’
He shook his head. ‘It was a knife, similar to those a lot of servicemen carry. It’s most probably the husband, but Munsie is considering other possibilities. Claremont Hospital, and Lemnos. There were no patients listed as missing from either, but you never know.’
These were the two mental hospitals in Perth, and both were just within walking distance of my home. Lemnos Hospital looked after the shell-shocked soldiers from the Great War. We sometimes found a lost patient from Lemnos wandering aimlessly around the neighbourhood. They could be agitated and frightening, but I’d never heard of anyone being hurt by one.
‘What else?’ Mr Goodley scanned the notes in front of him. ‘He’s looked into Mrs Luca’s activities at the Hollywood Military Hospital. She worked in administration, and was well liked by the patients and staff. None of the men she had dealings with appears to have been dangerous, or to have been unduly interested in her. They suspect she may have been engaged in some pilfering of hospital stores, but that isn’t uncommon, unfortunately.’
‘Captain Lagrange said she had twigs in her hair and her clothes were dirty.’
‘Yes. That’s mentioned in here.’
He leaned back in his chair.
‘Munsie’s keeping an open mind, but I’m of the firm view that she and her husband argued about her relations with American servicemen. He stabbed her in anger, was filled with remorse and ran off like a cowardly dog. Italians like to use knives.’
I wanted to tell him that I’d met the man, that I didn’t think that he was any more likely to stab a person than I was, and it was stupid to make generalisations about Italians. But Mr Goodley was my boss and there was a line I couldn’t cross. His attitude surprised me, however.
‘Frank Luca is Australian,’ I said. ‘He was born here.’
He ignored me. His hands were steepled in front of him on the desk, which meant he was about to make another pronouncement.
‘I’ll go for wilful murder and the death penalty, but I suspect the jury will convict him of the lesser offence and he won’t hang. She was a bit of a bad girl, it seems. Running around with all sorts of men, putting her child in an orphanage. Juries don’t like that sort of thing.’
I mumbled something about having work to do, and left his office.
Unfortunately, Mr Goodley’s views on Italians were widely held. At my Red Cross Circle meeting that evening the only subject of discussion was the murder. And the only suspect was Frank Luca.
Every week a group of local women met at the local scout hall to knit, gossip and pack comfort parcels for the Australian prisoners of war. The tins of food that had been declared as essential nutrition for the soldiers – chocolate, tea, jam, brown sugar, condensed milk, coffee, sultanas, cheese and canned lamb and peas – were set out on long trestle tables. There were also packets of tobacco, cigarettes, soap and socks, which were ‘essential for morale’. Everything was carefully packed into sturdy cardboard boxes with the Red Cross symbol on the top and ‘Australia’ on the sides. We could only hope that they actually got to the prisoners.
‘It must have been the husband,’ said Myrtle Glennister. She handed a packed box to me. I put on the lid and bound the whole thing tightly with twine before placing it with the other completed parcels on the dispatch table.
‘He’s Italian, isn’t he?’ Poppy Bates was at the side of the hall, part of a group of women who were knitting. ‘The husband, I mean.’
‘He was born in Australia,’ I said. No one paid me any attention. I tied up another box, snipping the twine angrily.
Mrs Morton was a large lady with a deep, almost mannish voice that echoed through the hall. ‘My Reggie says that the Italians were a liability in the last war when they fought with us and
it’s easier to have them as enemies in this one. Let the Nazis worry about them.’ That comment caused a lot of laughter.
‘I wish they’d find him.’ Olive Lawson sounded anxious.
Dimity Smith handed me a box. ‘Never trust an Italian, that’s what my Percy says. Italians are hot-blooded. He probably killed her in a jealous rage.’
I had to work hard to bite my tongue and say nothing. I couldn’t alter people’s views, but it irritated me to have to listen to such ill-informed comments. My best friend in Kalgoorlie had Italian parents. I had known her family well and liked them all very much. I thought of poor Nancy Gangemi, trying to raise three children in the absence of her husband. The women around me were not nasty or stupid, and I realised that it was hard to be objective when the Italians were fighting against us in the war – Australian POWs in prison camps in Italy might well receive the parcels we were packing tonight. But given such anti-Italian prejudice, my fear was that Frank Luca would be convicted no matter what the evidence.
‘Why don’t we listen to some music?’ I said loudly. ‘It’ll make the time go faster.’
‘Have you seen Mrs Gangemi? She’s looking for you. She’s really upset about this story. Apparently she knows Frank Luca,’ Annie said, holding up the paper. Frank’s photograph was on the front page, under the heading: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?
I had just walked into the office on Friday morning. It seemed like nobody in Perth was talking about anything other than the murder or Frank’s guilt.
‘Mrs G. kept slipping into Italian, telling me what a nice boy he was and how he couldn’t have done it. Mind you, he’s quite good-looking,’ she said. ‘Maybe he didn’t do it.’
I laughed. ‘You’d be a terrible juror.’
She gave me a sly look. ‘Speaking of good-looking, aren’t you meeting Captain Cute for lunch again?’
I felt myself flushing. ‘It’s not like that. I think he feels responsible for me, because I went out with his brother.’
‘Mmmm,’ said Annie. ‘He’s dreamy. Sort of a cross between Tyrone Power and Errol Flynn. Wish he felt responsible for me.’
I didn’t see Mrs Gangemi before I met Tom for lunch.
He was in good spirits. He seemed more alert and interested than he had on Wednesday, and there was a sharpness in his eyes that I hadn’t seen previously.
‘It looks like we’ve finally taken Buna–Gona,’ he said. ‘It’s just mopping up operations now.’
The joint Australian–American offensive to capture the Japanese beachheads at Buna, Gona and Sanananda on the northern coast of Papua had been much in the news over the past months. The casualties had been appalling.
‘At what cost, though?’ I said.
‘You’re right, of course. From the very first that offensive has been a litany of death, disease and despair. We learned the hard way that maps don’t show jungles, swamps, snipers or mosquitoes.’ He took off his cap and ran his good hand through his hair.
‘The government wouldn’t allow a lot of what really went on to be reported, because it would be too distressing to the public. MacArthur underestimated the Japanese and forced the men to fight with insufficient artillery and ammunition. Hopefully he won’t do that again.’
‘Harvey is up there with the 2/16th Battalion,’ I said.
‘That was my old battalion. I was with them throughout the Syrian campaign.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘We faced the Vichy French forces when we crossed into Palestine. Would you believe we were told to wear our slouch hats, not helmets?’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘In the hope that the French might remember us as comrades from the Great War, and not fire on us.’
I smiled and shook my head. ‘That’s crazy.’
Tom nodded. ‘We soon put on our helmets when the bullets and bombs started flying.’ He sighed. ‘The fighting 16th. Not many of the men I commanded in Syria would be left. The casualties at Buna were terrible. My old company would be made up of reinforcements I don’t know, like your Harvey.’
I still hadn’t written to Harvey to shatter his illusions. So, to change the subject, I said, ‘It’s been great to read about the commandos on Timor. I know a couple of them – there are a few Kalgoorlie men among them.’
The West Australian had been full of the exploits of this small group of Australian commandos that had been successfully fighting the Japanese in guerrilla-style warfare since February 1942. Everyone thought they had been killed or captured when the Japanese invaded Portuguese East Timor, until they cobbled together a radio and made contact with Darwin.
‘Country boys are often the toughest and most resourceful soldiers,’ Tom said with a grin. ‘Bad at taking orders and you need to earn their respect, but they were some of my best men.’
‘Do you miss being part of it all? Not the fighting, but just being part of it?’ Talking about the war like this seemed to have enlivened Tom and it was good to see it.
His smile was more like a grimace. ‘You’re perceptive, Meg. I hated fighting. I hated it more than I could possibly describe. And yet, I was surprisingly good at it . . . When you’re in the thick of it and your men are relying on you, you just have to get on with the job.’ He looked away, towards the river. ‘Yes, I miss being part of it.’
I wondered again why Tom was in Perth. And why he was considered ‘unreliable’.
Over our sandwiches we discussed what had been reported in the papers about Doreen’s murder and I told him what I’d learned from Mr Goodley. Tom agreed that the evidence was mounting against Frank Luca.
‘Mr Goodley thinks Italians are predisposed to crimes of passion,’ I said. ‘In fact, just about everybody is saying that.’
He laughed. ‘Whereas you are well aware that there are lots of cool, pragmatic Italians. And despite the paucity of evidence, I’m sure there are lots of passionate Australians, too. I hate stereotypes.’
I smiled. ‘Me too,’ I said, pleased that Tom didn’t share Mr Goodley’s views.
We sat companionably for a few moments, both watching the river.
‘Do you know Frank Luca? Is that why those comments about Italians annoy you so much?’
‘Yes, I know him, but the comments annoy me because they are unfair and ill informed,’ I said, almost offended. ‘Frank lived with Doreen in our street for a year before he joined the Navy. As you can see from the photograph in the paper, he’s rather handsome. A bit like Rudolph Valentino. I don’t know him well, but he seems nice enough, a gentle person. I thought he loved Doreen very much.’
‘Which makes it more likely that he killed her.’
‘That’s a horrible thing to say. Why would you say that?’
He looked amused and didn’t answer.
‘Mr Goodley thinks he might have killed himself.’ The thought of someone dying alone in that way had been haunting me. ‘He has a daughter. It would be a dreadful thing to do.’
‘He might think it was preferable to going through a trial and then being hanged.’
I looked down at the grass before saying, with some embarrassment, ‘I don’t like the death penalty. Not even for murder. I know that sounds stupid, when we are at war and people are dying horribly every hour, but I don’t think “an eye for an eye” is the answer.’
He gave me a quick, sideways glance. ‘Because any person’s death diminishes you? Because you are involved in mankind? I used to believe that, but war changes things.’
‘ “Involved in mankind”. That’s John Donne, isn’t it?’ I said slowly, hoping my schoolgirl memory wasn’t letting me down. ‘ “No man is an island.” ’
He nodded. ‘ “Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee –” It’s a great piece of writing.’
‘It’s exactly what I think. I’m sorry that you don’t believe it any more.’
There was a short silence. Tom was looking down, staring at his maimed hand.
‘T
here are some people whose death would improve humanity,’ he said at last. ‘And, to be perfectly truthful . . . if I could, I would opt out of mankind altogether.’
I moved my gaze over to the river and saw a water bird flash downwards, looking for fish. In the months after Peter died I had wanted to leave the world behind, too. Every breath seemed too much trouble and sleep brought only nightmares. That I had been able to drag myself out of the dark pit was due in no small measure to the unconditional love of my mother and sister. I wondered how unconditional Phyllis Gregory’s love was.
All at once, the day seemed cooler and I shivered.
‘Cold?’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of the wind. I’ll buy you a cup of tea.’
Ten
I was on my way to pick up Ma’s groceries the following Saturday morning when I saw Jimmy McLean sitting on Mr McCready’s wall, frowning at the footpath. His face was still too thin and drawn, but he smiled to see me.
‘Hey, Meg,’ he said eagerly. ‘Why do you think it would be a good idea to have a tax on prams?’
‘I have no idea,’ I responded. ‘Why would it be a good idea?’
‘Because then all the babies would be up in arms and we’d have a fully armed infantry.’
I laughed. ‘I like that one,’ I said.
He grinned, but it didn’t mask the tiredness in his eyes. When the grin faded his restless anxiety was obvious. ‘Meg, you found her, didn’t you? Found Doreen, I mean.’
I nodded.
‘It must have been awful for you. I’m sorry that you found her.’ There was a strange intensity in his voice. ‘No one should have to find a body. Not of someone they know.’
‘I’m fine, Jimmy. I didn’t see much. It was Captain Lagrange who found her really.’
His face screwed up in a frown. ‘What’s he like, Captain Lagrange? Stan said he was looking for her that day. What sort of bloke is he?’
A Stranger in my Street Page 10