‘But you thought up the idea of swapping my drugs.’
I felt the gun move as Betty laughed softly.
‘Nobbie thought you were getting too close. We wanted to make you look unreliable, let them know you were addicted. Maybe put you back in hospital. Get you off his back. I made up Nembutal to look like morphine pills and I swapped them for one of your prescriptions in the dispensary at the hospital.’
Tom regarded her blankly. ‘So you didn’t swap them to try to frame me for Jimmy’s disappearance?’
The gun moved suddenly as Betty laughed. I couldn’t help making a quick panicky movement and I saw fear spark in Tom’s eyes then disappear as his face became calm again.
‘Is that when you took them?’ she said. ‘What a lark. Now shut up, I want to get out of here.’
‘Why did you get me and Meg here tonight?’
‘That was Nobbie’s idea. He said you were asking too many questions at the base.’
‘What was the plan, Betty?’
‘He figured that if we had Meg he could get you to tell us what you knew. I wasn’t going to have anything to do with that,’ she said decisively. ‘I like Meg.’
I saw the fury in Tom’s eyes, just for an instant. I hoped Betty hadn’t seen it.
‘And after I had told you all that I knew?’ His voice was icily calm.
‘Nobbie said we needed a fall guy.’ Now there was a note of whining self-justification in her voice. ‘I like Meg. It was nothing to do with me. It was Nobbie.’
‘What was Nobbie going to do, Betty?’
She spoke quickly, as if saying it quickly somehow made it less appalling. ‘He didn’t tell me, not really. I wasn’t sure.
I think he was going to stab Meg, just like he stabbed Doreen. And then you were going to disappear and they’d think that you stabbed Meg and Doreen. No one would believe Jimmy then, no matter what he said. Not after they knew about you and the drugs. Nobbie thought it would be easy to get you. He didn’t expect you could fight.’
‘You and Nobbie were going to leave Meg here, dead on the floor? Then you were going to kill me and bury my body somewhere?’ Tom’s voice was flat. ‘That was your plan?’
Tears rolled down my cheeks and I felt them dripping from my chin. I couldn’t look at Tom.
‘He had dug the hole already,’ she said. ‘In the bushland near the base.’ I felt her head jerk up; the gun jerked too. ‘It wasn’t my plan. It was all Nobbie’s idea. I had nothing to do with it. I told him he shouldn’t do it. I didn’t like it at all. He said we had to or he’d be hanged. He said we’d both be hanged.’
‘I had an alibi for Doreen’s death.’
‘Only that fiancée of yours. No one would believe her. Not after it became known how many drugs you’d been taking and that Doreen was getting them for you. They’d think you killed her to keep her quiet. No. It was a good plan. Only he didn’t realise you’d be able to put up a fight.’ I felt her shrug. ‘That’s it. I’m leaving.’
‘Betty, before you go, give me some pills. Please. I’ve got money.’ It was Chad’s voice, low and desperate.
I’d forgotten about Chad. I turned to him. He was still shivering and there was a dead look in his eyes.
‘Please, Betty.’
‘No,’ Betty said, her voice sharp. ‘No. You’re pathetic, Chad Buchowski. Get the stuff from your own dispensary.’
‘They won’t give me what I need.’
I felt her shrug again. ‘There’s some in the box,’ she said, presumably to Tom. ‘Give them to him if you want.’
Tom whispered something to Stan and got up. He went to the tin box and took out a tube of pills. Moving over to Chad he crouched in front of him. As he moved away I saw Chad swallow. Tom started to return to Stan when Betty’s voice rang out. ‘Hey! Get the money from him. I’m not running a charity.’
Tom turned back to Chad. ‘It’s in my breast pocket,’ he said.
Tom reached in and took out a wad of American bills.
‘Give me all of it,’ Betty said. ‘Chad can keep the pills that are in the box. Bring the money over here, Tom. No funny business, mind, or I’ll shoot her. I mean it.’
She prodded me with the gun to make the point.
Tom walked towards us with the money. He was handing it to me when there was a sudden loud banging at the door. I felt Betty jerk in alarm and she pulled me with her as she turned to the door. Then everything seemed to happen in slow motion.
‘Betty Barwon, turn off those lights. Do you hear me? Get those lights off right now. You know better than that. Turn them off.’
Some part of me registered that it was Mr Phoenix’s voice, but Tom had used his shoulder to push me hard to one side. I landed heavily on the floor amid a shower of banknotes. In a blur of movement, Tom had circled Betty’s wrist with his left thumb and forefinger, while at the same time grabbing the barrel of the gun with his right hand and pushing it towards her stomach. Then the gun was in his hand. He shoved Betty backwards and I saw astonishment in her face as she hit the floor with a thud.
Tom laughed.
It was the burst of laughter, verging on hysteria, that brought me to my senses. Tom was examining the gun in his hand.
‘She had the safety on the whole time.’ He looked back at Stan, shaking his head and still laughing. ‘She had the safety on. I was so scared I could hardly think, and she had the safety on the whole time.’
Still laughing, he tucked the gun into the pocket of his trousers and bent over to help me up. I took his hand and he pulled me up towards him, folding his arms around me tightly. I burst into tears again, sobbing against his chest. It was hard and muscled and smelled of sweat and wet cotton. I hardly registered that Mr Phoenix was standing at the open back door, looking extremely annoyed.
‘Get those lights out in the front rooms or put up the curtains,’ he barked. ‘You’re breaching blackout. There is a war on, you know!’
Then I began to laugh.
Thirty
My hysteria faded as we waited for Detective Munsie to arrive. Tom was, as usual, coolly efficient. He gave Mr Phoenix the gist of what had happened and called the police. Once he had released me from that fierce hug, Tom had not looked at me. He and Stan had untied Chad and used the cords to bind Betty, whose courage and energy had dissipated as soon as she lost her gun. She sat still, looking miserable and sniffing quietly.
The cold-blooded horror of what Nobbie had planned for me and Tom played around the edges of my mind, sending shivers down the back of my neck every time I let down my guard. I tried to distract myself with the questions that remained unanswered. And there were too many of them. Like, where was Jimmy? Was he all right? What was Doreen’s relationship with Tom?
Mr Phoenix, with the same officiousness that made him an excellent air raid warden, did not let mere murder and mayhem deflect him from his duties. He went through the house, room by room, putting up every last blackout curtain.
As soon as Tom released him, Chad had gone over to the metal box and filled his pockets with tubes of pills before returning to sit on the floor near the back door. He avoided our eyes and said nothing. He looked a lot better than he had earlier. The shaking had stopped and he seemed normal.
I went over to sit next to Stan, who was crying in earnest now. I held him against me and let him cry himself out, rocking him a little as if he were a very small boy. He said Jimmy’s name over and over as he sobbed.
Detective Munsie arrived about thirty minutes after Tom had called him and everything seemed to become manageable with his calm presence. He spent some time talking to Tom in the lounge room, and spoke briefly to each of us in turn. I refused to allow him to talk to Stan alone and sat with them as Stan carefully recounted what he had heard. He didn’t mention that Doreen had been getting heroin for Tom. Nor did I.
Once Nobbie’s body had been removed and Betty had been taken away in the police car I asked if Stan could go home. Detective Munsie was giving orders about securing the h
ouse until the next day, when a full search for contraband would be carried out.
He glanced up at me and nodded. ‘I’ll need a further statement from you and the boy, but it can wait a day or two.’ His expression sharpened. ‘And mind you tell me everything when I next see you.’ I held his gaze, hoping I looked enigmatic, but Detective Munsie gave a short laugh. ‘Yes, take the boy home, Meg.’
So I went with Stan across the street to his mother, who wrapped him in a hug and cried. The police had already told her much of what had happened so I excused myself as soon as I could. My head hurt and I felt utterly miserable. We still didn’t know what had happened to Jimmy and I had no idea how to deal with what I had learned about Tom. I just wanted my mother.
Tom was waiting at my gate. I tried to make out the features of his face, but it was a grey blur in the darkness.
‘How is Stan?’ His voice was low, worried.
‘Still very upset. Not knowing where Jimmy could be is tearing him apart.’
‘How are you?’
I felt emotionally drained and very weary. And sad. I supposed that I was in shock, and eventually everything would come crashing down around me.
‘I’m terribly tired. It was hard hearing about Doreen’s death like that. It’s not like in novels, is it? It’s no relief that we know the answer to the puzzle of who killed her. I just feel so sad.’
Tom made a little sobbing sound, almost like a laugh.
‘You’re thinking about Doreen? After all you’ve just been through?’
‘It was all so pointless. So stupid. I don’t know, maybe I’m in shock and I’ll start screaming in a few minutes.’
He shook his head.
‘Tom, I need you to tell me the truth about you and Doreen. No more evasions. I’ve heard so many things now. I need you to talk to me.’
He tried to laugh, but it was a flat sort of sound. ‘The truth?’ He sighed. ‘You want the truth?’
‘Yes, Tom, that’s what I want.’ My tone was angry, but it was to hide my misery.
‘We’ll talk. But not now. Soon. I can’t deal with the truth or with any of this now. And you need to rest.’
He took my hand, lacing his fingers through mine, and led me down our path to the front porch. Ma was there, peering into the darkness, presumably wondering about the police cars and excitement in our quiet street. I pulled my hand away from Tom and went to my mother, who wrapped her arms around me and held me close.
We went inside together, leaving Tom alone in the dark.
Jimmy turned up at his house late the following morning, arriving in a police car that had collected him from his grandparents’ farm near Roleystone, a little community to the east of Perth. It seemed as if all of Megalong Street came out to welcome him home.
I found out the whole story that afternoon, over a cup of tea at the McLeans’ house. Detective Munsie was right. Jimmy had been scared and he had run away. Initially, his refusal to talk had been out of fear that he would be blamed for letting Doreen die, but it was the realisation that Nobbie had killed her that had made him run.
Doreen had told him, when he helped her to the shelter, that she’d been hurt by ‘that gap-toothed Yank bastard’. He had no idea who she meant. He had no suspicion of Betty, or of her big, sullen Yank boyfriend, who he thought were friends of Doreen’s.
Jimmy had made up his mind to tell me what he knew when I returned from work on Monday. But just after lunch he had seen Nobbie’s smile for the first time. Terror took over and Jimmy didn’t think. He just went. He cadged a ride on the train to Roleystone and walked the three miles out to where his grandparents lived on a small fruit farm. He told them that his mother wanted him to stay there and get better. Poor Jimmy looked so pale and ill that they believed it. They had no idea the whole of Perth was looking for him because they had no telephone and only got the weekend newspapers. When they went into town on Saturday they found out about the search for Jimmy and contacted the police immediately. And Jimmy came home.
So did Frank Luca. He turned himself in to the police as soon as he read in the newspaper that he was no longer under suspicion. He was promptly arrested by the naval police and charged with being absent from his ship without leave, but in the circumstances I knew he was unlikely to care about facing time in the brig. The Mirror printed a lovely photograph of his reunion with his daughter, Paulette.
Tom and I met up the following day. It was exactly eleven weeks since we had found Doreen’s body in the Phoenixes’ air raid shelter. We met in the Botanical Gardens where we had lunched so many times, but he led me across Riverside Drive to a spot on the foreshore and laid a rug on the grass. I sat beside him. It was a still, sunny morning and the river in front of us was a clear blue that mirrored the sky. A pair of black swans were floating nearby, oblivious to the concerns of the human world.
‘Tell me about why Doreen was trying to get heroin for you on the night she was murdered,’ I said.
‘What do you know about heroin?’ Tom said.
He was sitting with his legs bent up in front of him, resting his arms on his knees. There was a bitter smile playing around his mouth, but he wasn’t avoiding my eyes.
‘Nothing, really. It’s illegal to have it without a prescription. It’s addictive, like morphine. It’s like morphine, isn’t it?’
‘It comes from opium, like morphine, but it’s different. It’s a synthetic drug, diacetyl morphine. When it was first produced late last century, it was designed to be a non-addictive morphine substitute. It wasn’t, of course.’
Although the smile was still on his mouth, he had a haunted look.
‘Heroin will kill all pain and anger and bring relief to every sorrow.’ He made it sound like a quote. ‘It works more quickly than morphine. A single dose of heroin sends you into a deep, euphoric reverie, especially if it is injected into a vein. When you’ve been in terrible pain, Meg, physical and mental, can you imagine how that euphoria feels?’
I thought that perhaps I could understand. I knew that Tom was often in terrible pain. And he had seen so many men die.
‘Why did you want heroin? You’ve got morphine.’
‘It works better than morphine,’ he said brusquely. ‘More intensely. But there’s a flip side. Addiction. Repeated use creates an extreme physical craving. You become its slave, and your entire existence revolves around each daily dose. I’m hooked on the stuff. It wasn’t a choice.’
Tom’s dark eyes begged me to understand. ‘When I was captured by the Japanese I was in command of four men. I led them into a trap –’
He made a faint sound, like a groan. I could see the effort it took for him to make his face hard and closed. ‘They killed my men. They made me watch while they killed my men. They beheaded Bill Grieves. He was my sergeant. There was a little ceremony. They used a sword.’ He looked down, swallowing convulsively. ‘The others were bayoneted and pushed into a grave. Charlie Farrell and Vic Embleton. I’m not sure that Alan Carter was actually dead, but they buried him with the others . . .’
It was my turn to make a soft, horrified sound.
Tom’s voice became matter-of-fact, and his expression cool and distant. ‘I was bayoneted when we were first captured. Here.’ He put his right hand on his back, towards the left side. ‘And I was beaten quite badly – my back is scarred. They hurt my hand. It got infected. The result you see.’ He held up his maimed hand. ‘But they kept me alive, because they wanted information. The Japanese control the production of heroin in China. They have a lot of it. I needed pain relief. Giving and withholding heroin was one of the methods they used to make me talk.’
His face changed again. Of the multitude of emotions in his eyes, self-loathing was the most apparent.
‘I talked all right. What do the Americans say? I sang like a canary.’
‘How did you get away?’
‘I was lucky. They probably should have sent me straight to Tokyo, but at first I was too ill to be moved and then they couldn’t resist inte
rrogating me themselves. The outpost where I was being held was strafed and bombed. I escaped in the confusion and after a while in the jungle I ran into a coastwatcher. He contacted our side and they got me out.
‘I was a mess when I got back and I was given morphine, lots of morphine, for the pain. It’s not as good as heroin, though . . .’
He shivered.
‘I was in Brisbane after I got back, working for the Pacific High Command as an intelligence officer. But I needed heroin, Meg. I found a doctor who would prescribe it for me without putting me on his register. When he was discovered and charged with failing to keep a register of heroin it became known that I was getting the stuff from him illegally. I faced losing my commission and dishonourable discharge.’ He patted his front pocket for cigarettes, found the packet and shook one out.
‘Phyll went in to bat for me. She was amazing. She even went to see MacArthur. Phyll convinced them it wasn’t my fault, and pointed out how embarrassing it would be to discharge such a decorated soldier.’
His lips twisted as if he had a bad taste in his mouth. ‘So they sent me back here to Perth. To be a liaison officer. To be nice to people and to attend social events with my beautiful fiancée. To rot here for the rest of the war.’
I turned away from him to look at the river, trying to imagine needing something so much that you’d risk everything just to get it. Then I looked at Tom again; if he could be strong enough to tell me this, I had to be strong enough to meet his eyes as he did so.
‘I tried to come off the heroin, the morphine, all of it, when I arrived here from Brisbane. I thought I could kick it if I was strong-willed enough. I couldn’t. I was too ill. My body couldn’t take the withdrawal and I nearly died. Doreen was at the military hospital when I was brought in. She came to visit me. She’d read to me, talk to me. I was in a bad way.’
He lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply, almost desperately.
A Stranger in my Street Page 29