The Autumn Murders

by Robert Gott

‘He knocked you senseless, Tom.’ Joe prayed that Tom wouldn’t recall being filmed.

  ‘That must have been what happened. The next thing I remember is waking up in a room somewhere. I was naked, and tied to a chair, and my head was splitting. I remember my vision was blurred. Jones was there, and a woman. Jones didn’t ask me any questions. He broke my fingers, one by one.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to go on with this, Tom?’

  ‘Yes. He hit me. The woman watched. I think I must have kept passing out, and then once when I opened my eyes, you were there.’

  ‘They bragged about what they’d done to you, and what they were going to do to you, and to me. You were unconscious most of the time. Jones poured hot tea across your shoulders. I don’t think you felt it then.’

  ‘No. Afterwards, though, it was agony.’

  ‘They both stubbed cigarettes out on your skin. They did that to me, too.’

  ‘What else did they do to you?’

  ‘They beat me, and Jones stabbed me here.’ Joe indicated his shoulder.

  ‘Christ almighty.’

  ‘He’s dead, Tom. Jones is dead: safely dead.’

  ‘The other bloke, Starling, he’s not dead. I saw him at Titus’s house. I didn’t dream that, Joe. I know I was fairly out of it, but I did not dream that.’

  ‘You didn’t dream it, Tom. He was there. He burned down my flat — well, not just my flat. The flat next door to mine was gutted too, and the other two flats were ruined by smoke and water. A man died in the flat next to mine, so Starling is wanted for murder.’

  ‘Look at me, Joe.’ Tom held up his taped fingers. Then he stood up and unbuttoned his shirt.

  ‘It’s not a pretty sight, is it?’

  Tom’s chest and abdomen were a pale canvas of scabs, scars, and puckered flesh where the vicious scald had not yet healed. He took the shirt off and showed Joe his back, which was criss-crossed with slashes in various stages of repair, some livid, some pink. He put his shirt back on.

  ‘I want you to promise me something, Joe.’

  ‘I know what you’re going to ask, Tom, and I can’t make that promise.’

  ‘I want to help you find Starling.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Tom. It’s a police matter. You can’t be involved.’

  ‘If I remember correctly, Joe, you and I were working for Intelligence, not the police, when we were up at Candlebark Hill. As far as I’m concerned, I’m still working for them.’

  ‘Tom …’

  ‘I’m no longer incapacitated, so if I want to go looking for Starling, I’ll do it — with or without you. And this is none of Titus’s business, so don’t bring him into it.’

  ‘Where would you start, Tom?’

  ‘I’m starting with you, Joe. You and I have got more reason than anyone else to find Starling. I’m not going to sit back and do nothing. Are you?’

  Joe looked closely at Tom Mackenzie’s face. There was no madness in it. He suddenly recalled something that the woman had said when he’d come to in the room where Tom sat slumped and injured.

  ‘Ptolemy wanted to scoop Tom’s eyes out with a teaspoon,’ she’d said. Ptolemy: Starling’s hero and mentor.

  ‘All right, Tom. I’ll help you. We’ll find George Starling. I’ll lose my job, but we’ll find George Starling.’

  Tom nodded. ‘Yes, we will.’

  7

  HARDY TRUSCOTT HAD received Maria Pluschow’s telegram while performing one of his several daily rituals in the service of Odin. The knock on his door had annoyed him, but the contents of the telegram caused him to give thanks to Odin. On the night after he’d received the telegram, he set out for her house on the unmade road to Port Fairy. The road was awful, and he was always uncertain of his car, but the lure of food and sex, and the pleasure he got in schooling Maria, made him risk it.

  He arrived just after 6.00 p.m. The light was fading, and he could hear Blondi barking at his approach to the front door. Hardy didn’t like dogs and he particularly disliked Blondi. Maria reluctantly tied Blondi to a post whenever Hardy called. Blondi and Hardy would never be friends, which made Maria worry just a little about Hardy Truscott. Blondi’s judgement about people, she liked to think, was usually spot on.

  Maria had told George that a trusted friend was coming to dinner. He was wary and initially said that he’d go for a walk. He wasn’t in the mood to make small talk with a stranger. Maria convinced him that Hardy Truscott wasn’t just any stranger. He was a man who could inspire others to change the world.

  ‘He’s shown me how powerful National Socialism can be. I never really understood how glorious it was until Hardy came along. You would have seen him at some of the meetings your father took you to, but you won’t remember him. He was quiet. He didn’t like most of the people who came to the meetings. He especially disliked your father. He thought he was a windbag. No one understood Hardy’s message. They were too stupid.’

  George reluctantly agreed to have dinner with Hardy Truscott, and as soon as Truscott entered the house, he regretted it. What an unimpressive little fellow he was. For his part, when he was introduced to George Starling, Truscott too regretted his acceptance of Maria’s invitation. The scar on George’s face turned his stomach, and he wouldn’t believe that John Starling’s son was worth pissing on. Apples didn’t fall far from the tree, that was Hardy Truscott’s view. Maria didn’t miss the tension that rose up immediately between them.

  ‘The coppers came to see me about you,’ Truscott said. ‘I don’t like coppers sniffing around.’

  ‘They came here, too, Hardy. That’s not George’s fault.’

  ‘Maybe if he hadn’t killed his father, they’d mind their own business and keep their noses out of mine.’

  ‘Unfortunately, I didn’t kill that bastard. I wish I had.’

  That seemed to mollify Truscott sufficiently to prompt a relatively polite question.

  ‘What are you doing here, George?’

  ‘Getting ready for a job I need to do.’

  ‘And what might that be?’

  George decided against obfuscation.

  ‘There are two people I need to kill. They’re both coppers. One of them is a Jew. The other one is a woman. They’re both vermin.’

  Truscott thought it best to proceed carefully.

  ‘And how do you plan to kill these people?’

  ‘Slowly.’

  Truscott was emboldened to say, ‘Take your time with the Jew.’

  The mood in the room changed, and over dinner, George found himself explaining his relationship with Ptolemy Jones and the debt of honour he owed him.

  ‘Mr Jones sounds like he was a remarkable man,’ Truscott said.

  ‘He was that. He meant what he said.’

  Over several hours Truscott gently introduced, in the most general of ways, the basic tenets of Odinism. He linked them to ideas that were familiar to Starling — racial purity and the need to rid the world of the pernicious Jew and the especially pernicious influence of Christianity. He suggested that a man like Jones would certainly have assumed a place in Valhalla. Odin, as the great protector of heroes, would have embraced him. After a few glasses of a spirit Starling couldn’t identify, the idea that Ptolemy Jones might have been rewarded in some mystical kingdom moved him deeply. Prior to meeting this strange little man, Odinism would have struck Starling as foolish and childish. Now, though, it made perfect sense, and for the first time since Jones’s death he felt an easing of his grief.

  Hardy Truscott was pleased to have so easily recruited an acolyte, and he looked forward to introducing him to the arcane rituals that punctuated his day. He was disappointed at the end of the evening when Maria made it clear that she wouldn’t be offering him sexual favours. It was George Starling who she took to her bed when Truscott had gone.

  On more than one occasion in the past,
a prostitute had called Starling an ape when she’d laid eyes on his extravagantly hairy body. She’d paid dearly for the remark, in bruises. Maria didn’t call him an ape. She ran her hands over him and clutched at him in a fever of arousal. Starling was an inexperienced lover, and tenderness wasn’t in his repertoire of emotions. Maria wasn’t disconcerted by his clumsiness. She would school him in sex as Truscott would school him in Odinism. As he lay beside her after lovemaking that had been brutal and brief, Maria looked at his naked body and thought him beautiful. She’d never imagined that such a creature might be sent to her. She closed her eyes and whispered a prayer to Odin.

  ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON, the first of April, Ros Lord was told that her brother’s body would be released for burial. The autopsy and toxicology tests had been done. Ros, who believed that her brother would have wanted her to, rang St Patrick’s presbytery and asked to speak to Monsignor McGrath. McGrath offered his condolences, but regretfully refused her request that Peter be given a Catholic burial. He hadn’t been baptised, you see, and sadly it was impossible — unthinkable — to give him a Requiem Mass, ‘As I’m sure you understand,’ he said. He added that Peter couldn’t be buried in the consecrated ground in the Catholic section of the cemetery. His interment would have to be in the Protestant section. Ros Lord accepted these strictures without comment. She was grateful that this telephone call to Monsignor McGrath marked the last time she would ever have anything to do with him or his hateful, punishing religion. It was confounding to her that Peter had been attracted to it, indeed, seduced by it.

  The weather was still warm enough to allow Joe and Helen to sit in the garden. It was a conservative, very English garden with only one or two nods to the country in which it sat. A large river red gum dominated a back corner, and in the opposite corner, a lemon-scented gum rose spectacularly and aromatically, its limbs forming small folds near the trunk, like flesh. Helen told Joe about Monsignor McGrath’s refusal to give Peter a Catholic burial. He told her all he knew about the investigation so far and produced two photographs, which he placed in front of her.

  ‘How did you get these?’

  ‘There was a packet of photographs on Inspector Lambert’s desk. I presume he was going to take them home for Mrs Lambert to look at. I didn’t have time to go through them, so I just took two at random. I’m hoping Lambert hasn’t counted them.’

  ‘That’s incredibly risky, Joe. If Lambert ever finds out, you’ll be demoted.’

  ‘It’s worth the risk, Helen.’

  It was only as he said this that he realised that the sight of her uncle’s body might be overwhelming for Helen. He’d looked at the photographs. Neither was a close view of Peter Lillee’s face. One was taken on the bank, some distance from the body, and the other was taken from the water. Lillee’s body was visible, but again, his features were obscured.

  Helen picked up the photographs without hesitation. She looked at each of them closely.

  ‘Martin Serong must have waded out into the river to take this one.’

  ‘He did.’

  Helen continued to stare at the photograph taken from the water. She was about to replace it on the table when something caught her eye, and she peered intently at the image.

  ‘Uncle Peter’s hand is actually in the water. Are those dead fish?’

  ‘Yes. I think there were three of them.’

  ‘Were they collected?’

  ‘Yes. David Reilly organised for the mud near Peter’s hand to be sifted, and for the fish to be collected.’

  ‘Lambert thought that Uncle Peter might have dropped a phial of cyanide, didn’t he?’

  ‘It had to at least be considered, Helen. The fish might just have died because of pollution in the water, but there might be another explanation.’

  Helen took one final look at the photograph and put it back on the table.

  ‘There is nothing in these pictures that suggests anything other than suicide. I know that, Joe. But equally, I know that Uncle Peter would never have committed suicide. He loved Mum too much to do that.’

  ‘And you. He loved you, too.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose he did. I never really thought about it. You don’t think that an uncle loves his nieces and nephews in the same way as he loves a sister or brother. Nieces and nephews are sort of surplus to requirements, aren’t they?’

  ‘I think Peter probably thought of you as a daughter. You grew up in this house, after all.’

  ‘No. He never thought of me as a daughter. I suppose I never let him because I never thought of him as a father. I had a father, and when he died, well, I wasn’t looking for a replacement. And Uncle Peter wasn’t looking for a daughter. We never argued. I was never any trouble, but we were never close, and that’s the truth of it. I wasn’t interested in art or books or the theatre. I was probably a bit of a disappointment.’

  Helen had never spoken like this to Joe. He worried that she might start to cry and that he wouldn’t know what to say or do.

  ‘He liked having you here, Joe. You could talk to him about art.’

  ‘He was a good man.’

  ‘Was he? He had a lot of secrets.’

  ‘None of them sinister. He was just very private.’

  Helen poured the last of her mother’s home-made sour lemonade into a glass.

  ‘He didn’t trust us enough to tell us some pretty important things about himself. Mum hasn’t said anything, but I think she must feel a bit hurt by that.’

  Joe had no way of knowing that this expression of Helen’s feelings was without precedent. She never spoke so openly to her mother, and not even Peter’s death had allowed them to fall into unguarded conversation. Helen was wary of telling her mother how she felt about Peter’s obsessive privacy. Her resentment of his decision to exclude them from the richest elements of his life was only now beginning to settle into something hard and bitter. Her mother may well have shared these feelings, but it didn’t sit well with Helen to intrude on her grief by criticising her mother’s brother, and so yet again, as so often in the past, she opted for silence. She found, though, when couched in the language of an investigation, she could say things to Joe that she couldn’t say to her mother.

  ‘The engagement and the Catholic thing, they’re not going to be his only secrets, are they?’

  ‘His business associates haven’t revealed anything suspicious. Inspector Lambert is going to talk to people in the Melbourne Club on Monday. Maybe something will turn up there. We know he rubbed a couple of people up the wrong way over some investment schemes.’

  Helen shrugged.

  ‘I hate clubs. I wouldn’t join one even if I was asked. Not that I’d ever be asked.’

  ‘We’re in the same boat there. You can’t join the Melbourne Club because you’re a woman. I can’t join because I’m a Jew.’

  ‘Why would Uncle Peter want to belong to a place like that?’

  ‘He’s a businessman. I imagine that’s where most of Melbourne’s business gets done.’

  ‘It’s just one more thing about Uncle Peter I don’t understand. He can’t possibly have liked those people.’

  They spoke easily for another hour and not just about the investigation. They knew so little about each other that even small details assumed the quality of a revelation. Joe had no idea that Helen had a close friend named Clara. For her part, Helen was surprised that Joe had friends outside the police force.

  ‘You’ve never mentioned Clara.’

  ‘Why would I mention Clara? You never mentioned Guy Kirkham.’

  ‘Why would I mention Guy Kirkham?’

  They both laughed.

  It was strange how the sudden realisation that they each had a life of unknown friends and acquaintances was somehow reassuring. For Joe, the surprising existence of Clara made Helen seem more approachable. For Helen, Joe’s friendships excited a small spike of jealousy
, but she was also glad that he wasn’t as lonely as she’d supposed him to be. He hadn’t mentioned any female friends, which was a relief, but she wondered if this had been a deliberate omission.

  Helen knew that she had a tendency to over-think things when it came to Joe Sable. She couldn’t stop herself from going over what she’d said and what he’d said. Was he really indifferent to her? For a black few seconds, she wondered if she’d mentioned her £2 million inheritance in order to attract his attention. She banished the thought as soon as it arrived, but its exile wasn’t entirely successful. If Joe now began to show an interest in her, would that be the reason?

  SERGEANT BOB O’DOWD never took risks. Going along with Ron Dunnart’s plan to blackmail Peter Lillee had been a risk and look how that had turned out. His wife, Vera, had known that something was up. Vera always knew when something was up. The psoriasis gave him away. The patches of it on his wrists and ankles flared angrily whenever something was up. He tried to keep these out of sight, but her disregard for his privacy meant that a closed bathroom door wasn’t considered a barrier to entry. She would barge in without knocking, and so she’d seen the red patches as he lay in the bath. They’d made love the night before, and she hadn’t noticed them then, but the light had been flatteringly low, and besides, she’d been pleasantly distracted. Whatever else she might say about her husband — he was no Clark Gable, and he was a bit dull — she’d never accuse him of not being an attentive lover.

  As he dried himself, she’d taken his ointment from the bathroom cupboard, sat on the edge of the bath, and insisted that he raise each leg so that she could apply the cream. He’d brushed off her questions with vague references to a nasty homicide that was troubling him. When she’d finished with his feet, she’d applied the ointment to his wrists. She hadn’t questioned him further, but Bob O’Dowd suspected that she hadn’t believed him either. The idea that he might be having an affair was absurd. Vera O’Dowd was the only woman he’d ever been intimate with, and when courting her he’d been so shy that he’d made no attempt on her chastity before marriage. Nevertheless, Vera sometimes got it into her head that he’d been sexually unfaithful, and when this happened, it took weeks to convince her otherwise, weeks during which she barely spoke to him.