The Autumn Murders

by Robert Gott

  Inspector Lambert saw the sense in this, even though it meant his investigative resources would be depleted. Getting Helen Lord back would be useful, but out of the question. He didn’t bother raising the possibility with Cottrell.

  When Lambert returned to his office, he signalled to Joe, who was on the telephone, that he wanted to speak with him as soon as he was finished. When he sat down at his desk, he saw the note and envelope.

  ‘Sergeant!’

  Joe excused himself to the person on the other end of the line and hung up. He went into Lambert’s office. Inspector Lambert held up the key.

  ‘Sergeant Reilly has found this. I presume he took it from Ron Dunnart’s bundle of keys. I don’t know how. He’ll tell us when he comes back. Mrs Reilly is ill, and he’s gone home. His note says he’ll be back as soon as he can.’

  ‘Ron Dunnart is still here, sir. Should I get him?’

  ‘No. I’m hoping he won’t miss this key until we’ve got a match for the paint on it with Peter Lillee’s car. I want you to drive to Kew now, get a sample of the paint from the car, and get back here. While you’re gone, I’ll get the key photographed and take it to forensics. If there is a match, Ron may have trouble explaining it. We might at least get an admission of blackmail from him.’

  Joe took a deep breath.

  ‘Before I go, sir, I have a theory about how Mr Lillee might have died. Well, it’s not my theory. Helen Lord has a friend, a doctor named Clara Dawson. She came to dinner last night. It was the dead fish.’

  ‘The dead fish in the photograph you removed from my desk.’

  Joe blushed.

  ‘And which you showed to Helen Lord.’

  Joe was covered in confusion.

  ‘I hope you don’t think I hadn’t noticed, Sergeant. We’ll discuss that later. Go on.’

  ‘It was the dead fish in the photograph, yes. Clara — Dr Dawson — and Helen went down to the river.’

  ‘I would have expected nothing less from Constable Lord.’

  ‘Dr Dawson noticed that the place where Mr Lillee’s body was found had features that made her theory plausible.’

  Joe laid out, in as much detail as he could remember, Clara’s belief that Peter Lillee had died from hydrogen sulphide poisoning.

  ‘She acknowledges that the conditions would have had to be exactly right. She’s going to write it all up and offer to give evidence at the coronial inquest.’

  Joe, already shamefaced about the photographs, came close to not mentioning the autopsy report. He couldn’t, however, fail to do so.

  ‘You mentioned, sir, that Mr Lillee’s blood was purple. I told Dr Dawson that, and she said it was consistent with hydrogen sulphide poisoning. She is a doctor, sir. I didn’t think that was too much of a breach.’

  This wasn’t the time to dress Joe down for sharing aspects of an investigation with a stranger. Given that he’d invited Joe to keep Helen Lord informed it would also have been inconsistent.

  ‘I’d like to organise a meeting with Jamieson, who did the autopsy, and Dr Dawson. They may already know each other, of course. For now, though, Sergeant, the paint.’

  RON DUNNART PUT on his suit coat, preparatory to leaving the building. It wasn’t the end of his working day, but he needed a drink, and the bar at The Hotel Windsor was close by. He instinctively patted his pocket to make sure his keys were still there, and immediately noticed that they didn’t make quite the same sound. He took them out of the pocket. The knot was wrong, and one key was missing. Fucking Reilly. Why would he take one of his keys?

  The reason hit him like a truck. Lillee’s car. He’d underestimated Reilly. He cursed himself, first for dragging the key down the side of the car — it had given him pleasure at the time, but at what cost? — and secondly for not checking his key closely. That was a dumb, amateur error. He began to calculate the consequences for him if there was paint on the key. Of course, there must be paint on the key or why else would Reilly have taken it? He couldn’t convincingly blame O’Dowd for damage to the car. He’d have to own up to it. He needed time to figure this out.

  He figured he had twenty-four hours. Lambert wouldn’t act until he had a positive match from forensics. It would be enough to prove that he’d been with Lillee at some stage. It was too circumstantial to link him definitively with Lillee’s death. He was facing suspension from duty, at the very least. On his way down the stairs, Dunnart passed two detectives who he didn’t much like.

  ‘You look flustered, Ron,’ one of them said.

  ‘Working with Reilly will do that to you,’ Dunnart said and moved quickly past them.

  ‘David Reilly’s all right, isn’t he?’ said one of these men.

  ‘Course he is. Ron on the other hand …’

  GEORGE STARLING CAUGHT the 3.15 session of Suspicion at the Australia picture theatre. He dismissed the newsreels as propaganda. He liked the movie. Cary Grant was a fine actor, and Joan Fontaine could put her slippers under his bed any time. He went straight from the theatre to the address in Fitzroy. He was carrying his suitcase with a change of clothes in it. Though he had managed to keep them clean in the killing of the Reillys, he was expecting the clothes he was wearing — Mr Pluschow’s clothes — to be soiled by Joe Sable’s blood and viscera. He’d dispose of them afterwards.

  It was almost 6.00 p.m. when Starling stood at the gate to Bob O’Dowd’s house. It was a modest, semidetached Victorian terrace — the kind of place you’d expect a copper to be able to afford. It was well maintained, but it wasn’t flash. He hoped Sable would answer the door, but it didn’t really matter if O’Dowd answered. The Luger, which he held by his side, would guarantee him entry, and he’d take it from there.

  As Starling raised a hand to knock, a thrill ran through him of such intensity that he shuddered. He knocked.

  Bob O’Dowd was sitting in the living room when he heard the knock. He was wearing shorts and nothing else because his psoriasis had begun to gallop over his body and the itching was both painful and irresistible. Cloth exacerbated it, so he sat bare-chested. He’d barely moved for hours, except to tear at his inflamed skin. The knock startled him. Would Ron Dunnart knock? Of course he would, but the knock had been quite gentle, and Dunnart would hammer on the door. O’Dowd decided to ignore it. Maybe it was a telegram boy. Telegrams were usually bad news, so if it was a telegram boy he could just bugger off. There it was again, a little louder this time, but not impatient. Christ! All bloody right, he’d answer the fucking door.

  Starling was just thinking about how he’d break into the house when he heard someone approaching down the hall. He raised the Luger. The door opened to reveal a man in his late forties in shorts, and with a torso covered in angry sores and flaking skin.

  Bob O’Dowd was looking at the man’s face, at the scar that ran from his eye to his mouth. It took him a moment to notice the gun.

  Starling said nothing, but pushed the barrel of the gun so hard into O’Dowd’s belly that he propelled him back into the house. He closed the door behind them and put his suitcase on the floor.

  ‘Is he here?’

  O’Dowd, still uncertain of what was happening, said, ‘Who?’

  ‘Sable.’

  ‘Sable?’

  Starling caught the tone of genuine surprise, but mistook the nature of that surprise.

  ‘He thought he’d be safe here. A Jew haven.’

  ‘I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about, mate. Has Ron Dunnart sent you to do his dirty work?’

  The question meant nothing to Starling.

  ‘When is Sable due home?’

  ‘Joe Sable?’

  The question enraged Starling. He shot O’Dowd in the foot. It took a moment for O’Dowd’s body to register the shock. He looked at his shattered foot, his ears ringing, and the pain cascaded through him. Starling was out of patience. He hustled O’Dowd,
now hobbling and still unable to make sense of what was happening, towards the bathroom. Once there, he toppled him into the bathtub. O’Dowd, now shivery with shock, made no effort to resist. Starling sat on the edge of the bath.

  ‘What time is Joe Sable due back here?’

  Starling’s voice sounded far away to O’Dowd, as if it were coming from the end of a tunnel. He made an incoherent sound.

  ‘You will answer me.’ Starling stood up and with calm deliberation he undressed, took the filleting knife from the pocket of his discarded coat, and climbed into the bath with O’Dowd. He sat astride him and placed the blade against O’Dowd’s lips.

  ‘Last chance. When is Joe Sable expected to arrive here?’

  He lifted the knife so that O’Dowd could speak. O’Dowd made a small sound. No words would come. The question was meaningless.

  George Starling began his work. He thought of it as a rehearsal for Joe Sable.

  AFTERWARDS, WHEN HE’D wet some towels in the laundry to sponge off the blood, and when he’d dried himself, he returned to the bathroom to get dressed. He looked at the body in the tub and could barely credit that it had once been a man. Starling had thought, after the first few passes of the blade, that O’Dowd would break. He hadn’t seemed to grasp the meaning of the question, and it occurred to Starling, well before O’Dowd had died, that David Reilly had lied to him. This realisation hadn’t hurried him along. On the contrary, in his fury, he’d slowed down the work the blade was doing.

  When he was dressed, he searched the house and found no evidence that a second male was staying there. There was a spare bedroom, but it was obvious that it wasn’t being used and that it hadn’t been used for a while. Before he left the house, he checked the bathroom one more time, just to reassure himself that the evening hadn’t been entirely wasted. There was a bonus, too, because he hadn’t had to dispose of the clothes he’d arrived in. He could walk back into the city from Fitzroy and get something to eat along the way.

  RON DUNNART HADN’T returned to his desk. He’d intended to, but once he was outside he couldn’t face it, and he’d gone home. He’d told his wife he had a migraine and wanted to be left alone. They’d had dinner together, and Ron had feigned the after-effects of the headache while they ate. He’d said he had to return to work to catch up on what he’d left undone that afternoon. He’d taken the car, which rarely was driven these days.

  ‘It needs a bit of a run,’ he’d said.

  When he arrived at Bob O’Dowd’s house at 7.30 p.m., he found the place in darkness, but the front door ajar. This seemed wrong. A voice behind him said, ‘If you’re looking for Mrs O’Dowd, she’s taken off.’

  Dunnart turned. A woman in her sixties stood at the gate. There was still enough light in the fading day for Dunnart to see that she was stout, and without a hat.

  ‘It was Mr O’Dowd I was looking for.’

  ‘Oh, he’s still there. They must have had a row. I’m not a busybody, so I don’t know the details. Good evening to you.’

  She walked away.

  Dunnart pushed the door open. He hadn’t arrived with a clear strategy, and the dark house so disconcerted him that he wasn’t sure what his first words would be.

  ‘Why are you sitting in the dark, Bob?’

  It seemed a ridiculous question. He turned on the hall light, expecting this to rouse O’Dowd if he’d fallen asleep in a chair somewhere. There was no movement, no sound. As he moved down through the house, Dunnart flicked on the light in the master bedroom, the spare room, the living room, and the kitchen. The open front door might have signalled a burglary, but the house didn’t seem to have been disturbed.

  Maybe O’Dowd was in the dunny. Dunnart remembered that O’Dowd had boasted once that they’d brought the dunny indoors at vast expense. It was next to the bathroom. Both rooms were also off the front hallway, but he hadn’t checked them on his way to the living room. Well, you don’t just throw open a bathroom door, do you? Or a toilet door. The last thing he wanted to see was O’Dowd squatting on the dunny. There was frosted glass at the top of the bathroom door. The toilet door was solid. He knocked on it.

  ‘You in there, Bob?’

  He waited. Nothing. He opened the door and turned on the light. Mrs O’Dowd kept the lavatory spotless. He didn’t like the square of carpet at the foot of the toilet. That would soak up droplets of Bob O’Dowd’s piss. The thought disgusted him.

  There was no light on in the bathroom, but Dunnart was nothing if not a thorough detective, and besides, where else could O’Dowd be? He was careless and lazy, so he was quite capable of not closing the front door properly, and he was probably one of those people who take long baths and fall asleep in the tub. If this is what had happened, Dunnart would have him at a disadvantage. No one likes to be caught naked.

  Dunnart opened the bathroom door and was assailed by an abattoir smell. He snapped on the light.

  He was unable to assimilate what he saw. There was a shape, no, there were shapes, because gobbets of stuff sat on the floor and hung over the edge of the bath. Everywhere, blood glistened: wet, oily, dark, bright, dripping, viscous, pooling. There was pink skin and, catching the light, the stark white of bone.

  Was this a body? Just one body? Dunnart’s eyes followed the strange, butchered shape from its feet to its head. There was no face. Was this even a man? There were no genitals.

  Dunnart had seen a hundred corpses. He’d never seen anything like this, and he felt his stomach rebelling. He hurried to the dunny, kneeled, and vomited in the toilet, indifferent now to the piece of carpet. He was so violently ill that he passed out briefly. When he came to and got to his feet, he leaned against the toilet wall. It needed one more flush, so he waited, dazed, for the cistern to fill.

  He went back into the bathroom. He had to know if the thing in the tub was Bob O’Dowd. O’Dowd had a badly drawn anchor tattooed on his left forearm. Dunnart approached the bath, unavoidably stepping in blood as he did so. He wasn’t thinking clearly. All his senses were overwhelmed the closer he came to the corpse. There was the forearm. The right one had been butterflied open. The left had been overlooked. It was covered in blood. Dunnart leaned in and wiped the blood away with his fingers. The tattoo was there. This was Bob O’Dowd, and given the freshness of the liquids that oozed from him he’d been alive a very short time ago.

  When Dunnart stepped away from the bathtub he could see that his trousers were stained, as were his shirt sleeves. He needed to wash the blood from his fingers, so he found the laundry with its wet, bloodied towels, and put his hand under the tap. The cold water sharpened his mind. He’d walked blood from the bathroom to the laundry. When he checked the carpet and flooring, he saw that the murderer had been more careful than he’d been. His were the only footprints. This detail chilled Dunnart. What kind of person could do what he’d done to another human being and remain so calculating as to leave no marks? Apart from the towels. Had he intended to remove the towels? Had Dunnart disturbed him? Was he still in the house?

  Dunnart, whose shoes still left traces of blood wherever he walked, quickly checked the back door. It was locked from the inside. Every room was empty.

  Dunnart stood in O’Dowd’s living room and looked at the state of his clothes. He sat down and tried to calm the chaos of thought and emotion that was unmanning him. Who would want Bob O’Dowd dead? This was always the first question. Titus Lambert would ask it, and the name at the top of his list would be his, Ron Dunnart. Could he leave and wait for some other poor bastard, or O’Dowd’s wife, to find the body? No. His prints were now all over the house. He’d touched every door handle, placed his hand against walls and walked blood everywhere. Even his serpentine mind couldn’t come up with a convincing reason for visiting the man who’d accused him of murder. He’d never known despair, but as he looked at his bloodied shoes, trousers, and shirt front, despair was what crept up on him.

  Som
eone he’d spoken to about O’Dowd must have done this. Someone must have thought that this is what he’d meant when he’d said that O’Dowd needed to be taught a lesson. Had he actually said this to anyone? He couldn’t remember. His mind was breaking into fragments. The smell from the bathroom had attached itself to his clothes. He had to make a decision.

  O’Dowd had a telephone. He’d seen it in the hallway. He’d telephone Russell Street, but he wouldn’t wait here in the house. No. Why bother telephoning? He’d made a decision to run, and he needed a head start. But why should he run? No one could pin Lillee’s murder on him, and if he’d really sliced and diced O’Dowd, he’d be a lot bloodier than he was. He’d done nothing. If he ran, they’d find him. He didn’t have enough fuel in his car to run far. No. He’d stay. He’d telephone and stay. He’d sit here and wait.

  He went to the telephone, and when his call was answered, he gave his name and the details of Bob O’Dowd’s murder. When he put the receiver down, his mind played one last trick on him. It suddenly seemed sensible to him that he should drive home and change his clothes. He wouldn’t burn them. He’d put them in a bag and hand them to Homicide. He couldn’t bear the thought of wearing them much longer. He’d put on his other suit and come straight back to Fitzroy. If he was quick, he might even beat the police who’d been assigned to attend. Lambert would be one of them. This would interrupt the inspector’s evening. That was something, at least.

  He knew that leaving the house was wrong, that it would do him damage. The urge to get back to his own house was so strong, it overrode common sense. He left the front door ajar, walked to his car, got in, and started the engine. He felt numb. His life could now be divided into the time before he pushed open the front door of O’Dowd’s house and time after he left it ajar for his colleagues to enter. It was strange. As he turned the car into Nicholson Street and headed north, he wondered if his wife loved him enough to stay with him through what was about to hit them.