The Port Fairy Murders (2 page)

Joe felt his eyes well with tears and, unable to prevent it, he began to sob. He sat with his head bowed and his shoulders rising and falling. He made no sound, and Inspector Lambert made no move to intervene. As he regained control, Joe reached into his pocket and withdrew a handkerchief. He pushed it at his eyes and held it there.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘Has that been happening much?’

Joe nodded. ‘Well, a few times, and mostly it takes me by surprise. I’m sorry. You must think …’

‘Don’t presume what I think, Sergeant. If you’d walked away from that investigation without suffering any effects, I’d say you were as cold and insane as the man who stabbed you and tortured Tom.’

‘Can I visit him, sir?’

‘No. Not yet. He’s not ready.’

‘And Mrs Lambert?’

‘No. She’s not ready to see you yet, either.’

There it was — the confirmation that Maude Lambert could not forgive Joe for the injuries to her brother’s body and mind. Joe remembered with searing clarity the words she’d spoken to Inspector Lambert at the hospital.

‘He’s all broken, Titus,’ she’d said. ‘He’s all broken.’

Joe looked up at Inspector Lambert, and although he recognised sympathy in his eyes, he also saw pity, or thought he saw pity. Another wave of nausea passed through him.

‘Are you up to discussing a few matters relating to the case, Sergeant?’

This took Joe by surprise.

‘Yes, yes, of course.’

‘Good, because there are loose ends, and one of those ends in particular worries me.’

‘George Starling.’

‘George Starling. He’s still at large. If Military Intelligence had picked him up, I assume they’d have told us, although professional courtesy isn’t their strong point.’

‘He’ll have gone to ground, sir. Intelligence won’t find him. I didn’t spend much time with him, but he struck me as being as fanatical in his own way as Ptolemy Jones. And now that Jones is dead, Starling might want to pick up his leader’s sword. Tom spent more time with him …’

‘Yes, but it wasn’t Starling who tortured Tom, was it? It was Jones.’

‘I don’t think for a minute that that points to any squeamishness or humanity in Starling. Whatever the reason for his not being there, I’d say he felt cheated, peeved, at being denied that pleasure.’

‘He might also feel cheated because Germany will lose the European war. That gets clearer every day. I think our home-grown Hitlerites will quietly reorganise themselves into something less dismal, or work to whitewash their inconvenient allegiance.’

‘You don’t think George Starling will call his mates to arms?’

‘Ptolemy Jones was a deluded, fanatical psychopath. Those creatures are rare. George Starling is an acolyte. They’re common. I’m guessing, despite your observation, that politics mattered to him only because it mattered to Jones. With Jones gone, Starling’s hatreds are unfocussed and naked. He can’t dress them up in a well-tailored ideology. I may be wrong, of course. I hope I am. If it’s Nazism that fascinates him, I think we have a chance of catching him, because he’ll make contact with others. If he’s lost his taste for it, he’ll be an unpredictable menace. He’s out there, and I’m uneasy about that.’

‘Maybe we’ll never hear from him again. Maybe he’ll lie low until the war is over and live an anonymous, miserable life.’

‘Let’s hope it’s miserable, at any rate.’

JOE SABLE SAT
in the late-afternoon light in his flat in Arnold Street, Princes Hill. He’d recently begun to scour newspapers and journals for news of the horrors being visited upon Jews in Europe, and his life-long indifference to his own Jewishness had begun to torment him. He spoke to no one about this. His sleep was troubled, and his dreams, never remembered, left him waking each morning with a vague and lingering dread; and, to his mortification, he’d begun to cry in response to unpredictable, unrelated triggers.

He was twenty-five years old. Sometimes he thought of resigning, but what would he do? His arrhythmic heart wasn’t acceptable to the military. Manpower would place him somewhere ghastly — a munitions factory, or some other war industry where his brains were of no interest to his employer.

This afternoon, his thoughts were interrupted in their dismal progress by the jangling of his telephone.

‘I have a reverse-charge trunk call for a Joe Sable from a Fred — no other name. Will you accept the charge?’

Joe’s body tensed.

‘I’ll accept,’ he said.

‘Putting you through. Go ahead, please.’

There was silence, although Joe could hear Fred’s breathing.

‘You should live every day like it’s your last, Sable, because it might be.’

‘We know who you are, Fred. We know your real name is George Starling. We know all about you. We’ll find you.’

The line went dead, and Joe immediately regretted what he’d said. He’d thrown away what might have been an advantage — Starling’s probable assumption that Homicide didn’t know his real identity. Lambert would see this as unforgivable and, doubtless, typical thoughtlessness. Well, he saw no reason why Lambert had to be told the truth. He telephoned the inspector at home. Maude Lambert answered.

‘Mrs Lambert, this is Sergeant Joe Sable.’

There was a devastating pause before Maude asked, ‘How are you, Joe?’

He wanted to hang up. There was a mechanical quality in Maude’s voice, as if she was going through polite motions.

‘I’m doing all right. And Tom?’

‘Yes?’

‘May I speak to him?’

‘No,’ she said simply. ‘I’ll get Titus.’

Joe heard the handset hit the wood of the telephone table, and in the background he heard Tom Mackenzie’s voice asking who was on the telephone.

‘Nobody,’ Maude said, and Titus’s voice obscured any further exchange between them.

‘Sergeant Sable? What’s happened?’

Joe told him, and Titus instructed him to stay where he was until he could find out from the telephone exchange where the trunk call had originated. He hung up, and fifteen minutes later he called Joe back to tell him that the call had been made in Warrnambool.

‘Starling’s father lives there, or near there, doesn’t he, sir?’

‘An officer from Warrnambool is on his way to see Starling Senior. Did his son call himself Fred?’

‘No,’ Joe lied. ‘He called himself George Starling.’

There was silence at Lambert’s end, and Joe knew that his inspector suspected the lie. He didn’t press Joe on the point and said quietly, ‘I see.’

MEPUNGA MIGHT ONCE
have been substantial enough to warrant its designation on a map. By January 1944 it had been subsumed into the lush landscape until all that remained were a few dispersed structures — a schoolhouse, a church, a rarely used Mechanics Institute — and a handful of struggling dairy farms. No one would have dignified John Starling’s property with the term ‘farm’. There was a house that needed a new roof; a couple of out-buildings, one of which had lost a wall; and dry, sour paddocks, trampled from pasture into dusty aridity by two horses and a donkey. When Constable Manton began walking, in the gathering dusk, from his car to the house, the horses moved with ungainly haste from the far side of their paddock towards him. Constable Manton had grown up on a farm, and he knew that the horses must be hungry. He was immediately on edge. John Starling wasn’t well liked in nearby Warrnambool, but nobody had ever suggested that he neglected his animals. On the contrary, Starling was thought to prefer them to humans. Manton knocked on the front door and waited. Nothing. He knocked again, more robustly, and a peel of paint fell away from the frame.

‘Mr Starling?’ The bark of Manton’s voice caused two swallows to abandon the perch they’d taken for the night under the eaves. The small rush of their wings startled him. He peered through the grimy, curtained windows and saw nothing. No lights were showing. He tried the door, and it opened. He pushed it, and the house exhaled a warm, stale breath. Putting his head around the door, Manton sniffed the air and detected no telltale odour of putrefaction. He was relieved. At least Starling wasn’t dead somewhere in the house. He called his name again, and when there was no reply he decided against entering, convincing himself that a quick search of the outside ought to be done first.

The yard at the back of Starling’s house was a mess of small, broken machinery, tins, and rusting tools. A woodpile, stacked carelessly, threatened to topple over, and a splitter leaned against it. Manton couldn’t understand people who treated expensive tools with cavalier indifference. The yard was sequestered from the paddock beyond it by a tatty fence. Manton passed through the single-hinged gate and stopped to locate a peculiar noise. ‘
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves
,’ he thought, and was pleased to recall that verse from a poem he’d been forced to memorise at school. He couldn’t remember who wrote it. Keats? Yes, Keats. The sound of buzzing insects wasn’t insistent or remarkable — the fading light had calmed their frenzied work — but it was concentrated in one place, near a large, golden cypress. Manton crossed to it, and saw the legs first.

‘Mr Starling?’

This was a pointless question; he knew that. He’d caught a whiff of death on the wind. Not wishing to get too close to the body, Manton walked in a wide circle around the dark cypress. John Starling sat propped against the trunk, his head having lolled forward and his arms folded almost neatly in his lap. Manton put a handkerchief to his nose and approached. Earlier in the day, a dense, noisy aggregation of flies would have been busy feeding and breeding. A cursory glance at maggots dropping from the ears, eyes, and lips told Manton that Starling had been dead for several days at least. A closer examination could be left to the coroner. Manton checked the immediate surroundings for forensic evidence, and when he’d satisfied himself that there was nothing that needed collecting or securing, he returned to the vehicle and headed back to Warrnambool.

HELEN LORD NEVER
spoke to her mother about her work in Homicide. Having been the wife of a policeman, Ros Lord had seen the toll the work had taken on her late husband. She’d never pressed him for information, but had always waited patiently for him to come to her when he’d needed to. So it was with her daughter. She didn’t pry, or harry. She waited. For her part, Helen was determined to spare her mother both the disappointments and the satisfactions of her job. She thought, wrongly, that discussion of police work would serve only to poke at the wound left by her father’s death. The resulting silence between them, except on trivial matters, although borne of mutual respect, was beginning to compromise the easy intimacy between them. There was something uncomfortable in the silence, something slightly poisonous, something that might overwhelm them. Helen was more conscious of this than her mother, who was used to waiting for an expression of trust, and was used to being rewarded.

Helen couldn’t go to her uncle, Peter Lillee, in whose large house in Kew they lived. He’d taken them in after the death of Helen’s father in Broome. There’d never been any sense of charity about this. He lived alone, was wealthy, and loved his sister, Ros. It had been no hardship for him to offer her a place as his housekeeper, and the fees he’d paid to educate his niece amounted to an insignificant impost on his income. He was kind, but distant, and when Helen had joined the police force she’d noticed a finely nuanced wariness in his dealings with her. She suspected he was homosexual — a preference she knew little about and which, prior to her relationship with her uncle, she would have been liable to address as a deviancy. The horror it excited in her male colleagues, and the cruelty it encouraged in many of them, created in her a prejudice in favour of homosexuals, in spite of her unworldliness. She would have liked to learn from her uncle, but such wasn’t the nature of their relationship. He was a private man, without being secretive. Helen felt strongly that he had a rich, interesting life away from his home, about which he was punctiliously discreet. The household in Kew was suffocating in discretion.

Ros Lord and Peter Lillee sat listening to the wireless, as they often did after dinner. Helen sat with them, reading, tuning in to the news when an item seemed worth her while. Meat rationing was to be introduced on 15 January, and, in a bit of shameless editorialising, doubtless at the behest of the government, the reader embellished the bald announcement with: ‘Few people are sufficiently austere or angelic to wish meat rationing, or any kind of rationing, to be introduced for the sake of mortifying the flesh in wartime, but most will be fair-minded enough to recognise that a good case has been established for the rationing of meat. It has been shown by expert authorities that the supply is such and the demands are such that the old system of allowing each consumer to buy as much meat as he or she can afford cannot be continued.’

‘It’s been as good as rationed anyway for ages,’ said Ros. ‘Finding a decent cut of meat at the butcher’s is a novelty. Most of it goes to the black market, I suppose.’

‘You’ve never bought anything under the counter, Ros?’ Peter Lillee raised an eyebrow.

‘Your Sunday roast isn’t always in the window, Peter, if that’s what you mean.’

‘There’s a confession for you, Helen. Arrest this woman.’

‘I’ve eaten so many Sunday roasts I’d have to arrest myself as an accessory.’