The Port Fairy Murders (3 page)

In a stunning breach of protocol, Peter asked, ‘How’s work, Helen? You don’t talk about it much.’

Helen shot her mother a look, and was surprised to see her face open and smiling.

‘I like my work,’ she said. ‘I don’t like the other coppers much, but some are all right.’

‘I couldn’t do your job,’ Peter said. ‘Too much of a coward, and I suppose you see the very worst of human nature.’

‘And not just in criminals.’

Peter laughed.

‘Your father used to say that if it wasn’t for the uniform, you wouldn’t know who were the crooks and who were the coppers,’ Ros said. ‘He had rather a jaundiced view, of course.’

Helen, usually astute in her readings of conversations, failed to hear in her mother’s voice the invitation to talk, and so, in a mild panic, excused herself and went upstairs to her bedroom. Peter and Ros retreated into the familiar pattern of reticence, and said nothing. They gave their attention to the wireless.

Helen picked up the novel she’d been reading, making it to the end of one page without understanding a word she’d read. The incident downstairs — in her head, the sudden mention of her father had become an ‘incident’ — had unsettled her, and in this mildly discombobulated state her thoughts turned to Joe Sable. She’d been cool to him, and she’d known that he’d felt the coolness, but that he’d been baffled by it, not chastened. Bafflement didn’t offer the salve to bruised feelings that successful chastisement offered. Nevertheless, and despite the bleak pleasure to be had from simmering resentment, she acknowledged to herself that Joe’s physical suffering might serve as a displaced expiation for his failure to trust her at a critical point in the Ptolemy Jones investigation. Indeed, had she been more worldly, she might have acknowledged that his problematic heart and his physical wounds served to arouse her feelings in ways that threatened to transport her into unruly and unpredictable territory. Should she telephone him? No. If he answered, she’d stumble and stutter her way to an unconvincing explanation for the call; and if he didn’t answer, she’d be annoyed by his failure to do so and would speculate pointlessly as to the reason. She picked up the novel and returned to the top of the page she’d already read.

INSPECTOR TITUS LAMBERT
was already in his office when Sergeant David Reilly arrived. Reilly had just sat down when Helen Lord came in.

‘Constable,’ Reilly said, and nodded.

‘Sergeant,’ she replied. There was nothing in Reilly’s manner to suggest that he was doing anything more than adhering to protocol, but Helen suspected that he took pleasure in the daily reminder of the difference in their rank. Joe Sable arrived, and the exchange was identical.

‘Constable.’

‘Sergeant.’ She was at least confident that Joe’s use of her rank was un-nuanced protocol. Lambert emerged from his office.

‘John Starling was found dead last night on his property.’

Sergeant Reilly, who’d been fully briefed on recent and current investigations, asked, ‘Suspicious death, sir?’

If Reilly had seen the expression that fleetingly distorted Helen Lord’s face, he’d have realised that the wheels had just fallen off his project to win her over. Reilly was a blow-in — although he’d blown in not long after her own elevation to Homicide — and she felt unreasonably proprietorial (she knew this) about the case that had left Joe Sable wounded and Lambert’s brother-in-law near death. Reilly had had nothing to do with this case, had experienced none of its horrors. How dare he presume to ask questions ahead of her?

‘There are no indications of violence to his body. The preliminary report suggests that he died of a heart attack; but, given who he was, and the threat issued last night by his son to Sergeant Sable, I think we need to go down to Warrnambool and work from there for a couple of days.’

‘Sergeant Sable was threatened?’ Helen Lord’s voice was as carefully modulated as she could manage. Her internal interrogator hurried to, ‘Why didn’t he telephone me?’ bypassing altogether the more rational, ‘Why would he telephone me?’

‘George Starling rang me last night from Warrnambool,’ Joe said, ‘and issued what amounted to a threat. “You should live every day as if it might be your last, because it might be.” That’s what he said, and I don’t think he was trying to impress me with some homespun philosophy of living.’

‘Did he call himself Fred?’

Joe had come to realise that Helen Lord’s thought processes frequently matched, mirrored, or outran those of Inspector Lambert, so a part of him was unsurprised that she’d asked the question Joe was least prepared to answer. Unable to change the version of events he’d given to Lambert, he lied again.

‘No. He called himself George Starling.’

Helen was watching his bruised face carefully, sympathetically, and she was shocked by the certainty that he was dissembling.

‘Why would he do that?’

‘Maybe he figured the game was up. I mean, he’s not stupid. He must have known we’d find out his real name.’

‘But he is stupid. How could he think that National Socialism was a good idea without a good dollop of stupidity?’

Helen wanted to keep prodding, and Inspector Lambert was inclined to let her do so. He observed Joe with interest.

‘Why give us a free kick? Why not at least wait until he was sure his extra layer of anonymity had been breached?’

Joe’s eyes darted to Lambert and back to Helen. He was going to brazen this out, despite feeling that his credibility was draining away.

‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe he is stupid.’

‘I don’t think we should proceed with this investigation believing that George Starling is a stupid man,’ Lambert said. ‘That would be a very bad idea.’

Sergeant Reilly wasn’t insensitive, or unobservant, and he felt keenly that a storm of some kind was blowing behind the measured calm of this exchange. It unsettled him, because he couldn’t determine its implications for him. For the moment, though, he was grateful to be out of the weather as it were.

‘You’re absolutely right, sir,’ Joe said. ‘I didn’t mean to …’

Inspector Lambert raised his hand in a gesture that was both simple and brutal. Joe stopped speaking, and knew immediately that Lambert didn’t just suspect that he was lying — he
knew
. How hard would it have been to find the operator who put the trunk call through and ask her if she remembered the name of the person placing the call? ‘Fred,’ she would have said, because that was the name he’d given her. ‘I have a reverse-charge trunk call for Joe Sable from a Fred — no other name.’ Would the inspector go to the trouble of checking this? With a sickening recognition of Lambert’s distrust that this implied, Joe thought
Yes, yes, he would go to the trouble
.

‘Three rooms have been booked at the Warrnambool Hotel for tonight and tomorrow night. I’ll be driving down with Constable Lord and Sergeant Reilly in an hour. I’m afraid there’s no time to organise a change of clothes. We’ll have to make do. Sergeant Reilly, any problems?’

‘No, sir. I’ll telephone the wife. She’ll understand.’

‘Constable Lord?’

‘No problems at all, sir.’ Except that there was a problem, and it had a name — David Reilly.

Joe said nothing. What was there to say? He wanted to find a toilet and be sick.

‘I’m sorry, Sergeant,’ Lambert said to him. ‘You’re not physically well enough.’

In other circumstances, Joe might have protested. But for now, he lacked the will to even nod assent.

–2–

SELWYN TODD, WHO
always smelled of stale sweat, lived in a shed in a corner of his sister’s garden in James Street, Port Fairy. The sister, Aggie, 64, had settled into misandric spinsterhood. People in Port Fairy expressed admiration to her face for the way she looked after simple Selwyn, and proclaimed pity behind her back for the dud cards she’d been dealt in life. No one could remember how old Selwyn was. He’d been sent to Melbourne when he was very young, and had turned up in Aggie’s garden some time in his twenties. Aggie had never explained his reappearance, and no one had asked her for an explanation. It was supposed that he was now probably 55 or 56. Initially, people had been afraid of him. He laughed loudly and suddenly, and his speech was incoherent. Giggles and barking laughter were his primary means of communication, making adults uneasy and terrifying children. Gradually, he became a familiar, never-quite-trusted presence in the town. He would sit on an upturned box in Sackville Street, his head lowered, his bottom lip slick with saliva, scratching away on a slate. He’d learned to form a few letters, which he drew over and over. As walkers passed by him, he would raise his eyes and chortle. They found this disconcerting, largely because they experienced an uncomfortable feeling of being judged, of being laughed
at
. To make themselves feel better, they took to referring to Selwyn as ‘The Village Idiot’; thus cabined, they took little interest in him.

Aggie Todd didn’t have the luxury of complete indifference to Selwyn. She’d inherited him from her brother, Andrew, in Melbourne. Selwyn had taken to frequent and unguarded bouts of masturbation. Aggie’s sister-in-law, Phillipa, put her foot down when she entered her living room one morning to find Selwyn pleasuring himself in one corner while her five-year-old son, Matthew, was reading in another. Neither seemed aware of the other, but Phillipa declared that very evening that Selwyn had to go — what if he did this disgusting thing in front of little Rose? There was only one place for him to go to. ‘That spoiled sister of yours. She got your parents’ house in Port Fairy, and you didn’t lift a finger to stop her, and no one’s ever going to marry her. There’s plenty of room. End of discussion.’

Selwyn had been with Aggie for only a few days when she’d decided that he couldn’t live with her in the house. He never willingly bathed himself, as he seemed terrified of water. He stank, and Aggie was certain that the smell was getting into the curtains and the carpet — even into her own bedding. She’d never allowed him into her bedroom, but she could smell him on her sheets. He was therefore banished to the shed. She wasn’t cruel to him. She fed him healthy food, withholding it from him only occasionally when she used it as a reward for him allowing her to hose him down. She did this when she believed the smell was creeping from the shed, across the backyard like a viscous ooze, into the house.

When she’d done this for the first time, Selwyn had been with her for perhaps five weeks. She’d explained what she was going to do, that the water would be cold, but that she wouldn’t send it at him in a rush. Selwyn whimpered, but understood that Aggie was someone he had to obey — and he was hungry. Aggie told him to take off his clothes. He thought she’d meant all his clothes. She’d thought that modesty was a virtue separate from mental acuity. Selwyn stood before her, naked, not knowing that he should cup his genitals against his sister’s sight. He hadn’t yet grown podgy, and his pale body quivered in frightened expectation of the hose. Aggie was transfixed. She stared at him, with shame, horror, embarrassment, and something worse, far worse — excitement — jostling for position. She’d never in her life seen a naked adult male, and Selwyn stood there, his arms by his side. As her eyes darted over him, he was a confusion of muscle, hair, and penis. She glanced at it, and quickly looked at his face. She turned on the hose, not fully, so that the water flowed gently, and approached him. She let water fall over his shoulders, and he flinched.

‘Hold up your arms, Selwyn.’

He did as he was told, and, with her thumb over the end of the hose, she directed a sharp spray into each armpit. She showed him that she wanted him to rub there with his free hand, to help sluice the filth away. She went behind him and sprayed vigorously between his buttocks. Facing him, she sprayed his chest, and he rubbed there with his hands; averting her eyes, she sprayed his private parts, which, having learned now what to do, he also rubbed. His erection so startled Aggie that she dropped the hose and returned to the house. Two hours later, she came outside to find the hose still running, her precious tank water soaking into the ground where Selwyn had outraged decency.

Aggie waited two months before hosing Selwyn down again. The shock of that first occasion had by now been dulled by Selwyn’s frequent bouts of onanism, which he at least confined to the premises. There were times when Aggie watched him, and her disgust mutated, to her guilty dismay, into something that felt disturbingly like desire. Who would know, she allowed herself to think one morning, who would ever know if … This was as far as that thought went before a rush of nausea sent her to the bathroom. The thought crept back, and each time it did, the punishing nausea diminished until it wasn’t there at all. Eventually, in an astonishing feat of calculated moral and emotional sequestration, Aggie Todd encouraged her brother into her bed — or rather, his bed. She couldn’t bear the idea of him touching her sheets. This happened only twice, and each time their fumbling, mutual uncertainty made the experience clumsy and dull. It was too elaborate and confusing for Selwyn, and when Aggie, fully clothed, straddled him and forced him into her, she was barely able to tolerate the smell that came off him. Afterwards, she explained the incident away as having been the consequence of a vague fear she harboured that a mean-spirited mortician might snigger at his discovery that she was, post-mortem,
virgo intacta
, and that he might stand back from her elderly, shrunken corpse and say to himself, or to an assistant, ‘Well, after all, who’d want that?’ As time passed, Selwyn grew fat, and Aggie mostly managed to expunge the incidents from her memory.