The Port Fairy Murders (31 page)

‘The only one who comes close,’ said Joe, ‘is John Abbot. His alibi for the hours between midnight and 4.00 am was his wife, and his wife is dead. We can say with absolute certainty that he had nothing to do with the death of his wife. We can’t say that about the death of Matthew Todd. We know he couldn’t stand either Matthew or Miss Todd.’

‘Does a person kill someone because he doesn’t get on with him socially?’ Constable Filan asked. ‘The streets of Port Fairy would be knee deep in Catholic and Protestant dead if that was the case.’

‘There are people we haven’t yet spoken to,’ Helen said. ‘Matthew’s fiancée, Dorothy …?’

‘Shipman.’

‘Dorothy Shipman. I understand she’s been informed of Matthew’s death.’

‘Of course. Father Brennan has been with the Shipmans all day.’

‘He’s the Shipmans’ priest?’

‘He’s our parish priest, yes,’ Filan said.

‘I saw in the notes,’ Helen said, ‘that Miss Todd suggested that there might be some tension between the fishermen who turned their catch over to the Co-operative and those who used Matthew Todd as their forwarding agent. Is that worth pursuing?’

‘Anything is worth pursuing at this stage,’ Halloran said. ‘This looks too personal to be about money, though.’

‘Is it outlandish,’ Joe said, ‘to suggest that Rose Abbot might have killed her brother, and that Agnes Todd then killed her in revenge?’

‘The times don’t fit,’ Halloran said.

‘Unless she and John Abbot came into town and killed Todd. He’d have let them into his house. She could have distracted him. John Abbot could have slipped the ligature around his neck, taken the corpse around the corner to Miss Todd’s place, and driven back to the farm. Miss Todd finds the body in the morning, works out what’s happened, and calls her niece.’

‘How would she work out what’s happened?’

‘Maybe John Abbot had issued threats recently. I don’t know.’

‘Why would Rose, who knew her brother’s body was in the front room, agree to drive to her aunt’s house?’

‘And that,’ said Joe, ‘is where my scenario falls over.’

They all looked at the blackboard, now with lines, arrows, and under-scorings that made the names on it resemble a physics equation.

‘What do we do, sir,’ Helen asked, ‘if we can’t break Agnes Todd’s claim about Selwyn?’

‘He’ll be charged with murder, found incompetent to plea, and locked away in Brierly Mental Hospital.’

‘That isn’t justice, sir,’ Paddy Filan said. ‘That just isn’t right.’

AGGIE TODD SAT
in a chair beside the bed in the spare room of Mrs Cuthbert’s house. She didn’t want to lie down, and she wanted no light. ‘
That it should come to this
,’ she thought. Could she remember the bit that preceded that fragment from
Hamlet
? Something about the Everlasting having fixed his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter, and then, ‘
Oh God, God, How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world.
’ God? Where was God in all this? Her soul was now condemned to eternal damnation. Eternal damnation. She remembered a story a nun had told them in an attempt to get them to understand the idea of eternity. Imagine, she’d said, the world as a ball of the hardest material in the universe. Once every thousand years, a sparrow flies by and brushes the edge of the world with its wing. When the sparrow has worn the world down to the size of a pea, eternity hasn’t even begun.

Did she really believe all that? Could a dullard like Father Brennan really turn water into wine, and bread into the body of Christ? She couldn’t confess and gain absolution for what she’d done to Rose. Would God really blame her for punishing the person who’d murdered Matthew, who was worth ten Roses? What kind of God was that? A vengeful one. Yet if God was vengeful, surely he’d understand righteous vengefulness in others? No. Aggie was too smart to bother with this sort of sophistry. If there was a Hell, she was already in it. One mortal sin was the same as two. Thus, with absolute clarity of purpose, Agnes Todd made the decision to take her own life.

Mrs Cuthbert, deaf as a post, didn’t hear her leave by the back door. She went out through the back gate and opened the gate into her own property. She turned the light on in the kitchen, found what she was looking for in the cupboard under the sink, poured a glass of water into a saucepan on the stove, and stirred the embers in the firebox into flames. She took a bottle of brandy from a shelf and opened it.

Fletcher Adams was impatient to be relieved of his surveillance. He was bored numb. The fish and chips had been welcome, and he had to admit that he was glad to have copped the first shift and not the second. At least he’d be in his own bed soon. Filan was expected to get a few hours’ sleep and to take over at midnight, which was fast approaching.

Adams crossed the road, and walked up and down in front of the Cuthbert house. On his second pass he noticed that a light had come on in Aggie Todd’s house next door. He slammed his leather bobby’s helmet on his head and ran around the corner and down the lane that ran behind the houses in James Street. The gate to the Todd house was open. Aggie Todd was in the kitchen, with her back to the window. The silly woman was supposed to stay away from the house. Adams strode to the back door, cross that she should oblige him to intervene so close to the change of shift. He opened the unlocked door and gave Aggie Todd such a fright that she yelped.

‘What are you doing here?’ he said tersely. ‘This place is off limits. That has been explained to you.’

Aggie recovered quickly.

‘I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d just pop over and make myself a cup of warm water and brandy. Mrs Cuthbert doesn’t have any brandy. She’s a teetotaller.’

‘The water’s boiling.’

Adams’ irritation abated rapidly. What was the harm in an old lady wanting a glass of warm water and brandy?

‘Would you like a brandy?’

Adams thought for a moment.

‘Why not?’

Aggie had replaced the item she’d taken from under the sink, and her mug was already out on the table beside the brandy bottle. She retrieved a glass from the cupboard.

‘You can pour your own brandy,’ she said, and handed him the glass and the bottle. She then poured hot water into her mug. Adams treated himself to a generous slug of brandy, and returned the bottle to Aggie. She splashed an equally generous amount into her mug. Adams raised his glass to his lips and sipped. It was good. The brandy caught pleasantly at the back of his throat. Aggie was watching him over the rim of her mug, the steam from which she was breathing in deeply.

‘You’re very young,’ she said. ‘They say policemen get younger as we get older. How old are you?’

‘I’m 24.’

‘Are you married?’

‘Yes.’

He took another sip while, to his surprise, Aggie took large gulps from her mug. It must have burned her mouth, surely. She finished her drink and put the mug on the table, or tried to. It fell to the floor. She staggered, her eyes grew wide with fear, and her breathing became ugly pants. She fell, rather than sat, into a chair, where her body convulsed violently. Fletcher Adams was paralysed with horror. She gurgled and coughed, and her face became a jumping, quivering dance of muscles as great spasms of agony ripped through her. One final, terrifying rasp escaped her, and she was still.

Adams was open-mouthed, stunned into immobility. Aggie Todd’s bladder emptied, and Adams knew that she was dead.
My God, was there something in the brandy?
He felt weak and nauseated. Had she poisoned them both? He picked up the brandy bottle, smelled it, and held it to the light. It was clean. She hadn’t poisoned him. The mug that Aggie had drunk from hadn’t broken when it hit the floor, and Adams was now sufficiently calm to use his handkerchief to pick it up. At the bottom of the mug were granulated white dregs. He smelled it and quickly put it down, well away from him. He was pretty sure it was cyanide. Where would Miss Todd get cyanide? Adams opened cupboards and drawers. He found nothing until he opened the cupboard under the sink. Very carefully, making sure he didn’t smudge any prints, he withdrew a canister of wasp powder. He’d used this stuff in his own garden, and he knew how dangerous it was. The active ingredient in the wasp pesticide was cyanide, and Adams thought that Aggie Todd must have drunk enough of the stuff to kill a horse.

‘Jesus Christ!’

Constable Filan stepped into the kitchen. He’d arrived to relieve Adams, found that he wasn’t about, and seen the light in the Todd house.

‘She’s just fucking killed herself, right in front of me!’

‘What are you holding?’

‘Wasp dust. Cyanide. I couldn’t stop her. It all happened so fast.’

‘This looks bad, Fletcher. This looks very, very bad.’

DOCTOR MARRIOTT HAD
declared Agnes Todd dead, and taken blood samples. He’d arrived within half an hour of Agnes’ death to find Sergeant Joe Sable, Constable Helen Lord, Constable Paddy Filan, and Constable Fletcher Adams gathered in the kitchen. Paddy Filan had photographed the scene. Marriott had hurried because Filan had told him that cyanide was suspected. Because cyanide dissipated quickly in the body, it was important to get a blood sample within the first hour to get an accurate sense of how much had been ingested. Inspector Halloran wouldn’t yet have arrived back in Warrnambool; as the car wasn’t fitted with wireless radio, he’d hear about Aggie’s death from a message left with his wife. Joe had asked that he telephone the Todd house rather than turn around and drive back to Port Fairy.

Fletcher Adams was relieved that he wouldn’t have to speak to Halloran until the morning. He answered all of Joe’s and Helen’s questions without ducking and weaving. He made no attempt to disguise the fact that he’d been offered a glass of brandy and that he’d accepted the offer. He knew that he faced probable dismissal, but he’d already decided to save Inspector Halloran the trouble by resigning. Policing was a world he wanted nothing more to do with. Standing here, in a dimly lit kitchen, looking at the tortured face of an elderly dead woman wasn’t his idea of a satisfying career choice.

The telephone rang, and Joe spoke with Inspector Halloran. He was incandescent with fury. There was, however, no point in his coming back to Port Fairy now. He needed to get some sleep. There were no suspicious circumstances. Constable Adams had witnessed Aggie Todd’s suicide, which had the advantage of removing any ambiguities about her death. Discussions about its implications could wait until the morning.

With Agnes Todd’s body having been sent to the morgue to join her niece and nephew, the police retired to their respective beds. Fletcher Adams, who was driving the coal-burning vehicle, couldn’t help thinking that, with his luck, the unreliable bloody car would choose this night, of all nights, to break down. He was right. Halfway between Port Fairy and Warrnambool, the engine sputtered and died. He grimly accepted that this had been inevitable, pushed the dead lump to the side of the road, got back into the driver’s seat, and tried to sleep. No doubt, Inspector Halloran would blame him for this, too.

–13–

LATE ON MONDAY
afternoon, Sergeant David Reilly knocked on Inspector Lambert’s door. He had information that was both disturbing and of great value.

‘We may be getting closer to George Starling, sir.’

Lambert leaned back in his chair.

‘How so?’

‘Ron Dunnart has been busy. He’s on his best behaviour, and, I have to say, he’s more than competent as an investigator.’

‘I’ve never doubted his skills, Sergeant — only his ethics.’

‘We have the identities of the two bodies in the private club.’

‘Excellent.’

‘The building is owned by an elderly man named Jimmy O’Farrell. He lives in South Australia. All his properties, and he has a few, are managed for him by his son, Brendan. According to O’Dowd, who went to St Kilda and interviewed this Brendan O’Farrell, he’s a bit of a standover man. He was very unco-operative until it was pointed out to him that being an accessory to a murder that happened in what a court might decide was a male brothel wouldn’t be good for whatever reputation he had. He claims he had no idea that the room he rented out was being used for anything illegal. The man who paid the rent is a Sturt Menadue. O’Farrell was most reluctant, but O’Dowd was very persuasive and got him to go down to the morgue and identify the body. It’s Menadue, all right. Menadue’s home address is a flat in Prahran. It’s been searched, and that didn’t turn up much. There was an address book.’

Reilly produced the book. It was small and brown, bound in leather, with thin brass edging to protect the corners. Inspector Lambert flicked through it.

‘There aren’t many names here. They may just be friends, rather than regulars at the club.’

Two pages fell loose, from near the front of the book. The connecting pages, on either side of the stitched divide, were missing. Titus put the pages back and handed the book to Reilly. He didn’t need to say anything. Both men suspected what this meant.

‘And the young man?’

‘We know who he is, too. He’s a waiter at the Windsor Hotel, but he didn’t show up for work this morning. He’d never been late or absent before, so the hotel telephoned his mother, whom he lives with. She wasn’t concerned about his not coming home over the weekend; but when he failed to turn up for work, she contacted the police. She identified his body a couple of hours ago. His name is Steven McNamara.