Death in the Ladies' Goddess Club

by Julian Leatherdale

  Joan sat by the window of her flat for a long time, watching the morning light slide across the city below, a spectacle of bright colours and shifting shadows. The police would want to talk with her again in a few days about Hugh. What would she tell them? Up to this point, no suspicion had attached itself to Hugh over the deaths of Eleanor, Jessie or Frankie Goldman. If he had not been cornered by Joan into blurting out the truth and then decided to confess everything, it was possible he would have died and taken his guilty secret with him. Except, of course, that Greta had seen him and confided in Joan. That still had the power to change the whole story.

  Joan thought about everything Hugh had ever told her of his war service. Who could fail to feel sympathy for his suffering in France and understand his hatred of Gordon? Joan should have known better but she had been shocked by Hugh’s stories of her uncle’s heartlessness: his disregard for his men’s welfare; his refusal to question operational orders that put them in the frontline for days, too exhausted and demoralised to fight; his bullying of junior officers who dared defend men unfit to face battle; blaming his troops for failing to reach or hold their designated positions under enemy fire because it made him look an ineffective commander.

  She even understood Hugh’s own guilt and self-hatred. He had been a model officer at first, willing to carry out her Uncle Gordon’s commands to the letter and place his own life in danger, but his uncritical loyalty had given way to bitter disillusionment, a lingering sickness of the heart as crippling as his gassed lungs. Now the nightmares, in which he relived in horrific detail the deaths of his fellow soldiers, would not leave him.

  Thus far Joan had been swayed by Hugh’s righteous anger. She agreed that Gordon had behaved monstrously. But she could not follow Hugh down his feverish, irrational path of justifying the murder of a prostitute to punish Gordon for these crimes. On the one hand, Hugh seemed to regard Ellie as an unfortunate casualty of the private war that he waged against Gordon; on the other, he admitted that he loathed prostitutes for luring men into vice and disease. Hugh had been so deeply affected by the suffering he had seen visited on men in war that it became his life’s mission to avenge it. But when it came to visiting violence and suffering on women, he was either utterly indifferent or evangelical about how they deserved it. He was as monstrously hypocritical as the man he hated! Could he not see that?

  There. Joan had made her decision. She must tell the police about Hugh’s confession. He had said he was sorry for dragging Joan into this mess but not enough to refrain from deceiving her many times. He had talked her into blackmail, fooled her into betraying Ellie and Jessie, used her to uncover faked evidence. Her duty was clear. Whatever her personal feelings, there was principle at stake. However much Gordon and Olympia deserved to be punished, nothing could justify making them pay for crimes they had not committed. And Joan was confident that they would not escape that ‘long, painful public disgrace’ that Hugh had wished for them. Gordon would still stand trial and—if there was any justice left in this world that could not be paid for with clever, expensive lawyers—he would be convicted for seeking to profit from the suffering of returned soldiers by selling them cocaine.

  Having made her decision, Joan sat for a while by the window. Memories came to her in bursts. Her first encounter with Hugh on Goulburn Street under the octagonal tower and copper cupola of the Trades Hall. Their first kiss at supper on William Street that night. Attending a history lecture together at Haymarket Library and Hugh reciting her Wilfred Owens’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ with tears in his eyes. Reading each other’s poetry in Hyde Park on a sunny afternoon. Catching the six o’clock screening on a rainy evening in the cheap seats at the Kings Cross Theatre.

  Toasting the success of their Hotel Australia scam over oysters and chips: Here’s to stealing from the rich! Hugh’s windblown golden hair and boyish grin at the wheel of the Pierce Arrow, looking lean and prosperous in a flash suit. The rare look of happiness on her mother’s face (He’s very handsome, isn’t he?), the relief on her father’s (My God! Joan, how can you … ?), the sight of Hugh and Richard standing together, heads close, talking behind the tomato plants. Hugh rescuing her from Gordon’s thug, Geoffrey: If you come anywhere near me or Joan again, I’ll put a fucking bullet in your skull! His haunted pale face when confronted with Ruby and Greta on the bridge: Poor kid.

  Was this all a lie, a performance? Joan could not bring herself to believe that. Whatever madness had possessed him, whatever sickness of the flesh had taken his mind hostage, Joan believed that there were parts of Hugh untouched by bloody revenge and hatred. These parts had been expressed in acts, large and small, of tenderness, of courage, of protectiveness, of self-sacrifice. Was Hugh no more than a cold-blooded psychopath, able to mimic these emotions without feeling them, always detached and calculating? Unless Joan was deeply deluded—and yes, maybe she had been fooled all along—this did not feel like the Hugh she knew at all. He was, rather, a man at war with himself, a man wrestling with his own shadows.

  Joan had sat for hours by the window trying to make sense of her feelings about Hugh and working out what she should do. She seemed to arrive back at the same place again and again. However she judged him, it was clear she must tell the police what she knew—even though this meant admitting to her complicity in blackmail, which would, in turn, mean the public humiliation of her family and, with the return of the money, the loss of all help for mother and Richard. Possibly even a prison sentence for her, Joan.

  Exhausted by this emotional turmoil, Joan dragged herself to her divan-bed and closed her eyes for a moment. How she missed the physical loveliness of T.S., his sooty fur coat, his amber-green eyes and his calming steady presence by her feet or in her lap. She thought about that evening two weeks ago when she had sat at her window in Bomora, the stiff breeze upsetting the cosy order of her quiet room. She had been bent over her typewriter in the heat, writing her crime novel with nothing but a second-hand acquaintance of that Stygian underworld and with only Bill Jenkins as her guide. Now she had paid her fare to the ferryman, passed across the Styx all alone and walked unattended in the Land of the Dead.

  She was ready now to write her novel with a hard-won and painful new understanding. And with that thought, Joan Linderman drifted into a deep sleep.

  The suit jacket, all caked in white powder like a baker’s smock, had been neatly folded in half and laid on the footpath close to the fence. Despite its sorry state, it was unmistakeably well-tailored and cut from good-quality cloth. A bloodstain had spread below the right lapel and its source was soon identified by a distinct hole that pierced the right shoulder.

  Next to this jacket was a pair of well-worn shoes. They had been polished despite the patchwork of deep cracks in the leather. The soles were so thin and loosely attached to the uppers that the gent who wore them must have perfected that careful hobo gait that planted the feet deliberately on the heel and the toes with each step to avoid the soles flapping too noticeably. Inside the left shoe was a pair of darned black wool socks, balled up and shoved under the tongue.

  The incongruity of the tailored suit jacket and the poor man’s shoes was striking. ‘What do you make of that?’ Constable Howard asked Sergeant Armfield as they kneeled on the concrete pathway. The wind off the harbour was picking up as the sun climbed higher over the Eastern Suburbs.

  ‘A bloke fallen on hard times has kept the only thing that reminds him of his past. His once smart jacket. A last scrap of dignity.’ Armfield shrugged. ‘The whole story of this Depression, wouldn’t you say? Or maybe the poor fellow stole it from some posh bastard.’

  The constable stood up to admire the view. ‘If youse was gonna take the final step, this’d have to be the spot, wouldn’t it, Sarge?’ he observed in a philosophical frame of mind. ‘’Specially at sun-up. Jesus, that’d be something to see. Like walking into bloody heaven.’

  ‘I dare say you’re right, Constable,’ agreed Armfield. ‘Which makes me wonder if this wonderful bridg
e will become the new favourite spot for suicides. I’m sure that’s not what Mr Bradfield had in mind.’

  For a moment, Armfield let herself slip inside the mind of the man who had waited here——for several hours, if the little heap of cigarette butts and burned matches was any indication——struggling with his decision. She thought about the long and lonely vigil under a starless abyss of sky, the only other human presences nearby speeding past in a blur of car headlights, oblivious to this man’s mortal pain. And then the moment of resolution, the folding of the jacket, the removal of the shoes and socks in preparation.

  It must have been so cold in those minutes before sunrise. His skin would have pimpled in the chill air, his lungs burning with each frosty breath. Did it take him long to climb the metal fence in his bare feet? Did he linger there on the edge of the top railing as the sun’s light broke over the horizon? Did he hesitate at the thought of a new day’s promise of hope? Or was he in a hurry for it all to end?

  In her hands Armfield was holding the bloodstained envelope they had found in the inner pocket of the suit. A woman’s name was written on the front. It was this part of the job she hated most of all. Her uninvited presence in such intimate and private spaces. Her intrusion at a time when there was no longer anything she could do to help.

  And yet the contents of this envelope promised a story: a mystery that must be solved, a narrative that must be concluded, an attempt that must be made at a reckoning and perhaps even a sense of destiny. In the eternally delayed absence of Judgement Day, it was the compulsion to finish the story that called to Sergeant Lillian Armfield again and again with her persistent, almost indestructible, faith in the mystical power of endings.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Four weeks later Joan had already sent twelve chapters of her crime novel, Death in the Shadow City, to Reg Punch at The Australian Journal and he had asked to see the entire manuscript by 18 April. That was why she was sitting at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning, desperately trying to finish the final pages of her second draft, which she intended to deliver personally to Mr Punch first thing Monday morning. She was so close to the end now there was the temptation to take a breather, make another cup of tea, but Joan knew she must not stop—that the story demanded she continue to pay attention, to listen carefully to the voice inside her head, until she had the ending just right. Stories were like that: anything could happen right up to the last page and, as long as the writer had played fair with the reader, there was always that possibility of an incident, a revelation, an object, a memory that could change our understanding of the story completely.

  Bernie had already left for the Roma to enjoy lunch with the Itchies so Joan had the flat to herself. The window was open a fraction, allowing the comforting clatter of traffic to wash over Joan like an old love song. She and Bernie were still debating whether to adopt another cat but, despite T.S.’s absence, these new digs were starting to feel like home.

  For the last month, Hugh had haunted Joan’s every waking minute. He was her personal phantom, looking over her shoulder at every page of her novel as she wrote it. He was a phantom in another sense as well: his body was never found below the bridge, either washed up on the harbour foreshore or tangled in the nets of a fishing boat. He had simply vanished. Joan even wondered if his suicide had also been stage-managed, like every other part of his secret double life. Had he escaped and reinvented himself somewhere else?

  With help from Bill Jenkins and the solicitor Abbott, Joan’s own part in this story was concluded in a way that had managed to save both her family and herself. A deal was negotiated with Gordon’s lawyers that Joan would testify to the police about Hugh’s confession to murder on condition that Gordon not pursue any legal action over his niece’s blackmail or seek the return of the money. The Fielding-Joneses were easily persuaded by their lawyers of the wisdom of this course: the charges against them of murdering Eleanor Dawson and Jessie Simmons were dropped. Bill Jenkins scooped the story for Truth but Joan’s name was never revealed; she remained an ‘anonymous source’. The street photo of Ellie and Gordon was re-examined by the cops and proved to be a clever fake as every other piece of Hugh’s confession began to fall into place, including his playing the part of Gordon as witnessed by little Greta from behind the garden gate. With their focus on solving crimes and getting convictions, the police were even prepared to overlook Joan’s tampering with a crime scene and her involvement in a blackmail scam.

  Gordon was poleaxed when he learned of the depth of his trusted lieutenant’s treachery. Even with the murder charges dropped, Gordon’s troubles were far from over. He was still arraigned for trial for scheming to peddle snow to returned soldiers and conspiring with his wife in the killing of Frankie Goldman: Joan had decided to leave that part of the story out of her account of Hugh’s confession. Gordon realised he had fatally overestimated the unquestioning loyalty of his officers as several angry and embittered New Guardsmen came forward to testify about their commander’s covert meetings with Jeffs and Goldman at the gangster’s nightclubs. Joan now watched as her ruthless uncle and heartless aunt tried to squirm their way out of this nasty mess, which was already destroying the reputation of Gordon’s legal practice, scaring off his business partners and investors, and sabotaging his and Olympia’s social standing. With ill-disguised alacrity, Sydney’s wealthy elite abandoned them as swiftly as one would avoid a stinking carcass.

  Joan wound another sheet of paper into her Corona. There was a rap at the door.

  Joan sighed. ‘Coming!’

  She dragged herself from the typewriter and opened the door a crack. A small boy, aged nine or ten, stared at her solemnly. He had a freckled face, red hair and jug-handle ears like the kid out of the Ginger Meggs comic strip, and clutched a letter. ‘Is your name Joan?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  The boy thrust the letter at her. ‘The man told me to bring this to you. He said it was very important. Paid me a whole shilling, he did!’

  ‘Okay, thanks. Did he tell you his name?’

  ‘Nuh,’ said the boy, and he raced off before Joan could ask any more questions.

  Joan shrugged, closed the door and resumed her seat at the table. She tore open the envelope. The letter inside began: Hello Jo-Jo. She let out a cry. Was this some cruel hoax? Only one person in the world had ever called her that: her brother James.

  I bet I’m the last person you ever thought you’d hear from. Everyone seems to think I’m dead, except for poor old mum. And everyone thinks she’s crazy, poor love. I have visited her twice and we’ve gone for walks in the gully where you and I played as kids—remember?

  Gloria doesn’t seem to mind this bloody awful mask I have to wear to cover my ruined face. Shell burst damage. Took away my right eye, most of my right cheek and part of my nose. Not a pretty sight. Frightens the children, I can tell you. And most adults. But that is only part of the reason I have not been able to come home. My mind is damaged too, but there is no prosthetic to hide the ugliness in there, I’m afraid. I am not a fit member of society, as they say. Which is why I stay hidden, even though I miss you all.

  But I am coming out of the shadows now, just for a moment, dear sister. I cannot cannot bear to think of you suffering because of Hugh. He lied. I owe you the truth.

  I am sitting at the back of the Mockbell’s cafe at the Quay. I will sit here until they close tonight. If you want to know the truth and see your ridiculous brother James one more time, come and have a coffee with me. Please.

  Love,

  James

  P.S. Also, please bring the watch that I hope Hugh gave you.

  Joan sat back, stunned. Her brother James was alive and here in Sydney. How long had he been here, in hiding? And what did he mean that Hugh had lied? Joan could feel the kaleidoscope turning once more and all the pieces of the story that she thought she had finally understood might be about to tumble and fall into a new pattern. Joan put on her shoes, jacket and hat, grabbed her purse and k
eys, pocketed the old trench watch, locked the door and headed down the stairs. She had an appointment with her resurrected brother. A ghost made flesh.

  Only a few customers were seated at the Mockbell’s coffee palace on Pitt Street near Circular Quay at this time of day and Joan had no trouble slipping discreetly from the ladies’ saloon to the gentlemen’s lounge next door. Her heart thudded so hard surely everyone within earshot could hear it. Why was she so very scared? Her joy at knowing James was alive was contaminated by her fear of his talk about his ‘damaged’ mind; what mental injury was it he had suffered that he felt unable to return home?

  From the star-shaped punctures in the mock-Moorish copper lanterns overhead, rays of amber light pierced the gloom of the low-lit lounge, illuminating a tabletop here, a coffee cup there, the elbow crease of a jacket, a hand turning the page of a newspaper. Two blokes in cheap suits looked up for a moment from a nearby table and resumed their conversation.

  A voice whispered from the darkness. ‘Joan, over here.’

  Joan started a little and turned to see a figure seated in a booth deep in shadow against the back wall. ‘James?’

  The figure beckoned her over.

  Joan sat down and James leaned forward into the light. ‘Hi, Jo-Jo. I wasn’t sure you’d come.’

  She gasped at the sight of him—not in horror but out of a giddy mix of delight and disbelief at seeing him in the flesh and of sorrow at contemplating all the years lost. His face appeared oddly lopsided: the left side was noticeably more aged since she had last laid eyes on him while the right had perversely kept the smoothness and pink flush of youth. It took a few moments for her eyes to readjust and see the edge of the prosthetic mask that snaked, a fine crack, from under his right ear, across his jaw, cheek and nose and up into his hairline. It also soon became obvious that his right eye never moved or blinked, a startling trompe l’oeil of an eye, painted and glazed to match perfectly the colour and size of his left.