The Orchard Murders

by Robert Gott

  Guy laughed.

  ‘She must have a reasonable opinion of you. She’s given you a job. She hasn’t given me a job. That might be because I have absolutely no qualifications or experience. And I do fall asleep without warning. Still …’

  Dr Clara Dawson, Helen Lord’s closest friend, had explained Guy’s narcolepsy to Joe, and he understood that the benign expression ‘falling asleep’ really meant that Guy slipped unpredictably into unconsciousness. These episodes might last seconds or minutes. The cause, whether physiological or psychological, was uncertain, although in Guy’s case the condition had appeared after an incident in New Guinea. Whatever it was that had provoked the condition, it had led to the death of a young soldier. Guy had fallen asleep at the wheel of a jeep, which had overturned. He hadn’t yet found a way to live with this, and he’d become afraid of sleep. The horrors he could corral during the day broke from their restraints at night.

  ‘Trust me, Guy, Helen doesn’t think my detective training has made me a good detective.’

  Guy leaned back in the armchair.

  ‘Are you a good detective, Joe? I’ve never asked you that. We were all surprised when you became a copper.’

  ‘The army wouldn’t take me. The police force needed men, and they weren’t bothered about my arrhythmia. Am I a good detective? I think I was learning to be one. Inspector Lambert made me feel incompetent. Not deliberately. Just by comparison.’

  ‘I like Lambert’s wife. What’s her name?’

  ‘Maude.’

  ‘Maude. Yes. She’s very impressive.’

  ‘I always feel clumsy around her, and there’s a lingering sense I have that she still blames me for what happened to Tom. She’s assured me that this isn’t true, but of course how could it not be a bit true? How could you look at your brother and his injuries, and not blame the person who put him in danger?’

  Guy stood up. The mood in the room had changed suddenly.

  ‘Blaming yourself is much harder to live with than being blamed by someone else,’ he said. ‘Believe me, I know.’

  TOM MACKENZIE HAD never given his body much thought. At 32, he’d remained lean, and none of the women he’d slept with had made unflattering remarks. He’d taken it for granted. It was fit for purpose, serviceable, perhaps to some eyes even attractive. Now he stood before a full-length mirror in his house in South Melbourne and surveyed the damage done to him a few months earlier at the hands of two torturers. The cigarette burns had healed, but had left ugly circles of puckered skin. He forced himself to look at the ruined flesh over his shoulders and on his chest, the legacy of a vicious scald. He still had a splint on one hand. His right hand had healed much faster than his left, and those splints had been removed. The breaks in his right fingers had been cleaner than the breaks in his left. The bruising and swelling on his face had gone. He wasn’t a vain man, but he wondered if women would be repulsed by that raw, angry scald. He’d been assured by his doctor that it would settle down, although it would never repair itself into invisibility. It would be a permanent, physical reminder of what he’d suffered.

  Whether or not the psychological damage would recede was more problematic. The nightmares had eased. He wasn’t sure if the visits to his psychiatrist were helpful or not. He supposed they must be. He liked going, at any rate, which surprised him. He’d always been suspicious of psychiatry, and his sister, Maude Lambert, had been astonished at his willingness to seek help in that quarter. Until recently, Maude and Titus had shared Tom’s house. It had been unsafe for them to stay in their own house in Brunswick. The danger that had made this so had passed, and Tom now had the place to himself. He still approached sleep nervously, but his dreams were mostly untroubled.

  Tom knew that the day was coming when the air force would demand his return to Victoria Barracks. The thought of re-entering his tiny office, accepting the salutes of those junior to him, and giving salutes to his seniors, made him feel ill. It had been the monotony of his job that had led him to accept Joe Sable’s request for assistance. The fact that it had gone badly for both him and Joe hadn’t made him crave the safety of his desk. What would he do if he resigned his commission, and was this even possible in a time of war? He envied Joe Sable and his new position in Helen Lord’s private inquiry office. He understood that there wasn’t a place for him. It was a business, and he wasn’t a detective. Helen Lord wasn’t much interested in amateurs. Simultaneous with this thought was another that took him by surprise. He was interested in Helen Lord.

  HELEN LORD WAS unequivocally pleased, almost in fact happy. This situation was so rare that her friend Clara Dawson couldn’t help but draw attention to it. They were sitting in an office in East Melbourne, late on a Saturday night. Clara was exhausted, having finished a punishing shift at the Royal Melbourne Hospital. As one of only a handful of female doctors, she spent a good deal of every day dealing with people, both men and women, doctors and patients, who found her sex anomalous to her position. Men didn’t want her looking at their ‘bits’, and some women thought it unseemly that she would poke around theirs. Helen had heard this conversation many times, and had always found it both depressing and reassuring that it wasn’t just the police force that dismissed women as congenitally unsuited to ‘manly’ professions. Until recently, Helen had been a policewoman and had endured the daily derogations because she knew she was good at her job; better than most of her colleagues. Inspector Titus Lambert had seen this and had rewarded her. She’d lasted long enough in the Homicide unit to learn to respect Lambert more than she resented him, although a small ember of resentment held residual heat still. She couldn’t quite forgive him for suspending her from the unit, despite her knowing that this hadn’t been his decision.

  ‘Helen Lord and Associates,’ Clara said.

  ‘That’s what it says on the door, Clar, so it must be true.’

  ‘This office is pretty flash. It’s a proper suite, isn’t it?’

  ‘Three rooms plus bathroom and kitchen.’

  ‘It’s nicer than where I live.’

  ‘I love your flat.’

  ‘Or as I like to accurately call it, my bedsit. This must be costing you a fortune in rent. Is the private inquiry business in Melbourne sufficiently lucrative to offset that?’

  ‘I have no idea, Clar. That’s what I’m going to find out. However, I have one serious advantage over my competitors, and there are only a few of those anyway.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’ve done my accounting and, thanks to Uncle Peter’s legacy, I’ve calculated that, taking all overheads into consideration, including wages and sundry expenses, Helen Lord and Associates can run without making a profit for something like …’ She paused for effect. ‘… thirty years.’

  Clara laughed.

  ‘So, you see, I don’t need to panic about the bottom line until 1974. Ideally, of course, we will turn a profit.’

  ‘I can’t see you spying on wives for jealous husbands, or vice versa, and that’s the bread and butter of this sort of business, isn’t it?’

  ‘There might have to be a bit of that, but I can afford to pick and choose. I don’t really care if wives are cheating on their husbands.’

  ‘You don’t have a very high opinion of men, do you?’

  ‘I haven’t met a sufficient number of impressive men to believe that that’s the norm.’

  ‘Apart from Joe.’

  The mention of Joe Sable’s name caused Helen to blush lightly. This often happened when Clara spoke about him, because Clara Dawson was the only person privy to Helen’s great secret — that she was in love with Joe Sable. This was a situation that infuriated and excited Helen in equal measure. She’d shared an office with him in the Homicide department, but she’d felt, wrongly she now knew, that she hadn’t shared Inspector Lambert’s respect equally. He was young, and had been promoted to sergeant so quickly that other policemen at Russell Stre
et headquarters despised him. The promotion had been partly the result of personnel shortages. Those same shortages would never benefit Helen in the police force. Women weren’t even required to wear a uniform, because extra stripes of office would never be conferred on them. If you were a woman, you went in as a constable, and no matter how hard you worked or how talented you were, it might take you 20 years to reach the giddy professional height of senior constable.

  ‘Joe is a good man, Clar, but I’m a much better detective. He knows that, and I think it only bothers him a little bit.’

  ‘He’s working for you, so it can’t bother him too much.’

  ‘Am I doing the right thing, Clar? Is this all going to end in tears?’

  ‘Working with friends is always risky. Actually employing them strikes me as fraught.’

  ‘Joe is the only one on a full-time salary. He’s the only qualified detective, so that’s fair enough. Tom Mackenzie will have to go back to the air force eventually, once his wounds have properly healed. And Guy Kirkham, well, I don’t know much about him, apart from the fact that he has courage and that he has nightmares.’

  Clara laughed.

  ‘When you line them up like that, Helen, it’s like roll call at a casualty station. They’re each recovering from injuries, physical and mental. Guy Kirkham has narcolepsy, for fuck’s sake. Joe has an irregular heartbeat, and he’s carrying the scars from torture. And Tom, my god, I’m surprised he’s not a complete cot case after what happened to him. Maybe you should change the name to Helen Lord and Outpatients.’

  ‘The thing is, Clar, they’re my outpatients. When I turn up for work every day, I won’t be breathing the same air as people I have no respect for.’

  ‘You know you can count on me to help out whenever I can.’

  ‘I’m absolutely counting on it, Clar.’

  2

  ZAC WILSON’S MEMORY of what had happened at Peter Fisher’s house was uncertain. He couldn’t piece things together into a coherent whole. He’d woken up in hospital, but had no idea how this had happened. There’d been something wrong with his hearing. Voices had seemed muted, echoey, and distant.

  A week in hospital had eased a severe concussion, his hearing had improved, and his bruised body had turned various impossible shades of blue, green, and yellow. He knew his own name, he recognised his wife, and he began to worry about being away from the orchard. But the man who stood at the end of his bed wasn’t familiar to him. He introduced himself as Inspector Titus Lambert, and he asked Zac if he felt up to answering a few questions.

  ‘Of course. Are you from the police?’

  ‘Yes. Homicide.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘We’re a new division. We specialise in investigating suspicious deaths.’

  ‘You mean murder?’

  ‘Yes, murder.’

  ‘Who’s been murdered?’

  Inspector Lambert looked at Zac Wilson and tried to determine if that question was genuine or disingenuous. Wilson’s doctor had told Lambert that concussion had unpredictable consequences, and that every brain responded differently to trauma. Zac Wilson’s memory might be affected, and that effect might be temporary or it might be permanent; it might also be partial. This made Wilson a problematic witness to the events at Fisher’s farm.

  ‘Your wife has been to visit you, I believe.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did she talk about what happened?’

  ‘No. She said there was a tragedy at Peter Fisher’s place. An explosion.’

  ‘And you remember nothing about the explosion?’

  Wilson closed his eyes. There was something forming behind them. A vague shape that resolved itself into the figure of a man walking towards him. He was holding something in his arms. The shape dissolved.

  ‘Mr Wilson, I have to warn you that you are in serious trouble, so serious that your memory loss looks convenient.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You know Peter Fisher?’

  ‘Of course I do. He’s my neighbour.’

  ‘And you know his wife?’

  ‘Deborah. Yes. She had a baby only recently.’

  Lambert waited.

  Wilson’s face drained of colour so that the bruises under his eyes became stark.

  ‘He showed me the baby,’ he said. ‘He was holding him, wrapped in something, a blanket maybe. There was blood.’

  ‘When did he show you the baby?’

  ‘It must have been …’ Wilson tried to concentrate. ‘I don’t know exactly. He was walking towards me, holding something, and then he said, “Dead. All dead.”’

  Wilson’s face was contorted into puzzlement, as if his own words made no sense to him.

  ‘And what happened next, Mr Wilson?’

  ‘He said, “Dead. All dead.” And then … why can’t I remember what happened next?’

  A voice behind Inspector Lambert, a voice he recognised, said, ‘I think Mr Wilson needs to rest, Inspector.’

  Lambert turned to greet Clara Dawson, a doctor whose abilities had impressed him greatly.

  ‘Dr Dawson, I didn’t know Mr Wilson was your patient. I was briefed by another doctor.’

  ‘Strictly speaking, he isn’t. The female ward is my usual stomping ground, but I’m plugging a gap temporarily here.’

  Lambert turned to Zac Wilson.

  ‘I’ll need to speak to you again, Mr Wilson. If you remember any other details of the explosion, please let me know immediately. There’s a constable here in the nurses’ station who you can speak to.’

  Wilson didn’t ask why a constable had been posted in the hospital, but he nodded and instantly regretted it, as the nod seemed to unleash a headache of sudden ferocity.

  Clara sat with Titus in a small, untidy room at the end of the ward. It was essentially a store cupboard, the nurses’ station being too busy for privacy.

  ‘I don’t think I ever congratulated you on your evidence at the inquest,’ Titus said.

  ‘Thank you. I was pleased that the coroner didn’t dismiss it as fanciful.’

  ‘Can you give me a frank assessment of Mr Wilson’s condition?’

  ‘Where any injury to the brain is involved it’s difficult to be either confidently predictive or properly accurate. What I can tell you is that he was incredibly, freakishly lucky not to have been burned. The force of the explosion threw him beyond the heat. He has extensive, deep-tissue bruising, and he suffered a severe concussion. As far as we can tell, there isn’t any significant brain damage. His speech is unaffected, and he has full movement of his limbs. He has memory loss, which is not unusual. This seems to be improving.’

  ‘Could he be exaggerating or even faking these memory gaps?’

  ‘I suppose that’s possible, but why would he do that?’

  ‘We have four dead bodies and one live one. It might be convenient for the live one to have no recollection of what happened.’

  ‘You think Mr Wilson might be implicated in those deaths?’

  ‘He was there.’

  ‘There’s something else, though, isn’t there?’

  ‘There are anomalies, but I can’t discuss them with you.’

  ‘It would be handy to know if you think we have a dangerous killer on this ward, Inspector.’

  Clara almost called him ‘Titus’, but decided to stick with formality.

  ‘My instinct tells me that Mr Wilson is a peripheral victim, but there is some evidence to suggest otherwise, and given the nature of these crimes I have to err on the side of safety. I’m going to arrest him, and I need to know when it’s medically safe to place him on remand.’

  ‘I read about those murders. The papers really enjoyed themselves. I can’t believe Mr Wilson attacked a woman with an axe.’

  ‘When can I arrest him, Doctor?’


  Clara stood up and tried to disguise the dismay in her voice.

  ‘Mr Wilson was due to go home tomorrow. He should be here longer, but we need the bed, and he’s considered to be stable now. So I suppose you can arrest him now. How comfortable are the cells in the Magistrate’s Court?’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to spend the night in one.’

  ‘I’ll organise Mr Wilson’s clothes and belongings. I don’t want to be here when you do this, Inspector.’

  Titus got to his feet. He put his hand on Clara’s arm, a gesture that took her by surprise.

  ‘Doctor. Clara, I don’t want to do this either. Can I be frank with you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘We are so short-staffed and this case is so strange that I don’t believe we’re equipped to deal with it efficiently. My department has been so stripped of good detectives and so disrupted by recent events that I know we need help. Outside help. If I said that out loud at Russell Street, Commissioner Cottrell would demand my resignation. I’m exhausted, Clara.’

  ‘I can recommend a first-class investigator. She’s discreet and can work invisibly.’

  Titus smiled wanly.

  ‘Could you let Helen Lord know that I’ll call at the house tonight at 7.30? I don’t want any telephone trail that might indicate that I set up the meeting.’

  ‘I’ll telephone her and tell her to expect you.’

  Before leaving the small office to give Zac Wilson the astonishing news that he was being arrested on suspicion of murder, Titus said, ‘And, Clara, Mr Wilson’s life might depend on Helen Lord’s skills. I can’t tell you how tangled the threads of this case are.’

  Clara walked ahead of Titus and out of the ward. A policeman passed her. She turned to see him greet Inspector Lambert where he stood at the foot of Zac Wilson’s bed.

  IN THE WEEKS since Peter Lillee’s death, his sister, Ros Lord, had made no changes in the huge house she’d inherited. Lillee’s portrait still hung in the dining room. The pictures he’d carefully chosen, some of which Ros knew to be valuable, remained hanging throughout the house, and his bedroom and its contents hadn’t been touched. None of this was due to squeamishness, reverence, or denial. There was simply no pressing reason to remove the evidence of Peter’s life. Despite four people living in the house, there was no need to free up space. The house could easily accommodate four more without Peter’s room being called into service.