The Orchard Murders

by Robert Gott

  ‘Come!’

  Behind the door was what once had been a large room, but now consisted of three mean, partitioned offices. Like Tom’s own office, the partitioning had paid no attention to the windows in the room. There was a narrow reception area at the front, so narrow that when the door was opened fully it almost touched the partition that ran across the width of the room. There were three doors in this temporary wall, one of which was open. The man seated behind the desk in that room didn’t look up when Tom entered. He knew from his own experience that Tom Chafer didn’t make a good first impression, and that subsequent impressions didn’t make any improvements. They shared a first name, and Tom decided to use it.

  ‘Tom Chafer.’

  Chafer looked up, and the disdain on his face suggested that he disapproved of the intimacy. He was younger than Tom Mackenzie, but unlike his fellow Intelligence officers, Newman and Deighton, he didn’t pay Mackenzie the courtesy of calling him ‘Sir’.

  ‘Sit down, Mackenzie.’

  Tom, who’d never liked being called ‘Sir’, nevertheless felt the slight, and it put him on edge. Chafer hadn’t changed much since their last meeting a few months prior to this one. His hair was cut very short, and was slightly darker than his thin, blond moustache, which he no doubt grew to prove to an observer that he was an adult. He was thin, so thin that he looked unhealthy, and everything he wore looked too big for his frame. Chafer didn’t bother to welcome Tom back to Victoria Barracks, or to express any gratitude that he had volunteered for this intelligence work. On the contrary, his first objective was to put Tom firmly in his place.

  ‘Your last bit of work for us ended exactly as I thought it would end — badly. You were inexperienced and, in my view, foolish. Others disagree, and admire your bravery. The fact that you survived is down to luck, not bravery.’

  ‘I have never claimed that I was brave, but I wonder how someone as physically frail as you would have fared in the same circumstances.’

  Tom Chafer’s prominent ears flared red.

  ‘I would never have been stupid enough to find myself in those circumstances.’

  Tom Mackenzie’s fists clenched, and the involuntary action forced resistance in the still-braced fingers of his damaged left hand. The sharp bolt of pain made him impatient to be away from Tom Chafer’s presence.

  ‘If all you plan to do is trade insults, Chafer, I’d rather be briefed by your partner, Dick Goad. He seemed like a reasonable man.’

  ‘Goad is not my partner, and he never has been. We worked together briefly. He’s been moved into the Fleet Radio Unit, not that it’s any of your business.’

  ‘Well, maybe you shouldn’t have told me. That sounds like carelessness. Loose lips.’

  Chafer pushed a folder towards Tom.

  ‘The only reason you’re here, Mackenzie, is that you’re the senior officer in your section and you’ve already been given a security clearance, so I’m stuck with you. Inside that folder is what we know about Winslow Fazackerly. The folder doesn’t leave this office. Take it into the room next door and read it. Don’t take notes. Bring it back when you’re finished.’

  Chafer indicated that there was nothing more to be said by pushing a bony wrist from his sleeve and ostentatiously beginning to write something on a pad. Tom picked up the folder and took it into the room on the other side of the flimsy partition. Chafer had told him nothing, and Tom wondered what on Earth a man like that — he couldn’t have reached 30 yet — was doing in such an important position. Perhaps he had hidden talents. Perhaps he had a genius for cryptography, although if that was the case, surely he’d be in Frumel, and not Goad. Working with him was going to be a nightmare, and yet Tom realised that this was where he wanted to be, with only a thin wall between him and one of the most immediately detestable people he’d ever met.

  He opened the dossier on Winslow Fazackerly. There were several photographs, only one of which showed Fazackerly’s face clearly. His hair was black and well cut. He was clean-shaven, and looked to be about 30. Tom checked his date of birth and discovered that he was in fact 35. Perhaps the photograph flattered him. All of the pictures showed Fazackerly from a distance, meeting various individuals. On the back of each of the photographs was the date and the words, ‘Unidentified Asian. Possibly Japanese.’ Tom peered at the images, but they were too blurry to establish Fazackerly’s ethnicity, let alone his companions’.

  His background was sketched in with no more detail than Newman and Deighton had provided. He was well connected and well educated. He was married to a Japanese national named Etsuko Endo. In his twenties, Fazackerly had travelled extensively in Japan, and was known then to his friends as an unapologetic Japanophile. He had met his wife-to-be in the Hiroshima prefecture, and had married her against her family’s wishes when he was just 22 years old. She was 17. They returned to Australia in 1933 without any challenge being launched under the Immigration Restriction Act. The dossier had nothing to say about their marriage. There was a note to the effect that Etsuko may have formed connections with the handful of Japanese then living in Melbourne. All of these people were currently interned either at Camp No. 4 at Tatura, in Victoria, or Camp No. 14 at Loveday, in South Australia. It was also noted that many of these internees were elderly and poor, their poverty exacerbated by being ineligible, as aliens, for the old-age pension. This was underlined as if the person who’d prepared the dossier thought it was significant. Tom couldn’t see how.

  In 1938, Etsuko returned to Japan alone. There was no explanation as to why. She didn’t make any visits to her husband in Melbourne between 1938 and 1942 when Japan unequivocally showed its expansionist hand by bombing Pearl Harbor in 1941 and Darwin in 1942. After that, a return was impossible, and even if it had been possible, Etsuko would have been interned at Tatura.

  On a small square of paper, probably inserted recently into the dossier, was the name Yokito Torajiro, and beside it the words, ‘Male, Loveday Camp 42. Corresponding with Fazackerly?’

  These were just shreds of information. It wasn’t stated, but Tom assumed that Fazackerly spoke Japanese, which would have made him a useful Intelligence man, except Intelligence didn’t trust him. Putting him in Requisitions was a way of keeping him close, but as Tom re-read the dossier and committed details to memory, he began to suspect that Fazackerly wasn’t the only one being tested. He closed the folder and returned to Chafer’s office.

  ‘There’s not much here,’ he said.

  ‘Your job is to plug the gaps. Is he one of us, or one of them? Either way, he’ll be useful to us. Just don’t fuck this up. He’s never met you, although he was told yesterday that you’d be returning to work today after an accident. You can decide what sort of accident. Just don’t tell him it was an undercover operation that went pear-shaped.’

  ‘Do you always assume the person you’re talking to is a moron?’

  ‘It’s usually a safe assumption. We need to know about him quickly. I don’t care how you win his confidence. I don’t care if you have to fuck him — just find out if he’s passing information to the Japs, so we can hang him if he is.’

  Chafer pulled his sleeve up his hairless arm to reveal a watch, which needed the thickness of his forearm to remain in place.

  ‘He’s due in at 8.30.’

  Again, Chafer began writing to signal that the meeting was over.

  ON HIS WAY back to his office, Tom passed Benjamin Newman — headed, no doubt, to occupy one of the offices next to Chafer.

  ‘You’ve had your meeting, sir?’

  ‘Yes. Tom Chafer and I have exchanged pleasantries.’

  ‘And how did you find him?’

  ‘He lived down to my expectations, but remember, I have met him before.’

  When Tom entered his own office in Requisitions, or, rather, the half-room that had been assigned him, he discovered that it was much tidier than he’d left it. Not that he
was slovenly, but no one could accuse him of obsessive tidiness. Whoever had occupied the office in his absence had imposed order. As he was familiarising himself with where things now were, Winslow Fazackerly came into the room. He stopped when he saw Tom, and saluted.

  ‘Flight Lieutenant Fazackerly, I presume. We can dispense with the saluting inside the office.’

  ‘I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, sir.’

  Winslow ran his eye over the room.

  ‘I haven’t tampered with your system of doing things. I’ve just tidied up.’

  ‘Please, Winslow, sit down and get me up to speed on the underwear and boots situation.’

  Winslow smiled, and Tom looked for the sinister face of the fifth columnist behind the smile. He couldn’t see it. His first impression of Flight Lieutenant Winslow Fazackerly was that he was urbane, easygoing, and probably excellent company. After a few minutes of conversation, he found it difficult to believe that this man was a traitor, passing information to the monsters who’d perpetrated horrors in Asia.

  JOE DIDN’T HAVE to sell the idea of infiltrating the Church of the First Born to Guy. Guy jumped at it. They decided against using aliases. Allowing these people to see their identification papers, should that need arise, would help underline that they were genuine acolytes. Joe wouldn’t declare that he was Jewish, however. He suspected that the anti-Semitism revealed in the newspaper reports he’d read from 1871 wouldn’t have shifted much. Indeed, it was likely that it had become an entrenched part of the sect’s teaching. Joe’s cover was simply that he was bringing his friend to Prescott, but that he was not himself interested in religion of any kind. Guy’s story was of bitter separation from the Catholic Church, which no longer offered him solace or direction. This would be an easy role for Guy to play, because it was essentially true.

  They had a name, Anthony Prescott, and an address. Guy had read all the material provided by Meredith Wilson, and, like Joe and Helen, he was astonished by people’s gullibility, although less astonished than they had been, because he recalled his own childhood fervour for the rituals and credibility-straining beliefs of the Catholic Church. Faith did strange things to a person’s willingness to look too closely at what was being offered up as truth.

  Prescott’s property, a sizeable orchard in Nunawading, proved difficult to find. The road into it was unmarked, and was more track than road. Peter Lillee’s car was an incongruous presence where Joe parked it, at a point where the track met a closed farm gate. They decided to leave the car there, climb over the gate, and walk towards what they could see was a substantial house. Joe had been expecting a modest, perhaps run-down house. This place had been embellished by money. Its core was a simple dwelling, but it had been extended until it now sprawled on either side of an impressive front door. An elegant veranda ran the length of the house, and down two sides. The garden and lawns were maintained at a high pitch of neatness.

  ‘Wow,’ Guy said. ‘Someone works very hard to keep this place looking like this.’

  Two women came into view on the veranda. Both of them were dressed identically in a simple, grey linen tunic, gathered at the waist and falling to the ground. Guy and Joe were some distance from the house, but their presence seemed to alarm the women. They each put down the buckets they’d been carrying and hurried through the front door into the house.

  ‘We’ve been spotted,’ said Joe. ‘I think we’ve come to the right place. Those tunics were described in one of those articles.’

  ‘If the outside of this place is anything to go by, I’d say this Prescott bloke runs a tight ship.’

  ‘It’s a lot flasher than Fisher’s house. If I was the Messiah, I’d rather live here.’

  They continued walking towards the house. As Joe placed his foot on the lowest of the front steps that led up to the veranda, the front door opened, and a man wearing a tunic of a softer cloth, the hem of which fell only to his knees, emerged.

  ‘Why are you trespassing on my land? You have not been invited here.’

  Joe’s immediate reaction was that this was the rich voice of an actor. It was measured and weighty, as if every utterance was worthy of being heard in the back row of the balcony.

  ‘You are the man I saw in my dream,’ Guy said. ‘I have come to inquire after your gospel.’

  The man at the top of the steps hesitated. The remark had taken him off-guard. There was a slight quiver in his eyes, which made his gaze disconcerting. He looked from Guy to Joe.

  ‘I had no such dream,’ Joe said simply.

  The frankness of this response seemed to impress this man, and he smiled. There was nothing sinister in the smile. It softened his features, and Joe saw in him a dangerous charisma. This had to be Anthony Prescott. If it wasn’t, Guy had made a bad miscalculation.

  ‘And how did you find me?’

  ‘Some people might call it luck. I call it destiny.’

  Joe had no idea where Guy was going with this. He had no doubt that Prescott was a fraud, making money from the credulousness of others. Would he see through Guy, or accept him as one of the desperate people eager to believe?

  ‘I didn’t understand the dream,’ Guy said, ‘so I prayed and I read my Bible, and I prayed, and I found you.’

  Joe’s heart was in his mouth. Surely Prescott would press Guy to fill the gaps in this absurd story. He didn’t. He said, ‘You are welcome,’ and signalled with a sweep of his arm that they should follow him into the house.

  The room Prescott took them to was off the kitchen. It was large, and had probably functioned once as the estate office or the gunroom. It was now a domestic chapel. There was no altar, but there was a lectern, with 15 chairs lined up before it. To one side was a desk. Prescott sat behind it, and Joe and Guy took two chairs and sat in front of him.

  ‘My name is Guy Kirkham, and this is my friend, Joseph Sable.’

  Prescott nodded. It was now clear that he wasn’t going to introduce himself as Anthony Prescott, although that was undoubtedly who he was.

  ‘I’ve come here to be healed,’ Guy said.

  ‘Your friend here, Mr Sable, thinks you’re foolish. He is not a person of faith.’

  Guy feigned astonishment.

  ‘How did you know that?’

  Joe picked it as a lucky guess, although he acknowledged to himself that Prescott was a skilled observer. He’d noticed the difference in Guy’s and his demeanour, and had accidentally hit upon half the truth, the whole truth being that neither of them was a man of faith. Prescott smiled, and this time his smile had a faint air of self-satisfaction about it, as though he was confident that his seduction of Guy had begun.

  ‘You have a nervous disorder,’ Prescott said, ‘and it is this that you want healed.’

  Joe would have been properly impressed if Prescott had diagnosed narcolepsy, but nevertheless this was an adept guess. Guy must have been exhibiting small tells that he, Joe, had become so used to that he no longer noticed them. Prescott was a man they needed to be wary of.

  ‘Are you working, Guy? May I call you Guy?’

  ‘Of course. No, I’m not working. My condition makes that impossible.’

  ‘How do you support yourself?’

  Joe glanced at Guy, curious to know how he’d reply.

  ‘I have a private income,’ Guy said. ‘I was lucky in my choice of parents.’

  Was that the slightest of smirks? Or was Joe imposing that on Prescott’s face?

  ‘And what about you, Joe? You’re not an enlisted man?’

  ‘I have a heart condition.’

  ‘Ah. Two men in search of a miracle.’

  ‘I’m not here for a cure. Guy asked me to drive him here.’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘Kew.’

  There was no advantage to lying about the bare details of their lives. Lying was a recipe for being caught out. It was
easy to forget fictionalised snippets, easy to get them wrong.

  There was a knock on the door to the chapel, and without waiting to be acknowledged, a man in his late sixties entered. His hair was long and grey, his beard unkempt, and he smelled of sweat. He was wearing a rough tunic. The cloth under his armpits was wet with perspiration, and mixed with his body odour was the scent of earth and mud. He said nothing, but passed Prescott a piece of paper, and left. Prescott read the note.

  ‘Is that your car parked outside the gate, Joe?’

  ‘It is.’

  Prescott gave an appreciative nod.

  ‘Did you get lucky in your choice of parents, too?’

  ‘My parents are dead. I don’t call that lucky.’

  ‘We never really die, Joe. I could prove that to you.’

  Joe affected a small hesitation, as if just for a moment he was taken with the idea.

  ‘Joe doesn’t believe in miracles,’ Guy said.

  ‘And yet here you both are. That’s a small miracle in itself.’

  ‘Amen,’ Guy said. His chin quivered, and his eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Why don’t you go back to Kew, get some things together, and come back tomorrow. I’ll organise a room here for you. And Joe, you’re welcome to stay with your friend, just to make sure he’s safe and that being here is a retreat, a sanctuary. Just for a few days.’