The Port Fairy Murders

by Robert Gott

  ‘Mrs Lambert, this is Sergeant Joe Sable.’

  There was a devastating pause before Maude asked, ‘How are you, Joe?’

  He wanted to hang up. There was a mechanical quality in Maude’s voice, as if she was going through polite motions.

  ‘I’m doing all right. And Tom?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘May I speak to him?’

  ‘No,’ she said simply. ‘I’ll get Titus.’

  Joe heard the handset hit the wood of the telephone table, and in the background he heard Tom Mackenzie’s voice asking who was on the telephone.

  ‘Nobody,’ Maude said, and Titus’s voice obscured any further exchange between them.

  ‘Sergeant Sable? What’s happened?’

  Joe told him, and Titus instructed him to stay where he was until he could find out from the telephone exchange where the trunk call had originated. He hung up, and fifteen minutes later he called Joe back to tell him that the call had been made in Warrnambool.

  ‘Starling’s father lives there, or near there, doesn’t he, sir?’

  ‘An officer from Warrnambool is on his way to see Starling Senior. Did his son call himself Fred?’

  ‘No,’ Joe lied. ‘He called himself George Starling.’

  There was silence at Lambert’s end, and Joe knew that his inspector suspected the lie. He didn’t press Joe on the point and said quietly, ‘I see.’

  MEPUNGA MIGHT ONCE have been substantial enough to warrant its designation on a map. By January 1944 it had been subsumed into the lush landscape until all that remained were a few dispersed structures — a schoolhouse, a church, a rarely used Mechanics Institute — and a handful of struggling dairy farms. No one would have dignified John Starling’s property with the term ‘farm’. There was a house that needed a new roof; a couple of out-buildings, one of which had lost a wall; and dry, sour paddocks, trampled from pasture into dusty aridity by two horses and a donkey. When Constable Manton began walking, in the gathering dusk, from his car to the house, the horses moved with ungainly haste from the far side of their paddock towards him. Constable Manton had grown up on a farm, and he knew that the horses must be hungry. He was immediately on edge. John Starling wasn’t well liked in nearby Warrnambool, but nobody had ever suggested that he neglected his animals. On the contrary, Starling was thought to prefer them to humans. Manton knocked on the front door and waited. Nothing. He knocked again, more robustly, and a peel of paint fell away from the frame.

  ‘Mr Starling?’ The bark of Manton’s voice caused two swallows to abandon the perch they’d taken for the night under the eaves. The small rush of their wings startled him. He peered through the grimy, curtained windows and saw nothing. No lights were showing. He tried the door, and it opened. He pushed it, and the house exhaled a warm, stale breath. Putting his head around the door, Manton sniffed the air and detected no telltale odour of putrefaction. He was relieved. At least Starling wasn’t dead somewhere in the house. He called his name again, and when there was no reply he decided against entering, convincing himself that a quick search of the outside ought to be done first.

  The yard at the back of Starling’s house was a mess of small, broken machinery, tins, and rusting tools. A woodpile, stacked carelessly, threatened to topple over, and a splitter leaned against it. Manton couldn’t understand people who treated expensive tools with cavalier indifference. The yard was sequestered from the paddock beyond it by a tatty fence. Manton passed through the single-hinged gate and stopped to locate a peculiar noise. ‘The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves,’ he thought, and was pleased to recall that verse from a poem he’d been forced to memorise at school. He couldn’t remember who wrote it. Keats? Yes, Keats. The sound of buzzing insects wasn’t insistent or remarkable — the fading light had calmed their frenzied work — but it was concentrated in one place, near a large, golden cypress. Manton crossed to it, and saw the legs first.

  ‘Mr Starling?’

  This was a pointless question; he knew that. He’d caught a whiff of death on the wind. Not wishing to get too close to the body, Manton walked in a wide circle around the dark cypress. John Starling sat propped against the trunk, his head having lolled forward and his arms folded almost neatly in his lap. Manton put a handkerchief to his nose and approached. Earlier in the day, a dense, noisy aggregation of flies would have been busy feeding and breeding. A cursory glance at maggots dropping from the ears, eyes, and lips told Manton that Starling had been dead for several days at least. A closer examination could be left to the coroner. Manton checked the immediate surroundings for forensic evidence, and when he’d satisfied himself that there was nothing that needed collecting or securing, he returned to the vehicle and headed back to Warrnambool.

  HELEN LORD NEVER spoke to her mother about her work in Homicide. Having been the wife of a policeman, Ros Lord had seen the toll the work had taken on her late husband. She’d never pressed him for information, but had always waited patiently for him to come to her when he’d needed to. So it was with her daughter. She didn’t pry, or harry. She waited. For her part, Helen was determined to spare her mother both the disappointments and the satisfactions of her job. She thought, wrongly, that discussion of police work would serve only to poke at the wound left by her father’s death. The resulting silence between them, except on trivial matters, although borne of mutual respect, was beginning to compromise the easy intimacy between them. There was something uncomfortable in the silence, something slightly poisonous, something that might overwhelm them. Helen was more conscious of this than her mother, who was used to waiting for an expression of trust, and was used to being rewarded.

  Helen couldn’t go to her uncle, Peter Lillee, in whose large house in Kew they lived. He’d taken them in after the death of Helen’s father in Broome. There’d never been any sense of charity about this. He lived alone, was wealthy, and loved his sister, Ros. It had been no hardship for him to offer her a place as his housekeeper, and the fees he’d paid to educate his niece amounted to an insignificant impost on his income. He was kind, but distant, and when Helen had joined the police force she’d noticed a finely nuanced wariness in his dealings with her. She suspected he was homosexual — a preference she knew little about and which, prior to her relationship with her uncle, she would have been liable to address as a deviancy. The horror it excited in her male colleagues, and the cruelty it encouraged in many of them, created in her a prejudice in favour of homosexuals, in spite of her unworldliness. She would have liked to learn from her uncle, but such wasn’t the nature of their relationship. He was a private man, without being secretive. Helen felt strongly that he had a rich, interesting life away from his home, about which he was punctiliously discreet. The household in Kew was suffocating in discretion.

  Ros Lord and Peter Lillee sat listening to the wireless, as they often did after dinner. Helen sat with them, reading, tuning in to the news when an item seemed worth her while. Meat rationing was to be introduced on 15 January, and, in a bit of shameless editorialising, doubtless at the behest of the government, the reader embellished the bald announcement with: ‘Few people are sufficiently austere or angelic to wish meat rationing, or any kind of rationing, to be introduced for the sake of mortifying the flesh in wartime, but most will be fair-minded enough to recognise that a good case has been established for the rationing of meat. It has been shown by expert authorities that the supply is such and the demands are such that the old system of allowing each consumer to buy as much meat as he or she can afford cannot be continued.’

  ‘It’s been as good as rationed anyway for ages,’ said Ros. ‘Finding a decent cut of meat at the butcher’s is a novelty. Most of it goes to the black market, I suppose.’

  ‘You’ve never bought anything under the counter, Ros?’ Peter Lillee raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Your Sunday roast isn’t always in the window, Peter, if that’s what you mean.’
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  ‘There’s a confession for you, Helen. Arrest this woman.’

  ‘I’ve eaten so many Sunday roasts I’d have to arrest myself as an accessory.’

  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.’