The Port Fairy Murders

by Robert Gott

  Selwyn had been with Aggie for only a few days when she’d decided that he couldn’t live with her in the house. He never willingly bathed himself, as he seemed terrified of water. He stank, and Aggie was certain that the smell was getting into the curtains and the carpet — even into her own bedding. She’d never allowed him into her bedroom, but she could smell him on her sheets. He was therefore banished to the shed. She wasn’t cruel to him. She fed him healthy food, withholding it from him only occasionally when she used it as a reward for him allowing her to hose him down. She did this when she believed the smell was creeping from the shed, across the backyard like a viscous ooze, into the house.

  When she’d done this for the first time, Selwyn had been with her for perhaps five weeks. She’d explained what she was going to do, that the water would be cold, but that she wouldn’t send it at him in a rush. Selwyn whimpered, but understood that Aggie was someone he had to obey — and he was hungry. Aggie told him to take off his clothes. He thought she’d meant all his clothes. She’d thought that modesty was a virtue separate from mental acuity. Selwyn stood before her, naked, not knowing that he should cup his genitals against his sister’s sight. He hadn’t yet grown podgy, and his pale body quivered in frightened expectation of the hose. Aggie was transfixed. She stared at him, with shame, horror, embarrassment, and something worse, far worse — excitement — jostling for position. She’d never in her life seen a naked adult male, and Selwyn stood there, his arms by his side. As her eyes darted over him, he was a confusion of muscle, hair, and penis. She glanced at it, and quickly looked at his face. She turned on the hose, not fully, so that the water flowed gently, and approached him. She let water fall over his shoulders, and he flinched.

  ‘Hold up your arms, Selwyn.’

  He did as he was told, and, with her thumb over the end of the hose, she directed a sharp spray into each armpit. She showed him that she wanted him to rub there with his free hand, to help sluice the filth away. She went behind him and sprayed vigorously between his buttocks. Facing him, she sprayed his chest, and he rubbed there with his hands; averting her eyes, she sprayed his private parts, which, having learned now what to do, he also rubbed. His erection so startled Aggie that she dropped the hose and returned to the house. Two hours later, she came outside to find the hose still running, her precious tank water soaking into the ground where Selwyn had outraged decency.

  Aggie waited two months before hosing Selwyn down again. The shock of that first occasion had by now been dulled by Selwyn’s frequent bouts of onanism, which he at least confined to the premises. There were times when Aggie watched him, and her disgust mutated, to her guilty dismay, into something that felt disturbingly like desire. Who would know, she allowed herself to think one morning, who would ever know if … This was as far as that thought went before a rush of nausea sent her to the bathroom. The thought crept back, and each time it did, the punishing nausea diminished until it wasn’t there at all. Eventually, in an astonishing feat of calculated moral and emotional sequestration, Aggie Todd encouraged her brother into her bed — or rather, his bed. She couldn’t bear the idea of him touching her sheets. This happened only twice, and each time their fumbling, mutual uncertainty made the experience clumsy and dull. It was too elaborate and confusing for Selwyn, and when Aggie, fully clothed, straddled him and forced him into her, she was barely able to tolerate the smell that came off him. Afterwards, she explained the incident away as having been the consequence of a vague fear she harboured that a mean-spirited mortician might snigger at his discovery that she was, post-mortem, virgo intacta, and that he might stand back from her elderly, shrunken corpse and say to himself, or to an assistant, ‘Well, after all, who’d want that?’ As time passed, Selwyn grew fat, and Aggie mostly managed to expunge the incidents from her memory.

  No one in Port Fairy would have called Aggie Todd cheerful, but neither would they have called her unpleasant. Dour perhaps, and a little snobbish. She took great pride in owning a highly polished set of silver apostle spoons. People knew about her apostle spoons — real silver, not plate — because they glittered in the saucers under teacups at the occasional morning tea that Aggie organised for the ladies of St Patrick’s. The women who came to these teas did so with some trepidation, knowing, as they did, who lived at the bottom of Aggie’s garden. Selwyn, however, never made an appearance, and he was only ever seen at his station in Sackville Street.

  THE TODD FAMILY had lived for several generations in Port Fairy, and although Selwyn did little for their reputation, it was generally held that old families inevitably threw up a wrong’un at some stage. Father Brennan, a man Aggie had little time for, ludicrously suggested to her once that Selwyn was God’s gift to the family.

  ‘God loves his Selwyns,’ he’d said. ‘They are as innocent as children.’

  You wouldn’t think that, she’d thought, if you had to hose him down.

  Aggie’s brother Andrew had married ‘out’. Not only was Phillipa a Melbourne girl, she was a Protestant, and when the collective intake of breath in Port Fairy was exhaled, it blew the couple to Melbourne, where standards were lower. Visits after the death of the elder Todds were infrequent, and ceased altogether when travel restrictions were introduced after the outbreak of war. This was hard on Phillipa, because both her children, Matthew and Rose, who’d grown up with the sense, instilled by their father, that the Port Fairy district was a sort of Todd demesne, had chosen to live there. Rose had married a stolid, plain, and incompatibly short dairy farmer. That was Aggie’s assessment of John Abbot, at any rate. On the few occasions she’d met him, the impression he’d left had faded quickly. He was stocky, probably reliable, and definitely boring. She didn’t have a much higher opinion of her niece. She was pretty, but insufficiently interested in her appearance to do herself justice. Her voice was irremediably awful, beyond surgical help because it wasn’t just a question of adenoids. Timbre, tone, and pitch were all off. For Aggie, a conversation with her niece was aural agony.

  Her feelings about her nephew, Matthew, were, if not extreme, at least extravagant. She adored him. He was beautiful — others less smitten admitted to his being good-looking, nothing more — and his decision to live within minutes of her had raised her flagging spirits. The adult Selwyn had been a shock to Matthew at first, understandably. His childhood memories of him were vague and insubstantial. When Matthew had next met him, Selwyn had been very substantial indeed. Aggie could tell at this first meeting that Matthew had been repelled by Selwyn. Well, how could someone who looked like Matthew not be repulsed by someone who looked like Selwyn, and the hideous fact of their blood relationship must have been hard to stomach. Nevertheless, as Selwyn became more intractable about being hosed down, Matthew pitched in and helped manage him.

  When he’d first seen Selwyn — pale, blubbering, and shivering in expectation of the hose — Matthew had expressed disgust, and then laughed. He’d poked at his uncle with a broom handle, and chortled at how far it sank into the exposed belly. Selwyn had chortled, too, and Aggie had allowed a giggle to escape. There were no more giggles after this. As Matthew became comfortable in his aunt’s house, and as he came to understand that she’d formed an attachment to him, his intolerance of and disgust with Selwyn were given free expression. The hosing sessions became brutal exercises in efficiency. When Selwyn was called to the yard, any hesitation was met with a vicious slap from Matthew, and when he tired of stinging his own hand, he used the broom handle and whacked Selwyn about the shoulders. Aggie had been horrified the first time she’d seen Matthew slap Selwyn’s face, but he’d explained to her that someone as retarded as Selwyn felt pain like a dog or a cow felt it. It was an effective corrective, but it had to be repeated because the memory of it faded quickly. It was the only way to discipline dumb animals. It was the way he disciplined his dog, and he liked the sensation of raising his hand and watching the animal cower in expectation of a blow. He liked, too, the way the do
g came to him, its head lowered, grateful that he’d stayed his hand. It was astonishing how like the border collie Selwyn was. Aggie could see it, too, as Matthew demonstrated by showing Selwyn the broomstick. He smiled triumphantly as his uncle flinched and widened his eyes in fear.

  ‘Now, see,’ Matthew said as he put the broomstick behind his back and patted Selwyn’s naked shoulder. Selwyn laughed, and relaxed.

  ‘See.’

  Aggie saw. She saw as Matthew went behind her brother and swung the broom handle in a wide arc so that it hit Selwyn’s buttocks with a sharp ‘thwack!’ He yowled.

  ‘Turn the hose on him, Aunty. That’ll shut him up.’

  Aggie turned the hose on Selwyn, and, without her really noticing it, her pity ebbed away.

  –3–

  THE DRIVE TO Warrnambool took six-and-a-half hours. Helen Lord drove. She recognised this as a gesture of Inspector Lambert’s confidence in her. Indeed, when they’d approached the car at Russell Street, David Reilly had automatically put his hand on the driver’s side-door handle.

  ‘You’ve got reading to do,’ Lambert said. ‘Constable Lord will drive. I’ll sit in the back. She can answer any questions you might have about George Starling and his cronies.’

  He handed Reilly a folder.

  ‘I’ve read this, sir.’

  ‘Read it again, and ask questions. You need to have a clear understanding of the person we’re dealing with.’

  Reilly nodded, and wondered how he’d disguise the motion sickness that plagued him whenever he tried to read in a moving vehicle. It was hot, so at least the windows would be down.

  In the back seat, Inspector Lambert read through the contents of his own folder. It contained the same notes and photographs he’d given Sergeant Reilly. He pored over these notes, trying to find the point in the initial investigation where he ought to have identified its true nature. He’d sat up in bed with Maude, passing her sheaf after sheaf, but neither of them could say, ‘There! That’s what we missed.’ Maude tried to reassure him that her brother’s injuries were unforeseeable, at least by Titus, but she wasn’t willing to extend this dispensation to Joe Sable. She knew, after years of sharing the details with him, that Titus’s investigations rarely progressed with the logical certainty of a puzzle. The solving of cases depended as much on the carelessness and stupidity of the perpetrators as on the deductive powers of the detectives. There were no master criminals. There were chancers, drunks, mean-spirited losers, and psychopaths, and the thing that bound them all, as far as Maude could determine, was a fatal flaw in their intelligence. However well they presented, however smart they appeared to be, when you got right down to it, they were just plain dumb. The worst of them were dumb and dangerous. Titus didn’t entirely agree with her, and frequently cautioned her against confusing moral bankruptcy with intelligence. In return, she cautioned him against confusing intelligence with elusiveness. Titus often ran the conversations he’d had with his wife through his head. He could be unguarded with her in a way that would be unthinkable with a colleague, and he couldn’t imagine doing his job effectively without her.

  The car made it to Camperdown before David Reilly lost his battle with motion sickness. He asked Helen to pull over, almost fell out of the car in his haste, and emptied the contents of his stomach beneath the beautiful, bronze statue of Victory in the avenue of elms. Ashen, sweating, and ashamed, he returned to the car. Helen, who moved around to the passenger side, said, ‘You should have said you got car sick.’

  ‘I don’t if I drive.’

  Helen narrowed her eyes slightly. Reilly noticed.

  ‘I didn’t mention it because it makes me look like a spoiled little boy who chucks a turn if he doesn’t get his own way.’

  Inspector Lambert leaned out of the window.

  ‘Are you well enough to drive?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then perhaps that’s what you should do. I’d like to get to Warrnambool before next week.’

  Helen and David looked at each other across the roof of the car, and for the briefest of moments they were allied in feeling included in the sweep of Lambert’s irritation. David Reilly managed a small smile, and Helen Lord managed to return it.

  CONSTABLE MANTON WASN’T at his desk when the trio arrived at the Warrnambool police station, so the constable on duty was confused initially when Inspector Lambert identified himself and his colleagues as being from Homicide in Melbourne.

  ‘Never heard of it,’ he said, but tidied his response when he was made aware of the rank of the thin, balding man before him. The presence of the woman, who’d inexplicably been introduced as ‘Constable Helen Lord’ — he thought he’d misheard — further confused him. They were rescued from the tedium of more explanations by the emergence of a trim, well-dressed man with short, grey hair. Everything about him was clipped, which lent the moustache he wore drama it hardly needed. It was lush, black, and carefully topiaried into a shape familiar from daguerreotypes, but rarely seen in the flesh. Detective Inspector Greg Halloran looked as if he’d stepped out of the nineteenth century into 1944.

  ‘Titus,’ he said, with shocking familiarity.

  ‘Greg,’ Titus said, with an equally shocking indifference to protocol.

  ‘One Homicide man might be considered alarming, but three! Pardon me — two and a lady. I know we’re a bit out of the way down here, but I think even we would have noticed a mass murder.’

  ‘Detective Inspector Halloran was the outstanding talent in our intake at Detective Training School,’ Titus said. ‘To everyone’s dismay, he chose to exercise those talents in Warrnambool.’

  ‘Where,’ Halloran said, ‘they have become comfortably flabby through disuse. I presume that’s where your homily was headed, Titus?’

  ‘I don’t believe that for a minute.’

  ‘Come on through.’

  Halloran’s office was small, and the order that had been imposed on it was strict. A small cobweb, high in one corner, struck Helen as an undiscovered region of anarchy that was unlikely to flourish. Greg Halloran noticed her eye loiter on the ceiling, and he followed her line of sight to the fluttering web. Its hours were numbered.

  The easy camaraderie between Titus and Greg was curious to Helen. She’d never seen him relax so quickly and so easily in the company of any of the detectives at Russell Street. She’d never thought of him as having friends, or people who were accommodated by him as being equals — apart from his wife, Maude. Detective Inspector Halloran was something of a revelation. She was struck by his acceptance of her presence as uncontroversial and unremarkable. She’d been steeling herself for a sort of blokey repartee that she was expected to hear with good grace, and perhaps compound with a bit of self-deprecation. Halloran seemed to have no interest in playing that game.

  ‘We can’t find George Starling,’ he said, revealing that he was acquainted with the case, ‘and all the indications are that John Starling died of a heart attack, which is disappointing.’

  Helen raised her eyebrows.

  ‘If George Starling had murdered his own father, he’d find it very difficult to hide in this community.’

  ‘You mean his Hitlerite sympathies might not make him a pariah on their own?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Warrnambool is like everywhere else, Constable. There are good people, and there are bad people, and the full sliding scale in between. Hitlerites? I imagine there are the odd one or two, or three or four, but it would be a brave or stupid man who called himself that out loud these days. Back in the Thirties we were aware of a small group that met out at John Starling’s house. He fell out with them, and the group broke up.’

  He handed each of his visitors a sheet of paper.

  ‘These are the names and addresses of the members who are still around Warrnambool. As you can see, there are only three. None of them has a crimi
nal record, which doesn’t mean they’re nice people. I can personally attest to the fact that the last name on the list is a deeply unpleasant man. His name is Stanley Halloran, and he’s my brother.’

  Helen, in a way that was becoming automatic with her, checked for Titus’s reaction. A slight widening of the eyes suggested that this was news to him; she surmised that the familiarity and warmth between him and Halloran had been established long ago, but that they were not in regular contact.

  ‘I’ve asked around the station, and no one can really remember George Starling. He didn’t attract any attention growing up. He left school at 14, and I don’t think he hung around here or Mepunga much after that.’

  ‘Was there a Mrs Starling?’ David Reilly asked. It struck Helen with some force that Reilly had asked a question she hadn’t thought to ask.

  ‘Mrs Starling died when George was an infant. There was an accident with a tractor. If you talk to some of John Starling’s detractors — and if you threw a dart at random in Leibig Street, you’d hit one of those — you’d hear that Mrs Starling was often seen in town with a black eye or a swollen lip. It’s generally assumed that John Starling went too far one night and then used a tractor to obscure her injuries. There was never any proof. Death by misadventure was the official version.’

  ‘George Starling made his phone call to my sergeant from Warrnambool,’ Titus said, ‘so we know he’s in the area. Someone must have seen him.’

  ‘I imagine a few people have seen him, Titus, but I doubt anyone would recognise him. You told me yourself that the only photograph you have of him was taken when he was, what, 16, and that he was fat? If anyone does remember him, that’s what they’d remember — that he was fat. A fat kid looks very different from a lean adult.’

  Titus reached into his bag and withdrew a sheaf of papers.

  ‘These are the artist’s impression of George Starling. Sergeant Sable gave the description, and he’s happy with the likeness.’