The Port Fairy Murders

by Robert Gott

  ‘Is it obvious?’

  ‘Oh yes, it’s obvious.’

  ‘Well, he’s one of those unimaginative, dull-witted coppers. He’d be hopeless interviewing suspects.’

  Conversation flowed easily between them when it was about work. They’d found this at the height of the last investigation.

  ‘When you read the reports of the interviews in Warrnambool,’ Helen said, ‘you’ll see what I mean.’

  ‘What do you mean, so I know what I’m looking for?’

  ‘Reilly was assigned to talk to a woman who was married to a German and who was once an enthusiastic National Socialist — although she’s gone quiet now, of course, like most of them. He briefed us on the interview, and I didn’t believe a word of it.’

  ‘You think he made things up? Surely not.’

  ‘No. I just mean there wasn’t enough there. If he’d managed a proper interview, we’d have a much better sense of who the woman was. I’ve got no idea what she was like and whether or not it would be worth talking to her again.’

  ‘He’s done Detective Training. That should have taught him something.’

  ‘And I haven’t, is what you mean?’

  ‘That’s not what I mean.’

  The conversation stopped. They avoided eye contact. Joe thought he’d probably said the wrong thing, but it was impossible to predict how Helen would react to the most harmless comment. She was touchy about her position in Homicide; he was aware of that. She’d spoken to him about it. Still, why did she always assume the worst when it came to things that he said? He drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair, and broke the silence.

  ‘I actually meant that you’d think he’d be better at his job, given that he’s done the proper training.’

  ‘You do realise you’ve pretty much said exactly the same thing and that it’s still insulting?’

  Joe looked at her.

  ‘He’s done the proper training. You don’t think that reveals anything about the way you see me? You’ve done the training, yes?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Of course. You’ve done Detective Training; every other nong in Homicide has done Detective Training. I, needless to say, haven’t, because women can’t do it. At some point in every day, someone helpfully reminds me that I’m unqualified to work with proper policemen, who’ve had proper training. From where I sit, the training hasn’t done a lot of them much good. You can’t train someone not to be stupid. Stupid is forever.’

  ‘There are plenty of good men in the Homicide squad.’

  Helen, who couldn’t stop the diatribe once it had begun, hated how truculent she sounded. Or rather, she wished she could control it better in front of Joe.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There are some good men in Homicide. Some. Don’t ask me to name them.’

  Another silence descended. This time Helen broke it, and for her this was almost an act of contrition.

  ‘No one seems to know very much about George Starling. He went from fat to thin to invisible.’

  ‘Even when you meet him he’s invisible. He never said very much. There was something malevolent about him, though.’

  ‘He’s a kind of bogey man, isn’t he?’

  ‘No. He’s just a nasty thug who thinks the world would be a better place if people like him were in charge, and if there were no Jews in it.’

  ‘Is he stupid?’

  ‘Let’s hope he’s at least slightly more stupid than we are.’

  ‘Yes. Touché.’

  ‘You have a pretty low opinion of police generally, don’t you?’

  ‘I’ve been around them my whole life. There are good coppers. My father was a good copper, but up in Broome he worked with a couple of truly dreadful men. I’d listen at the door when Mum and Dad were talking late at night. There was one bloke who’d killed a black man, but there was no way he was going to admit it. The man died in the cells, and there was no proper investigation, until Dad started to agitate for one. Then he died, and nothing came of it.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘There was nothing suspicious about it, nothing that anyone could point to, anyway. We were at Cable Beach — have you heard of Cable Beach?’

  Joe shook his head.

  ‘It’s possibly the most beautiful beach in the world. We were there late one afternoon, along with a few other people. Dad went in for a swim, and he got into trouble. He was a strong swimmer, but when they carried him up the beach we could see that there were jellyfish tentacles sticking to him, and there were red welts on his legs and chest. He was dead when they pulled him out of the water. The coroner said that he’d had a bad reaction to the stings, and that he’d had a heart attack. I was about 14, and I didn’t believe the coroner. A part of me still doesn’t believe that dad’s death was an accident. I don’t know how it was managed. I was there, and I didn’t see anyone approach him in the water. He went in, and he just seemed to die.’

  ‘What does your mother think?’

  ‘We don’t talk about it. She’s never got over it. What about you? Why are you a copper?’

  ‘I don’t think I would be if it weren’t for the war. I’d be doing something useless like studying the International Gothic in art history. Manpower would take a dim view of that. I don’t think I could convince them that studying the works of Gentile de Fabriano would contribute to an Allied victory.’

  ‘That’s a painter, I presume.’

  ‘One of the greatest. I’ve never actually seen one of his paintings in the flesh, only in books.’

  ‘So policing isn’t your great passion?’

  ‘It is now, I think. I’ve got lots to learn, and I know that Inspector Lambert sees me as only mildly competent.’

  ‘I hope you’re not fishing for compliments.’

  ‘Just a few weeks ago you made it crystal clear that you don’t think much of my skills, and sitting here, in another man’s house and in another man’s clothes, I can’t argue with that. My heart means that I can’t be relied on. I do know that, Helen.’

  Helen stood up abruptly and walked to the window. She wanted to tell Joe that none of that mattered, and she was afraid that she’d blurt it out. That mustn’t happen.

  ‘You know, Joe, I don’t think your heart makes you a poor policeman.’

  ‘You think it’s everything else.’

  She laughed and returned to her seat.

  ‘Are your parents alive?’ She’d never asked him a personal question before. All their conversations had been about investigations. It seemed significant to her that she felt able to ask him such a question. To Joe, it was a natural and uncontroversial query.

  ‘They’re both dead.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It will sound cold, but I wasn’t close to them — or, rather, they weren’t close to me, and they certainly weren’t close to each other. At some point in their marriage they stopped talking to each other. That is almost literally true. Hard to believe, I suppose.’

  ‘But they spoke to you.’

  ‘Less and less. I never doubted that they loved me, but at some point, when I was 12 or 13, I had to remember that, rather than experience it. It just became the way we lived.’

  Helen found the ease with he spoke of his family compelling. She was unused to this sort of intimacy, and she was both confounded and excited by it.

  ‘Were your parents born here?’

  ‘No. Their names were David and Judith, by the way. We were Jewish, but not observant.’

  ‘Observant?’

  ‘We didn’t go to synagogue or live by any of the strictures about food and that sort of thing. They emigrated from England, and Dad’s big boast was that he was English first and Jewish a very poor second. They were actually embarrassed by the Jews in Carlton, th
e refugee Jews from the shtetls in Europe. They thought they were peasants, and they raised me to think the same. Noble blood flowed through Sable veins, not shtetl blood. Jews spoke Yiddish and looked foreign. My parents wanted nothing to do with them. I didn’t grow up feeling Jewish at all.’

  ‘I didn’t grow up feeling Presbyterian. That’s apparently what we are.’

  ‘Hitler isn’t killing Presbyterians.’

  The sudden fierceness in Joe’s voice took them both by surprise.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and Helen noticed that his hands were shaking. He put them in his trouser pockets. Helen didn’t know what to say. Her life suddenly seemed uncomplicated, and her concerns trivial. Joe Sable was a mess of contradictions and wounds of all stripes, and when Helen saw his shaking hands she knew without a shadow of a doubt that she loved him. The knowledge calmed her. She would wait now. The house in Kew was, after all, a house where people waited patiently.

  IT WAS WELL after 11.00 pm when Titus made it to Tom Mackenzie’s house in South Melbourne. The place looked very different from when he’d seen it earlier in the day.

  ‘It was all surface clutter,’ Maude said. ‘Tom and I tidied it away quite quickly.’ She lowered her voice. ‘It was amazing, Titus. As soon as we started, something seemed to happen to Tom. Maybe it was just that he was touching stuff that was his, but there were long periods during the day when he was like his old self. He got tired, but then he sat and he talked to me while I worked. He actually talked to me. He remembered last night, and he remembered Joe being there.’

  ‘And Starling?’

  ‘He wasn’t sure. He said he finds it hard to separate his nightmares from real experience. But, Titus, he was able to talk about it in those terms, and with that level of clarity.’

  ‘That’s wonderful.’

  ‘If we can string days like today together, I think he’ll recover much faster than the doctors expect.’

  Bed was the place where Titus brought his daily investigations to Maude. It had been like this since the early days of their marriage, and although Police Command might frown on it, Titus discussed everything with Maude. He spared her nothing. She’d demanded this of him, and his initial reluctance gave way to gratitude, and now the idea that she might be excluded was unthinkable. In fact, she had become so much a part of the way in which Titus did his job that he valued her opinion above all others. She examined crime-scene photographs, and read briefings and witness statements. No one in Homicide knew the full extent of her access, although most people suspected that she knew more than she ought to about investigations. If Command ever found out that photographs left Russell Street without authorisation, Titus would have been subject to serious reprimand and possibly even dismissal. However, for Titus it was worth the risk. Maude had the uncanny knack of seeing in photographs telling details that others missed, and she could ascertain from witness and suspect statements unexpected aspects of their characters.

  It was deeply frustrating to Titus that almost all material relevant to the investigation that had so damaged Maude’s brother and Joe Sable had been taken away by Army Intelligence, and was now out of reach under the secrecy restrictions of the Crimes Act. He’d heard nothing from Intelligence since New Year’s Day. If they had any continuing interest in George Starling, or any other Hitlerites, they weren’t using Homicide to help them. That suited Titus. He hadn’t liked the way they worked.

  Maude was reading the briefings written in Warrnambool. She was fascinated by the difference between the Halloran brothers. She remembered Greg Halloran fondly, and she thought Helen Lord’s description of her meeting with Stanley Halloran was evocative and brutally honest.

  ‘She doesn’t spare herself, does she? Most people would have left out that remark about her being ugly.’

  ‘Why did she leave it in, do you think? Leaving it out wouldn’t have mattered.’

  ‘Yes, it would have. We need to know that Stanley Halloran would say such a thing because it lends credence to Helen Lord’s recollection of everything else that he said. What he said to her is nasty; what he said about the Jews and Italians is doubly disturbing because we know his capacity for nastiness sits alongside his ideology.’

  ‘What does he say? Remind me.’

  ‘ “This is what’s fundamentally wrong with this country — Jews, Italians, Japs, blacks; no one likes them, but no one dislikes them enough. They don’t want them in their clubs, or next door, but that’s about as far as it goes.” ’

  ‘Christ. The bloke Greg and I interviewed said that democracy was Jew thought. We all need to start worshipping Odin.’

  ‘Yes. He was an oddball. He worried me, though. Anyone who believes that he knows the way to form a perfect society is suspect. It usually involves those in opposition being disposed of. Ideology and human nature aren’t good bedfellows.’

  ‘I wish I’d been able to remember the exact quotes he read to us from a book he had. Democracy leads to government by Jews. That was one gem.’

  ‘I thought David Reilly’s briefing notes were thin. I didn’t get a good sense of this Maria Pluschow at all.’

  ‘David’s experience is wide but shallow.’

  ‘You mean he belongs to the great D+.’

  This was one of Maude’s favourite shorthand tropes. There were smart people at one end of the social continuum, seriously stupid people at the other, and between them sat the great D+. These were the people who made everything work, but who weren’t much given to analysing the world around them.

  ‘I think Reilly’s a bit better than a D+,’ Titus said. ‘He’s not a bad detective, but he’s constantly surprised that other people aren’t like him and don’t believe the things he believes.’

  ‘Well, anyway, I don’t trust his account of that interview. It’s too smooth. She says everything he wants her to say without demur, and I don’t believe for a minute that this Maria Pluschow would have been so charmingly compliant.’

  ‘You’re probably right. I think it’s clear though that none of these people have had anything to with George Starling for years, and I don’t think he’d approach any of them.’

  ‘Besides, he’s here in Melbourne.’

  ‘I’m going to have to get in touch with Intelligence again.’

  ‘Yes, you are. They might know people here, other than the ones who’ve been interned.’

  ‘I really don’t like those people. Sometimes, Maude, I think the number of people I can’t stand far outweighs the number of people I can stand.’

  Maude leaned across and kissed him.

  ‘I’m so tired, Maudey. I don’t have the energy to talk about the incident tonight. I wish we were in our bed. I don’t like strange ceilings.’

  Maude switched off the light and left her hand on Titus’s chest until his breathing told her that he was deeply asleep. We are a strange species, she thought, as she drifted into sleep. We kill each other.

  ON SUNDAY MORNING, over tea and butterless toast, Titus saw for himself the change in his brother-in-law. His voice was firmer, his movements more assured, and there was something altogether more stable about him. Perhaps the shock of seeing Starling had had the unexpected effect of rebalancing rather than unbalancing him. Or perhaps Maude was right, and the effect of being in his own house was remedial. He reiterated that Starling’s visit had merged inextricably into the landscape of his dreams, and he couldn’t say with any confidence that it had actually happened.

  ‘Joe was there. I know that was real. I didn’t say anything to him. Why didn’t I say anything to him?’

  ‘You’d come straight from sleep, Tom,’ Maude said. ‘Maybe you were in a sort of fugue state — half-waking, half-sleeping. That can happen.’

  ‘Like sleepwalking. I need to talk to Joe, Maude.’

  Maude looked at Titus.

  ‘The doctors thought you
might need to talk to a professional — a psychiatrist— at some stage, Tom. Maude and I have found a good one, if you’d like to do that.’

  Maude had never known Tom to express an opinion either way on the efficacy of psychiatry. She thought he would probably be suspicious of it, but he’d never been the type to express hostility without first looking into things. He surprised her, though, when he said, ‘I’ll have a go at that. I want to talk to Joe as well. There’s so much that I can’t remember.’

  ‘Do you want to remember?’ Maude asked.

  ‘There are things that come at night. I can’t get their measure. I want to know what horrors my mind is manufacturing and what it’s remembering. Maybe if I knew the difference it would help. Maybe not, too. Is Joe a good man? I barely know him.’

  ‘Yes, Tom,’ Titus said. ‘Joe is a good man.’

  He decided not to tell Tom that George Starling was hunting Joe — that’s how Titus thought of it — and that he’d burned down Joe’s flat and killed a man in the process.

  ‘I keep seeing Joe in that room with me, at the end. He was there, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he was there.’

  ‘Did they hurt him?’

  ‘Yes they did, but not as much as they hurt you.’

  Tom looked puzzled.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Only because we got there in time. The intention was to kill you both.’

  Maude’s hand covered her mouth. Titus’s statement had seemed brutal to her. Tom wasn’t shocked by it.

  ‘Yes, I see,’ he said quietly.

  ‘I’ll see if Joe can visit you here as soon as possible. Are you absolutely sure you’re ready to talk about what happened to you both?’

  ‘I’m not absolutely sure of anything anymore. I do want to talk to him, though.’

  After breakfast Tom returned to the room where a camp bed had been made up for him. As Titus shaved, Maude sat on the edge of the bath and expressed her concerns about Tom and Joe talking together.

  ‘I know Tom seems relatively fine, Titus, but he’s been practically catatonic for two weeks. This sudden burst of clarity might be worrisome. What if it’s just another, less alarming, symptom of shellshock, if that’s what they still call it.’