The Holiday Murders

by Robert Gott

  ‘Now, Titus, you know that grief doesn’t follow any rules.’

  ‘This one’s going to take us on a ride, Maude. Everything about it raises my hackles. And these’ — he leaned across Maude and retrieved a copy of The Publicist and Health and Efficiency from a small table — ‘bother me especially. I took these from a collection in John Quinn’s bedroom. Have you seen this one before?’ He showed her a copy of The Publicist.

  ‘Unfortunately, yes, I have. My brother used to read it, but not regularly. I remember him saying that it was strident and vicious.’

  ‘Tom used to read this?’

  ‘For the book reviews I think, and … oh, yes, it published Xavier Herbert, and Tom had a thing about Capricornia. I could never understand the attraction. I did try to read it, but it annoyed me so much that I stopped.’

  ‘I’ve never read it, and I know nothing about Herbert.’

  ‘I think he’s someone you grow out of.’

  ‘I wonder if Military Intelligence works on Christmas Day. They’d have been tracking these Australia First people. They might know something about John Quinn and his cronies.’

  ‘Of course they’ll be working tomorrow. Surely they wouldn’t expect subversives to stop subverting because of a public holiday.’

  ‘Well, we’re stretched pretty thinly, and I imagine they are, too. Tell me more about Tom and this rag.’

  ‘It was only about Xavier Herbert for him. He said it really went bad just before the war, and I don’t think he’s read it since.’

  ‘Listen to this. It’s awful stuff:

  Now the Jews are coming. Not all of them, but too many. Jews are not of the right temperament to be good citizens, or good countrymen among us Australians. We think that they are the worst of the foreign people that could come amongst us, assuming that Australians of British blood wish to maintain their hold upon Australia … There could be no anti-Semitism were there no Semitism: we think that Jews bring their world-known troubles on themselves through an inherited misfortune, they themselves being unwilling — probably unable — to make sacrifices that would rid themselves of it.

  ‘And it goes on.’

  ‘It’s frightening, Titus. I can’t bear the idea that there are people here who think like that — and Tom isn’t one of them, as you well know. When I hear something like that I feel an awful sense of despair, as if it cancels out the decency in other people.’

  ‘It doesn’t, Maude. It doesn’t.’

  He handed her a copy of Health and Efficiency.

  ‘Quinn had a pile of naturist magazines, too. Joe said that Mary Quinn was affronted by the idea that her father might be a nudist, so what was he doing with the magazines? Perhaps he liked looking at the pictures.’

  Maude looked at the cover of the magazine.

  ‘That’s fairly obvious, I’d say. The girl on the cover is very beautiful, and it’s actually quite a lovely photograph, don’t you think?’

  ‘I didn’t linger over it.’

  ‘Don’t be so stuffy, Titus. It’s a beautiful photograph of a beautiful woman. I’m not going to fly into a jealous rage if you agree with me on that.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Titus admitted. ‘I suppose she is beautiful, and it is a nice photograph.’

  ‘Of course, the magazine was published in 1935, so she wouldn’t look like that anymore.’

  ‘Perhaps now she’s reassuringly fat and unattractive?’

  Maude laughed, and opened the magazine.

  ‘Have you read this?’ she asked.

  ‘No. I haven’t yet had the pleasure.’

  ‘There’s more text than pictures and, goodness, it wants us to take it seriously. Listen to this: Are you fit for marriage? Chronic catarrh: How cured, How remedied? Colonic lavage. What on earth is that? I’m definitely going to read that article. Summer breakfasts. Nudism — a natural reaction from Industrialism. Sleep — and your figure. Why I am naturist. Science definitely conquers baldness. That’s good news for you, darling. Why naturism is logical. This is a jam-packed issue, Titus. I think we should start subscribing.’

  ‘It’s all very prescriptive, isn’t it? Maybe it’s not so very different in intent from The Publicist, although it doesn’t provoke quite such a visceral response. You know, I wouldn’t mind talking to Tom at some stage about that particular journal.’

  He felt Maude tense slightly, and rushed to reassure her that he knew her brother’s beliefs differed dramatically from those expressed in The Publicist.

  ‘I just want to get some idea about who used to read it and why, and maybe Tom knows someone who kept on reading it after it became rabid. I’m working in the dark here, Maude. I’ll try anything that might give me a spark.’

  ‘He’ll be so cross that I mentioned it.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be diplomatic. I’m going to have to go into Russell Street tomorrow. Our Christmas has to be postponed.’

  ‘I appreciate the effort you’re making to sound aggrieved, darling, but it isn’t necessary. I do understand that a double murder reorders our priorities.’

  She leaned across, kissed Titus on the forehead, and placed her hand on his chest. He covered her hand with his. They both knew that it was too hot to make love.

  ‘Not tonight, Josephine,’ they said in unison, and both of them laughed.

  Joe Sable’s flat in Arnold Street, Princes Hill, was extravagantly larger than a single man needed. He’d bought it because it was around the corner from where he’d grown up, and because he hadn’t wanted to stay in the family home after the death of his father. The dull monotony of his parents’ stultifyingly silent hostilities had ended with his mother’s death, but the memory of them remained in the silence between father and son. By then, David Sable had become so distant that physical proximity to him made not the slightest difference. The closer Joe was to him, the further David retreated.

  Joe’s parent’s had emigrated from England before the first war. They were English first and Jewish second, and the nearest they’d come to expressing their Jewishness was to join, for a time, the Anglo–Jewish Association. They spoke no Yiddish and attended synagogue irregularly. Once, when Joe was nine or ten, he’d gone with his father to the Jewish Cultural Centre, the Kadimah, in Lygon Street. He couldn’t remember why David had taken him there, but he remembered how strange and alien it had seemed. It was the first time he’d heard Yiddish spoken, and there’d been men there who’d looked nothing like his father. His strongest memory, though, was how afterwards, when walking home, David had laughed and made disparaging remarks about the shtetl Jews. He’d heard the words without understanding their meaning, and later he’d listened to his father expanding on the unfortunate and unpleasant foreignness of the people at the Kadimah. His mother, Judith, had made a pointed remark about David taking Joe there in the first place, and they’d retreated into their silent corners.

  By the time Joe was a teenager, the Jewish presence in Carlton had become quite marked as refugees from Eastern Europe settled there. Joe always felt separate from them — a separation reinforced by his father’s reminders that the Sables were English, and possibly noble. He had, therefore, a vague and receding sense of his Jewishness, and was reminded of it only when someone at school called him a kike. The insult puzzled him, and it didn’t connect to anything he felt about himself.

  But it angered him now. At the age of twenty-five, his Jewish identity had begun to mean more to him because of the persecutions in Europe. He’d begun to clip pages from The Argus that detailed the systematic extermination of the Jews in Europe. That word, ‘extermination’, had leapt out at him from a report headed MASSACRE OF 700,000 POLISH JEWS. This was one of the pieces he’d read and re-read:

  Men and boys aged from 14 to 60 were assembled usually in a public square, or cemetery, where they were stabbed, machine-gunned or bombed with gr
enades, after having dug their own graves.

  It was a small article, competing on the page with reports of problems in the dairying industry and an advertisement announcing the exciting news that there’d been an arrival at Wardrop’s of ‘American Officers’ slacks, for immediate wear’. Although he felt that the world itself wasn’t large enough to contain the story, its compression into a demure few hundred words — no, fewer even than that — made him fearful in a way that was impossible to define.

  Sitting at his table in a curved window overlooking Pigdon Street, Joe turned the pages of The Publicist that Titus had given him. He couldn’t quite believe what he was reading. When he looked up from the page, the world had shifted somehow:

  Is Nazi race theory scientific? Yes, fundamentally. What are The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? A brilliant exposition of Jewish aims and ways. Why has the Jew been chosen as scapegoat? Because he chose himself to dominate the world. Who is stirring up anti-Semitism in Australia? The Jew refugees by being anti-gentile. What should be our attitude to refugees? Uncompromising hostility — the Germans are right in this. What is being done for Jewish refugees? Stupid gentiles are helping them. What is the solution to the Jewish problem? There can be none while a Jew lives.

  This last sentence made Joe gasp. The Publicist cost sixpence. Sixpence. That was all you had to pay to be admitted into the realm of pure evil. Joe’s heart was racing. The people who wrote this, and the people who read it, weren’t thousands of miles away in Europe. They were here, in Melbourne.

  John Quinn had a whole set of these magazines, and the evidence seemed to suggest that Xavier Quinn had shared his interest in them.

  If it was their politics that killed them, Joe presumed that the killer wasn’t in sympathy with their poisonous extremism. Were the police looking for someone who saw himself as a resistance fighter? Was the savage parody of Xavier Quinn’s crucifixion some sort of message? Were they looking for a Jew? Joe dreaded floating this suggestion with Inspector Lambert — not because he thought that Titus might scoff at it, but because he thought that if he uttered it, he would somehow speak it into being. These murders were bound to attract a great deal of publicity, and Joe wondered what the consequences might be for the Jewish community if suspicion fell on one of them. What Joe had just read had dismantled his formerly unquestioned belief that the society he knew could be relied upon to act with civilised restraint.

  From his folder of clippings, Joe retrieved one that he’d glanced at, but had been unwilling to return to. It was from The Argus, and had been published earlier in the year, its contents so unthinkable to him at the time that it had felt like horror fiction. Joe had grown up believing that people were good — mostly. Crimes, both violent and petty, were committed by rare, unbalanced, or morally bankrupt individuals — not by whole populations. Now, with the final two sentences of The Publicist’s rant echoing in his head, he read as much as he could bear of the article that had appeared in The Argus on 28 May:

  SLAUGHTER OF JEWS IN POLAND

  Report Tells of Shocking Barbarity

  From Our Own Correspondent

  LONDON, Thursday

  Details of the report, after reading which Smul Zygelbejm, Jewish representative on the Polish National Council in London, committed suicide, have now been revealed. It contains details of the Nazis’ ‘human slaughterhouse’ camp at Treblika [sic], in Poland, situated near the main Bialystok-Warsaw railway, at which thousands of Jews have been mass slaughtered in chambers into which superheated steam had been poured.

  The report states that a number of Jews called ‘kapes’ are forced to serve inside the camp, burying the dead, and doing other tasks connected with the disposal of the clothing and belongings of those who have been murdered. Jews employed as kapes are treated with the utmost brutality by the Germans, and very few can stand the inhuman treatment and the horrors of the job for more than a fortnight. Those who become unfit for work are executed outright, and their ranks are filled by new arrivals in transports, which reach the camp twice daily. Every arriving train is composed of many tons of freight trucks, which are shunted to a siding facing the entrance to the camp. The trucks are rapidly emptied of their human cargo — a mass of terror-stricken men, women, and children.

  The victims are received by the Jewish kapes, who instruct them, separate the women and children from the men, and conduct them to barracks. Then follows the final act. The Jewish kapes rapidly arrange files of the men 10 abreast, or get them to strip and prepare for a bath. Their clothing is immediately taken away for disposal. The women and children are formed up in rows at the same time.

  STEAM LET IN

  At a signal from the camp commander the German guards suddenly begin to shout and drive all the victims towards the entrance to the death house with whips. When the chambers are filled the doors are shut hermetically, and steam is let into the chambers by means of pipes. In 15 minutes the victims are slowly asphyxiated, and execution is complete …

  Joe put the clipping down and picked up The Publicist. He stared at its cover. His hand began to shake with rage, and with something far worse — shame.

  Joe switched off the lamp, and sat in the pitch black of his living room. He closed his eyes — it didn’t seem as dark behind his eyelids — and started to go over his interview with Mary Quinn. At least it was a distraction from what he’d just read. He’d frightened her, inadvertently; Titus wouldn’t be happy about that, but surely she’d have come to realise, without prompting from Joe, that she might be in danger. He’d got permission to post a policeman outside Sheila Draper’s boarding house. When she had come out of her faint, Mary Quinn had been reassured by that. Sheila Draper had told Mary that she wouldn’t be letting her out of her sight.

  Miss Draper had impressed him much more than Mary Quinn had. She was more open than Miss Quinn, and carried herself with great assurance and dignity. Her friendship would be worth a great deal more, he suspected, than the value Mary Quinn put on it. He thought he might contrive to see Sheila Draper again. It was well after midnight when he fell asleep. ‘Merry Christmas,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Merry for whom?’

  Christmas Day

  -5-

  Titus and Maude exchanged presents over a hurried breakfast. They had an egg each, thanks to a neighbour’s generosity. Maude wanted to scramble the eggs to make them go further, but Titus shook his head.

  ‘No, definitely not.’ he said, ‘Nothing beats a soft-boiled egg. This will be the highlight of my day.’

  He’d barely finished it when they heard the car pull up outside. It was a measure of his exalted position in the new branch of Homicide that when they weren’t needed elsewhere, he could call on a car and a driver. As he was leaving, he asked Maude to read The Publicist from cover to cover, and to winkle out of it anything that she thought might shed light on the case. He apologised again for having to work on Christmas Day, and she told him that she wasn’t upset at all — but the family of the driver of his car, on the other hand, might have a different view.

  On the way to the new police headquarters in Russell Street, he stopped to pick up Joe Sable from outside his flat. As they headed off, Titus asked, ‘That name on your block of flats, “Rosh-Pinah”, what does it mean?’

  ‘It’s Hebrew. I’m fuzzy on the details. It means “cornerstone”, and it’s also a place in Israel where the Messiah is meant to appear at the end of the world.’

  ‘Maybe the people who built the flats hoped the Messiah might get confused and turn up in Princes Hill instead.’

  Joe laughed. ‘My parents were careless with my Jewish education, sir. I only know the bare bones. I didn’t choose the flat because of the name on the building. I like it, though — I’m glad it’s there.’

  ‘I wish my parents had been more careless with their Methodism,’ Titus said. ‘It took me years to slough it off.’

  For
the remainder of the short drive to Russell Street, they discussed the Quinn murders — particularly the difficult question of what to do with Mary.

  ‘We don’t have the manpower to provide her with 24-hour protection,’ Titus said. ‘I’d like her to be somewhere more secure than in that boarding house.’

  ‘I’ll look into it, sir. Do you think she might be in some sort of danger?’

  ‘That has to be a possibility.’

  The police headquarters in Russell Street were brand-new, and the even newer Homicide branch was on the fourth floor. When Titus and Joe stepped out of the lift, they found two men, one seated and the other standing, who were managing to look perfectly comfortable being in Homicide’s offices on Christmas morning. They even managed to give off an air of annoyance at having been kept waiting. The seated man stood up.

  ‘Inspector Lambert?’ he asked.

  Titus nodded.

  ‘And who is this?’ He indicated Joe Sable with undisguised disdain.

  Titus ignored the question. ‘Perhaps you should identify yourself,’ he said evenly.

  ‘Tom Chafer, and this bloke is Dick Goad.’

  ‘And you’re here because …?’

  ‘We’re here because John Quinn is dead, and he was one of ours.’

  ‘Ours?’

  ‘Military Intelligence, Inspector. John Quinn died yesterday, and we were wondering when you’d planned to get around to telling us.’

  Titus didn’t respond to this obvious attempt to put him on the back foot. Instead, he opened the door to his office, allowing Tom Chafer and Dick Goad to follow him in. Joe moved towards his desk in the outer office, but Titus called him in, too.

  ‘This is Sergeant Joe Sable,’ he said. ‘Whatever you have to say, he needs to hear it, too.’

  Joe took stock of the two visitors. The thin one, Tom Chafer, was in his late twenties, and he seemed all angles, bones, and Adam’s apple. His browny-blond hair was cut very short, which made his ears appear prominent, and he wore a thin moustache. His wrist bones protruded like bell pulls, and his suit hung on him the way it would in a wardrobe. He was carrying a battered leather satchel. His companion, Dick Goad, was fat — not enormously so, but proximity to his partner didn’t flatter his shape. He was in his fifties, and bald, but with a slipped tiara of grey hair around his ears. His jowls were clean-shaven, and raw with razor burn. It was Tom Chafer who did all the talking.