The Holiday Murders

by Robert Gott

  Jack Ables didn’t press her for details about the deaths that had altered her life. He gave her ample opportunity to talk about them, but she avoided discussing anything personal. They talked about The Red Mask, about how awful some of the dialogue was, and how awkward it was that Dora Mansfield was so close to Constance Thorpe. No one felt comfortable criticising her. They talked about the other cast members, not nastily, but speculated gently about their private lives. Neither of them felt like dessert — the rabbit had been a generous serve — and Jack offered to walk Mary to the Windsor Hotel. She accepted, admitting she was certain that her life was in danger. She said she felt foolish saying it, because it sounded so melodramatic. ‘Do you think I’m being paraoid?’ she asked.

  ‘Paranoia has no basis in fact,’ Jack said. ‘I don’t know what happened to your family and your friend, not in any detail — and I don’t want you to tell me, if you don’t want to — but it seems to me that you have bloody good reasons for feeling vulnerable.’

  ‘I’d like to tell you, Jack. I didn’t want to over dinner. I feel so alone.’

  The Windsor dining room was still open when they reached the hotel, and they took a table and ordered a pot of tea. Jack was a sympathetic listener. Mary told him all that she knew. She described finding her brother’s body and described, too, how the detective had made her identify the body — how he’d made her look at her brother’s naked corpse.

  ‘I don’t like him,’ she said. ‘I know he’s got a job to do, but I don’t think he likes me. I suspect he thinks I’m rather cold.’

  As Mary spoke and as Jack listened, occasionally reaching out and covering her hand with his, she began to think that he mightn’t be queer after all. He looked at her warmly, and she felt that there was more to the look than sexless sympathy. However, if he was expecting an invitation to her room, he’d be disappointed. She felt in no position to begin an affair with her leading man.

  Jack Ables wouldn’t have said no to a sexual advance from Mary Quinn, although he would have been slightly uneasy about taking advantage of her at a vulnerable time in her life. His was not a predatory nature. The worst that could be said about him was that he was sexually opportunistic, but not consciously at the expense of another person’s feelings. Where sex was concerned, Jack Ables happily inhabited a broad church. The war had been a godsend to him. As his profile grew among the locals, and as his face became well known, his sexual dalliances with men became more dangerous. American servicemen, however, didn’t have a clue who he was, and there were more than enough of them to keep him busy when he felt the need — and when initiating sex with a woman was too complicated and fraught.

  Feeling primed for sex by his dinner with Mary Quinn and the more intimate conversation that had followed at the Windsor, Jack decided that he’d take a detour to St Kilda Road on his way home. The gardens opposite Victoria Barracks were always busy with GIs far enough from home to want to explore sexual options not available to them in Hicksburg.

  Ptolemy Jones had watched Mary Quinn enter the Windsor Hotel with a man he didn’t recognise — not that he expected to recognise her acquaintances. He hadn’t got a good look at him, but he’d seen him place his hand in the small of her back as they passed through the door. This man obviously had some sort of relationship with her that was a few notches above casual. He’d waited to see if the man stayed. When Jack Ables came out of the hotel, Jones followed him down to Flinders Street and across Princes Bridge onto St Kilda Road.

  The dance hall on the west side of the road was busy. Ables kept to the opposite side and slipped into the park. Jones fell back, but didn’t lose sight of him. The path was carrying an unusual amount of traffic, and the reason soon became apparent to Jones. There was a tentative rhythm to the perambulations. Men would pass each other, turn to observe the retreating back, and if encouraged by a similarly turned head, stop, and then go back to where the other man now stood. Words were exchanged, and they would either part or head off together deeper into the shadows.

  Jones made sure he kept off the path. He knew that he’d react with instinctive, unstoppable violence if some GI offered to suck his cock, or presented his own cock for Jones to enjoy. He had bigger fish to fry, and was sufficiently self-disciplined to postpone dealing with these perverts. He’d leave that for another night, when he’d come back with his acolytes and enjoy doling out some lessons on the purity of National Socialism. For now, he was content, although it disgusted him, to watch as Jack Ables brazenly kissed an American soldier on the mouth before leading him away. As far as Jones was concerned, whoever this man turned out to be, that kiss had sealed his fate. Such creatures had been swept from Germany’s streets, and the same would happen here. But not tonight. Not now.

  Titus and Maude agreed that the mutton stew was a failure. It was a Women’s Weekly recipe. Everything that might have made it tasty had been stripped out of it, on the assumption that households wouldn’t have the butter to brown the meat, or the wine to enrich the broth. Maude had followed the recipe to the letter. The result was greasy and with a flavour that was simultaneously bland and unpleasant. Fortunately, neither of them was much interested in food. They ate for sustenance rather than enjoyment.

  Maude passed on what she’d learned about Helen Lord, and confirmed for Titus that his instincts about her were correct. In Maude’s opinion, Helen was spectacularly more gifted than any of Titus’s male colleagues, a fact that no doubt would not go unpunished in the police force. Titus was briefly offended, but conceded the essential truth of his wife’s comment.

  Titus told Maude about his frustratingly fruitless afternoon. He’d visited the Savage Club, hoping to speak with some of John Quinn’s fellow members. There’d been only a few men there, only one of whom knew Quinn, and even then the acquaintance was only glancing. Quinn had been an irregular visitor to the club, and this chap felt that he hadn’t really been the club type. He had a notion that Quinn had used the club more regularly before he’d retired. This was confirmed by the doorman, who said that Quinn hadn’t been into the club for more than a year, although he’d kept up his membership. He’d given Titus the names of two men with whom Quinn had seemed to be friendly. Both names were familiar to Titus — they were retired judges.

  ‘They might be able to tell us something about John Quinn’s character,’ Titus said to Maude. ‘But, more and more, I think that Xavier Quinn was the focus of these killings.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a safe assumption, Titus. The theatrics might have been designed as a distraction’.

  Titus sighed.

  ‘Yes, there is that. I must admit that I’m feeling strangely defeated.’

  28 December

  -14-

  Mitchell Magill, Peggy Montford, Arthur, and Margaret left Magill’s house after midnight to avoid police detection. Half-a-dozen like-minded people were to arrive at Candlebark Hill at lunchtime, and Ptolemy Jones and one of his friends were also expected. How all these people would organise travel passes wasn’t Magill’s problem, and it had never been an issue in the past. Restrictions on rail travel seemed flexible, to say the least.

  Darkness obscured the monotony of the farmland and grassland to Melbourne’s west. By the time Magill’s Bentley reached the turn-off from Ballarat Road into Gully Road, all three of his companions were asleep, but they awoke as the car rattled its way down the driveway to Magill’s house. It was a cool evening, although not cool enough to make it worth the bother of lighting a fire. The air in the house was stale, but not unpleasant. It was the staleness of wood smoke, with a faint background note of boiled meat. Aware that mosquitoes made airing the house at night impossible, the quartet retired to bed, so fatigued as to be indifferent to air quality.

  In the morning, Peggy and Margaret set about preparing lunch for twelve, and Mitchell and Arthur tidied the outhouse that would accommodate their guests. Arthur again expressed his reserv
ations about Ptolemy Jones, this time more forcefully than before.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about him,’ he said. ‘I don’t like him, and neither does Margaret. I mean, we really don’t like him, Mitchell.’

  ‘I don’t like him either,’ Magill said, ‘which is precisely why we need him. I can’t imagine anyone liking him. No one’s going to be taken in by his manners, which are so thin, anyway, that they’re barely there. It’s not important that people like him. What is important is that they’re intimidated by him. He’s exactly what Australian Patriots needs. We want people to feel glad that he’s on their side.’

  ‘I think he sees himself as more than a dumb enforcer, Mitchell. I’m afraid that he has ideas, and I don’t think he’ll be easy to control.’

  ‘Leave that to me, Arthur. Trust me, he’s a follower. I’m sure he’s got ideas. What he doesn’t have is our intelligence. He’ll follow orders once the pack hierarchy has been firmly established. He’s even got you fooled, Arthur. Jones is no wolf; a snarly little terrier, maybe. I’ll protect you if he bites your ankles.’

  Titus met Joe and Helen in the Homicide office at 9.00am and briefed them on the preliminary reports of the three autopsies. The red marks around John Quinn’s nose and lips were chloroform burns. As Titus had first suggested, he hadn’t shot himself. The brown hair on his fingers had come from the body of his son, and had been deliberately placed there by a third party. In an attempt, perhaps, to confound police and humiliate John Quinn, the clump was pubic hair. Xavier Quinn’s injuries were extensive, and consistent with him having been tortured before his death. Beneath the blood there were several burns, as well as slashes and welts. Two fingers on each hand had been broken. Sheila Draper’s body was severely bruised, suggesting that she’d been badly beaten before her death. She’d also been sexually assaulted.

  ‘Pre- or post-mortem?’ Helen Lord asked.

  ‘Impossible to say. Also, there’s been one other murder since Christmas Eve, which is below average for this time of year. I suppose we should be grateful for that. The body of a tattooist was found last night. He’d been dead for a couple of days at least — broken neck.’

  ‘Is there a connection, do you think, with the Quinns?’

  ‘They’re geographically close, Sergeant, or close enough. Beyond that, I can’t see a connection. The tattooist, from what we can tell, died quickly. There are no signs of messy violence, and no forced entry. Whoever killed him was invited in.’

  ‘Which suggests he knew his killer,’ Joe said.

  ‘As you know, the vast majority of murder victims know their killer,’ Titus said. ‘So, yes, that death looks more domestic than the Quinns’ or Miss Draper’s. I mean domestic only in the sense of its banality.’

  ‘Was it a clean break?’ Helen Lord asked.

  Titus knew what she was getting at.

  ‘Yes, that’s a connection, although it’s hardly an illuminating one. The Quinn murders and the tattooist murder were done by a strong person.’

  ‘Fingerprints?’ Joe asked.

  ‘No matches yet across the sites.’

  Titus handed Helen and Joe a sheaf of typed pages.

  ‘These are the full briefing notes so far. It’s everything we have. I’ve put an asterisk next to anything that seemed to me even minimally anomalous. They may be meaningless, but I’d like you to consider them.’

  ‘Anomalous?’ Joe hadn’t meant to say that out loud.

  ‘Yes. On page 60, for example, there’s a note from a constable stating that a neighbour passed someone on Christmas night, a man who he’d never seen in the area before. He didn’t like the look of him, although that might just have been because he wasn’t wearing a hat. The constable didn’t press for details, unfortunately. At least he made a note of it, but if he’d done his job properly we wouldn’t have to follow it up. As it is, I’d like you, Constable Lord, to pay the witness a visit, and see if you can winkle anything useful out of him.’

  ‘What about those diaries?’ Joe asked.

  ‘There’s a note about them in there. They haven’t been fully translated yet, but they’re mostly gibberish. Xavier Quinn’s grasp of Latin was idiosyncratic, to say the least. The only bits he gets right are long transcriptions of the Mass. The translator is ploughing on reluctantly. The only clue they provide is to Xavier Quinn’s uncertain grasp on reality.’

  Before Titus went any further, Joe thought it would be politic to remind him that he wouldn’t be available to Homicide for the remainder of that day, or the following day. No mention had been made so far of his meeting with Tom Mackenzie. Joe expected that he’d be quizzed about that in private. He intended to tell Titus that Tom had been cooperative and that he didn’t have much that was useful to offer. He didn’t intend telling him that Tom would be going with him to Daylesford. He wasn’t sure why — he suspected that Titus would disapprove of bringing his wife’s brother into the investigation in any capacity other than as a source of information.

  Titus wasn’t happy when Joe mentioned Daylesford, and his face betrayed his annoyance. Outside Inspector Lambert’s office, Helen Lord couldn’t help but comment on that annoyance.

  ‘Is he right, do you think? Is Intelligence on the wrong tram?’

  ‘We’re all on foot, Constable. None of us is even near a tram, so Intelligence’s hunch is as valid as any.’

  ‘Are you being used to fill a manpower gap at Intelligence’s end?’

  ‘That is what they’re doing. They were quite up-front about it.’

  Joe found himself unexpectedly defending Intelligence. His loyalty remained with Homicide, of course, but he didn’t like the feeling that investigating Australia First was unworthy.

  ‘Even if Intelligence is wrong about the murders,’ he said, ‘surely any information I can get about a subversive organisation is worthwhile. Their priorities are different, that’s all.’

  ‘You don’t have to convince me, Sergeant. Besides, the more you’re away, the more I get to do.’

  She smiled at him, and the only decent thing to do was to smile in return.

  Joe Sable and Tom Mackenzie sat opposite Tom Chafer and Dick Goad in an office that was as insalubrious as Tom Mackenzie’s Requisitions office. Intelligence might exercise considerable surreptitious power and influence, but it was insufficient to overcome the limitations of Victoria Barracks. Checks had been run on Tom Mackenzie, and nothing untoward had been found, so there’d been no hindrance to Joe’s request that Tom accompany him to Daylesford.

  There was no record of Tom’s connection to The Publicist, probably because he rarely bought a copy and wasn’t a subscriber. Tom told Chafer and Goad that his past interest in Xavier Herbert had led him to the magazine, but that he now found Herbert almost unreadable.

  ‘You don’t need to dissociate yourself from Herbert, Group Captain Mackenzie. He is of no interest to us, or to Inter-Allied Services. He’s here, you know, in Melbourne.’

  In spite of himself, Tom was interested.

  ‘Really? Doing what?’

  ‘He was a neurotic mess when he came back from what might be described as his unruly service in the Northern Territory, and he’s now filling in time until the army sees fit to discharge him. He’s at the Royal Park General Duties Depot. He’s a drill sergeant, and the word is that he loathes it. So everybody’s happy. If you’re keen to meet him, I’m sure that could be arranged when you come back from Daylesford.’

  Tom demurred. He had no wish to meet a literary hero whom he’d outgrown.

  Neither Chafer nor Goad expressed surprise when Joe told them that Mitchell Magill and his mates were avid naturists. They knew this already, had always known it, and had lied about it by omission on their previous visit; and they knew, too, of their spurious connection to the German nudist movements of the 1930s. Chafer let slip that no one in Intelligence, including
the British-run arm, had been keen to infiltrate Magill’s group for that reason. The eccentricities of individual Hitlerites were legion, he said — some of them worshipped the Norse gods, if you please. Joe realised that his inexperience had played into their hands, and that Intelligence was a stranger to honesty and trust. Well, he’d make the most of it.

  ‘Running around in the nuddy doesn’t bother me,’ he said. ‘Perhaps your people have deficiencies they’d rather not reveal.’

  Chafer smirked.

  ‘I’ll look forward to reading your report,’ he said.

  Back in Tom Mackenzie’s office, Joe asked how many branches of Intelligence worked out of Victoria Barracks.

  ‘Who knows? I know the Netherlands East Indies Force is here, and I presume that’s a fancy handle for some branch, but here in Requisitions we’re not privy to anything sensitive. The fact that I can’t wait to strip off and run around in the bush should tell you how deadly this job is. Now that we’re actually doing this, don’t you think I need to know a bit more about it?’

  Joe hesitated for a moment. In giving the green light to Tom joining Joe in Daylesford, Chafer had outlined the secrecy provisions of the Crimes Act. Those provisions would cover, in this instance, the details of the Quinn and Draper murders, so that Inspector Lambert need never know that his brother-in-law had been involved in this peripheral way. Joe experienced a brief crisis of confidence, even as he gave the details of the case so far, and wondered if involving Tom Mackenzie in this represented a failure of nerve. Mackenzie was older than him, looked strong, and had a full clearance from Intelligence. Why not make use of him? Tom was eager, and after only a brief acquaintance, Joe thought he’d be reliable. But however he rationalised it, Tom Mackenzie’s presence calmed Joe’s fears. It was as simple as that, and those fears had started to unsettle him.