by Robert Gott
‘Tell me about this nudist stuff,’ Tom said.
‘I don’t know much about it. It seems to be about brotherhood and Nietzsche and art and nation-building. It’s all very vague, pretentious, and spurious.’
‘Right. I get the general idea. Manliness, heroism, and myth-making. It wouldn’t surprise me if Xavier Herbert himself turned up. Mens sana in corpore sano. The cult of the body.’
He shook his head. ‘It’ll be interesting to see what fine specimens of Aryan manhood make an appearance.’
‘Aryan womanhood, too, of course.’
‘Let’s hope they prove to be the leaven in the lump.’
Over the next two hours, Joe and Tom worked on their strategy. Turning up with an unannounced and unvetted accomplice would undoubtedly upset Magill. It was imperative therefore that Tom establish his credentials as a sympathiser firmly and quickly. It was with some slight chagrin that Joe felt Tom taking charge, although the feeling was muted by the acceptance that the age difference between them would naturally discourage subservience in Tom.
‘I need to be brash,’ Tom said. ‘They need to shift their attention from you to me. Maybe you could give the impression that you’ve gone a bit lukewarm on the political-party idea.’
‘I don’t want to alienate them.’
‘No. You could appear to need reassuring, though, whereas I’ll be gung-ho, and throw a few names from The Publicist’s ranks into the conversation. If he’s sure enough about you, he won’t be suspicious for very long about me. I can sing from his song sheet. You don’t have to worry about me.’
But Joe was worrying about him. Now that everything was in place, he had a vague sense of dread about what he’d set into motion.
Constable Helen Lord found the witness to whom Inspector Lambert had referred — a man in his sixties who lived a few doors down from the Quinn house. He’d been out walking his dog at 9.00pm when he’d passed a fellow, he said, who was standing in an odd sort of way. He couldn’t say what was odd about it, exactly; it was probably just that he hadn’t been expecting to see anyone there, and that always makes an encounter a bit odd. He couldn’t for the life of him recall what the man looked like. The light wasn’t very good. He was thin; no, not thin, lean. That’s right. At any rate he wasn’t fat, and he wasn’t wearing a hat, which wasn’t all that peculiar. His hair? Oh dear. It was short. At any rate, it wasn’t long. Colour? Hard to say. Probably not red, although red can look dark at night, can’t it? Blond maybe. At any rate, not black. Clean-shaven, though. Definitely clean-shaven. He would have remembered a beard because he didn’t like beards. He’d never worn one himself as a result. Untidy, grubby things. When his wife was alive she’d always appreciated the fact that he shaved closely every day. Had he seen the man before or since? No, definitely not. He’d remember, because he never forgot a face.
Helen Lord took notes patiently, and reassured him that he’d been most helpful. There was one more thing. Did he know the Quinn family very well? Barely at all, it turned out. It was strange, wasn’t it, seeing as how they lived just a few doors down, but they kept to themselves. They were Catholics, of course, and that Quinn boy was very odd indeed. No, he couldn’t say he’d ever had so much as a polite chat with any of them, let alone a long conversation. Helen thanked him for his time, and closed her notebook.
Outside, she went to the spot where the witness had passed the stranger. She stood and looked towards the Quinn house. Whoever had been there on Christmas night would have had a clear view of the house. Would a killer, who’d know that the house would be crawling with coppers, risk coming back?
While she was in the neighbourhood, Helen decided to re-visit a few of the Quinn’s immediate neighbours. Inspector Lambert hadn’t authorised her to do this, but he could have no objection to her showing some initiative. The results were disappointing, though. No one was any more forthcoming than he or she had been with the policemen who’d already questioned them. The Quinns, it was universally agreed, kept to themselves. They were no different in this respect from several of the other rich inhabitants of Clarendon Street.
Helen headed back to Russell Street feeling disappointed that she’d have nothing of value to report to Inspector Lambert. This feeling curdled in her into an unfounded suspicion that she’d been sent to do busy work. By the time she reached the Homicide office her mood was filthy, and included in the general scope of that mood was a retrospectively intense resentment of Maude Lambert’s questioning. Helen now felt the force of what she took to be its impertinence and inappropriateness.
Titus could hardly miss the anger that came off her in waves when she entered the office. To his astonishment, he found himself intimidated by Helen’s emotion. He proceeded warily.
‘Anything of interest at Clarendon Street?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she replied tersely. ‘But you already knew that.’
These simple words subdued Titus’s feeling of intimidation. It wasn’t the outrageous insubordination that angered him; it was Helen’s inference that he would willingly waste her time and talent.
‘What I knew, Constable Lord, was that an unimaginative policeman had failed to ask a potentially useful witness some basic questions. I’d hoped that a more imaginative police officer could do a better job. You seem to feel that the task was beneath you — and that, I have to say, disappoints me greatly.’
Helen said nothing. She could see the sense in what Lambert said, and the knowledge that she’d disappointed him made her feel almost physically ill. How had he got under her guard? How had he made her want to impress him?
‘Tell me what the witness told you,’ Titus said coolly. ‘I presume he told you something.’
Helen opened her notebook and read her notes in a steady voice. This was something of an achievement, given that what she wanted to do was cry. When she’d finished, he said, ‘I saw the same man.’
Helen Lord’s eyes lifted involuntarily to his.
‘Your witness saw this man at nine o’clock. I was leaving the Quinn house a short time after that, and I saw a person walking away. It was too dark to be really sure whether it was a man or a woman. He was wearing trousers, but it could easily have been a woman either going to or coming home from work. Now we can be sure it was a man. We have a time, and a place, and a direction in which he was walking. We also know that at the time the witness saw him, he was stationary. Why? There could be a million innocent reasons, or one guilty reason. Is it outside the bounds of possibility, Constable, that our man was walking towards Sheila Draper’s house, having reassured himself that Mary Quinn was not at home, and that if she wasn’t at home, perhaps she’d gone to stay with her closest friend? In such a scenario, our man would have to be close enough to Mary Quinn to know who her best friend was. None of which gives us anything definite to work with, but it does perhaps weaken the notion that these murders are about politics. I’d say that your babbling witness, despite it having been beneath your dignity to have had to listen to him, has added significantly to our understanding.’
Helen’s mortification was complete. She’d allowed her anger, her lingering bitterness, about her treatment in the police force to cloud her powers of observation and interpretation. And, worst of all, she’d sprayed her bitterness in the direction of the one man who’d recognised her strengths. She couldn’t bring herself to apologise — not because she didn’t feel the need to, but because she had no clue how to do it without sounding stupid. Instead, she agreed that Titus’s scenario was entirely plausible, and she hoped that he would detect that no one was more aware than she was that she’d let herself down. Titus, who had himself calmed down by the end of his exposition, didn’t press her for an explanation of her behaviour, and wasn’t interested in demanding an apology. He’d seen how stricken she’d looked, and he could hear it in her voice. No doubt she thought her time in Homicide was over. He didn’t feel the need to
make her sweat over that.
‘We need to door-knock more widely, Constable. I want you to do that tomorrow. I’ll get you half-a-dozen policemen. They’ll be under your direction, and I don’t want you to tolerate any insubordination. You have my permission to pull anyone into line who steps out of it, and I don’t care how old they are. I’ll support you if any complaints come my way.’
When Helen left Titus’s office, she telephoned Joe at his home. She needed a drink and someone to talk to. The telephone rang and rang, and she was about to hang up when Joe answered, breathless. Helen quickly established that his working day was finished, and that he was home for the evening. She invited herself over, and said that she knew a man who’d sell her a couple of bottles of beer, which she’d bring, just as soon as he told her his address.
Joe looked around his flat and tried to assess its tidiness from a visitor’s perspective. It would do. He gave the toilet a quick clean, and wondered if Helen would be happy with baked beans on toast, because that was all there was to eat in the flat. He was pleased that she was dropping in, glad that she needed to talk to him about the case and about the run-in she’d had with Inspector Lambert. He’d have some sympathy for her on that score.
When she arrived, Helen complimented Joe on his flat, and said that she longed to have a place of her own. It was a slip of the tongue because, having said it, she had to explain what her living arrangements were. She hadn’t intended to give as much away about herself as she’d given to Maude Lambert, although her hostility about that interrogation had eased by now. She gave Joe the bare bones of her life story, and in the course of the conversation Joe returned the favour. After a couple of warm beers, any awkwardness between them vanished, and they were able to speak easily about work and the Quinn–Draper murders. Here, in the privacy of Joe’s flat, it was easier to speculate about things. Neither of them felt constrained by professional niceties.
‘Is Mary Quinn admirably honest, or a heartless bitch?’ Helen asked.
‘A bit of both, maybe. I feel a bit guilty about mucking up my interview with her. I frightened her — accidentally. She was too distracted after that to be helpful. Lambert didn’t say anything to me about it, but I always know when he thinks I’ve fallen short.’
‘He gave me the full benefit of his disapproval this afternoon,’ Helen told him, and proceeded to give Joe details of her exchange with Titus. They agreed that one of the most annoying things about Titus Lambert was that he was generally right — and the fact that he managed to be right without being pompous somehow made it more annoying.
‘What do you think of his wife?’ Helen asked.
‘I like her.’
‘Were you manoeuvred into a private conversation with her?’
Joe laughed.
‘Of course. We had lunch. I didn’t mind at all. She was good company.’
‘I didn’t mind at the time, but I think I mind now. It felt like an audition, like she was vetting Lambert’s appointments.’
‘I think he relies on her a good deal, and I suspect that she’s far more involved in investigations than anyone knows.’
Helen narrowed her eyes.
‘I don’t think I like that very much.’
‘They’ve been married a long time.’
‘If she wants to be a detective, why doesn’t she join the force?’
Joe had no answer to that, although he couldn’t imagine Maude Lambert putting up with the stuff that Helen Lord had to put up with.
‘Like I say,’ he said, ‘I like Maude Lambert a lot. I think you should like her, too. She’s on your side.’
‘Yes, I know. I want to like her. I just don’t like people doing me favours.’
With the beer finished, they ate the baked beans, and Helen left soon after. Joe hadn’t told her about his plans for the following day, and she’d been sufficiently discreet not to probe him about them. For her part, Helen tried, and failed, to quell a sensation about Joe Sable that felt remarkably, and inconveniently, like desire.
29 December
-15-
Joe Sable and Tom Mackenzie met at Spencer Street Station. The train to Ballarat left at eight; they would change at Ballarat and catch another train back to Daylesford. The Ballarat train was surprisingly busy, given the official restrictions on travel. Intelligence had sprung them a seat in first class, although how this differed in quality from any of the other carriages escaped Joe. Perhaps the extra cost assured a better class of passenger; it certainly didn’t provide a more comfortable seat.
Once they were under way, Tom wondered out loud if any of their fellow passengers were headed for Magill’s property at Candlebark Hill. He went to the toilet at the far end of the carriage, and gave each of them a quick once-over on the way. When he returned to his seat, he said that he hoped none of them were fascist sympathisers of Magill’s ilk, because he didn’t fancy seeing any of them naked.
He told Joe that he’d been thinking overnight about how to present himself to Magill.
‘I don’t think I should be a subtle character. Things are either black or white. You’re with me or you’re against me — if you’re not a friend, you’re an enemy. That sort of thing. What do you reckon?’
‘The ideal fascist mentality. Magill certainly isn’t looking to recruit people with imagination or subtle intelligence. This isn’t a game, though, Tom. It’s not just a day off work. These are people who might not be violent themselves, but they’re not above employing others to do their dirty work.’
‘I’m aware of that, but how much damage can someone do when he’s naked? There’s no danger of concealed weapons.’
Joe recognised Tom’s tone as a cover for nervousness.
‘I’m as uncertain about this as you are, Tom, believe me.’
‘Thank Christ for that, because now that we’re actually doing it, I’m shitting myself. Why do these clowns have to be fucking nudists?’
Mitchell Magill was waiting at the Daylesford railway station, as promised. He looked surly, and when Joe stepped down from the train with the uninvited Tom, Magill’s face puckered with suspicion. Joe introduced Tom as a sympathiser, a keen one, whose discretion could be counted on. Magill shook Tom’s proffered hand reluctantly.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Tom said, and his vowels had been flattened slightly. ‘Joe here tells me you and I might have a fair bit in common. Not impressed so far, I have to tell you. You seem a bit flash and stand-offish. Not sure we’ll have that much in common after all.’
Magill was taken aback by this brash assessment. He made a lightning reappraisal of Tom Mackenzie.
‘It’s been a very difficult twenty-four hours,’ he said. He looked at Joe. ‘A few of our friends have left us. Apparently they’re not as committed as we thought they were. We’re a depleted group.’
‘Not Peggy, surely,’ Joe said.
‘No, not Peggy. She’s solid.’
If Magill had any further qualms about Tom Mackenzie, he chose not to express them, but told him that he was welcome to stay at Candlebark Hill.
They began to walk into Daylesford, whose main street was dominated by a lavish, gold-funded town hall, the Rex cinema, and two hotels. There were several horses tied up outside them, and there was enough dung on the road to suggest that horses and carts were at least as common there as motor vehicles. A few of these, their lines disfigured by large charcoal-burners on the back, were parked in the street. Joe wasn’t paying particular attention to his surroundings because Tom had brazenly asked Magill what he’d meant when he’d said that those friends of his lacked commitment. There was no lightness in his voice, and no hint of nervousness. He sounded severe and humourless, as if Magill somehow owed him an explanation.
‘I’m not here just to run around in the nuddy, Magill. Joe told me about that. If the commitment you’re talking about i
s just to this naturist bullshit, tell me now, and I’ll save myself a walk.’
Joe could tell that Magill was yet again taken aback by this stranger’s gall.
‘Naturism is not just about the body,’ he said carefully and calmly. ‘It’s about the mind too, and the Earth. It’s …’
‘Fuck the mind, mate, if it’s not about the Japs and the Jews I’m not dropping my strides. Joe reckoned you were the man to see about Australia First. Is that right, or not? A straight answer would be helpful at this point, mate.’
Magill had probably never been spoken to like this in his life, and he was so surprised he confirmed that he was indeed the man to see about Australia First.
‘Except we’re now called Australian Patriots.’
Joe was flabbergasted by the success of Tom’s gambit.
‘There aren’t many of us left,’ Magill said. ‘At least, officially. Being a patriot is frowned upon these days. They’d rather lock you up than give you a pat on the back.’
Tom did just that. In a display of masculine bonhomie, he slapped Magill on the back and said, ‘Good man.’
‘And you needn’t worry about dropping your strides, to use your expression. The mood at Candlebark Hill isn’t right to celebrate the body. You’re welcome to shed your textiles, of course, and I assure you no one will bat an eyelid, but you’ll be the only one to do so, and you might not be comfortable with that.’
Both Joe and Tom heaved a silent sigh of relief, and Joe wondered what could have happened to take the shine off licht land — an expression he’d learned from the title of one of the magazines found in John Quinn’s bedroom.
