The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish

by Dido Butterworth

  Dithers felt himself being pulled from his soapbox. His left hand was being shoved far up his back. The blue of a police uniform pressed against his face.

  It was early afternoon before Griffon learned that one of his curators was locked in the police cells.

  He arrived at Darlinghurst police station to find Slugger Doolan slouched over the counter.

  ‘You museum chaps do like a stoush, don’t you?’ he said as he led Griffon to the cells.

  ‘Oh dear! My poor chap. What happened?’

  Dithers was sitting on a concrete floor. The side of his head was caked in blood and his patrician nose was badly broken.

  ‘Officer!’ Vere shouted. ‘Get this man out of here. He is doing valuable work for the premier. Now move it!’

  Griffon hailed a cab, helped Dithers in, and headed for Dithers’ rooms.

  Dithers spoke from the heart. ‘I know what I must do, Vere. Never again will I suffer an injustice of this kind to remain unchallenged. I am going to Alice Springs, where the last of the wild tribes roam. The war still rages there, and I will not allow the desert people to suffer the fate of their coastal neighbours. You have my resignation: I can be nothing but an embarrassment to you from now on. Now go, Vere. Your museum needs you. And the tribes need me.’

  When Archie and Beatrice heard about Dithers they rushed to his rooms. They found him lying on his bed.

  ‘Oh, Courtenay, what have they done to you?’ cried Beatrice.

  ‘Don’t tell the truth in this country, Beatrice.’

  ‘Dithers, old chap, did you really have to stand in the Domain reading your manuscript? The place is full of rough types.’

  ‘No need to worry about me, Archie. I’m off to Alice Springs. The final frontier of the black war. There are still shootings going on out there, and I’m determined to stop them.’

  ‘We must come with you, Courtenay!’ cried Beatrice impulsively. There were tears in her eyes as she lit the cigarette he had fumbled into his mouth.

  ‘No. No!’ Dithers replied emphatically. ‘I need to face this alone.’ He turned to Archie. ‘For God’s sake, treat the remains of the fallen with the respect they deserve.’

  Archie had never felt so utterly helpless. His friend had gone where he could not tread. As a newly minted curator, he had a duty to treat the skulls as specimens.

  When Vere Griffon walked through the door of his apartment that evening he was surprised to see the wall of his sitting room alive with the dancing shadows of a fire. It was burning gently in his fireplace, and sitting in a lounge chair before it, her back to him, was Dryandra Stritchley.

  ‘Dryandra, what a surprise. What a pleasant surprise, I mean.’

  ‘I realised, after I wrote to you, Vere, that I couldn’t leave. It would all be for nothing without you.’

  Griffon stepped back.

  ‘Surely you knew? How many times had you confided in me that you’d like to rid yourself of those appalling curators? I have a talent for carrying out orders, you know. And for looking after you.’

  ‘Dryandra, are you mad? Tell me, for God’s sake, what’s going on.’

  ‘Were you sorry to see that useless Polkinghorne, and Dolt, Hadley and Jones, vanish? I made it so easy for you, Vere.’

  ‘But, Dryandra, how could you possibly make them leave? Did you threaten them?’

  ‘No, Vere. I was far more decisive. Dolt, Hadley and Jones were easy. Men are such simple, gullible creatures. They were all eager to come home with me. And I love cooking, especially fish. It was old Trembley who told me about fugu. It’s such a common species, and I love the challenge of preparing it. Getting the dose just right. It’s such a gentle death that it’s almost a pleasure. And it makes candlelit dinners for two so very interesting, even when the company is more comfortable communing with a blowfly than a woman.’

  Vere slumped into the unoccupied armchair beside Dryandra.

  ‘You killed them?’ he whispered.

  ‘The bodies would have been a problem if it wasn’t for my rose garden. I thought that those useless curators should be productive, in death at least. They did little enough in life.’

  ‘Polkinghorne gave me trouble, I admit. I watched him fight with the father of that young man. He didn’t want to come with me at first. He was scared of you, Vere. Of what you might think of him. So I followed him onto the ferry, and eventually I persuaded him to come back with me to Circular Quay, and to my home.

  ‘But surely you agree that my greatest triumph was Sopwith. I did hope that I’d killed two birds with one stone there. And I didn’t even have to manage the body. With the others, Mordant was always eager to earn some pin money. Carrying boxes, letting people in, administering a few drops of fugu here and there. But he never glimpsed the full genius of it all.’

  ‘But the letters. They all sent letters!’ cried Griffon.

  ‘Oh, Vere, you simple boy! I’m an excellent copyist, and our files are full of paperwork bearing staff signatures. You never asked to see the envelopes. But the best trick is yet to come. I had to dig them up, of course. Couldn’t leave skeletons in the garden. It was tremendously interesting smoking the skulls so they resembled the originals, and sewing them onto the fetish. I do believe I was a forger in a previous life!

  ‘And don’t worry, Vere dearest, the skeletons, along with the skulls I took from the mask, are safe in our collection. I even labelled the skeleton boxes with their state of origin. Dolt, with a switched skull, is now a “native of Victoria”, while Jones and Hadley are natives of New South Wales. I don’t worry much about the switched skulls. They always were wrong-headed anyway. Delicious—and rather funny—don’t you think? Perhaps one day some super sleuth will discover my clues, and understand the genius of it all. But not for a very, very long time.

  ‘I only slipped up once. My bone staining wasn’t up to old Bumstocks and his bleach. But even that wouldn’t have mattered except for that young man, Meek. I almost had him, you know. If Beatrice had played hard-to-get just a little longer, you would have received a letter from the broken-hearted Mr Meek. “I can find neither peace nor love here. I’ve returned to the islands,” it would have said. But he never took the bait.’

  Vere was staring at Dryandra, his eyes dark with horror.

  ‘Our work’s not yet done, my beautiful Vere. My poor, hard-working Mordant is now assisting with the roses. Those man-catchers really are most ingenious objects. Archie Meek was careless enough to leave one unattended after the opening. I don’t know how I would have managed Mordant without it. But there are yet suspicious minds we must still. Meek and Goodenough at the least.

  ‘We’re two of a kind, Vere. Inseparable. Let’s pledge on our better selves that we’ll never part. Come with me to Malaya. After we’ve done our tidying up, that is.’

  Sunlight spilled onto the old sandstone verandah where Beatrice stood looking out between the buildings at a tiny sliver of water glittering in the sunlight. A real estate agent might describe it as ‘harbour glimpses’. As the warm sun dispelled the last of the winter gloom, Archie stood, looking positively Arcadian, in his gardening boots and gloves, and secateurs in hand.

  ‘I’m so happy, Archie. I keep havi
ng to pinch myself to know it’s real.’

  ‘I can hardly believe it myself, Beatrice. I had no idea that Dryandra Stritchley thought so highly of us. To leave us use of her house until she returns. And with no real duties apart from caring for her roses. It was extraordinarily generous.’

  ‘Such a lovely letter, too, wishing us well for our marriage. I never realised how similar her handwriting was to Griffon’s,’ Beatrice said absently. ‘Strange that she was so emphatic about not disturbing the flower beds. But I suppose that her roses are like children to her.’

  ‘And that, Beatrice, is the only dark spot thus far, on the glory of married life. No matter what I do, I can’t get the things to bloom as gloriously as she did. I’ve read every book—put my everything into it. But still it’s not enough.’

  Beatrice was aware of a tenderness in her breasts. She thought she knew what that meant, but it was far too early to say anything.

  ‘When do you think she’ll be back, Archie?’

  ‘Her letter gave no idea. But surely she’ll write from Malaya, giving us time to find somewhere else, before she returns.’

  ‘Darling, I’d be delighted if we could stay here forever.’

  ‘Perhaps we will, my sweet. It all depends on Dryandra.’

  END

  END NOTE

  While preparing the manuscript for publication I uncovered some remarkable facts pertaining to various incidents portrayed therein. A cult mask, known as the great Darnley Island mask, is strikingly similar to the fetish described in the manuscript. It was probably (though not certainly) destroyed in a fire that consumed most of the Australian Museum’s ethnographic collection in the nineteenth century. The cause of the fire was never determined, but newspapers reported that a one-legged man and a butcher’s boy were seen fleeing the scene shortly before the blaze broke out.

  Even more remarkable instances concern Dr Doughty’s adventures in the Spice Islands. A privately published journal reveals that a Count Vidua of Genoa had travelled to the Dutch East Indies. While climbing a volcano, his leg broke through a lava crust and was badly burned. A German surgeon travelling on the count’s vessel urged the nobleman to have his limb amputated. But Vidua waited too long, developed gangrene, and died. That surgeon’s name was Leggenhacker. Moreover, I was astonished to learn that Cummingtonite and Dickite are actual mineral species, and that Abraham Trembley was a world-renowned authority on the Medusae.

  Less certain, but still intriguing, are the parallels between Courtenay Dithers and several anthropologists of historical note. George Augustus Robinson’s experiences in 1840s Victoria are similar, as is the story of Sydney University anthropologist Olive Pink, who gave up her studies to live among the Aborigines at Alice Springs.

  When I first worked at the Australian Museum in the 1980s, its collection included a most grotesque assortment of stuffed goats. They had been acquired ninety years earlier through an exchange with an Italian professor of zoology, who received in return an irreplaceable collection of now-extinct marsupials. Strangely, around the time of the exchange, the director, Edwin Pearson Ramsay, was made a Cavaliere of the Crown of Italy, though what services he rendered that country remain obscure. But here, I must emphasise, I rely on my memory. Many specimens have been de-accessed from the collection over the intervening years. I’m not sure that the goats still exist.

  T.F.