A Thing of Blood

by Robert Gott

  Scribe Publications

  A THING OF BLOOD

  Robert Gott was born in the small Queensland town of Maryborough in 1957. He has published many books for children, and is also the creator of the newspaper cartoon The Adventures of Naked Man. He lives in Melbourne. This is his second novel in the William Power series.

  For my parents, Maurene and Kevin. Always.

  Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria, Australia 3056

  Email: info@scribepub.com.au

  First published by Scribe Publications 2005

  Text and illustrations copyright © Robert Gott 2005

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

  Edited by Margot Rosenbloom

  Cover illustrations by Bryce McLoud

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data

  Gott, Robert.

  A thing of blood.

  9781922072139 (e-book)

  1. Murder - Fiction. I. Title.

  A823.4

  www.scribepub.com.au

  This is entirely a work of fiction. All of the main characters are products of the author’s imagination, and they bear no relation to anyone, living or dead. Only the streets they walk down are real.

  Cast of Characters

  William Power

  Brian Power

  Mrs Agnes Power

  Darlene Power

  Peter Gilbert

  Paul Clutterbuck

  Gretel Beech

  George Beech

  Anna Capshaw

  John Trezise

  Ronnie Oakpate

  Mr Crocker

  Mr MacGregor

  Mary Rose Shingle

  Nigella Fowler

  James Fowler

  Mr Fowler

  Mr Wilks

  Detective Radcliff

  Detective Strachan

  Sergeant Wilkinson

  Captain Spangler Brisket

  Contents

  Map of Princes Hill and Parkville

  BOOK ONE

  OneHomeward Bound

  TwoClutterbuck

  ThreeA Fine Mess

  FourPoor Decisions

  FiveBearing Up

  SixBy George

  SevenChurch Going

  EightShining Knights

  BOOK TWO

  NineArmy Intelligence

  TenVery Poor Decisions

  ElevenPieces of Brisket

  TwelveThe Unexpected Visitor

  ThirteenMurder in the Cathedral

  ‘… from face to foot

  He was a thing of blood, whose every motion

  Was timed with dying cries.’

  Coriolanus, Act 2, Sc 2, Vs 110.

  Book One

  Chapter One

  homeward bound

  MY BODY WAS BRUISED. My ego was bruised. I was feeling, generally, a bit on the sensitive side — which is why my impatience with my brother’s prurient questioning was beginning to show.

  ‘Brian,’ I said, my voice providing the thinnest of crusts against the emotional magma that threatened to break the surface. ‘Brian, I am grateful that you travelled all this way to render assistance, but I really don’t wish to discuss what happened in Maryborough any further.’

  When I said these words, we were an hour into the train journey from Maryborough in Queensland to Melbourne, two thousand miles south. In 1942 this journey took four days, and the thought of going over and over the unpleasantness in which I had become embroiled was intolerable.

  ‘All I’m saying, Will,’ Brian said, characteristically indifferent to my mood, ‘all I’m saying is that, even though I was only up here for a few days, it does seem odd that every woman you were involved with ended up dead. It just doesn’t look good. I’d be reviewing my courtship strategies if I were you. This is all I’m saying.’

  I leant forward. Between clenched teeth, and keeping my temper under admirable control, I told my smirking brother that we were now officially at the end of this conversation.

  ‘And you needn’t,’ I added, ‘think that I’m nursing a grieving or broken heart.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t think for a minute that you were grieving or heartbroken,’ he said, and somehow conveyed in this assurance his dubiousness as to my having a heart to grieve or to break.

  ‘I’m going to find the dining car,’ I said, and my tone made it unambiguously clear that I didn’t want Brian to accompany me.

  This first leg of our journey was to Brisbane, and as this was the night train the world outside sped by unseen. In any case the windows were shuttered against the unlikely event that the Japanese air force chose tonight to bomb the Queensland railway. The train was crowded, even though all civilians were required to obtain a permit before travel. We had had no difficulty getting a permit, and neither, apparently, had anybody else. I suppose any journey out of Maryborough would be looked upon as essential. We were travelling in what passed in these parts for style — a first-class sleeper — paid for by Brian who, in not making anything of this, subtly let me know that I was beholden to him. Is there anything more calculated than self-less generosity?

  In the corridor of the second-class sit-up carriage I was told by a man — who smelled so strongly of horse that he must have been a stockman — that there was no dining car between Maryborough and Brisbane, but that one was attached for the Brisbane-to-Sydney leg.

  ‘Broken arm,’ he said, nodding in the direction of my ostentatiously slung left limb.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, in a manner that I hoped would discourage further conversation and indicate that I found his powers of observation unremarkable. He must have been brighter than he looked, or smelled, and didn’t attempt further intercourse. He shrugged, muttered something that may have been ‘arsehole’, and pushed past me.

  There was little to detain me in any of the carriages, so I returned to our first- class compartment.

  ‘This train seems to be a special transport for the dull,’ I said.

  ‘So you won’t stick out like a sore thumb then,’ Brian said snippily.

  ‘A few days away from those children you teach obviously isn’t enough to rescue your wit.’

  He folded his arms.

  ‘At least I’ve got a job, Will. What are you going to do when we get back to Melbourne?’

  ‘I’ll see what’s happening in the theatre, I suppose. That is my profession.’

  ‘There’s not much,’ he said. ‘A couple of plays. You might have to learn how to juggle. Get on the Tivoli circuit.’

  ‘I don’t do vaudeville, as you very well know.’

  ‘Wirth’s Circus is in town.’

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘Well, it’s a branch of show business, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m not in show business, Brian. I’m a professional actor. I might start a new company.’

  ‘They’re looking for munitions workers. There are ads in the paper every day.’

  I didn’t dignify that with a response.

  ‘Oh, by the way,’ Brian said. ‘I forgot to give you this. It was left on the bar at the hotel some time this afternoon.’

  He reached into the poc
ket of his trousers and withdrew a sealed envelope. The name ‘Power’ flowed across its front in beautiful copperplate.

  ‘It’s nice that you eventually got around to giving it to me,’ I said. I opened the envelope and pulled out a folded sheet of unlined paper. It smelled faintly of jasmine, as if it had come from a stationery box. In a script as elegantly and carefully formed as that used to write my name were the words, ‘It’s not over, you bastard. I’m on the train.’

  I stared at it for a moment, willing it to make sense, and passed it to Brian.

  ‘Charming,’ he said. ‘Any idea who it might be from?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said.

  ‘You know,’ Brian said, ‘it’s amazing how you manage to rub people up the wrong way. You have a gift for making enemies. Darlene says that there’s just something about you. You can’t help yourself.’

  ‘The thing about your wife, Brian, if you don’t mind my saying so, is that she is very stupid.’

  ‘The thing about my wife, Will, if you don’t mind my saying so, is that she simply doesn’t like you. That doesn’t make her stupid. It makes her pretty normal. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to use the dunny.’

  He left the compartment and I didn’t feel the slightest regret at having accurately diagnosed Darlene’s stupidity. She was a harpy, with all the social graces of a wildebeest. Now pregnant, we would all be expected to bill and coo over her calf when it sensibly fought itself free from the mire of her womb.

  When Brian returned we didn’t speak further, but took to our bunks in sullen silence. I slept badly that night. The bunk was hideously uncomfortable, and I discovered something I didn’t know about my brother — he babbled incomprehensibly in his sleep. Just after I’d managed to drift off I was awakened by Brian getting up to go to the lavatory. His bladder had always been the size of a peanut. He made no effort to minimise the noise he created. My irritation at his thoughtlessness prevented my return to Nod, but that irritation changed to puzzlement and then worry when he hadn’t returned after half an hour.

  I descended from my bunk, pulled on my trousers and opened the door into the corridor. I saw him immediately, lying on his stomach a few feet from the toilet door. Perhaps reprehensibly, my initial thought was that his termagant of a wife would blame me for whatever had happened to him.

  As I walked towards him he began to move, and by the time I’d reached him he was on all fours and groaning. A small stream of blood was making its way down his neck towards the edge of his singlet.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked as I helped him to his feet. He seemed dazed and didn’t immediately respond. ‘You seem to have hit your head.’

  This simple observation provoked a flurry of anger from him.

  ‘I didn’t hit my head. Someone hit it for me. I was on my way back from the dunny and someone obviously thought that I was you.’

  ‘Well, I think that’s a bit of a leap,’ I said.

  Brian became a bit short with me. Perhaps he was concussed.

  ‘I’m twenty-seven years old and the only injury I’ve ever suffered is a shaving cut. I’m with you for a few days and someone tries to kill me.’

  He shook off my support and we returned to the compartment.

  Brian bled quite extravagantly from the scalp wound but, apart from a headache, he declared that he was unhurt. We agreed that my entry into the corridor must have prevented his assailant from finishing off the job, although I had seen no one.

  ‘I suppose we should report this to the police when we get to Brisbane,’ I said.

  ‘Well, of course we should report it to the bloody police,’ Brian snapped. ‘Someone tried to kill me. That might be an everyday event for you, but I take a pretty dim view of it.’

  Neither of us slept for the rest of the night and we kept a watchful eye on the door. We arrived in Brisbane without further molestation, but with Brian maintaining an uncommunicativeness that bordered on infantile self-indulgence.

  In Brisbane we stayed in a hotel close to the station. There was no train to Sydney until the following morning, so this gave us plenty of time to inform the police about the assault on Brian. They were unhelpful, although their interest was aroused when I gave them a brief outline of recent, pertinent occurrences in Maryborough. News of that investigation had filtered through to them and they were mildly intrigued to meet me.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said the overweight sergeant who was hearing our tale. ‘We heard there was some actor or circus rouseabout — can’t remember which — who got in everyone’s way. So that was you, was it?’

  ‘Yes, it was him,’ Brian replied firmly, thereby denying me the opportunity of correcting this buffoon’s absurd précis of my role. It transpired that the police were rather stretched at that time, what with all the Americans in town. They said that they would make a few inquiries, but that perhaps it was just a bungled robbery.

  ‘After all,’ the copper said, ‘if he’d really wanted to do you in, I don’t think you’d be sitting here telling me about it. But we’ll look into it.’

  This was most unsatisfactory, but it was as much as we were going to get. We returned to the hotel, drank in the bar, had a disgusting meal and kept to our room afterwards. Brian had become more and more jittery about his personal safety as the day had progressed.

  The remainder of the trip to Melbourne was managed without incident. We stuck close together, never leaving our compartment separately. Over the three days the chill between us thawed slightly, but every look Brian gave me was inescapably imbued with his resentment at having been dragged into what he clearly considered was my sordid life. It was with some relief that we alighted at Spencer Street Station in Melbourne. Whoever had mistaken Brian for me had had no further opportunity to catch me unawares.

  In the tram, on our way up to Mother’s house in Princes Hill I was preoccupied by the impending meeting with the frightful and fertile Darlene, and with my mother, whose voracious appetite for gossip would brook no opposition. So I didn’t consider the possibility that whoever had boarded the train in Maryborough with the intention of attacking me might well have disembarked in Melbourne, his intention geographically relocated but otherwise unchanged.

  Chapter Two

  clutterbuck

  OUR MOTHER’S HOUSE in Garton Street sat opposite Princes Park and was rather grand. Unlike many of its neighbours it had not been subdivided into flats during the Depression. My father — who died when I was sixteen (his many absences meant that my memories of him were vague) — was a canny, and I suspect ruthless, banker. He picked up this double-storey Princes Hill mansion for a song, no doubt unsentimentally condemning its previous owners to a life of reduced circumstances in the process. Unlike my father, my mother, Agnes, looms in my childhood with the solidity of an impressive pinnacle. She is a striking woman. I get my looks from her. She is dark, and her hair has remained determinedly black throughout the vicissitudes of marriage and child rearing. It was a small shock to me to discover that its corvine splendour was protected by a proprietary dye.

  ‘Hirohito himself might be perched in Spring Street,’ she once said, ‘but he won’t have the satisfaction of seeing me with grey hair.’

  The day of our arrival was, portentously perhaps, bleak. Rain was falling when we pushed open the front gate and climbed the few steps to the front door. There on the porch, despite the chill, was the gravid Darlene. Even from several feet away she exuded the smug self-assurance of the newly knocked up.

  ‘Brian,’ she said, her voice vibrating with solicitude, ‘are you all right?’, and she hurried to him. I couldn’t help but notice that she’d put on rather a lot of weight since I’d last seen her, and it didn’t suit her. If you don’t have much in the way of a personality, a decent figure is advisable.

  ‘Someone hit me on the head,’ Brian said.

  Darlene uttered a
little squeal of horror and shot me an accusatory glance, as if that someone might have been me.

  ‘He’s fine,’ I said, ‘and so am I, you’ll be relieved to hear.’

  ‘Well, of course I’m relieved, Will. It must have been a dreadful experience for you. Mum and I have been just sick with worry.’

  Among the vast catalogue of Darlene’s unattractive features was her insistence on calling our mother ‘Mum’, as if marriage to my brother somehow entitled her to an extra parent. She leaned down and picked up my suitcase. This was an unnecessary gesture designed to elicit Brian’s immediate intervention, and expressions of concern for her welfare and that of her unborn child. It was like observing the rebonding ritual of the albatross. In a miracle of transference I was, fantastically, being held responsible for endangering Darlene’s health.

  My mother was upstairs in her study, writing to my brother Fulton. Her correspondence with him was regular — much more regular than her correspondence with me. He was the youngest, after all, and being stationed in Darwin he was at far greater risk than I had been in Maryborough. He was also more assiduous in replying than I’d ever been over the course of my travels. Mother heard us come in and called from the top of the stairs.

  ‘Is that you, Brian?’ And with the awful thud of an afterthought, she added, ‘And Will?’

  ‘Brian was attacked,’ Darlene called.

  Mother gave an exclamation of fright and began her descent. Although I hadn’t seen her in over a year, she’d somehow contrived to look younger than when I’d left to take my eponymous acting company to Queensland. She was tailored from head to foot, obviously diverting a considerable amount of her generous annuity into the coffers of a Collins Street seamstress. She never bought anything off the rack. It was a short step, she would say later, when the expression became current, from prêt à porter to prêt à mourir. With the example of our mother before him, how could Brian have settled for the drab fecundity of Darlene?

  ‘I’m fine,’ Brian said before Mother reached him. ‘Just a blow on the head. Someone thought I was Will.’