A Thing of Blood

by Robert Gott

  ‘Don’t make the mistake of thinking that she’s waiting for someone to rescue her,’ he said. ‘That’s sentimental tosh. She knows exactly what she’s doing, and it suits her to do it.’

  I had to agree that there was nothing reticent about Gretel’s stage persona.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he said. ‘I’m bored sitting here.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said.

  In the hallway he called up the stairs to Gretel.

  ‘Will and I are going out.’

  ‘OK,’ she called back.

  ‘Do you want us to come back, or will we meet you there?’

  She turned on the tap and called over its noise, ‘I’ll meet you there. I’m on at twelve-thirty.’

  In the street outside, the weird and chilling yawn of a lion reached us from nearby Melbourne Zoo. We walked aimlessly for a while, and Clutterbuck sang to himself a few bars of ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition’.

  ‘I wouldn’t have picked you as a propaganda peddler’, I said.

  ‘That’s Nigella’s influence. She works for that crowd. Have you seen that hideous short that’s on before every film?’

  He raised his voice a few octaves and minced in imitation of a woman: ‘I found the WAAF in many important respects just as vital as the RAAF. There’s so much a girl learns in the air force. It’s given me a new interest in life. An entirely different outlook, and has supplied the answer to a question. It’s a haunting question, you know.’ He paused dramatically. ‘Are you in a war job? Are you?’

  He snorted.

  ‘That’s one Nigella had a hand in. Frightful, isn’t it? Needless to say I told her I loved it, and, if it comes up in conversation tomorrow, don’t be surprised if I dragoon you into expressing admiration for it, too.’

  ‘But I haven’t seen it.’

  ‘What you just saw is better than the original, so that should be enough to carry any expressions of awe you are required to make.’

  We slowly wended our way towards Ma Maguire’s, and Clutterbuck began asking questions about my background. I told him as much as I thought he needed to know. As we crossed Princes Park he asked me to recite something from Shakespeare. Confident of my skill, I did not demur, but produced a sound, if subdued, reading of a passage from The Tempest. I threw in a few lines of Caliban’s, just to demonstrate my range. He seemed genuinely impressed, which was pleasing, and he nodded and said, ‘Yes’ and ‘Yes’ again as if to reinforce that his affirmation was well considered.

  We walked on in silence after that, until we reached Ma Maguire’s. The entrance to this establishment was through a lane at the rear, and as soon as the door was pushed open the heat and noise that hit us indicated a crowded house. Gretel would have a large audience for her late performance, and from the raucous sounds coming from deep in the house, most of them were already drunk.

  Clutterbuck left me to my own devices, and I was soon approached by a woman who said she was on her way to the dunny outside. She paused long enough to observe that she thought I looked like ‘somebody.’

  ‘Don’t know who,’ she said, ‘but somebody in the movies.’

  She meant, of course, Tyrone Power, to whom I bore more than a passing resemblance. This made the coincidence of our surnames remarkable.

  ‘People say Tyrone Power,’ I said.

  She was quite drunk, and slurred, ‘No. Not someone good looking. But someone in the movies. Definitely.’ She stumbled away towards her date with a toilet bowl.

  Twelve-thirty came and went, and when Gretel still hadn’t arrived at one-thirty Clutterbuck said that she must have fallen asleep, and that we should go and wake her up. There was still time for her to perform. There would be a crowd at Ma Maguire’s until the early morning.

  We half-walked, half-ran back to Clutterbuck’s house. Inside it was dark and quiet, so I assumed Gretel must indeed have fallen asleep. A few moments after our arrival, Clutterbuck came out of his bedroom and said that Gretel wasn’t there. He shrugged.

  ‘Maybe she just decided she had better things to do. She’s not the most reliable girl in the world. They’ll be pissed off at Maguire’s, but all she’ll have to do is expose her breasts to the manager, and maybe give him a feel, and she’ll be sweet. I’m turning in. Goodnight.’

  He produced an elaborate yawn and closed his bedroom door.

  In my bedroom I felt obliged to fold my clothes neatly and not just toss them in a heap. Knowing that there was no one else in the house, there was no reason to wrap a towel around my waist in order to walk to the bathroom next door. I switched on the dim light and saw in its pale, yellow glow that Gretel Beech was lying on her back in the bathtub, her face submerged beneath the water, her eyes open and glassy. Simply because I didn’t know what else to do, and perhaps because I thought she might sit up at any moment and hoot with laughter at the fright she’d given me, I approached the tub and put my hand in the water. It was cold. I forced myself to look into Gretel’s face, and I saw, with sickening dread, that there was a tie wrapped so tightly around her throat that it bit deeply into her skin. I only owned one tie, and this was unmistakably it.

  I stood back from the bath and was pleased to discover that I hadn’t descended into an irrational panic. I was clear-headed and relatively calm. If the bath water was anything to go by, Gretel Beech had been dead for quite a while, which meant that whoever had strangled her had done so while Paul Clutterbuck and I had been waiting for her at Maguire’s.

  The first thing that I had to do was to tell Clutterbuck that his girlfriend had been murdered in his own house. I didn’t expect him to take her death hard. He had demonstrated by his general behaviour that hysterical displays of grief were probably outside his emotional range, but I didn’t know exactly how he would react. I put on a pair of trousers and knocked on his bedroom door.

  ‘Come in,’ he called.

  He was in bed, and sounded as if he had been on the brink of falling asleep. I could think of no subtle way to inform him of the horror that was lying in my bath.

  ‘Gretel has been murdered,’ I said, and wished that there might perhaps have been a gentler way of saying it. He sat up in bed and was silent, probably considering whether what he had heard was real or part of a vivid dream. He leaned across and switched on a lamp.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Gretel Beech’s body is lying in my bathtub. I think she’s been strangled.’

  Clutterbuck slowly got out of bed. I couldn’t tell what effect my words had had on him. He seemed calm, but his stillness might have been shock. Without speaking, he pushed past me and went into my bathroom. When he emerged his face was unreadably impassive.

  ‘Did you kill her?’ he asked.

  I was so stunned by this question that I gasped.

  ‘Of course not. She’s been dead for hours. You can see that. Someone must have done it while we were at Maguire’s.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m not thinking clearly. I need a drink.’

  Downstairs, Clutterbuck poured each of us an enormous whisky.

  ‘We should call the police,’ I said.

  ‘Should we?’

  He looked at me over the top of his glass. There was a wariness in his eyes, as if he was gauging my reaction to this challenge to common sense.

  ‘Gretel’s been murdered,’ I said quietly. ‘We don’t have any choice.’

  ‘It’s, what, two in the morning. Who’d be on duty at this hour?’

  It wasn’t really a question, but more like an expression of disbelief that there were people in the world who had organised their lives so poorly that they could be required to work at uncivilised times. I knew exactly who would be on duty. It would be Sergeant Wilkinson, and he would doubtless be surprised to find me at two different crime scenes within the short space of twenty-four h
ours. Despite the awful conclusions such a ghastly coincidence must provoke, there was no question but that we should contact the police, and I told Clutterbuck this.

  ‘No,’ he said sharply. ‘Let me think, let me think.’

  ‘There’s nothing to think about. There’s the body upstairs, of a girl you were having some kind of a relationship with.’

  ‘That’s precisely the problem.’ His voice was now edgy. ‘She can’t be found here. The Fowlers can’t know about her. Nigella mustn’t find out about her.’

  ‘You’re not serious,’ I said, feeling quite certain that he was very serious indeed.

  ‘This is a set-up,’ he said suddenly. ‘This is to stop me marrying Nigella Fowler.’

  ‘Who would want to do that? And why?’ I asked.

  Clutterbuck put his drink down and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

  ‘Will, you’ve known me for two days. You have no idea how complicated my life is. I can think of half-a-dozen people who would stop at nothing to destroy me. Murdering some tart, and leaving her body where it causes the greatest inconvenience, would be no problem at all. And maybe it isn’t even about the Fowlers, but it sure as hell is about destroying me. If the coppers get a hold of this, how would you rate my chances of joining the Melbourne Club?’

  He began to work himself up into an indignant fury.

  ‘Those pricks are not going to get away with this. It’s going to take more than a trollop’s corpse to shut me down.’

  ‘Paul,’ I said, ‘who are you talking about? Who are these people?’

  He looked at me squarely.

  ‘Communists. My former wife. A jealous husband. I don’t know. Take your pick.’

  ‘But you have an alibi. You weren’t here when she was killed. Dozens of people can attest to that, and Gretel was alive when we left the house. I can attest to that.’

  ‘I don’t know how much you’ve had to do with the coppers, Will, but they’ll find out we left Maguire’s with Gretel and came back without her. Your word won’t be worth shit to them. In fact, when they find out it’s your bathtub she’s in, they might be even more interested in you than in me.’

  ‘That tie around her neck is mine,’ I said flatly.

  Clutterbuck said nothing for a moment.

  ‘How do I know she’s been dead for hours and not minutes?’ he asked.

  I knew what he was doing. He was trying to put me in the uncomfortable position of having to defend myself against an absurd, but devastating, allegation. And he succeeded. I couldn’t hold back the awkward bleating of my innocence, and it sounded desperate and unconvincing. He stopped me before I’d gone very far.

  ‘Listen, Will. I know you didn’t do this. I can’t explain why she was strangled with your tie and dumped in your bath. I imagine the half-wit who did it just got it all wrong. But you’ve got to admit, it looks bad for both of us.’

  There was no disputing this.

  ‘There is a way out,’ he said.

  I began to feel ill.

  ‘You’re a PI. You could find out who did this and present the information to the police at the right time. What do a couple of days matter? No one’s going to miss Gretel for a while. What have we got to lose?’

  ‘This is murder, Paul. Somebody has to be told that Gretel Beech is dead.’

  ‘It doesn’t make any difference to her whether it’s today, or tomorrow or the next day. I can’t afford to have the police crawling all over my house. Christ! The Fowlers are coming for afternoon tea.’

  ‘Paul, tea with the Fowlers is not more important than Gretel’s death.’

  ‘Yes it is, Will,’ he said fiercely. ‘Yes it is! All we’re talking about here is doing the coppers’ work for them. I’m not saying we don’t report it. I’m saying we don’t report it yet. That’s all. You’re a PI, for Christ’s sake. Why should the police get the credit here? You can fix this. And I’ll pay you.’

  This last was thrown casually into the mix. I wasn’t seduced by his flattering confidence in my untried abilities, but I began, God help me, to see the situation from his point of view. What, after all, was wrong with paying Gretel the compliment of finding out who had killed her?

  ‘If we don’t have these people, or the person, in two days’ time,’ I said, ‘do you agree that you’ll come with me to the police?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said hurriedly. ‘Of course I do. But we will find them.’

  ‘All right then,’ I said.

  Clutterbuck looked so relieved I thought he might embrace me.

  ‘We’ll have to move the body,’ he said.

  I hadn’t considered this, and his words fell on my ears like blows. I was suddenly dizzy, and could do nothing to prevent myself from falling forward in a faint. I woke on the floor, with whisky running down my chest and with Clutterbuck looking down at me — the expression on his face must have been concern, but my swoon distorted it so that it resembled laughter.

  Chapter Four

  bearing up

  CLUTTERBUCK LAID A SHEET on the floor beside the bath, and we lifted Gretel’s naked body onto it. All my sensibilities were outraged by what we were doing. It wasn’t just irregular. It was illegal, immoral, imperilling, and ill-conceived. And yet … And yet, I went along with it and carried Gretel’s body downstairs and into the back garden, at the bottom of which sat a small garage. Until Clutterbuck opened the garage door, I hadn’t known that he owned a car — a Studebaker that was at least ten years old, but looked well maintained. We manoeuvred the corpse into the back seat. Clutterbuck took a shovel from the corner of the garage and laid it across Gretel’s body.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘We don’t want the coppers to find the body until you’ve sorted out who did this.’

  ‘Then what? We can’t retrieve it and plonk it back in the house.’

  ‘It’s too late to worry about that now.’

  Clutterbuck started the engine and pulled out into the lane behind his house.

  ‘Where’s the best place to hide a body, Will?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘If you wanted to hide a specific marble, where would you put it?’

  ‘This isn’t a parlour game, Paul.’

  ‘Where would you hide the marble, Will?’

  Giving him what he wanted I stated the obvious. ‘In a bag of marbles.’

  ‘Exactly, so I hope you’re not afraid of goblins or ghouls.’

  Clutterbuck stopped his car outside the back entrance to the Melbourne cemetery, in MacPherson Street. No light seeped from the edges of the blackouts in the houses that faced the perimeter. This was hardly surprising, given the hour. The gate was shut and locked, presumably to protect the dead from the living and not the other way around. The fence wasn’t too difficult to negotiate, although heaving eight stone of uncooperative flesh over it took some ingenuity, especially with the handicap of my broken arm. I managed it by imagining that my actions were part of a performance — that I was Hamlet, lugging ‘the guts into the neighbour room’ and that once accomplished the curtain would fall and the ‘guts’ would spring to life to be lugged another day.

  Once inside the cemetery, our task, Clutterbuck said, was to find a recently dug grave, preferably one that had been excavated and filled that very afternoon with the earth still loose in preparation for the pounding down and the stonemason’s craft. To give Clutterbuck his due, I had to acknowledge that as a place to conceal a corpse a cemetery was an inspired choice. We were obliged to leave the body unattended while we sought out a new grave. It took us twenty minutes, but a tarpaulin stretched over a rising in the ground indicated that there had indeed been a burial there that day. We collected Gretel Beech and began to dig into the recently turned earth. It was surprisingly easy, and in a very short time
we’d made a depression sufficient to accommodate the body. In the great tradition of such matters, it was a shallow grave; neither one of us wishing to dig to the depth of the already buried coffin. When we’d finished and remounded the soil and replaced the tarpaulin, the scene looked much as we had found it. Later, in my bedroom, I remembered that I hadn’t removed my tie from around Gretel’s neck. That it was my tie, there could be no doubt — I had sewn my name onto its back to prevent my losing it when travelling.

  Despite not having been able to sleep until almost 5.00 a.m., I was awake and dressed at eight. I was surprised that Clutterbuck too was awake and I found him in the kitchen, making coffee. On the bench there was a tin of the cream he had purchased from the American PX.

  ‘Try it,’ he said. ‘You’ll like it.’

  ‘Where do we go from here?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re the PI, Will. You do realise that there’s every chance now that Gretel’s body will never be found, and that means that if you don’t find her murderer, he’ll get away with it.’

  ‘We’re going to the police in two days, right?’

  Clutterbuck shrugged.

  ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now that I think about it, unless you hand over the culprit the police are going to respond poorly to an unauthorised burial. No. This is entirely in your hands, and I have no doubt, Will that you can protect us both — and we both need protecting. I’m placing my trust in you.’

  In the few seconds it took for Clutterbuck to speak these words, my emotions lurched from furious resentment to reluctant acceptance, and settled on that vaguely satisfying sensation that expressions of trust arouse in me. The situation in which Clutterbuck and I found ourselves was a long way from the ordinary, so I had to expect that the rules and regulations that govern the ordinary would be suspended. I drank Clutterbuck’s coffee with Clutterbuck’s cream in it and I knew that from that point on I stood apart from legislated behaviour. It was strangely liberating and frightening in equal measure.

  ‘You’re right to trust me, Paul. I’ll find who killed Gretel.’