The Phar Lap Mystery

by Sophie Masson

  ‘Good heavens, Dad!’

  ‘I’ll say,’ said my father happily. ‘Quite a case, eh?’

  ‘But who—who’s the client? Is it Phar Lap’s owner?’

  ‘No. Phar Lap has two owners—an American businessman called David J. Davis and the horse’s trainer, Harry Telford—but Mr Kane assured me they have nothing to do with this job. And it’s not anyone connected to the police. No, he said that his client, who wishes to remain anonymous, is just one of Phar Lap’s greatest fans, and is very worried about the fact the dastardly attempt on the horse’s life was never solved. The client smells a rat, in fact, thinks the case was dropped too quickly and underworld links were not properly investigated. The police are not interested in taking it further and suggested it was best to drop the whole subject. The client wants a discreet inquiry. They heard I’d had very good results in cases linked to the underworld in the past. So there you go.’

  ‘Oh! Dad! This is so exciting!’

  ‘Intriguing, yes. But dangerous too. The Melbourne underworld might not be quite as vicious as our Sydney razor gangs, but they’re still pretty nasty. Mind you, although Mr Fleming didn’t like me to take on cases like that, I do know my way around a little and I have one or two useful informers, so I wasn’t too worried about that angle.’

  ‘So what did you say?’

  ‘Well, that I was interested but that I wasn’t much of a horse or racing-world expert. But Mr Kane said that didn’t matter, in fact it was all to the good. His client said they did not want an insider, but a fresh eye looking at the evidence in Melbourne. He told me the terms and fee, which were more than generous, like I said—and asked me to say yes or no there and then …’ He smiled. ‘Well, what could I say?’

  ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’

  He threw back his head and laughed. ‘That’s exactly what I said, Sal, though maybe with a bit more decorum. He gave me some papers to sign and an advance on expenses, and these clippings, and a few names to start with.’ He looked at me. ‘We’re leaving tomorrow. I’ve already booked the train tickets. So what do you say?’

  ‘Oh, Dad!’ I said, flying to him and throwing my arms around his neck. ‘I can’t wait!’

  I sure can’t. It’s going to be hard to sleep tonight, but I have to try. Dad let me have one of the clippings about the shooting to stick in here (he’s got heaps of different ones), so I’ll paste it in and then I really have to hit the sack, as Dad would say!

  April 17

  We arrived in Melbourne last night very late, and I was much too tired to write anything down. Mr Kane had organised a room in a hotel not far from the station for us, but this morning Dad said we had to find something more permanent and less costly, because though he’s getting good expenses, he would rather save as much of them as he can.

  So we trudged around a few places this morning and finally settled on a small, nice and cheap boarding-house in Carlton. The landlord, Mr Bellini, is Italian, and he and his wife love children, though they haven’t got any themselves. Their boarding-house, which is called Sorrento after the place Mr Bellini comes from, caters especially for families. They only have a few rooms, and at the moment there are two other families staying in Sorrento apart from us. The Quinn family, who only have one little baby, were away visiting relatives in Sydney for a few days, but we met the Fox family tonight at dinner. They are a funny lot. Mrs Fox is a real chatterbox and didn’t stop talking, while Mr Fox mostly kept himself to himself. He’s a printer, but he’s been in and out of work for more than a year and they only survive because his wife is clever with her needle and takes in heaps of sewing and mending and things like that. They have two children, a girl of about four called Ruby and a boy called Billy who’s about twelve. Ruby is very sweet, with golden curly hair and blue eyes, She hardly talks at all, like her dad, but she smiles more than him. You can tell she’s the apple of her parents’ eyes. Billy is small and skinny with freckles and red hair. He looks rather like Ginger Meggs in that comic book I’ve got, The Adventures of Ginger Meggs, and he’s a smart-aleck like Ginger too. You can tell he gets into trouble a lot, and that he’s not the apple! It’s true he’s pretty annoying, he’s one of those people who just have to butt in and have the last word, even when they know it’s going to get them into trouble. Mrs Bennett would say I’m that sort of person too, but I’m not really. I do know when it’s better to keep your mouth shut!

  Talking of keeping your mouth shut, Dad had said to me yesterday that it was best we didn’t talk to too many people about just what we were doing in Melbourne. At least, not about the investigation bit. But because he said it would be too hard to hide everything, he’s decided on something close to the truth. So he told the Bellinis and the Foxes that he was a Sydney sports journalist coming to Melbourne to write about Phar Lap and Victorian racing generally. That of course led the conversation on to what had happened last year, and everyone had their theory about it.

  Mr Bellini said in his opinion it was American gangsters, probably the Italian-American Mafia that big gangsters like Al ‘Scarface’ Capone belong to. After all, one of Phar Lap’s owners was American, and who’s to know if he hasn’t crossed bad people there and they want revenge? Mr Bellini lived in the States for a while after leaving Italy and before coming to Australia, so he said he knows how bad those people are, they are tigers compared to the pussy-cats here!

  Mrs Bellini snorted and said, ‘Alfie, that’s just silly, just because Mr Davis is American doesn’t mean he’s met Al Capone personally! Besides, he’s lived in Australia for years and years.’ She said it was no good blaming the attack on the Yanks when we had home-grown villains right here, and in her opinion every bit as bad. ‘Think of all those shootings and stabbings we keep hearing about, and that awful gangster Squizzy Taylor, he was almost as bad as that Scarface, and—’

  ‘But that one, he’s been dead four years now, woman,’ said Mr Bellini crossly. ‘You can’t blame him for the Phar Lap shooting.’

  ‘No, but there are others,’ said Mrs Bellini stubbornly, ‘in league with crooked bookmakers, that I don’t doubt.’

  Mrs Fox put in quickly that she’d read the attack might have been carried out by a doping ring that had been responsible for nobbling other horses recently. Then Mr Fox came out of morose silence to say, with a challenging look at Dad, that all this gangster talk was rot, he’d heard down at the pub one day that newspapermen could be responsible, and that they’d done it as a prank.

  Mrs Fox said, ‘Nonsense, Rob, you don’t want to credit what you hear down at the pub.’

  ‘You forget, love,’ he snapped, ‘in my work, I’ve seen what them journos are like. Wouldn’t put it past them to pull a stunt like that and try to create the news. And the fellow that shot at Phar Lap, he obviously couldn’t hit a barn door with a banjo. Typical of them scribbling lot, that’d be.’

  Mr Bellini said, exasperated, that they did not shoot straight cos they meant just to scare the horse, it was a warning only, not an assassination.

  Mrs Bellini jumped in then and said that everyone loves Phar Lap, nobody in their right mind would want to do a thing like that as a joke, even if they didn’t intend to hurt him. Horses are flighty and poor Phar Lap could have done himself an injury just from sheer panic. ‘And if the police found it was just a newspaper prank, why wouldn’t they have charged the people responsible? After all, you can hardly have newspapers running around doing dangerous things like discharging a gun in a public street!’

  Mr Fox shrugged and said, ‘Maybe they didn’t know exactly who it was, but they put the hard word on all the newspapers and got them to pull their horns in. Anyway, no other attempt was made on the horse after that, so it proves the point, doesn’t it?’

  ‘But Phar Lap had been spirited away,’ said Dad quickly, ‘and nobody knew where he was, isn’t that right?’

  Everyone nodded and Mr Fox said that nobody was even sure Phar Lap would run in the Cup till that very day. ‘Yes, you remember,’ said Mrs Fox ex
citedly, ‘he was really late, we thought he wasn’t coming. We were all pressed up against the enclosure and all the horses were saddled up and parading and still he hadn’t come.’

  ‘But then he did,’ said Billy, interrupting, ‘and everyone screamed and shouted as if he was a film star or the King and not just a bleeding horse.’ Well that united his mum and dad against him, they told him to shut up and stop swearing and go to his room at once if he couldn’t be polite, and what would young Sally here think of him?

  Young Sally here went bright red as Billy shot her a glare and marched off. Mr Fox said that by jeez one day he’d have to give that boy the strapping of his life. Mrs Fox said, ‘Rob, you know I don’t hold with that, but he’s a trial and no mistake.’ The Bellinis looked sad. Mrs Bellini murmured that she was sure Billy had a lot of good in him, he was just at an awkward age.

  ‘He’s been there too bloody long then,’ growled Mr Fox. I thought how funny it was that he could send Billy off for swearing but there he was doing the same thing and nobody said anything.

  Anyway, after that the subject was quickly changed by Mrs Bellini, who asked Dad what school I was going to go to. To my relief Dad said, ‘Oh no, we’re not here permanently, just for a short while. Sal can have a little holiday. Anyway, she’s such a clever little thing, my girl,’ he went on, making me go red. ‘Already runs rings around her teachers. I don’t suppose a little break would do her any harm at all.’

  Honestly, dads can be so embarrassing sometimes!

  April 18

  I know why Mr Fox is so hard on Billy. Mrs Bellini told us this morning when we were having breakfast (the Foxes weren’t down yet). Billy isn’t Mr Fox’s real son, but his stepson. Mrs Fox was married before, but her first husband vamoosed to America when Billy was born, and after a while he wrote to say he was never coming back and she divorced him. He’s never returned and never even bothered to try to see Billy. Anyway, she met Mr Fox three years later and married him. Ruby is their child. Mrs Bellini feels sorry for Billy, but she says he’s not an easy child to love at the best of times. ‘At least Rob Fox doesn’t lay a finger on him. You have to hand it to Pearl Fox, she wouldn’t ever let him do such a thing, and he knows it. His bark’s worse than his bite, poor soul, especially since he lost his job.’

  Well, I don’t think it’s fair. Maybe Billy’s bark is worse than his bite too, but no-one thinks of that. I can’t say I really took to him, but it makes me feel angry that people excuse Mr Fox and not poor Billy. And besides, why should being his stepfather and not his real father give Mr Fox an excuse to treat Billy badly? Mr Walters is Lizzie’s step-dad and he couldn’t be nicer or love her more. In fact everyone forgets he’s not her real father. I think Mr Fox is just a miserable and unjust old coot and that’s all there is to it.

  I said that to Dad later and he smiled sadly and ruffled my hair and said, ‘Sal, the world and people are very clear when you’re young. I only wish they could stay as clear later.’ I don’t quite understand what he meant, but I did see he didn’t want to talk about the subject any more. I think it upsets him too and he doesn’t want to think about things like that. He has a job to concentrate on.

  We started on that today—yes, Dad is taking me around with him, at least in these first stages, he said, where it’s not dangerous. We went to the offices of the Melbourne Herald and Dad talked to a couple of the reporters there (still pretending to be a newspaperman from Sydney, but changing his name slightly to Field rather than Fielding, just in case). They dug around in their files and came up with the address of the newspaper delivery boy, Ron Taylor, who’d been first on the scene of the shooting after the attack, and also a man called Jim Creed who wrote reports of race meetings and track work for the papers, and who’d seen the Studebaker parked in the street some time before Woodcock and Phar Lap came on the scene. Both of them had talked to the police at the time.

  One of the reporters said, ‘Jeez, mate, what are you bringing all that stuff up again, it’s all done and dusted. Why waste shoe leather? Best just read the reports we wrote and cobble bits together, eh, just like the Sydney papers always do. Surely even you sleepy New Zealanders know that!’ (Dad still has a faint New Zealand accent though he came out to Australia when he was 17, a long time ago!) His mate laughed but Dad didn’t rise to the bait, he just thanked them and we went out.

  But we didn’t go to the addresses we’d been given. Dad said both Taylor and Creed would be unlikely to be home at that time of the day, he’d call round on them in the evening. Instead we went to the offices of the Argus, and then the Age, and then the Sun. In each place Dad asked the same sorts of questions as at the Herald, and was shown files of clippings and notes, and told pretty much the same things. One reporter at the Sun asked suspiciously why a Johnny-come-lately from Sydney was stirring the whole thing up again, but otherwise they all seemed to accept his story at face value, or so Dad said.

  It was interesting at first being in those big noisy places with typewriters clattering and people shouting, but I soon got bored and tired and I was very glad when Dad said at about three o’clock that enough was enough for today and we would catch the tram to St Kilda to walk by the water, did I fancy that? You can bet I said yes! It was lovely there, with the sun shining and the water sparkling and the sound of the funfair. Dad bought us both ice-creams and we walked along the pier and watched the crowds and had a lovely time.

  We got back to Sorrento in time for dinner—a really delicious shepherd’s pie. Mrs Bellini is a good cook, she says she has to be because Mr Bellini as an Italian would never excuse bad food! Luckily the Foxes were out somewhere so it was just us and the Bellinis, and very cosy. After dinner Dad said he was going out to see the two witnesses, on his own. Of course he said it was too late for me to come and I made a bit of a protest, but just for the look of it. Actually I feel really, really tired from all that walking we did today, and I didn’t mind so much staying with the Bellinis in their sitting-room for a while, listening to some records of Italian songs (they are nice but old-fashioned, not like the swing records Miss O’Brien has), before heading back up to my room.

  April 20

  Dad’s visit to the newsboy and the track writer turned out just like those reporters had said. They didn’t have anything really to add beyond what they’d told the police already and what had been in the papers. Mr Creed had seen the car early that morning when he was on his way, on foot, to the racecourse to write about that day’s track work. It had been parked near the picture theatre, he said, and he’d thought it odd that it was waiting there at that time in the morning. So he’d taken down the front numberplate as he passed it. As he walked past, the men inside raised newspapers to cover their faces, just as they did with Tommy Woodcock later, so he hadn’t been able to see them properly.

  As to Ron Taylor, he had arrived just after the man in the back of the car had shot at Phar Lap, and he only got a glimpse of the car as it hurtled past him and sped away. It had all happened too quickly to get a proper look at anyone, he said.

  Dad is interested in the numberplates. It seems to him the most promising trail to follow. Even though the numbers had been crudely lettered on, they were not fakes—at least, the numbers were real. Jim Creed told him the police had said the numbers belonged to cars that had been scrapped by their previous owners and had their registrations cancelled: one a few months before the shooting, the other five years before. The police had checked out the previous owners but found no connection at all, so the numberplate clue had been left to one side and the matter not pursued.

  But Dad thinks it’s strange that the shooters should have used not just random numbers of cars they might have seen in the street, but official numbers that had been cancelled quite some time ago. How would they have got hold of them? So that’s the lead he’s going to follow up next.

  Not much happened otherwise. We visited the offices of the Melbourne Truth, and a few smaller newspapers, and went through the same thing again. Dad wrote
a letter to Mr Telford to ask if we can see Tommy Woodcock in person and talk to him about the shooting. At the moment Mr Woodcock is looking after Phar Lap at a stud farm near Bacchus Marsh, which is west of Melbourne. The horse is being what they call spelled (which means he’s resting). Dad didn’t spin Mr Telford the Sydney newspaper story, but told him the truth, and gave him Mr Kane’s details so the story could be checked. He said it was better that way, as Mr Telford was known not to like the press, and was devoted to the welfare of his phenomenal horse. He’d be pleased to know someone hadn’t given up on finding out the truth! I can’t wait for Mr Telford to reply, I hope so much he says yes! Then not only would we see Mr Woodcock, but much better still, we might even get to meet Phar Lap himself—and not just glimpse him like we did last year at Randwick!

  Billy was sent to his room again at dinnertime for being cheeky, missing out on dessert—Mrs Bellini’s lovely brown sugar flummery. I felt sorry for him, but really he is his own worst enemy, as Miss O’Brien would say.

  April 22

  Dad has been following up the numberplate lead to see who might have had access to the numbers. Motor-car numbers are allocated and cancelled by the roads and traffic section of the police, so that’s one possibility: someone working in that section might have passed on the numbers that were in the motor registry records. Another is the junkyards where cars are scrapped. Another is people who knew the numbers from before, because they knew the cars’ owners. But that isn’t very likely, because you’d have to remember the number from a fair way back, five years in the case of one car. So the first two possibilities are the most likely. Dad’s following up the junkyards and used-motor dealers first, because he says these are sometimes connected to criminals—they have been known to supply cars for robberies and also disguise cars that have been stolen and so on. So he’s working on the idea that the organiser of the attempts on Phar Lap had got both the Studebaker and the scrapped numbers from someone in the used trade.