‘Someone’ll recognise him,’ said Simmons to Franklin, and there was no doubt in his mind.
Then Simmons sat back in his chair, knowing full well that the best part of his morning—a phone call with Ping Williams—had already concluded, and that the rest of the day would be downhill from there.
He had called Ping as a courtesy—or so he liked to consider it—to tell her of the Somerton Man, to alert her to the striking similarities between the two cases, to advise her of the consequences of this development.
‘What are those consequences?’ whispered Ping.
‘Well, we’ve notified homicide. Not that we necessarily think it’s a homicide—but obviously we have to keep that door open. I’ve had to take it up the chain a bit—I’ve been on a few calls this morning. It just makes it a bit more interesting for everyone, doesn’t it?’ said Simmons.
‘Why, yes.’ Ping agreed that it did. ‘Absolutely mystifying’ was how she described it, and Simmons loved it most when she said: ‘I would love to get hold of the original post-mortem reports on this Somerton Man. Would you be able to provide me with those, Detective?’
‘Leave it with me,’ he said, and he got off the phone rather hurriedly, with a discreet sense of embarrassment, a feeling which only settled when he went over—again—the list he’d compiled of similarities between the Somerton Man and the Cedar Valley Man. It was a list that spread over two columns, with a few haphazard arrows going here and there, connecting lines darting off in several directions, some words circled in red pen.
On another sheet, he had written a list of the things that were different. There were fewer things on this list—location, content of the note in the fob pocket, absence of an unclaimed suitcase with the name ‘T. Keane’ in it—and the most exciting thing, as far as Simmons was concerned, written in his own infantile handwriting: Extra (third) comb. Next to the list on his desk, he had placed a photocopy of the comb itself, which showed the hallmarks on the silver: the banana and the skull, as Franklin saw it; or the bird and the house, as Simmons saw it; and the number 935.
Simmons pored over the papers—thinking, thinking—until the phone rang—a call from his mate in Sydney with the contact who knew a thing or two about silver hallmarks.
‘Mate,’ said Simmons, ‘give me news.’
Thankfully, Simmons’s mate—Bob Watts—had news. Bob Watts had tracked down his contact: an older man who’d worked for several auction houses and was now an antique dealer. He had a fine eye for value, and a particular interest in jewellery and watches.
‘What about combs?’ asked Simmons.
‘If it’s gold or silver, he knows it,’ said Bob, and he continued.
Most of the silverware this dealer handled was of British, Scottish or Irish origin, and every country had its own particular hallmarks, depending on the vintage and city. Most makers had their mark, too, and there were any number of assay offices or import marks, plus numbers or letters that indicated the fineness of the silver. It turned out the area of hallmarks was far more complicated than Simmons had imagined, but in the case of this particular silver comb, there was at least some simplicity.
The number—935—was the fineness mark. It was the number of parts of pure silver of one thousand possible parts. That meant this comb was 93.5 per cent silver, which was not a bad number at all, since anything above 925 is considered sterling.
‘So it’s valuable?’ asked Simmons.
‘Relatively,’ said Bob. ‘As far as combs go.’
‘And what about the, uh, other marks?’ asked Simmons, unsure of what they were.
Yes, well. Of course, it could be difficult to make out a hallmark when they were stamped so small, and every mark came out a little different, depending on various conditions, but the two little pictures on the handle of the comb were not a banana and a skull, and they were not a flying bird and a house either.
They were a crescent moon and a crown.
‘A crown,’ said Simmons, picking up the clear bag with the comb in it, and squinting at the little stamp. He had thought it was a house, or a pentagon with a smudge in it. But yes, as he looked again, he could see it was indeed a crown.
‘That means it’s German,’ said Bob Watts. ‘There’s different stamps for different countries and cities. The British ones are all anchors and lions, the Britannia Standard, all that stuff. But my guy says the moon and the crown means it’s German. He reckons early twentieth century, and it was probably part of a set, with brushes and a mirror and that kind of thing.’
Simmons could half hear the electronic musings of the fax machine dialling as Bob made a few more comments about the quality of German silver, the introduction of a national hallmarking system, and the fact that his mate, the antique dealer, would be interested to find the rest of the set.
Simmons, nodding and holding the bag with the comb, wound up the conversation and thanked Bob Watts.
Then he wrote German in blue pen on the photocopy of the crown, and made some more notes on his list.
He held up the bag again, lifting it between his thumb and forefinger, as if the comb would somehow become transparent to the light and reveal its secrets. It did not. But Simmons sure did spend a good while studying the squished stamps of a moon and a crown on this relatively valuable, sterling silver, German-made, early twentieth-century comb as it glinted in the hot light of day.
50
Benny Miller walked quickly back to Wiyanga Crescent, past the low-slung houses, the flowering trees, and up the steps to the door of the green cottage.
It had occurred to her midway through her walk what she wanted to do next, and she let herself into the house and went straight down the hallway, through the kitchen to the back doors. She unlatched them and stood for a moment, staring at the slanted shed. Then she went along the mossy brick path to where Vivian’s old box of books sat on a high shelf.
In the shed, Benny lifted the box down carefully and set it on the dusty concrete, wiping away a newly spun spider web that went across the top. The books inside were as she had left them: stuffed back messily in uneven piles.
Now she unpacked them all one at a time, looking over each one carefully, as if they were artefacts from a museum. Novels by Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch, Carson McCullers—the books took on the glow of some bygone treasure. Benny looked again at the phrasebooks and foreign language dictionaries, a guide to Greece, collections of William Blake and T.S. Eliot, a book of paintings by Marc Chagall. She opened almost every cover to see the same name written there: Vivian Moon. And every time she saw it, a tiny pulse went through her, like another heart beating alongside her own.
It wasn’t until Benny was near the bottom that she found the book she was hoping for, and a shiver went across her when she saw The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam nestled in there among a selection of Australian bird books and bushwalking guides to the Gather Region.
She lifted it out carefully, as one would handle a fossil.
It was a fancy-looking little book: a green cover with gold letters and decorative inlay—Translated by Edward Fitzgerald, it said in smaller text on the front. Benny opened it up to see her mother’s name written there, and then she flicked through the pages. Almost every poem had some phrase underlined, or notes scrawled in the margin.
Benny, who had been crouching, sat back cross-legged and began examining the pages, slowly at first, and then more quickly as she realised just how much her mother had underlined, or circled, and how much her mother had written.
On one page, a thick black box was drawn around the lines: A flask of wine, a book of verse—and thou beside me singing in the wilderness—and wilderness is paradise enow.
On another, Vivian had underlined in red: Ah, my beloved, fill the cup that clears TO-DAY of past regrets and future fears. And she had written alongside it in the margin: The day on which you are without passionate love is the most wasted day of your life.
All the lines Vivian had highlighted, the other lines she had written—
all of them attributed to ‘Omar K’—were about wine and death and love.
How sad, a heart that does not know how to love, that does not know what it is to be drunk with love. If you are not in love, how can you enjoy the blinding light of the sun, the soft light of the moon?
Benny sat reading, her heart throbbing for reasons she could not understand, sitting in the dank shed, feeling such unexpected disgust—or was it anger?—at the things her mother had been impressed by.
While you live Drink!—for once dead you shall never return. This was circled in pencil, and inside the back cover Vivian had copied out more quotes, and done some small drawings; Benny looked over them—they were just little shapes.
Then, in black wobbly pen, was written: The fears and sorrows that infest the soul! And underneath it, neatly in red, Everything now is O.K., with a love heart.
Well. Benny had had enough of the fraught feelings this book was giving her.
Passionate love, overt despair, life and death.
Benny had had no inkling of these tumults in her mother. She had never been privy to her afflictions or desires. Did these lines belong to Omar Khayyam, or to Vivian Moon? Did Vivian possess them, or live in them? Did she live for them? How horrifying was the enthusiasm in the notes and markings—all over the book! Benny flushed with embarrassment and cursed her own shameful curiosity.
Then she threw the book across the shed. It thudded against a bag of mulch and landed splayed open on the concrete floor.
51
Constable James Hall knocked cautiously on Simmons’s door at lunchtime.
‘I got a call back from Telecom,’ he said.
Simmons waved him in, and Hall sat down on the chair.
‘So who’d she call?’ asked Simmons.
‘The time,’ said Hall.
Simmons looked at him blankly. ‘The time,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ said Hall, wide-eyed. ‘You know, you call 1194 and it says, “At the third stroke,” and then it tells you the time?’ ‘Yes, Jimmy, I know,’ said Simmons, and the two men sat in silence for a moment, considering the peculiarity of the fact that, at 2.27 pm on December 1st, just before crossing the road and speaking to a man who would soon be dead, the blonde woman who resembled an American soap actress had stepped into a phone booth and called the time.
‘But it looks like she took a call as well,’ said Hall.
‘How’s that?’
‘Someone called the payphone on Valley Road at two twenty-three, and the call lasted thirty-four seconds. It came from a silent number.’
Simmons nodded and said, ‘Of course it did.’
‘So do you reckon she waited in there for three and a half minutes after that, and then she called the time? Or maybe someone else took the incoming call and then she got in after,’ said Hall.
‘I don’t fucking know,’ said Simmons, and he sat back and considered their timeline.
As they had it, the blonde woman had been at Curios first. This was according to Cora Franks and Lil Chapman, who put the woman there a little earlier in the day, after Therese Johnson had left.
The blonde looked at the watches, tried on a few with thin gold bands, her hands shaking like leaves in a gale. In fact, so much was her shaking noted by shop staff on Valley Road that Constable James Hall had stopped in at Valley Road Family Medical to ask Janet Avery, the nurse, why a woman of a certain age would shake like that. Thanks to Janet, Hall had written a list of possibilities in his notepad: Parkinson’s (very serious); essential tremor; neurological disorders; inherited/ genetic; alcohol withdrawal; prescription drug related etc.
And, speaking of drugs, it was sometime after her visit to Curios that the blonde woman had turned up at the chemist and asked, sadly, for a sedative. Maureen Robinson sold her some mild over-the-counter sleeping tablets. And then Dieter Bernbaum, eating a pie, had seen the woman making a call from the phone box—to the time. All of this before she crossed the road again, spoke to the seated gentleman—had a proper conversation, as Nigel Haling described it—and later on she was photographed among the crowd, looking on at the deceased body—an innocent bystander—before disappearing without a trace from the town of Cedar Valley.
‘Why wouldn’t she just ask Maureen for the time? Or anyone on the street?’ asked Simmons. ‘If she’s gonna go up and talk to our bloke in the suit—which is more than anyone else did the whole time he was sitting there—why doesn’t she just ask someone for the time?’
‘Maybe it had to be very precise,’ said Constable James Hall. ‘The talking clock is very precise.’
Simmons raised his eyebrows.
‘Or maybe she knew our dead guy,’ said Simmons. And he sat back, wondering what on earth was going on in the mind of the blonde woman, who was done up to the nines and wasted thirty cents on calling the time when any old person up on Valley Road would have had a watch on.
•
And while Simmons and Hall sat in the office back at the police station, Constable Gussy Franklin, in uniform, was sitting at the bar at the Royal Tavern having a counter meal and a Coke.
Tom Boyd, elbows on the bar mat, was discussing how Evander Holyfield compared, historically, with Ezzard Charles, and Franklin, who had been eating deliberately slowly, was pleased when Ed Johnson eventually took his regular lunchtime break and sat down on a stool with his apron on.
‘G’day, Gussy,’ said Ed.
‘Ed,’ said Gussy Franklin, cutting into his steak.
‘Don’t often see you in here on a work day.’
‘Sometimes I get sick of a sandwich,’ said Franklin.
Ed Johnson laughed—the man seemed to laugh at most things, a funny, wary laugh—and Franklin settled into a conversation with Ed, with Tom Boyd half involved, and Linda Carlstrom, wearing a Jack Daniels singlet and sitting a few stools up, pretending not to be listening.
‘We’re making some headway on our dead ’un,’ said Franklin casually, after a lull.
‘Oh yeah?’ said Tom Boyd. ‘I hear no one’s claimed him. And what about this other bloke from back in Adelaide?’
‘It’s one of the weirder ones I’ve seen,’ said Franklin. ‘We’ve had no luck with the blonde, though. Jimmy came in here, didn’t he, and showed you the photo?’
‘He did,’ said Tom. ‘I never saw her.’
‘Real attractive lady,’ said Gussy Franklin to Ed. ‘Nice clothes. Looked like she’d just had her hair done and that kind of thing.’
Ed Johnson nodded, his eyes fixed on the bar mat.
‘You didn’t see her, did you, Ed?’ asked Gussy Franklin. ‘You’d probably recall it, if you did. Real nice-looking lady. Apparently she had a chat with our dead ’un, which is pretty interesting. The whole thing is pretty interesting.’
Ed Johnson laughed, again, and it was funny how he would not look at Gussy Franklin directly. Instead his eyes darted left, towards Linda, who was now looking at Ed dead on, sitting back with her arms folded.
Ha ha ha, went Ed. ‘Yeah, I don’t know, Gussy. What would I know?’
52
Cora Franks had been waiting patiently on her front verandah, potentially for a very long time—or this was how it seemed to Benny Miller as she emerged from the cottage that afternoon, dressed in her Royal Tavern T-shirt.
‘Oh, you’re off to work, are you?’ said Cora loudly from her wicker chair. Her handbag sat next to her on the boards, ready to go.
‘Yes,’ said Benny.
‘I’ll walk with you,’ said Cora Franks, and she rose swiftly and started down the steps, her necklaces clinking together. ‘I’m off, Fred!’ she yelled through the screen door, and Benny let out an ‘oh’ as Cora was suddenly next to her, squat and smiling.
The two of them stood for a brief moment on the mowed grass, and then Benny began to walk and Cora followed, and soon they were walking together, awkwardly, towards town.
‘I’m off to the Royal, too,’ said Cora. ‘It’s Shop Night.’ And she began to list the various groups and club
s she belonged to, noting that Cedar Valley was a small but very social town, very recreational, and that there was never any shortage of things to do. No matter what your interest—sewing, quilting, ceramics, fishing, books—you could definitely find a club for it. Cora was in three clubs, and Fred was in one. Fishing was Fred’s thing, lake fishing mainly. And from that point it took mere minutes, thanks to Cora’s deft conversational steering, to arrive at the topic of her book club—the better of the town’s two book clubs—and the air hung with tension as both Benny and Cora wondered who would bring up the photograph first.
It was Cora.
‘I wasn’t sure if I should pop it in there. In the cake tin. But I thought you might like to have it,’ she said.
‘I’m glad to have it,’ said Benny, who’d been feeling a strange kind of detachment since her morning discoveries in the shed. Feathery clouds lay across the sky and Benny, who had been wanting to speak with Cora about this exact subject, was now somehow lukewarm about the reality.
Cora Franks, in her peach blouse and grey skirt, made a few sallies towards the core of Benny’s true sentiments. She approached from a couple of angles, testing the water with an air of false confidence. Some disingenuous remarks came out—of how saddened she was by the news of Vivian’s death, and what a surprise it was for such a young woman ‘to pass’. ‘What a terrible shock that must have been for you,’ she said, waiting for Benny to fill her in on the details. When Benny merely nodded, a feeling of distaste arose in Cora Franks at this young woman’s rudeness, and a feeling of distaste arose in Benny at this older woman’s lack of subtlety and tact.
‘I know she worked at Curios,’ said Benny, bluntly.
Cora Franks looked alarmed, and then somehow pleased.
‘Yes, she did. I hired Vivian. She was a neighbour and she asked for work.’
Benny loped along with her eyes on the thick mowed grass underfoot. ‘And what happened?’ she asked in an unfeeling tone that surprised even herself.
Cedar Valley Page 21
