The Autumn Murders

by Robert Gott

  JOE SABLE SAT opposite Inspector Lambert and prayed that he wouldn’t begin to cry in the course of their conversation. This had happened once before as the emotions surrounding the torture of Tom Mackenzie and his own torture had overwhelmed him. That had only been a few weeks previously and Joe recalled it with shame. He hated feeling weak in front of Lambert, but he always began from that position because Lambert knew about the physical unreliability of his heart.

  ‘You’re beginning to look human again, Sergeant. The bruising is disappearing.’

  ‘I was fortunate, sir, compared to Tom.’

  ‘He’s improving too. The human body is remarkably resilient. The mind is more fragile.’

  ‘My mind is fine, sir.’ There it was, that childish, defensive response which Joe hated falling into, but of which he was too frequently guilty. Inspector Lambert’s patience made him feel worse.

  ‘I wasn’t talking about your mind, Sergeant. I was talking about Tom.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘However, to be perfectly honest, I suppose I was thinking of you as well. My wife thinks I let you come back to work too soon, and I listen to my wife.’

  ‘With all due respect, sir, Mrs Lambert is wrong. I would’ve gone crazy if I’d been sitting in my flat with nothing to do.’

  ‘Do you have anyone you can talk to?’

  ‘I have close friends, yes. But I don’t see them much as they’re mostly in the forces. My closest friend is in New Guinea. I’m not even sure if he’s alive or dead.’

  ‘Surely his parents would have let you know.’

  ‘No. They thought our friendship was inappropriate.’

  ‘Inappropriate?’

  Joe realised what Inspector Lambert was asking.

  ‘Not sexually inappropriate. Worse than that. I was Jewish. I was amused by that at the time. It didn’t interfere with our friendship. I’d never really come up against that sort of thing before, and I just thought it was eccentric. I never had much to do with his parents, so it didn’t mean anything. Guy was a boarder at Newman College. His family lived in western Victoria. It doesn’t seem quite so amusing now.’

  ‘But you do have someone you can talk to?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t need to talk to anyone. I don’t want to talk to anyone. All I want to do is my job. That’s all.’

  ‘I’m not trying to annoy you, Sergeant, so try to control your testiness. All I’m trying to do is my job, and part of my job is to make sure that the people I rely on can be relied on.’

  The cold steel in Titus Lambert’s voice reminded Joe of the distance in experience and authority that separated them. He lowered his eyes in embarrassment.

  ‘Tell me how Helen Lord is travelling. I imagine she’s disappointed and angry.’

  ‘She’s both of those, yes.’

  ‘And how much of that is directed at you?’

  ‘Oh, she doesn’t think I’m responsible.’

  ‘No, she thinks I’m responsible, but you’re still here, and she isn’t.’

  ‘She has made it clear that she’s a better detective than I am. She’s right, of course.’

  ‘Self-pity, Sergeant?’

  ‘Self-awareness, sir.’

  ‘Don’t underestimate your skills. You’re young. What you lack is experience, not talent.’

  Joe didn’t take this as a ringing endorsement of his abilities. He was conscious of the fact that he had yet to demonstrate any real evidence of a talent for policing. He knew he lacked the intuitive skills that Helen Lord possessed. He supposed he might have the doggedness required to solve most cases, although he felt this was a second-order talent. He used to think he was courageous, but he’d experienced the crippling, destructive power of pure fear at the hands of George Starling, and so he wondered now if his heart would fail him at some critical moment.

  ‘Tell me honestly, Sergeant, are you well enough to work?’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  ‘Good. I need detectives I can trust, and I can count them on the fingers of a leper’s hand.’

  Joe knew that Inspector Lambert had a fractious relationship with a couple of officers in the Homicide unit, but he was too new, and too junior, to have been made privy to any of the details.

  ‘A good detective, Sergeant, is not the same as a good man.’

  GEORGE STARLING KNEW he’d been lucky. Despite the severity of the wound he’d inflicted on his face, no infection had set in. He’d been careful, and he’d endured the pain of carbolic regularly, as well as what he believed to be the antiseptic wash of cold water from the Southern Ocean. He’d heard, or read perhaps, that some Aboriginal tribes created elaborate, dramatic scarring by packing wounds with hot ash. He was tempted to try this, but thought better of it.

  For seven days he remained at Murnane’s Bay. He had no mirror, so he kept track of the progress of his wound by feeling the firming of the long scab with his fingers. He let his beard grow, and it grew in quickly. He lost weight, even though he had no weight to lose. The rations he’d brought were meagre, and he didn’t supplement them by attempting to catch fish or crabs. He’d developed a distaste for seafood since his recent work scaling and gutting fish in Port Fairy.

  Fresh water was his biggest problem. He couldn’t rely on rain in March, but he knew there was a farm dam a mile or so from the point where the descent began to Murnane’s Bay. He walked to it at night. Getting there on his motorcycle wasn’t an option. Conserving fuel was essential, and the noise of a motorcycle’s engine might carry across paddocks into the ears of a curious farmer, or a curious farmer’s busybody wife, or one of their disgusting children. Starling didn’t know for certain whether such a family lived nearby, but the dam belonged to someone, and its edges were trampled by cattle.

  He needed the cover of darkness for another reason. He wore no clothes, being unwilling to risk soiling one of his beautiful suits. They would be his best disguise — as he’d discovered, elegant tailoring was as protective against discovery as armour.

  He carried the water back to Murnane’s Bay and boiled it. It still tasted muddy, and he worried that this precaution was insufficient when he suffered a bout of diarrhoea so severe that he thought he was fouling the ocean with it.

  At the end of seven days, he was ready to leave. Early one hot morning, in the last week of March, George Starling took one last swim, stood with his arms outstretched to let the warm wind dry his skin, and, for the first time in a week, dressed. He packed his things, buried his rubbish, and removed all evidence of his fire. His hair and beard felt as if they were encrusted with salt. He needed a haircut and a close shave, and a place where the wound on his face could settle into its final, livid form.

  There was someone he remembered from the meetings his father used to take him to: meetings of National Socialists who gathered at various houses in Warrnambool to sing Hitler’s praises and discuss the pernicious influence of Jews and Communists in Australia. Most of these people were men, and they either ignored him or joined with his father in humiliating him. There had been a woman, Mrs Pluschow. She was different. She’d married a German man, and they lived just outside of Warrnambool, on the Port Fairy road. Starling recalled that she’d got along well with his father, which was by no means the case with others who came to the meetings. John Starling would have claimed that he didn’t suffer fools gladly, when in fact he simply despised most people and made no secret of the fact. However, in George Starling’s memory, there was no record of his father having had cross words with Mrs Pluschow. What was her first name? Maria. Maria Pluschow. She’d never been particularly, or especially, kind to George, but she’d never gone out of her way to be unkind to him either. Indeed, on more than one occasion, she’d spoken harshly to his father and curbed what would have developed into a vicious attack on him. His strongest memory of Maria Pluschow was her fierce National Socialism. She wore her hai
r in braids, pinned close to her head, like a storybook Fräulein. Her broad Australian accent always came as a surprise.

  He hadn’t seen Maria Pluschow since he was sixteen years old. Sometime in the ensuing ten years, she’d been widowed. His father had told him that. She’d remember him as a fat, shy, silent lump of a boy. If he visited her now, she’d open the door to a thin, scarred, and bearded man, and his appearance might alarm her into calling the police. He had no other options. The more he thought about it, the more he convinced himself that this was a risk worth taking. If she screamed, or turned him away, he’d simply kill her. Weighed in the balance, a decent bath and a shave were more valuable to him at this moment than the life of a middle-aged widow. He started the motorcycle and headed for Maria Pluschow’s house.

  3

  UNTIL WATSON COOPER began killing policemen, his neighbours thought of him as merely eccentric. He was sixty-six years old, tall, thin, and stooped. If Mrs Carstairs next door had known the word, she would have described him to the reporters who asked for her opinion after the tragedy as lugubrious. What she told them instead was that, on the rare occasions when she saw him, he was ‘surly looking, like he’d just been told some bad news’. She heard Cooper more frequently than she laid eyes on him. He used to stomp around his house — well, his late mother’s house — in the dead of night, barking orders at himself, as if he was marching or square bashing on a parade ground somewhere. The house in Coburg was on a generous block, although its southern wall sat quite close to Mrs Carstairs’s northern wall, so sound carried, especially at night when competing sounds were few. She’d become used to the stomping, but she never got used to the gunfire. Two or three times a week, Cooper would wake Mrs Carstairs and his other neighbours by firing his .22 repeating rifle in the backyard at dawn. What was he firing at? Possums, birds, cats? When Mrs Carstairs looked over the fence into his yard, there were no corpses to indicate what his targets might have been.

  Watson Cooper knew what he was firing at. Germans. He saw their shadows creeping about the bottom of his garden, near the dunny, and he did what any good soldier would do — he shot at them. When he checked for their bodies, he discovered that they’d always managed to avoid his bullets.

  On 28 March 1944, as George Starling began his ride to Port Fairy, as Inspector Lambert questioned Joe Sable about his fitness for work, as Ron Dunnart and Bob O’Dowd drove back from Peter Lillee’s house in Kew to Russell Street Police Headquarters, and as Helen Lord began to worry what their visit might mean, Watson Cooper wandered through the rooms of his mother’s house, trying to quell the echoing voices that insisted on reminding him that his life had amounted to nothing.

  ‘I’m a soldier,’ he said under his breath. Was that laughter? ‘I’m a soldier,’ he repeated more firmly. This time there was silence. ‘I’m a soldier!’ he yelled. If you’re a soldier, the streets are full of Germans. They’re all in uniform — you can’t mistake them. Why aren’t you out there, killing them? Why are you leaving that to all the other young men? Was this voice male or female?

  It wasn’t his mother, he was sure of that. She knew he’d been no coward. She knew he’d tried to join up, right at the beginning of the war, right then, in 1914. He was thirty-six then, but that wasn’t too old, was it? He was fit and healthy, and his eyes were good. ‘Varicose veins,’ the doctor said. ‘Rejected.’ He’d tried three times, and each time he’d been told, ‘Varicose veins. Rejected.’

  The Australian Imperial Forces didn’t want him and his bad veins, so he went back to his work as a colour printer. He was good at that. He knew all about inks and the latest processes. He was a soldier, though. He was a printer, but what he really was, was a soldier.

  The first white feather arrived one Friday in September 1914. It was wrapped in that week’s casualty list. Each Friday, for the remainder of 1914, and for the whole of 1915, an envelope arrived at the house in Coburg, and inside the envelope was a white feather wrapped in the casualty list. Watson Cooper kept every one, and his life became the short walk to his work and the short walk home. He saw his mother, and, until she married and moved out, his sister. The white feathers stopped after Christmas 1915. Perhaps the sender died. The sending of white feathers was women’s work.

  ‘Ignore them, love,’ Mrs Cooper said. ‘She doesn’t know about your veins. Still, she ought to be ashamed.’

  ‘She’s not ashamed, Mum,’ Watson Cooper said. ‘She might have lost a son, or several sons. She wants me to die of shame, and sometimes, I do want to die of shame.’

  ‘Don’t be so silly, Watson. What would I do without you? I’ll make us a cup of tea.’

  The cups of tea stopped in 1920, when Mrs Cooper died. Watson found her, lying on the floor in the kitchen. It was a stroke, the doctor said, and it must have happened not long after Watson had left for work, because the fire in the stove had gone out, and Mrs Cooper hadn’t done the shopping.

  With his mother dead, the house became his, and he began to be gripped by a sense of destiny. He wasn’t sure what this destiny was, but in preparation for it he needed to limit his contact with other people. Conversations with workmates, shopkeepers, and neighbours were kept to a minimum. He wasn’t rude. He was never rude. Any sort of familiarity was simply to be discouraged. He was always well turned out, and it was while he was shaving one morning, over two decades after his mother’s death, that a voice said to him, You should grow a neat moustache. He wasn’t startled by the voice. It was quiet, undemanding, simply making a suggestion, and accordingly, that morning he refrained from shaving above his top lip. After two weeks, he had a good, dark moustache, but he wasn’t sure it suited him. People at the printing works said nothing. Perhaps they didn’t notice.

  Clip it a little, said the voice. You look like an officer now, and for the first time Watson Cooper answered it. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I do.’

  He began marching through the house at night, following the instructions in his head, and eventually the voice whispered his destiny to him. ‘There are leftover Germans, the ones you didn’t kill during the war. They’re here. You have to do something about that.’ It was just a whisper and hard to understand at first. It would take him by surprise and he’d have to stop what he was doing and say, ‘What? What did you say?’ and strain to hear the reply. Bit by bit the whisper became more confident, until it was easily heard and until finally it began to roar in his ears. ‘The Germans! You have to kill the Germans!’ He began shooting at their shadows in the backyard.

  On that March morning, his carefully trimmed moustache now as grey as the hair on his head, Watson Cooper slung his .22 repeating rifle across his back and walked to the tobacconist. The tobacconist was next door to the greengrocer, and there were many people about, some of whom nudged companions and indicated the gun slung across Watson Cooper’s shoulders. ‘That’s Cooper,’ one woman said. ‘He’s an odd sort of bloke. Harmless. Keeps to himself.’ The tobacconist, Mr Blake, handed Watson Cooper a pouch of tobacco and a packet of Craven As. ‘That’s fourteen shillings.’

  ‘Bill the government,’ Cooper said.

  ‘Very funny, mate.’

  ‘This is government business, so that’s who you should bill.’

  ‘What’s government business?’

  ‘This is.’

  ‘Pay for the smokes, mate, or hand them back.’

  With a flurry of disdain, Cooper threw the cigarettes and the pouch of tobacco on the floor. Mr Blake, made nervous by the rifle, even though Cooper made no move to retrieve it from his shoulder, simply said, ‘I think you should go home, mate.’ Cooper turned and walked into the street. Mr Blake picked up the telephone and asked to be put through to the police.

  Watson Cooper stood on the footpath outside the tobacconist shop for a full minute. His stillness drew eyes to him, as did the gun. Several people crossed the road rather than pass close by him. He took the rifle from his shoulder and held it, bar
rel down, by his side. One witness, an ex-soldier, later said that the smoothness of the movement gave him the creeps and that he knew this bloke was dangerous. Cooper moved to the tram stop a few doors up from Blake’s shop. There was a seat there with two women sitting on it. Cooper sat down beside them. Neither of the women had noticed the gun, and continued chatting about the inconvenience of meat rationing.

  ‘They’ll be rationing the air we breathe next,’ one of them said. Cooper couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. He strained to hear them, but a tram passing, and the rattle of a milk horse and dray, drowned out their words, which is why the clarity of the man’s voice, quite near his ear, startled him.

  ‘Mr Cooper, isn’t it? Could you stand up, please?’

  This wasn’t the voice in his head. This voice was deeper, and a sweet smell came with it. Soap? Hair oil?

  ‘Mr Cooper?’

  He felt a hand rest on his shoulder. It didn’t grip him. It just rested there, gently. He was conscious of the two women looking at him now, and he was conscious, too, that they were suddenly afraid. He stood up slowly, and the hand on his shoulder remained there. He turned to face Constable Paul Beckett, who had been told just a few hours earlier that his wife, Anne, had given birth to their first child, a daughter. They hadn’t yet decided on a name for her. He’d been given a few hours leave to visit Anne in hospital, and he’d been about to leave the station when Mr Blake had telephoned there. Constable Beckett knew Watson Cooper, and the police station was just around the corner from the shops.

  ‘I know old Cooper,’ he said. ‘I’ll sort it out on my way to the hospital.’

  ‘Mr Cooper,’ Constable Beckett said again. Watson Cooper turned around, raised the rifle, and shot Constable Beckett once in the face and twice in the chest. Beckett was dead before his head hit the ground.

  ‘A dead German is a good German.’