The Autumn Murders

by Robert Gott

  One of the women was screaming. He turned the rifle towards her. ‘He’s dead. You’re safe.’ He lowered the rifle, puzzled that the woman continued to scream, but that was women, wasn’t it. She’d settle down when she realised the German really was dead. He began walking back to his mother’s house. No one tried to stop him. He was aware of people getting out of his way, and that they were staring at him. He didn’t know why. He entered the house, sat in a chair in the front room with the gun across his knees, and waited for the voice to say, ‘Well done.’ Instead it said, ‘There are more of them.’

  News of the murder of Constable Paul Beckett was telephoned to Homicide within minutes of its occurrence. Joe Sable and Sergeant David Reilly were dispatched, and three quarters of an hour later were being brought up to speed outside the Cooper house. There were eight uniformed police there and two CIB men, both of them senior to Reilly and Sable, and both of them sceptical about the decision to create a Homicide unit separate from the CIB. Joe’s expensive suit confirmed their suspicion that newly minted Homicide detectives gave themselves airs and graces.

  ‘Have you got people round the back?’ Reilly asked.

  ‘Oh Christ! No, we hadn’t thought of that,’ said Detective Kevin Maher, a lean man in his early forties. ‘We were just waiting for you to arrive to tell us what to do. Of course we’ve got men round the fucking back.’

  Reilly seemed indifferent to the rebuke and replied with a steeliness Joe hadn’t heard in his voice before.

  ‘So, we’re all just standing around, are we, chatting?’

  Perhaps Constable Allan Humphries overheard this remark, or perhaps his impatience simply broke at that moment. Paul Beckett had been the best man at his wedding, and he was to be godfather to Paul’s baby. Whatever the cause, he simply walked to the front door of the Cooper house, turned the handle, and entered. He instinctively took off his helmet, and it was this movement that killed him. He ought to have unholstered his gun. Watson Cooper was standing in the hallway, and he calmly raised the rifle and pulled the trigger. Constable Humphries collapsed against the door, and Cooper fell upon him and plunged a newly sharpened Bowie knife into his neck.

  Humphries’s sudden, unauthorised move had taken everyone by surprise, and although both the CIB men and the uniformed men began to move quickly, they weren’t quick enough, so that Humphries had fallen back against the door before anyone had reached it. It was Detective Maher who began pushing against it. One violent shove dislodged Cooper from Humphries’s body and set him back on his haunches. It also caused his knife to slide through Humphries’s neck where its brutal edge found no purchase or resistance and would have decapitated the body entirely if Cooper hadn’t let go of the hilt. As it was, Constable Humphries’s head lolled to one side, attached only by stubborn tendons and skin.

  Cooper was mesmerised by the welter of blood and the strangeness of the head’s position, so he remained seated and made no attempt to reach for his gun. There would have been time to reach it, because Detective Maher took a moment to assimilate the grotesque tableau that greeted him, before he fired three shots into Watson Cooper’s chest. The noise bounced off the walls and hammered his ears, disorienting him so that it was only as the echoes died away that he became aware of Joe Sable standing at his side.

  ‘He was going to shoot me,’ Maher said.

  ‘What with?’ Joe asked evenly.

  Maher looked to where Cooper’s rifle lay on the floor, well away from his body. With a swift, deft movement, he used his boot to move it close to him, and then slid it across the floor to lie between Cooper’s splayed legs.

  ‘With that,’ Maher said, and the room began to fill with the remaining police officers.

  4

  GEORGE STARLING RODE the motorcycle into Maria Pluschow’s front yard. It was almost midday. He didn’t want to sneak up on her. He wanted to remove any unnecessary element of surprise, although when he cut the engine, the barking of a dog from behind the house would have ensured that his approach would have been detected anyway. That was fine, because that he was there at all would be surprise enough.

  Either the noise of the motorcycle or the dog’s barking brought Maria Pluschow from the backyard, where she’d been hanging sheets to dry. Starling was standing by the machine, one hand on its now silent throttle. Elegant from the neck down and dishevelled from the neck up, he was an unusual sight. She knew immediately who he was. She’d been shown a sketch of him just a few weeks earlier by a rather dull-witted policeman from Melbourne. She’d given this detective short shrift and denied that she recognised the face in the sketch. Now here he was, George Starling, in her front yard. She surprised him by calling out his name.

  ‘George Starling. The police have been here looking for you. They think you might have killed your father. Did you?’

  ‘Unfortunately, no.’

  Maria Pluschow laughed, and Maria Pluschow rarely laughed.

  ‘You’d better push that thing out of sight, round the back. Don’t worry about the dog. She’s chained up. You look like the wild man from Borneo.’

  Maria Pluschow’s house was uncluttered and maintained at a high pitch of cleanliness and neatness that suggested that its maintenance was her principal occupation. It made Starling feel self-conscious about his appearance — a feeling that was new to him.

  ‘You look truly terrible, George.’

  She spoke to him with sudden familiarity, as if she’d known him for a long time.

  ‘I need to clean myself up.’

  ‘Well, first I think a cup of tea will do you good. Sit in here.’

  She directed him to the front room and to an armchair with an antimacassar and embroidered sleeves draped over the arms. Starling had no doubt that the embroidery was Maria’s. Among the flowers, small swastikas punctuated the cloth. You couldn’t buy that in any draper’s shop.

  On the wall, directly opposite the chair, there was a large print, which Starling had seen before. It was of four naked women and might have seemed out of place, except that he knew its significance. It was called The Four Elements, and Hitler had the original in his house in Munich. Starling had no knowledge of, or interest in, art, but he’d seen another version of this picture at a house at Candlebark Hill, near Daylesford. The house was owned by a soft, decadent man named Mitchell Magill, who played, along with his silly companions, at being a National Socialist. He’d loathed Magill and his coterie of flabby, self-indulgent companions. They’d been more interested in art and running around in the nuddy than in confronting the Jewish menace. He supposed that they’d all been rounded up and interned by now.

  He couldn’t think of them without anger, because he held them partly responsible for the death of the man who’d rescued him, who’d given his life purpose: Ptolemy Jones. Jones was the only person who’d aroused in him feelings akin to love — not physical love, deeper than that — and now Jones was dead. He hadn’t thought of him for days. Oddly, this painting inflamed his grief, and in doing so, it also inflamed his hatred of Joe Sable, the man he truly blamed for Jones’s death.

  ‘You like that picture?’ Maria asked, having noticed its physical effect on Starling.

  ‘I’ve seen it before, that’s all.’

  ‘I’ll make the tea.’ Maria retreated to the kitchen, sensitive to the tone of Starling’s response, which indicated that further inquiry would be unwelcome.

  ‘Who did that to your face?’ she called, as she encouraged embers in the stove into flames.

  ‘I did it to myself.’

  The easy honesty of his response made them both aware that a strange and immediate domesticity between them had sprung into being. When Maria returned with the tea, and half a dense fruitcake, she sat near him.

  ‘I wouldn’t care twopence if you’d murdered your father. He was a dreadful man. He killed your mother, I’m sure of it — and got away with it.’

 
‘I barely remember my mother.’

  ‘That’s all to the good. Your father liked to keep one of her eyes blackened at all times. That’s how it seemed to me.’

  ‘I wish I had killed him. He didn’t deserve to die a natural death.’

  ‘Why did you come here, to me?’

  ‘I remembered you from meetings my father used to take me to. Some of them were here, in this house.’

  ‘What do you remember about the meetings?’

  ‘They bored me. It was all talk. Empty talk.’

  ‘You didn’t approve of your father’s politics?’

  ‘It was him I didn’t approve of. He didn’t really believe in the politics. He was all wind.’

  ‘Why are the police after you, George?’

  In other circumstances a direct question like this would have curled Starling’s fingers into a fist. Coming as it did from a woman who defiantly decorated her walls with an Adolf Ziegler print, he was happy to answer bluntly.

  ‘I killed two perverts and burned down a flat that belonged to a Jew.’

  ‘You are welcome in my house, George Starling. I think this might be what people call fate.’

  PETER LILLEE WOULD have been surprised had he known that his name had been jotted down in Sturt Menadue’s diary. The news of Menadue’s murder, which he’d just been given, was interesting, but not particularly distressing. Apparently, Menadue and a young man named Steven McNamara had been violently killed in a queer club in Little Bourke Street. The murderer had not yet been found. Lillee wondered how much time and energy the police expended on the murder of homosexuals.

  ‘You’ve met Menadue,’ said the man who sat opposite Lillee.

  ‘I don’t think so. The name isn’t familiar.’

  ‘You met him here, a couple of months ago. He came to supper.’

  ‘Oh? Was he taking instruction?’

  ‘No. He was a cradle Catholic. I asked him to come. He was something of a lost soul.’

  ‘Did you know he was queer?’

  ‘My job is to love the sinner, not the sin, Peter.’

  Peter Lillee had no strong objection to queers. He was aware that many people believed him to be one, although he wasn’t. He’d known many and generally preferred their company to that of men like Sir Marcus Ashgrove. Outside his professional life, he moved discreetly in circles that might euphemistically be called artistic. Peter Lillee loved artists and was perfectly at home in their louche, chaotic world. These were the two great secrets of his life — his flirtation with what passed for the demi-monde of Melbourne, and the fact that he was taking instruction to convert to Roman Catholicism. The priest from whom he was taking instruction was Father Dougal McGrath, who served at St Patrick’s Cathedral, and who, on the recommendation of Archbishop Daniel Mannix, had just been granted the honorific of ‘Monsignor’.

  ‘It’s not a promotion. It’s just a title in recognition of service.’

  ‘So, what do I call you?’

  ‘Oh, Monsignor, definitely.’

  Peter Lillee didn’t much like Monsignor McGrath. He was too spick-and-span, too groomed. Vanity wasn’t a quality a priest should indulge. Lillee wasn’t impressed by his intellect, either, but for him conversion wasn’t about the mediocre men who held offices in the Catholic Church. It was about the offices themselves and the sense of the sacred that moved through the flawed conduits who dispensed the sacraments. There were elements of the faith with which he struggled. He could accommodate the key articles of faith — the Resurrection, the Assumption of Mary into Heaven (although this required a real suspension of disbelief), transubstantiation, and the others. The sacrament of confession was attractive to him, but he could not imagine revealing his transgressions to Monsignor McGrath. If he was accepted into the church, he would take advantage of confession only in circumstances where he was anonymous, and where the priest was unknown to him.

  Monsignor McGrath leaned back in his chair, appraising Peter. They were sitting in the study of the presbytery, which sat close to the cathedral, and which housed two other priests. Archbishop Mannix, who Peter had seen but had never met, preferred to live at his residence, Raheen, in Kew.

  ‘I think, Peter, that you’re ready to be brought into the Church.’

  ‘I’m not without doubts, Monsignor.’

  ‘If you told me you were without doubts, I’d know you were lying.’

  ‘Do you have doubts?’

  ‘Of course. Doubts test our faith. We know our faith is strong when it overcomes our doubts. My certainties outweigh my doubts.’

  ‘And the Pope? Infallibility and doubt are contradictory, surely.’

  ‘The Holy Father is infallible only in matters of faith. I’m sure he makes as many mistakes in the course of a day as anybody else. He is a man, Peter. He is God’s representative, but he is not God.’

  Peter Lillee wished that Monsignor McGrath was a more subtle and able theologian. Their discussions were always unsatisfactory. McGrath was a shallow thinker, but, imbued as he was with the priestly authority to administer the sacraments, he was a tolerable teacher of Catholic doctrine. And that was the thing about Catholic doctrine — it was codified and simplified into a catechism of beliefs and observances that didn’t make intellectual demands on adherents. Sometimes, Lillee worried that his attraction to the Church was because of its paraphernalia. High art and vulgarity were a heady mix.

  ‘I think we should set a date for your reception into the Catholic faith, doubts notwithstanding.’

  ‘I want it to be a private affair.’

  ‘It’s a celebration, Peter.’

  ‘My faith is private. If I am to be received into the Church, I see no reason why it needs to be bruited abroad.’

  Monsignor McGrath nodded in acquiescence.

  ‘Shall we say Saturday next at 3.00, here in the cathedral? I’ll perform the baptism and give you your first communion.’

  Lillee agreed and was disappointed in his failure to feel elation. Perhaps that would come later. For now, his mind turned to the meeting of the Capital Issues Advisory Committee and his desire to get there before any of the other members arrived. Sir Marcus Ashgrove may well have approached some of them individually. Lillee wanted to avoid entering a room where a discussion may already have begun, or taken place. He made his apologies to Monsignor McGrath and left the presbytery.

  Lillee didn’t believe that the committee was susceptible to influence, but he was a cautious man, and he was certain that Sir Marcus Ashgrove would attempt to exert some influence. He, Lillee, was the only member of the five-man committee who was not a public servant. He’d served on the earlier incarnation of the committee, the Capital Issues Board. The board had consisted mainly of businessmen until John Curtin’s government, in 1941, had thought it wise to remove any possibility of conflict of interest by reducing the representation of the business community to one person. That person was Peter Lillee. The brief of the committee was clear. It was to advise Treasury on those investments which it deemed unnecessary, or which were designed to enrich individuals or corporations in ways which had no bearing on the war economy. Lillee got on well with the four men who sat on the committee with him, and it was rare that there was a disagreement over whether a particular investment was or wasn’t approvable for war purposes.

  As it happened, this meeting of the committee dismissed Sir Marcus Ashgrove’s application in a few minutes. The chairman of the committee, Mr McConaghy, who was also the chairman of the Tariff Board, raised the Wombat goldmine issue not as an order of business, but as an annoyance to which he’d been subjected none too subtly in the Australian Club.

  ‘I think,’ he said, ‘we need to issue them with a Treasury refusal as quickly as possible.’

  ‘It is in train,’ Peter Lillee said. ‘We’re just waiting for it to come down the line.’ He didn’t mention his spiky meeting in
the Melbourne Club with Sir Marcus.

  ‘The bloke who buttonholed me,’ McConaghy said, ‘tried to imply they could bring pressure to bear at Treasury level.’

  ‘That’s just bluster,’ Lillee said. ‘These people know perfectly well that this committee was successful two years ago in limiting the ability of goldmining companies to make calls on shares and to open new mines. They have no access to Manpower, so they can’t staff their claims even if they wanted to.’

  ‘Good, so let’s squash this bloody claim once and for all.’

  ‘It won’t help our popularity.’

  ‘Did we have any to begin with, Peter?’

  ‘Well, no. Rich people don’t like being told they can’t do what suits them.’

  ‘Are you speaking from personal experience?’

  Peter Lillee’s wealth was no secret to his fellow committee members, but this question wasn’t intended to offend, and it didn’t.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I am,’ he said. ‘I’m as guilty as the next man of wanting to get my own way. I’d like to think it wasn’t always at the expense of someone else, but perhaps that’s pious self-delusion.’

  The committee moved on to other matters.

  ROS LORD HAD gone upstairs to bed. Peter Lillee had not yet returned home. He’d telephoned in the late afternoon to say he’d be dining out, which Ros understood to mean that he’d be spending the evening with his friends. She had a vague idea who these friends were, but she’d never met any of them. She knew they were artists, writers, and actors, but Peter had never brought any of them home. She hoped he wasn’t protecting her sensibilities in the mistaken belief that she’d disapprove. She was close to her brother, but as with her daughter, there was a point at which closeness surrendered to stifling discretion.

  Downstairs in the library — a gorgeous room, the existence of which, in a private house, Joe Sable could scarcely believe, but which he’d already begun to take for granted — Joe and Helen Lord sat listening to a radio drama.

  ‘Do you mind if I turn it off?’ Helen asked. ‘It’s not very good.’