A Thing of Blood (14 page)

He didn’t look at me when he spoke, his attention still commanded by the man opposite him, and his mind yet engaged on some combustible point about modernism.

‘It’s a private matter,’ I said. ‘Could we speak outside?’

‘Nothing’s private here, mate. If Gretel’s got something to tell me, she should tell me herself, not send a message boy. So what is it?’

He looked at me finally, and in his pale, Irish face I read that the dominant emotion in his life would be anger. He was handsome enough to draw a woman like Gretel Beech to him, but there wasn’t a skerrick of humour in his eyes. Life, for George, was a very serious business indeed.

His three companions were now waiting for me to deliver Gretel’s nonexistent message. It occurred to me suddenly that any one of them could be Gretel’s killer. It’s a rare victim who doesn’t know her murderer, and the way to find this culprit was to assemble those people who knew Gretel and eliminate them as suspects by careful questioning and intelligent reasoning. I’d eliminated Clutterbuck already — I’d been with him the night Gretel died — and I now had in front of me several people who might move my inquiries forward. I didn’’t think Detectives Strachan and Radcliff could have done any better, and I certainly couldn’t see either of them being prepared to stand naked in a roomful of women in the service of an investigation.

‘The first thing I need to know,’ I said, ‘is if you’re the right George.’

‘I’m George Beech. Gretel’s husband. How many other Georges would Gretel be sending a message to? Who the hell are you anyway, and where’s Gretel? Is she shacked up with you or what?’

The ugly tone of these questions was no different from the ugly tone of all George Beech’s utterances, and it wasn’t driven by anger particular to the possibility that I was sleeping with his wife. Uxoriousness was not a quality George Beech could be congratulated upon possessing. They had, I surmised, an open marriage. I thought I’d show him how open I could be, too.

‘You’re the George I’m looking for only if you have a larger-than-average penis.’

This was met with silence, until George Beech stood up, said, ‘You tell me,’ undid his flies and produced what any sensible person would describe as a larger-than-average penis. This didn’t go unnoticed by people at other tables, but it happened so quickly that there wasn’t time for anyone to register a shocked response before the impressive appendage had been re-housed.

The three other men with George turned to me, and one of them, a slightly overweight, sandy-haired chap with ink-stained fingers asked, ‘Right George do you think?’

‘The evidence for that seems pretty good,’ I said.

‘So what’s the message?’ George asked.

How was I going to play this? I had to assume, until proven otherwise, that Gretel’s death was unknown to her husband. What was the etiquette?

‘May I join you?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘You may not. Just tell me the message and piss off back to Gretel with a message from me. My message is, “Fuck you”. Got that? “Fuck you”.’

I wasn’t going to tell him that Gretel was past caring about her estranged husband’s obscenities — a fact, I had to remind myself, that he may already have known. With little else to go on, I would have to accept that the obvious rift between them might be a motive for murder.

‘To tell you the truth, George, there is no message. I haven’t seen Gretel for quite a while, and I can assure you that there was nothing at all between us. I didn’t even know she was married. A Mr Wilks, who teaches drawing, suggested you might know where she was because you modelled for him a few weeks ago when Gretel couldn’t make it. This is embarrassing, but she owes me some money, just a couple of pounds, and I’m a bit short and need it. And that’s all there is to it.’

‘Let me tell you something Mr whoever-you-are. I wouldn’t care if Gretel owed you several million pounds. If you’re silly enough to lend her money, that’s your lookout. I suppose you were hoping for other favours.’

I didn’t much like being portrayed as a fool who has been parted from his money, especially as the story was spurious.

‘I just need to find her,’ I said, and tried to inject a little note of desperation, designed to elicit sympathy, into my voice.

One of his companions jumped in at this point.

‘Why don’t you quit while you’re ahead, mate? You can see George isn’t interested in answering your bloody questions, so maybe now would be a good time to piss off.’

The hostility around the table was palpable and I saw no advantage to myself in pursuing the matter any further, so I decided that I would wait outside and follow George Beech home. I would have to forgo meeting Nigella and Clutterbuck and not see Katharine Hepburn. The latter was hardly a sacrifice. As an actress I had always found her so unappealingly equine that I suspected a centaur in her family tree.

Outside the Petrushka there was nowhere close by that was suitable for dawdling unseen. I found a doorway on the opposite side of the street, and some way up from the café, and leaned in it as inconspicuously as I could. An American soldier, slightly drunk, passed, returned and passed again, before stopping and making an obscene inquiry as to what I charged. He was disgruntled when I set him straight. I thought perhaps Manpower needed to do a sweep of Melbourne’s doorways, unless of course the government considered prostitution an essential service. After half an hour and another approach — I could have earned a few quid that night — I was so catatonically bored and uncomfortable that I abandoned my plan to wait for George Beech to emerge. The fact that Mother was alone at home, and no doubt anxious to hear how my meeting had gone with Brian, began to nag at me. I would return to the Petrushka in a few hours when there was a chance that I would find Beech still ensconced there, a good deal drunker and less guarded.

I had never seen my mother so frantic. She’d always been dependably unruffleable, almost unshakeably languid. To find her distracted and agitated was shocking to me.

‘We will have to get Brian out of there,’ she said. ‘He won’t manage. He isn’t strong enough for all this.’

‘He’s doing all right, Mother. Really.’

‘Oh, Will, you don’t know your brother very well. He’s much more highly strung than you think, and he’s fragile and naïve and lovely, and this shouldn’t be happening to him.’

She broke into tears. I wasn’t quite sure how Brian’s lurid affair with Sarah Goodenough might be accommodated into his fragility, naivety and loveliness, but it wasn’t the moment to make inquiries on that point.

‘I was told that you’ve hired a lawyer.’

‘Peter Gilbert. Yes. He was an associate of your father’s and he’s a good man. We’ve been friends for many years.’

When Mother had calmed down she told me that this Gilbert fellow would go through the coppers like a dose of salts, and that he would have Brian home as soon as was legally possible — even if it meant posting a large bail. I wondered how Brian’s arrest would affect his job. Would the Ministry of Education approve of bailed murder suspects teaching the nation’s youth, even in this time of severe teacher shortage?

I made a cup of tea and outlined the police case against Brian. Mother listened and, unexpectedly, acknowledged its awful plausibility — from the police point of view. But she insisted it wouldn’t be sustained among people who knew Brian. While we were discussing these matters, Peter Gilbert arrived. He was a man in his early sixties; neat, almost dapper, and with a build still sufficiently athletic to ensure that his face had not begun its melt into jowliness. He was uncommonly solicitous, I thought, of Mother’s welfare and sat close by her, holding her hand in startling intimacy and paying scant attention to my presence. After the briefest of introductions his concern was entirely for Mother.

I was clearly supernumerary to Mother’s immediate needs, so I made my farewells and headed for Royal Parade, where I caught a tram into the city. Having been away from Melbourne for a while, the sight of a female conductor was still disconcerting, although this one wasn’t the best advertisement for the innovation. She was a surly hulk of barely contained rage, and she seemed to hold each of the passengers personally responsible for whatever grim depths to which her life had descended. She took my money and issued the ticket and the change with such ill-grace that you’d think I had just confiscated her soul.

I disembarked at Collins Street and walked quickly in the direction of the Regent Theatre. By now the picture would be over, and before returning to the Petrushka I might be lucky and catch Clutterbuck and Nigella as they came out. I could make some excuse for missing the movie, but it wouldn’t involve telling them about my brother’s incarceration. I identified this reluctance to tell the truth with an unsettling swelling in my attraction to Nigella Fowler. When I thought of her I considered what it might be like to be alone with her, and more and more I thought it incumbent upon me to step between her and Clutterbuck. I knew that relationship could only end in tears, and the tears would be Nigella’s. I hadn’t seen much evidence of Clutterbuck’s lachrymose leanings.

There was a small crowd outside the Regent Theatre — the rump of that evening’s audience — and Nigella and Clutterbuck were not among them. I was disappointed, and found myself indulging in an inconvenient rush of jealousy. Just how far had Nigella licensed Clutterbuck’s roving hands? This was none of my business, but the knowledge that the only part of my own body she had yet to discover was the forearm hidden beneath the plaster cast somehow made me feel proprietorial towards her, as if the intimacy was already mutual.

Clutterbuck had money and this gave him an advantage, although Nigella didn’t strike me as a gold digger. In all probability she had her own fortune — her father was a wealthy man — so Clutterbuck’s attractiveness must have been other than his cash. If it was his looks, this was puzzling. He was good looking but he didn’t, as I did, bear a striking resemblance to Tyrone Power.

Nigella must see that Clutterbuck was driven by self-interest, and that she couldn’t hope to curb his adulterous fornications once they were married. It was while I was turning these matters over in my mind that a hand fell on my shoulder and I was spun around entirely against my will. I found myself facing Paul Clutterbuck, grinning in the dimmed lights of Melbourne’s brownout. It took me a moment to recover from a natural abhorrence at being so casually manhandled.

‘Where were you?’ he asked. I could smell whisky on his breath. Its source was revealed when he reached into his voluminous and beautiful coat and produced a flask, which he pushed towards me. Knowing that his whisky was reliably good and not the vile hooch that sometimes found its way into reclaimed bottles with undamaged ‘Bottled in Scotland’ labels on them, I took it and enjoyed a decent swig.

‘I got caught up,’ I said. ‘I found Gretel’s husband.’

‘Didn’t know she had one. To be fair, I didn’t ever ask. Is he our man?’

‘He’s a possibility, but there are three other blokes who are of interest as well.’

I was pleased with how professional this sounded and from the surprised look on Clutterbuck’s face I could see that his confidence in my abilities had been given a boost.

‘Four suspects already,’ he said. ‘That’s good going.’

‘Where’s Nigella?’

‘She went home.’

‘I thought she’d stay over.’

Clutterbuck laughed.

‘God no. Nigella’s not that sort of girl. It’s all very proper. No hanky-panky before the wedding night.’

This was an enormous relief, and it fixed my determination to step between Clutterbuck and Nigella. I would have to take things slowly though. He was employing me after all, and the accommodation he offered was luxurious. I was also welded to him for the moment by our experience with poor Gretel Beech’s body. The sooner I solved that crime the better. I didn’t know Clutterbuck sufficiently well to be able to predict with confidence how he might react to losing Nigella, and I was hideously conscious of the fact that Gretel Beech was lying under a few feet of earth in the Carlton Cemetery with my tie around her neck. This was as good as a signed confession, and an enraged Clutterbuck might well deliver it to the police. With a newly fierce determination to find out as much as I could about my chief suspect, George Beech, I said, ‘I’m on George Beech’s tail. That’s where I’m headed. Beech knew that his wife was cheating on him. I just need to find out how he knew it was you. He definitely has a motive.’

Clutterbuck screwed the cap back on the flask and returned it to the folds of his coat.

‘Fine. But don’t forget Cunningham. I need to know about him, and soon.’

With cool professionalism I told him that Cunningham was really a man named Trezise, and that he’d popped into confession quite soon after his most recent ejaculation. Clutterbuck was duly impressed.

‘Good man,’ he said and took another swig from his flask. ‘I’ll wait up for you and you can fill in the details then. You know, Will, I’m glad you’re working for me. You’re bloody good at your job.’

I’m as susceptible to praise and affirmation as the next man, and Clutterbuck’s words, along with the whisky, made me flush with warmth. He turned then in his beautiful coat and walked away. I remained firm in my intention to rescue Nigella from the horrible mistake of marrying him.

The Petrushka café was still open, and even busier than it had been earlier. The noise and smoke were intolerable. Beech was still there, but only one of his companions remained with him, and they were both so bleary-eyed with drink that they didn’t register my entrance. There were no available tables, so I leaned against the counter, performing nonchalance rather that feeling it.