The Holiday Murders (32 page)

Titus nodded, not wishing to say out loud that he suspected this was precisely what had happened.

‘I got the sergeant in Daylesford out of bed, and he should be at Candlebark Hill by now — we should be hearing something from him soon I’ve also sent two men to Magill’s house in Hawthorn.’

‘Do you think we should let Chafer and Goad know what’s happening, sir?’

‘That would be your decision, Sergeant — not mine. Homicide, not Intelligence, is my demesne.’

Joe accepted what he took to be a mild rebuke without resentment. He believed that his relationship with Lambert had been irrevocably damaged.

‘I’ll telephone them,’ Joe said. ‘Apart from anything else, it will be a pleasure to disrupt their New Year’s Eve.’

‘Tell them to come to Russell Street.’

‘They won’t be happy about that.’

‘Their happiness is of no interest to me, Sergeant. If they wish to see the film, it will be at Russell Street. Two lives are in grave danger. If that is of no concern to Messrs Chafer and Goad, I’ll go above their heads.’

Titus Lambert sat
behind his desk, waiting for Tom Chafer and Dick Goad to arrive. He was breathing slowly and deeply, drawing on an ability he’d acquired over the years to suppress fierce emotions in favour of ordered thoughts. In the past, this had been how he’d managed to investigate the murder of children. Now, he forced his feelings about Tom Mackenzie into procedural neutrality. In dark moments, it troubled him that being able to do this might mean that there was something wrong with him — that this wasn’t a strength, but a disturbing peculiarity.

Joe sat at his desk in the outer office. He’d been surprised when he’d made contact with Chafer. He’d shown no reluctance to come down to Russell Street; on the contrary, he seemed eager to do so, and he said that he’d organise for Goad to join him. They had information to pass on that might lead to Jones.

Titus had not yet heard from the police in Daylesford. There’d been no one at Magill’s house in Hawthorn, and there was no car in the garage, so Titus assumed they were still at Candlebark Hill. He closed his eyes, worried that he’d misread and mishandled the investigation. He wasn’t able to pinpoint how he should have done anything differently, but he thought there must have been something he’d missed that had led to the horror he’d seen in Prahran. The film was surely more than a taunt — it was a warning, a threat, an expression of how far Jones was willing to go.

More than ever, Titus was convinced that politics was peripheral to the case. How could what he’d seen in that film be construed primarily as an expression of nationalist fervour? Something began to coalesce in his mind. There was a kind of logic at work here, but it was elusive. They were all missing something. They were all working from a false assumption, and he suspected that the right assumption sat impenetrably obscured behind the wrong one.

It was well after midnight when Chafer and Goad arrived at Russell Street. They watched the film and were both visibly shaken by it. Neither of them was used to seeing this sort of brutality. It was the job of other people in their organisation to confront the violent reality of the criminal class.

‘We now know who he is,’ Dick Goad said. ‘His name isn’t Ptolemy Jones. That’s a ridiculous affectation. It’s Alistair Smith, would you believe? Originally, it was Schmidt, until the first war. He grew up in Belgrave. His father’s house was one of the meeting places for National Socialists in the Thirties, but the boy lived mostly with his mother elsewhere. The elder Smith died in ’39. Cancer. We don’t know much more than that. The son inherited the family business, as it were, along with the property, but never moved in, and it’s been vacant since. Alistair Smith kept himself out of trouble, and became invisible.’

‘Until now,’ Joe said.

‘Why now?’ Titus asked.

Tom Chafer put his hands behind his head and began to intone an explanation of which he was obviously, revoltingly, proud.

‘He now feels powerful enough to feel invulnerable. I suspect he’s been feeding on the reports of extraordinary massacres coming out of Europe. I don’t believe it’s too fanciful to think of him being gorged on them, energised by them, and ready.He doesn’t like traitors to his legacy or his cause — he likes to weed them out, root and branch, and he likes to terrify others who might have similar traitorous ambitions. It’s a common controlling technique of dictators, and his great hero is a master of it. His model is the Gestapo: don’t negotiate with your enemies; punish them. We’ve seen milder versions of this sort of delusion and aggrandisement in other Hitlerites. None of them have gone this far.’

‘So you still think all this is because Jones, or Smith, discovered that Quinn was looking into Australia First?’ Titus asked.

‘Of course,’ Chafer said. ‘What other reason would he have for attacking the Quinn family?’

‘The chronology isn’t right,’ Titus said. ‘We have to suppose that Jones met Quinn before he met Magill, and that supposition is weak. It’s convenient, but it’s weak.’

‘Especially,’ Joe said, ‘as there is nothing in Quinn’s reports about meeting with a person like Jones — unless what you told me isn’t true, and there is a reference to Jones somewhere.’

Dick Goad sighed. ‘There is no reference to Jones among Quinn’s reports. I agree that the chronology is out. But when one of our people who has been investigating a particular, suspect group turns up dead, the most obvious explanation is surely the right one. Ockham’s razor.’

‘I wish it were that simple, Mr Goad. Unfortunately, there is the inconvenience of Sheila Draper’s savage murder. Whatever drove Jones to commit that, it wasn’t politics.’

‘You’re making your own convenient assumption on that point, Inspector,’ Tom Chafer said, reverting to his normal unpleasant tone. ‘You’re assuming that the person who killed the Quinns is the same person who killed Sheila Draper.’

This was undeniably true, and Titus acknowledged as much.

‘If we’re talking about competing assumptions,’ he said, ‘I think ours is based on evidence and experience, and is the stronger of the two.’ To be diplomatic, he added, ‘The truth of the matter is that Jones’s motivations are likely to be a witches’ brew of the political and the personal. It seems to me that Miss Quinn might have been right when she implied that this was all about her. At the time, it seemed more like an actress’s ego expressing itself.’

‘I don’t know what you mean, Inspector,’ Goad said.

‘Mary Quinn’s first reaction when we told her about Sheila Draper’s death was to say that someone was killing the people she loved before getting around to killing her.’

‘An elaborate sort of torture?’ Goad said.

‘Yes. Slow and pointed revenge, which makes me think the key to all this isn’t Jones’s connection to John Quinn, but Jones’s connection to Mary Quinn. He knows her, which means that someone must know them both.’

Dick Goad took a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to Titus.

‘This is a list of names and addresses of people associated with Alistair Smith’s father. As you can see, it’s a short list.’

‘Do any of these people have children who’d be Jones’s, or Smith’s — I can’t get used to calling him Smith — who’d now be Jones’s age?’ asked Joe.

‘We’re ahead of you, Sergeant. Yes. One of them, John Starling, has a son. He’d be about Smith’s age. Name of George.’

‘What does he look like?’

Goad produced a blurry photograph.

‘This was taken at the Belgrave house at about the same time as the one you saw of Smith.’

The photograph was of two people approaching the house — a man in his fifties, by the look of him, and a boy about sixteen. The boy was chubby. Titus handed the photograph to Joe. Joe shook his head.

‘This is Starling, is it, and his son?’

Goad nodded.

‘That boy could be the bloke who calls himself Fred. It’s hard to say. If it is Fred, he’s lost a lot of weight since then.’ Joe peered at it closely. ‘Can I have a magnifying glass, sir?’

Titus took one from his desk drawer and gave it to Joe.

‘This boy may only be sixteen or seventeen, but he’s an early developer.’

Both Goad and Chafer looked quizzical.

‘The man I know as Fred has extremely hairy arms and a five o’clock shadow that made me think he must have started shaving when he was four. This young man has similarly hairy arms. I’d say this is Fred. I can’t, of course, be absolutely certain.’

He handed the magnifying glass and the photograph to Dick Goad.

‘Good,’ Goad said. ‘We know where John Starling lives, and I’m sure he can be persuaded to tell us how to find George, or Fred, if that’s what he’s calling himself now. If we can find Fred, and I think we can, we can find Jones.’

Goad looked at his watch.

‘It’s 1.00am.’

‘This can’t wait,’ Titus said.

‘I wasn’t thinking of waiting, Inspector. However, John Starling doesn’t live in Melbourne. He lives outside Warrnambool, at a place called Mepunga. It’s going to take some time to get to him, and sending a Warrnambool walloper — pardon me — to question him will get you nowhere. He’s not keen on policemen. He’s even less keen on us, but he’ll cooperate when I waft the smell of the Crimes Act in his direction. A few of his mates from the halcyon Belgrave days are uncomfortably interned. Starling has lost his passion for National Socialism. He won’t want his flirtation with it in the Thirties to land him in hot water now.’

When Chafer and Goad had left, having given Titus an assurance that one of them would be leaving for Warrnambool immediately, Joe said again how worried he was about Tom and Mary, and how badly he felt about Tom’s involvement. Titus, rather brusquely, repeated that he, Joe, was not responsible for his brother-in-law’s decisions, and he should stop implying that he, Titus, thought that he was.

‘I don’t think Mrs Lambert will be so understanding, sir.’

Titus ignored the comment, which left Joe wondering whether he thought it inappropriate, or whether he agreed with it.

‘Tomorrow — well, today now — I want you and Constable Lord to take that sketch to 3UZ and see if anyone there, apart from Jack Ables, has seen Mary Quinn with Jones. His sick obsession with her can’t have escaped everyone. We should have been focussing on that from the beginning.’

‘How could we, sir? We didn’t even know Jones existed.’

Titus ran his fingers through his thinning hair.

‘Yes, but in concentrating on the dead in this case, we missed the importance of the living, and now Tom and Mary …’ He stopped himself. ‘Go home, Sergeant, and get some sleep.’

-21-

Ptolemy, Fred, Frank,
and Mark sat in Clarry’s café. Frank and Mark were drunk, and they weren’t happy when Clarry told them there was no alcohol on the premises. This wasn’t true, as it happened. There were a couple of bottles of beer out the back, but Clarry had decided that he’d had enough of supplying these people with free booze. If it had been just Jones and Fred, he’d have produced the beer, but he’d be damned if he’d give it away to Frank and that blond moron, Mark.

Clarry had been in his café since ten o’clock, hoping that Jones would see in the New Year there. Jones and his mates had turned up at 12.30, when Clarry had been about to leave. Despite his admiration for Jones, it still irked him that he seemed to expect that Clarry’s café would be at his disposal at all hours, and without notice. And he never expressed any gratitude. This time, though, Clarry’s irritation was instantly quelled when Jones put his arm around his shoulder and said, ‘Tonight is a big night, Clarry. We make a big noise tonight, and you’re a part of it.’

Clarry was pleased, but his pleasure was diminished somewhat by the presence of Frank and Mark. Before he lost his nerve, he took the flyer from his pocket and put it on the table in front of them.

‘A woman copper showed me this, this arvo. She’d been showing it around to shopkeepers.’

Jones looked at it.

‘This arvo?’

‘Yeah, about five o’clock. She said this person had been seen in the area and that he might be able to help with their enquiries. She didn’t say what the enquiries were about.’

Jones and the others seemed surprisingly unconcerned to Clarry.

‘Sable?’ Fred asked.

Jones shook his head.

‘Maybe that actor. He saw me at the Windsor. I almost had him. That’ll make dealing with him a double pleasure.’

Clarry had no idea what they were talking about. It was clear to him, though, that he could forget his fantasy of implicating Mark in some sort of betrayal of Jones.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Jones said, and pushed the sketch away. ‘Something like this would’ve been all over town tomorrow anyway, which is why we make our move tonight — the first of January 1944.’ He looked at each of the men in turn. ‘The first of January 1944. This will be our home-grown
Kristallnacht
.’

‘What’s that?’ Clarry asked. Mark giggled at his ignorance, and Clarry wondered if he could find a way to kill him that night — or morning, as it now was.

‘
Kristallnacht
was the night Germany knew that the Third Reich had begun,’ Jones said. ‘It was back in 1938. There wasn’t a Jew in Germany who felt safe after that. They were all on notice, and the people loved the Fuhrer for it.’