The Holiday Murders (6 page)

STEAM LET IN

At a signal from the camp commander the German guards suddenly begin to shout and drive all the victims towards the entrance to the death house with whips. When the chambers are filled the doors are shut hermetically, and steam is let into the chambers by means of pipes. In 15 minutes the victims are slowly asphyxiated, and execution is complete …

Joe put the clipping down and picked up
The Publicist
. He stared at its cover. His hand began to shake with rage, and with something far worse — shame.

Joe switched off the lamp, and sat in the pitch black of his living room. He closed his eyes — it didn’t seem as dark behind his eyelids — and started to go over his interview with Mary Quinn. At least it was a distraction from what he’d just read. He’d frightened her, inadvertently; Titus wouldn’t be happy about that, but surely she’d have come to realise, without prompting from Joe, that she might be in danger. He’d got permission to post a policeman outside Sheila Draper’s boarding house. When she had come out of her faint, Mary Quinn had been reassured by that. Sheila Draper had told Mary that she wouldn’t be letting her out of her sight.

Miss Draper had impressed him much more than Mary Quinn had. She was more open than Miss Quinn, and carried herself with great assurance and dignity. Her friendship would be worth a great deal more, he suspected, than the value Mary Quinn put on it. He thought he might contrive to see Sheila Draper again. It was well after midnight when he fell asleep. ‘Merry Christmas,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Merry for whom?’

-5-

Titus and Maude
exchanged presents over a hurried breakfast. They had an egg each, thanks to a neighbour’s generosity. Maude wanted to scramble the eggs to make them go further, but Titus shook his head.

‘No, definitely not.’ he said, ‘Nothing beats a soft-boiled egg. This will be the highlight of my day.’

He’d barely finished it when they heard the car pull up outside. It was a measure of his exalted position in the new branch of Homicide that when they weren’t needed elsewhere, he could call on a car and a driver. As he was leaving, he asked Maude to read
The Publicist
from cover to cover, and to winkle out of it anything that she thought might shed light on the case. He apologised again for having to work on Christmas Day, and she told him that she wasn’t upset at all — but the family of the driver of his car, on the other hand, might have a different view.

On the way to the new police headquarters in Russell Street, he stopped to pick up Joe Sable from outside his flat. As they headed off, Titus asked, ‘That name on your block of flats, “Rosh-Pinah”, what does it mean?’

‘It’s Hebrew. I’m fuzzy on the details. It means “cornerstone”, and it’s also a place in Israel where the Messiah is meant to appear at the end of the world.’

‘Maybe the people who built the flats hoped the Messiah might get confused and turn up in Princes Hill instead.’

Joe laughed. ‘My parents were careless with my Jewish education, sir. I only know the bare bones. I didn’t choose the flat because of the name on the building. I like it, though — I’m glad it’s there.’

‘I wish my parents had been more careless with their Methodism,’ Titus said. ‘It took me years to slough it off.’

For the remainder of the short drive to Russell Street, they discussed the Quinn murders — particularly the difficult question of what to do with Mary.

‘We don’t have the manpower to provide her with 24-hour protection,’ Titus said. ‘I’d like her to be somewhere more secure than in that boarding house.’

‘I’ll look into it, sir. Do you think she might be in some sort of danger?’

‘That has to be a possibility.’

The police headquarters in Russell Street were brand-new, and the even newer Homicide branch was on the fourth floor. When Titus and Joe stepped out of the lift, they found two men, one seated and the other standing, who were managing to look perfectly comfortable being in Homicide’s offices on Christmas morning. They even managed to give off an air of annoyance at having been kept waiting. The seated man stood up.

‘Inspector Lambert?’ he asked.

Titus nodded.

‘And who is this?’ He indicated Joe Sable with undisguised disdain.

Titus ignored the question. ‘Perhaps you should identify yourself,’ he said evenly.

‘Tom Chafer, and this bloke is Dick Goad.’

‘And you’re here because …?’

‘We’re here because John Quinn is dead, and he was one of ours.’

‘Ours?’

‘Military Intelligence, Inspector. John Quinn died yesterday, and we were wondering when you’d planned to get around to telling us.’

Titus didn’t respond to this obvious attempt to put him on the back foot. Instead, he opened the door to his office, allowing Tom Chafer and Dick Goad to follow him in. Joe moved towards his desk in the outer office, but Titus called him in, too.

‘This is Sergeant Joe Sable,’ he said. ‘Whatever you have to say, he needs to hear it, too.’

Joe took stock of the two visitors. The thin one, Tom Chafer, was in his late twenties, and he seemed all angles, bones, and Adam’s apple. His browny-blond hair was cut very short, which made his ears appear prominent, and he wore a thin moustache. His wrist bones protruded like bell pulls, and his suit hung on him the way it would in a wardrobe. He was carrying a battered leather satchel. His companion, Dick Goad, was fat — not enormously so, but proximity to his partner didn’t flatter his shape. He was in his fifties, and bald, but with a slipped tiara of grey hair around his ears. His jowls were clean-shaven, and raw with razor burn. It was Tom Chafer who did all the talking.

‘When I said that John Quinn was one of ours, Inspector, I meant
was
in the sense that he’d been retired for some time.’

‘How did you find out that he was dead?’

‘It’s our job to find out things. There’s nothing sinister about it. By last night, dozens of people, both in the police force and out of it, knew about the deaths. One of those people, who I won’t name, passed the information on to us. It really isn’t very mysterious.’

‘You have an unfortunate manner, Mr Chafer,’ Titus said. ‘When you’re in my office, I think you should make an effort not to be an arsehole.’

There was a stunned silence. It was the first time that Joe had heard Inspector Lambert swear. He noticed a small smile creep across Dick Goad’s lips, and in that smile he also saw the nature of the relationship between these two: Goad ought to have been in charge, but he wasn’t. He took orders from this boy, Chafer, and he hated it.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Chafer said.

‘You’re with Intelligence, so I’m sure you do important work. You haven’t been sent here by your superiors to put us in our place. You’ve been sent because you need our help, and from the little we know about the Quinns, we apparently need your help. Perhaps we can acknowledge the equality of our needs, and not waste time spraying in corners like tomcats.’

A flush of embarrassment flooded Tom Chafer’s face. Titus continued, rescuing him from the need to respond immediately.

‘I’d intended, as it happens, to call Intelligence this morning. I had no idea that he’d once worked for you — how could I have? I was interested in the magazine he’d once subscribed to,
The Publicist
. You know it, of course.’

Chafer opened his satchel and removed a bundle of them.

‘Quinn was retired, but he kept in touch, and did a bit of work for us on the side. We know he subscribed to this because we asked him to. Australia First was planning to set up a wing of its party here in Melbourne, and John Quinn was going to join — and report to us, of course.’

Dick Goad spoke for the first time. His voice betrayed the money that had been spent on it.

‘The last of these was published in March last year. It’s the brainchild of a bloke called Stephensen, who’s been interned, by the way, along with a few of his cronies. They started publishing this stuff back in 1936, and we’ve been keeping an eye on them since then. They’ll tell you that they love Australia and the king, but they’re a bit too fond of Mr Hitler and Hirohito. They like a good manifesto, and it’s all very hairy-chested and windy.’

He withdrew a carefully folded piece of paper from his pocket and opened it.

‘Australia First attracts, or attracted, a range of supporters, not all of them extremists’, Goad went on. ‘But it provided a platform for people like Mr Arthur Bullock in Western Australia. This is a proclamation written by him, which outlines his vision for a new, improved Australia:

Men and women of Australia, today a new government assumes control of your destinies. Your government brings with it an entirely new system based upon a negotiated settlement with Japan. The Australian nation is ordered to lay down its arms. The Japanese army of occupation will maintain law and order until such time as the government feels that the new system has been safely established.

‘
He goes on to tell us what the cornerstones of this new system will be. Important members of the Catholic Church will be liquidated, along with communists and any other undesirable elements. Jews will be sterilised, and road works will be carried out by the forced labour of priests. Mr Arthur Bullock is currently interned.’

Goad spoke without emotion. Joe managed, just, to control an urge to utter an expression of disgust and disbelief. His mouth opened slightly, and the muscles in his face tautened.

‘Thank you,’ Titus said. ‘You’ve just provided us with a raft of possible motives.’

‘We do our best, Inspector,’ Tom Chafer said, and the look that Titus turned on him must have made him regret his tone. He scrambled to save the situation. ‘We’d appreciate it if you could brief us on what you found at Clarendon Street.’

‘Sergeant, could you provide Mr Chafer and Mr Goad with that briefing?’

‘Of course, sir.’ Joe was aware that, by giving Chafer no choice but to hear the details of the Quinn murders from a subordinate, Joe was being used adroitly by Titus to put Chafer in his place. When Joe had finished, Chafer turned to Titus and asked, ‘And you’re quite convinced that John Quinn was murdered — that it wasn’t suicide?’

Titus said nothing. Joe replied.

‘The attempt to make it look like suicide was quite clumsy. We’re confident that the autopsy will reveal that chloroform was used to subdue John Quinn, and that he was propped up in the bath and shot through the roof of the mouth while he was unconscious. It seems almost like an act of mercy, compared to the suffering his son must have endured.’

Dick Goad looked up from the notes he’d been taking.

‘John Quinn hadn’t had any contact with Australia First for some time. There were a couple of poorly attended meetings after the internments — but, with no leadership, interest fell away.’

‘Would his children have been aware of his activities?’ Titus asked.

‘No. None of these people ever came to his house. I’m pretty sure that his children didn’t even know that he was with Intelligence in the last war, and that he stayed with us afterwards — until he went into the law. But, as I say, he never lost touch.’

‘All right, Mr Goad, what’s your take on this?’

‘It seems to me that these were targeted killings. I don’t think they’re interested in the daughter. If they’d wanted her dead, she’d be dead by now. It has to be bound up in some way with John Quinn’s work for us in investigating Australia First. The puzzle is, we’ve kept dossiers on the main players and lots of the followers for years, and they’re all full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. We don’t know anyone in Australia First who’d be capable of this sort of crime. This either means that we’re on the wrong track entirely, or that there’s a new recruit out there who plays dirty.’

‘You think someone found out that John Quinn wasn’t a true-blue member, and killed him?’

‘That seems to be a reasonable inference — assuming, of course, that we’re talking about a rogue member with a brutal approach to dissidents. It’s not an unheard-of response in Germany.’

‘And Xavier Quinn?’

‘It’s possible, Inspector, that what they did to his son was part of the punishment, and that they made him watch it. We’re not talking about your common or garden killer.’

‘Xavier Quinn was a religious zealot,’ Titus said. ‘He had visions. He was a very peculiar young man. Whoever killed him knew something about him — certainly enough to mock his beliefs. As Sergeant Sable told you, there was a copy of
The Publicist
in Xavier’s room. What do you make of that?’

Tom Chafer made to speak, but Dick Goad spoke over the top of him.

‘He might have been snooping in his father’s room and taken one to read, or perhaps he was genuinely interested in Australia First.’

‘Despite their anti-Catholic bias?’

‘That was just one bloke in Western Australia,’ Chafer said, reclaiming his authority. ‘The magazine was more anti-Semitic than anti-Catholic, and a papist who saw visions might have found the anti-Semitism to his taste — the people who killed Christ, and so forth. There are gaps in our theory, I grant you, but the murder of an Intelligence man makes this a national-security matter. We need you to find the killer, but I’ll be frank with you — you can’t have him once you’ve found him. He’s ours. We’ll give you as much support as we can, but we’re seriously under-manned. We need someone to get a look inside at what’s happening in the rump of Australia First; whatever is going on there, it won’t be in the best interests of this country.’