The Port Fairy Murders (10 page)

JOE TOOK THE
full teacup from Maude. To his dismay, it rattled slightly in its saucer.

‘You’re shaking, Sergeant.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry.’

Maude waited.

‘It isn’t fear. It’s …’

‘I know that, Sergeant.’

‘I don’t know why I’m shaking.’

‘Titus and I don’t have any secrets. I think you know that. He told me what happened in that house in Belgrave. Of course, I don’t pretend to understand what it must have been like. I suspect what took place there is more than reason enough to make your hand unsteady.’

Joe heard the door of the front room open, and Tom Mackenzie’s footsteps coming up the hallway. He thought he saw a subtle, rapid shift away from sympathy in Maude’s expression. When she spoke, however, there was no hostility in her voice. Very softly, she said, ‘Tom needs time, Sergeant.’

Tom Mackenzie took a couple of steps into the living room and stopped. He looked at Joe, was puzzled for a moment, and then smiled.

‘I thought I heard someone come in.’

Joe was startled. He’d been expecting Tom to be an incoherent, shattered man. He was wearing only pyjama bottoms, possibly because of the hot night, but more probably because his torso was bruised, cut, and spot-burned by cigarettes. Several of his fingers were in splints, and his face was swollen. Joe stood up.

‘Tom.’

‘Yes, I’m Tom.’

‘It’s good to see you again.’

Tom nodded politely, but gave no indication that he recognised Joe.

‘I’m just going to the toilet.’

‘Can you manage?’ Maude asked.

‘Yes. I’m right.’

He walked through into the kitchen, opened the back door, and stepped down into the backyard.

In the living room, Joe sat down, stunned.

‘The psychiatrist said it was a kind of shellshock,’ Maude said. ‘I’m sure he recognises you, but his mind is protecting itself against, well, against any associations with what happened, I suppose. He is getting better, Sergeant. I see that every day, but his physical injuries are always there to …’

‘Remind him.’

‘Yes. He smiled when he saw you.’

‘And then he stopped smiling.’

GEORGE STARLING HEARD
the back door open. He could still hear the murmur of two voices, so a third person was now in the house. Starling stood up awkwardly. His left leg had gone to sleep. He shook it, and waited for the tingle and ache to pass. Stepping carefully, he returned to the backyard. The door to the privy was open. He waited by the side of the house for whoever was using it to emerge. A man coughed. Now was the time to take him, Starling thought, when he had his trousers down around his ankles. Who was in there, though? An attack, even when the attacker had the advantage, was risky, and Starling’s advantage was diminished by his uncertainty about this bloke’s identity. Not that Starling thought he might be armed. He might, though, be fast and strong, and Starling was not carrying a weapon. While he was pondering this, the person came out of the dunny. The faint spill of light from the kitchen revealed a man wearing pyjama bottoms. With a jolt of surprise, Starling recognised Tom Mackenzie. So he was still alive. It was obvious from the confusion in Mackenzie’s face that he wasn’t immediately able to account for the presence of the man he knew only as Fred. What he did next took Starling by surprise. Tom turned, calling at the top of his voice, ‘Maude! Maude! Maude!’, and retreated to the toilet, where he pulled the door shut after him. He continued calling, ‘Maude! Maude! Maude!’ The peculiar keening quality of his voice unsettled Starling. Unsure how many people might emerge from the house, he decided not to risk a confrontation and left quickly through the back gate.

TOM MACKENZIE SAT
where Joe had been sitting before he and Maude had rushed into the backyard.

‘He was there, staring at me. Fred — Fred was there.’ He was shaking. ‘I hid in the toilet,’ he said with quiet shame.

‘Do you have a torch, Mrs Lambert?’

‘On the bench in the kitchen.’

Joe picked up the torch on his way to the backyard. He also picked up a knife, and moved quickly. If he stopped to think about the implications of Starling being so close, he might lose his nerve. He checked the side of the house first and then swept the torchlight over the garden. The only place for Starling to hide was the toilet, but it was empty. Joe checked the back gate, and saw that it was unlocked. He stepped into the laneway and shone the torch to the right and left. The batteries were weak, so he couldn’t see far. He switched off the torch, not wishing to run it down, and knowing that batteries were almost impossible to get. He waited. There was no movement that he could discern. Had Starling really been here, or was Tom jumping at shadows? The thought that Starling might have been here made Joe feel sick. It meant that he’d been followed and that he’d brought this monster into Inspector Lambert’s home. This could only be seen as more incompetence, more carelessness. But he’d been careful. He’d looked back at regular intervals. No, this had to have been a waking nightmare for Tom.

Joe went back inside. Tom looked at him, and with sudden recognition said, ‘Joe — he was here. Fred was here — out there.’

‘I searched, Tom. I couldn’t find him.’ He was reluctant to suggest that Tom might have been mistaken. Tom looked at Joe quizzically, and was about to speak when something in him seemed to collapse. The animation that appeared briefly in his face vanished. He stood up and returned to his bedroom. Joe, unable to hide his distress, said, ‘He thinks I don’t believe him.’

‘And do you believe him?’

‘I don’t want to believe him.’

‘Because that would mean you brought him here.’

‘Yes.’

‘Sit down, Joe. Nothing’s changed. This Fred, or George Starling, or whatever he calls himself — maybe he was here, and maybe he wasn’t. If he was here, he followed you. That doesn’t mean you brought him here.’

For Joe, this was precisely what it meant. Inspector Lambert would think so, and so would Helen Lord.

‘Titus won’t be here for a couple of hours. I’m afraid there’s no spare bed, just a fold-down camp bed in Tom’s room.’

‘I don’t think I should …’

‘No, of course. I was intending to bring it up here.’

‘I’m just as happy to sleep sitting up in one of these armchairs, Mrs Lambert, although I don’t imagine I’ll sleep at all tonight.’

‘I’ll get you some pillows when you’re ready.’

‘Does your back gate lock?’

‘There’s a bolt that goes across it. I’ll make a fresh pot of tea if you go out and bolt it.’

When Joe bolted the gate he shook it to test its strength, and then unbolted it and stepped again into the laneway. He was afraid as he stood there in the darkness. He had to force himself to stay there. If Starling was nearby, with his eyes accustomed to the night, he could take Joe easily. He swallowed, exquisitely aware that his heart was pounding and that at any moment it might miss a beat. He breathed deeply, concentrating on its rhythm; as he did so, it began to slow. He listened intently. There was a skittering nearby — a possum, or a rat. There were no other sounds. The air was still; so still that not even leaves rubbed together. He began to hear low sounds that must have been in the background always — a late tram rattling down Sydney Road, and, far in the distance, a car’s horn. There was, too, the sound of a motorcycle, faint and nowhere near Bishop Street. He was suddenly aware of the sound of breathing, and it took a moment for Joe to realise that it was his own. He went back into the yard, locked the gate, and returned to the living room.

‘I checked the lane again. Nothing. I think you should lock the back door. It wouldn’t hurt to take precautions, just in case …’

‘Just in case Starling really was here.’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me about him, Joe.’

Joe hesitated.

‘Titus has told me a good deal. I’m under no illusions about the type of person Starling is, but he’s never met him. You have. Tell me why my brother is so afraid of him. He’s never been afraid of anyone before.’

‘It wasn’t Starling who tortured Tom.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘In some ways, though, he’s even worse than the man who did.’

‘Is he a Nazi, do you think?’

‘He could probably spout a few bits of National Socialist philosophy, but I think he’s attracted to its ugliness, to the licence it gives him to be violent — not to anything else about it. It’s a way to express his hatreds.’

‘Titus thinks he’ll lose interest in it now that his leader is dead. Would you say that was likely?’

‘He’s a follower — I know that much.’

‘Yes, but will he find someone else to follow?’

‘I don’t think he will. None of the other people I met — the other sympathisers, those Australia First people — are candidates. Starling had nothing but contempt for them. He thought they were soft, effete little dandies.’

‘So politics won’t be driving Starling. That leaves what? Grief?’

Joe looked at Maude Lambert, and found that she’d been watching him closely.

‘Grief?’ he asked.

‘Yes. How close was Starling to Ptolemy Jones?’

‘Are you asking if Starling is queer? Nazis hate queers almost as much as they hate us. Jews, I mean. I’m Jewish. Did you know that?’

He hadn’t meant there to be, but there was a sharpness in the question that somehow implied that he needed to express this fact defiantly.

‘Yes, Joe, I knew that,’ she said quietly, and was offended that Joe thought he needed to be defiant with her. She wanted to say something, but held fire.

‘I was wondering if there’d been some element of homo-eroticism in the relationship between Starling and Jones. It would probably never have been acknowledged, maybe not even recognised as that. That isn’t really what I meant, though. What did Jones offer Starling? Just a political direction, or something more?’

Joe felt out of his depth, and was suddenly conscious of how young and inexperienced he was. Homo-eroticism. He wasn’t absolutely certain what that was, although he was pretty sure that there weren’t many women in Melbourne who could introduce it into a conversation with Maude Lambert’s unembarrassed ease.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Lambert. I’m not sure I understand what you mean by Starling feeling grief.’

‘His emotions may seem crude to you, Joe. The only emotion you’ve ascribed to him is hatred.’

‘That’s the only emotion I saw.’

‘Is that what you saw when Starling spoke to Jones, or looked at him?’

‘No.’

‘So what was that emotion?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Was it indifference?’

‘No.’

‘Annoyance? Anger?’

‘No. You want me to say “love”, Mrs Lambert, but it didn’t look like that either. If you ever met Starling, you wouldn’t believe he was capable of love. A shared passion for cruelty isn’t love.’

‘A shared passion for anything can sometimes feel like love. I don’t think George Starling needs National Socialism to feed his anger. I really do think it’s fed by grief, and I think that puts him beyond the reach of reason.’

‘So, revenge?’

‘Revenge, pure and simple. I remember, years ago, probably before you were born, Titus worked on a murder case that just seemed senseless. He couldn’t find a motive until he discovered that this was the second victim, not the first. The first had been killed in a fit of vengefulness. I can’t recall the details, but I do recall that after the first murder, the killer didn’t feel that his thirst for revenge had been satisfied, and so he looked around for people who’d only been peripherally involved in whatever the dispute had been. Titus was convinced that he wouldn’t have stopped at two. He would have moved out in widening circles from the centre, finding reasons to punish people.’

Maude paused. Joe understood that she was equating Starling with this earlier killer, and that she could only have formed this view from a close reading of the case notes.

‘We don’t have evidence that directly implicates Starling in any murders,’ Joe said.

‘Yes, it’s strange, isn’t it?’

‘Strange?’

‘Yes. Because your sense of him, and our sense of him, is that he’s at least as violent as Jones was. He’s a frightening figure.’

Joe thought about that.

‘Is it weak to be afraid of him, Mrs Lambert?’

‘It would be foolish not to be. I don’t think we’re inventing a bogey man, and this might be a bit forthright for you, but I believe that if he gets to you, he won’t stop at you.’

‘He won’t get to me, Mrs Lambert. And I promise you, he won’t get to Tom either.’

IT WAS 3.00
am when Inspector Lambert made it home to Bishop Street. He’d dropped Helen Lord and David Reilly at their respective houses first. (The first thing Reilly said to his wife on waking her was, ‘You should see the house that Helen Lord lives in. It’s a mansion. She shouldn’t be taking a bloke’s job.’)

Joe and Maude were still awake when Titus entered the house. Before he’d spoken a word, Joe told him about Tom’s encounter, real or imagined, with George Starling. He spoke calmly, but there was a desperate edge to his voice that Titus couldn’t miss. It was a strange relief to Joe when Titus suggested that they should proceed on the assumption that Tom had, in fact, seen George Starling. To do otherwise was folly. There must have been some silent exchange between Titus and Maude, Joe thought, because Titus hurried to assure Joe that Starling’s being in the backyard didn’t represent a failure on his part. Rather, it provided further proof that the man they were dealing with was not to be underestimated. He briefly outlined what they’d learned in Warrnambool, and included the hideous cruelty meted out to John Starling’s animals.