The Port Fairy Murders (11 page)

‘Do you think he killed his father, sir?’

‘It doesn’t look like it, but I don’t think he’ll waste time weeping over him. He burned his house to the ground. I presume he would have inherited it. Clearly, he’s not the sentimental type.’

Titus suggested that they try to get some sleep. When Maude fetched a couple of pillows for Joe, he assured her again that he could sleep comfortably sitting up.

In the bedroom, Titus held Maude to him, despite the heat. He needed to feel her body against his skin. They spoke softly, conscious of Joe just a few feet from them in the living room.

‘Joe is sure he wasn’t followed,’ Maude said.

‘Joe wants to believe that.’

‘He shouldn’t be back at work, Titus. As soon as I saw him, I wanted to cry.’

‘At least if he’s at work we can keep an eye on him.’

‘How can you do that after hours?’

‘We don’t have the manpower to post someone at his flat around the clock, and we can’t do that here, either.’

‘You really believe that this Starling creature was here, don’t you?’

‘I’m certain of it. However alert Joe thinks he is, he’s injured, he’s scared, and he’s not himself. On top of that, he’s inexperienced, and he can’t get past feeling guilty about Tom.’

‘I didn’t help him, did I?’

‘Please, darling, don’t you start feeling guilty, too.’

‘I don’t feel guilty. I’m just angry with myself.’

‘You and Tom — well, all of us — need to move somewhere safer. I can’t protect us here; not now.’

Maude knew that he was right, although her fears were for Tom, not for herself.

‘We can stay at Tom’s house. It’ll be messy, but it’s got two bedrooms. What about Joe?’

‘He won’t like it, but he can’t stay at his flat. I’m not giving him a choice. I’m billeting him with Helen Lord.’

‘Does she know this?’

‘Not yet, and neither does Joe. I knew she and her mother lived with her uncle in Kew. What I didn’t know until this evening is that the house is huge. It’s a proper Victorian pile. There must be half-a-dozen bedrooms; more, probably. It’s the kind of place that would have a butler’s pantry — whatever that is.’

‘How did Helen Lord go in Warrnambool?’

Titus elaborated on the sketch he’d given earlier of their investigations. He expressed reservations about David Reilly — reservations he’d spoken of to no one else. As they both began to drift into sleep, Titus said, ‘There’s something eating away at Joe. Something apart from this case.’

‘I think it’s Europe,’ Maude said, but Titus’s breathing had deepened, and he didn’t hear her.

–6–

WHEN MATTHEW TODD
looked at his sister, Rose, he wondered, just as his Aunt Aggie did, why she didn’t take more trouble with her appearance. She was a looker, but everything about her was practical. She had a practical haircut, wore practical clothes and shoes, and never wore make-up. Matthew didn’t understand people who took no pride in their appearance, unless there was nothing about them that was worthy of pride — and, God knew, there were legions of people like that. Rose’s choice of husband had done nothing to raise Matthew’s opinion of her. She’d married beneath her; beneath all of them. John Abbot was stocky, stolid and, yes, practical. He was plain as a pikestaff, and when Matthew visited, Abbot thought the occasion was so inconsequential that he wore his singlet indoors. In fact, he’d been known to sit down to lunch in a singlet, and Matthew found his hairy shoulders an affront to etiquette. It didn’t seem to bother Rose in the least, which was proof enough for Matthew of how far she’d fallen.

The Abbots ran dairy cattle on a large property outside Port Fairy, on the Portland side. John Abbot had been raised by his father, his mother having died when John was ten years old (‘Sensibly died,’ Aunt Aggie had said). This explained his staggeringly awful uncouthness, Matthew supposed. Old Mr Abbot had died at the age of just 55. He’d never looked youthful, and most of the mourners at St Patrick’s — and the church had been full — were surprised to learn that he was so young. He’d always been referred to in the parish as ‘old Mr Abbot’. Father Brennan knew that Abbot could be relied on to leave £5 on the plate each Sunday — a donation that hadn’t been continued by his son. John Abbot’s view was that you paid money to go to the pictures, but that being bored numb every Sunday should be free.

There was a reason Matthew had taken to visiting his sister. His reason had a name: Johanna Scotney. She wasn’t officially a Land Army placement on the Abbot farm, but her employment protected her from being put somewhere out of the district.

Johanna Scotney was 18 years old, the daughter of a fisher-man in Port Fairy — not one of Matthew’s clients — and she was pretty. Matthew hadn’t settled yet as to whom she most closely resembled. He judged all women against their resemblance to someone he’d seen at the pictures. It didn’t matter how faint the resemblance, he saw the actress first and the real woman second. Rather than wrestle with a woman’s personality, he found it simpler to ascribe to her the traits of the carefully scripted and directed character played by her vague shadow in some film or other. His Aunt Aggie was Judith Anderson — not the severe lesbian, Mrs Danvers, in
Rebecca
, but the less off-putting Ann Treadwell in
Laura
. Rose was Ann Sheridan, stripped back to basics, unmade-up and poorly lit. For Johanna Scotney, Matthew was tossing up between Deanna Durbin and Ann Baxter. Either way, she needed deflowering, and he’d begun his campaign by making what he believed to be the occasional erotic remark to her. So far, she’d met him with stony, disapproving silence.

ROSE ABBOT SUSPECTED
that her brother’s visits, and his willingness to stay for lunch, had to do with Johanna Scotney, rather than with his having any interest in her, her husband, or the farm. The potatoes and eggs he took away with him weren’t sufficient to encourage grateful lingering. She’d watched him follow Johanna with his eyes, and she’d noted with abhorrence the lewd set of his mouth when he did so.

He’d arrived earlier than usual this morning, and Rose hoped he wasn’t intending to stretch his stay until lunch. It was just after nine when she heard his bicycle clatter against the front door. She and Johanna were in the kitchen, talking about the boy in Port Fairy who was tentatively courting her. It had become a ritual after the morning milking for Rose and Johanna to repair to the kitchen while John Abbot checked fences and did running repairs on machinery. The intimacy between them was easy, sisterly, but wasn’t so deep that Johanna felt able to raise her feelings about Rose’s husband or her brother. When she’d first come to the farm, in June the previous year, John Abbot had been cool to her, resentful of her femaleness, because the person he’d wanted was a male. Farm work was for wives and blokes, not young sheilas — especially young sheilas who looked like Johanna Scotney. She pulled her weight, though, so his resentment subsided, and he stopped minding paying her the 40 shillings a week that Rose insisted was fair. After all, the going rate was 30 shillings, and that included food and board. Johanna didn’t need three meals provided — lunch was all — and she went home at the end of each day.

Johanna had disliked John Abbot on sight. He was short, and she didn’t like short men, and he could only be bothered shaving a couple of times a week, so his already ugly face was made uglier by dark bristles. Still, Rose and John Abbot seemed solid, reliable, and hardworking, so she didn’t mind that her feelings for John were unpleasant. They would gradually calm into indifference, or they might have done if, about three months after her arrival, John Abbot hadn’t made an obscene remark to her. They’d been repairing a fence, refitting a strainer, when Abbot had said, out of the blue, ‘You’ve got a bloody good set of breasts on you. Anyone ever tell you that before?’

Johanna hadn’t known what to say. She blushed and turned away from him.

‘Didn’t mean to offend,’ he said. ‘I was just saying. Do us a favour and don’t tell the wife I mentioned your knockers.’ He laughed. ‘She might get jealous.’

She said nothing to Rose — partly because she liked her, and partly because she felt sorry for her having to crawl into bed each night beside that hairy-shouldered gnome. Was she also worried that Rose might believe that she’d encouraged John to speak to her like that? Her mother had warned her to be careful around Catholics. They knew no restraint. Johanna hadn’t understood what she’d meant by this. As if it cleared the matter up, Mrs Scotney had said, ‘Well, you only have to look in their churches and at the number of children they have.’ What one had to do with the other wasn’t enlarged upon, but John Abbot’s obscenity confirmed for Johanna what her mother had hinted at.

Somehow it didn’t seem odd to Johanna that she felt comfortable in Rose Abbot’s presence. Although Johanna couldn’t understand how she could bear to be physically intimate with her husband, she saw no evidence in Rose’s gaze of the revulsion that she, Johanna, felt when looking at John Abbot. Catholics, of course, never divorced, so perhaps Rose was making the best of a bad situation. But, no; there was nothing of the martyr about Rose. The only conclusion that Johanna could reasonably come to was that, inexplicably, Rose loved her husband. It was this, really, that prevented her from voicing any complaint about him. Johanna couldn’t put Rose in the position of having to take sides. Besides, Rose was the only woman, apart from her mother, in whom she could confide, and she rarely confided in her mother. Not that she didn’t get on with her mother. It was just that she didn’t want her interfering in her budding romance.

The boy would soon be 18, but he was mature for his age — he could, he’d told her, grow a moustache if he chose to. His name was Timothy Harrison. He was tall, and not yet settled into the long arms and legs that seemed to have grown overnight. He knew nothing about fish or fishing. His father, whose health had been compromised by mustard gas in the first war, was an invalid. Fortunately, his mother’s people had money, so the Harrison family — his older brother was somewhere in Italy, fighting — was able to live comfortably in town. Timothy planned to join up the minute he turned 18.

Johanna had sketched all this information for Rose during their first talk about Timothy. She’d withheld a couple of things, though. Chief among these was that Timothy was an Anglican. She didn’t think Rose would really care — although the crucifix in the living room and the framed picture of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour (Rose had identified it for her) in the kitchen silenced any talk of religion, however inconsequential. Timothy’s religious affiliation was one of the reasons she’d kept him a secret from her mother. At least he was a Protestant, but he wasn’t Presbyterian, and the Anglicans were pale imitations of the Catholics, according to Mrs Scotney. They didn’t go in for popery, though, and their churches weren’t quite so gaudy and pagan. The Harrisons were respectable people, so Johanna was confident that she could talk her mother round about Timothy. This wouldn’t have been possible if the Harrisons had been Catholic. Nothing would induce Mrs Scotney to welcome a papist into her home. She tolerated them in shops and had a nodding acquaintance with one or two of them when she passed them in Sackville Street. After all, she was fond of saying, she wasn’t an intolerant woman. She hoped she had enough Christian charity in her to disguise her contempt. She wasn’t in the business of hurting people’s feelings.

The sound of Matthew’s bicycle annoyed both Rose and Johanna. This morning time together had become the favourite part of the day for each of them. Rose enjoyed being Johanna’s confidante. She’d never been in such a position before, having found female company of little interest while she was growing up. Now, as a married woman who’d been inducted into the mysteries and miseries of sex, she felt wise, and able to offer Johanna counsel. Not that sex was ever overtly discussed. Timothy Harrison had made no physical overtures, beyond holding Johanna’s hand at the pictures.

‘How would you feel if he kissed you?’ Rose asked. Johanna was about to reply when Matthew Todd’s arrival brought the conversation to an end.

He entered the house without knocking — a habit he had that set Rose’s nerves on edge. It wasn’t just that it was rude, which it was; it was the proprietorial air he brought with him, as if the Abbot house somehow belonged to him.

‘Morning,’ he said. ‘A cup of tea seems essential. Would you mind, Johanna?’

‘I’ll make it,’ Rose said. ‘Johanna’s got more important things to do than make you cups of tea.’

Matthew, who hadn’t taken his eyes off Johanna since entering the kitchen, decided she was much more like Ann Baxter than Deanna Durbin, and he was relieved. Deanna Durbin was too impossibly prim and sweet to excite him. Ann Baxter had some spark. Johanna put the tea cup she’d been drinking from in the sink.

‘Good day, Mr Todd,’ she said as she moved past him. Despite being only a few years older than Johanna, Matthew had never suggested that she call him by his first name. It pleased him to be called ‘Mr Todd’. When Johanna had left, Rose said, ‘You have a fiancée, Matthew.’

‘And what exactly is that supposed to mean?’

‘It means I’ve seen the way you look at her.’

Matthew didn’t bother denying it. Instead he said, ‘You should do something with your hair. You look like a frump.’

‘It’s so lovely when you visit, Matthew.’

He laughed. ‘Don’t take it personally, Rosie. I’m just trying to be helpful.’

‘You can be helpful by staying away from Johanna. She’s spoken for, and so are you.’