A Thing of Blood (13 page)

I was not, as a matter of fact, prepared to excuse that liberty, and I stood up with every intention of slamming my fist into Radcliff’s thin, complacent face. He must have been ready for this, waiting patiently for his goading to have an effect, because he was out of his chair and had my unencumbered arm twisted behind my back before I was aware of what had happened.

‘Calm down,’ he said in my ear. ‘Calm down or I’ll help you calm down.’

‘I am calm,’ I hissed.

With one hand on my shoulder and the other still painfully pressing my arm, he pushed me back down into the seat.

‘I have to say, Mr Power, that your priorities are a little askew if what provokes you is a suggestion about your mother’s ego rather than your brother’s proximity to the hangman’s noose.’

‘If you knew my brother you’d know that these Machiavellian manoeuvres are beyond him. My god, he fell in love with Darlene, and, believe me, that should tell you all you need to know about his imagination. You don’t grow dissatisfied with Darlene by degrees. It’s something that happens on the spot — unless you’re my brother, in which case you make the macabre decision to shackle yourself to her.’

‘He did cheat on her.’

‘Yes, and all I can say is that it was completely and inexplicably out of character.’

Radcliff had by this time returned to his seat.

‘Given all the information that we have gathered over the last twenty-four hours I can safely say that at least you are behaving in ways that Sergeant Topaz would recognise as absolutely characteristic. You’re not seeing what is staring you in the face.’

‘The only thing staring me in the face is a detective who doesn’t know his arse from his elbow.’

Radcliff maintained the impassive demeanour of a man used to being proved right in the end.

‘Have you filled him in?’

Detective Strachan had entered the office unannounced, and with oily stealth.

‘Pretty much,’ Radcliff said.

‘The other one’s not being helpful. He’s putting on a good show of being scared witless — I almost feel sorry for him. Is this bloke going to talk to him?’

‘This bloke,’ I said, and did a first rate imitation of Strachan’s voice, ‘isn’t too impressed with the case you’ve constructed. I heard Darlene scream. That fact alone makes a nonsense of the idea that Brian had killed her earlier.’

‘Detective Radcliff obviously hasn’t told you what we think happened.’

‘I was getting to it,’ Radcliff said. ‘I was just extracting a little of Mr Power’s bile first.’

‘Well, I’ll hurry things along,’ Strachan sat on the edge of Radcliff’s desk and crossed one leg over the other, exposing a blackly hairy ankle.

‘Miss Goodenough has given your brother a poor character reference, and we have no reason to disbelieve her when she says that he was unfaithful to his wife prior to his arrival in Maryborough. You say you heard a scream coming from the kitchen and the sound of breaking china. We don’t dispute that. Your mother confirms it. Your assumption that it was Darlene screaming is what we dispute. We believe that this is a classic case of misdirection. We think that the woman in the kitchen was Brian’s Melbourne mistress and that the two of them cooked up this performance. Hence the speed with which the so-called kidnapper vanished and the silly splashing about of bullock’s blood. We don’t know whether your brother approved this flourish. We doubt it. He’s smart enough to realise that it would be analysed and distract us from the simple storyline he had set up.’

As Strachan was unfolding the police version of what had happened the previous day, my resistance to its logic began to weaken. It was neat and hideously possible. The only stumbling block was that I could not imagine Brian coolly planning and then carrying out so callous a crime. Of course, if I hadn’t heard from his own lips that he had had a sexual relationship with Sarah Goodenough, I wouldn’t have thought that likely either.

‘Can I see him?’ I asked.

Radcliff indicated the door and I followed him. I thought Brian would be across the road in the cells, but I was led into an interview room where he sat slumped behind a table. He looked hollowed out. A uniformed officer sat in a corner.

‘Your brother hasn’t been formally charged as yet,’ Radcliff said. ‘I’ll leave you alone — apart from the officer there.’

Brian’s face was puffy from crying, and from fear, and from the devastation wrought by the internal bomb blast of having his life brutally altered. I knew as soon as I saw him that the police story was absurd. Brian simply didn’t possess the qualities required for serial adultery, murder and concealment. He breathed shakily.

‘You know what they think?’ he said, and his voice was thin, stripped of its confidence by the humiliation he was suffering.

‘Yes, but they don’t actually have a case, just a theory, and it’s all based on the word of a madwoman.’

‘How could they think these things?’

‘I understand what it feels like to be where you are now.’

He nodded.

‘Now listen to me, Brian. If I’m going to help you I need to know everything there is to know.’

‘How can you help me? What do you mean? You’re an actor.’

‘I’m not just an actor anymore. I’m a private inquiry agent, too.’

This was meant to reassure him; instead, even through the fog of his now thoroughly obscured normal life, he laughed.

‘You’re kidding me.’

‘No Brian, I’m not kidding you, and you’re not my first job either. As a matter of fact I’m working on a couple of things.’

‘But Will, you couldn’t detect your arse if it wasn’t always in the same place.’

‘Only last year they hanged someone in Victoria for murder. Now probably isn’t the time for smart-aleck remarks. Whatever you think of my skills, I don’t see a queue of people lining up to defend you.’

‘Mother will get a good lawyer.’

‘Lawyers don’t investigate. I don’t care how good he is, if this goes the wrong way the best he might be able to do is get your sentence commuted.’

A new wave of fear broke over Brian, and he was immediately more compliant.

‘All right. All right.’

‘You have to tell me everything, however sordid.’

He inclined his head.

‘Was Sarah Goodenough really the first woman you cheated with, or were there others here in Melbourne?’

The look on his face was one of disbelief that such a question needed to be asked. He calmly said, ‘Sarah Goodenough was the first and only one. There was nobody in Melbourne. Nobody.’

‘So everything that Sarah told the police is a frighteningly convincing lie?’

‘Everything.’

‘There’s no one I need to speak to? No one who can provide me with any information?’

Rallying for a moment, Brain declared angrily, ‘Will, there
is
no information to provide.’

All I could offer at this point was an assurance that I would do my best to find Darlene’s kidnappers.

‘I’m not going to spend the night in jail, am I?’

‘I don’t see how that can be avoided, but you’ll be out tomorrow, I promise you.’

The look of unmitigated horror that flooded Brian’s face as he suddenly realised that he would be spending at least one night in a cell was heartbreaking. As I left I told Radcliff that Brian had emphatically denied all allegations against him, and that they would be hearing from our lawyer almost immediately.

‘We’ve already heard from him,’ Radcliff said, ‘while you were in with your brother. Your mother organised it.’

I had no idea who Mother had hired or how she even knew who to ring. As I walked down the steps of the police headquarters in Russell Street I thought that there was a great deal about my mother that I didn’t know.

Chapter Six

by george

IT WAS SEVEN-THIRTY
by the time I had crossed Russell Street and walked past the lumpish conglomerate of the Magistrates’ Court. The picture was due to start in twenty minutes, so I could easily make it to the Regent Theatre in Collins Street in time. There were a lot of people on the streets, most of them American servicemen squiring women to the lounges of hotels.

The local boys couldn’t afford to do this. Bars, many of which ran out of beer regularly, were obliged to close at five-thirty and thereafter alcohol could only be bought in the lounge — and the prices in the lounge were prohibitively high. A beer that cost seven pence in the bar at twenty-five minutes past five cost one shilling in the lounge ten minutes later. The price of spirits was even more inflated. This didn’t put too much pressure on the doughboys’ pay packets, and for underpaid shop girls or exploited WAAFs turning down the offer of a few two- shilling gins was a sacrifice they weren’t prepared to make. I can’t say I blamed them, returning as they would be to unheated houses and five lousy inches of tepid bathwater. I wondered if the emperor of Japan had any idea of the effect his belligerent expansionism was having on the sex and social lives of Melbourne’s bourgeoisie.

Very quickly I found myself in Little Collins Street passing the Petrushka café. It was open and busy, and I decided, on the spur of the moment, to duck in and make an enquiry about George, the fellow who could possibly tell me something about Gretel Beech. I pushed open the door and was hit by a fug of human heat and cigarette smoke. Melbourne’s bearded, corduroy crowd was here in force. Surprisingly, there were a couple of Yanks as well. At the counter I raised my voice above the surrounding babble, and asked whether a man named George was in the café tonight. The woman shrugged. ‘George who?’

‘I don’t know his last name,’ I said, and summoned the courage to nonchalantly add, ‘All I know is that he’s very well endowed.’

‘You’re a pervert,’ she said. ‘Get out before I get someone to throw you out.’

Mr Wilks had overstated the
laissez-faire
virtues of the Petrushka café. Anything did not go, after all.

I turned away from the counter and was preparing to move among the tables, to ask discreetly whether this or that person was George, when four policemen burst through the door and began blowing their whistles hysterically. Three of them hurried to the rear of the café and the fourth stood by the entrance. Two suited men, who had come in after them, surveyed the crowd, who had gone quiet, and one of them said loudly: ‘Everyone stay where you are. We’re Manpower officials and we’re here to check your papers. Please get them ready and we’ll get this over with as quickly as possible.’

I found this an extraordinary situation, but the patrons of the Petrushka seemed resigned to the interruption — so obedient were they that this couldn’t have been the first time a Manpower raid had been conducted on the premises. I’d heard about them and thought it bizarre. A Manpower official had the authority to redirect anyone not working in a designated war job into such a job. If you had the misfortune to be scratching a living in an inessential industry, such as hairdressing or shop assisting, or any of the thousands of other occupations deemed frivolous, you might find yourself ordered to report for work at a munitions factory. We were all supposed to carry ID cards showing the name and address of our employer. If you weren’t employed, someone from Manpower would helpfully find you something ghastly to do. I was in the fortunate position of holding a card that indicated that I was in a reserved occupation — entertainers being regarded as essential to the morale of the general populace — so I had nothing to fear from the little Napoleons of the Manpower unit. When my papers were examined the odious man looked down his vein-webbed nose at me, as if I was one of the loathsome deserters on the home front who was not pulling his weight, but there was nothing he could do. He made no attempt to hide his disappointment at his inability to transfer me to a dully repetitive factory job.

The raid was over in a few minutes. I don’t know if any orders were issued. I’d be surprised if everyone in the Petrushka that night was making a critical contribution to defeating Japan, but perhaps many of them were sufficiently well connected to carry convincing, if not necessarily accurate, identification papers. The patrons of the café didn’t strike me as being members of an underclass. Their politics were, I suspected, as susceptible to fashion as their outfits.

The arrival of the Manpower people had distracted the woman behind the counter from her intention of having me thrown out. The clamour of conversation reasserted itself as I began to look for George. I approached table after table and said, ‘I’m looking for a man named George. I know this sounds odd, but I have a message for him from Gretel.’ I didn’t risk mentioning George’s most distinguishing feature again. At a table of four men, carefully, artfully shabby in their attire, I interrupted a boisterous argument about the merits of an artist whose name was unfamiliar to me. It didn’t appear to be a particularly friendly exchange of views, and when I asked my question a dark-haired young man said, ‘Yeah. I’m George. What’s she want?’