A Thing of Blood (23 page)

‘I’m doing a bit of work now for Army Intelligence. It’s hush-hush, so you mustn’t tell anybody, and that includes Fulton. I’m telling you because …’ When I came to ‘because’ I realised I didn’t know why I was telling Mother this sensitive material. I floundered and she filled the gap.

‘You’re telling me because you want to let me know that you’re doing something useful. That’s nice, Will, but you know you don’t have to impress me. I always thought your acting was a fine profession to follow. I’m glad, though, that you’re having some success with your detecting. I want my boys to be happy. You don’t have to compete with Fulton or Brian.’

I’d always found these blessedly infrequent assurances that Mother distributed her affections equally, embarrassing, and I moved to head off further maudlin and deeply unconvincing observations.

‘As I said earlier, Mother, there’s an opportunity that I need to discuss with Brian, and I’m afraid it can’t wait. I’m sure he’s very tired but I’m also sure this will take his mind off his troubles.’

I went upstairs to Brian’s room — until recently Brian and Darlene’s room — and found him lying on the bed, his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling.

‘I’m not here to talk about Darlene,’ I said hurriedly. ‘I’ve got a job I think you might be interested in doing.’

By the end of my account of all that James Fowler had told me about Secret Armies and Shining Knights, Brian’s interest had been aroused. The idea of playing the part of a rabid, angry, volatile, anti-Catholic, anti-government, anti-just-about-anything agitator was appealing to him. With his professional and personal life in ruins, a risky, potentially violent adventure was just the tonic he needed. He didn’t even mind that there was no salary attached. The sudden, seismic shift from plodding teacher with wretchedly dull wife to Army Intelligence mole so energised him that he leapt from the bed and began stuffing Darlene’s clothes into a suitcase.

‘I’ll give these to the Red Cross. She’ll be ropeable, but bugger it, Captain Spangler can fork out for a new wardrobe.’

‘The Red Cross? I always said her wardrobe consisted of stuff you’d only wear in an emergency.’

Brian began to say something, probably a reflex defence of his wife’s taste, but caught himself in time and laughed instead.

‘When do I start?’

‘Right now. I’ll take you to Clutterbuck’s. He won’t be there until Monday, but I think you’ll find his house quite instructive.’

Chapter Ten

very poor decisions

UNTIL THE ARRIVAL OF THE AMERICANS
, Melbourne slipped into a coma each Sunday. Influence was brought to bear, however, when thousands of troops wandered the city’s streets, bored and dismayed by the absence of entertainment. A bored and dismayed doughboy is liable to make his own fun, so the city fathers, with the greatest reluctance, and with the noisy disapproval of church mice from various denominations, decided that perhaps the veil of the Temple would not be rent in twain after all if movie houses were permitted to operate.

This is why the centre of the city was quite busy when I passed through it on Sunday morning on my way to the Beech residence in St Kilda. I was slightly hung over, having had more of Clutterbuck’s whisky than I’d intended. This was Brian’s fault. He’d been impressed by the house, and even more impressed by the quality and quantity of Clutterbuck’s single malts. My reticence about drinking it had faded with every nip, until we’d disposed of most of a bottle. Brian said it might be a good introduction for Clutterbuck to Brian Power, anarchist.

‘Anarchy,’ I said, ‘is the last thing Clutterbuck is after. He’s a controller. His idea of anarchy is a poorly folded sock.’

‘Anyway, Will, I’ll take responsibility for the whisky. I’ll say I was toasting the death of all Vatican vultures, and got carried away. I’ll stress how much you tut-tutted and tried to stop me.’

At first I thought this was a bad idea, but then it occurred to me that it would be very useful if Clutterbuck thought that there was tension between my brother and me. I explained this to Brian and he agreed, saying that licensed and unbridled attacks on my character and personality would be endlessly entertaining for him.

‘All in a good cause, of course,’ he said. ‘Having a go at you in front of this Clutterbuck will be a kind of patriotism.’

I counselled him not to go too far, that any rivalry between us needed to reflect the banality of real life, not the excess of a Sheridan Restoration comedy.

The morning was grey, exacerbating the disappointment of the late Spring bud burst. I didn’t know my way around St Kilda at all. Although it was a suburb only a few miles from where I’d grown up in Princes Hill, it might as well have been on the other side of the continent. It faced the sea, which made it seem alien to me. My internal geography was calibrated to dry land, and it seemed to me that Melbourne resolutely faced away from the turbulence of the ocean in favour of the sluggish predictability of the Yarra River. St Kilda was, as well, terribly déclassé, and in my memory it smelled unpleasantly of brine and salt-rotted timber.

Finding the boarding house where Beech lived turned out to be surprisingly easy. The first person I asked — the female driver of a horse-drawn bread delivery cart — pointed me in the direction of a street that ran off the Esplanade. It was close to Luna Park, and as I approached it I was reminded of the occasion I had visited this fun fair with my father. I must have been ten years old, and this was supposed to have been a treat. Perhaps it was my birthday. I hope the visit wasn’t a substitute for a present, because I recall finding the experience hideous and upsetting. I’ve always found fairgrounds and sideshows and circuses rather sinister, and the great, gaping mouth at the entrance to Luna Park didn’t seem to me then, and doesn’t seem to me now, to be an invitation to fun and games. Its sheer size makes it grotesque, and the unavoidable conclusion that children passing beneath its teeth are being swallowed whole was disconcerting to a sensitive ten-year-old.

My father was deaf to my protestations, and I was harried onto the Scenic Railway without really being aware that it was neither scenic nor a railway, but a rollercoaster of terrifying antiquity. The howls of delighted hysteria from the other passengers convinced me at this early age that the general public are, sadly, never at their best. I didn’t enjoy that day; I endured it. My sense of my father being so vague, I can’t know for certain whether my discomfort was seen by him as being evidence of a job well done. He certainly made no attempt to shield me from every ghastly excess Luna Park had to offer.

As I turned into George Beech’s street the Scenic Railway clattered its way to the top of a rise, and screams and laughter flew over the rooftops as it hurtled into a dip. I knew I could never live within earshot of Luna Park, but it was obviously not a concern that troubled Beech. The house where he boarded was only two doors away from the Esplanade. It was a two-storeyed building which would once have been a single home, although even in its heyday it would never have been considered grand. It was both bland and ugly, with stained and flaking stucco walls, and window frames that were peeling and splitting with rot and neglect. I didn’t have to walk through the front door to know that the conversion into flats would have been cheap and nasty. This wasn’t a house that would attract a better class of tenant. This was a house that actually preferred the George Beech’s of this world, and it shared his odours of drink, smokes and sweat.

I discovered which was Beech’s room when I peered through a grimy window. George Beech was sprawled on a mattress on the floor, dressed only in his underwear, with one arm covering his eyes against the light. He was deeply asleep, his chest rising and falling in the steady, slow rhythm of the comatose. I surmised from what I knew of the man that this was an alcohol-induced sleep, so I had no qualms about going into the house and trying the door to his flat. It was unlocked and opened soundlessly.

The air in the room was stale and, among all the other foetid odours, I detected the sweet taint of perfume, probably arising from Gretel’s clothes which were still strewn about. George Beech showed no sign of having heard me come in; he continued to sleep and breathe deeply. Beech grunted and I turned to look at him. His hands were enormous; great plates of flesh with powerful fingers that would have closed easily around his wife’s throat. I could picture the sinews moving beneath the skin of his arms as he applied and adjusted pressure to Gretel’s neck. It was clear from the state of the room that George was determinedly slovenly. Clothing, shoes, bits of paper, books and newspapers lay where they’d fallen. I had no idea what I was looking for, and anyway, finding anything significant would be unlikely, and given that I had to move gingerly, impossible.

There was a desk beside the mattress on which George lay; the legs on its right side just a few inches from his head. It was risky to approach it, but as it was the most promising object in the room, I had no choice. Its top was strewn with cosmetics and other detritus of domestic life, and its drawers were stuffed with socks and undergarments. In the second drawer I pushed these aside and revealed a neat pile of papers. They were of a design which was familiar to me because every citizen was required to carry them. My own was in the wallet in my back pocket. They were ID papers, the kind Manpower officials checked on their regular raids. I suddenly recalled that one of the men who’d been at the Petrushka with George had had inky fingers. George Beech and his friends were in the business of counterfeiting ID papers. No wonder he’d been so quick to accuse me of being a copper. I picked up a bundle and riffled through them. They were utterly convincing to my eye. If George was the artist, or one of them, his thick fingers were nimble.

I was considering this when those very fingers closed around my ankle. I looked down into George’s open, if bleary eyes, and the expression on his face wasn’t a welcoming one. He was sluggish but his grip was tight, so tight that it felt as if he might crush my bones. The greater danger, though, was that he might yank my foot out from under me and tip me onto the ground where I would stand as much chance as a small animal in the jaws of a crocodile. I had the slight advantage of being awake and sober, so I groped on the desk top for a weapon. I found a paperweight that was simply a heavy lump of rock with crystals protruding from it, and, almost instinctively, I hurled it down at George Beech’s head. It caught him above the right eye and bounced onto the mattress.

His grip relaxed immediately and his eyes juddered from side to side before they seemed to roll upwards so that only the whites were showing. Then his eyelids closed, slowly, as if the mechanism needed oiling, and he lay still, a bloom of blood spreading around his head. All this had taken place soundlessly, although I quickly became aware of my own rapid breathing, and the muted squeals of excited girls on the Scenic Railway. Beech’s great paw lay palm upward at my foot. I nudged it, hoping to make it twitch. His chest was no longer rising and falling and his face was already assuming the pallor of the dead. I’d never killed anyone before, and I was shocked at how easily a life could be extinguished. George Beech had looked as if it would take a blunderbuss to bring him down, and all it had required was a paperweight.

I stepped away from his body and tried to gather my thoughts. His death had been an accident, but the police wouldn’t believe this, so involving them was out of the question. The man was a criminal — definitely a counterfeiter, and in a time of war that made him a traitor, too — and probably a murderer. It wasn’t as if the country had suffered an irreparable loss. My reaction may seem cold, but you can’t work in Army Intelligence
and
be sentimental about life and death. I slunk out of the room and fortunately met no one in the corridor. Beech’s body would be found soon enough, and there wasn’t a thing in the world to connect him to me. There were threads, it’s true — I’d asked Mr Wilks for Beech’s address; Beech’s friends had seen me at the Petrushka; the police would want to find Beech’s wife — but I couldn’t see how any of these threads could be pulled together. The police would have no reason to speak to Mr Wilks; Beech’s friends had no way of identifying me, and Gretel wasn’t about to speak from beyond the grave.

With Beech dead, of course, I would now be unable to deliver him as Gretel’s murderer. As I walked along the Esplanade I began to consider the awful possibility that Gretel would have to remain where she was. Two things then struck me forcibly at once. The first was that if I was unable to produce Gretel’s killer, Clutterbuck had only to open his mouth to put me in a very delicate position indeed; the second, and more immediately pressing, was that I’d left my fingerprints all over the paperweight that had clobbered Beech. To be implicated in the murder of both husband and wife was quite beyond the pale. I had no option. I had to go back to Beech’s room and wipe that piece of stone clean, along with the doorknob.