A Thing of Blood (26 page)

‘The last thing we need,’ he said, ‘is priests thundering from pulpits about persecution.’

I returned to Clutterbuck’s house just as he was cutting slices from a nut of corned beef. He offered me some and I took it, not having eaten. It was quite good, although Mrs Castleton — for it was she who had made it — had been too generous with the cloves and this is a flavour of which I’ve never been particularly fond. The meat itself was excellent, of a quality that was unobtainable except from the black market. We put the beef between buttered slices of good bread — Clutterbuck wouldn’t stoop to using dripping — and washed it down with Ballarat Bitter — another commodity that was getting harder and harder to buy legally.

Nigella arrived soon afterwards and I went up to my room to read
Timon of Athens
, a play I’d long dreamt of producing. I had no desire to sit and watch Nigella and Clutterbuck bill and coo, knowing that for every coo there was a corresponding bill of a very different kind. I fell asleep in my clothes and didn’t wake until the clanging of the telephone downstairs demanded to be picked up. It was 7.00 a.m., and the horrifying Wednesday was about to get underway.

I answered the telephone. It was Brian, and the fear and panic in his voice tumbled into my ear in an incoherent demand that I get over to Mother’s house immediately.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked, my own voice now taut with the contagion of alarm.

‘Just get here,’ he cried, and hung up.

I was already dressed, so I left Clutterbuck’s at once and ran almost the full distance to Garton Street.

Mother was on the porch, wrapped in her nightgown and with an expression on her face that I’d never seen before. She was speechless, her eyes wide, but dulled by shock. I don’t think she saw me, and didn’t respond when I asked her if she was all right. I went into the house and found Brian pressed against the wall of the corridor leading to the kitchen. It was a strange and disconcerting attitude to strike, and it filled me with a kind of terror. I tried to speak but had to swallow first.

‘What? What’s happened here?’

Brian stared through me, and with a jolt was suddenly aware of my presence. He pulled himself together and led me into the kitchen. At first I saw nothing amiss. Then I saw them — four severed fingers and a thumb, lying on the bench.

‘They were in the cutlery drawer,’ Brian said. ‘Mother found them.’

I walked over to the bench and looked down at them. They’d been severed cleanly. I noticed that the nails were well manicured.

‘They’re not Darlene’s, are they?’ Brian asked.

‘Not unless she had hairy knuckles.’

Even in this bizarre situation I couldn’t stop myself from suggesting that this didn’t necessarily rule her out.

‘Have you checked anywhere else in the house?’

Brian looked even more stricken; I don’t think the possibility that other parts of this person might be scattered around had occurred to him. I pulled open the drawer under the cutlery drawer, expecting to find something grisly, but it contained nothing out of the ordinary.

It was Brian who found the next body part. In a saucepan on the stove top someone’s right foot sat as if waiting for water and a
mire poix
to make a stock. A rapid search of cupboards turned up a left hand, and in the refrigerator, bloodied, unidentifiable viscera wrapped in yesterday’s copy of the
Truth
newspaper.

Neither Brian nor I were capable of making any sense of this. We had no idea whose body this was. All we could surmise was that sometime in the night, someone had come into Mother’s house and planted the butchered remains of an adult male. In a fog of revulsion and dread we left the kitchen to look in all the downstairs rooms. Brian went into the living room and I, having caught sight of something in the umbrella stand near the front door, approached this receptacle. Rammed among the brollies, and poised in a ghastly parody of them, was an entire left leg — from the hip bone down — the remainder of a right leg, and two, handless arms. I touched nothing, of course, and through my disbelief and dreamlike state of disconnection, I noticed principally that the cuts were clean, precise and surgical. Whoever had done this hadn’t attacked the corpse in a frenzy. There was skill and deliberation in this dismemberment. The deliberation extended, I was certain, to the choice of Mother’s house in which to distribute the carcass.

I was on the point of joining Brian when the front door flew open and detectives Strachan and Radcliff burst in, followed by three uniformed policemen. The umbrella stand immediately commanded their attention.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Strachan said, and one of the uniformed officers visibly blanched and hurriedly went outside, presumably to be ill. My eyes darted to the living room door, and this didn’t escape the notice of Messrs Strachan and Radcliff. They pushed it open and there, in the middle of the room, stood Brian, a look of uncomprehending surprise on his face — a look that was mirrored on the startled face of Captain Spangler Brisket, whose severed head Brian held by his side.

‘It fell out of the cupboard,’ he said, as if this explained everything. This was entirely the wrong moment for Mother to push her way to the front, but she was a mistress of the wrong moment. She uttered a peculiar little cry and collapsed into a nearby chair. The remaining policemen were at Brian’s side in a moment, and Radcliff took Brisket’s head by the hair and lowered it to the floor, where it lay like a discarded stage prop. Strangely, nothing was said. We simply left the living room in a group, a policeman was stationed outside its door, I took Mother upstairs, and Brian was taken away.

I sat with Mother in silence. For the moment, words couldn’t convey the enormity of what had happened downstairs. The house had been turned into an abattoir. Detective Strachan intruded upon our dumb contemplation by telling us that we were to remain where we were, and that a contingent of coppers would go over the house and try to locate all of Spangler Brisket’s body parts.

‘Like humpty dumpty,’ I said. Strachan looked at me with distaste, as if this harmless remark were the most vulgar thing he’d ever heard. ‘You’ve arrested Brian,’ I added flatly.

‘We’ve taken him in for questioning. He hasn’t been arrested.’

‘Do you really think he’d do this in his own house?’

Strachan sighed wearily and gave a surprising answer.

‘No. For the moment though, he’s our best bet. Unless you’d like to put your hand up.’

I looked at him with an unmistakable expression of utter contempt for his deductive abilities.

‘Your arrival was very convenient,’ I said.

‘We were tipped off by an anonymous American serviceman who said we’d find the body of a Captain Spangler Brisket at this address. He also said that this Brisket had been having an affair with your brother’s wife. Turns out Brian had threatened Brisket’s life just the other day.’

‘That could only have come from Darlene.’

Strachan gave a noncommittal shrug.

‘We’re keeping an open mind. We do seem to be spending a lot of time at this house.’

Mother suddenly found her voice.

‘Brian couldn’t …’

‘If you want my opinion, Mrs Power, I agree with you. This is the work of a deranged and violent person and your son just doesn’t strike me that way. You’d have to agree, though, that we found him in something of a compromising position.’

‘So ridiculously compromising,’ I said, ‘as to be almost a proof of his innocence.’

Strachan produced an insultingly pitying expression and wondered aloud if I mightn’t like to keep quiet.

‘An American army officer has been murdered and violated. The Americans aren’t going to be too happy about that, and they’re going to want a culprit, and they’re going to want him now. They dealt with Leonski with ruthless speed, knowing full well what a disaster that was for relations with the Australians. They appeased the locals and they’re going to demand a bit of
quid pro quo
on this one. I guarantee it.’

‘They wouldn’t sacrifice an innocent man,’ I said.

‘Leonski’s going to hang in a few weeks time. It doesn’t bother them that the man is insane. He’s been killing Australian women and
that’s
what matters. He has to die and the legal niceties of his mental state are ignored. Now, Brian had motive and opportunity, and issued a threat. They might be tempted to run with that. Tensions are pretty high between the Yanks and our soldiers. They’re going to want to douse this before it really catches fire.’

Strachan made mollifying mutterings to the effect that he’d try to ensure that the investigation stayed out of American hands as much as possible, and he reassured Mother that this time they’d be working to prove that Brian was innocent. I said nothing, believing it to be unwise to remind Strachan of his recent errors of judgement. I wanted to ask him if John Trezise had confessed to Anna Capshaw’s murder, but I restrained myself, realising just in time that it would be foolish to establish a link between Trezise and me.

Mother and I sat in her small study for three hours while police downstairs put Spangler Brisket’s body back together again, piece by bloody piece. Eventually detective Strachan told us that they’d found all of him.

‘His torso was in the vegetable garden.’

We were told that it wouldn’t be possible for us to remain in the house that night. It was a crime scene and we would have to vacate until it had been thoroughly investigated.

‘That’s fine,’ Mother said. She’d reclaimed her verve. ‘I can stay with Will, at least for tonight. I’m sure he’ll find room.’

‘There’s plenty of room,’ I said without thinking. I’d never expected Mother and Paul Clutterbuck would ever meet, and there was something perilous about this.

As we walked across the park — I was lugging a suitcase that Mother insisted contained only the bare essentials for a one night stay, but the weight of which suggested that the bare essentials included several bricks — I gave Mother a brief account of how things stood with Paul Clutterbuck. I left out any details that were pertinent to Army Intelligence’s interest in him. I did hint that his politics weren’t quite as liberal as her own and that politics wouldn’t be a fruitful conversation starter.

When Mother finally met Clutterbuck, shortly after our arrival, he couldn’t have been more charming. I took her bag up to my room — Clutterbuck said that there was a cot bed somewhere that I could set up in an empty spare room — and the two of them repaired to the living room where they began chatting as if they were picking up the threads of a conversation only recently abandoned. When I joined them I found Clutterbuck’s brow knitted in empathetic distress as Mother related the horrible events of the morning.

‘And poor Brian,’ she was saying, ‘the first time he was falsely accused was bad enough, but now this. You’ve met Brian, haven’t you?’

‘Yes. He’s been here to see Will a couple of times. He certainly didn’t strike me as the murderous type.’

Mother spoke rapidly, and as was always the case with her, the more she spoke, the calmer she became. Clutterbuck reassured her that there was really nothing to worry about with regard to Brian’s being in custody. With the detectives on his side this time, he’d probably be released as soon as he’d been questioned . Mother was relieved to hear him say so, more relieved than when I’d said the very same thing — several times — barely an hour previously.

‘You’re more than welcome to stay here, Mrs Power, for as long as you need to. It will be no inconvenience at all. I imagine you’re reluctant to go back to your house after, well, after that body was strewn about there.’

Mother thanked him, but said that she wasn’t afraid of the dead and that there’d be stains to get out.

‘Would Marlene have any reason to do something like this?’

‘Darlene,’ Mother said.

I expressed the view that it was unlikely that psychopathy was among her vast catalogue of personality defects, a moody pregnancy notwithstanding.

‘She’s quite capable of boring someone to death, and I wouldn’t have been in the least surprised if Spangler had woken up next to her one morning and opted for suicide, but in the current situation the dismemberment rules that out.’

Under normal circumstances, such a remark would have prompted a sharp response from Mother, and I detected the automatic beginning of one, but she checked herself, realising, I suppose, that the days of leaping to Darlene’s defence were over.

‘I imagine Darlene is in a state of shock,’ she said. ‘She no doubt believes that Brian had something to do with Captain Brisket’s death. I’m sure she’ll realise how absurd this is.’

‘Is there anybody else who’d want to put Brian in this terrible position?’ Clutterbuck asked, and the obvious, disingenuous nature of the question — which Mother missed — indicated that Brian had told him about his affair with Sarah Goodenough in Maryborough. Without embarrassment or reticence, Mother sketched the facts of Brian’s grim little adultery and its consequences. It was possible, she said, that Sarah Goodenough had an agent in Melbourne who was charged with harassing Brian, but it beggared belief that such a person would be licensed to kill and butcher an essentially innocent man — a man whose only crime was to fall in love with Darlene.

‘And that,’ Mother said firmly, ‘is not a crime.’

‘Just a gross error of taste,’ I said.