A Thing of Blood (31 page)

We were to film this epic of the tramways in St Kilda Road, and on the drive there I asked Nigella if she’d enjoyed her drawing class that morning. She laughed and said it had been a memorable one.

‘We had this model who was a young Jewish man from Poland who spoke in the most extraordinary accent. He was in the mould of Tyrone Power actually. Quite good looking, but he rather disgraced himself by getting an erection. I had a three quarter view of him at the time and it just popped into the picture. I suppose the poor man was mortified but he didn’t break his pose and Mr Wilks thought that was very professional of him. None of us was brave enough to draw what we were looking at, so we all made small adjustments. At the end of the session the young man stepped down, still stark naked, but more relaxed if you know what I mean, and shook us each by the hand and introduced himself and asked us our names. Quite bizarre, but also rather naïve and touching. Mr Wilks was cross about it. Apparently there is to be no contact between artist and model. He said he wouldn’t be employing that fellow again, which raised a howl of protest from the group. We thought he was lovely.’

It was a pleasure to see Nigella so animated, and I wondered how I could ever have thought her plain. It was less of a pleasure to learn what a dog’s breakfast Brian had made of a relatively simple task. I accept that standing nude in a roomful of women falls short of hiding in plain sight, but he managed to make it more memorable than was strictly necessary. It was so like Brian to do everything wrong and have everyone love him for it.

‘Now, Will,’ Nigella said, a note of seriousness entering her voice. ‘There’s no live sound on this film and we’re going to do it all as quickly as possible. The director is a man named Gregory Howden and I’m afraid he thinks he’s Howard Hawks. He’s competent but he thinks he’s an artist. I’m sure you know the type.’

A small smile escaped her reins, and for a moment I thought she was referring to me. This was of course absurd, and merely the oversensitivity one feels when one is in the sure grip of a strong, unreciprocated attachment.

‘He spent time in Hollywood in the early twenties and worked in a minor capacity on a couple of Wally Reid pictures, before morphine did Wally in.’

‘Ah, poor old Wally Reid.’

‘Anyway, Howden treats every short as if he was shooting
Gone With the Wind
, so don’t be surprised by the megaphone or the constant stream of barked instructions.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I’m afraid he wears jodhpurs and riding boots.’

My initial contact with Mr Gregory Howden wasn’t all it might have been. He was standing by a camera, with a few assistants taking light readings and making jottings in notebooks. When Nigella introduced me, he pointed the tip of a riding crop at my face.

‘What are those ugly marks on this man’s face?’

‘They’re the remains of a nasty gravel rash and they’re barely visible now,’ I said, perhaps haughtily. ‘A little pancake will make them invisible.’

He turned to Nigella.

‘In the whole of Melbourne you couldn’t find one unscarred actor?’

Nigella folded her arms, stared him down and said with magnificent finality, ‘No. Directors on the other hand are surprisingly plentiful.’

Mr Howden looked from Nigella to me and said, ‘Ah, I see. In Hollywood I was used to the casting couch working the other way round.’

Nigella didn’t seem to be offended, and I took this as a sign that she wasn’t appalled by the idea that someone thought she might be sleeping with me. Mr Howden didn’t know it, but his grubby, snide remark served to raise my spirits.

‘No close-ups then,’ he said. ‘We’ll shoot you from the less unsightly side and stay in wide shot. I want you over there by the tram stop and when I say ‘Action’ I want you to look up and down the street as if waiting for a tram.’

‘Am I perplexed, worried about it being late? Should I look at my watch?’

‘Just look up and down the street. Can you do that Mr Barrymore?’

He was deliberately overplaying his exasperation to unnerve me. Passers-by were stopping to gawk, and Howden’s assistants had to keep them moving so that an unrealistic clot of them didn’t form at the edges of the shot. I stood at the tram stop and Howden raised his megaphone and shouted, ‘Action!’

I did as requested — came forward and looked up and down the street. I took my cap off and ran my fingers through my hair as I did so.

‘Cut! I don’t recall asking you to get undressed!’

There was a smattering of laughter from his assistants.

‘Go again! Action!’

I stepped forward again, and just to do something with my hands, I placed them casually on my hips.

‘Cut!’ Howden screamed through the megaphone. ‘You’re an air force officer. Not a chorus girl! Go again!’

My fury was mounting, but for Nigella’s sake I submitted to this little Napoleon’s commands until after the sixth, unnecessary take, he called, ‘Print it! It’s lousy but it’ll have to do.’

Apart from recording the narration this was all I was required to do. Apparently the rest of the short had been filmed that morning at a shunting yard, with another actor playing the air force officer who gets on the tram. So all that insulting nonsense about not being able to shoot a close-up had been nothing more than a bad joke. No wonder Howden wanted me to keep the cap on. All he needed was an establishing shot of someone in a uniform, seen from a distance. It would be edited together with the material shot in close-up and no one would guess that the man at the tram stop and the man who gets on the tram weren’t the same person.

In the car on the way back to Henry Buck’s to return the uniform we agreed that Mr Gregory Howden was a kind of monster.

‘I thought you did a great job,’ she said.

‘So you
really
believed that I
really
wanted that tram to come, did you?’

We both laughed, and I leaned across and kissed her quickly and gently on the mouth. Her driver saw nothing. I sat back in the corner of the car and watched for her reaction.

‘You really mustn’t do that again, Will. You really mustn’t,’ she said quietly.

‘And you really mustn’t marry Paul Clutterbuck. You really mustn’t.’

Her eyes darted to the back of her driver’s head, alarmed that she might have heard this exchange, but the noise of the engine made this unlikely.

‘Paul wants us to get married this Sunday afternoon. A civil ceremony. It’s all arranged. All I have to do is say yes.’

I had to take my hat off to Clutterbuck — an assassination in the morning and a wedding in the afternoon. Most people would consider this an unworkably crowded schedule. I was confident that neither event would take place. All I said was, ‘I see’, and avoided anything more consequential.

I recorded the badly written narrations, as agreed, and made no comment about how awful they were. I sat obediently in the booth of a studio that had once belonged to Efftee Film Productions, and which was now an arm of the government’s film services, and read the words as if they were poetry. I did each of them in a single take, and was pleased to acknowledge to myself that this was the easiest money I’d ever earned. Afterwards I thought about telephoning James Fowler, but as I was in the city and as the news I had for him was significant, and not suitable for an insecure telephone line, I decided to walk across Princes Bridge and see him in his office. This turned out to be a complicated process. I was canny enough to ask at the gate for the offices of Native Policy for Mandated Territories and was told that this was a military establishment and that whatever I was looking for sounded like the public service. I explained that the fact that the Victoria Barracks was associated with the military hadn’t escaped me but that if this dullard to whom I was speaking would just check he’d find that I was in the right place after all.

‘The person to whom I wish to speak is a Mr James Fowler.’

With a graceless sneer the soldier made a phone call from the gatehouse and returned with the information that James Fowler was unavailable and that he’d be out of town for several days. Was there anybody else I wanted to speak to? I had no other names and I had no idea how much anybody else in James’ department knew. He’d stressed that this whole investigation was at his behest, and I understood that he hadn’t gained official approval to undertake it — hence his reliance on my skills. The top brass certainly wouldn’t sanction the use of non-military personnel, although my quick success in uncovering George Beech’s forgery ring would provide James with a bulwark against their wrath if they were to ever find out.

I couldn’t just leave matters unresolved like this. James must have a subordinate who worked closely with him.

‘Perhaps I should speak to someone,’ I said. ‘Does Mr Fowler have a secretary?’

‘And a butler probably,’ said the soldier, clearly dismissing the whole public service as an extravagant waste of money. I gave this sour comic my name and he phoned Fowler’s office again. He passed the handset to me, and a man’s voice said, ‘I believe you have a message for James Fowler.’

It was important that the message be sufficiently ambiguous to convey meaning only to James or to someone who’d been taken into his confidence.

‘I understand Mr Fowler is out of town at the moment, but it’s imperative that he keep an appointment at St Patrick’s Cathedral at nine on Sunday morning.’

‘I see,’ was the reply, and it was immediately followed by the click of disconnection.

James’ absence posed several serious problems. The thought that Archbishop Mannix’s life might now be in my hands frankly made me feel ill. I had no opinion of the man one way or another, but I knew he was a powerful and influential force in Melbourne and that his assassination would divide the city and possibly provoke riots in retribution. Certainly, a murdered religious leader would have a less than beneficial effect on morale generally. It also struck me as rather shocking that he might be gunned down in front of the Vienna Boys’ Choir.

I walked all the way from Victoria Barracks to Mother’s house in Princes Hill. I was so preoccupied with the dilemma of James Fowler’s sudden posting elsewhere — no doubt to deal with something of grave importance — that the hour that it took me passed rapidly. I was considering a range of strategies Brian and I might employ to both thwart and apprehend any of Clutterbuck’s cronies who came to the cathedral on Sunday — and Clutterbuck himself, of course. They must all have thought they’d been terribly clever in manoeuvring Brian into being the assassin. We, however, were several steps ahead of them, which should have given us an advantage, but Brian and I hadn’t taken into account the possibility that there would be no military people in the cathedral — and that was now a real possibility unless I found a way to speak to James Fowler before Sunday morning.

I couldn’t help but contemplate, as I walked, the dark power of passion that had brought me to this point. All around me was evidence of the havoc it wreaked. John Trezise’s passion for Anna Capshaw; George Beech’s for Gretel; Sarah Goodenough’s for Brian, and Darlene’s, perhaps, for someone as yet unknown. Death shadowed each of these attachments, and what must have begun in excitement and pleasure, illicit or not, had soon declined into upheaval and loss. That one person’s love for another could be so destructive that it smashed his or her moral compass, that it could be so all-consuming that it devoured common decency and rectitude, was incomprehensible to me, and it was mirrored, I thought, in Clutterbuck’s distorted and single-minded hatred of a religion practised by half the population. When Trezise and Beech strangled the life out of the women they supposedly loved, were they proving that excessive love and excessive loathing were essentially the same thing, that the consequences for both the loved and the loathed were similarly dire?

The house at Garton Street was crowded. Peter Gilbert, Mother, Brian and detectives Strachan and Radcliff sat in confabulation. There was no hostility in the air. Indeed, everyone was drinking tea — not from Mother’s best china, but this time she wasn’t making a point. Her best china had been smashed by Darlene, an action that had made any subsequent atrocity entirely feasible.

The Clutterbuck scenario had been put to the police, but they hadn’t found it as compelling as we had. Brian told me, after they’d gone, that Darlene’s distress over Spangler’s murder had been so extreme that she’d lost the baby. She was under sedation and had made no contact of any kind with anyone. The only constant in her behaviour was her maddened belief that Brian had killed the man she loved, and she expressed this even under the restraint of strong sedatives.

‘I think they’ve fallen,’ I said, ‘as we all did, for her crust of stupidity and missed the cunning underneath.’

‘If the rozzers are right about Darlene it means that there’s someone out there who really hated Captain Brisket.’

‘Given where he ended up, Brian, it seems more likely that there’s someone out there who really hates you.’

‘That’s not a good feeling. Not that I have to tell you that.’

I would have asked what he meant by that last remark but Peter Gilbert put his head round the door and said that a Nigella Fowler was downstairs and wanted to see me.

‘Nigella,’ Brian said. ‘Clutterbuck’s fiancée?’

‘Yes, Brian, and I don’t think it’s a good idea for her to see you here. I believe, by the way, that you gave the ladies their money’s worth.’