A Thing of Blood (33 page)

Darlene sat, distracted now, in one of the damaged chairs. She whimpered, and took no further interest in what was happening around her. I drew Brian’s fingers away from where they’d curled around the knife’s handle. His eyelids closed and he became unconscious just as Mother entered the room and knelt with me beside Brian. She held his hand and wept soundlessly as we waited for the ambulance. Darlene didn’t move. Even as Brian was carried out on a stretcher she stayed quite still; present but absent. Mother accompanied Brian to hospital and I was left to deal with this strange creature—the husk of Darlene who’d emptied herself in a storm of screaming and who may well have killed Brian in the mistaken belief that he’d killed her Captain Spangler Brisket. The police were right and Clutterbuck was wrong. There was clearly no third party to whom Darlene was attached.

Darlene sat in this catatonic state for two hours and I sat opposite her, watching her and watching the room as it settled down around her into a chaotic tumble of ruin. She barely moved and eventually fell asleep sitting up, her head lolling forward onto her chest. She didn’t wake when the front door opened and Mother came in.

‘He’s all right,’ she said, ‘Brian’s all right. The blade missed vital organs and it didn’t go in very far. He’s sore, but he’s not in any danger.’

She looked across at Darlene.

‘Brian doesn’t want her charged with anything.’

‘So what do we do with her?’

‘What time is it now? Seven o’clock? In a little while I’ll call Dr Spitler and he’ll know what to do.’

She went upstairs and returned with a blanket that she tucked around Darlene’s body.

‘Don’t you want to slap her, Mother? Look at what she’s done.’

‘No, Will, I don’t want to slap her. Her life is never going to work out for her after this. I think she’s lost her way now. It’s the end of happiness for her. You go up to bed. I’ll watch her.’

‘I’ll make us a cup of tea.’

‘Brian’s going to be all right, and that’s all that matters, Will.’

That wasn’t all that mattered, of course. Who, for example, was now going to shoot Archbishop Mannix?

Chapter Thirteen

murder in the cathedral entrance

NOT LONG AFTER DARLENE HAD BEEN TAKEN
from Mother’s house into medical care, I crossed the park to tell Clutterbuck that he’d have to change his plans for Sunday. Brian wouldn’t be able to crawl from his hospital bed to do his bidding. Clutterbuck took the news well. I’d never seen him rant or rail and he wasn’t about to start now. Indeed, he pretended concern for Brian’s welfare, and said that he’d visit him in hospital.

‘It’s a shame, but it really only means a slight change of plan.’

‘Oh?’

‘Brian was always my first choice, but you’ll do just as well, Will.’

I’d been expecting that he’d say this, so it didn’t come as a shock. What did surprise me was the sudden surge of heart-pounding hatred that I felt for him. It so overwhelmed me that I was unable to speak.

‘You
will
do it.’

I found my voice.

‘I will not do it.’

‘Yes you will, and afterwards we’ll help you disappear and you’ll never have to have anything to do with any of us ever again.’

‘And what makes you think that I’m prepared to spend the rest of my life hiding from the authorities?’

‘You don’t have a choice; that’s the thing.’

‘Ah. Gretel Beech.’

He gave a non-committal shrug.

‘If that’s the ace up your sleeve, Paul, it’s worthless.’

I thought it best not to mention Army Intelligence at this point — I didn’t want to run the risk of Clutterbuck changing his plans. I wasn’t, however, going to accept the role of assassin, even though I knew it would never come to that. I’d allow Clutterbuck to push me sufficiently hard to give him a guarantee that I’d be there in the cathedral on Sunday, but he’d have to get one of his goons to hold the gun. I didn’t care for being the centre of attention in a situation where anything might go awry.

‘The police have George Beech and he’ll confess to Gretel’s murder.’

Things began to go awry much sooner than I’d expected. Clutterbuck said, ‘George Beech didn’t kill Gretel, Will. I did.’

‘That’s impossible.’

My mind raced back to the night of Gretel’s death. We’d watched her sing and we’d come home so that she could rest and take a bath before her next performance. Clutterbuck and I had had a drink downstairs and then decided to return to the speakeasy before Gretel. As we were leaving, Paul had called up to Gretel to tell her that we were going out. She’d replied that she was due to go on at 12.30, and that she’d meet us there. Paul was never out of my sight for more than a few minutes after that, and yet Gretel was dead when we came back home.

‘You mean, I presume, that you had Gretel killed.’

‘No, Will, I don’t. I mean that I put my hands around that lovely throat, and wrung it. And I can’t believe that you still don’t know how I did it, or rather I can believe it because you’re not a very good detective, although to give you your due, you did much better than I thought you’d do.’

‘All right, Paul, I’ll bite. If you really did kill Gretel, how did you do it, and why?’

‘I confess I had a little help, Will, but not with the deed, just with the misdirection. When the three of us came home here, Gretel and I went upstairs. I was only gone for a few moments. Long enough to kill poor Gretel. It was quick, and so completely surprising for her that she really didn’t have a chance to be frightened or distressed. I wasn’t the only person upstairs with her at the time — Anna Capshaw was waiting there. She ran the bath, and it was her voice you heard. You assumed, quite reasonably, that it was Gretel’s; the tap was running at the time, so any differences in their voices would have been hard to pick. She also put your tie around Gretel’s neck. And why? It was for your benefit, Will. Well, it was to make sure that you’d be useful to us. I couldn’t believe my luck when you agreed to help me bury her. I thought I was going to have to work much harder on you, really scare you with the implications of that tie of yours. Your experiences up in Maryborough must have made you very jumpy about the police.’

‘And how was I going to be useful to you?’

‘Our work is important, Will, and everyone in the Order is essential. What we needed was a person who’d carry out our most ambitious plan, but who we could then afford to lose. As soon as I met you I knew you were our man — the perfect mix of gullibility and misplaced self-assurance.’

I tried to interrupt him, but he stopped me.

‘Let me finish, Will. I’ll lay everything out before you. Everything.’

‘What more could there possibly be?’

He smiled.

‘Let’s start with Trezise. I’m afraid he didn’t kill Anna Capshaw in a fit of jealousy or rage. I killed Anna and, believe me, it broke my heart. It was possibly the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do, although I don’t expect your sympathy. I don’t think you know the first thing about sacrifice. You see, Will, we weren’t really sure what we were going to do to strike at the fucking Catholics. Trezise was a target, but the more I thought about him, the more I realised we needed to go after a much bigger fish, so I settled for setting him up for Anna’s murder. I think I loved her, Will, I really do, but she wasn’t going to stand quietly aside for Nigella. She just couldn’t see the bigger picture, and in the end I couldn’t trust her to keep quiet about Gretel.

‘Trezise’ll never prove his innocence. I made sure there was plenty of evidence linking him to the crime, so that gives me pleasure. Even if they don’t hang him, he’ll spend the rest of his life in prison wondering how his Catholic god could have deserted him. Things were going along swimmingly until your brother turned up, and it was transparently clear that the two of you were up to something. I thought you’d been through my drawers, so I did a more thorough job of it to confuse you. That was a painful thing to do, I can tell you.

‘I wasn’t convinced by Brian, Will. He’s almost as bad an actor as you are. I think you’d got it into your head that you could break up the Knights and establish yourself as some sort of brilliant investigator. It’s the kind of thing that’d appeal to your vanity. The thing about vanity, Will, is that you spend too much time staring at yourself in the mirror and not enough time looking over your shoulder.’

He paused, just to let that jibe sink in.

‘Brian is a bit different from you, though. He’s smarter and therefore more dangerous. I humbly admit that my attempt to get rid of him was a bit of a miscalculation. When he told me about his wife and her American lover, I thought I’d been handed a gift-wrapped opportunity. Spangler was easy to find and even easier to kill. MacGregor did the butchery, out the back of Ronnie Oakpate’s factory. It was amazing to watch, Will. Very skilful. When you take a man apart like that, he’s remarkably easy to transport — a few burlap sacks is all you need. I planted him around your mother’s house, and I
am
sorry if she found it distressing. I like your mother. I’d hoped that the coppers would arrest Brian as a matter of course and take him out of circulation. It had been such a successful strategy with Trezise. What I hadn’t counted on was their immediate and accurate assessment that if Brian was the killer he’d be unlikely to foul his own nest in that way. I got carried away with the drama of it all. It was about that time that we decided to execute Mannix. I can’t think why we hadn’t thought of it earlier. He’s the public and ugly face of Catholicism in this country after all. Strike at the head and the body’s bound to falter. It was Crocker who suggested that Brian be given the task of shooting Mannix.’

‘But if you knew that he wasn’t really one of you, how were you going to get him to pull the trigger?’

‘We were going to give him a choice — he shoots Mannix, or we shoot you. I was counting on him making the right choice. Now I have to count on you making the right choice.’

I knew what was coming.

‘You shoot Mannix, Will, or we shoot your mother.’

It was said very simply, very matter-of-factly, as if he was trying to minimise giving offence. He looked at his watch.

‘She should be having a not very nice cup of tea with Mary Rose Shingle right about now. I’m not sure that they’ll find very much to talk about, Miss Shingle being a couple of coupons short of a pullover.’

‘You don’t need me to shoot Mannix.’

‘Well, I suppose it’s partly personal now, although the reasons I stated earlier still hold. I confess it will give me a great deal of pleasure to watch you do something that goes against your nature and that you’re going to find difficult to live with afterwards. I do like actions that lead to a lifetime of punishment. They play in my head like favourite tunes. Ten years from now I’ll think of John Trezise languishing in jail, and it will give my day a lift.’

‘I’ve never fired a gun in my life,’ I said.

MacGregor and Crocker, who must have been listening at the door, took this as their cue to enter. MacGregor was holding a large hand gun, a Colt 45.

‘Mr MacGregor will be pleased to instruct you. He’s a man of many talents, our Mr MacGregor. You’ll be staying here with us today and tonight, Will, and I’m sorry but you’ll be confined to barracks. At least you’ll get in one more bath.’

MacGregor showed me how to fire the Colt, but we didn’t fire off any live ammunition.

‘It’s too noisy,’ he said. He warned me that there’d be considerable recoil and that I should tense the muscles in my arms in anticipation of it.

‘You’ll be in the front pew, so you can hardly miss, but I think you should try to get two or three shots off. He’s a big target. Aim for the centre of the back. Don’t try for a head shot. You’ll miss.’

I had plenty of time that afternoon and evening to think about what Clutterbuck had said. For all his murderousness and duplicity, his view of the world was essentially a simple one, and the field of his vision was narrow — so narrow that James Fowler had gone undetected by him. This wasn’t really surprising; he’d gone undetected by his sister as well.

It had been decided that Mannix would be shot at the moment in the Mass when he consecrated the host. He would have his back to the congregation, most of whom would have their heads bowed in prayer. I was to stand in the pew and fire, then drop the gun and leave by a side entrance. A car would be waiting and I would be taken to Oakpate’s house in Brunswick where I’d have the opportunity to see that Mother was alive and well, and then I’d be driven to Ballarat, where a safe house had been organised. It all sounded neat, and I knew it was all bullshit.