A Thing of Blood (5 page)

By the time I’d seen the rest of the house, I’d realised that although Paul Clutterbuck must have had a good deal of money, he couldn’t afford its upkeep without the relief provided by a tenant’s rent. Of the six rooms upstairs, two were unfurnished, and the air in them had the uncirculated dullness of the air in rooms that are never visited.

When we returned to the living room Miss Gretel Beech was there, dressed and poised for departure. With her hair brushed into place and wearing a dress that flattered her figure, but which had seen better days — I was surprised to see that the seam at one of the shoulders had begun to come away — she was, somehow, diminished. She now seemed merely pretty. When I’d first seen her I had thought her beautiful. I wondered which incarnation the obsessively neat Paul Clutterbuck preferred. Perhaps ungroomed women were a violation of his ordered life which he found exciting. The few seconds it took for these thoughts to race through my mind were sufficient to stir in me sensations of delightful lust.

‘Will I see you at the show tonight?’ she asked Paul.

‘Yes,’ he said, and turning to me he added, ‘Will you come, Will? To hear Gretel sing?’

‘Of course,’ I replied, and knew even as I did so that I should be spending the evening with Brian, supporting my brother in his anxious wait for news of Darlene. Looking at Gretel Beech, however, familial obligation evaporated, and I found myself hoping that my evening would not be ruined by the inconvenient discovery of Darlene’s corpse and the ensuing necessity of being on hand to offer condolences.

‘Of course,’ I reiterated. ‘I’d love to hear you sing.’

‘Paul says you’re an actor,’ she said. ‘I hope you won’t think I’m an amateur.’

She kissed Paul lightly on the cheek and he crassly cupped one of her breasts in his hand. She seemed unconcerned by this public intimacy.

‘I’ll see you tonight then,’ she said.

When she had gone, Paul Clutterbuck sat in one of the uncomfortable chairs and indicated that I should do the same.

‘Is your room OK?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘It’s a generous size.’

‘And you can manage three pounds?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I lied.

‘You’ll like Mrs Castleton. She works miracles with tired shirts and trousers. What do you think of Gretel?’

‘She’s lovely,’ I said. ‘She’s a singer. Is that what she does for a living?’

‘Oh, she does a bit of this, a bit of that, and a bit of the other, you know.’

‘Is she any good?’

‘She’s OK at this, better at that, and superb at the other.’ He laughed and stood up suddenly. ‘What do you think?’ he asked and smoothed down the front of his dark green army shirt. ‘Gretel says women can’t take their eyes off the Yanks’ groins. It’s the zipper, see. No chunky buttons. She says you can’t beat the zipper for ease of access. And, I have to say, she’s right.’

‘I’ve never had a pair of trousers with a zipper,’ I said.

‘As a private inquiry agent, aren’t you wondering why I’m wearing the uniform of our over-paid allies? It’s not exactly legal to impersonate a soldier.’

I seized the opportunity to demonstrate my natural, instinctive skills in this area.

‘Asking obvious questions almost always leads to hearing obvious lies,’ I said. ‘The truth has a tendency to leak rather than spill.’

He considered that for a moment and sat down.

‘I’m glad I hired you,’ he said.

‘Have you hired me?’ I asked.

‘Two week’s rent,’ he said. ‘Six pounds to do the job. It’s straightforward and it’s not dangerous.’

I nodded acceptance, relieved that I’d been given a stay with regard to my precarious finances.

‘But first,’ I said. ‘Why are you wearing that uniform?’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘It’s ridiculously simple. I’m afraid I’ve become addicted to tinned cream and coffee, and both of those are found only in the American PX. Australian soldiers, and certainly civilians, are not allowed into those G.I. canteens. I do a passable Yank accent — sort of mid-Atlantic rather than regional — and the PX at Camp Pell is just around the corner. I haven’t been challenged yet. Do you smoke?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Pity. A packet of twenty is only sixpence. That’s less than half what you’d pay normally. It’s enough to make you want to take it up, isn’t it? The uniform is good for sex, too. Shop girls love it. You’ll find them any night of the week at the Australia Hotel. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, as the Americans say. Lots of Yanks, lots of girls. It’s almost impossible to find an unoccupied doorway after closing time.’

‘Sex in a doorway doesn’t sound very edifying.’

‘You’re not a Puritan, are you? Or a moralist?’

‘No, of course not. I was thinking about comfort.’

‘I think you’d be pleasantly surprised at the amenity offered by a narrow doorway. And the thrill of discovery doubles the pleasure and doubles the fun.’

‘No wonder our blokes can’t stand Yanks.’

‘Let me tell you something about our boys, Will. Their uniform is ugly, they don’t know how to shave properly, they smell, and most of them have their teeth ripped out for free when they join up. Dentures are no match for a good, clean set of American teeth. Do you have your own teeth?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And my mother’s still got all hers, and she’s in her sixties.’

‘Ah, you must have had money.’

He ran his tongue over his front teeth.

‘I’ve got all mine, too. No girl would believe I was a Yank if I had dentures. A few sweeps of the tongue and I’d be found out.’

He seemed so pleased with this vulgarity that he laughed.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘To business. Are you able to do something for me this afternoon?’

I nodded, and was filled with trepidation.

‘I want you to find out who my ex-wife is fucking.’

I didn’t betray any emotion. I impassively took this direction in, but it did seem extraordinary, given his own priapic tendencies, that he should be concerned about the sexual gymnastics of a woman from whom he was now permanently disengaged. Knowing that discretion is a private inquiry agent’s most important characteristic, I forbore to ask him ‘Why?’, settling for the more professional and detached ‘Where?’ and ‘When?’. The address he gave me wasn’t a private house, but a bookshop in Little Collins Street, in the centre of town, called ‘Leonardo.’ He said that his ex-wife would be in the bookshop at 2.00 p.m. He didn’t tell me how he knew this.

‘Her name,’ he said, ‘is Anna Capshaw, formerly Clutterbuck, of course. She’ll be meeting a man there. I want you to find out where they go.’

‘But how will I know her?’

‘She’ll be the most beautiful woman in the shop. You’ll know her. You won’t be able to take your eyes off her. Are you up to this job?’

‘Of course,’ I said, thereby committing myself to a series of events that were to make my recent troubles in Maryborough look like a mild comedy of manners.

Chapter Four

poor decisions

HAVING UNPACKED MY MEAGRE WARDROBE
of clothes — most of them with the dust of Maryborough still on them, and all of them smelling faintly of the kitchen of the George Hotel where we’d been staying — I stretched out on the bed and considered the last few crowded hours. Darlene’s kidnapping began to assume the strange dimensions of a dream.

A madwoman rising out of the darkness and snatching a pregnant woman from the safety of her own house: this was bizarre. Even more bizarre was the notion that this madwoman had become so besotted with my brother that she had followed him all the way from Maryborough to Melbourne. What kind of woman was this? Knocking Darlene to the ground would be like felling a bullock. Sarah Goodenough would have to be of Amazonian proportions to overpower Darlene and drag her from the house. It occurred to me that Brian had not described her, and it was suddenly obvious that heft was of some importance.

With a few hours to spare before my 2.00 p.m. stalk, I decided to return to Mother’s house. I wanted to ask Brian a few questions. He was on the front porch and he saw me coming across Princes Park. He hurried over and met me beneath a large Canary Island palm. His eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep, he was unshaven, and his breath smelled of tea and fruitcake. He leaned in close to me and almost whispered, ‘The coppers think I had something to do with it.’

‘They think that about me too, Brian. That’s what coppers do. It’s why they’ve got no friends.’

He clutched my arm.

‘I had nothing to do with it.’ There was panic in his voice.

‘Of course you didn’t,’ I said. ‘You need to get some sleep. You’re not thinking straight.’

We went into Mother’s house and found her upstairs in her study, writing her daily letter to Fulton.

‘I haven’t told him about Darlene,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to worry him until we know what’s really happened.’

I thought this was an odd expression, but didn’t comment on it. I knew that Mother loved gossip, but I also knew that she held firmly to the view that events could not be dressed neatly as anecdotes in the presence of grief. She put down her pen and asked, ‘Brian, is this Sarah person a big woman?’

This was precisely what I had intended to ask.

‘No,’ he said. ‘She’s small, petite. Smaller than Darlene. The coppers asked me the same thing. I told them that she was mad, and that mad people are very strong.’

‘Yes,’ Mother said, ‘when they’re in a frenzy. But this was planned. She must have had help.’

‘Yeah. And they think I’m the one who helped her.’

‘Well, of course they do, darling. They’re not entirely sure that I’m innocent either. We just have to get on and let them do their work. There’s no point taking it personally.’

‘If I could just turn the clock back,’ Brian said and began expressing his profound regret over his affair with Sarah Goodenough. Mother listened patiently, but I left them and went downstairs, and helped myself to a slice of Darlene’s ever-diminishing fruit cake. While I was in the kitchen, I realised Mother was right — Sarah Goodenough must have had an accomplice, and the accomplice must have been a man. He probably came with her from Maryborough. If I wanted to go any way towards finding Darlene, I would have to telephone Sergeant Peter Topaz in Maryborough, and this was something I really didn’t want to do.

My relationship with Peter Topaz was less than cordial. I acknowledge that I had made one or two understandable errors of judgement in my efforts to clear my name, but he’d been wrong about me, and that should have evened the score. He hadn’t quite seen it that way. Nevertheless, finding Darlene, apart from being the first feather in my PI agent’s cap, was more important than my feelings about a country-town walloper who harboured a grudge. I rang the exchange and booked a call to the Maryborough police station. I would be connected, I was told, in half an hour.

While I was waiting, I flicked through that day’s copy of
The Age
. There was very little in the way of professional theatre in town. ‘The Mikado’ was playing at His Majesty’s — nothing for me there. Singing is not among my accomplishments, although I can carry a tune well enough. ‘Robert’s Wife’ was on at The Comedy. Lowbrow fare. Apart from that, there was the Tivoli, and I wasn’t prepared to prostitute my talent by donning a pair of roller skates and performing a vulgar dance surrounded by half-naked women. I don’t consider dancing on roller skates to be a skill. It is simply a failure of the imagination.

My acting career might have to be rested. Indeed, I saw no reason why I couldn’t combine acting with investigating, should a suitable part come along. The certainty that one did not preclude the other, and the equal certainty that I had a talent for both, filled me with a sense of optimism and excitement. My reverie was interrupted by the clang of the telephone. My person-to-person call to Peter Topaz was now ready. I thanked the operator and waited for the sound of Topaz’s voice.

‘Well, well, well. Will,’ he drawled, and I reminded myself that those elongated vowels didn’t reflect any lassitude in his thinking.

‘Peter,’ I said, and tried to sound as though all that had passed between us was now of no consequence. ‘How are you?’

‘Is this just an expensive personal health inquiry, Will?’

I pretended I thought this was funny and laughed.