A Thing of Blood (8 page)

In the hallway he called up the stairs to Gretel.

‘Will and I are going out.’

‘OK,’ she called back.

‘Do you want us to come back, or will we meet you there?’

She turned on the tap and called over its noise, ‘I’ll meet you there. I’m on at twelve-thirty.’

In the street outside, the weird and chilling yawn of a lion reached us from nearby Melbourne Zoo. We walked aimlessly for a while, and Clutterbuck sang to himself a few bars of ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition’.

‘I wouldn’t have picked you as a propaganda peddler’, I said.

‘That’s Nigella’s influence. She works for that crowd. Have you seen that hideous short that’s on before every film?’

He raised his voice a few octaves and minced in imitation of a woman: ‘I found the WAAF in many important respects just as vital as the RAAF. There’s so much a girl learns in the air force. It’s given me a new interest in life. An entirely different outlook, and has supplied the answer to a question. It’s a haunting question, you know.’ He paused dramatically. ‘Are you in a war job? Are you?’

He snorted.

‘That’s one Nigella had a hand in. Frightful, isn’t it? Needless to say I told her I loved it, and, if it comes up in conversation tomorrow, don’t be surprised if I dragoon you into expressing admiration for it, too.’

‘But I haven’t seen it.’

‘What you just saw is better than the original, so that should be enough to carry any expressions of awe you are required to make.’

We slowly wended our way towards Ma Maguire’s, and Clutterbuck began asking questions about my background. I told him as much as I thought he needed to know. As we crossed Princes Park he asked me to recite something from Shakespeare. Confident of my skill, I did not demur, but produced a sound, if subdued, reading of a passage from
The Tempest
. I threw in a few lines of Caliban’s, just to demonstrate my range. He seemed genuinely impressed, which was pleasing, and he nodded and said, ‘Yes’ and ‘Yes’ again as if to reinforce that his affirmation was well considered.

We walked on in silence after that, until we reached Ma Maguire’s. The entrance to this establishment was through a lane at the rear, and as soon as the door was pushed open the heat and noise that hit us indicated a crowded house. Gretel would have a large audience for her late performance, and from the raucous sounds coming from deep in the house, most of them were already drunk.

Clutterbuck left me to my own devices, and I was soon approached by a woman who said she was on her way to the dunny outside. She paused long enough to observe that she thought I looked like ‘somebody.’

‘Don’t know who,’ she said, ‘but somebody in the movies.’

She meant, of course, Tyrone Power, to whom I bore more than a passing resemblance. This made the coincidence of our surnames remarkable.

‘People say Tyrone Power,’ I said.

She was quite drunk, and slurred, ‘No. Not someone good looking. But someone in the movies. Definitely.’ She stumbled away towards her date with a toilet bowl.

Twelve-thirty came and went, and when Gretel still hadn’t arrived at one-thirty Clutterbuck said that she must have fallen asleep, and that we should go and wake her up. There was still time for her to perform. There would be a crowd at Ma Maguire’s until the early morning.

We half-walked, half-ran back to Clutterbuck’s house. Inside it was dark and quiet, so I assumed Gretel must indeed have fallen asleep. A few moments after our arrival, Clutterbuck came out of his bedroom and said that Gretel wasn’t there. He shrugged.

‘Maybe she just decided she had better things to do. She’s not the most reliable girl in the world. They’ll be pissed off at Maguire’s, but all she’ll have to do is expose her breasts to the manager, and maybe give him a feel, and she’ll be sweet. I’m turning in. Goodnight.’

He produced an elaborate yawn and closed his bedroom door.

In my bedroom I felt obliged to fold my clothes neatly and not just toss them in a heap. Knowing that there was no one else in the house, there was no reason to wrap a towel around my waist in order to walk to the bathroom next door. I switched on the dim light and saw in its pale, yellow glow that Gretel Beech was lying on her back in the bathtub, her face submerged beneath the water, her eyes open and glassy. Simply because I didn’t know what else to do, and perhaps because I thought she might sit up at any moment and hoot with laughter at the fright she’d given me, I approached the tub and put my hand in the water. It was cold. I forced myself to look into Gretel’s face, and I saw, with sickening dread, that there was a tie wrapped so tightly around her throat that it bit deeply into her skin. I only owned one tie, and this was unmistakably it.

I stood back from the bath and was pleased to discover that I hadn’t descended into an irrational panic. I was clear-headed and relatively calm. If the bath water was anything to go by, Gretel Beech had been dead for quite a while, which meant that whoever had strangled her had done so while Paul Clutterbuck and I had been waiting for her at Maguire’s.

The first thing that I had to do was to tell Clutterbuck that his girlfriend had been murdered in his own house. I didn’t expect him to take her death hard. He had demonstrated by his general behaviour that hysterical displays of grief were probably outside his emotional range, but I didn’t know exactly how he would react. I put on a pair of trousers and knocked on his bedroom door.

‘Come in,’ he called.

He was in bed, and sounded as if he had been on the brink of falling asleep. I could think of no subtle way to inform him of the horror that was lying in my bath.

‘Gretel has been murdered,’ I said, and wished that there might perhaps have been a gentler way of saying it. He sat up in bed and was silent, probably considering whether what he had heard was real or part of a vivid dream. He leaned across and switched on a lamp.

‘What did you say?’

‘Gretel Beech’s body is lying in my bathtub. I think she’s been strangled.’

Clutterbuck slowly got out of bed. I couldn’t tell what effect my words had had on him. He seemed calm, but his stillness might have been shock. Without speaking, he pushed past me and went into my bathroom. When he emerged his face was unreadably impassive.

‘Did you kill her?’ he asked.

I was so stunned by this question that I gasped.

‘Of course not. She’s been dead for hours. You can see that. Someone must have done it while we were at Maguire’s.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m not thinking clearly. I need a drink.’

Downstairs, Clutterbuck poured each of us an enormous whisky.

‘We should call the police,’ I said.

‘Should we?’

He looked at me over the top of his glass. There was a wariness in his eyes, as if he was gauging my reaction to this challenge to common sense.

‘Gretel’s been murdered,’ I said quietly. ‘We don’t have any choice.’

‘It’s, what, two in the morning. Who’d be on duty at this hour?’

It wasn’t really a question, but more like an expression of disbelief that there were people in the world who had organised their lives so poorly that they could be required to work at uncivilised times. I knew exactly who would be on duty. It would be Sergeant Wilkinson, and he would doubtless be surprised to find me at two different crime scenes within the short space of twenty-four hours. Despite the awful conclusions such a ghastly coincidence must provoke, there was no question but that we should contact the police, and I told Clutterbuck this.

‘No,’ he said sharply. ‘Let me think, let me think.’

‘There’s nothing to think about. There’s the body upstairs, of a girl you were having some kind of a relationship with.’

‘That’s precisely the problem.’ His voice was now edgy. ‘She can’t be found here. The Fowlers can’t know about her. Nigella mustn’t find out about her.’

‘You’re not serious,’ I said, feeling quite certain that he was very serious indeed.

‘This is a set-up,’ he said suddenly. ‘This is to stop me marrying Nigella Fowler.’

‘Who would want to do that? And why?’ I asked.

Clutterbuck put his drink down and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

‘Will, you’ve known me for two days. You have no idea how complicated my life is. I can think of half-a-dozen people who would stop at nothing to destroy me. Murdering some tart, and leaving her body where it causes the greatest inconvenience, would be no problem at all. And maybe it isn’t even about the Fowlers, but it sure as hell is about destroying me. If the coppers get a hold of this, how would you rate my chances of joining the Melbourne Club?’

He began to work himself up into an indignant fury.

‘Those pricks are not going to get away with this. It’s going to take more than a trollop’s corpse to shut me down.’

‘Paul,’ I said, ‘who are you talking about? Who are these people?’

He looked at me squarely.

‘Communists. My former wife. A jealous husband. I don’t know. Take your pick.’

‘But you have an alibi. You weren’t here when she was killed. Dozens of people can attest to that, and Gretel was alive when we left the house. I can attest to that.’

‘I don’t know how much you’ve had to do with the coppers, Will, but they’ll find out we left Maguire’s with Gretel and came back without her. Your word won’t be worth shit to them. In fact, when they find out it’s your bathtub she’s in, they might be even more interested in you than in me.’

‘That tie around her neck is mine,’ I said flatly.

Clutterbuck said nothing for a moment.

‘How do I know she’s been dead for hours and not minutes?’ he asked.

I knew what he was doing. He was trying to put me in the uncomfortable position of having to defend myself against an absurd, but devastating, allegation. And he succeeded. I couldn’t hold back the awkward bleating of my innocence, and it sounded desperate and unconvincing. He stopped me before I’d gone very far.

‘Listen, Will. I know you didn’t do this. I can’t explain why she was strangled with your tie and dumped in your bath. I imagine the half-wit who did it just got it all wrong. But you’ve got to admit, it looks bad for both of us.’

There was no disputing this.

‘There is a way out,’ he said.

I began to feel ill.

‘You’re a PI. You could find out who did this and present the information to the police at the right time. What do a couple of days matter? No one’s going to miss Gretel for a while. What have we got to lose?’

‘This is murder, Paul. Somebody has to be told that Gretel Beech is dead.’

‘It doesn’t make any difference to her whether it’s today, or tomorrow or the next day. I can’t afford to have the police crawling all over my house. Christ! The Fowlers are coming for afternoon tea.’

‘Paul, tea with the Fowlers is not more important than Gretel’s death.’

‘Yes it is, Will,’ he said fiercely. ‘Yes it is! All we’re talking about here is doing the coppers’ work for them. I’m not saying we don’t report it. I’m saying we don’t report it yet. That’s all. You’re a PI, for Christ’s sake. Why should the police get the credit here? You can fix this. And I’ll pay you.’

This last was thrown casually into the mix. I wasn’t seduced by his flattering confidence in my untried abilities, but I began, God help me, to see the situation from his point of view. What, after all, was wrong with paying Gretel the compliment of finding out who had killed her?

‘If we don’t have these people, or the person, in two days’ time,’ I said, ‘do you agree that you’ll come with me to the police?’

‘Of course,’ he said hurriedly. ‘Of course I do. But we will find them.’

‘All right then,’ I said.

Clutterbuck looked so relieved I thought he might embrace me.

‘We’ll have to move the body,’ he said.

I hadn’t considered this, and his words fell on my ears like blows. I was suddenly dizzy, and could do nothing to prevent myself from falling forward in a faint. I woke on the floor, with whisky running down my chest and with Clutterbuck looking down at me — the expression on his face must have been concern, but my swoon distorted it so that it resembled laughter.

Chapter Four

bearing up