A Thing of Blood (9 page)

CLUTTERBUCK LAID A SHEET
on the floor beside the bath, and we lifted Gretel’s naked body onto it. All my sensibilities were outraged by what we were doing. It wasn’t just irregular. It was illegal, immoral, imperilling, and ill-conceived. And yet … And yet, I went along with it and carried Gretel’s body downstairs and into the back garden, at the bottom of which sat a small garage. Until Clutterbuck opened the garage door, I hadn’t known that he owned a car — a Studebaker that was at least ten years old, but looked well maintained. We manoeuvred the corpse into the back seat. Clutterbuck took a shovel from the corner of the garage and laid it across Gretel’s body.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘We don’t want the coppers to find the body until you’ve sorted out who did this.’

‘Then what? We can’t retrieve it and plonk it back in the house.’

‘It’s too late to worry about that now.’

Clutterbuck started the engine and pulled out into the lane behind his house.

‘Where’s the best place to hide a body, Will?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘If you wanted to hide a specific marble, where would you put it?’

‘This isn’t a parlour game, Paul.’

‘Where would you hide the marble, Will?’

Giving him what he wanted I stated the obvious. ‘In a bag of marbles.’

‘Exactly, so I hope you’re not afraid of goblins or ghouls.’

Clutterbuck stopped his car outside the back entrance to the Melbourne cemetery, in MacPherson Street. No light seeped from the edges of the blackouts in the houses that faced the perimeter. This was hardly surprising, given the hour. The gate was shut and locked, presumably to protect the dead from the living and not the other way around. The fence wasn’t too difficult to negotiate, although heaving eight stone of uncooperative flesh over it took some ingenuity, especially with the handicap of my broken arm. I managed it by imagining that my actions were part of a performance — that I was Hamlet, lugging ‘the guts into the neighbour room’ and that once accomplished the curtain would fall and the ‘guts’ would spring to life to be lugged another day.

Once inside the cemetery, our task, Clutterbuck said, was to find a recently dug grave, preferably one that had been excavated and filled that very afternoon with the earth still loose in preparation for the pounding down and the stonemason’s craft. To give Clutterbuck his due, I had to acknowledge that as a place to conceal a corpse a cemetery was an inspired choice. We were obliged to leave the body unattended while we sought out a new grave. It took us twenty minutes, but a tarpaulin stretched over a rising in the ground indicated that there had indeed been a burial there that day. We collected Gretel Beech and began to dig into the recently turned earth. It was surprisingly easy, and in a very short time we’d made a depression sufficient to accommodate the body. In the great tradition of such matters, it was a shallow grave; neither one of us wishing to dig to the depth of the already buried coffin. When we’d finished and remounded the soil and replaced the tarpaulin, the scene looked much as we had found it. Later, in my bedroom, I remembered that I hadn’t removed my tie from around Gretel’s neck. That it was my tie, there could be no doubt — I had sewn my name onto its back to prevent my losing it when travelling.

Despite not having been able to sleep until almost 5.00 a.m., I was awake and dressed at eight. I was surprised that Clutterbuck too was awake and I found him in the kitchen, making coffee. On the bench there was a tin of the cream he had purchased from the American PX.

‘Try it,’ he said. ‘You’ll like it.’

‘Where do we go from here?’ I asked.

‘You’re the PI, Will. You do realise that there’s every chance now that Gretel’s body will never be found, and that means that if you don’t find her murderer, he’ll get away with it.’

‘We’re going to the police in two days, right?’

Clutterbuck shrugged.

‘It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now that I think about it, unless you hand over the culprit the police are going to respond poorly to an unauthorised burial. No. This is entirely in your hands, and I have no doubt, Will that you can protect us both — and we both need protecting. I’m placing my trust in you.’

In the few seconds it took for Clutterbuck to speak these words, my emotions lurched from furious resentment to reluctant acceptance, and settled on that vaguely satisfying sensation that expressions of trust arouse in me. The situation in which Clutterbuck and I found ourselves was a long way from the ordinary, so I had to expect that the rules and regulations that govern the ordinary would be suspended. I drank Clutterbuck’s coffee with Clutterbuck’s cream in it and I knew that from that point on I stood apart from legislated behaviour. It was strangely liberating and frightening in equal measure.

‘You’re right to trust me, Paul. I’ll find who killed Gretel.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘So life goes on. Nigella and her father and brother will be here at three o’clock. Mrs Castleton will prepare afternoon tea and I’ll ask her to include you in her baking. I want you to meet these people. I also still want you to find out as much as you can about Cunningham and Anna. You might get lucky and kill two birds with one stone, as it were. I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if Anna paid someone to set me up.’

This seemed ludicrous to me. I wasn’t completely discounting the possibility that the purpose of Gretel’s murder was to undermine Clutterbuck’s reputation, but there were other scenarios. Gretel had lived among a dissolute crowd. She’d mixed with criminals and strip-tease artistes and God knows who else. It was among this crowd that I thought her killer lurked and it was this crowd that I would need to infiltrate.

‘How much do you know about Gretel Beech?’ I asked.

‘Practically nothing. I met her at Maguire’s a few months ago and we enjoyed each other’s company. I never met any of her friends and I never went to her place — she had a room in a boarding house in St Kilda, I believe. I don’t think she was from here. She mentioned some family connection in Horsham, or somewhere in the bush. There was something of the country girl about her, wasn’t there?’

‘Well, no,’ I said. ‘Although I didn’t know her as well as you did obviously, stripping in a speakeasy isn’t my idea of rural manners.’

‘It’s what happens sometimes when country girls get lost in the big city.’

‘Where are her clothes?’

‘I’ve bundled them up. I intend to burn them.’

‘I want to look through them. I might find something that will help me locate somebody who knew her.’

Clutterbuck looked sceptical, but led me upstairs to a chest in one of the unoccupied rooms where he’d placed her clothes.

‘They were stuffed into my wardrobe,’ he said, ‘and were obviously meant to be found there by the basset noses of the constabulary.’

Gretel’s garments smelled of perfume and were slightly acrid with sweat. There were no pockets, but a small, beaded purse was caught up in the folds of one of her scarves. It was empty except for a torn piece of paper on which was scribbled an address in East Melbourne, a time, and a date. Gretel’s rendezvous was later that morning, and I immediately determined to turn up in her place.

‘This isn’t where she was staying?’ I asked.

Clutterbuck looked at the scrap of paper.

‘Heavens no. That’s a good address.’

I didn’t mention my plan to Clutterbuck. He was more forthcoming about his plans for me.

‘I don’t want to tell you how to run your business,’ he said, ‘but it might be relevant that Anna likes to have a late breakfast. So if you hurry you’ll probably catch her and her lover in the dining room of the Menzies Hotel. She isn’t the kind of woman who would pass up a free feed.’

Clutterbuck was right about his ex-wife. I entered the dining room at the Menzies Hotel at nine-thirty, and saw Anna and Cunningham seated at a table, the detritus of a recently eaten meal before them. They gave every appearance of being a respectable couple, and didn’t betray by expression or gesture that there was anything illicit about their relationship. The same couldn’t be said of the several US Army officers who clutched the hands of the women opposite them with proprietorial and post-coital vulgarity. There were no Australian Army uniforms in the room.

I sat in the foyer reading the paper and hoped that they would leave the hotel soon. Gretel’s meeting was for eleven o’clock. I couldn’t form a plan beyond that until I had ascertained the nature of the appointment. I suspected it might be sexual, in which case her client would be unwilling to help me. The important thing was not to give away the hideous fact of her death. I would have to think on my feet.

As I was half-reading the paper and half-pondering how I would approach Gretel’s assignation, Anna Capshaw and Cunningham came into the foyer and passed outside into Collins Street. On the pavement they said a few words and went in different directions. I followed Cunningham. He began to half run, half walk as if he was late for an appointment. At Spring Street he turned left and increased his pace so that in a few minutes he had reached St Patrick’s Cathedral. He moved quickly up its steps to the entrance and disappeared inside. There was so little alteration in his stride that I formed the impression that this monolithic, intimidating edifice was a familiar haunt. I didn’t enjoy the same familiarity; despite having grown up in Melbourne, I’d had no occasion to enter this earthly manifestation of Catholic power. I did so now with some trepidation.

The soaring Gothic space was obviously designed to diminish the congregation, rather than celebrate God, and the odorous silence, broken only by the echoey footfall of someone hidden in its depths, frankly gave me the creeps. I saw Cunningham kneeling in a pew outside what I presumed were the confessionals. I sat several pews behind him and waited for something to happen. A person emerged from one of the cubicles and knelt to pray. I wondered what tawdry little sins she had divested herself of. Cunningham took her place. He would probably unburden himself of the terrible sin of fornication. I didn’t know yet whether or not he was married, but I supposed that the virgin priest listening to his tale of lust would take a pretty dim view of the transgression. Three Hail Marys as penance certainly wouldn’t cover it. He was in there for a very long time and when he came out he didn’t kneel to begin his penance but headed for a side door. Before he reached it a voice called, shockingly loud in the respectful silence:

‘Mr Trezise!’

Cunningham turned and met a priest who was coming towards him. He smiled and held out his hand. The priest shook it, and they walked together behind the enormous altar. By the time I got there they’d gone, but it was impossible to discover where. The cathedral seemed to me to be a rabbit warren of mysterious doors and side chapels.

So Cunningham was really named Trezise. I wasn’t surprised that he’d given a false name at the hotel; no doubt he was married. Now I could begin the real work of finding out the information that Clutterbuck needed.

With Cunningham, or more correctly, Trezise, occupied with the priest, I decided to make my way towards the address scribbled on Gretel Beech’s scrap of paper. It was a house in East Melbourne. With an hour to spare, I thought I’d walk the distance rather than spend money on a Red Top taxi or a tram. The walk would clear my head, and give me time to think about Gretel’s murder and Darlene’s kidnapping. I couldn’t shake the notion that there was something amiss there. Having just disposed of a body myself, I realised how difficult it would have been to have snatched Darlene and effectively made her vanish in only a few minutes. This was surely more than a single person was capable of achieving. Could an embittered woman thousands of miles north organise a gang of thugees to do her bidding in punishing the man who threw her over? It seemed unlikely.

Perhaps it was Darlene’s life that needed to be examined, but this was too absurd. She was socially inept certainly, but not to the point of provoking someone to take her out of circulation by abduction. She was too drab and boring to attract the attention of professional ransom-raisers, if such people existed outside cheap Hollywood programmers. There had been no demands for a ransom thus far. If squeezing money from her nearest and dearest had been the intention, I imagined that her kidnappers would have been filled with despair when they spoke to her, or saw her in the harsh light of day. If I’d been one of them I would have argued for an immediate reduction in the asking price; realistically, I would have realised that, far from expecting payment, the kidnapping gang could possibly be held liable for cartage costs.

I smiled to myself as my ruminations became more extravagant and unseemly, and arrived at my destination just before 11.00 a.m. It was a large house, double-storeyed, with a beautiful cast-iron railing around the upper veranda. It was, without doubt, a good address, and an unlikely rendezvous point, at this hour of the day, for a prostitute and her client. I rang the bell. The woman who answered the door was obviously the help. She wasn’t wearing a uniform, but the lady of this house would not have been seen dead in such ill-fitting attire, made entirely of shoddy.

‘I’m here on behalf of Miss Gretel Beech,’ I said.

‘Wait in the hall,’ she said. ‘Mr Wilks won’t be happy.’

She climbed a broad staircase and entered a room off the upper landing. A babble of voices escaped when she did so. A man in his fifties emerged and came down the stairs towards me. He was wearing a ridiculous beret and a pleated smock. All that was missing was a carefully trimmed moustache and a French accent, and the cliché would have been complete.