The Holiday Murders (30 page)

‘You’ve spoken to Tom, sir?’

Titus looked puzzled.

‘No, I haven’t. He always comes. It’s a standing invitation. What do you mean, have I spoken to him? Why would I have spoken to him — or, more to the point, why
wouldn’t
I have spoken to him?’

Joe’s confusion was obvious to both Titus and Helen, and he covered it badly by saying that Tom hadn’t struck him as the party type. Titus, who was now aware that something was up, let it go. But when Joe had left, he said to Helen, ‘Do you know anything about Sergeant Sable and my brother-in-law, Constable?’

Helen, who was a more accomplished liar than Joe, said, ‘I didn’t even know you had a brother-in-law, sir.’

The photograph that
Tom Chafer pushed across the desk to Joe was of half-a-dozen men standing at the front steps of a weatherboard house. It wasn’t a good photograph. None of the faces was crisp and in focus, but a teenage boy at the edge of the group was unmistakeably Ptolemy Jones. He was tall for his age, and his narrow, vulpine features had already settled into their adult shape.

‘Well, well, well,’ Chafer said. ‘How very interesting.’

‘Don’t tell me he’s one of yours.’

Chafer laughed.

‘No, Sergeant, he’s not one of ours. He’s the one person in that picture we’ve never identified. I suppose the fact that he was a child made it seem unimportant. However, we know the others, and it shouldn’t be difficult to track down a couple of them, and make it clear that it would be in their best interests to give us the name of their little acolyte. I think we’re making progress, Sergeant.’

Chafer managed to invest even this expression of success with disdain.

Titus had exerted
his considerable influence to ensure that the police sketch of Jones was photographed and printed with unusual speed. By the time Joe returned from Victoria Barracks, a sufficient number had been run off to cover businesses within a reasonable circumference of the Windsor Hotel. Titus had decided that delivering the picture to shopkeepers would be a good place to start, and that it just might turn something up. The catch was that only one constable was available to help, so Joe and Helen would have to hit the pavements. Neither objected. Joe’s visit to Tom Chafer had taken the edge off his concern for the welfare of Group Captain Mackenzie. At least now there was the real probability of finding Ptolemy Jones. For her part, Helen was glad to be doing something practical.

They started at the Windsor together. When they showed the sketch to the concierge and told him that the subject was wanted in connection with serious crimes, the gatekeeper hesitated for just a moment before saying that he didn’t recognise him. Both Joe and Helen noticed the hesitation, and knew it meant that the concierge was lying. He refused to change his story, though, even when Joe pointed out that it would go badly for him if it turned out that he wasn’t being entirely truthful.

‘If he’s threatened you in some way, you should tell us now,’ Joe said.

The concierge shook his head.

Outside the Windsor, Joe and Helen decided to split up and to meet back at Russell Street a couple of hours later.

Joe returned to Russell Street first. He’d had no success. All the shopkeepers who’d looked at the picture said that if they’d seen that person, they’d certainly have remembered him, but that he’d never been in their shops. It was a little dispiriting to think that Jack Ables had been the only person to see Ptolemy Jones the previous afternoon. Perhaps Inspector Lambert had been right, and Joe had imposed a false identification on Ables’s quick, impressionistic sketch. Perhaps they were looking in the wrong place. If so, it was an error of judgement that could cost Mary Quinn her life.

Helen Lord, similarly, had met with no success. She folded the last few flyers and put them in a pocket, almost missing ‘Clarry’s Café’. It was only because she collided with a man — who turned out to be Clarry — that she realised the doorway he was exiting from belonged to a cafeteria. The man said nothing and made to move off.

‘Is this your place?’ she asked.

‘What if it is?’

Helen was unsurprised by the man’s unpleasantness, and she knew that it would be exacerbated when she announced herself as a policewoman.

‘My name is Constable Helen Lord, and I’m not interested in your business. What I am interested in is whether or not you’ve seen this man in the area.’

She produced a folded flyer and showed it to him.

‘Why are you asking me?’ Clarry asked, before looking at it.

‘I’ve been asking shop-owners all day. You’re the last.’

Clarry Brown ran his eyes over the picture and recognised Jones immediately. He’d turned his face away from Helen Lord, not deliberately, but because the sun was in his eyes. Consequently, she didn’t see the involuntary tensing of his muscles.

‘What’s this bird wanted for?’ he asked.

‘We just want to talk to him.’

‘Why?’

‘We want to eliminate him from our enquiries.’

‘Enquiries about what?’

‘Have you seen him?’

‘No.’

Having spent a good few hours hearing ‘No’, Clarry Brown’s response raised no suspicions in Helen. She accepted the denial at face value. It wasn’t until much later that she thought it odd the way the man had put the flyer into his pocket without offering to return it. Every other person she’d shown the picture to had automatically given it back.

Clarry Brown had
been more shaken than he’d let on by the encounter with the policewoman. Apart from the shock of seeing the picture she’d shown him, the fact that the police were now hiring women seemed to him a symptom of how decadent society had become. ‘Decadent’ was a word he’d learned from Ptolemy Jones. The bracing clarity of National Socialism was definitely what Australia needed.

After the policewoman walked away, Brown took the flyer out of his pocket and stared at it. He was shocked that Jones had put himself in the position of being a person of interest to the police, let alone of allowing someone to get close enough to create a remarkable likeness of him. A part of Clarry was pleased that Jones seemed to have made a mistake, seemed to have been careless. He felt that the flyer shifted the balance of power slightly in his favour. He couldn’t articulate how — it was just a feeling that this meant something important, and that he could use it to unsettle Jones’s nasty little group. He didn’t want to bring Jones down. Not that. Jones was his saviour, after all. Still.

Clarry shook his head quickly. What was he thinking? How had these traitorous thoughts entered his head? It wasn’t Jones he wanted to hurt. No — he wanted to get closer to him. If there was one person fewer at the table when Jones held his meetings, then perhaps he, Clarry Brown, would be offered the vacant seat. Thoughts of disposing of the blond simpleton, Mark, returned, and with these thoughts came the notion that Jones couldn’t have made a mistake, that he hadn’t been careless. He must have been betrayed.

Clarry couldn’t wait to present his theory to Jones and to attempt to cast doubt on the simpleton’s loyalty in the process. All it would take would be the tiniest inkling of a suspicion, and then he could dispose of Mark. He’d make sure the body was never found, so the others would assume he’d just taken himself off, unable to show his face because of his betrayal.

Joe Sable arrived
at the Lamberts’ house in Brunswick at eight o’clock. Helen Lord was already there, among a small group in the backyard. Much of the garden had been turned over to the growing of vegetables, although a small patch had been sown with poppies. Joe recognised one or two people from Russell Street, but the other half-dozen guests were unknown to him. Having been introduced to them all, he was discreetly excised by Maude Lambert, who put her hand on his arm and pulled him away gently. In the kitchen, as she cut sandwiches into ribbons, she took Joe completely by surprise by asking where her brother, Tom, was.

‘I haven’t been able to reach him for days — not at work and not at home. What have you done with him, Joe?’

The question was delivered in a tone that Joe could only have described as steely light-heartedness. He was momentarily confused, and his confusion provided Maude with all the confirmation she needed.

‘Will Tom be coming here tonight, Joe?’

There was no frivolity in her voice, and Joe saw in the expression on her face what a formidable woman she was. At the same time, he was annoyed that Titus had passed on to Maude information that ought not to have left Russell Street, even though all she could know was that he’d been sent by Titus to interview Tom about
The Publicist
. Joe understood now why Helen Lord had had such qualms about Titus including his wife in all aspects of an investigation.

‘No, Mrs Lambert, he won’t. At least, I don’t think he will. I can’t say for sure, because I don’t know.’

‘Is he safe?’

There was a moment’s hesitation before Joe said, ‘Yes.’

Maude didn’t let him off the hook.

‘You can’t say that with any certainty, can you?’

‘No, but is anybody ever safe? The people in your backyard, are they safe, absolutely safe, just standing there?’

‘That’s fatuous, Joe. I’m not blaming you for whatever Tom signed on for. He’s a grown man, and bored to death at Victoria Barracks. If, however, he is in danger, I’d appreciate your honesty.’

‘I’m caught in a bind here, Mrs Lambert. There are certain operational matters I’m simply not at liberty to discuss.’

‘Not even with Titus?’

Joe blushed.

‘I see,’ Maude said. ‘I won’t press you. Can you take these sandwiches outside.’

Joe realised that he’d handled this encounter with Maude Lambert badly. Why hadn’t he just told her the truth, or enough of the truth to avoid the rightful charge of having deliberately withheld information? In breaching his previously open relationship with Inspector Lambert, Joe knew that using the defence of the obligations imposed on him by the Crimes Act wouldn’t wash. Lambert would accept the defence — how could he not? — but he’d feel that when Joe’s loyalty had been tested, he’d chosen Intelligence over Homicide, despite Joe’s previous assurance to him that this would never happen. Maude was sure to tell Titus that her brother had become involved somehow, and Titus would know that Joe had chosen to keep this from him. And what if Titus discovered that Joe had confided in Helen?

Joe passed among the guests, playing waiter with the sandwiches, and, when he reached Helen, said quietly, ‘Could I talk to you for a minute?’

The backyard was too small to provide a private corner, so they moved to the side of the house, where saw-toothed ferns grew in profusion.

‘I’m in a pickle,’ Joe said. ‘Maude Lambert knows that something is up with Tom Mackenzie.’

‘Of course she does,’ Helen said. ‘You gave that away this afternoon.’

‘How?’

‘Are you kidding? Do you think you got away with that, “I didn’t think Tom was the party type” comment? You might as well have held up a big placard saying, “Tom Mackenzie is working for me.”’

‘Was it that obvious?’

‘After you left, Lambert asked me if I knew anything.’

‘You didn’t say anything, did you?’

Helen Lord was so instantly offended by this question that she uttered a small gasp before turning on her heel and walking away. It took only a second for Joe’s initial dismay to be replaced by an awful feeling that what he’d just done went far beyond the commission of a
faux pas
. Rising anxiety caused his heart to flutter, and, at the first sign of this, his anxiety increased. By focussing on the ground in front of him, he managed to make it back into the house, down the corridor, and out into the street. There, he leaned against a car, hoping that his heart would settle. It did, and yet a great rush of nausea overwhelmed him, and he was sick in the gutter.

Returning to the Lambert’s New Year’s Eve party was impossible. There was nothing for him there. He couldn’t bear the pretence of sociability when he’d just made himself a pariah. Perhaps tomorrow, at the start of a new year, he’d put things to rights. Without saying goodbye, a rudeness he now thought would surprise no one, he began to walk back to his flat in Princes Hill.

Rosh Pinah
, he thought as he pushed open his front door.
Spare me
.

As the door clicked shut, the telephone rang. It was Ptolemy Jones. ‘This is the fourth time I’ve rung,’ he said. ‘Tonight at eleven. Rainbow Hall, Commercial Road, Prahran. Be there.’ He hung up.

Joe’s first thought was,
How did he get my number?
He’d given it to Sheila Draper, and she might have given it to Mary Quinn. If Jones had kidnapped Mary, he could have extracted it from her. No, that couldn’t be right. Why would he associate Joe with Mary in the first place? Jones must have got the number from Tom Mackenzie. When Joe considered this, it sent a fizz of panic through his body —Tom wouldn’t have volunteered his number.

It was close to ten o’clock. Joe would have to catch a tram to Flinders Street Station and a train to Prahran. He didn’t think about how he might get home afterwards, nor did he give any thought to the alternative of not going. Joe assumed this to be a meeting of Our Nation, and at the very least he hoped to see Tom there. If he found him there, safe and sound, Joe could ease his conscience by reporting that fact to Titus.