The Holiday Murders (28 page)

‘Our priority is to find out who killed John Quinn.’

‘Nevertheless, there were a few gaps in your notes about Mitchell Magill.’

‘If John Quinn were alive, you could take that up with him. The information came from him.’

Joe wished he hadn’t gone down this path. He hadn’t properly formulated his concerns about the notes he’d been given on Magill and Australia First.

‘Quinn must have got pretty close to Magill to know where he liked to eat. I’ll wager, though, that if I mentioned his name to Magill, he wouldn’t know it. Why is that? Is the whole thing about Quinn knowing Magill just bullshit?’

Chafer looked at Joe as if he were simple.

‘Of course he wouldn’t know it. Quinn wasn’t using his real name, and he was careful to remain on the periphery of things. He went to meetings, and spoke to Magill there. If you showed Magill a photograph of John Quinn, he’d know him as John Jackson.’

‘And you didn’t think that was important enough to put in the notes?’

‘You might be a good detective, although I’m not convinced of that, but you’re a lousy Intelligence agent. We knew you’d be amateurish, so, to protect you, we decided not to tell you everything. If you’d gone galumphing in there asking about John Jackson, they’d have been on to you in an instant — assuming they’re our killers, and I believe they are.’

‘You don’t have much faith in my abilities, do you?’

‘I have
no
faith in them. Dick Goad disagrees, but he would, wouldn’t he? Dick likes to disagree. It’s what he does best.’

‘You know what, Chafer, you really are an arsehole. If I worked with you …’

‘But you wouldn’t work with me. You don’t have the aptitude or the competence to do that.’

‘Why did you choose me?’

‘That’s already been explained to you. We began with the optimistic hope that you’d be useful, and I suppose you have been, after a fashion. We have the name of a tattooed Nazi. It’s not much to be going on with, though, is it?’

Joe had had enough of Chafer, and stood up and walked out of the bastard’s office without a word. His self-confidence had been shaken, and he couldn’t for the life of him understand the reason for Chafer’s intense dislike of him. He thought he’d done a fair-enough job. Joe assumed that the vitriol to which he’d just been subjected signalled the end of his work for Military Intelligence. It was strange — he’d thought his work was just beginning.

Walking up Lygon Street towards Princes Hill, Joe worried over Chafer’s brutal assessment of his skills. Why had he done this? Was it personal? Was Chafer an anti-Semite? Joe hated the notion that he needed to build this possibility into any unpleasant dealings with people. He’d seen, though, how close to home dangerous hatreds had flourished.

By the time he reached the Carlton Cemetery, he’d become annoyed with himself for allowing Chafer to get to him. He felt deflated; there was no getting around that. And while this mood was upon him, he had to acknowledge to himself that he was lonely. Perhaps it was all those graves mouldering to his left. He’d often wandered through the cemetery, stopping at neglected, crumbling graves, and wondering at the brevity of grief. At the time of burial, any of these graves would have been surrounded by weeping, grief-stricken mourners. Now there was probably no one still alive who remembered the person buried there; no one to recount a single incident in this person’s life; no one to recall an act of kindness. Such thoughts gave Joe no comfort.

He decided to walk to the western edge of the cemetery where the Jewish section abutted the narrow road on that side. The gates were now closed, so he walked around via Macpherson Street. He’d be able to see his parents’ graves through the railings. It had been something of a surprise to him when he’d discovered that they wanted to be buried here. He’d visited their graves only a few times since their deaths — he’d stopped at the graves of strangers more frequently than where his parents lay. But when he reached the Jewish section, his stomach tightened: a Star of David had been clumsily painted on various headstones, and the word ‘Juden’ had been scrawled in red chalk.

Joe grabbed the railings and looked for his parents’ headstone. To his relief, it was untouched, but the amateurish, moronic nature of the surrounding vandalism made him feel weak. It seemed more dangerous, somehow, that this foulness was coming not from the top, but seeping up from the bottom, like sewage. Joe began to shake, and his heart stuttered. Closing his eyes, and trying to will his heart into a normal rhythm, he moved away and headed for home.

Unexpectedly, supplanting all else, Joe Sable was filled with an extraordinary yearning. He’d had romantic disappointments in his past, and they’d made him careful. It had been a while since he’d met anyone who’d provoked in him feelings of desire. There was plenty of time, he told himself. He was only twenty-five. In the past, when his thoughts had turned to the absence of a woman in his life, and the uncomfortable ache that came with these thoughts, Joe had found some way to distract himself to quell them. But Tom Chafer, with his mean-spirited, personal attack, had prised something loose in Joe, and tonight he allowed his thoughts to run their course. By the time he reached his flat, he was miserable.

Suddenly, as he put his foot on the bottom step of the stairs that led to his front door, his heart began to syncopate with nauseating irregularity. He sat down, put his head between his knees, breathed deeply, and waited for it to pass.

‘Joe?’

Helen Lord came down the stairs and stood behind him.

‘Joe? Are you all right?’

Joe, who felt on the edge of vomiting, nodded. His assurance was so patently untrue that Helen moved quickly and knelt in front of him. He looked up at her, and she could see that there was fear in his eyes.

‘Is this what happens?’ she asked.

He nodded again.

‘What can I do to help? Is there anything I can do?’

He shook his head. He was afraid that if he spoke, he’d throw up. After a few seconds, he managed to whisper, ‘It’ll pass in a minute or two.’

Helen stared at him, panicked by her helplessness.

‘Where are your keys?’

He touched his trouser pocket, and Helen reached in and retrieved them. She ran up to his flat, let herself in, and filled a bowl with water. It was all she could think of to do. She came down to him with the bowl and a tea towel, wet the towel, and held it to his forehead. The gesture had a surprisingly remedial effect. It might have been the coolness, or the fact that it distracted Joe, or it might simply have been applied just as Joe’s heart returned to normal, but he immediately began to feel better, and he was able to stand up.

‘Can you get up the stairs all right?’

‘Yes, thank you. I’m fine now.’

Inside the flat, Joe went to the bathroom and splashed water on his face. By the time he returned to the living room, Helen had opened the bottle of beer she’d brought, and had poured two glasses from it. It was warm, but, not having a refrigerator, Joe had got used to warm beer. Helen said nothing about what had just happened. If it had been she who’d suffered some sort of attack, she would have been angered by someone fussing about her.

‘I just got here,’ she said. ‘I’d hate you to think I’d been waiting on your doorstep like a lost kitten. I felt bad about the way our conversation went this afternoon, so, on the off-chance that you’d be home, I brought a peace offering.’

She said all this in a rush.

‘At least now you know I wasn’t spinning you a yarn,’ Joe said. ‘I wish you hadn’t seen that, though.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. So what if I saw it? Saw what, anyway? You were dizzy, and sat down. Big deal.’

Joe put the blackouts up and turned on a table lamp. He was glad that Helen Lord had come round. He’d actually been thinking of telephoning her. Any of his residual feelings of loyalty to Intelligence had been banished by Chafer’s tirade. Bugger him. He needed to get this off his chest. Once he’d begun recounting to Helen the flood of bile that Chafer had directed at him, he went on to tell her about Tom Mackenzie, and Candlebark Hill, and Ptolemy Jones. He saw no reason to hold anything back. He told her how awkward it was that he’d kept Inspector Lambert in the dark about his brother-in-law.

Helen saw his dilemma about Lambert, and rescued Joe from the possibly embarrassing request that she say nothing — embarrassing because the assumption that it needed to be said might point to a lack of trust — by saying, ‘One thing’s for sure. Inspector Lambert must never know that I knew about Tom Mackenzie before he or Maude did.’

Joe assured her that he had no intention of ever telling him this. It was only later, after Helen had gone home, that Joe realised how skilful she’d been in making him feel that theirs was now a shared responsibility.

Helen asked Joe dozens of questions about the people at Candlebark Hill, many of which Joe thought irrelevant.

‘Who did Ptolemy Jones look at during lunch?’

‘No one in particular. It depended who was talking. He wasn’t staring crazily at anyone, if that’s what you mean.’

‘What about the other one, Fred?’

‘Same. No — I noticed him staring at Tom when someone else was saying something. It was just for a moment. He looked at everyone, except Jones, with an equal measure of contempt.’

Helen was fascinated by the misspelled tattoo. A dead tattooist and a recently tattooed Nazi was a tantalising juxtaposition. That, they agreed, was all it was. Jones was an unknown entity. They had no file on him, and no address. Beyond his self-confessed politics, nothing about him was certain.

‘Intelligence is on to him,’ Joe said. ‘At least, they now know about him. Chafer was reluctantly happy to have a name to pursue.’

Their conversation was almost entirely about the investigation, apart from a brief discussion about Mitchell Magill’s skills in reproducing the dreadful nudes that passed as high art among the fascist philistines. But when Joe walked Helen to the tram stop in Lygon Street, and waited with her there until a tram came, he had no way of knowing that, for Helen, the whole evening represented a shift in the nature of the intimacy between them.

‘I’m sure Tom Mackenzie will be back tomorrow,’ she said, as a tram hove into view, ‘and he’ll have more stuff on this Jones bloke. I’m going to ask Inspector Lambert if I can work on finding him — without mentioning Tom, of course. How hard can it be to find someone called Ptolemy?’

‘That’s not a good idea,’ Joe said. ‘If you do find him and start asking questions about his tattoo, he’ll know where you got your information. He’ll put two and two together, and know I’m a copper. That would ruin any chance of Tom or me being able to look further into Our Nation. Even if I did find him, I wouldn’t talk to him, not on my own. Anyway, you said you were through with Intelligence.’

‘You said you were through with Intelligence.’

‘I think I am, but I suspect you’re never through with them once you’ve worked for them. Besides, I don’t think Chafer and Goad would appreciate Our Nation being alerted to their interest in them. It would drive them further underground.’

Helen immediately saw that Joe was right, and told him so. On the other hand, as she took her seat on the tram, she wondered why she shouldn’t find this Mr Jones on her own. That would be a feather in her cap. She was smarter than a Nazi thug who couldn’t spell ‘argument’. Jones seemed to her more comical than dangerous, despite Joe’s assurance that he was a nasty piece of work. If she couldn’t outwit a pantomime Nazi, what kind of police officer was she?

When Joe returned to his flat, he went straight to bed. He hadn’t mentioned the vandalism in the cemetery. Had he been afraid to test Helen Lord’s reaction? That was the most likely reason, and the thought depressed him.

Clarry Brown stayed
in his café until very late. It was preferable to going home, and maybe Jones would drop in. By ten o’clock he’d given up on that notion, and was about to leave. He’d been rehearsing what he’d say about the Jew he’d killed, and with each silent rehearsal he’d made an elaboration — nothing big, nothing too far from what had actually happened. He’d added a brief conversation. He thought Jones would like the story better if the Jew knew in his dying moments that this was retribution, that none of his kind was safe anymore. Should he give him some last words? Yes. The Jew should beg for his life so that Clarry could demonstrate the Jew’s cowardice and his own implacability. He wasn’t the kind of man who could be weakened by pity. Having settled on a final version, he went over it in his head again and again. When he finally got to say it, he wanted it to sound like the truth.

Jones arrived just as Clarry was on his way out. He was alone, and smelled of perfume. He seemed unsurprised to find Clarry still there, and also seemed tenser than usual — almost agitated. His mood constrained Clarry from launching into his story. Jones sat at a table and asked for a glass of water. Clarry brought him one, checking it out before he put it down. Jones didn’t like smeared glasses.

‘I killed a Jew last night,’ Clarry said.

‘What?’

‘I killed a Jew in Toorak. It’ll be in all the papers tomorrow. I killed him. Just like that.’

Jones didn’t react the way that Clarry had expected. He’d been hoping for a slap on the back. Instead, Jones got to his feet and grabbed Clarry’s shirt front.