The Holiday Murders (31 page)

As Joe set out, he had the nervous thought that there were only two people in the world who knew his destination — himself and Ptolemy Jones. He was foolish to have let himself be put in this position, but he had no choice — or no choice that he was prepared to exercise.

Joe found the
hall without difficulty, just a few minutes from the station. It was a small, weatherboard building, undistinguished in every way — exactly the sort of place that an organisation without much money could afford to rent for an evening. Perhaps, Joe thought, it was used by a scout troop or some grim Christian Ladies’ group that met to knit socks for the army.

There were several men lurking near the entrance — even though they were just shadows, there was something furtive about them. The door to the hall opened, and a dull light spilled into the porch. The men went in, but Joe held back. After a few minutes, more men turned up and continued to file in, until Joe estimated the audience to have reached about fifty. He was surprised. Our Nation was obviously recruiting rapidly, which made him uneasy. There was no sign of Jones. He must have been inside all along.

Joe entered the hall, feeling that there was some safety in numbers, even if those numbers were Nazis. Chairs had been set up, and most of them were occupied. At the front, a portable screen had been installed; at the rear, a movie projector was being tinkered with by a bald man in his late forties. The man didn’t look up as Joe entered and took a seat as inconspicuously as he could. No one spoke. It was as if this was a roomful of reluctant strangers in church. Jones was nowhere to be seen, and none of the men — they were all men — seated in the dim light was familiar to Joe.

The man who had been fiddling with the projector walked to the front of the room and announced in a high voice that just as soon as he’d collected ten shillings from everyone, the evening could get under way.

‘And I promise you that you won’t be disappointed. We’ve got some travelogues and some fillums from Europe. It’ll be money well spent, gentlemen.’

With the entrance money duly collected, the single, naked bulb that had illuminated the hall was switched off. Joe tensed his muscles in expectation of violence. If anything was to happen to him, he thought, it would happen in these few seconds before his eyes had become accustomed to the darkness. Joe instinctively leaned forward in his seat, as if this might protect him from a blow aimed at head height. But no blow came.

The sound of the projector filled the room, and light burst from it. The screen was filled with a grainy landscape of palm trees and beachfront, but there was no sound. A line of bare-breasted Tahitian ladies danced across the screen, with the camera lingering insistently on their endowments. Clearly, this was more bodylogue than travelogue; but, after ten minutes of being exposed to sinuous conga lines of native women, the audience became restless. Joe realised that they’d come to this hall on New Year’s Eve, and paid their good money, for real pornography; Tahitian beauties didn’t fit the bill.

In a few seconds, a short film called
Easy Money
began. This was more satisfactory from the audience’s point of view. Again, there was no sound, but the quality of the images was better. It looked American to Joe, and the ladies who paraded before the camera and stripped down to nothing could have stepped from the chorus line of any Busby Berkeley extravaganza. They had the same forced smiles on their faces, and were oddly sexless. When naked, each of them stood for a few seconds, as if modelling the memory of a swimsuit, before surrendering the stage to the next artiste. The first few women, when they revealed their pubic hair, elicited wolf whistles from the audience, but repetition soon dulled the response. The next film had the promisingly lurid title of
Women: how we like them
. But it was more of the same, and the reel broke halfway through.

‘Patience, gentlemen,’ the projectionist said. ‘I’ve got a couple of beaut fillums from France coming up.’

He played one of these next. Joe suspected he’d been saving them for last, but he’d taken the measure of the room and thought better of delaying. The film had obviously been made during the 1920s, and it was scratchy and jumpy, but it had the advantage of being true pornography. It was, in fact, the first pornography that Joe had ever seen, and he found it startling. It involved nuns with hairy armpits, priapic priests, a tradesman who explored the plumbing of both sexes, and a Pomeranian dog that did its own unrestricted exploring.

It ran for only a few minutes, and was greeted with hoots of approval. Joe wondered what the cast of the film was doing nowadays. Another American film,
Tease for Two
, followed; this was more gynaecological than its predecessors, and generated a good round of applause. The man in this film was masked, and the woman wasn’t, as if he had a reputation worth protecting and she didn’t.

‘This next one is from our friends at the Melbourne Nudist Club,’ the projectionist said. ‘I haven’t seen it myself yet, but I’m sure it’ll be very picturesque. They always do a lovely job. We’ll get back to the other sort straight afterwards.’

As the first image flickered into movement, Joe was enveloped in a fog of dread. It was Candlebark Hill, inexpertly captured by someone unfamiliar with using a camera. There were no people in the shot, which was of the house — first blurry, then sharp, then blurry again, and again sharp. The screen went black, and the next shot was a cut to the inside of the house. The paintings on the walls left Joe in no doubt that this was Magill’s house.

The camera moved through the empty interior, and somehow the absence of people was menacing. It wasn’t just Joe who felt this — the audience was silent. The screen went black again. The next shot was taken outside, among the copse of candlebarks that Mitchell Magill’s father had planted. The camera swung around to focus on Ptolemy Jones leaning against a tree. He was masked, but his tattoo was clearly visible, and his body unmistakeable, even with its distracting erection. He was looking beyond the lens: when it swivelled to follow his gaze, it revealed a man and a woman, both naked and both tied to trees. They were too far away to be identifiable, but Joe knew they were Mary Quinn and Tom Mackenzie.

A crude edit brought the camera in close. Mary was gagged, her eyes bulging. Tom was calling out something, and struggling against the ropes that ran across his shoulders, thighs, and ankles. The audience in the hall was enthralled — believing, Joe presumed, that because it had been captured on film, it was fictional, and that the players were unexpectedly good at their craft.

The camera moved to one side — who was working it, Mitchell, Arthur, or Fred? — with Mary in the foreground and Tom still sharply in focus. Jones stood in front of Tom, and spat in his face before slapping him hard. The audience gasped. Joe was paralysed with horror.

Jones took Tom’s face in his hand and turned it toward Mary. He said something in his ear. Mary must have heard it, because her face became contorted with a fierce emotion. Jones moved across to her and, with brutal ease, raped her. Just like that. The audience had each paid ten shillings for this, and many of them thought, no doubt, that it was money well spent. There was one last cut in the film, and the final few seconds were of Jones urinating on Tom. When it was over, someone said, ‘Was that for real?’

‘Nah,’ a voice answered. ‘She was lovin’ it.’

There was laughter. They hadn’t been watching Tom’s face. Joe had, and he’d seen there the death of everything in him that was optimistic. Joe went into a kind of shock, which was why the confusion of the next few minutes was at first incomprehensible to him. The light in the hall was suddenly switched on, and Joe was aware of people shouting and then the rushing presence of policemen.

‘Stay where you are! Police! Stay where you are!’

There was a clattering of chairs, and the sound of scuffles as the patrons overwhelmed the constables and headed for the door. In a matter of seconds, amid cries and whistles, the hall was empty — except for the projectionist, who’d been pinned to the ground, three other men who’d been similarly restrained, and Joe. He hadn’t moved from his chair. It was only when a hand grabbed his left shoulder and a man’s voice said, ‘You’re under arrest, sunshine,’ that Joe became fully conscious of his surroundings.

-20-

In an office
at the Prahran police station, Sergeant Peter Colby sat opposite Joe. They knew each other slightly, which expedited the confirmation of Joe’s credentials. Joe had telephoned Inspector Lambert, whose arrival was expected at any minute. Joe wasn’t looking forward to it.

‘What do we know about the bloke who organised this soirée?’ Joe asked.

‘His name is Talmadge. He’s a sleazy bastard, with a long record of being a sleazy bastard.’

‘I need to talk to him.’

‘Let’s do it.’

Bert Talmadge stank of sweat. He’d been told that the film he’d shown had been real, that he’d become an accessory to a very serious crime, and that this time he was likely to face jail. When Peter Colby began questioning him, he bleated his innocence.

‘You’ve got the wrong idea,’ he said. ‘I never knew what was on it.’

Colby calmly unfolded a piece of paper and read:

Exhibiting in a place of public resort, films of an indecent, obscene and disgusting nature; exhibiting obscene films; having unlawfully in your possession prohibited imports, namely 12 cinematograph films; and having unlawfully in your possession prohibited imports, namely 12 obscene cinematograph films.

‘Those are the minor charges, Bert. You’ll be familiar with some of them.’

‘I knew nothing about that fillum.’

‘So how did you come by it?’ Joe asked.

Bert Talmadge looked at him. He must have thought that Joe’s face was more sympathetic than Colby’s, because he directed his response exclusively to Joe.

‘Look, I show a few stags. So what? Who gets hurt? Everyone has a good time, then goes home and fucks his wife. Big deal. Right? I mean, Christ, some of these fillums are twenty years old.’

‘How did you come by the film we’re interested in?’ Joe asked again.

‘Look, I don’t want to put anybody in it. All that happens is when I’m going to have a bit of an evening, I send a note to the Melbourne Nudist Club at a post box. On the night of the show, they drop off a reel. It’s harmless stuff — a few chubby nudists lolling about or playing tennis, or leapfrog. You wouldn’t want your grandmother to see it, I grant you, although on more than one occasion a grandmother has wandered into frame. I send the reel back to the post box with a few bob inside, and that’s it.’

‘And you never preview the reel?’

‘Nah. No point.’

Colby stood up.

‘We’ve let the other three blokes go. Their wives don’t need to know what their husbands have been up to on New Year’s Eve. Or maybe they do, but we’ve got enough on our plates without ruining someone’s marriage. We’ve set up your projector in another room, Bert, and we want you to run that film for us again when Inspector Lambert arrives.’

Joe’s stomach lurched. This would be have to have been one of the worst experiences of his life. He instantly decided that once Jones was apprehended, he’d resign. He couldn’t see how he could continue working with Lambert when the full extent of what he’d withheld had been revealed.

Joe didn’t have long to worry about this. Titus was shown into the room where Colby, Joe, and Talmadge sat. Joe had briefly sketched in the nature of the film when he’d telephoned Titus earlier. He expected him to be incandescent with anger, but he wasn’t. He was calm. Colby took Talmadge into the room where the projector had been set up, and Titus, conscious that Joe was nervous, moved quickly to calm him down.

‘Whatever is on this film, Sergeant, it’s not your fault. You are in no way responsible for the actions of this Ptolemy Jones, and beyond offering my brother-in-law an opportunity to get out from behind a desk, you are in no way responsible for what has happened.’

Joe began to say something, but Titus stopped him. ‘I need to see this film, Sergeant. Nothing else matters at the moment.’

When the film had run its course, Titus’s body was rigid with horror and fury in equal parts.

‘Constable Lord is never to see this,’ he said. ‘Jones is masked, so there is nothing to be gained from it.’

Joe understood. His own reaction to the film had been more visceral than any reaction he’d ever had to the sight of a corpse, however violated it had been. Inspector Lambert’s silence about his brother-in-law was more devastating to Joe than any accusatory expression could possibly have been. He wanted to find Ptolemy Jones and kill him. It went against all his training, but Joe didn’t at this moment believe that, in such cases, the courts could be anything other than ponderously inept.

After Talmadge had been charged, Titus asked Sergeant Colby how it was that his men had raided the Rainbow Hall on this night in particular.

‘We had a tip-off,’ Colby said. ‘Anonymous, of course, but telling us that Bert Talmadge was up to his old tricks.’

Turning to Joe, Titus said, ‘And you said, Sergeant, that it was definitely Jones who told you to go to the Rainbow Hall.’

‘Definitely, sir.’

‘In other words, he wanted you to see this film, and he wanted the rest of us to see it, too.’

‘We underestimated these people, sir. Or, rather, I under-estimated them. They must have suspected Tom, and tortured information out of him.’