The Port Fairy Murders (19 page)

After the film, the quartet returned to Kew, and Joe went upstairs. He ran himself a bath, taking Peter Lillee at his word and filling it well above the Plimsoll line. His bath at home had been too small to stretch out in, and this one was generous. The hot water relaxed his body, but his mind was a circus of disconnected thoughts. He’d never before been the focus of another person’s hatred, and it was both disconcerting and strangely exhilarating. He couldn’t account for the exhilaration. He’d always thought he’d feel something like this when he knew for certain that the woman he loved loved him and him alone. Here, dozing fitfully in slowly cooling water, he found that George Starling’s fierce, violent, and psychopathic loathing of him was thrilling. If he could go back into the Lamberts’ backyard, he wouldn’t now be afraid.

When Joe returned to the bedroom, he looked at his discarded clothes and decided they needed to be washed before he wore them again. He laid out a complete set of Peter Lillee’s clothes and stared down at them for a minute before putting them on. It felt strange. Although these were casual in style, he’d never before worn anything of this quality. The cotton shirt must have been bought before the war, the fine material having been woven in England. Nothing like this could be produced in Australia. His first thought was how he could stop himself sweating in the clothes, or getting them dirty.

When he went downstairs, he found Helen alone in the library, reading. She looked up, and whistled. He was embarrassed.

‘I feel a bit, I don’t know, odd, wearing someone else’s clothes.’

‘If it’s any consolation, you don’t look odd.’

‘Your uncle has expensive tastes in clothes.’

‘Uncle Peter has expensive tastes in everything.’

‘What does your uncle do for a living?’

‘It’s a mouthful. He’s a banker, of sorts. He’s on the Commonwealth Bank board. He advises the Capital Issues Advisory Committee on controlling private investment. The government wants to restrict investment to projects associated with the war effort. That’s the limit of my knowledge about his job, and I’m not even sure I understand what I just said.’

‘Very impressive. Where are they, Peter and Ros?’

‘In the kitchen. Dinner on a Saturday night is always a decent one. Uncle Peter likes to help prepare it. It’s become a sort of tradition with us. I stay out of the kitchen. I think they like that time together. They were pretty close when they were children.’

Joe sat opposite Helen, and for the first time felt truly comfortable in her presence. Perhaps it was the soothing influence of the long bath, and the softly diffused light in the library. There was still bright sunlight outside, but it was tamed by filtering trees and dusty windows. Helen had seen him at his most vulnerable, weakened by his unreliable heart, and wounded in a hospital bed, and he felt no awkwardness about this. Nevertheless, from their first acquaintance the previous December, there’d been a stubborn distance between them. He knew that Inspector Lambert thought she was a better detective than he was, and he couldn’t shake how this galled him, even though he’d acknowledged to himself that it was true.

‘I really appreciate …’

Helen stopped him.

‘We could hardly say no to Inspector Lambert.’

Joe looked stricken, and Helen realised with dismay that the joke had fallen flat.

‘I didn’t mean that, Joe. It was supposed to be funny. We didn’t have to have our arms twisted to have you billeted here. If Inspector Lambert had had some other idea, we’d have insisted that you come here. I mean, imagine ending up in the Reilly household.’

‘You don’t like him much, do you?’

‘Is it obvious?’

‘Oh yes, it’s obvious.’

‘Well, he’s one of those unimaginative, dull-witted coppers. He’d be hopeless interviewing suspects.’

Conversation flowed easily between them when it was about work. They’d found this at the height of the last investigation.

‘When you read the reports of the interviews in Warrnambool,’ Helen said, ‘you’ll see what I mean.’

‘What do you mean, so I know what I’m looking for?’

‘Reilly was assigned to talk to a woman who was married to a German and who was once an enthusiastic National Socialist — although she’s gone quiet now, of course, like most of them. He briefed us on the interview, and I didn’t believe a word of it.’

‘You think he made things up? Surely not.’

‘No. I just mean there wasn’t enough there. If he’d managed a proper interview, we’d have a much better sense of who the woman was. I’ve got no idea what she was like and whether or not it would be worth talking to her again.’

‘He’s done Detective Training. That should have taught him something.’

‘And I haven’t, is what you mean?’

‘That’s not what I mean.’

The conversation stopped. They avoided eye contact. Joe thought he’d probably said the wrong thing, but it was impossible to predict how Helen would react to the most harmless comment. She was touchy about her position in Homicide; he was aware of that. She’d spoken to him about it. Still, why did she always assume the worst when it came to things that he said? He drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair, and broke the silence.

‘I actually meant that you’d think he’d be better at his job, given that he’s done the proper training.’

‘You do realise you’ve pretty much said exactly the same thing and that it’s still insulting?’

Joe looked at her.

‘
He’s
done the
proper training
. You don’t think that reveals anything about the way you see me? You’ve done the training, yes?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Of course. You’ve done Detective Training; every other nong in Homicide has done Detective Training. I, needless to say, haven’t, because women can’t do it. At some point in every day, someone helpfully reminds me that I’m unqualified to work with
proper
policemen, who’ve had
proper
training. From where I sit, the training hasn’t done a lot of them much good. You can’t train someone not to be stupid. Stupid is forever.’

‘There are plenty of good men in the Homicide squad.’

Helen, who couldn’t stop the diatribe once it had begun, hated how truculent she sounded. Or rather, she wished she could control it better in front of Joe.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There are some good men in Homicide. Some. Don’t ask me to name them.’

Another silence descended. This time Helen broke it, and for her this was almost an act of contrition.

‘No one seems to know very much about George Starling. He went from fat to thin to invisible.’

‘Even when you meet him he’s invisible. He never said very much. There was something malevolent about him, though.’

‘He’s a kind of bogey man, isn’t he?’

‘No. He’s just a nasty thug who thinks the world would be a better place if people like him were in charge, and if there were no Jews in it.’

‘Is he stupid?’

‘Let’s hope he’s at least slightly more stupid than we are.’

‘Yes. Touché.’

‘You have a pretty low opinion of police generally, don’t you?’

‘I’ve been around them my whole life. There
are
good coppers. My father was a good copper, but up in Broome he worked with a couple of truly dreadful men. I’d listen at the door when Mum and Dad were talking late at night. There was one bloke who’d killed a black man, but there was no way he was going to admit it. The man died in the cells, and there was no proper investigation, until Dad started to agitate for one. Then he died, and nothing came of it.’

‘How did he die?’

‘There was nothing suspicious about it, nothing that anyone could point to, anyway. We were at Cable Beach — have you heard of Cable Beach?’

Joe shook his head.

‘It’s possibly the most beautiful beach in the world. We were there late one afternoon, along with a few other people. Dad went in for a swim, and he got into trouble. He was a strong swimmer, but when they carried him up the beach we could see that there were jellyfish tentacles sticking to him, and there were red welts on his legs and chest. He was dead when they pulled him out of the water. The coroner said that he’d had a bad reaction to the stings, and that he’d had a heart attack. I was about 14, and I didn’t believe the coroner. A part of me still doesn’t believe that dad’s death was an accident. I don’t know how it was managed. I was there, and I didn’t see anyone approach him in the water. He went in, and he just seemed to die.’

‘What does your mother think?’

‘We don’t talk about it. She’s never got over it. What about you? Why are you a copper?’

‘I don’t think I would be if it weren’t for the war. I’d be doing something useless like studying the International Gothic in art history. Manpower would take a dim view of that. I don’t think I could convince them that studying the works of Gentile de Fabriano would contribute to an Allied victory.’

‘That’s a painter, I presume.’

‘One of the greatest. I’ve never actually seen one of his paintings in the flesh, only in books.’

‘So policing isn’t your great passion?’

‘It is now, I think. I’ve got lots to learn, and I know that Inspector Lambert sees me as only mildly competent.’

‘I hope you’re not fishing for compliments.’

‘Just a few weeks ago you made it crystal clear that you don’t think much of my skills, and sitting here, in another man’s house and in another man’s clothes, I can’t argue with that. My heart means that I can’t be relied on. I do know that, Helen.’

Helen stood up abruptly and walked to the window. She wanted to tell Joe that none of that mattered, and she was afraid that she’d blurt it out. That mustn’t happen.

‘You know, Joe, I don’t think your heart makes you a poor policeman.’

‘You think it’s everything else.’

She laughed and returned to her seat.

‘Are your parents alive?’ She’d never asked him a personal question before. All their conversations had been about investigations. It seemed significant to her that she felt able to ask him such a question. To Joe, it was a natural and uncontroversial query.

‘They’re both dead.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It will sound cold, but I wasn’t close to them — or, rather, they weren’t close to me, and they certainly weren’t close to each other. At some point in their marriage they stopped talking to each other. That is almost literally true. Hard to believe, I suppose.’

‘But they spoke to you.’

‘Less and less. I never doubted that they loved me, but at some point, when I was 12 or 13, I had to remember that, rather than experience it. It just became the way we lived.’

Helen found the ease with he spoke of his family compelling. She was unused to this sort of intimacy, and she was both confounded and excited by it.

‘Were your parents born here?’

‘No. Their names were David and Judith, by the way. We were Jewish, but not observant.’

‘Observant?’

‘We didn’t go to synagogue or live by any of the strictures about food and that sort of thing. They emigrated from England, and Dad’s big boast was that he was English first and Jewish a very poor second. They were actually embarrassed by the Jews in Carlton, the refugee Jews from the
shtetls
in Europe. They thought they were peasants, and they raised me to think the same. Noble blood flowed through Sable veins, not
shtetl
blood. Jews spoke Yiddish and looked foreign. My parents wanted nothing to do with them. I didn’t grow up feeling Jewish at all.’

‘I didn’t grow up feeling Presbyterian. That’s apparently what we are.’

‘Hitler isn’t killing Presbyterians.’

The sudden fierceness in Joe’s voice took them both by surprise.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and Helen noticed that his hands were shaking. He put them in his trouser pockets. Helen didn’t know what to say. Her life suddenly seemed uncomplicated, and her concerns trivial. Joe Sable was a mess of contradictions and wounds of all stripes, and when Helen saw his shaking hands she knew without a shadow of a doubt that she loved him. The knowledge calmed her. She would wait now. The house in Kew was, after all, a house where people waited patiently.

IT WAS WELL
after 11.00 pm when Titus made it to Tom Mackenzie’s house in South Melbourne. The place looked very different from when he’d seen it earlier in the day.

‘It was all surface clutter,’ Maude said. ‘Tom and I tidied it away quite quickly.’ She lowered her voice. ‘It was amazing, Titus. As soon as we started, something seemed to happen to Tom. Maybe it was just that he was touching stuff that was his, but there were long periods during the day when he was like his old self. He got tired, but then he sat and he talked to me while I worked. He actually talked to me. He remembered last night, and he remembered Joe being there.’

‘And Starling?’

‘He wasn’t sure. He said he finds it hard to separate his nightmares from real experience. But, Titus, he was able to talk about it in those terms, and with that level of clarity.’

‘That’s wonderful.’

‘If we can string days like today together, I think he’ll recover much faster than the doctors expect.’