The Port Fairy Murders (32 page)

‘Now, this is where it gets interesting. Ron Dunnart had a look at the hotel’s register, and a George Starling had booked in late on Friday, stayed Saturday night, and booked out on Sunday. The description given by the
maître d’
, and by waiters who recalled him, didn’t sound like our George Starling. They described a well-dressed man who took great care with his appearance. He was always closely shaved, and his hair was trimmed and Brilliantined. They thought his manners were a bit rough. He was, however, obviously a wealthy man. He paid in cash. I took the sketch of Starling down to the Windsor, and the
maître d’
was almost positive that that was the man. The waiters in the dining room were less sure. Steven McNamara was this George Starling’s breakfast waiter on Saturday morning.’

‘What about the room Starling stayed in?’

‘It’s been cleaned, and an American officer and his wife are staying there. We had a quick look, but it was pointless.’

‘And Starling didn’t give any indication where he was headed.’

‘No. Do you think it’s him, sir?’

‘He’d have to produce identification in order to register. It seems extraordinarily risky for him to do that, but he must have thought that the Windsor Hotel would be the last place we’d go looking for him — and he was right. It’s an unusual name, George Starling. Where did he get the money?’

‘He was at his father’s house. There, maybe?’

‘Yes, maybe. I think it’s him.’

‘Even if it isn’t our George Starling, this man had contact with Steven McNamara on the morning of his death. Ron wants to find him. His sudden departure from the Windsor is suspicious.’

‘What’s Dunnart’s strategy?’

‘He thinks this man might move to another hotel. He’s got people checking the register of every flash hotel in town. They’re looking for either George Starling or Sturt Menadue, who had no papers on him. He wouldn’t use McNamara’s papers. The date of birth would give him away.’

‘This is very good. Will you let Ron Dunnart know that you’ve brought me up to speed?’

‘Yes, sir. Any word from Port Fairy?’

Titus looked at his watch.

‘They’ll only just have arrived. I’ll keep you informed.’

NOT LONG AFTER
George Starling had learned David Reilly’s last name, he experienced a moment of intense anxiety. It had nothing to do with Reilly. It was about his money. He’d left it in his suitcase, in his room at the Australia Hotel. If he’d been a member of the hotel’s staff, he’d have made sure that he checked people’s rooms for valuables, and helped himself. He therefore assumed that someone would be stuffing his pockets with his, Starling’s, cash. He ran most of the way back to the hotel, which drew stares from the people he rushed past and bumped into. No one had been in his room. The money was safe. He’d given himself a needless fright, and, as the suitcase wasn’t heavy, he decided that he’d carry it with him wherever he went. If it became too much of an inconvenience, he’d put it in a locker at Flinders Street Railway Station. He certainly wasn’t going to hand it over for safekeeping at the hotel. He didn’t trust them. The concierge asked if everything was satisfactory, or was Mr Menadue checking out?

‘Everything’s fine,’ Starling said. ‘I’m not checking out.’ He offered no explanation as to why he was carrying his suitcase. It was none of their business.

The suitcase quickly became a nuisance, though. Starling hired a locker at the railway station, and because he’d never been inside it, he ducked into the Glaciarium nearby to watch people ice-skating. Music blared through loud speakers. ‘Weekend in Havana’, ‘Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree’, and ‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition’ sent people gliding around the rink, or squealing as they stumbled and fell. How ridiculous and frivolous they were. He left before his temper got the better of him. With nothing better to do, he retrieved his suitcase and walked to the City Baths at the top end of Swanston Street. A session on the Roman rings would do him good, and he couldn’t be bothered waiting until 8.00 pm for the mixed-bathing session. He’d tire out his muscles, maybe swim, and have a hot bath. That would put him in a good frame of mind to extract information from the detective named Reilly.

Starling loved everything about the City Baths. The gymnasium wasn’t crowded, and it smelled of sweat and lineament. The pool at this hour had only three men in it — two American soldiers, by their accents, and a flabby office worker. He had a lane to himself, and he swam ten laps. He was self-conscious about the clumsiness of his stroke, having learned it from observation and not instruction, so he was very pleased not to be looked at. He showered, and spent ten minutes in a deep, hot bath. It had been a long time since he’d felt something that came this close to contentment.

He changed into the second suit he’d bought. It was a dark, charcoal-grey number that had cost more than Peter Hurley paid him in a week. At 5.00 pm he was standing opposite police headquarters in Russell Street. With unusual patience, he waited for half an hour, and was rewarded when David Reilly stepped down into Russell Street. He wasn’t alone: there were two other detectives with him. One of them was the man Starling had seen at the private club. The other was familiar, too. He’d seen him in the yard of his father’s house in Mepunga. They were moving quickly. Starling followed them to Collins Street, and then realised where they were headed. Outside the Australia Hotel, three uniformed men were waiting for them. The man he’d seen in Mepunga gave them instructions, and they all went inside. Starling crossed to the southern side of Collins Street, put his suitcase down, and waited.

After a few minutes, two of the detectives emerged. The man named Reilly sat on a bench near the tram stop to the right of the hotel’s entrance. The other man leaned against a shop window on the other side of the entrance. Starling knew that they were waiting for him. They’d identified the bodies, and they’d made a connection between him and Steven McNamara. They must have seen his name in the Windsor Hotel’s register. One of them was smart, and had figured out that he might use Sturt Menadue’s identity papers to register at another hotel. Well, he’d saved himself some money. He hadn’t paid for his room in advance. He had his suitcase; he hadn’t left anything in the room, except his fingerprints. They were welcome to those — much good it would do them. They would have checked all the hotels in town for George Starling and Sturt Menadue, so he’d have to postpone his meeting with the Reilly bloke. That was fine. He’d do that tomorrow. For now, he’d take a tram up to Carlton, where his motorcycle was parked near the cemetery, its spare fuel hidden nearby. There were plenty of hotels in the northern suburbs where no one would think of asking for identification papers, and where rooms were cheap. It’d be a bit of a comedown. Still, it pleased him to know that he was one step ahead of the coppers. Finding Sable was, however, more urgent now. He would take Reilly in the morning, and he had a whole night to think about how.

‘DO YOU THINK
the air will ever stop smelling of smoke?’ Maude asked.

Maude Lambert and her brother, Tom Mackenzie, were sitting in his small back garden. It was late, well after ten, and Titus hadn’t yet arrived from work.

‘It’s not an unpleasant smell, is it?’ Tom said.

It was a simple-enough reply, but everything he said made Maude’s heart sing. He was recovering at an astonishing rate, or he seemed to be. His physical injuries troubled him badly, but his mental state had improved so dramatically that it was as if someone had turned a switch in his head from ‘off’ to ‘on’.

‘I suppose it is quite nice,’ Maude said. ‘Aromatic. It represents such loss, though, doesn’t it?’

‘Titus works long hours. Is it always like this?’

‘Not always. Unfortunately, people don’t kill each other only during business hours.’

‘I didn’t imagine George Starling, Maudie. He
was
there.’

‘The reason we’re here at your house, Tom, is because Titus knows that you weren’t just having a waking nightmare.’

‘So he doesn’t think I’m crazy.’

‘No one thinks that.’

‘I sometimes think it.’

By the time Titus made it to Tom’s house, Tom had gone to bed. Maude had tried to keep a meal of cold lamb and salad palatable by putting it in the icebox. Titus, indifferent as always to the quality of the food he ate, cleared his plate. He was reluctant to join Maude in bed because he’d heard nothing from Port Fairy. He knew there would have been good reasons for this, and when the telephone call finally came through at 1.00 am, it took all his powers of concentration to overcome his exhausted mind and follow the complicated sequence of events. The suicide of Agnes Todd was particularly frustrating, and the consequences for Selwyn Todd troubled him. He’d speak to Greg Halloran in the morning and get his advice on whether or not he should come down to Port Fairy. He woke Maude when he got into bed. She’d have been furious if he hadn’t done so. She saw immediately that a great injustice seemed inevitable, and saw too that finding a solution to the murder of Matthew Todd might resist all the skills that the police had to offer. Short of a confession, the investigation looked depressingly as if it had been snookered. Having talked it through, at least Titus was able to sleep.

‘I’m glad anyway,’ he said, before dropping off, ‘that Joe is out of harm’s way in Port Fairy. George Starling is still in Melbourne. We know that for certain.’

THE LORD LUTTERAL
Hotel in Coburg, a suburb about three miles to the north of Melbourne’s city centre, wasn’t a dive. It wasn’t grand either. At least Starling didn’t have to share a room; and the linen, although it smelled damp, looked clean. The proprietor was surprised that a man as expensively dressed as Starling would request a room there. He told his wife later that the suitcase probably meant that he’d been thrown out of the house by his wife, that this sort of thing was none of his business, and that asking about it was a recipe for being shirt-fronted. He’d managed to avoid being worked over by his patrons by not asking them too many questions. If they wanted to talk, they’d do it at the bar after a few drinks.

On Tuesday morning, Starling rose early. He hadn’t yet bought a razor, and he didn’t much care for the beard-shadowed face that met him in the bathroom mirror. He went downstairs to pay the bill, and had to wake the hotel owner to do so. The man came to the bar in pyjama bottoms and no top — a sight that Starling found unappealing.

‘Is there a barber around here?’

‘There’s a Greek bloke up the road. He opens at eight.’

‘How far is it up the road?’

‘About a ten-minute walk.’

Starling paid and left. By the time he got to the barber it would be eight o’clock, so Starling decided to walk instead of wasting petrol. He was the first customer. The barber was a bad advertisement for his own business: he could have done with a shave himself. As Starling waited for him to strop the razor and prepare the shaving cream, he flicked through that week’s copy of
Truth
. It was a rag, but it was good for the stories that
The Age
and
The Argus
wouldn’t touch. Divorce, rape, murder, and adultery were its bread and butter.
Truth
knew its patriotic duty, and reported war news on its front page. Beyond that, it was business as usual. Starling sat bolt upright in the chair, just as the barber was about to apply the cream. On page three, a headline screamed: ‘Port Fairy Murders Rock Town. Village Idiot Main Suspect. Police Tight-lipped.’ There was a photograph of two detectives and a woman coming out of a house. They weren’t identified, but they didn’t need to be. George Starling would have recognised Joe Sable anywhere, and he’d seen that woman in Mepunga.

‘You ready?’ the barber asked.

‘Quick as you can,’ Starling said.

Thirty-five minutes later, Starling was on his motorcycle and on his way to Port Fairy.

THE BELFAST CAFÉ
in Bank Street served eggs from its owners’ chooks, chokoes from the garden, and scones instead of toast. It was an unexpectedly satisfying breakfast. Also unexpected was the photograph in that morning’s
Port Fairy Gazette
. It was similar to the one that had been flown to Melbourne the previous evening in time to make it into
Truth
. The headline in the
Gazette
was less lurid, more sensitive perhaps to local sensitivities: ‘Todd Family Tragedy’. The story, cobbled together from neighbours’ comments, speculation, and gossip, offered nothing of interest to Joe or Helen. No one from the press had approached them.

‘Someone must have collared Paddy Filan or Inspector Halloran. They must have given them nothing,’ Joe said.

‘The parents are coming today. I can’t imagine how they’ll cope with this.’

The waitress, who was no more than 16, refilled the teapot.

‘That’s you in the paper, isn’t it?’ she said, and looked awestruck, as if a movie star had dropped into the Belfast café.

‘What’s your name?’ Helen asked.

‘Elizabeth, but Betty’s what I’m called.’

‘Did you know the Todd family, Betty?’

‘Too grand to talk to me. I seen them at church and that. Rose was all right. I didn’t like the way her husband gawked at me but. She was good. She come in here once or twice, for a malted milk. That Matthew wouldn’t be seen dead in here. Pardon me. He was stuck up, walking around with his nose in the air. Thought he was it and a bit.’