The Port Fairy Murders (6 page)

Halloran had heard enough.

‘You’ll let us know, won’t you, if George Starling makes contact?’

‘Why would he?’

‘Maybe he’s as crazy as you are.’

‘I’d have nothing to say to the offspring of John Starling. He wouldn’t be welcome in my house.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Although, if I did run into him, I’d certainly congratulate him on killing his father.’

‘John Starling wasn’t murdered, Mr Truscott.’

Titus said, ‘We’ll see ourselves out.’

HELEN LORD PULLED
up outside the address she’d been given by Inspector Halloran. There’d been no time to brief her on what she might expect, but she wasn’t bothered by this. It was a routine inquiry, and she preferred making such inquiries without preconceptions imposed by someone else’s assessment of a person’s character. In truth, of course, Halloran’s thumbnail sketch of his brother as ‘a deeply unpleasant man’ had fixed Stanley Halloran in her mind as someone of whom to be wary. The house, a California bungalow that looked as if it might have been built in the 1920s, was obscured by a garden that had become unruly, its growth checked by desultory clipping of the most vigorous branches that had been left to rot where they’d fallen. Helen opened the gate, which had been oiled sufficiently recently to utter only a small squeal of resistance. She knocked on the door. There was no response. She was about to knock again when a voice called, ‘Who is it? What do you want?’

‘I want to speak to Mr Stanley Halloran.’

‘Who wants to speak to Stanley Halloran?’

‘My name is Helen Lord.’

Helen thought it politic to announce her credentials only after she’d gained entry. Nazi admirers, despite the secretiveness of their sympathies, had more than probably been visited by one or another of the state or federal agencies whose job it was to track them. Stanley Halloran, with a brother who was a prominent policeman, would doubtless have been harried by at least one of the special branches — the Commonwealth Investigation Branch, perhaps, or the Commonwealth Security Service.

‘So? What do you want?’

‘I’m afraid I have some bad news, but I need to speak to Mr Stanley Halloran personally.’

‘What kind of bad news?’

‘Please, can we stop shouting at each other through the door? This won’t take a moment.’

There was silence for a few seconds. The lock was turned, and the door was flung open. In a bar of sunlight, Helen saw a man seated in a wheelchair, his face in shadow. He was wearing a pair of shorts and nothing else — not unseasonable attire on such a hot day, but Helen noticed a crumpled shirt against the skirting board, and knew that he had taken it off in a deliberate attempt to give offence. She stepped into the house quickly, and closed the door behind her — an action that took the man by surprise.

‘Hey, who said you could come in?’

Now that she could see his face, the resemblance to his brother was remarkable.

‘I’m in, Mr Halloran, so that saves you the bother of asking me.’

She walked away from him, towards the living room, forcing him to follow her.

‘You can’t just walk into my house.’

‘If you have a complaint, call your brother at the station. My name is Constable Helen Lord. Melbourne Homicide.’

‘Constable? You’re a fucking walloper?’

‘Yes, Mr Halloran, I’m a fucking walloper, and I’m the daughter of a fucking walloper.’

‘Christ, they must be desperate. A tough-talking sheila — whatever next?’

Helen looked at him. His face had aged well, but his body had given up pretending it was anything other than its 60-odd years. It was thin and wiry, but also somehow slack and fallen, and the hair that grew on it was piebald and dry, like a withered, invasive creeper. Helen had no wish to prolong this encounter. She unfolded the sketch of George Starling and handed it to Stanley Halloran.

‘Do you know this person?’

He looked at it.

‘What if I do?’

Helen decided not to dance around the subject.

‘I’m not here on a social call, Mr Halloran. I’m here as part of an ongoing homicide investigation. Now do you know this man or not?’

‘You think this bloke’s killed someone?’ He laughed. ‘If he did, he’s grown some balls since I last saw him. That’s George Starling. A skinny George Starling, but it’s him all right. Last time I saw him, he was a pathetic, whining fat boy. I knew his father.’

‘Knew?’

‘Haven’t seen him for years. Thick as four planks, he is.’

‘John Starling is dead, Mr Halloran.’

Again, Stanley Halloran laughed.

‘Well, bugger me. And you think his son did it? Or what? You think maybe I wheeled myself out to his place and did it myself?’

‘There’s no suggestion that John Starling was murdered by anyone.’

‘Would you like a cup of tea, lovey? It’s not every day a female copper comes a’courtin’.’

The question took Helen by surprise.

‘No.’ She added, ‘Thank you,’ and regretted it when she saw the smile creep across Halloran’s face.

‘You and John Starling shared an interest in politics.’

Helen had expected that bald statement to make Halloran wary. Instead, he clutched the wheel rims of his chair and leaned forward.

‘Let me tell you something about politics, lovey, although it’ll go over your head. The female mind isn’t designed for thinking.’

He paused to give Helen time to object. She didn’t give him the satisfaction, beyond a slightly exaggerated expression of ersatz interest.

‘I’m glad we’re going to win the bloody war.’

‘Are we?’

‘Germany lost the war at Stalingrad, and the Japs were nongs for involving the Yanks. That’s not to say that National Socialism hasn’t got something going for it. I presume that’s what you’re referring to when you say Starling and I shared an interest in politics. I wasn’t Robinson Crusoe about the Nazis in the Thirties, you know. Mr Menzies saw its good points, but I’ll wager he regrets saying anything these days.’

Helen looked doubtful in spite of herself.

‘He’s had a change of heart, but back in ’38 he was all for abandoning individual liberty. There was something magnificent, he said, about Germany turning its back on everything that was easy and pleasant. Magnificent — that’s the word he used, and he was right. I thought for a while that National Socialism was the answer for this dump of a country, but Australians are too dumb to diagnose their own cancer. Are you following me?’

‘Unfortunately, yes.’

Halloran snorted.

‘The truth is, lovey, that we don’t have any leaders — decent leaders. We’ve got milksops and nancy boys, but we need harsh men — men who are fanatics and who can inspire fanaticism in others. Democracy is weak. A strong leader, that’s what will work.’

‘Like Hitler, you mean?’

‘Sure. Like Hitler, but he’s not right for here.’

‘Hirohito, then?’

‘Don’t make me laugh. Wrong race, lovey. Race matters. I’ve got nothing against the Nips, except that they’re Nips and they should stay in Nipland, where everyone is happy to be a Nip, see?’

Helen stepped around Stanley Halloran, obliging him to turn his chair to face her. She did this because she could no longer bear to look at his body in the full light from the windows.

‘You’re not a Jew, are you?’ he asked.

His tone was so blunt that it bruised her in an inexplicable way — except that it wasn’t inexplicable. As soon as his question struck her, she imagined she was Joe Sable, and heard the words as he might have heard them — each syllable a gobbet of bile.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not,’ and instantly wished that she’d answered in the affirmative, realising, with some shame, that her answer represented a small act of cowardice.

‘I’m not a Jew hater,’ Halloran said. ‘Like everyone, they’re fine in their place. This just isn’t their place. This is what’s fundamentally wrong with this country. Jews, Italians, Japs, blacks — no one likes them, but they don’t dislike them
enough
. They don’t want them in their clubs, or next door, but that’s about as far as it goes. If you’re going to protect white Australia you have to understand what accommodating these people means; you have to understand this at the level of bone and marrow, and you have to be willing to do something about it, see? And you need someone to lead.’

‘You were looking for a leader when you met up with Starling and his cronies?’

Halloran moved his wheelchair forward.

‘You wouldn’t be saying that if I wasn’t in this fucking wheelchair, you smug, ugly little bitch. I was the leader
they
were looking for.’

Helen took a step backwards, repressing the urge to retaliate. The priority here was to find George Starling, not to best an old man in a wheelchair. She was close enough to him to lean in and retrieve the sketch of George Starling.

‘So, you haven’t seen him recently?’ she said.

He wheeled away from her, towards the front door, which he opened.

‘Get out of my house, and tell my prick of a brother if he wants any information from me he should send a real policeman, not some silly slut who should be doing something useful like working on a munitions line, or fucking soldiers for free. If it’s dark enough, they mightn’t notice how fucking ugly you are.’

If Halloran was expecting to get a rise out of Helen, he was disappointed. She moved past him, onto the porch.

‘Thank you for your time, Mr Halloran. I think I’ve learned everything about you that’s worth learning.’ She smiled at him. ‘It only took ten minutes.’

He slammed the door.

Sitting in the car, Helen looked in the rear-view mirror.

Sticks and stones, she said to herself. What a pious old lie that is.

MARIA PLUSCHOW’S HOUSE
sat close to the verge, ten minutes out of Warrnambool, on the Port Fairy road. Sergeant David Reilly liked neat houses — a preference catered to by his wife, who picked up after him — and the Pluschow house was a model of neatness. The land behind it, and on either side, was a comparative chaos of ungrazed grass and thistle, leading Reilly to surmise that it wasn’t owned by Maria Pluschow.

He was slightly nervous. Having read and re-read the briefing notes, he’d been appalled by the violence meted out by people of Maria’s political persuasion. It had come as an unpleasant shock to him that there were people in his own familiar city who thought seriously, passionately, and dangerously that National Socialism wasn’t just a viable alternative to democracy, but a preferable and necessary one. He half expected that Maria Pluschow would be an exaggerated version of Magda Goebbels, whose austere, determinedly maternal visage he’d seen in newsreels. When Maria Pluschow opened the door to him, he found a thin, plainly dressed woman, with grey hair pulled severely into a bun, away from her face. Her skin was lined, making her look older than she perhaps was. Reilly’s wife, Barbara, always said that a little plumpness around the face protected it from ageing too quickly, which licensed her fondness for sponge cake — a fondness that had been sorely curtailed by the frequent difficulty in finding fresh eggs.

Reilly took off his hat.

‘My name is Sergeant Reilly. I’m a policeman from Melbourne. May I come in?’

Maria Pluschow looked him up and down, thought about closing the door in his face, thought better of it, and said, ‘I haven’t broken any laws. Why don’t you people leave me alone?’

‘May I come in?’

‘No, you may not.’

Reilly was wrong-footed by her obstinacy. Back in Melbourne he might have insisted and used his foot against the door to demonstrate this insistence. Here, in a strange town, he felt constrained by an uncertainty about how his city manners would be received by Inspector Halloran. He reached into his pocket and withdrew the sketch of George Starling.

‘Do you know this person?’

Maria Pluschow glanced at it and said, ‘No. Never seen him before in my life. What’s he supposed to have done, and why are you asking me?’

‘We’re asking a few people, Mrs Pluschow.’

‘You know my name. Why?’

Reilly was flustered by the aggressiveness of her questions, and afterwards he realised he’d given her too much information too early in the encounter. He should have tested her claim that she didn’t recognise the sketch. Instead he said, ‘This is George Starling. He grew up around here. His father is — was — John Starling.’

‘Was?’

‘John Starling died very recently.’

‘How recently?’

‘Two days ago.’

‘And what’s that old bloke’s death got to do with me?’

By now Reilly was only too aware that he’d lost control of the interview. Maria Pluschow was asking all the questions. He tried to wrest back some control.

‘John Starling’s death isn’t being treated as suspicious. We want to find his son, that man in the sketch, so that we can tell him that his father has passed away.’

Reilly thought this appeal to sentiment was inspired.

‘Why would they send a policeman all the way from Melbourne to look for John Starling’s boy just to tell him his dad was dead?’