The Autumn Murders Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  The Holiday Murders

  The Port Fairy Murders

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  Acknowledgements

  THE AUTUMN MURDERS

  Robert Gott was born in the small Queensland town of Maryborough in 1957, and lives in Melbourne. He has published many books for children, and is also the creator of the newspaper cartoon The Adventures of Naked Man. He is the author of the William Power series of crime-caper novels set in 1940s Australia: Good Murder, A Thing of Blood, Amongst the Dead, and The Serpent’s Sting. The Autumn Murders is the third book in the Joe Sable detective series, following The Holiday Murders and The Port Fairy Murders.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  First published by Scribe 2019

  Copyright © Robert Gott 2019

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  9781925713466 (paperback)

  9781925693591 (e-book)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  For my parents, Maurene and Kevin. Always.

  Before The Autumn Murders, there was The Holiday Murders …

  IN LATE 1943, the newly formed Homicide department of Victoria Police in Melbourne finds itself undermanned as a result of the war. Detective Inspector Titus Lambert has seen the potential of a female constable, Helen Lord. She is twenty-six years old, and, as a policewoman, something of a rarity in the male world of policing. Lambert promotes her on a temporary basis to work in Homicide, alongside a young, inexperienced detective, Joe Sable.

  On Christmas Eve, two bodies — of a father and son — are found in a mansion in East Melbourne. As the investigation into their deaths proceeds, Military Intelligence becomes involved. An organisation called Australia First has already come to the attention of the authorities through its public meetings and its pro-Hitler, pro-Japan, and stridently anti-Semitic magazine, The Publicist. A local branch of the organisation’s enthusiasts has been trying to form itself into a political party, but they are essentially dilettantes. What they feel they need is muscle, and they find it in the person of Ptolemy Jones — a fanatical National Socialist. Jones has gathered about him a small band of disaffected men, susceptible to his dark charisma. Among these is George Starling, who calls himself Fred, a man in his late twenties who is dedicated to Jones.

  Soon, Military Intelligence joins with Homicide to find the killer. Detective Joe Sable, for whom the atrocities in Europe are awakening the dormant sense of his own Jewishness, is given the task of finding his way into Australia First. He does so with the help of Constable Helen Lord and Group Captain Tom Mackenzie, an air force officer who is also Inspector Lambert’s brother-in-law. But the operation goes horribly wrong, and both Sable and Mackenzie are badly injured.

  The Holiday Murders ends with the death of Ptolemy Jones, and with the sense that this case has not yet run its course. It has damaged the lives of everyone involved in it. George Starling, previously overshadowed by Ptolemy Jones, remains at liberty, and he is determined to avenge Jones’s death and to step out of his shadow …

  And then there was The Port Fairy Murders ...

  SERGEANT JOE SABLE, of the Melbourne Homicide division, has returned to work, having suffered severe injuries in the course of an investigation into National Socialist sympathisers. The investigation has for Joe, who is Jewish, focussed his attention on what is happening to the Jews in Europe under the Nazi regime. Inspector Titus Lambert, the head of Homicide, is worried that Joe has returned too soon.

  When a known Hitlerite, John Starling, is found dead at his property near Warrnambool, a town six hours south-west of Melbourne, Inspector Lambert, Sergeant David Reilly, and Constable Helen Lord make the long trip there to investigate. They’re interested because John Starling’s son, George Starling, is a known acquaintance of the brutal Ptolemy Jones, the man who tortured both Joe and Group Captain Tom Mackenzie, Lambert’s brother-in-law. Both Joe and Tom were working for Military Intelligence at the time.

  In Melbourne, two men are savagely murdered, and Joe’s flat is burned to the ground. Now homeless, he is billeted with the wealthy businessman Peter Lillee, who lives in a grand house in Kew, along with his sister, Ros Lord, and her daughter, Helen Lord. Inspector Lambert organised the billet, and Lillee was happy to oblige. Here, Joe should be safe.

  In a decision that will put both their lives at risk, Joe and Helen are sent to Port Fairy, a small seaside town near Warrnambool, to investigate the bizarre double murder of a brother and sister. Nothing about the case is straightforward, but nothing is as dangerous as the menacing George Starling, who has become obsessed with finding and killing Joe Sable, and whose shadow falls as far as Port Fairy.

  1

  Late March 1944

  GEORGE STARLING WAS often angry, but he’d never felt anger like this before. Usually, his anger subsided to allow him some breathing space — some time to think clearly. This time, there was no relief. He was shaking with it: possessed by it; invigorated by it. He’d come so close, so close, so close. He’d had her there. He’d run his hand up her thigh and seen the intoxicating fear in her eyes as he’d played around her lips with his stinking filleting knife. It had come to nothing; and worse than that, much worse than that, he’d had to run away. He’d never run from anything in his life. As a child he’d endured his father’s beatings, and had met his verbal abuse with silence, rather than give him the satisfaction of seeing his son cringe. But that night in Port Fairy, it had been run or die.

  Well, he had no immediate plans to die. He had plans for other people to die — and his list was growing. Sitting at the top was the Jew policeman Joe Sable, and just below him was that fucking ugly bitch of a policewoman Helen Lord. Just knowing their names and being able to say them out loud kept the furnace of his fury fuelled. Joe Sable. Helen Lord. Joe Sable. Helen Lord. He’d find them, and when he did, he’d cut out their tongues, so they couldn’t scream, and he’d take them slowly, slowly to their deaths.

  Starling picked up his filleting knife and examined the blade. It still smelled of fish guts. Gutting fish was a job he’d never have to do again. He had £5000, taken from his dead father’s house, and a motorcycle. He had no petrol rations, but money trumped rations, and where it didn’t, a filleting knife was an eloquent persuader.

  Joe Sable and Helen Lord had seen his face. This troubled him. He imagined that a description of him would have been circulated among police stations, and a police artist had doubtless worked up a likeness. All the police had to do was show this to his landlord in Port Fairy to determine its accuracy. He could grow a beard. He knew this would take only a few days — his beard shadow was dark and heavy — but it wouldn’t do as a disguise. They’d be expecting that.

  Starling had come to the place he’d come to since chil
dhood. It was a remote and secret place. In all his years of coming here he’d never seen another person. It was a cove, a few miles from his father’s house in Mepunga. Burning that house down had been a moment of keen joy. It was called Murnane’s Bay — he had no idea who Murnane was or how it was that a bay was named after him. He’d smashed the sign that said ‘Murnane’s Bay’ a long time ago. As far as he was concerned, it was Starling’s Bay. It was a small, inconsequential gap in the coast on the south-western edge of Victoria. The descent to the beach was steep and along a single narrow path worn by wallabies or bandicoots, made reasonably accessible by his own repeated visits. Getting down to the small arc of sand and rocks had never been easy. The bay’s inaccessibility secured it for him as his private demesne. Helen Lord would be surprised that he even knew that word. She probably didn’t know it herself. Well maybe she’d find out that he was a lot smarter than she was, a lot smarter than Joe Sable, a lot smarter than all of them.

  His motorcycle was hidden in scrub above Murnane’s Bay, and he was sitting down below, beneath an eroded overhang at the back of the cove. The sand was dry here and he knew that the waves never reached this far up the beach, not even in the wildest weather. He’d sat here many times, frightened and exhilarated, as storms had broken over the Southern Ocean. Once, he’d been joined by a shivering, wet wallaby, too afraid of the thunder and lightning, he presumed, to be afraid of him. He’d just turned seventeen at the time, and the wallaby was the first truly wild thing he’d ever killed. He’d killed it simply because it was afraid and had thought it had found shelter. The electric charge he experienced as he watched the wallaby die under his hand would never be matched later by the muted pleasure he took in hunting, or in the small cruelties he inflicted on domestic animals.

  Starling laid out on the sand the things he’d need for a week-long stay at Murnane’s Bay. He had food, a length of canvas, fuel, and an English translation of Mein Kampf. He’d dipped into it a few times and had found it dull, repetitive, and uninspiring. Perhaps here, in isolation, he’d find something in it to reinvigorate his interest in National Socialism.

  Starling had bought himself decent clothes — better than decent. He had three suits, good socks, good shoes, and flash underwear, and in a very short time he’d come to admire their capacity to disguise him. He’d also come to enjoy the feel of expensive cloth against his skin. For Starling the sensation of fine woollen trousers against his legs, and the perfect fit of his beautiful grey fedora, offered an erotic charge that had taken him by surprise. He’d always had contempt for the rich cunts who wore clothes like these. His contempt for them had grown. How easy they were to fool! They paid deference to a suit, and were blind to the hard, dangerous body it covered.

  His clothes now, however, were something of a problem. He had nothing ragged or cheap to change into. He’d taken off his shoes and socks when he’d reached the beach, and they sat neatly beside him now, alongside his suitcase, which had been an extravagant but essential purchase. He took off his suit coat and trousers and folded them into the suitcase. Despite the heat of the day, the breeze coming off the ocean had teeth, and he left his shirt on while he stood for a moment and gathered his strength for what he intended to do. He would need a week after this, and at the end of that week he’d be ready, and implacable.

  He removed his shirt and underwear and put them in the suitcase, which he closed and placed against the rocky wall behind him. Among the items he’d unpacked, he located a bottle of carbolic. He again picked up the filleting knife. He splashed the blade with carbolic and walked to the water’s edge. He paused there, concentrating on the chill of the waves as they curled around his toes. He followed the cold as it moved up his legs, into his belly, and across his chest.

  He put the blade against the skin under his eye, and in one swift, fierce movement sliced open his flesh, down past his nose to a point just below his mouth. He made no sound, and, for a moment, he wondered if the edge of the knife had bitten. Blood began to pour over his chin and into the thick hair on his chest, and a searing pain engulfed him. Still he made no sound.

  He threw the knife behind him, safely away from the tug of the waves, and again opened the bottle of carbolic. He cupped some in his free hand and took it to his face. As it hit the open wound, he uttered a small sound. He recapped the bottle, stood it in the sand, and walked into the ocean. The wound bled extravagantly into the stinging, salty water. George Starling floated on his back, tasting blood and brine as the Southern Ocean lapped over his ruined face. The pain, now, was intense, and he began to slip into an ecstatic state. As the blood poured out of him, he wondered at his own strength, and at his genius. The wound would heal with the help of sea water and carbolic, and his face would be dramatically scarred. People would see and remember the scar. What they wouldn’t see was the face behind it: the face that Joe Sable and Helen Lord had seen; the face that every copper in the state would be on the lookout for.

  HELEN LORD DIDN’T have a gift for friendship. At school she’d made no enemies, but a close friendship came late, in her final year. When she’d first arrived at the Methodist Ladies’ College at the age of twelve, she hadn’t been particularly impressed by the imposing building that greeted her. Her uncle’s house was, to her eyes, its equal. She’d been prepared to hate MLC, but she’d made a vow to herself that Uncle Peter, who was footing the bill for her education in this establishment, would never hear her complain. As it happened, she sailed through her schooling without incident. She was clever, and she liked most of her teachers and tolerated those who she knew to be less accomplished than she was. One of these, a Miss Ferrier, was retained, surely, out of loyalty and pity. She was elderly, deaf, and if she’d ever been a good teacher, the beneficiaries of her abilities would have been middle-aged by the time Helen sat in her class.

  If Helen had ever been excluded from a party or a sleepover, she’d never felt the sting, because she hadn’t been aware of it. She was immune to social slights because she was uninterested in the private lives of her classmates. She would never have been accused of stand-offishness. She joined in games and conversations, but the truth was that her classmates liked her more than she liked them.

  At the beginning of sixth form, a girl arrived who decided in her first week that Helen Lord’s friendship was worth cultivating. Her name was Clara Dawson, and, without meaning to exactly, she intimidated both students and staff. The intimidation wasn’t ugly or aggressive. It was simply because she was brilliant. There was a certain haughtiness that sprang from this, but it was accepted as natural and earned, and no one despised her because of it. Girls wanted to be in her company. The girl whose company Clara Dawson sought out was Helen Lord. Helen was someone you could have a decent conversation with, and Helen’s forensic dissections of her classmates’ idiosyncrasies, and her speculations about their futures, were endlessly entertaining. Helen discovered for the first time the joy of unguarded friendship. She could talk to Clara in a way that she’d never been able to talk to her mother. And Clara was witty. She made Helen laugh.

  At the end of matriculation, both Clara and Helen graduated cum laude. Clara chose medicine at Melbourne University, and she was so demonstrably brilliant that she joined the handful of women accepted into the faculty. Helen’s talents lay elsewhere. She had no interest in medicine, or science — there had been some suggestion that she might pick up a position in the CSIR — and although journalism was vaguely attractive to her, the idea of languishing on the women’s pages put her off. There was teaching, of course, and she’d had six years of mostly excellent teachers to guide her, but she knew that she had no aptitude for teaching. She wouldn’t be patient with dull students and she didn’t believe she could confect a continuous interest in her students’ work. She joined the police force to the astonishment of almost everyone who knew her.

  Only Clara knew that Helen’s father had been a policeman, so she’d been less surprised than anyone else. What had
surprised Clara was Helen’s willingness to stick it out. There was no prospect of promotion — a fact made manifest to all policewomen by there being no uniform. Policemen wore uniforms because adjustments to rank could be sewn onto shoulders. A female constable would remain at that rank for the duration of her career. Helen might not have stuck it out if Clara hadn’t been there to listen to the daily humiliations she was forced to endure. Clara assured her that things weren’t much better in hospitals.

  ‘I’m constantly reminding careless, incompetent male doctors that I’m not a glorified nurse, that I’m not going to run screaming from the room at the sight of some cantankerous old bastard’s withered cock, and that my opinion on most matters is more useful than theirs. Naturally I’ve been quietly relegated to the female wards.’

  Variations on their respective complaints were a part of almost every conversation, but it created a collegiate determination to persist, however ugly some encounters were. Clara didn’t come often to Peter Lillee’s house. She said she never felt comfortable there, that it was like having afternoon tea in a museum, or some terribly respectable public building where you didn’t feel able to smoke or say ‘fuck’, both of which Clara liked to do. She rented a room in an all-female boarding house in East Melbourne. It was a large room, with its own kitchen. She shared the bathroom with two other women, one a nurse, the other a teacher.

  On the day after Inspector Lambert had suspended her from duty — Helen was resolute in interpreting this as him telling her that she wouldn’t be returning to Homicide — she and Clara sat talking over what had happened in Port Fairy. It was a rare afternoon off for Clara, a break she’d pay for in a brutal run of night shifts.

  ‘I can’t tell you what it felt like to be touched by George Starling, Clar. He ran his hand all the way up the inside of my thigh.’