A Thing of Blood Read online

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Pity. A packet of twenty is only sixpence. That’s less than half what you’d pay normally. It’s enough to make you want to take it up, isn’t it? The uniform is good for sex, too. Shop girls love it. You’ll find them any night of the week at the Australia Hotel. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, as the Americans say. Lots of Yanks, lots of girls. It’s almost impossible to find an unoccupied doorway after closing time.’

  ‘Sex in a doorway doesn’t sound very edifying.’

  ‘You’re not a Puritan, are you? Or a moralist?’

  ‘No, of course not. I was thinking about comfort.’

  ‘I think you’d be pleasantly surprised at the amenity offered by a narrow doorway. And the thrill of discovery doubles the pleasure and doubles the fun.’

  ‘No wonder our blokes can’t stand Yanks.’

  ‘Let me tell you something about our boys, Will. Their uniform is ugly, they don’t know how to shave properly, they smell, and most of them have their teeth ripped out for free when they join up. Dentures are no match for a good, clean set of American teeth. Do you have your own teeth?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And my mother’s still got all hers, and she’s in her sixties.’

  ‘Ah, you must have had money.’

  He ran his tongue over his front teeth.

  ‘I’ve got all mine, too. No girl would believe I was a Yank if I had dentures. A few sweeps of the tongue and I’d be found out.’

  He seemed so pleased with this vulgarity that he laughed.

  ‘Now,’ he said. ‘To business. Are you able to do something for me this afternoon?’

  I nodded, and was filled with trepidation.

  ‘I want you to find out who my ex-wife is fucking.’

  I didn’t betray any emotion. I impassively took this direction in, but it did seem extraordinary, given his own priapic tendencies, that he should be concerned about the sexual gymnastics of a woman from whom he was now permanently disengaged. Knowing that discretion is a private inquiry agent’s most important characteristic, I forbore to ask him ‘Why?’, settling for the more professional and detached ‘Where?’ and ‘When?’. The address he gave me wasn’t a private house, but a bookshop in Little Collins Street, in the centre of town, called ‘Leonardo.’ He said that his ex-wife would be in the bookshop at 2.00 p.m. He didn’t tell me how he knew this.

  ‘Her name,’ he said, ‘is Anna Capshaw, formerly Clutterbuck, of course. She’ll be meeting a man there. I want you to find out where they go.’

  ‘But how will I know her?’

  ‘She’ll be the most beautiful woman in the shop. You’ll know her. You won’t be able to take your eyes off her. Are you up to this job?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, thereby committing myself to a series of events that were to make my recent troubles in Maryborough look like a mild comedy of manners.

  Chapter Four

  poor decisions

  HAVING UNPACKED MY MEAGRE WARDROBE of clothes — most of them with the dust of Maryborough still on them, and all of them smelling faintly of the kitchen of the George Hotel where we’d been staying — I stretched out on the bed and considered the last few crowded hours. Darlene’s kidnapping began to assume the strange dimensions of a dream.

  A madwoman rising out of the darkness and snatching a pregnant woman from the safety of her own house: this was bizarre. Even more bizarre was the notion that this madwoman had become so besotted with my brother that she had followed him all the way from Maryborough to Melbourne. What kind of woman was this? Knocking Darlene to the ground would be like felling a bullock. Sarah Goodenough would have to be of Amazonian proportions to overpower Darlene and drag her from the house. It occurred to me that Brian had not described her, and it was suddenly obvious that heft was of some importance.

  With a few hours to spare before my 2.00 p.m. stalk, I decided to return to Mother’s house. I wanted to ask Brian a few questions. He was on the front porch and he saw me coming across Princes Park. He hurried over and met me beneath a large Canary Island palm. His eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep, he was unshaven, and his breath smelled of tea and fruitcake. He leaned in close to me and almost whispered, ‘The coppers think I had something to do with it.’

  ‘They think that about me too, Brian. That’s what coppers do. It’s why they’ve got no friends.’

  He clutched my arm.

  ‘I had nothing to do with it.’ There was panic in his voice.

  ‘Of course you didn’t,’ I said. ‘You need to get some sleep. You’re not thinking straight.’

  We went into Mother’s house and found her upstairs in her study, writing her daily letter to Fulton.

  ‘I haven’t told him about Darlene,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to worry him until we know what’s really happened.’

  I thought this was an odd expression, but didn’t comment on it. I knew that Mother loved gossip, but I also knew that she held firmly to the view that events could not be dressed neatly as anecdotes in the presence of grief. She put down her pen and asked, ‘Brian, is this Sarah person a big woman?’

  This was precisely what I had intended to ask.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘She’s small, petite. Smaller than Darlene. The coppers asked me the same thing. I told them that she was mad, and that mad people are very strong.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mother said, ‘when they’re in a frenzy. But this was planned. She must have had help.’

  ‘Yeah. And they think I’m the one who helped her.’

  ‘Well, of course they do, darling. They’re not entirely sure that I’m innocent either. We just have to get on and let them do their work. There’s no point taking it personally.’

  ‘If I could just turn the clock back,’ Brian said and began expressing his profound regret over his affair with Sarah Goodenough. Mother listened patiently, but I left them and went downstairs, and helped myself to a slice of Darlene’s ever-diminishing fruit cake. While I was in the kitchen, I realised Mother was right — Sarah Goodenough must have had an accomplice, and the accomplice must have been a man. He probably came with her from Maryborough. If I wanted to go any way towards finding Darlene, I would have to telephone Sergeant Peter Topaz in Maryborough, and this was something I really didn’t want to do.

  My relationship with Peter Topaz was less than cordial. I acknowledge that I had made one or two understandable errors of judgement in my efforts to clear my name, but he’d been wrong about me, and that should have evened the score. He hadn’t quite seen it that way. Nevertheless, finding Darlene, apart from being the first feather in my PI agent’s cap, was more important than my feelings about a country-town walloper who harboured a grudge. I rang the exchange and booked a call to the Maryborough police station. I would be connected, I was told, in half an hour.

  While I was waiting, I flicked through that day’s copy of The Age. There was very little in the way of professional theatre in town. ‘The Mikado’ was playing at His Majesty’s — nothing for me there. Singing is not among my accomplishments, although I can carry a tune well enough. ‘Robert’s Wife’ was on at The Comedy. Lowbrow fare. Apart from that, there was the Tivoli, and I wasn’t prepared to prostitute my talent by donning a pair of roller skates and performing a vulgar dance surrounded by half-naked women. I don’t consider dancing on roller skates to be a skill. It is simply a failure of the imagination.

  My acting career might have to be rested. Indeed, I saw no reason why I couldn’t combine acting with investigating, should a suitable part come along. The certainty that one did not preclude the other, and the equal certainty that I had a talent for both, filled me with a sense of optimism and excitement. My reverie was interrupted by the clang of the telephone. My person-to-person call to Peter Topaz was now ready. I thanked the operator and waited for the sound of Topaz’s voice.

>   ‘Well, well, well. Will,’ he drawled, and I reminded myself that those elongated vowels didn’t reflect any lassitude in his thinking.

  ‘Peter,’ I said, and tried to sound as though all that had passed between us was now of no consequence. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Is this just an expensive personal health inquiry, Will?’

  I pretended I thought this was funny and laughed.

  ‘And how’s the Company? How are they getting on?’

  ‘Since you left? Never better, Will. Never better.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s drop the pretence that this is a social call.’

  ‘No pretence at this end, Will. I imagine you want something.’

  ‘I need your help,’ I said, and let this startling admission sink in.

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘but the only reason I’m listening is that you’re two thousand miles away. So whatever it is, I won’t be tempted to thump you.’

  ‘It’s about my brother Brian,’ I said, and told him all that had happened. He wasn’t in any way censorious about Brian’s having had an affair, but he said Sarah Goodenough wasn’t the ideal choice of mistress.

  ‘Given who he’s related to, that’s hardly a surprise though, is it?’ he said.

  He told me that Sarah Goodenough was known to the Maryborough police, although she had never been charged with anything. The owner of the Royal Hotel had had suspicions that she had been using her room there as a brothel. It was true that she entertained a lot of men, but there had been no evidence that money had changed hands.

  ‘There’s no law against giving it away for free,’ Topaz said, ‘so you might like to tell your brother that he’d been cultivating a well-ploughed furrow, and that if Sarah Goodenough told him she loved him she was lying.’

  Topaz said he’d do some checking, but that any information would be passed to the Melbourne police, who would, he assumed, be contacting the Maryborough police in due course, if they hadn’t already done so. He would, however, ring later that afternoon and tell me anything he thought was relevant as long as it didn’t compromise the investigation. I gave him Paul Clutterbuck’s number and said that I would be there about 5.00 p.m.

  ‘I liked your brother, Will. I’m doing this to help him. I still think you’re a complete dill.’

  ‘Give my regards to everyone,’ I said.

  ‘Now why would I want to ruin their day?’ he said, and hung up.

  I congratulated myself on not having risen to any of Topaz’s childish taunts, and was pleased to admit a little rush of professional superiority. I felt I had passed some sort of test. Private inquiry agents don’t allow their emotions to run away with them.

  The Leonardo bookshop sat at the eastern end of Little Collins Street in an area that was favoured by a louche crowd who thought themselves modern. Here one could see men in corduroy trousers, (I recalled my mother’s advice that corduroy was always a mistake), and with beards, and with the self-conscious swagger of the determined and committed outsider. Artists and writers and communists gathered here, but I wasn’t interested in what they painted or what they wrote. I am not, I hasten to add, a philistine, but I don’t believe that verses penned by badly dressed, scrofulous comrades pose a serious threat to the sonnets of Mr William Shakespeare. It seemed to me that the only thing these people had in common with the Bard was facial hair.

  I wasn’t entirely comfortable in this part of town but, drawing on my acting skills, I affected an appropriate slouch and entered the bookshop at a quarter to two. It was an odd place. There was no counter at the front. Instead, the man who I took to be the proprietor sat behind a table in a far corner. He nodded when I came in, and went back to reading his book.

  I began browsing casually: there was a table in the centre of the room and I picked up one of the titles that lay upon it. It was a collection of poetry written by someone with an unpronounceable name and translated by someone else with an equally unpronounceable name. I read the opening line of the opening poem and recognised the words as being English, but could force no sense from them. I put it down and browsed through a volume of photographs. There were some rather beautiful nudes among the pretentious still lifes and brooding landscapes, and I was surprised that such a book had not been seized by the police. I could see that the Leonardo catered for a literary crowd that differed markedly from book-buyers in Melbourne’s more staid establishments. I imagined that material of a particularly racy nature could be obtained under the counter from the corpulent owner.

  There was one other customer in the Leonardo when I entered. He was a man who looked to be in his early forties, and was clean-shaven, though sporting a neat, Ronald Colman moustache. He was wearing a Dedman suit, the austere lines of which had been softened by its being made from expensive material. This compromise made me think that he might work in a government position where adhering to the clothing regulations would be expected. Perhaps he’d come down from Parliament House, which huddled behind sandbags just a few minutes’ walk away. He looked up expectantly when a woman came in, but returned his eyes to the page as soon as he’d seen her. This shabbily dressed creature was unmistakably a comrade. Her hair, dragged back from her plain face, was ragged from the rigours of self-cutting.

  ‘Gino,’ I heard her say, and she kissed the proprietor on both cheeks.

  As she did so, a second woman came into the Leonardo, and this, without a doubt, was Anna Capshaw. Clutterbuck had exaggerated her beauty, but she was rather remarkable nonetheless. If she had been impoverished by her divorce it didn’t show in her appearance. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and fell in carefully regulated waves to her shoulders. No penny-pinching Victory Bob for Anna Capshaw. When I saw her face in full light I couldn’t help but notice that she bore an arresting resemblance to Hedy Lamarr.

  Anna Capshaw went over to the man with the neat moustache and they touched each other lightly on their respective forearms. I found the gesture peculiarly intimate, more intimate than a social kiss. There was something furtive about the touch, something deliberately restrained which nevertheless revealed that their relationship was sexual and illicit. They left immediately and I followed them.

  In Little Collins Street they headed uphill towards Parliament House, but ducked into a café on the way. It was called the Petrushka, and as soon as I went inside I realised that I had entered a grim ventricle of Melbourne’s bohemian heart. Heads were raised when I came in and lowered when people had reassured themselves that I was neither a literary enemy nor the police. The café was noisy, and if the food was as poisonous as the place smelled I didn’t think its patrons could look forward to a long life. Anna Capshaw and her male companion were sitting at a table at the back of the café. I caught her eye unintentionally, but it seemed to be of no more consequence to her than if she had caught the eye of anyone else in the room. I sat down and a waiter asked, ‘Wine?’ This was such a singular question to be asked in a café that I automatically replied, ‘Yes.’ A chipped mug was placed before me containing a liquid that was wine only if that term is expanded to include sump oil. I took a small sip, and felt that if I had any more my teeth would dissolve.

  I couldn’t hear anything of what passed between my quarries, and couldn’t get any closer, but they were deep in conversation and, from the looks on their faces, this wasn’t chit-chat. They left at exactly two thirty. This is noteworthy only because Anna Capshaw arrived at the Leonardo at exactly two. She seemed to be running to a timetable.

  Once outside, they began to walk briskly towards Parliament House again but before they reached the top of Little Collins Street, they turned down an alley which cut through to Collins Street. This was the sort of narrow space where American servicemen took their dates for a quick exchange of fluids. I followed warily. If one of them had turned around he or she would have formed the inescapable impression that they were being tailed. Fortun
ately this didn’t happen, and I emerged in Collins Street undetected. I kept them in view until they disappeared into the foyer of the Menzies Hotel. By the time I’d stepped through its doors, they were nowhere to be seen — they must have hurried upstairs.

  At this point I became acutely conscious of my inexperience in matters of pursuit. Bribing the concierge was out of the question, not only because the idea of doing so was mortifying, but also because I had no money. I thought I had nothing to lose by asking him a simple question.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he replied. ‘Mr and Mrs Cunningham.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I’ve just forgotten what room they’re in.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘I’ll be happy to let them know you’re here, but I can’t tell you their room number. Hotel policy. I’m sure you understand.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I understand completely. I’ll catch up with them later.’

  ‘Do you wish to leave a message?’

  ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I’m seeing them this evening.’

  At least I now had a name. Clutterbuck should be happy about that at any rate. I assumed that Anna Capshaw and her companion had gone upstairs to make love, and I wasn’t going to hang about waiting for them to re-emerge. Besides, I needed to be back at Clutterbuck’s to take Topaz’s phone call.

  When I got back to Clutterbuck’s, or my place, as I would have to get used to saying, it was empty. I went up to my room and was immediately aware that someone had been there. It only took a moment, though, to deduce that it had been Mrs Castleton. My clothes had been pressed and my socks, underwear and handkerchiefs had been arranged in neat rows in their drawers. The socks, which I had rolled into a ball, had been pulled apart and folded flat. This had the unfortunate effect of drawing attention to their ragged condition. I would have to sacrifice some clothing coupons and do something about my wardrobe.