The man lay slumped on the sofa as if taking a short nap, head lolling to the left, eyes shut, hands resting on his thighs just below his watch chain and buttoned-up waistcoat. Both his legs stuck out straight, the right foot turned at such an angle that the sole of his shoe was entirely visible. Not a stick of furniture in the room appeared to have been disturbed. Except for the bloodied upholstery of the sofa itself and the bright trickle leaking from the victim’s nose, it was hard to believe at first this was the scene of a murder.
‘Fancy decor,’ observed Inspector Phillips.
He was well used to the uncanny peacefulness of crime scenes by now: a corpse splayed, skewed or folded in a pool of its own blood in a room where everything else appeared ordinary, everyday. Photos on the mantelpiece, fresh-cut flowers in a vase, a cheap but cheerful painting on the wall, a cup of tea gone cold. The furniture in this particular room was expensive and tasteful: Arts and Crafts chairs and coffee table and Liberty print curtains.
‘The missus would love her drawing room done out like this, but it ain’t happening on my salary, I can tell you,’ declared the Inspector. ‘So, what have we got so far, Sergeant?’
Beside him, Sergeant Lockwood flipped open his notebook. ‘Victim has been shot through the back of the head, and then again through the right side of the skull and a third time through the chest. The killer was thorough, you’d have to say. But here’s the oddest thing: looks like they went to the trouble of buttoning up the poor fella’s waistcoat after he was shot. A coupla screws loose, wouldn’t you say, sir?’
‘I’ve seen that kind of thing before,’ said the Inspector, kneeling by the sofa to take a closer look. ‘Amazing what people will try on, thinking they can get away with it. So, I assume we have found the murder weapom
Damn! A bead of sweat had slid down from Joan’s forehead into her left eye, causing her to blink and mistype. She backed up the carriage of her Corona Portable and stabbed a line of xxxx’s through the last word. It was so bloody hot in here! Stifling. She’d pulled down the roller blind to block out the sunlight but left the window chinked open. Joan worked better to the accompaniment of buses idling and cars honking, the rattle and clang of trams headed to Watsons Bay or back to the city.
Her concentration broken, Joan began to reread the scene she had just written. Leaking. Was that the right word? ‘No, no, you mustn’t,’ she scolded herself. ‘Get it down first, tinker later.’ But she had become aware now of the slick of sweat on her brow, a droplet running down to her chin that threatened to drip and smudge her typewritten page, the wetness at the nape of her neck where it met the collar of her blouse. Her mind wandered and she found herself staring through the worn fabric of the blind out the window of her Kings Cross flat.
It was too easy to become distracted by this, her favourite rectangle of blue sky in all the world. Without stirring from her chair, she had a clear view over the neighbouring blocks of flats, the rusty tin-roofed Fitzroy Stevedoring warehouses, the dark green streak of Garden Island and distant glitter of water, and the lovely mirage of the sandstone foreshore and city beyond. And there, on the horizon, that miraculous steel arch of the new bridge, a city’s prayer for a brighter future, now only two weeks away from its ceremonial opening.
To refocus, Joan looked up at the row of eight photos thumbtacked to the wall above her desk. They were copies of crime scene pictures from the forensic files at Central Police Station: dead bodies in empty rooms. Her ‘inspiration’. While all eight cases had been closed years ago, the photos remained the property of the Crown, strictly for police eyes only.
Last year Joan had been friends—well, to be frank, much more than friends—with Bill Jenkins, chief crime reporter for Truth and a regular drinking companion of one of the official NSW Police photographers. The eight prints were Bill’s notion of a romantic gesture, and Joan had been rather taken with this covertly acquired gift. She had made no secret of her fascination with the world of crime. ‘You realise the only reason I like you so much is because you hang about with coppers and crims,’ she’d told Bill, only half jokingly.
Bill had grinned. ‘Fair enough.’ And because he was sweet on Joan, he’d set out to show off his familiarity with that world, offering to take her on ‘a bit of an adventure’: a visit to one of the upmarket sly-grog gin palaces owned by Phil ‘the Jew’ Jeffs. Although risky, Bill assured her that he would have mates keeping an eye out for them the whole time. So after work one Friday Joan had a shandy in the ladies’ lounge at the Surrey on George Street while Bill knocked back a few schooners in the front bar, then they met up with their host for the evening, Bill’s mate Harry Cox, and the trio headed off to the Fifty-Fifty Club on William Street.
From the outside, the building appeared almost derelict, but as the ancient cage lift ground its way to the top floor, Joan could hear the muffled strains of music and laughter and she felt the adrenaline percolating in her veins like champagne bubbles. Harry Cox knocked on the only door. The sliding panel on the viewing grille shot back with a clunk and Harry exchanged a few words with the club’s bouncer, vouching for his two guests. The door was opened and they entered. Inside, the main room was furnished palm-court style, with glossy button-back chesterfields and wing chairs, heavy drapes over the windows and Oriental rugs. At one end were gambling tables for bridge, baccarat and poker, while at the other supper tables glowed white under mock-Tiffany lamps. A long zinc bar ran down one side, behind which a row of brass-hinged ice boxes offered alcohol of every kind imaginable. In the centre was a dance floor and, at the far end, a rowdy four-piece orchestra invited patrons to get up and foxtrot, waltz or tango. Electric fans cooled the room—overheated by jazz, cocaine, booze and the nervous excitement of gambling—and dispersed the thick haze of tobacco smoke.
Joan had never been in such a room before nor seen so many well-dressed people. Light bounced off Jean Harlow platinum curls and pearly backless cocktail dresses, glistening hair oil and silk-lapelled tuxes. Over vodka martinis, Bill pointed out some of Sydney’s colourful underworld characters: Phil Jeffs’s strongmen, Jimmy Sparks and Frankie Goldman; the pretty bottle-blonde prostitute Dulcie Markham (nicknamed the Angel of Death, as all her gangster-lovers wound up corpses); and a who’s who of the city’s professionals and politicians, including doctors, barristers, businessmen and parliamentararians—all of whom, it seemed, liked a tipple after the pubs’ official closing time and a turn around the dance floor with their wives or mistresses. What shocked Joan most of all, though, was the presence of out-of-uniform police officers from the Liquor Squad lounging at the bar. ‘Cops get thirsty too, Joanie,’ Bill explained. ‘And Mr Jeffs has deep pockets. He likes to be warned of any potential trouble.’
And then with his heavy-lidded, dead-fish eyes, there was Phil Jeffs himself, nicely turned out in a white linen dinner jacket and bow tie to match. Tonight, he was very much the affable host, moving among his high-class guests with a friendly clap on the shoulder and a handshake here or a winning smile and a kiss on the cheek there. While as ruthless and violent as any of his competitors, Jeffs was cut from a different cloth; he was better connected, with more polish and taste. Having survived the razor-gang wars between his strongmen and those of his rivals Norman Bruhn, Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh, he was now the undisputed crime boss of Kings Cross and the neighbouring suburbs of Surry Hills and Darlinghurst.
Joan had arrived in the Cross in the middle of those dark and frenzied days: streetwalkers and dope peddlers getting their faces slashed in unlit alleyways by standover men; psychotic thugs, brawling with bottles and razors on Kellett Street and Eaton Avenue or gunning each other down outside pubs; even the crime bosses themselves brandished shotguns for sieges in the back streets of Maroubra and scrapped with constables as they broke down the doors of their brothels and sly-grog ‘hotels’. Until the new consorting laws were introduced two years before, the coppers had made little headway against the cocaine and sly-grog trades or the endless cycle of blood-letting. ‘There’s a perverse code of honour among these bastards,’ Bill explained to Joan. Even as they lay bleeding to death on the footpath or in a hospital bed, gangsters never dobbed in a fellow crim—not even the nasty piece of work who had just opened their throat with a razor or shot them in the stomach.
It was a frightening, chaotic time for those who lived in the Cross and its environs, but Joan felt an undeniable thrill to be living on the edge of this vortex of violence. For a nice middle-class girl from the suburbs, poverty and crime were a novelty, a thrill that made her body shiver with delicious dread. The forbidden allure of crime had long stirred in Joan’s blood. As the bookish daughter of bookish parents, she had shown some talent as a writer from a young age, but knew better than to alarm her parents with talk of becoming a novelist. She had initially dreamed of being the next Henry Handel Richardson, but when Joan was fifteen Dottie Francis, her best friend in high school, had lent her Fergus Hume’s Mystery of a Hansom Cab, a tale of murder and intrigue set in the gas-lit streets of 1880s Melbourne. Joan devoured it in two nights. When Dottie later moved to New York with her American father, she did not forget her friend, regularly mailing Joan back issues of Black Mask and Dime Detective. Then Bill had handed over his well-thumbed copy of The Barrakee Mystery by Arthur Upfield. Set in New South Wales, the detective was a half-caste Aborigine called Inspector ‘Boney’ Bonaparte. ‘Not a bad yarn,’ Bill said. It was a bloody good yarn, thought Joan—and home-grown to boot! Fired up with enthusiasm, Joan, though only a humble subeditor for a popular women’s magazine, told Bill, ‘I reckon I could write a pretty good detective story.’
Bill laughed so hard his face turned bright red and his eyes almost popped out of his skull.
‘Crime’s not a woman’s business, Joanie. It’s not some bloody game.’
Joan felt her own face burning with indignation. ‘What about Lillian Armfield and her Women’s Police Unit? They’re all women!’
‘Yeah, sure. But we’re talking eight women coppers out of the state’s whole police force, and most of them are just Special Constables, not even allowed to wear a uniform or carry a firearm.’
‘So what? They’re still coppers, aren’t they? They’re still solving crimes.’
‘Well, I guess so—if you count rescuing runaway girls from prostitution.’
‘That’s not all they do by a long chalk and you bloody well know it, Bill Jenkins! Keeping a rein on streetwalkers. Cracking down on abortionists. Catching those fortune-telling frauds who prey on young women. Working on rape and homicide cases. Right now, Armfield’s in charge of the hunt for that girl from Cheltenham who’s been missing for months. And she’s been promoted to Special Sergeant, with the right to carry a gun and the same powers of arrest as a male copper. Not to mention the same risks of being clobbered or even killed!’
‘Yeah, yeah, alright, Joanie, keep your hair on.’ Bill looked well and truly snookered. He should have known better than to make light of the work of Sergeant Armfield and her team. ‘Anyway, we’re talking about writing crime, and I’ll eat my hat the day a woman sits at my desk.’
‘Better start softening it up then, Bill, so you don’t bloody choke on it!’ Joan kept her tone light, but she was more wounded than she cared to let on. As far as she was concerned, that conversation spelled the beginning of the end of her infatuation with Bill Jenkins, despite the gift of eight crime scene photos he later offered in atonement. No matter, thought Joan, the brief romance had served its purpose. It had further whetted her appetite for crime stories—and made her determined to prove Bill Jenkins wrong.
The blind at the window bucked as a gust of wind burst through the narrow crack. Joan gave the pull-ring a yank so the blind snapped back up onto its roller. ‘At last!’ she sighed, dragging the stiff window open to let the breeze in.
She checked the time on her alarm clock. Ten past five. Hugh, her boyfriend of six months, had said he might take her to the eight o’clock screening of The Cheaters (‘Daughter of successful crim chooses a better life by falling in love with a wealthy heir’) at the Kings Cross Theatre. Bernice, her flatmate, would not be home until much later—Saturdays were her big night out—so if Joan was sensible, she should make the most of her few remaining hours of solitude.
But first a quick cuppa. She slung the kettle on the gas-ring in the corner, scooped two spoonfuls of Goldenia into the yellow pot and fetched her favourite mug. Back at the desk, Joan finger-tapped a cigarette out of the Luckies packet in her top drawer. The tobacco sizzled in the match-flame and she sucked the smoke indulgently into her lungs and exhaled two blue-grey jets. The light outside had started to fade, the harbour and city dissolving like an Aspro powder in the fizzy blackness of dusk, with an early scattering of stars overhead and the glow of neon from the street below. Joan finished her smoko and resumed her writing:
‘So, I assume we have found the murder weapon, Sergeant?’
‘I believe so, sir. A Colt pistol in the upstairs bedroom. Four bullets missing from the chamber.’
‘And no signs of a struggle,’ the Inspector mused aloud. ‘Photographer been in yet?’
‘Not yet, sir. Should be here soon.’
‘And what about the woman they found upstairs? Has she been interviewed?’
‘Tight as a clam so far, sir. She’s being attended to by the medico. Lost a fair bit of blood, so still pretty groggy. And it looks like she’s also dosed herself up with something. The doc’ll let us know when we can talk with her.’
A ball of sooty fur leaped through the window and landed on soft little feet on the desk. It was Rimbaud, Bernice’s cat, who liked to roam the neighbouring rooftops all night but always turned up at their window for supper. With a loud trill he butted his head against Joan’s chin, demanding the writer’s attention. Bernice’s ownership of Rimbaud was largely theoretical, given that it was Joan who usually ended up feeding him in her flatmate’s absence. A successful novelist, journalist and poet, Bernice loved the Cross’s bohemian life of endless parties; as Joan’s comrade-in-writing and literary mentor, she was easily forgiven.
‘Okay, okay, enough with the smooching,’ Joan said. ‘Typical bohemian male! Out all night, spreading it about, but always home in time for a good woman to give you a meal and a cuddle.’ She had a soft spot for this cat, whom she privately called ‘T.S.’ in honour of the poet Eliot and the lines from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ about the cat-like fog that wraps itself around the house and rubs up against the windows. Having put two tinned sardines in T.S.’s saucer (an expensive indulgence), Joan hurried back to her desk.
Weekends were precious writing time. Her weekday job as a subeditor for The Australian Woman’s Mirror, a magazine that hit newsstands every Tuesday morning, left Joan very little time or energy for her own writing. After leaving school, Joan had stayed at home for almost six years helping her parents care for her wounded war veteran brother, Richard, while she worked a series of uninspiring sales jobs in a florist, a shoe shop and a small corner store, before deciding it was time to acquire some secretarial skills to improve her employability.
Her parents had been astonished when, nearly four years ago, she had dropped out of her stenography and typing course at Mrs Holt’s Secretarial College to become a copy clerk on the Mirror. ‘Why are you throwing away your best chance at a proper job?’ they lamented—meaning, of course, a ‘respectable’ job (as a typist, maybe, or a nurse), and then only to fill the gap until she married and took on the role of wife and mother. Despite parental disapproval, Joan reminded herself every day what a privilege it was for a young woman (was twenty-eight still young?) to be working on one of the most popular magazines in the country (‘162,000 copies sold every week’). Apart from advice on domestic and personal topics, a large part of the Mirror’s appeal was its charter to publish short stories, poems and serials by women writers, including big names like Ethel Turner and Kathleen Dalziel, but also lesser-knowns and even unknowns. The senior editors had all cut their teeth on The Bulletin; her direct boss, Mr Lofting, a stern taskmaster, was happy to strike his blue pencil through columns of copy that did not meet his high standards. Joan told herself this was a priceless apprenticeship, the day job she needed to support her own literary ambitions.
Two months ago, Bernice had introduced Joan to Reg Punch, a senior editor on The Australian Journal. Reg had told her a slot might be coming up for a serial in May. ‘Send me a chapter or two as soon as you can—April at the latest—and I’ll see what I can do.’ It was an opportunity not to be missed, and Joan had spent every spare minute since chained to the Corona.
In the meantime, she continued to subedit her three pages a week of gossip and womanly wisdom sent in by the readers of the Mirror. The ‘Between Ourselves’ section was so popular it was always sandwiched between full-page ads for Foster Clark’s Creamy Custard (‘Her Puddings Bored Her Husband’) and Johnson’s Baby Powder (‘A restful balm over play-weary limbs’). It was ironic, Joan thought, that the readership of the Mirror lived in a world she had consciously rejected. Joan’s schoolfriends had long ago found their life’s purpose in the care of husbands, ‘little bundles of joy’ and Californian bungalows in middle-class suburbs, while Joan had chosen instead the perilous life of a ‘new woman’, as the tabloid press liked to characterise the independent younger female generation.
According to what Joan’s parents read in the newspapers, these ‘fast’ single women, living alone or sharing with their ‘flapper’ sisters in squalid boarding houses and overcrowded apartment blocks in Darlinghurst and Kings Cross, were exposed to terrible moral dangers. They smoked and drank in public, wore provocative clothing and mixed freely with unmarried men at cafes and nightclubs—not to mention dancing to jazz and guzzling cocktails at booze- and cocaine-fuelled parties. Dr and Mrs Linderman pleaded with Joan to ‘hurry up and find a nice fellow to settle down with’.
Joan was pretty sure that Hugh was not the kind of ‘nice fellow’ they had in mind. His war service would certainly earn him points in her father’s estimation. First Lieutenant Hugh Evans had been twice mentioned in dispatches for gallantry and awarded a Distinguished Service Order thanks to his company commander, Major Gordon Fielding-Jones, who by a strange if not altogether happy coincidence was her mother Gloria’s brother-in-law and Joan’s rich uncle. Joan’s second brother, James, had also served under Gordon but, sadly, had gone missing in action. The problem was Hugh did not have a drop of patriot’s blood left in his veins. He had been badly gassed and now suffered from crippling episodes of gas neurosis. Coming home as a disability case on a pension, Hugh’s frequent bouts of panicked choking and depression scuppered any chance of a job. Instead he had joined the Balmain branch of the fledgling Australian Communist Party (under the false name of Billy Watts to protect himself against police spies and the loss of his pension) and sat at home writing anti-war poetry.
As Joan returned to her typewriter, a sudden gust of wind burst through the open window and unpinned one of her crime scene photos from the wall so that it fell onto the keys. Startled, she snatched up the photo and studied it closely. A pretty young woman in black stockings and shawl lay sprawled on a bed in a depressingly shabby boudoir, the only sign of violence the bright stain blooming on her pillow. Joan felt a chill creep across her neck. She repinned the photo to the wall and resumed writing. But she could not dismiss the unpleasant impression that this interruption was symbolic in some sinister way. Maybe even a warning.