Mr Lofting called Joan into his office on Tuesday morning soon after she arrived. It felt so comforting to slip into the familiar everyday routine of the Mirror’s offices again, a million miles from the horrors of the preceding days. Never did Joan imagine that she would ever be so grateful to be plunged back into the banality of ‘Between Ourselves’. Within minutes of her hanging up her coat and taking the dustcover off her typewriter, Vera had hastened to inform her that Olive (whom Joan secretly suspected of scheming to replace her) had done a ‘fabulous’ job of proofreading the final copy of her section.
‘It is admirable to see you back at work so soon, Miss Linderman,’ said Mr Lofting in a tone that never failed to smack of paternalism even when Joan suspected he was trying to be sincere. ‘Your colleague Miss Grey was kind enough to explain to me the horrific’—he paused as if in search of an appropriate euphemism—‘circumstances of your absence yesterday. Allow me to convey my deepest sympathies for the’—another hesitation—‘distress this event must have caused you.’
‘Thank you, Mr Lofting, I appreciate that,’ said Joan, thinking that he didn’t know the half of it, this owlish man who had dwelled all his years in the benign black-and-white world of print.
‘If you feel you need more time to recuperate, rest assured we will be more than happy to accommodate you. Olive has proved a most efficient factotum in your absence.’
I bet she has, thought Joan. As the unemployment queues lengthened, Joan was not alone in her terror of losing her job. She had seen the huge crowds in the morning, milling about the Jobs Vacant boards outside the Fairfax Building down on O’Connell Street.
‘Thank you for your concern, Mr Lofting, but to be honest I think the best remedy is to throw myself back into my work.’
Joan was grateful to Mr Lofting for his offer of more time off, and she might yet take advantage of this, depending on how things unfolded, but that morning she needed to immerse herself in normal life again—at least for a while—so that her mental state did not unravel. Her encounter with Mavis and the terrifying suspicions it provoked had made her question her sanity. She had barely slept a wink the night before and had even flinched in her bed when Bernie let herself into the flat in the wee hours. Out of fear, out of guilt? Joan was worried that her novelist’s imagination was running away with her. It was one thing to play God with characters on the page, but something altogether more daunting to question the motives of a real person.
Bernice, her best friend and confidante of the last four years, as close to her as a sister, capable of murder? It was inconceivable. There had to be a reasonable explanation for what Mavis had told her, but Joan was not ready yet to confront Bernice with her questions. Once that door was opened, it could not easily be closed again, and it would surely destroy their friendship. And, anyway, there were some obvious steps she should take first.
‘Very well, Miss Linderman, if that’s what you think is best,’ said the editor, and he handed over a thick sheaf of readers’ contributions to be culled and edited for next week’s ‘Between Ourselves’.
Joan retreated from Mr Lofting’s office and resumed her seat at her desk, settling into her well-sprung swivel chair for the initial read-through.
From ‘Eunice’: Still more queer christenings. The baby in this case has been a great asset to the mother in these days of Depression. The plan is to take the child to various churches to be christened. The clergy, being sorry for the abject poverty of both child and mother, give money, food and clothing to the parent, and also make no charge for the service.
‘Doona’: The Mirror has many times instanced women doing jobs of which they might fairly be considered incapable, but the feat of a woman of my acquaintance will challenge comparison. Her husband is a slaughterman and it is her regular custom to assist him in the skinning and cleaning of the beasts. When her husband recently went down with flu, she did the whole job unaided for a week! And she is not a muscular, masculine type of female either but feminine in appearance.
‘Alexis’: A tale of courtesy—a lady of imposing stature and quite ducal dignity riding on the Toorak tram found herself without the necessary threepence …
‘Blue Eyes’: Walking into a draper’s shop recently I found it managed by foreigners and the woman who served me could not write English …
About an hour later, a cheerful murmur rippled across the main room, heads turning, faces brightening as a familiar figure made her way through the maze of desks and filing cabinets. It was the poet and novelist Zora Cross, one of the Mirror’s longest-serving contributors under the pen name Bernice May. Zora had travelled down from the Blue Mountains on an early train and was dropping off the latest article for her long-running series of interviews with fellow women writers.
Joan smiled with delight to see this welcome visitor. She had admired Zora for many years and for many reasons. Mourning the loss (or, rather, the never-ending absence) of her own brother, James, Joan had been deeply moved by Zora’s popular ‘Elegy on an Australian Schoolboy’, written in memory of her own soldier-brother, John.
I only know you, brother of my blood,
Have gone; and many a friend,
Trampled and broken in the Flanders mud,
Found Youth’s most bitter end.
Only a couple of years earlier, Bernice had introduced Joan to the love sonnets of Zora’s two poetry collections, Songs of Love and Life and The Lilt of Life, which had been a huge success for her publisher, Angus & Robertson. Like many other readers, Joan had marvelled at Zora’s honesty as a poetess of eroticism. No longer were women the passive objects of male lust; in Zora Cross’s poems it was the woman who lusted and pursued and experienced the intense longings and depths of sexual fervour. In the hot, damp darkness of summer nights in her twenty-sixth year, Joan Linderman discovered words that called to her own forbidden feelings:
He called me up to home
Through joy-mists dim,
Till all my being was a rainbow-fire,
Lit with the ecstasy of such desire
It made me one in promise with the stars.
But Zora’s actual romantic life—as told to Joan in great detail by Bernice—struck her more as a cautionary tale for women writers. At the age of twenty-eight, Zora had moved into a cottage in Glenbrook, in the lower Blue Mountains, with her lover David McKee Wright, twenty-one years her senior, a respected Irish poet and literary editor of The Bulletin. The story went that David had been drawn to Zora for her ‘fast and loose disregard for ordinary decencies’. Their affair was the scandal of bohemian circles. But with a son from a previous affair and two daughters by David, Zora was soon overwhelmed by her duties as a wife and mother. Joan’s admiration for Zora was not diminished, but she did sometimes see her as a martyr who had sacrificed her own work to marriage and motherhood. It was instructive, thought Joan, to see how many of these male bohemians had wives tucked away in the suburbs to tend to their hearth and children. The performance of a rebel poet, free of the shackles of convention, could be sustained on the brash stage of Sydney as long as a devoted spouse, hidden in the wings, kept everyone washed and fed.
Then, four years ago, David died suddenly of a heart attack. Bereft and impoverished, Zora continued to write to support her three children, struggling to make ends meet with a modest Literary Fund pension. Despite her travails, she maintained a cheerful demeanour with no trace of self-pity.
‘Hello, my dear. How is the writing going?’ Zora stopped by Joan’s desk to have a chat before she knocked on Lofting’s office door. Joan looked up at her lovely soulful face with its generous nose, sensuous mouth and flyaway fringe of brown hair. She was still a striking woman even at forty-two, thought Joan.
‘It’s going well, thank you. Seems to be taking on a life of its own.’ Joan could not begin to explain the strange symbiotic nature of her writing and her life at present.
Zora was such a generous spirit when it came to other writers. This was abundantly clear in the monthly profiles she wrote for the Mirror about her fellow women authors and poets. Her own warm personality was evident in every piece and her interview subjects reciprocated with confidences about the challenges of the writer’s life: how some married authors struggled to find scraps of writing time in between childbirth, laundry, gardening and cooking, while others took a break until their children grew up. Some, like Joan, had day jobs as librarians, teachers, women’s page editors, working on a farm or in an office writing with one eye on the boss and the other on the clock. Joan found these frank portraits oddly heartening.
‘Is Reg Punch still going to take a look at it?’ Zora asked. When the poet had been in the office last month, Joan had been bursting with nervous excitement and pride at Punch’s offer to read her novel and had shared her secret with Zora over a cuppa in the tearoom.
‘Yes—if I deliver it by April. I’m feeling a bit anxious about the deadline to be honest,’ confessed Joan. ‘So many things seem to get in the way.’
‘Have you settled on a pen name yet for this masterpiece?’ asked Zora.
Joan had confided that she was nervous about coming out as a woman crime writer just yet and so was considering a male pseudonym.
‘I’m thinking of Alec Foster.’
‘Mmm, very rugged and no-nonsense. I like it.’
‘You’re always so encouraging, Zora.’
Zora patted Joan on the shoulder. ‘Well, my dear, I know for a fact you have the true soul of a writer. Nothing else matters, eh? Like you, I have no wish to travel, no love for expensive hats, frocks or shoes, don’t care a fig for race meetings or concerts by Madame Melba or the thrill of a Ford motor car. My most treasured possession is my Oxford Dictionary!’
Joan laughed. It was always good to talk to Zora. It reminded her that the international reputation of Australian literature was, to a large degree, being carried on the shoulders of its women writers, despite all the challenges they faced. Today’s exchange was a tonic to her soul and made the possibility of a career as a novelist seem less remote.
‘If you and Bernie want to come up to Glenbrook sometime for lunch, please do. You might have to help me water the chooks and hang out the washing, though.’
‘We would love to come up. We both need a break from the city.’
‘Done!’ Zora offered Joan a handshake to seal the deal and then gave her a quick peck on the cheek. ‘Give my love to Bernie, won’t you? And all the best with the writing, my dear!’
‘You too!’ replied Joan as Zora headed into the editor’s office to deliver her article.
Taking this serendipitous encounter with Zora (she could just as easily have come in yesterday or tomorrow) as a blessing, she settled back into her reading with renewed hope. She cherished the conviction that somehow, despite all the frightening complications of her life at the moment, her story would find its way to a meaningful conclusion.
When lunchtime arrived she made excuses (‘Sorry, errands to run’) to avoid being interrogated by her colleagues and dashed along George Street. There was a phone call Joan had to make, preferably somewhere more discreet than the Mirror offices, and two letters that she had written last night to be posted. She worked her way through the throng flowing around the Cenotaph, competing cross-currents of bankers and insurance men in dark suits and grey trilbies and typists and ladies-who-lunched in bright dresses, shawls and autumn bonnets rushing through the granite and honeyed-sandstone canyon of Martin Place.
‘Paper!’ yelled an old wreck of a man by his newsstand bearing the headlines: TALK OF JAPAN LEAVING LEAGUE OF NATIONS and RANSOM DEMANDED FOR LINDBERGH BABY. The flower stalls parked outside the General Post Office glowed purple, white, yellow and pink with stock, sweet peas, dahlias, violets and chrysanthemums as the breeze ruffled the stalls’ canvas awnings and dispersed their flowers’ sweet perfume. Under the GPO’s dusky colonnade the beggars had lined up to ply their daily trade; veterans with stumps for legs and arms, still in uniform in the hope of eliciting sympathy. ‘Spare a deener for a war hero, love?’ croaked one fellow whose painted face mask was only obvious if you looked very closely. Joan had her coins ready and handed them out as she walked inside.
First of all, the phone call. She found an empty booth at the far end of the GPO’s main room, packed with a frantic lunchtime crowd, but still cooler than outside thanks to all the marble. She crossed her fingers that Bill Jenkins would not have headed out for lunch yet. ‘Bill? Is that you?’
‘Hiya, Joanie. How ya doing, love?’
Joan felt surprisingly relieved to hear his voice. Maybe it was because he was outside the tormenting puzzle that was playing in her head. He was not caught up—not yet at least—in her investigation.
‘I’m alright, I guess.’ Joan’s voice began to shake. She heard the quaver of fear in it for the first time herself. ‘It’s just that I need your help.’
‘You don’t sound too good, love. Must be stressful what with the death of that poor bloody woman in your boarding house. And now that other girl—Jocie? Jocelyn?—vanishing into thin air like that! Has the police well and truly stumped, I can tell you.’ Trust Bill to know everything that was going on. ‘So when are you and I gonna catch up for lunch? As long as that commie fella of yours doesn’t get too jealous.’
‘He’s not like that, Bill. We’ll lunch soon, I promise—but right now I have a favour to ask.’
‘What is it, Joanie?’
‘Have the medical examiners released the autopsy report on Ellie yet? I was hoping you might have seen it by now.’
There was a short silence on the end of the phone. ‘I read the preliminary report this morning. It can’t be released to the public while the police are still investigating.’
‘Please, Bill, I need to know what it says.’
‘Look, love, it’s natural for your imagination to dwell on unpleasant—’
‘Please don’t, Bill. I have good reasons.’ Joan sounded irritated and she was.
Again, there was a pause. ‘Alright, love, have it your way. I’m doing this just because it’s you, Joanie. But not a word to a soul or I’ll get it in the neck, promise?’
‘Of course, I promise.’
A silence fell on the other end of the line; no doubt Bill was searching for the report on his desk.
‘Here it is,’ he said finally. ‘The autopsy found that her death was caused by strangulation and then having her throat slashed by a sharp instrument, probably a razor. Her face was mutilated by multiple wounds most likely from the same instrument. The frenzy of the attack suggests a high level of aggression towards the murder victim.’ He hesitated. ‘Are you sure you’re okay, Joanie?’
‘Go on.’
Bill cleared his throat. ‘She was not raped or sexually interfered with in any way. There was evidence of contusions over the left eye consistent with a punch to the face. There was also a great deal of cocaine and alcohol in her system. The contents of her stomach indicate a small meal eaten around six o’clock that evening. Time of death is estimated at about ten-thirty. What else did you want to know?’
‘Any idea if there might be an inquest?’
‘Not until the police have exhausted all their leads or decided to lay charges.’
‘Thanks, Bill.’ Joan had calmed down and was genuinely grateful. ‘I mean it: thank you.’
Bill did not respond straightaway. ‘Now come clean, Joanie—you’re not getting yourself mixed up in any kind of trouble, are you? Snooping around playing detective?’
‘Don’t be silly, Bill,’ Joan said with a laugh that sounded unconvincing even to her own ears. ‘You must think I’m mad.’
‘Well, we went out together for seven months, don’t forget! I think I know something about what makes Joan Linderman tick.’
‘I’m sure you do, Bill. I have to move flats in the next week or so, but I’ll give you a call about lunch after that …’
Bill jumped in just before she hung up. ‘Hey, Joanie, promise me something. If you do get yourself in a tight corner, give me a bell. I won’t judge.’
Joan hung up then and walked, slowly and with enormous effort of will to stop herself breaking into sobs, towards the postal clerk behind the curved brass grille at the desk. She had looked into the butchered face of poor Ellie and seen the copious quantities of blood sprayed on the wall and pooled around the body. But somehow the cold, detached language of the autopsy report awoke an even more bitter sadness in her.
‘How can I help you?’
‘Stamp for a letter to Willoughby, please. And one for Tempe.’
The clerk affixed stamps to both envelopes. ‘Will that be all, madam?’
Joan mumbled, ‘Yes, thank you,’ and handed over her money. She then headed outside. There was nothing quite like the satisfaction of dropping a letter into the mouth of a postbox, thought Joan. She enjoyed the finality, the irrevocability of it.
Had Hugh sent their blackmail letter to Gordon yet? she wondered. That too would be irrevocable, she thought with a frisson of excitement. If Gordon took the bait, the plan was to hand over the incriminating note and collect the payout at a meeting on Friday. ‘We must strike while the iron’s hot, Joanie,’ Hugh had advised. ‘The last thing Gordon needs right now is a police investigation. He’d probably be asked to step down as a New Guard commander. And it would damage his legal practice, whether he’s guilty or not.’
The letter to Tempe was addressed to Mrs Dawson, Ellie’s mother (Joan had copied the address from the notepad on Bernie’s bedside table). Please accept my deepest condolences. I was a friend and neighbour of your daughter Eleanor. I understand how reluctant you must be to have someone intrude upon your grief at this time, but I sincerely hope you might consider meeting me. I am not a police officer or a journalist, however I do have information that may throw light on the circumstances of Eleanor’s death and I am determined to learn the truth. Though I have a modest income, I will do whatever is within my means to help you and Greta.
Joan calculated that a combination of curiosity (‘Information that may throw light on the circumstances of her death’) and the hint of financial compensation (‘I will do whatever is within my means to help’) might tempt Mrs Dawson to agree to the meeting. Given her situation, she had nothing to lose and possibly something to gain. Joan had no idea what she would say at this meeting or what she hoped to learn, but inside her head her fictional Lillian Armfield insisted that it had to be worth a shot. In fact, Joan suspected that she would still be following in the real Armfield’s footsteps, just as she had done last night when she spoke to Mavis.
The other letter was, of course, to her mother Gloria, letting her know that Joan would be visiting the family on Sunday after lunch. ‘After lunch’ was Joan’s attempt to forestall her mother cooking up a storm in honour of the occasion, given how hard up they were, but she had already resigned herself to that eventuality. Joan was excited by the possibility that, if matters turned out well on Friday, she would come bearing a very handsome late Christmas present for her parents and Richard.
Was it wrong of her to think this way? Was she just trying to buy her way back into their affections? All she really wanted was to see them happy, to be accepted by them and, most of all, to feel their love. The death of Ellie and the precariousness of Joan’s own life these last few days (who could she really trust?) had focused her thoughts on family again, as the only safe refuge in a dangerous and heartless world.
The two letters dropped from her hand and she heard them land with a soft thud in the depths of the postbox. There was no going back now.