There was a triple-knock at the door.
Joan rolled over and looked at her alarm clock. Her head was pounding severely. Christ, who was this at quarter to eight on a Sunday morning? Especially after the Saturday night she had just been through.
The triple-knock repeated. And then a voice called out. ‘Miss Linderman?’
Joan knew that voice all too well. Sergeant Lillian Armfield. What on earth did she want?
‘Hold on, I’m coming!’ Joan pulled on her dressing-gown and unbolted the door.
The policewoman stood there in her pearls and twill jacket, that familiar soulful expression on her face. ‘I am genuinely sorry to disturb you so early. But I’m afraid I have some bad news.’
‘Is there any other kind?’ Joan pulled a sour face. ‘Am I under arrest again?’
‘No. May I come in?’
The policewoman nodded. ‘Thank you. Nice place,’ she observed, looking around the flat. ‘Given you didn’t have much time to look.’
‘Christ Almighty! Not her again!’ Bernice was standing in the doorway of her bedroom, nursing her headache with both hands. ‘Are you still convinced I murdered poor Ellie?’
‘No, Miss Becker, we are not at all convinced of that. But we are not ready to close the case yet. New evidence seems to turn up all the time.’
‘Like Frankie Goldman’s head?’
‘Exactly.’
Joan cleared her typewriter and her manuscript from the small kitchen table, and she and Sergeant Armfield sat down while Bernice made the tea. After all the excitement of the police raid on Bomora, Joan and Bernice had been given a free ride in a Black Maria to Central Police Station late the previous night along with some of the other guests to provide short statements and pay a small fine. The cops were unimpressed by the amount of sly-grog on the premises but, given that the whole building was condemned, they didn’t take the property damage too seriously. Joan and Bernice had argued that their lease was not finished until Sunday so nobody was strictly trespassing as they were all ‘invited guests’. The police had rolled their eyes at that elegant dodge! Bernice pointed out that if a similarly wild, boozy party had taken place at Darling Point or Mosman, the cops would have given the ladies and gents a good talking-to and walked away; this did not impress any of the officers on duty and earned her a foul-mouthed reprimand.
Amelia was taken into custody and charged with possession of an illegal firearm and discharging a weapon in public. As no one other than Hugh and Frank Bennett had witnessed Amelia firing at her, Joan decided not to say anything about what had happened. She asked Frank to keep quiet too. ‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ she told Amelia. ‘I’m not the one you want. It’s Phil Jeffs who’s screwed your parents over. Sic your lawyers onto him if you dare!’
Bernice thought she was crazy to let her cousin off, but Joan had made up her mind. She hoped that Amelia already regretted her moment of insanity and was sobering up after spending a night in the cells. She even felt some compassion for her, though she would never admit this to anyone, least of all Bernice. Pressing charges would only make matters worse.
‘How is the novel going, if I may ask?’
Joan may have been mistaken, but she thought she detected a note of contrition in Sergeant Armfield’s voice.
‘I’m still trying to work out the ending. Just like you.’
‘Of course.’ The policewoman cleared her throat. ‘Now, I have something to give you, Miss Linderman. But I must warn you that you may find it distressing.’
‘Please, call me Joan. After all this …’ Joan had no words to summarise everything that had occurred in the last two weeks and how it had affected her life.
‘Very well, Joan.’
The policewoman pulled an envelope out of her pocket and placed it on the kitchen table. It was splashed with blood which had begun to dry to a dark red-brown. Joan’s hand flew to her mouth. She had a dreadful intuition.
‘We found this at six o’clock this morning on the footpath on the southern side of the bridge. It was inside a man’s jacket that had been folded up and placed next to a pair of shoes.’
Joan began to cry, gently at first. She turned the envelope over and there, in Hugh’s handwriting, was her name: Joan Linderman. Grief clutched at her chest and throat so tightly, Joan could barely bring herself to speak. ‘Was there … a body?’ This was already an admission of disaster. She knew how this story ended.
‘No, Joan. No body.’
‘So …’ Joan’s hands were shaking. ‘So he …’ She could not finish the sentence. The oddest thought occurred to her then: was Hugh the first person to commit suicide from Sydney’s new bridge? As if this mattered! Two bridge workers had fallen to their deaths during construction. But had the engineers given any thought to acts of suicide when they designed the pedestrian pathway and its fence? Probably not. Maybe they would now.
‘It appears that he must have jumped. We’ve asked the Water Police to inspect the most likely spots.’
Joan’s crying now escalated into full-throated sobs. Was it wrong for her to grieve over the death of a man who had confessed to killing three people? Wrong or not, she could not help herself. It was as if all the memories stored in her body had yet to catch up with the knowledge in her head.
‘I’m sorry, Joan.’
Bernice placed a hand on Joan’s arm to comfort her. But she was beyond consolation. She kept nodding repeatedly, as if trying to persuade herself that Hugh had made the right decision, that she must accept this as the best possible ending. Images flashed into her mind of him pacing the pathway, smoking furiously. And then sitting patiently to watch the sun come up. Wouldn’t it have been easier to jump in the dark, so as not to see the metal-grey water looming up at him? Maybe he wanted someone to see him fall. He had said his disease was destroying his brain, playing havoc with his mind. It seemed then that Hugh’s plan all along had been to end his life before his mind deteriorated further. That his suicide was also a result of his own guilt, a sentence he passed on himself, was not at all clear.
‘His name was Hugh Evans, is that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he also used the name Billy Watts.’
Joan looked up at Armfield. This was not delivered as a question.
‘We’ve been interested in Hugh for some time. Ever since he joined the Communist Party and then the New Guard. He would have made a very useful witness in our investigation of the Fielding-Joneses.’
Joan nodded. Hugh had always been convinced the cops were on his case. He was right to be paranoid. But then, a lot like Bernie, he also seemed at home in this city of shadows.
‘We’ll need to have a talk with you about him at some stage. But not now. I think you’ve been through enough the last couple of weeks. We’ll be in touch.’
The policewoman finished her tea and stood up. ‘Thank you, ladies. I’m sorry we had to go so hard on you both earlier. It was nothing personal. Just part of the job.’
‘Of course, we understand.’ Bernice stood up to usher Armfield to the door. ‘We want the person who killed Ellie and Jess brought to justice just as much as you do.’
‘Sergeant Armfield?’
The policewoman turned at the door. ‘Yes, Joan?’
‘Thank you.’
After the policewoman left, Bernice asked if Joan needed to be alone for a little while. ‘Thanks Bernie, love. Yes, I think I could use some time.’
‘No worries. I was due to have a coffee with a friend later this morning anyway.’ Bernie dressed quickly and patted her flatmate on the shoulder as she left. ‘Be kind to yourself, Joanie.’
Alone now, Joan opened the blood-splattered envelope from Hugh. The blood must have come from the bullet wound in his right shoulder, his stigmata from the attack by Amelia in Bomora’s backyard. Did he step between Joan and the gun out of love for her? Or was he hoping for a quick suicide that could be mistaken for a heroic sacrifice? If Amelia’s bullet had killed him, he would have been spared the decision to take his own life. But Joan preferred to think the impulse had been to save her and not himself.
The envelope did not contain a letter of confession, as she was half expecting, or even a suicide note; a farewell from her lover who knew his mind was failing and had contemplated taking his own life. Instead, an old watch with a worn leather strap and a scratched brass case and winder fell into the palm of her hand. Was this the object that Hugh had fumbled for before Amelia arrived on the scene? Oh, wait a minute—there’s something I have to give you.
A watch … Was it Hugh’s? And why was this his parting gift to her? It made no sense.
As she turned it over in her hand, the mystery of this object deepened. Engraved on the back of the brass case was the message: To James with love from Horace and Gloria. Joan cried out in shock and anguish. Dear God! It was an old banged-up trench watch, a gift from her parents to her brother James before he left for France.
How on earth had Hugh come to possess it? Joan knew that Hugh and James had been officers together in Gordon’s battalion. She’d had the impression they did not know each other that well, though Hugh had mentioned the odd encounter. Was it possible that James, convinced he would not return from some suicidal foray into no-man’s-land, had handed this watch to Hugh as a keepsake? But then why had Hugh waited so long to return it to Joan and her family? Joan was not sure what to do next. Would giving this memento to Horace and Gloria bring them any comfort or only worsen their grief and speculation about James’s final fate?
Joan sat by the window of her flat for a long time, watching the morning light slide across the city below, a spectacle of bright colours and shifting shadows. The police would want to talk with her again in a few days about Hugh. What would she tell them? Up to this point, no suspicion had attached itself to Hugh over the deaths of Eleanor, Jessie or Frankie Goldman. If he had not been cornered by Joan into blurting out the truth and then decided to confess everything, it was possible he would have died and taken his guilty secret with him. Except, of course, that Greta had seen him and confided in Joan. That still had the power to change the whole story.
Joan thought about everything Hugh had ever told her of his war service. Who could fail to feel sympathy for his suffering in France and understand his hatred of Gordon? Joan should have known better but she had been shocked by Hugh’s stories of her uncle’s heartlessness: his disregard for his men’s welfare; his refusal to question operational orders that put them in the frontline for days, too exhausted and demoralised to fight; his bullying of junior officers who dared defend men unfit to face battle; blaming his troops for failing to reach or hold their designated positions under enemy fire because it made him look an ineffective commander.
She even understood Hugh’s own guilt and self-hatred. He had been a model officer at first, willing to carry out her Uncle Gordon’s commands to the letter and place his own life in danger, but his uncritical loyalty had given way to bitter disillusionment, a lingering sickness of the heart as crippling as his gassed lungs. Now the nightmares, in which he relived in horrific detail the deaths of his fellow soldiers, would not leave him.
Thus far Joan had been swayed by Hugh’s righteous anger. She agreed that Gordon had behaved monstrously. But she could not follow Hugh down his feverish, irrational path of justifying the murder of a prostitute to punish Gordon for these crimes. On the one hand, Hugh seemed to regard Ellie as an unfortunate casualty of the private war that he waged against Gordon; on the other, he admitted that he loathed prostitutes for luring men into vice and disease. Hugh had been so deeply affected by the suffering he had seen visited on men in war that it became his life’s mission to avenge it. But when it came to visiting violence and suffering on women, he was either utterly indifferent or evangelical about how they deserved it. He was as monstrously hypocritical as the man he hated! Could he not see that?
There. Joan had made her decision. She must tell the police about Hugh’s confession. He had said he was sorry for dragging Joan into this mess but not enough to refrain from deceiving her many times. He had talked her into blackmail, fooled her into betraying Ellie and Jessie, used her to uncover faked evidence. Her duty was clear. Whatever her personal feelings, there was principle at stake. However much Gordon and Olympia deserved to be punished, nothing could justify making them pay for crimes they had not committed. And Joan was confident that they would not escape that ‘long, painful public disgrace’ that Hugh had wished for them. Gordon would still stand trial and—if there was any justice left in this world that could not be paid for with clever, expensive lawyers—he would be convicted for seeking to profit from the suffering of returned soldiers by selling them cocaine.
Having made her decision, Joan sat for a while by the window. Memories came to her in bursts. Her first encounter with Hugh on Goulburn Street under the octagonal tower and copper cupola of the Trades Hall. Their first kiss at supper on William Street that night. Attending a history lecture together at Haymarket Library and Hugh reciting her Wilfred Owens’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ with tears in his eyes. Reading each other’s poetry in Hyde Park on a sunny afternoon. Catching the six o’clock screening on a rainy evening in the cheap seats at the Kings Cross Theatre.
Toasting the success of their Hotel Australia scam over oysters and chips: Here’s to stealing from the rich! Hugh’s windblown golden hair and boyish grin at the wheel of the Pierce Arrow, looking lean and prosperous in a flash suit. The rare look of happiness on her mother’s face (He’s very handsome, isn’t he?), the relief on her father’s (My God! Joan, how can you … ?), the sight of Hugh and Richard standing together, heads close, talking behind the tomato plants. Hugh rescuing her from Gordon’s thug, Geoffrey: If you come anywhere near me or Joan again, I’ll put a fucking bullet in your skull! His haunted pale face when confronted with Ruby and Greta on the bridge: Poor kid.
Was this all a lie, a performance? Joan could not bring herself to believe that. Whatever madness had possessed him, whatever sickness of the flesh had taken his mind hostage, Joan believed that there were parts of Hugh untouched by bloody revenge and hatred. These parts had been expressed in acts, large and small, of tenderness, of courage, of protectiveness, of self-sacrifice. Was Hugh no more than a cold-blooded psychopath, able to mimic these emotions without feeling them, always detached and calculating? Unless Joan was deeply deluded—and yes, maybe she had been fooled all along—this did not feel like the Hugh she knew at all. He was, rather, a man at war with himself, a man wrestling with his own shadows.
Joan had sat for hours by the window trying to make sense of her feelings about Hugh and working out what she should do. She seemed to arrive back at the same place again and again. However she judged him, it was clear she must tell the police what she knew—even though this meant admitting to her complicity in blackmail, which would, in turn, mean the public humiliation of her family and, with the return of the money, the loss of all help for mother and Richard. Possibly even a prison sentence for her, Joan.
Exhausted by this emotional turmoil, Joan dragged herself to her divan-bed and closed her eyes for a moment. How she missed the physical loveliness of T.S., his sooty fur coat, his amber-green eyes and his calming steady presence by her feet or in her lap. She thought about that evening two weeks ago when she had sat at her window in Bomora, the stiff breeze upsetting the cosy order of her quiet room. She had been bent over her typewriter in the heat, writing her crime novel with nothing but a second-hand acquaintance of that Stygian underworld and with only Bill Jenkins as her guide. Now she had paid her fare to the ferryman, passed across the Styx all alone and walked unattended in the Land of the Dead.
She was ready now to write her novel with a hard-won and painful new understanding. And with that thought, Joan Linderman drifted into a deep sleep.
The suit jacket, all caked in white powder like a baker’s smock, had been neatly folded in half and laid on the footpath close to the fence. Despite its sorry state, it was unmistakeably well-tailored and cut from good-quality cloth. A bloodstain had spread below the right lapel and its source was soon identified by a distinct hole that pierced the right shoulder.
Next to this jacket was a pair of well-worn shoes. They had been polished despite the patchwork of deep cracks in the leather. The soles were so thin and loosely attached to the uppers that the gent who wore them must have perfected that careful hobo gait that planted the feet deliberately on the heel and the toes with each step to avoid the soles flapping too noticeably. Inside the left shoe was a pair of darned black wool socks, balled up and shoved under the tongue.
The incongruity of the tailored suit jacket and the poor man’s shoes was striking. ‘What do you make of that?’ Constable Howard asked Sergeant Armfield as they kneeled on the concrete pathway. The wind off the harbour was picking up as the sun climbed higher over the Eastern Suburbs.
‘A bloke fallen on hard times has kept the only thing that reminds him of his past. His once smart jacket. A last scrap of dignity.’ Armfield shrugged. ‘The whole story of this Depression, wouldn’t you say? Or maybe the poor fellow stole it from some posh bastard.’
The constable stood up to admire the view. ‘If youse was gonna take the final step, this’d have to be the spot, wouldn’t it, Sarge?’ he observed in a philosophical frame of mind. ‘’Specially at sun-up. Jesus, that’d be something to see. Like walking into bloody heaven.’
‘I dare say you’re right, Constable,’ agreed Armfield. ‘Which makes me wonder if this wonderful bridge will become the new favourite spot for suicides. I’m sure that’s not what Mr Bradfield had in mind.’
For a moment, Armfield let herself slip inside the mind of the man who had waited here——for several hours, if the little heap of cigarette butts and burned matches was any indication——struggling with his decision. She thought about the long and lonely vigil under a starless abyss of sky, the only other human presences nearby speeding past in a blur of car headlights, oblivious to this man’s mortal pain. And then the moment of resolution, the folding of the jacket, the removal of the shoes and socks in preparation.
It must have been so cold in those minutes before sunrise. His skin would have pimpled in the chill air, his lungs burning with each frosty breath. Did it take him long to climb the metal fence in his bare feet? Did he linger there on the edge of the top railing as the sun’s light broke over the horizon? Did he hesitate at the thought of a new day’s promise of hope? Or was he in a hurry for it all to end?
In her hands Armfield was holding the bloodstained envelope they had found in the inner pocket of the suit. A woman’s name was written on the front. It was this part of the job she hated most of all. Her uninvited presence in such intimate and private spaces. Her intrusion at a time when there was no longer anything she could do to help.
And yet the contents of this envelope promised a story: a mystery that must be solved, a narrative that must be concluded, an attempt that must be made at a reckoning and perhaps even a sense of destiny. In the eternally delayed absence of Judgement Day, it was the compulsion to finish the story that called to Sergeant Lillian Armfield again and again with her persistent, almost indestructible, faith in the mystical power of endings.