The Port Fairy Murders Read Online Free Page A

implied, Joe thought Yes, yes, he would go to the trouble .
    ‘Three rooms have been booked at the Warrnambool Hotel for tonight and tomorrow night. I’ll be driving down with Constable Lord and Sergeant Reilly in an hour. I’m afraid there’s no time to organise a change of clothes. We’ll have to make do. Sergeant Reilly, any problems?’
    ‘No, sir. I’ll telephone the wife. She’ll understand.’
    ‘Constable Lord?’
    ‘No problems at all, sir.’ Except that there was a problem, and it had a name — David Reilly.
    Joe said nothing. What was there to say? He wanted to find a toilet and be sick.
    ‘I’m sorry, Sergeant,’ Lambert said to him. ‘You’re not physically well enough.’
    In other circumstances, Joe might have protested. But for now, he lacked the will to even nod assent.

–2–
    SELWYN TODD, WHO always smelled of stale sweat, lived in a shed in a corner of his sister’s garden in James Street, Port Fairy. The sister, Aggie, 64, had settled into misandric spinsterhood. People in Port Fairy expressed admiration to her face for the way she looked after simple Selwyn, and proclaimed pity behind her back for the dud cards she’d been dealt in life. No one could remember how old Selwyn was. He’d been sent to Melbourne when he was very young, and had turned up in Aggie’s garden some time in his twenties. Aggie had never explained his reappearance, and no one had asked her for an explanation. It was supposed that he was now probably 55 or 56. Initially, people had been afraid of him. He laughed loudly and suddenly, and his speech was incoherent. Giggles and barking laughter were his primary means of communication, making adults uneasy and terrifying children. Gradually, he became a familiar, never-quite-trusted presence in the town. He would sit on an upturned box in Sackville Street, his head lowered, his bottom lip slick with saliva, scratching away on a slate. He’d learned to form a few letters, which he drew over and over. As walkers passed by him, he would raise his eyes and chortle. They found this disconcerting, largely because they experienced an uncomfortable feeling of being judged, of being laughed at . To make themselves feel better, they took to referring to Selwyn as ‘The Village Idiot’; thus cabined, they took little interest in him.
    Aggie Todd didn’t have the luxury of complete indifference to Selwyn. She’d inherited him from her brother, Andrew, in Melbourne. Selwyn had taken to frequent and unguarded bouts of masturbation. Aggie’s sister-in-law, Phillipa, put her foot down when she entered her living room one morning to find Selwyn pleasuring himself in one corner while her five-year-old son, Matthew, was reading in another. Neither seemed aware of the other, but Phillipa declared that very evening that Selwyn had to go — what if he did this disgusting thing in front of little Rose? There was only one place for him to go to. ‘That spoiled sister of yours. She got your parents’ house in Port Fairy, and you didn’t lift a finger to stop her, and no one’s ever going to marry her. There’s plenty of room. End of discussion.’
    Selwyn had been with Aggie for only a few days when she’d decided that he couldn’t live with her in the house. He never willingly bathed himself, as he seemed terrified of water. He stank, and Aggie was certain that the smell was getting into the curtains and the carpet — even into her own bedding. She’d never allowed him into her bedroom, but she could smell him on her sheets. He was therefore banished to the shed. She wasn’t cruel to him. She fed him healthy food, withholding it from him only occasionally when she used it as a reward for him allowing her to hose him down. She did this when she believed the smell was creeping from the shed, across the backyard like a viscous ooze, into the house.
    When she’d done this for the first time, Selwyn had been with her for perhaps five weeks. She’d explained what she was going