A Thing of Blood by Robert Gott

his penance but headed for a side door. Before he reached it a voice called, shockingly loud in the respectful silence:
    ‘Mr Trezise!’
    Cunningham turned and met a priest who was coming towards him. He smiled and held out his hand. The priest shook it, and they walked together behind the enormous altar. By the time I got there they’d gone, but it was impossible to discover where. The cathedral seemed to me to be a rabbit warren of mysterious doors and side chapels.
    So Cunningham was really named Trezise. I wasn’t surprised that he’d given a false name at the hotel; no doubt he was married. Now I could begin the real work of finding out the information that Clutterbuck needed.
    With Cunningham, or more correctly, Trezise, occupied with the priest, I decided to make my way towards the address scribbled on Gretel Beech’s scrap of paper. It was a house in East Melbourne. With an hour to spare, I thought I’d walk the distance rather than spend money on a Red Top taxi or a tram. The walk would clear my head, and give me time to think about Gretel’s murder and Darlene’s kidnapping. I couldn’t shake the notion that there was something amiss there. Having just disposed of a body myself, I realised how difficult it would have been to have snatched Darlene and effectively made her vanish in only a few minutes. This was surely more than a single person was capable of achieving. Could an embittered woman thousands of miles north organise a gang of thugees to do her bidding in punishing the man who threw her over? It seemed unlikely.
    Perhaps it was Darlene’s life that needed to be examined, but this was too absurd. She was socially inept certainly, but not to the point of provoking someone to take her out of circulation by abduction. She was too drab and boring to attract the attention of professional ransom-raisers, if such people existed outside cheap Hollywood programmers. There had been no demands for a ransom thus far. If squeezing money from her nearest and dearest had been the intention, I imagined that her kidnappers would have been filled with despair when they spoke to her, or saw her in the harsh light of day. If I’d been one of them I would have argued for an immediate reduction in the asking price; realistically, I would have realised that, far from expecting payment, the kidnapping gang could possibly be held liable for cartage costs.
    I smiled to myself as my ruminations became more extravagant and unseemly, and arrived at my destination just before 11.00 a.m. It was a large house, double-storeyed, with a beautiful cast-iron railing around the upper veranda. It was, without doubt, a good address, and an unlikely rendezvous point, at this hour of the day, for a prostitute and her client. I rang the bell. The woman who answered the door was obviously the help. She wasn’t wearing a uniform, but the lady of this house would not have been seen dead in such ill-fitting attire, made entirely of shoddy.
    ‘I’m here on behalf of Miss Gretel Beech,’ I said.
    ‘Wait in the hall,’ she said. ‘Mr Wilks won’t be happy.’
    She climbed a broad staircase and entered a room off the upper landing. A babble of voices escaped when she did so. A man in his fifties emerged and came down the stairs towards me. He was wearing a ridiculous beret and a pleated smock. All that was missing was a carefully trimmed moustache and a French accent, and the cliché would have been complete.
    ‘Not again,’ he said in broad Australian vowels, which immediately mollified the effect of his costume. ‘Gretel is so unreliable. This is the second time she’s done this and she swore solemnly it would never happen again. The ladies will be so disappointed. They were looking forward to a woman this week. We had a bloke last week.’
    I had no idea what he was talking about but it seemed wise to behave as if I sympathised with whatever inconvenience Gretel’s absence had caused him.
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, but