The Holiday Murders by Robert Gott

liked getting his hands dirty.
    After lunch, Mitchell led his guests into the front room for more drinks. There were no landscapes on the walls in this room. Instead, there were three paintings, all of them of nudes. Above the mantelpiece and dominating the room was a large picture of three women, two of them naked, standing before a seated, naked man. Jones walked up to it.
    ‘ The Judgement of Paris ,’ Magill said.
    ‘That’s me,’ Peggy said, pointing unnecessarily to the brazenly full-frontal figure standing closest to the male. One arm was raised above her head while the other supported the cloth she’d obviously just removed in order to reveal herself to Paris. The face — and, Jones supposed, the body — was Peggy’s.
    ‘It’s a copy from Adolf Ziegler,’ Magill said.
    The unclothed Paris was clearly Magill, but Jones doubted that his suit covered quite so heroic a body.
    ‘The body is pure beauty,’ Magill said. ‘It has been traduced by degenerate artists who think art happens when you hold a mirror up to nature. Art, Ptolemy, has nothing to do with reality. The job of art is to transcend what is real, to create something that’s eternal.’
    Jones looked at The Judgement of Paris again and tried to make sense of what Magill had said, but he couldn’t relate it to what sat above the mantelpiece. All he felt was a familiar, resentful uncertainty about his own intellect. He hated Magill for arousing this in him, and to demonstrate that he was unintimidated, leaned on the mantel and faced the room. It was an assertion of his physical presence.
    ‘How many members have you got?’ he asked.
    Startled by this sudden digression from his fascinating exposition of fascist aesthetics, Magill said, ‘None, officially.’
    As soon as these words had been uttered, an astonishing shift occurred in the room. The polite, almost deferential, but somehow frightening stranger seemed to have taken charge. It was perhaps an illusion, and only momentary, but Jones was now at the heart of what remained of the Victorian branch of Australia First, and there would be no getting rid of him. If there was to be any getting rid of anybody, he would be the one to do it. After a brief conversation over brandy — a conversation that made him feel confident he’d got the measure of these dilettantes — Jones announced that he had to leave. Margaret, Arthur, and Peggy feigned regret that he needed to leave so soon, and Mitchell went with him into the hallway.
    ‘There’s a great deal we haven’t touched on,’ he said. ‘We’re committed to expressing, to living, ideal lives, Ptolemy, and we … well, there are aspects of how we realise those ideals that we don’t expect everyone to follow, but we encourage people to join us.’
    ‘What are you talking about?’ Jones asked, his manners now abandoned, and his tone abrupt and expressing frank irritation.
    Magill handed Jones a book in brown wrapping.
    ‘This should explain it. I’m sure you’ll find it interesting. Do you read German?’
    ‘A little. Enough.’
    ‘I think you’ll get the drift. It’s our philosophy, or one aspect of it. It’ll help you understand us better, and that’s important if we’re to work together.’ Jones took the book without any show of gratitude. He hoped it wasn’t Mein Kampf . He already had a copy of it.
    Magill escorted Jones to the front gate.
    ‘I can see that you’re very interested in Australia First,’ he said. Jones nodded. He’d achieved something if Magill really thought that Jones was keen on Australia First. What he had faith in was Magill’s money; and when he managed to get his hands on that, he’d give Australia First something proper to believe in. He put his hands in his pockets and headed towards Riversdale Road.
    When Magill re-entered the house, he found Arthur and Margaret in the hallway.
    ‘I don’t like that Jones character,’ Arthur said. ‘There’s something wrong with him.’
    ‘He frightens