By all accounts, theywerewell received; at least, they were for the most part. Farmer McKenzie, next door, put on a show of holding a grudge about the sale, grumbling about the indignity of a “Johnny-come-lately” snatching the opportunity from a local, but that was “just his way.” As police would hear more than once, “He’s a prickly old dog, Hamish McKenzie, but he’s all bark.”
Thomas Turner had fallen in love with the romance of growing grapes and making wine when he was hiding on the property of a vintner in the French countryside on his way toward the Free Zone and, once home, threw himself into the task with formidable energy. His knowledge might have been lacking, but his enthusiasm was unrivalled. He didn’t always take the advice he sought, and he certainly set other fruit growers’ tongues wagging with some of the unorthodox decisions he made—“He’d read some book when he was abroad,” reported Mr. Walter Hansen of the co-op, “by a fellow called Steiner who had ideas about ‘biodynamics’”—but he overcame early setbacks and was starting to make real progress.
There was a degree of consternation in the community when he suddenly pulled out every vine and put cattle on his land instead. Whether farming or weaving, sausage or cheese making, brewing or blacksmithing, there was a “way of doing things” in Tambilla. The proprietress at the local grocery shop, Mrs. Meg Summers, still held the book of recipes that accompanied her maternal forebears aboard theZebrawhen it set sail under the stewardship of Captain Hahn, and it was said, with more than passing solemnity, that no one in Tambilla baked aRoggenbrotloaf as well as she.
Mr. Hansen scratched his head as he pondered the matter of Thomas Turner’s abrupt change of heart. “Winemaking can be a fiddly business,” he said at length. “More of an art than a science. And his ideas were strange to say the least. But he was turning things around. He’d have got there in the end. No, I couldn’t understand him altering tack like that. I thought he was committed.”
Mr. Hansen was not mistaken. Thomas Turnerhadbeen wholly devoted to his ambition of making wine—right up until he wasn’t. Like so many men of his type, Turner suffered the dreamer’s curse: the moment one grand plan came close to fruition, another bright lightstarted flickering on the horizon. By 1959 his interest in a life on the land was waning.
Indeed, in the weeks leading up to Christmas that year, Thomas Turner was on the other side of the globe, chasing a new dream. As the summer sun began to rise over the line of gums on the highest ridge of his fields on Willner Road, the wintry evening darkness of the day before was drawing around London and Mr. Turner, having enjoyed a long, hot bath in the hotel’s gleaming tub, was now polishing his silver cuff links and straightening his three-piece suit, taking one last approving look at himself in the Dorchester mirror before trotting downstairs and across the lobby, out through the big glass doors onto Park Lane, on his way to dine with a pair of investors whose support he hoped to gain for a new scheme of “boundless possibility.”
And lucky it was, too, the townspeople were all quick to agree, when they gathered in the Tambilla Hotel and Diamond’s Tearoom in the days and weeks that followed, for not only was he spared the immediate horror of the discovery, but he was also shielded from the hot flares of speculation and suspicion that fired up afterward. Everybody knew that the first person police looked to when a woman and her children turned up dead was the husband and father. So it was that, even as his family lay dead in the West Terrace morgue, the assessment of the townsfolk, when talk turned to Thomas Turner, was how lucky he was, the poor, poor man; how lucky that he hadn’t been home.
Daniel Miller, January 1960
Jess let out the breath she’d been holding. What had she just read? She scrolled quickly back to the top and skimmed the article again. The name of the man, the name of the house—both of those were right. Thomas Turner had been born in Sydney and he’d had a doting younger sister. Nora had mentioned something about him being a war hero. But the rest of it was wrong: weirdly, specifically, intricately wrong. Nora’s brother had lived in London, he’d had a house thereand a wife, but he hadn’t had any children—let alone children in a morgue.
Maybe this was a piece of fiction, the biographical similarities some sort of strange coincidence, or a psychedelic sixties mash-up of fact and fiction?
Jess added the word “Tambilla” to her search and then, for good measure, “murder,” and watched as a new page of responses appeared. She scanned their titles, bracing herself against the impact of words like “infamous” and “secret” and “tragedy.”
Spoiled for choice, she opened the first entry: a brief post on a blog calledAustralian Historical Crime Chronicles.
Turner Family Tragedy
On Christmas Eve 1959, one of the hottest days of the summer, the Turner family of South Australia left their grand Georgian house “Halycon” and carried the makings of a picnic across their paddocks and down to a creek that ran through the property. Isabel Turner and her four children—the youngest, Thea, still an infant—were well-known within the Adelaide Hills village of Tambilla, and it was not unusual for them to be spotted outdoors enjoying the beautiful natural surroundings. On this summery day, they had set up camp beneath the shade of an old willow that grew on the edge of the bank where the creek widened to form a water hole. The bodies of Mrs. Turner and her three eldest children were found late in the afternoon by a passerby who raised the alarm. Baby Thea was missing from her crib.
A high-profile detective from Adelaide, Sergeant Peter Duke, who had previously worked on the notorious Somerton Body case, was called out to assist local officers with their inquiries, and an extensive investigation was launched. Despite local fears that amurderer was on the loose, police were able to determine that the crime’s perpetrator was closer to home. A coronial inquest was held in July 1960, seven months after the deaths, at which testimony was given by numerous witnesses. The South Australian coroner, Mr. T.R. Sterling, found that the family had died from poisoning, though the type and source could not be determined. The case was ruled a murder-suicide, the coroner satisfied, after hearing evidence, that the poison had been administered by Mrs. Turner herself.
The infant’s remains were discovered in 1979, only a mile or so away from where the bodies of her mother and siblings had been found. Dog prints had been detected at the picnic site, and the coroner heard evidence that a pack of dingoes had been active in the area during the spring and summer of 1959. Expert evidence was mixed, but the coroner accepted that dingoes, coming upon an unprotected infant, were capable of removing the small body from the scene, and indeed were likely to have done so. It was a scenario that was to gain attention in Australia after the death of baby Azaria Chamberlain during a family camping trip at Uluru in 1980.
Greedy now for more information, Jess clicked on the next link, and then the next, reading each page faster than the one before. Aside from minor differences, the information was the same. A woman named Isabel Turner was found to have killed herself and her children. Her husband, who was traveling in the UK for business at the time, never returned to Australia. His name was Thomas Turner and his house in the Hills, known locally and historically as “the Wentworth place,” had been rechristened “Halcyon” by the Turners. He had died in London in 1988, and only after his death was his body returned home to be buried in the family plot in Sydney.
It was Nora’s brother. His name, his house, his residence in London, and the year of his death: every detail matched. The house named Halcyon had been in South Australia, not England, and there had been another wife, daughters and a son, too, before he moved to London and began his new life there.
Jess clicked through to Google Images. A single photograph circulated on the internet, released at the time of the tragedy presumably. She wondered who had handed it over, and what they’d have thought had they known it would still be floating around in cyberspace sixty years later, giving the family an uncanny virtual life after death. It had been taken in 1955, four years prior to their deaths and some time before the youngest child was born, so there were only three children pictured. The image was black and white, and the resolution wasn’t great, but it was clear enough to make out their faces. The family was on holiday in Sydney. If the background of the Harbor Bridge hadn’t made that obvious, the caption beneath the photo said as much.
Thomas and Isabel Turner were standing together, his arm around her back, hers in turn resting on the shoulders of their eldest child, a girl named Matilda, who wore black Mary Janes with white ankle socks and clutched a small purse. Two younger children stood in front of their parents, the boy sporting a peaked cap, the girl with ribbons tied at the ends of two long plaits. John Turner had his hands pushed casually into his trouser pockets and flashed a broad gap-toothed smile, whereas Evelyn Turner, while dressed as finely as her siblings, had not yet learned to pose prettily for the camera. She held her hands together, playing with her fingers, and had tucked her right shoulder behind her brother’s. It seemed she had been caught on the edge of a thought; she was frowning distractedly at something beyond the camera lens.
Jess could see flashes of Nora in their faces. There was no doubting that these were her nieces and nephew. Matilda, John, and Evelyn. It was sobering to witness this family in a shared, happy moment, each member unaware of what the future had in store.
She shifted her focus away from the children and onto their mother. During the investigation and after the coroner returned his findings, Isabel had become something of a cause célèbre: the latest in a list of that most scandalizing of figures, the beautiful female killer. Like her youngest daughter, Mrs. Turner had glanced sideways at the moment the photo was taken, but Jess nonetheless took in the attractive features of her profile, the tilt of the chin, and the intelligent-seeming gaze.
A kookaburra somewhere outside in the breaking dawn threw his cackle across the sky and Jess felt a sudden frisson. Never in her wildest imaginings had she suspected that a scandal of this type lurked within her family. Nora had never said anything to suggest the possibility—not a word. In fact, it now seemed clear to Jess that her grandmother had gone out of her way to keep the terrible tragedy hidden.
But it must have impacted her life significantly, even if it had happened far away from Darling House. Nora had adored her brother. Had she been close to his wife, to Isabel Turner, as well? Jess was impatient to know, and she could feel other questions rising inside her, too. Every investigative instinct she had honed during the last two decades as a journalist was alert. She needed to find out more about Isabel Turner, the woman in the photo, and precisely what had led up to that afternoon by the creek.
Her very next thought, and one that she had been having in various forms for the better part of her life, was that Nora would know.
She had to speak to her grandmother.
14
But Nora was still asleep when Jess arrived at the hospital. She tried to get a sense from the nurse as to when her grandmother might be expected to wake, but the other woman only noted that Nora had passed the night without disturbance. An element of restraint in her manner gave Jess pause. “That’s an improvement, right?” she asked.
“It’s better than the alternative,” said the nurse.
Despite the cryptic reply, Jess could see for herself that her grandmother was looking better. She was still impossibly small and pale, tucked neatly beneath the white hospital sheet, but her expression was easier than it had been, and the heart monitor was counting out a steady beat.
