Miss Lucy Finkleton had been due to finish an hour before, but had stayed put when the new sergeant, Liam Kelly, and Constables Doyle and Jerosch leapt into action. She’d been left with a flurry of tasks to accomplish—telephone calls to the police in Adelaide, instructions to the ambulance service—but since then had been at a loss: pacing, peering through the windows, working herself into a state of some agitation as she awaited further word as to what was going on. She wasn’t supposed to use the telephone herself for fear of tying up the line, but in truth the need to tell someone what she knew was burning inside her like a fever.
When the telephone began to shrill at ten past six, she darted behind the desk and picked up on the second ring. “Maud,” she said, when she heard who it was at the other end. The next words tumbled out like convicts relishing release. “There’s been an accident. They all left here in such a hurry. I had no idea what was happening, but I put a call through to Mrs. Hughes.”
“Mrs. Hughes?” said Maud. Esther Hughes was one of the few townspeople who bore the honor—or ignominy—of having been neither born nor bred in Tambilla. A Sydneysider who’d “gone west” to work as agoverness on a sheep station out beyond the Darling River, she’d met there a serious young solicitor from Adelaide, entering an earnest and chaste courtship before marrying and moving south. Discretion being central to her nature, she was rarely implicated in any of the happenings of the town, and to hear her mentioned now was a great surprise. “What on earth does Mrs. Hughes have to do with it?”
“It was her husband that telephoned the police. He was one of the first to find them.”
“Them?”
“The Turner family. Mrs. Turner and the children. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Oh, Maud, it’s ghastly. They’re all dead, the lot of them.”
Mrs. Landry, who had abandoned her post at the front of the church, was standing at the doorway to the vestry, not yet brave enough to step across the threshold. She watched as Maud lowered the telephone receiver silently back into its cradle and finally, when she could stand the suspense no longer, ventured, “Well?”
Maud McKendry was staring at the desk, trying to make sense of the shocking news. Being caught short of words was not a condition with which she often suffered, but on this occasion, she was silenced.
“Maud! Please.”
Mrs. McKendry took ahold of herself. It was her responsibility, she knew, to pass on what she’d learned.
Mrs. Landry’s hand leapt to her mouth as she listened, and there it stayed, long after Mrs. McKendry had finished.
Like that the pair remained, frozen as still as the wooden figures in the nativity scene at the front of the church. Joyous strains of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” drifted through the glass doors from the church: the choir were rehearsing for the service, and the heartbreaking wonder of innocent voices raised in song mingled with the horror of the news.
It might have seemed that things could not get worse. But when the clock had turned a full wretched minute, Mrs. Landry remembered. “Oh my,” she gasped. “Oh, Maud. Mrs. Turner’s sister-in-law. I ran into her during the week. She’s staying through until she has the baby.”
Maud McKendry sank into the reverend’s chair, the full weight of the afternoon’s events descending on her. “That poor woman,” she said. “What news to receive. And in her delicate condition.”
It was 6:30 p.m., and the first drops of rain had just begun to fall when Sergeant Kelly and Probationary Constable Jerosch knocked on the door of the Turner family home.
Inside, Nora woke from a strange, nonsensical dream to the stifling atmosphere of a summer’s day that had lost its light but retained its heat. In the dusky gloaming, it took a moment for her to remember where she was, let alone to realize what had woken her, but then came another knock, and she eased herself from the bed.
As she made her way along the dim landing and carefully down the stairs, she wondered why Isabel and the children were still not back. The house was held in a state of unmistakable quiescence. Bedroom doors stood sullenly ajar, objects maintained the place and posture of that morning’s abandonment, lamps and lightbulbs were cold and dull. Through the large window on the landing where the staircase peeled off at right angles to reach the bedroom level, she could see that the weather had come in as forecast. The pewter sky was heavy with intent, and the landscape, the rolling hills, and the silver-trunked gums, already darkened by the dusk, were further smudged by rain’s approach.
Beyond the glass panes in the front door, Nora made out two shadowy forms on the porch. She knew at once that it wasn’t Isabel or any of the children—there was none of the attendant noise she would have expected from her nieces and nephew—but assumed that the guests were some of the neighbors bringing over a basketof vegetables from their garden, or a home-cooked pie, or a little Christmas cheer. Or perhaps it was a delivery from town, something Isabel had ordered for the dinner and forgotten to mention.
Whatever the case, as she reached the Bessarabian rug at the bottom of the stairs, Nora was experiencing no unsettlement beyond that of being newly awoken and heavily pregnant in a hot climate. Indeed, it was the pregnancy alone that occupied her thoughts as she crossed toward the front door. The baby had shifted into an awkward position over breakfast, one foot stuck beneath her rib, and try as she might, Nora could not get her to budge.
“You might have found a more comfortable position, little one,” she whispered, prodding gently at her rib cage. “Not even born and you’re bending me to your will.”
A big kick came then from the baby, as if in response, and Nora smiled to herself as she opened the door to admit the visitors. She would later recollect that this little back-and-forth with her baby was her last happy moment.
***
18
Sydney
December 12, 2018
Jess sat with the book open on her lap, captivated by the image of young Nora sharing communion with baby Polly in her last seconds of innocence.
Miller’s final scene drove home the great trauma her grandmother had suffered, the horrific tragedy that had suffused the arrival of her long-awaited child. No wonder it was on her mind now—it had probably never left. The scene also showed the intimate way in which Daniel Miller had come to know his “characters.” Jess recognized Nora: even the dialogue at the bottom of the staircase felt familiar to her, as somethingherNora would have said.
Of note, too, was Miller’s handling of Reverend Lawson’s role in the investigation. The reverend had told police that Mrs. Turner came to see him in a poor state—drawn, not sleeping, weighed down with worry, and talking about “doing something” that would deprive her children of their mother. But he’d held information back in his initial interviews; Miller’s book said as much.
For starters, as the book revealed, Reverend Lawson had advised Isabel that, whatever she was planning, she should find a way to take her children with her. Jess was skeptical as to whether that would have been enough for the police to consider the intelligence a breakthrough: it was possible that in 1959, when evidence gathering was comparatively limited, police were more convinced by the oral testimony of close contacts, particularly from a minister of God in a small-town setting. But this was a murder case. One would expect that to find a woman guilty of murder required a significant quantity of proof.
There must have been more to it, something Miller had left out of his book, but which he’d taken to police—to Sergeant Duke, whom Nancy said he’d come to know well. Maybe Miller had even convinced the reverend to give evidence at the inquest. According to the internet, the coroner had suppressed the vital testimony; it wasn’t hard to imagine that such an arrangement might have been struck on account of a clergyman being reluctant to be seen to divulge his parishioners’ confessions.
