The Woman Who Knew Too Little Read online

  PRAISE FOR OLIVIA WEARNE’S

  THE GRAND TOUR

  ‘Laugh out loud funny. If you love characters of a certain age behaving very, very badly, read this book.’

  Victoria Purman, bestselling Australian author of The Nurses’ War

  ‘A great debut novel packed with crazy characters, this is an entertaining story of growing older and coming up trumps.’

  Tricia Stringer, bestselling author of Birds of a Feather

  ‘Olivia Wearne’s compelling and witty novel unveils the frailties and passions of a complex array of characters … The perfect book to take on your own Grand Tour.’

  Jane Coverdale, author of The Jasmine Wife

  ‘An astutely observed, slyly funny, adventure-packed Thelma and Louise–type romp—with a significantly better ending. Put simply: The Grand Tour is the ultimate escapism without having to pack a suitcase. In telling the story of two ordinary Aussies whose lives unexpectedly intertwine for extraordinary reasons, Wearne explores the families we have, and the families we choose.’

  Mamamia

  OLIVIA WEARNE began her writing career as a screenwriter and has several film credits to her name. After receiving a Masters in creative writing she went on to write The Grand Tour, which was published in 2020. Born and raised in Melbourne, Olivia now resides in Ballarat, Victoria, with her filmmaker husband and two sons.

  Also by Olivia Wearne

  The Grand Tour

  www.harpercollins.com.au/hq

  For Harvey and Otto

  Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.

  Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

  CONTENTS

  Praise

  Also by Olivia Wearne

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER ONE

  My parents were initially amused by my decision to join the police force. They already had two children satisfactorily married; if their stroppy middle child wanted to try her hand at something unusual, then so be it. As my mother told the neighbours, frequently within my hearing, ‘Where better to find an available husband?’

  ‘Cop or crim?’ I’d once asked.

  ‘Either—or perhaps a criminal—it pays better!’ Mum and the neighbour had cackled.

  I certainly didn’t look the part of a female officer, with my damp brown eyes and serviceable chestnut waves that should have carried a warning: Frizzes When Wet. My childlike overbite made me appear harmless, if not a little dim. Soft as I may seem, I’ve been told I’ve a tongue like a razor strop. And I can walk for twenty miles on nothing but a cup of tea, and frequently have cause to do so.

  My parents Noel and Wilma had been progressive enough to ensure that my older sister Martha and I completed our School Certificate, leaving me with more job options than most career-minded young women. Still, none of the available professions struck me as being sufficiently significant or unique. I wanted to do something exceptional. I’ve a fiercely competitive nature that Mum claims is my cross to bear. Which seems hypocritical, coming from a dedicated midwife. Possibly she’s jaded because her career was pulled out from underneath her. My father used to joke that he and Wilma fought for space at the sink of a night to wash the blood off their hands (no cause for alarm, Dad’s a butcher).

  The main obstacle to my ambitions, other than being of the fairer sex, was my lack of any singular ability. I was competent over consummate, doomed to come in second place. My childhood brass bedhead was decked with red ribbons, the runner-up’s blushing shade. Martha, having promptly produced three offspring for her dentist husband, assured me children would quench the desire for recognition, replace it with a deeper satisfaction: the creation of life; nurturing whelps into able citizens. I remain unconvinced, particularly as Martha has a desultory hands-off approach to my nieces and nephew, and conversely complains that parenting is a yawn.

  Mother considered nursing to be the obvious choice. I was reluctantly inclined to agree. I’m diligent and obstinate, no pushover for exploitative doctors or belligerent patients. Yet six months’ training confirmed my reservations. I had no yen for emptying bedpans or lancing boils. By that stage I’d seen Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, the top-billing Saturday matinee at the Theatre Royal. I instantly fancied myself as a fast-talking career gal. I ditched nursing to try my hand at secretarial college, happening to miss by a year the commencement of the war, where, as a nurse, I might have met with more dramatic ailments. I soon decided typing was the pits. I abandoned the course, relinquishing the dream that it would somehow open a door into journalism.

  At my dad’s urging, impertinently backed by my younger brother Kenneth, I enrolled in teachers’ college. My father and brother agreed the family know-it-all should have a pulpit from which to preach. Despite my patchy history, I was immediately accepted. The war was in its infancy, and though it was anticipated that the Krauts would be expediently dealt with, conscription meant staff were in short supply. I earned my qualification and made it as far as a classroom full of jug-eared, pasty-faced ten-year-olds before a happening on a tram rerouted me down yet another career path.

  The couple sat across from me: a bullish man with a pale, knobbed head and bright devious eyes and a woman with an unexceptional face masked by the serene countenance of the unflappable. I noticed that he intentionally thumped into his partner with every jolt and judder of the tram. She elbowed him roughly back. There was something childish and brutal about the routine that seemed pleasing to them both. The man caught me watching and gave a wink. I fancied thrusting my funny bone into his rib cage too. Then I spotted the handcuffs he wore, bridging the crevasse between his knees, where his elbows rested. The tram shuddered to a halt outside the police station. The woman, in a belted olive knit dress with pleated skirt, jerked the prisoner to his feet. Passengers skimmed their shoes in under their benches to permit them access down the aisle. It was a revelation. Not the fact of a woman apprehending a man, but the respect that her actions inspired.

  I had found my calling. The police force was the perfect fit for my high ideals.

  Any grandiose illusions I might have entertained concerning my choice of career were scotched on the first day of training. It was drummed home to the handful of new recruits that women police were essentially high-level social workers. The principal went on to impress the importance of our work. How crucial we were in supporting Adelaide’s underprivileged. In spite of my misgivings, it would have felt despicable to welch out after that.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I had a knack for patrolling the beaches. I knew how to strike just the right balance of joviality and authority with the offenders I encountered. I usually referred to the conditions: surely it would be warmer, cooler, perhaps more comfortable, to take the liaison indoors—very casual, very charming. I aimed my torch at the sand so that embarrassed lovers could locate their shoes, and sometimes clothes, while still maintaining a degree of anonymity. The couples were generally agreeable, accepting they’d been caught out. A juvie was a different kettle of fish. If the lass looked underage, then I became stern, almost threatening. I’d ask to see the man’s identification and slip it inside my handbag for safekeeping then escort them both to the station. The man would be charged and the minor returned to her parents. I’m not in the business of penalising naïve or needy girls.

  Gwen took the job of upholding the moral virtue of Adelaide rather more seriously than I. She was partial to ambush and would flash her torch beam into lovers’ startled faces, blinding them for as long as was necessary for them to presume their image had been committed to her memory. She never missed an opportunity for sermonising about respectability and licentiousness.

  No one was better at taking down a felon than Eunice. The sixty-year-old had brought men twice her size to their knees in three ju-jitsu moves (defensive combat being an important part of our training) with her brown felt cloche still in place. Eunice was a drawcard for night patrols. We could all breathe a little easier with her by our side.

  I was with Fiona on the night we saw the unknown man. Fiona was a good officer: meticulous, as Gwen or Eunice might say in praise. To a fault, I thought. I found her pedantry made her inflexible. Fiona had been an English teacher for the better part of her forty year
s, but a stint as a driver in the air force had broadened her horizons. Six months after the war ended, her husband had died during an appendectomy, leaving her with a teenage son to rear single-handed. She applied and was accepted into the police force, where her age and prior experience counted as assets.

  Despite the lateness of the hour, Somerton Beach was still warm, the final night of spring. Three hours’ walking had taken its toll. My nylons chafed against my inner thighs, my arches ached, the dry beach sand kept tumbling in over the sides of my shoes, making tiny dunes beneath my feet. We’d finished our patrol and were returning to the office. The last tram was due to depart in five minutes. I was longing for the staffroom’s green chairs with their solid wooden legs and vinyl pads for buttocks and back. I was hoping someone had left me some nut loaf to accompany my final cup of tea of the day.

  A monochrome figure lay propped against the sea wall only metres from the wooden steps leading up to the esplanade. In the silky moonlight I could just make out that he was semi-supine, his legs stretched out in front. Fiona directed her torch beam at his face as we drew in. ‘Intoxicated,’ she concluded. Charging him would mean supporting his weight back into town and across to the male cells.

  I was in favour of leaving him to sleep it off. I scanned the area around him, my beam sweeping the sand like a searchlight. ‘He looks to have finished whatever he was drinking. There’s no sign of a bottle.’

  ‘Taken by someone else, most like.’

  ‘He’s well presented, doesn’t seem like a troublemaker. I expect he’ll wake with the sun and make himself scarce.’

  Fiona lifted her gaze to the crippled children’s home looming on the ridge above, beyond the streetlamp’s waxy glow. The building’s Victorian facade was as dour as her expression. ‘I’d rest better knowing he was gone.’

  I reminded my colleague of her mother-in-law, who wouldn’t turn in until Fiona’s key clicked in the lock. It was a dirty tactic, but I was longing for bed. She switched off her torch and moved onward, striking out across the sand like an officious water bird.

  Word of our sighting was never leaked beyond the force—a confidence that caused Fiona no end of relief and compunction. I was equally remorseful, only my regret wasn’t due to carelessness but, rather, missed opportunity. The thought we’d knowingly passed him by would plague me. I doubt we’d have been in time to offer salvation, but the key to the mystery may have been within reach.

  Then again, I consoled myself, if I had all the answers, what would be the fun in that?

  CHAPTER THREE

  I heard nothing more of the man on the beach until sundown the following day. I was patrolling Victoria Park, moving the prostitutes along, always with an eye cocked for minors needing to be sent home. I’d received a few comments from admiring streetwalkers complimenting my linen suit, teal with a white cuff at the elbows. The women police branch maintained the standards set by the original female officers, who eschewed uniforms, believing civvies would make us seem trustworthy and more approachable. The only acknowledgement of our profession was a tiny enamel badge worn on the underside of our collar.

  Most of the prostitutes were amenable to my request to relocate, graciously accepting they’d broken the rules and happy to oblige—for the time being. I was a woman of the night in much the same way they were, audacious enough to brave the streets as a means to earn a dollar. We all had rocks in our heads; unable to live an ordinary life for various reasons. Except where I naïvely considered myself invincible, these women had faced the worst and found they could endure it. Only Sally was proving recalcitrant. She didn’t want to leave her park’s-edge position for fear it would be usurped. It was a sultry evening, the perfect weather to rouse her clients’ libidos. The fact that I was patrolling and intended sending all the girls away meant little. She pointed to a platinum blonde, crossing the grass towards us, to emphasise her argument: ‘The seagulls are circling.’

  Margo approached, her eyes as beady as the glass pellets in the face of her fox stole. ‘There’s a dead man in the park.’ The words slinked through a crack in her crimson cupid’s bow. She wasn’t sounding the alarm. It was a matter of interest, a juicy tidbit. None of the park’s nocturnal inhabitants, the down-and-outers and the out-of-towners, had bothered to report the incident.

  I was the only officer on the scene so I immediately ordered the onlookers back. They blithely obeyed. They could just as well enjoy the spectacle from five paces, as curious to see how I handled myself as they were about the assault. I foraged through my handbag until I located my notepad and crouched alongside the body. I intended being both thorough and prompt in jotting down what I saw, because a male foot patrol might come along at any moment—they’d stepped up their policing since the immigrants began flooding in—and they’d surely appropriate a potential murder for themselves.

  As I was writing up my description of the body it occurred to me that I should grab some witness statements. The corpse didn’t have anywhere else to be. My hamstrings shrieked as I rose from my crouch—I asked too much of my calves in the space of a working day.

  I crossed to the posse of spectators. ‘Did anyone see what happened?’

  A ripple of chuckles broke the group’s silent surface.

  ‘Go on,’ a man’s voice jeered. ‘Someone help her out.’

  Another voice, male, syrupy accent, probably Italian: ‘You’d best be asking him, darlin.”

  ‘Who?’ I scanned the gathering.

  The man, bronzed and beaked, definitely Mediterranean, jerked his thumb at a nearby elm tree. ‘The bloke who done it.’

  The offender, who I later learned was Seb Suzela, sat at the base of the tree. He was muttering to himself and with every unintelligible complaint, his fingers twitched. At first I took him for a German. He wearily corrected me, having reconciled himself to the misnomer. He was from Austria.

  ‘A witness tells me you’re responsible,’ I said.

  Suzela dropped his blistered lower lip and grunted an admission. Then he began explaining, falling in and out of Austrian when his English failed him.

  I flipped the cover of my notepad, which I hadn’t bothered to open, expecting belligerence and unresponsiveness. ‘Hang on a tick … Can you start at the beginning?’

  The confessor paused, rocking from side to side, nudging his tailbone in closer to the trunk. In the silence that followed, I presumed I’d lost him. I cursed myself for allowing him a moment for reflection.

  ‘You ready?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’ I bounced my head. ‘Yes, go on.’

  Suzela claimed he’d stabbed the old bastard (I’d pinned the victim as late seventies, possibly eighties) to make him shut up. They’d been staying at the Salvation Army shelter. The victim was after cigarettes and somehow got it into his head that Suzela was the man to ask. He’d pestered and pestered until Suzela, meaning to silence him, grabbed a knife from the communal kitchen. As the assailant spoke, his fingers kept up their jerky accompaniment, as if tapping out his confession in Morse code. I was having trouble ascertaining the time frame, uncertain whether Suzela had chased his victim to the park or come looking for him there.

  Suzela was tiring, more Austrian than English in his stream of consciousness. ‘Old, old,’ he kept saying (presumably of his victim) as though this absolved him of the crime, or at least diminished the severity.

  Two boyish constables parted the onlookers. One of them was holding a bloodied knife, which he’d picked up in passing. The appearance of the murder weapon threw me. How had I missed it?

  ‘Does someone want to tell us what’s going on?’ the ginger one asked.

  I may as well have been another vagrant.

  ‘This fella killed the other fella,’ the Italian announced, having sauntered up behind them.

  I explained that I was in the middle of taking his confession.

  ‘Right.’ The second officer winked, his pocked cheeks like pitted rock. ‘We’ ll take him across to the station and make it official.’

  ‘I’ve written it down.’ I presented him with the scrawl inside my notepad.

  ‘Have ya? Never mind.’