‘You’re an admirer of Churchill’s, I see,’ Martin says, making conversation.
‘Not at all. Pompous windbag. He gave us Gallipoli. And Singapore. Thanks to him I spent three years in and around Changi.’
‘I heard you were there. It’s why I wanted to talk to you.’
‘Long time ago now, son. Why the interest?’
‘I was very close to Max Fuller. I believe he and your daughter were working on a big story when they were murdered. It may have been connected to Changi.’
The old man smiles. It strikes Martin as an odd response. ‘You think they were murdered?’
‘I do.’
‘And you’re trying to find out why?’
‘That’s right.’
Again the smile, teeth unnaturally well aligned. ‘That’s good enough for me.’ The voice is reedy, but Martin can detect an underlying strength. ‘Do you know why I agreed to see you at such short notice?’
‘Not really.’
‘Right. Do you have a notepad and dictaphone with you? No? Here, use these. There’s a fresh tape and batteries.’ He hands Martin an old-fashioned micro-cassette recorder, a museum piece, a fresh notebook and pen. ‘Ready to start?’
‘Of course,’ says Martin, covering his surprise. He’d come prepared to ask questions, uncertain how to frame them to a man he’d imagined incapacitated by age and grief. Instead the old judge is taking the lead. Martin starts the cassette recording, duplicating the function with an app on his phone.
‘Good. Do you know anything of the big exposé my daughter was working on? What it was about?’
‘No.’
‘Well, let’s start at the beginning then. Have you ever in your journalistic exploits come across an organisation called the Mess?’
‘No. What is it?’
‘It’s why Elizabeth was working with Max Fuller. So listen.’ The old judge pauses for a moment, perhaps considering how to get to the core of his subject. ‘It started in Changi, almost by accident. We were just trying to survive, to keep body and soul together, and to keep our spirits up. I was just nineteen when Singapore fell. I’d only been there two weeks. I was a lieutenant, brittle, callow, ostensibly responsible for older and tougher men, men who had wives and children and experience. Imprisonment was hard, but not so hard for me, being an officer, albeit a junior one. The Japanese cared about such hierarchies. I became a firm friend of a young fellow my own age, Joe Murphy. It’s a long story, largely irrelevant. The important thing is that we survived, partly because Joe and I and a couple of others looked out for each other. We were mates. Good mates. It’s an overused expression these days, bowdlerised by advertising and politicians, but that’s what we were: mates. Bonded for life. You won’t understand, but you don’t have to.
‘The war ended, we were repatriated. I was keen to restart my life: I had escaped the trauma of the railway and the other atrocities, unlike so many of those poor devils. I went back to Sydney University, back to law. So did Joe Murphy. Life was full of promise. It was easy for me. My family was well off. A large property up in New England, cousins in the law. Joe relied on the Repatriation Board: it paid his fees and a living allowance, and he worked nights at a knitting mill in Chippendale. Then Joe came across a young bloke called Barry Diamond, a chap we had known briefly in Changi. Barry had lied about his age to enlist, got to Singapore in time for the Japs to overrun us. He was very young, very scared, no weight on him even before the privations began. Later, he suffered terribly on the railroad; he copped dysentery and malaria. We lost track of him, until Joe found him down and out, not far from Chippendale, down the road in Redfern. We took him out, gave him a decent feed. A week or two later, a few of us held a dinner in his honour, raised a few pounds to help him out. And that’s how it started. The Mess.’
‘Why was it called “the Mess”?’
‘Honestly, I couldn’t tell you. It was connected with Changi and the war. The whole defence of the Malaya Peninsula was a mess, Changi was a mess, the officers and men messed in together. Strange, isn’t it? I was one of the founders, but I don’t know. It’s just what we came to call ourselves.’
‘Sounds pretty innocuous to me,’ says Martin, unsure of where this is leading.
‘It was. Absolutely. It became a regular thing. We were different, you see, us ex-servicemen. We didn’t really fit into university life. There weren’t that many of us, and we were a bit older, of course, and we’d experienced all sorts of things. Some were traumatised by the war, had a hard time coping with the carefree life of their fellow students. Not me and Joe: we were the opposite. We’d lost years at the war, in the camps. We were hungry for life, eager to make up for lost time and not easily daunted. We’d stared down Jap guards; a university lecturer was unlikely to intimidate us. Anyway, the dining became a monthly event. Barry became a member, and we assisted him. Fed him up and got him healthy, found him somewhere to live, helped him through the last few years of school, got him a job. Later we got him into uni. We did
