Shark Arm by Phillip Roope & Kevin Meagher

Author:Phillip Roope & Kevin Meagher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2019-11-15T16:00:00+00:00

At 1.10 a.m., Constable Harold Casey was driving alone down Hickson Road in a patrol car. He saw a car standing near Hickson Steps with the headlights burning and the front passenger door open. Casey pulled up and got out into the freezing night with his torch. He could see the driver slumped forward, his forehead on the steering wheel, his hat resting on the back of his head. At first, Casey thought that the man was asleep. He went around to the open passenger door and shone his torch on the driver. The man’s hands were placed neatly on his knees, and blood was oozing from the left side of his thick grey coat. He looked as though he had composed himself for death. Casey felt for a pulse, but life was extinct. Reginald Holmes’s despair was over.

When her husband did not return by 9.30 p.m., Inie Holmes began to worry. By midnight she was frantic and rang Albert Stannard, asking if he knew where Reg might be. Stannard said that he had no idea, but Inie pressed him: ‘I thought he might have told you, as I know he saw you today.’ Stannard answered by saying that he had not seen Holmes since 2 p.m. that day—this was clearly untrue. He then offered to come around, but Inie declined. She was now so unnerved, she called her friend and neighbour, Eileen Cobb, to come and be with her, saying, ‘Reg has not come home yet, young Billy is walking in his sleep, and I am almost distracted.’

When Cobb arrived, she told Inie to call the police. Just before 1.30 a.m., Inie telephoned the C.I.B. and asked the operator to get either Matthews or Allmond to call her. Not long after, the phone rang and Inie picked it up, expecting it to be one of the detectives. Shockingly, it was a reporter from The Telegraph, asking whether she knew that her husband was involved in a car accident in the city. Distraught, Inie hung up. The phone rang again a few minutes later, and Cobb answered it. It was a sergeant at the Phillip Street Police Station, who coldly asked Cobb to inform Inie that her husband was dead, found shot in his car. They had not been bothered to send a man to deliver the news in person. Inie, now hysterical with grief, called Stannard, who said he would be ‘straight round’. True to his word, he arrived by car shortly after with his wife and a Mr Chapman, who was possibly his bodyguard.

Matthews and Allmond had been phoned at about 1.30 a.m. with the shattering news that Holmes was dead. They dressed and made their separate ways to Hickson Road, where reporters had already gathered at the crime scene. Leaving Dr Arthur Palmer, the government medical officer, to examine the body, they made their way across the Sydney Harbour Bridge to Holmes’s house. When they arrived at about 3 a.m., they found Inie, Stannard and the others assembled in the lounge room.

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