by Judy Johnson
‘Do you know what a grille is?’ he asks.
‘No.’
‘It’s a piece of metal with boxes cut out of it. When it’s held up against a note that has the same dimensions, these boxes correspond to words on the page. Those words are the message.’
He hands me a piece of burlap. I can feel a hard rectangle beneath it.
‘You will continue to receive notes. Take them back to your room and decipher them using the grille. Memorise the message, then burn it. Be sure to disperse the ashes. Henceforth, you will come to the wharf at ten o’clock every Saturday morning. Inspect the Chinamen’s fish baskets. A man will approach you. He wears a dirty white neckerchief. He’ll ask you, conversationally, which fish you think you might buy that morning. You will tell him you fancy the flathead. He will suggest the flounder because of the brightness of its eyes. You are then to recite the message verbatim. Do not look him in the face, and he will not look at you. I leave it to you to ensure that bystanders don’t overhear you. Repeat the message until he leaves; he won’t go until he’s memorised it or he feels it is unsafe to continue. If he tells you that none of the fish are any good, you may take it to mean something untoward has happened and you should not speak at all. You will then try again the following Saturday. Do you understand?’
‘Yes.’ But my head is spinning. ‘When will I see you again?’
‘In about six weeks time.’
He pulls something from his pocket and hands it to me. Pound notes by their feel.
‘Do a good job and there’ll be more where that came from. Oh, and another thing.’ He stands, dusts off his trousers and looks down. ‘If you value your life, don’t lose the grille.’
‘Is that what happened to your other decoder?’ Cotton wadding’s jamming up my throat. ‘Did he lose his grille?’
But I’m talking to myself. His back is to me, walking away into the night.
4
Story plots are like black pudding,
better thickened with blood than water.
From the secret diary of Mary Watson
9TH NOVEMBER 1879
The next night is a long one and I’m glad when my shift is over. I negotiate the obstacle course home without incident. The boarding house has tall windows and a breezy verandah. In my stuffy room, I coax the lantern to a panting flame. Strip off. Dab my mosquito bites with a piece of rag soaked in the pale-blue sear of meths. I’ve just unlaced my boots, taken them off and slipped on my nightdress, when there’s a squeal outside the window.
I peer through a gap in the curtains. By the soft flutter of gaslight, I watch a man’s bare backside jerking up and down in the middle of Charlotte Street. Two fists thump half-heartedly above it. The fists belong to Nicole, one of Charley’s girls. I can tell by the high, shrieking voice. She’s on her back on the sodden ground, petticoats around her waist. She’s forgotten the refined French accent Charley’s schooled her in and swears in fluent Sydney Sailor. ‘Ah, get orf, ya fucken robber! Ya promised ya’d pay me first!’
I drop the curtain, pull a flannel from the drawer, sprinkle it with a wet forest of eucalyptus oil and hold it to my forehead. The smoke and cheap scents at Charley’s always let loose the nibbling mice of a headache behind my eyes. I catch a glimpse of my image in the dressing table’s glass. My mother’s platitude rises like a bloated fish. Don’t judge the quality of the linens inside by the rough wood of the glory box.
Quite right, Mama. In fact, I decided some time ago that it’s better to be clever than pretty. Faces fade. Figures fall. But, unlike a slackening money-box between the legs, what’s between the ears keeps on paying dividends. Unless, of course, the head is held beneath the water for long enough, puts in the other little voice that followed me home from my meeting with Percy last night. Then the cleverest brain in the world is no help.
I give myself a mental shake. This is not a good time to have an attack of the vapours. Silence outside. The two have finished, it seems. I snuff out the lantern.
On the last edge before sleep I hear another noise. A thin scream. Then a gurgle, like a penny whistle trying to make music in the rain. A heavy thump. Something pushed with a hiss-crush against the bushes a few doors down.
I don’t light the lantern again. I cup my hands like a viewfinder on the cool glass. Nothing.
The wood whinnies at the frame as I lift it. I’m downwind and the smell that wafts through the window is straight from Papa’s first job in Australia: the Maryborough boiling-down works. But the body sprawled awkwardly in the dirt four yards away isn’t destined for anything as useful as meat cubes. Copper hair, illuminated by gaslight as it falls across his forehead. Eyes wide open. Throat cut from ear to ear with something ragged. A broken bottle?
It’s him. The man I thought might be Percy’s decoder.
I pull the window down again, hard. It shudders the glass. I knit my hands together and sit, tense and upright, on the bed.
It can’t be right. Nobody’s fears come to fruition quite so easily. The clunky foreshadowing of our discussion last night, and now the corpse!
No. It’s anybody but him. Or if it is him, then he’s not the code man. That’s the part I got wrong. Just one of those strange synchronicities my Cornish third eye is attuned to.
Deep breaths. The mad trotting in my chest eventually slows.
No one will collect the corpse until dawn. That’s when Inspector Fitzgerald does his rounds.
To calm myself, I project the night forward six hours. See the first sluggish flies, and a blood-streaked show on the horizon. Fitzgerald scratches his backside. Piles the body onto his cart, careful not to smear his boots with blood. His horse twitches in the comparative cool. A few minutes later, he’s waking Müller, the butcher. There’s Müller, his umlaut firmly in place even so early in the morning. His German-sausage torso fills the doorway. They manoeuvre the body into the room-sized meat safe. Dump it with a thud, like a gourd tossed on a stone floor. The corpse stares with glazed eyes at the goat carcasses hanging above it.
Fitzgerald asks Müller if he knows the man. Müller fetches his glasses, mended on the right-hand side with string. Peers more closely, shakes his head. Or maybe he nods.
What will happen after that? A half-hearted investigation, probably. Fitzgerald will wander over to Blotch, the undertaker. Blotch will agree to knock up a cheap coffin (as though he ever makes any other kind). Blotch, in turn, will send word to the gravedigger.
It’s working. I wipe the fluff off an aniseed ball from the nightstand drawer and pop it in my mouth. The shiny blackness melts like medicine, with the help of a worrying tongue.
Eight o’clock the next day and already the air’s heating the sun’s iron on the blue-hot stove of the sky. In a few hours, clouds will pile log on log, and the silver-snake smell of rain will uncoil from the centre of the woodpile. But that’s for later. Now, a light onshore breeze sneezes through the open window. The curtains billow, then settle. A blowfly operates its small saw in the corner.
The corpse is gone. I checked at 6 a.m., saw only a faint stain. Drag marks in the dirt. Then I fell back into bed and a trouble-free sleep.
A hollow beat in the distance — the Good Templars are heading this way. Heaven-bent on collaring the drunks when they spill, top heavy with hammering heads and empty pockets, into the stoic heat outside the Commercial Hotel. If I don’t get up and close the window, tambourines will hiss like crazed ducks at the sill.
I throw the covers aside. Walk over, only half-awake. I see Inspector Fitzgerald across the street.
‘There you are, my lovely,’ he says.
He’s not talking to me, but his dog, Virgin Mary, who’s lying under a bauhinia tree in the shade. Fitzgerald has the stoop of a tall man used to carrying the heavy monkey of his conscience on his back so he never has to look it in the eye. His loose braces hang frayed down either side of his trousers as he bends to place a bowl of water on the ground. He’s an animal lover, I’ll give him that. It’s just the blacks
he hates with an itchy-trigger-finger passion.
‘Inspector,’ I call. ‘The man near the bushes?’
I point in the general direction of where the body had lain, and realise suddenly I’m standing in full sight of the street in my nightdress, hair still in a sleeping cap. No matter, I suppose. Compared to the dress of the prostitutes in town, I could be off to join a nunnery.
Fitzgerald turns and lifts a hand in greeting. The water in the Endeavour River behind him belches blue, then flattens.
‘A gold-stealing blow-in from Dead Dog Creek. Reginald Bawly by name.’
By the faint slurp-clack in Fitzgerald’s voice, I can tell he still hasn’t worn in the new set of teeth he bought last month, for a guinea, from the London Dentistry Institute in Melbourne.
‘How did you find that out so quickly?’
He stares over the water for a minute. It’s still murky from yesterday’s storms. The breeze carries that weedy stink of crushed shell and iodine. He looks back, shields his eyes, and quenches my last faint spark of hope in the competence of the local constabulary.
‘Can’t take credit for sleuthing. The lair sunk himself. Went from one drinking hole to the next last night, boasting he’d seen Jack Wilson bury his stash of nuggets, and dug it up when Jack came into town to stake his claim. The Kangaroo Court, or part thereof, must have caught up with him sometime through the night. It’s a good survival tip: keep your bleedin’ mouth shut or you’ll end up with a bleedin’ throat.’
My mind underlines that ragged wound.
‘Who did you talk to?’ I ask. ‘Are you sure that’s the whole story?’
It could be tiredness, but I feel a pressure between my brows, my third eye peering intently.
‘Several men I doubt you know,’ he says, mildly offended by my lack of faith. ‘A slug fisherman, Percy Fuller, and others.’
A sick tingle moves downwards from my chest.
‘Did you know him before, this Reginald Bawly? Was he renowned for usurping other men’s claims?’
‘I know nothing about him really,’ he says. ‘But I’ve no reason to question local opinion on the matter.’
At least, not if it involves a skerrick of real police work. There’s nothing else to say. Fitzgerald assumes my feminine sensibilities have been violated by the night’s events.
‘Don’t take it to heart,’ he says. ‘This part of the street was just nearest to hand. Left him there as a public example of what happens to thieves, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘Of course,’ I say dully. The informative part of the conversation is over.
He hitches up his braces over a stained grey singlet. ‘You hear the latest on the Myalls?’
‘No. What about them?’
‘Speared a white prospector down at the Deighton. Poor beggar wandered into camp with the shaft still in his thigh. They pulled it out and put a mustard poultice on the wound, but he’s a dead man walking. Infection. You know they dip the spear tips in putrefying corpses?’
‘No, I didn’t know that.’
‘My boys and I are riding out today to shoot up the camp. You watch yourself. Don’t wander on your own after dark. Spearing’s the least of what they’ll do to a white woman.’
My ears wake up a little at this. Does he know I sometimes go walkabout at night? I will have to be more careful in future.
If I wonder how many blacks it takes to throw a single spear, and why a whole camp needs to be shot up, I keep my thoughts to myself. Leave criticism to the couple of native sympathisers in the Brisbane Courier. They’re far enough away not to choke on a cloud of contempt.
‘No, I won’t wander,’ I say. ‘I’ll stay safely in town with all the upright European citizens. And if any other deceased appear in the general vicinity, I’ll mind them until you get back.’
He’s oblivious to irony. ‘You’ve got pluck, young Mary.’
I give up. He clearly couldn’t care less about a murder committed by a white man in town. He’s already galloping through the tinder-dry bush, crashing through rivers, the hot scents of sweaty horse and revenge in his nostrils. The monkey of his conscience hanging on to his back like grim death; a sackful of innards bouncing up and down.
The Templars are almost on top of us. I dress behind the closed curtain. My eyes dart, nervous birds, to the place where I’ve hidden the grille. Between the third and fourth chapter of Wilkie Collins’s novel, Hide and Seek.
There’s a stone of dread settled deep in my stomach. How do I avoid the same fate as Copper Hair? How do I prevent myself from making the same mistake?
I don’t even know what it was he did wrong.
5
Occasionally, of its own volition,
the future picks up
the stitch of the present.
From the secret diary of Mary Watson
11TH NOVEMBER 1879
Seven o’clock and I’m yawning already, playing another tedious Mozart set, when Charley approaches me.
‘What is it?’ I ask. ‘I’ve barely skipped a beat all night.’
‘Why do you assume, ma chérie, that I wish only to admonish you? I am most grateful to you for telling me about Nicole and her client in the street.’
I’d also told him about the dead man near the bushes, but he was, predictably, more interested in possible damage to his salon’s reputation.
‘Did you talk to her?’ I ask. ‘Perhaps it’s a case of species confusion and she thinks she’s a dog. They fornicate in the middle of the road all the time.’
The moustache turns: a worm tickled by a feather. ‘I have talked with her, yes. And she will behave. Unlike your tongue.’ He looks down at me from his not-so-lofty height, more in sorrow than anger it seems. ‘When I find that whetstone you sharpen it on, I intend to throw it into the sea.’
‘Is that what you came over to tell me?’
‘Non.’ He straightens his cravat. ‘There is a man I think you will like to meet. He has just arrived, and as it is almost time for your break …’
So Charley is playing cupid. Why?
‘You mean, a potential suitor? Exactly what kind of a man would I meet in a place like this? And who appointed you village matchmaker anyway? Or perhaps you have changed my duties without telling me and I must now entertain male clients?’
Charley drags up a sigh from some well of long suffering. ‘I do not change your duties. I do not think you are suited to being a hostess.’
‘True,’ I say, thinking of Nicole. ‘My tongue may be honed, but my baser instincts are clearly not up to the task.’ A frown pulls at the skin between my eyes. ‘What mischief are you hatching?’
He holds a hand to his heart. ‘I am distressed you think so little of Charley Boule.’
‘I’m nineteen,’ I say. ‘I can look after myself. I don’t need you to drag men out of the gutter on my behalf. If you want to help me, increase my wages.’
Never mind the extra money from my second job neatly stashed in a tin hidden behind my dresser. One useful thing I learned from Papa: it doesn’t do to let the truth get in the way of a good argument.
His eyes are glinting as he rests his arm on the piano top. I feel sorry for the material of his shirt when I see the sweat in his armpit. ‘All the more reason to find yourself a beau — improve your financial security.’
Something near the door to the street attracts his attention. ‘Turn your head,’ he says. ‘Je vous présente: Captain Bob Watson, a sea-slug fisherman from Lizard Island.’
I sit a little straighter on the stool. Watson is Percy’s partner in his ‘legitimate’ business. I’ve seen him in here a few times, drinking quietly by himself. He strikes me as awkward in company, unsociable, a closed book. And he never disappears upstairs with any of the girls. If he doesn’t want a woman for the night, why does he come here? And why would he want to meet me?
Of course, there is that other critical question. How might it serve me to meet him?
Charley answers at least one of my queries. ‘
He observes you playing. He thinks you to be a nice girl.’ His tone suggests the poor man’s in for a rude shock. ‘He asks Charley Boule to make an introduction. He has taken a little shine to you.’
It seems unlikely. But not impossible, I suppose. I’m probably the only virgin for a hundred miles in any direction.
I turn to glance at Captain Watson. He is paused just inside the doorway, hat in hand, like a cartoon of a destitute farmer. Gilt dust from the porchlight fizzes around him. He surveys the room. Its mirrors and velvets. Charley’s girls flitting from table to table in their unlaced corsets. His head is suddenly still. So is Laura’s, over in the corner. He looks away. She skips to a noisy table and plops herself extravagantly onto a surprised prospector’s lap.
‘He’s short,’ I tell Charley. ‘And old. I’m not interested.’
It isn’t strictly true. I have nothing against older men. They are far more intriguing than silly boys my own age. Take nineteen-year-old Heccy Landers, for instance — one of Charley’s barmen, who makes no secret of his admiration for me. Hopeless, gangly, innocent Heccy with his painful stammer. Percy is forty, after all; and Bob Watson seems only five years his senior, if that.
Think, Mary. Think.
Watson runs the sea-slug business with Percy on Lizard Island. What could I learn about Percy and his doings by talking to him? I haven’t time to ponder the possible repercussions. But what harm could come of a conversation or two? I won’t lead him on, exactly. Just be friendly. Get him talking.
‘Why are you trying to push me towards him?’ I ask Charley. I have no intention of letting him off the hook too easily. ‘Where would you find another piano player if I decide to run off with a man? I’m not so bad with Mozart and Strauss. Why are you so keen to get rid of me?’
‘Some nights, only so-so,’ he mutters. ‘Some nights your rancour sizzles on the end of your fingertips like a match held too long. Unattractive for any woman. But for you …’
His voice trails off and he consults the book of hopeless cases in his head for a possible precedent. His mouth puckers. The moustache looks suddenly less like a worm and more like a curled-up dead possum.
