Good Murder

by Robert Gott

  ‘I can’t force Walter to remain in the company, Kevin,’ I said evenly. ‘We all have to wear the consequences of his leaving, and we still have a show to put on.’

  He turned his head slightly to one side and raised his eyebrows fractionally. It was a minimal gesture of disapproval, but also of acceptance. He offered no other comment. Here, I thought, was yet another person I could not trust.

  The read-through went surprisingly well. I say ‘surprisingly’ because Bill Henty’s hostility, although unexpressed, was expressive nonetheless, and Kevin Skakel was even more reserved than normal. They were professional, determinedly so, but even Miss Helen Keller would have noticed the froideur. I was relieved to discover that everyone had his or her lines down. They had not been slacking off. This was a timely reminder to me that the Power Players were not amateurs. At the end of the read-through the cast dispersed, but Annie Hudson remained behind.

  ‘That was good,’ she said. ‘I always like this stage. You can see how it fits together, where the relationships are. I’ve got a good sense now of how to play her.’

  I didn’t want to deflate this bubble of enthusiasm by saying that the way Annie played her characters was indistinguishable, one from another. Lady Macbeth and Connie, the bad-breath girl? Same person. Until very recently I might have humorously pointed this out, but that was before I had been afflicted with the intensely pleasurable torture of wanting to sleep with her. I would have to seduce her. The thought made my stomach lurch. Did she know me too well? Did she look at me the way a loathsome, annoying brother is looked at? Could I compete with Topaz? My confidence drained away at a rate of knots and I marvelled, not for the first time, at how easily a woman can unman a chap.

  ‘Will? Why are you staring at me like that? Stop it. It’s giving me the creeps.’

  I snapped out of my reverie.

  ‘Oh, sorry. I was miles away. Looking through you, not at you.’

  ‘Thanks very much. That’s very flattering,’ she said, and smiled. ‘I’m having lunch out at Teddington Weir tomorrow, with Peter. Why don’t you come, let him get to know you better.’

  This was such a remarkable suggestion that I let out an involuntary laugh.

  ‘You can’t be serious.’

  ‘Why not? After all, he wouldn’t think you were capable of murder if he could see for himself how …’ She was hurrying to a mildly offensive observation, but stopped short. This left her sentence dangling, needing the descriptor to complete it.

  ‘So he could see for himself how what? How piss weak I am? Is that what you were about to say?’

  ‘No. Well, yes, but not exactly. I was going to say how civilised, how decent, you are — how you wouldn’t raise your hand against anyone and especially not against a woman.’

  She reached out, put her hand on my neck, and looked closely at my face. Inexplicably, and embarrassingly, my eyes welled with tears. She turned discreetly away, picked up her script, said, ‘Think about it’, and left. Without her knowing it, her tent had been pitched well inside the fortified walls of my emotional keep.

  The dining room was quiet. Voices and laughter came from the bar, but here I was alone. In a few minutes the setting up for dinner would begin. I had pushed the vision of the almost decapitated Mrs Drummond into a far corner of my mind, but now it appeared before me, untrammelled and disconcerting. It was after 5.00 pm. Her body must have been found by now. Topaz would turn up soon, and I wondered if I had the strength to tolerate his questions and insinuations without giving something away. And what about Arthur? Would he be steady? My hand began to shake slightly and I felt light-headed, as if I might faint. My body had a tendency to go into delayed shock at moments of high anxiety. As last night’s abattoir colours and odours flooded my memory, a terrifying fact presented itself. There was someone out there who had killed two women. This person had looked through the darkness to the place where I had been standing, and he had decided to let me live.

  ‘Why?’ I asked Arthur when I went to his room later. ‘Why didn’t he attack me?’

  ‘I can think of lots of reasons. Firstly, you can’t be sure he really knew you were there.’

  ‘I am sure. I felt his eyes on me, and they were like dank hands running over my body.’

  ‘Even if he did know you were there, he couldn’t risk a fight. He might lose, or get hurt. But if you couldn’t see his face, he couldn’t see yours. Besides, having someone else in the house at the time might suit him. Being there doesn’t make you a witness; it makes you a suspect.’

  Topaz called for Annie the next day. I was sitting with her and Arthur and Adrian on the second-storey verandah, outside Annie’s bedroom. We were tinkering with the script. Adrian was the first to see Topaz riding towards the George down Wharf Street. The legs of his trousers were sensibly secured with clips. He was out of uniform, but his eyes were always in uniform.

  ‘Here’s your boyfriend,’ Adrian said.

  ‘And don’t you just wish he was yours,’ Annie replied.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ he said, and they both laughed.

  Annie jumped up and waved.

  ‘Come up,’ she called as he leaned his bicycle against the downstairs railing.

  Topaz came through Annie’s bedroom and eased himself out of the low window on to the verandah. His obvious familiarity with the room sent a spasm of resentment through me. He greeted everyone with a wide smile, but when he nodded at me the edge of the smile retreated a little, so that I would know that he did not greet murderers warmly. Annie, feeling perfectly at ease, kissed him on the mouth. He did not resist or make any attempt to disguise the nature of their relationship. He returned her kiss and put his arm around her waist.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘It’s a long ride.’

  ‘Tibald’s made us lunch,’ she said. ‘Isn’t he a dear?’

  She turned to me.

  ‘Will, are you coming?’

  Topaz stiffened at these words and shot me a glance that was unambiguous in its intent. He needn’t have worried. I had no desire to join them. The thought of watching them bill and coo made me sick.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea.’

  It was only after they had left, as I was watching them ride away, that I realised that Mrs Drummond’s body had not yet been found. My god, how long was it going to take? Was there really no one who would call on her to see how she was doing? A little rush of elation went through me. Maybe it would be days before she was found. With the days getting warm and with the ravenous appetites of Maryborough’s insects, and who knows what else, establishing the exact time of Mrs Drummond’s death would be difficult. With the passing of a few more days, accuracy would be almost impossible.

  Chapter Five

  so few answers

  DETECTIVE SERGEANT CONROY called at the George on Monday morning. He came into the bar where I was sitting. There was nobody else there, as the George did not serve alcohol until after 11.00 am. When I saw him I assumed that the body had been found, and I girded my loins for the first remark. I half-expected him to arrest me. However, it quickly became clear that Mrs Drummond was still propped on her pillows. This visit was designed to embarrass and unnerve me, but it did neither. He must have been sorely disappointed to find me alone, with no one to witness any discomfort I might feel.

  ‘Just checking a few details,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know how many times I have to repeat it, Sergeant Conroy,’ I said.

  ‘Detective Sergeant,’ he said, his vanity pricked by my error.

  ‘When I left the Drummond house, Polly was still alive.’

  ‘We don’t dispute that, Mr Power. It’s one of the few facts we agree on. It’s what happened next that is of interest to us.’

  ‘And there our ways must part because I have no idea what happened next,
except that I came here and went to bed.’

  ‘And nobody saw you.’

  ‘And nobody saw me. It was late. What was I supposed to do — knock on people’s bedroom doors and announce the joyous news that I had got home in one piece from the pictures? If I had killed her, don’t you think I would have organised an alibi?’

  ‘I never try to second-guess a murderer, Mr Power.’

  I shook my head in weary resignation.

  ‘Is there anything else you want to ask me?’

  ‘Perhaps tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll be at Wright’s Hall most of the day, rehearsing.’

  ‘We may require you at the station. We’ll let you know.’

  With that, he left. So this was how it was going to be. They had no evidence, but they thought they could harass me into a confession.

  I had cancelled Monday afternoon’s rehearsal. I had other plans — like saving my skin. I wanted to speak to the young woman who had given Polly’s eulogy and who had described Polly as her closest friend before breaking down. This was Shirley Moynahan, and she had worked with Polly at Manahan’s, the department store in Adelaide Street. I went in just after the 11.00 am test siren had sounded. I discovered, with a perverse tinge of pique, that I had overestimated my notoriety. I thought that I would draw stares as the man most likely to have murdered Polly Drummond. No one spared me a second glance. My looks had improved, of course. My eye had gone down and showed only faint bruising. The scratches left by Polly’s fingernails had healed, and my other injuries were hidden under my clothes.

  I asked at the front counter for Shirley Moynahan. A woman, in her late sixties by the look of her mean, desiccated face, directed me to Ladies’ Lingerie.

  ‘She’s popular,’ she said. ‘You’re the second person today.’

  I took a stab in the dark. ‘I’m just following up some of the detective’s questions.’

  ‘I told that Conroy not to upset Shirl. She’s had a rough trot. I hope you’re not going to upset her either. You coppers never know when to stop.’

  ‘We’re just trying to find answers, Mrs …?’

  She didn’t provide her name, and I thought that I had overplayed my hand. I should have moved on quickly and not replied to her remark. I did not want to be caught out in a lie about who I was.

  ‘You’re not from round here,’ she said, and she cocked her head in a way that was skin-crawlingly salacious. ‘Brought you up from Brisbane, have they? That’d be right. Conroy couldn’t work out the size of his underpants without help. I told him, I said, if he wanted to solve Polly’s murder all he had to do was arrest that actor, or was he from the circus? Anyway, the one who took her to the pictures.’

  ‘Really? What do you know about this … actor, did you say?’

  ‘I think he was an actor, but he might have come in with the circus. They’re all the same. Well, Shirl said that Polly told her that he was keen on her. She knocked him back and he went berserk. It’s obvious, but Conroy can’t see it.’

  ‘Berserk, you say?’

  ‘I’ve told all this to Conroy. Don’t you people talk to each other?’

  ‘I spoke to him earlier. And no, he didn’t mention it, but we were discussing other aspects of the case.’ This at least was the truth.

  A customer took my informant from me and I made my way towards Ladies’ Lingerie, more than a little disturbed by the revelation that I was the front runner as far as this well-short-of-perfect stranger was concerned. If she were representative of the general populace then I was in serious public relations trouble.

  I recognised Shirley Moynahan, even though she had her back to me. It was the defeated slump of her shoulders. When she was delivering her eulogy I had noticed that they were rounded, as if the world’s unpleasantness bore down upon her and formed an invisible yoke. She was plain, and that’s all there was to it. Her hair was badly cut in that ubiquitous victory bob, encouraged by propaganda, that suited one girl in a hundred and which depended anyway upon a skilful hairdresser if it was to appear anything other than drab. I didn’t think that even the skills of Mr Sydney Guilaroff himself would have saved her. The overall effect, confirmed when she turned around, was lumpen. Her nose began well but ended badly, and her lips were so thin as to be hardly there at all. Her eyes, which might have rescued her, let her down by being a dull, flat brown with none of the shifting facets of a true hazel iris. They were surmounted by two strong eyebrows, which would have benefited from a judicious shaping and thinning. Clearly, she had decided long ago, even though she was only twenty-four, that trading on her looks was simply not an option. I hoped for her sake that she had a talent in reserve that would assist a visitor in overcoming the unfortunate first impression she couldn’t help but make.

  She was assisting a customer, selling her a garment that looked almost orthopaedic in its shapelessness. She took the money and coupons, and then noticed me. Her hand flew to her mouth and she quickly looked away. The customer left, happy I presume, to have purchased a foundation garment sufficiently robust to deal with the demands she would make upon it. I walked to the counter and introduced myself, unnecessarily, as she obviously already knew who I was. I raised my hand in a calming motion, and she flinched as though she thought I might strike her.

  ‘Miss Moynahan, please.’

  I tried to convey in those few words enough information to reassure her that she was quite safe, and that she was not face-to-face with the man who had murdered her best friend. I drew on all my acting experience to get the cadences exactly right.

  ‘I’ll scream,’ she said.

  I took a few steps back.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Look. I’m way back here. Please just hear what I’ve got to say and then I’ll leave.’

  She digested this and nodded. Her eyes darted around the lingerie department. There was a well-dressed woman at the far end. A RAAF officer’s wife, probably. Her presence gave Shirley courage.

  ‘I did not kill your friend,’ I said. ‘I’ve never killed anything in my life, not even a rabbit. I was one of the last people to see her alive, that’s true, but I wasn’t the very last person. That was the person who took her life.’

  Shirley Moynahan began to sniffle and then to cry. I moved towards the counter and said quietly, ‘Shirley, your friend was a lovely woman, and she deserves to have the person responsible brought to justice. I am not that person. If you knew anything about me you would know that.’

  I opened my eyes as wide as a doe’s and filled them with enough tears to make them glitter. She saw then that she need not fear me, not here in the lingerie department.

  ‘She liked you,’ she said. ‘Polly said that you were good friends with Cary Grant. Is that true?’

  I had to think rapidly. Would a harmless lie help put her further at her ease?

  ‘Well, I don’t know about good friends. Acquaintances, really.’

  ‘She said you liked her, that she might get to meet Cary Grant.’

  For goodness sake!

  ‘I did like her. Very much. But I didn’t know her very well. We only went out once before …’

  She gulped back a sob.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Before she died.’

  ‘Can I be honest with you, Shirley? May I call you Shirley?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  She straightened up, prepared to accept the precious gift of my honesty.

  ‘The police,’ I said, ‘the police think that I’m guilty, and they’re not the only ones. I’m sure lots of people think the same thing. Can you imagine how that makes me feel?’

  ‘Hunted,’ she said, and her face told me that she had slipped into a melodrama of her own imagining.

  ‘Yes. Exactly. Hunted. The police are so sure of my guilt that if I don’t find the answer myself they’ll make a case
against me and send me to trial. I could spend the rest of my life in prison for a crime I didn’t commit.’

  That hand flew to her mouth again.

  ‘I need help,’ I said, and sounded helpless. ‘I need your help. Please.’

  I thought this was nicely judged, a perfect balance of need and determination.

  ‘How can I help you?’ she asked, with an agreeable note of despair in her voice.

  ‘We can’t talk here,’ I said. ‘When do you finish?’

  She hesitated, and I knew that she was reluctant to meet me privately, despite the softening of her attitude.

  ‘When you finish work,’ I said, ‘I could meet you in King’s Cafeteria.’

  She was visibly relieved. Even if I were the killer I would be unlikely to strike in a busy café.

  ‘Three-thirty,’ she said. ‘I’ll meet you there.’

  ‘I’ll buy you a milkshake,’ I said, and bestowed a radiant smile upon her. She took a ball of filthy cloth from her pocket and blew her nose noisily.

  With a few hours to spare, I walked to Wright’s Hall, let myself in, and tried to ignore the threat hanging over me by imagining a performance of Titus Andronicus here. We had played in less salubrious places, although never with the possibility of arrest hovering in the wings. We were a reduced company, two players short — Tibald and old Walter Sunder. I could collapse several minor characters into one, knowing that the majority of the audience would only understand one word in ten anyway. I was walking back and forth in the area that would be our stage, blocking our movements in my head and configuring one or two dramatic tableaux. So intensely was I concentrating that I did not hear Peter Topaz come in. I discovered him standing at the back of the hall when I whirled around, practising a movement I intended to make in Act 111.

  ‘I’ve already spoken to Conroy today,’ I said.