by Robert Gott
‘This is Patrick,’ Shirley said, and added unnecessarily that they had both just been to confession, where Shirley had probably unburdened herself of the impure thoughts she entertained about her unimpressive companion.
‘I’m William Power.’ I held out my hand. Patrick did not reciprocate.
‘So, we start as rivals,’ I said. ‘That’s fine by me, but it’s not to your advantage to be so sour. Polly wasn’t interested in me. She was using me to get at you. It puzzles me that she would do this, but there you are.’ I saw no reason to obfuscate.
‘We can’t talk here,’ Patrick said, and his voice was unexpectedly deep. ‘Someone will see us.’
I followed them around to the side of the church, where we stood in the shadow of a door which was not in regular use. I didn’t beat about the bush.
‘No doubt Shirley has told you why I wish to speak to you.’
‘She also told me that they think you killed Polly. Why should I think otherwise?’
‘Because it is entirely possible that you killed her.’
Shirley exhaled a high-pitched shriek of outrage. Patrick coughed in disbelief at this bold and brutal assertion.
‘I had no reason to kill Polly,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know you existed, let alone that you and Polly had an understanding. You on the other hand had a good reason. Jealousy.’
‘I don’t have to hear this,’ he said, rallying, and made to walk away.
‘You’d better talk fast,’ I said, ‘because the only way I’m not going to the police with the information about your engagement and your arguments is if you can convince me that you didn’t do it. I’m not playing a game with you. I don’t have that luxury.’
He whirled back towards me, and his eyes were wide and glassy with rage.
‘You kissed her!’ he hissed. ‘You kissed her!’
There was an awful moment of silence as we all realised the implication of his uncontrolled remark.
‘My God,’ I said. ‘You were there. You followed us. It was so dark. You must have been very close.’
For one horrifying moment, there in the side portico of St Mary’s Church I thought I was looking at the unlikely murderer of a young woman and her deranged mother. Then he began blubbering, and my certainty collapsed.
‘I saw you,’ he said between wracking sobs. ‘You kissed her.’
Shirley put her arm around his shoulders and said, ‘Ssssh.’ It was a truly grotesque little pietà.
‘You followed us,’ I said again, hoping the exaggerated incredulity in my voice would prompt something more substantial than a choking cry. He calmed down sufficiently to exchange weeping for pique.
‘Shirley told me about you. Yes, I followed you. You were so caught up that you didn’t even notice, and I was so close behind you that I could have touched you. Polly knew I was there. She knew. That’s why she kissed you. She knew I’d see it. Why else would she kiss you?’
‘Perhaps she wanted to. I have been in situations where I have been kissed irrespective of lurking fiancés.’
‘You’re old enough to be her father.’
‘Only if I fucked her mother when I was sixteen,’ I said.
Shirley recoiled and Patrick’s mouth dropped open.
‘This is a church,’ he said. ‘You can’t say that kind of filth here.’
‘I’ll risk the thunderbolt. How dare you follow us like some lunatic. How long did you hang around for? Long enough to kill her?’
I knew this pathetic creature couldn’t have murdered Polly and have had the self-possession to dispose of the body so imaginatively. He certainly could not have stood in the living room of the Drummond house, having just slashed Mrs Drummond’s throat and looked so calmly at the shape he perceived standing only a few feet from him.
‘No,’ he said, and withdrew three paces from me. ‘No.’ He looked wildly at Shirley and said, ‘No,’ again, but he knew that he had put himself in a terrible position, as terrible as my own.
‘What else did you see?’ I asked, and my voice was hard.
‘I saw Fred light a cigarette, and then you went inside and he followed. I waited for a bit, and then you came out.’
‘Then what?’
‘I followed you. I thought I’d say something to you, but I didn’t.’
‘Polly left the house after I did. That was when she was killed.’
‘I wasn’t there! I didn’t see! I was following you.’
His voice was becoming hysterical. Shirley stepped between Patrick and me. With her face empurpled, her eyes bulging, and a vein at her temple pulsing, she spat her words at me.
‘Leave him alone! Leave him alone!’
Shirley flew at me, her hands clawing my face. I raised the arm resting in the sling and warded off her nails. She landed no blows, and Patrick encircled her with his arms from behind. She didn’t struggle against him, but fell back on his puny chest, subdued, even ecstatic. If Patrick chose the priesthood, this was as close as she was ever likely to come to sex. They were breathing heavily, not in any erotically charged way. Both were simply shocked and exhausted by the unexpected release of unruly and fierce emotions. I left them there, propping each other up in the portico. Patrick Lutteral hadn’t killed anybody, unless a vicious Mr Hyde was resting quietly beneath his flaccid exterior.
The following night, Wednesday, was a full moon. The dining room was full. It had become the place to eat for RAAF officers and their wives and mistresses. Augie walked around the room like the maître’d at a grand establishment, pausing occasionally to explain a particular dish to a customer who was unfamiliar with terms like rognons de veau flambés and cervelles au beurre noir. Augie himself had to work from notes. I was still not helping out at table service, but I was in the kitchen doing as much as I was able to with the use of only one arm. At the end of the meal Topaz arrived, and he and Annie went for a walk in the brilliant moonlight. He stayed out of my way. At any rate, he chose not to speak to me when he saw me.
On Thursday the front page of the Chronicle carried the news that the Duke of Kent had been killed in an air crash. The war in the Pacific could not compete with a royal death. That afternoon, Mrs Drummond’s body was found by a neighbour who had sniffed the air and followed the rank odour of putrefaction to its awful source. After six, undisturbed days I could only imagine the sight which met her eyes when she pushed open that bedroom door. Mrs Drummond’s body would have been a swarming colony of beetles and maggots, and human in its general outline only. Her head may well have fallen free from its tenuous grip on the torso and rolled away in disgust from the feeding frenzy beneath it.
Conroy did not send one of his slow-witted minions to tell me the news. He came himself, and he was scrubbed and shaved as if he were inviting me on a first date. It was after five o’clock, and we had returned from that day’s rehearsal. There was a short, sharp rap on my bedroom door, and Conroy entered before he had been invited to do so. He was accompanied by a uniformed officer who I had seen around town but whose name I did not know.
‘We’ve found her,’ he said.
I had been mentally preparing for this moment for days. In a beautifully underplayed reading I said, ‘Found who?’
He narrowed his eyes and said in a voice taut with irritation, ‘Mrs Drummond.’
This was no time for sarcasm or a smart remark. I arranged my features into a portrait of perplexity and concern.
‘You’ve found Mrs Drummond? I didn’t know she’d gone missing. What happened? Did she wander off? Is she all right?’
‘She’s dead, as you very well know,’ he said sourly.
‘Are you accusing me of something?’
Conroy didn’t flinch.
‘I haven’t accused you of anything,’ he said. ‘Yet.’
‘And what am I supposed to make of
that “As you very well know”?’
‘You can make of it whatever you like.’
I began to work myself up into a white-hot furnace of indignation, and as I spoke I was careful to drop in well-placed indications that I did not know how long Mrs Drummond had been dead. Conroy would be alert to the merest hint of prior knowledge.
‘I have been harassed and embarrassed and inconvenienced by you for days now. You have no evidence against me, and yet you persist in focussing your investigation on me while the trail that would lead you to Polly’s killer gets colder by the day. Now you have a second corpse, and you head straight back to me. This time I have an alibi. I was with people all day today and all day yesterday, and I can account for last night as well. If you’d been looking in the right place for Polly’s killer instead of wasting your time on me, Mrs Drummond might still be alive.’
I addressed these remarks to both Conroy and the policeman with him. I could tell from the expression on the uniformed man’s face that this interview had departed from an expressed plan. He kept shooting looks at Conroy which suggested he was curious to hear how Conroy would deal with this. There was an unmistakeable, but barely perceptible, smile about his lips which betrayed his detestation of Conroy and revealed that he was enjoying the fact that things were not falling neatly into place. To Conroy’s credit, he did not bluster or express his frustration, except in the quickening of his eye quiver.
‘I have not said anything about the time of Mrs Drummond’s death, and I am not fooled by your assumption that it was today or yesterday. Senior Constable Harvey here might be, but I assure you I am not.’
This gratuitous dig at his companion was proof enough that an antagonism existed between them. Senior Constable Harvey said nothing in his defence, but the colour rose in his neck and the muscles along his forearms tensed.
‘Why don’t you arrest me, if you’re so certain of my guilt?’ I asked.
‘This is not Nazi Germany, Mr Power. When I have the evidence against you it will be my pleasure to arrest you, and I will make sure that I do it personally. I am a patient man.’
I wanted to put my face close to his and scream, ‘You moron! How could I sever a woman’s head with only one hand?’
I didn’t. Instead, I lifted an eyebrow and said, ‘You need more than patience to catch murderers, Detective Sergeant Conroy. You need intelligence.’
The slightest of smirks on Constable Harvey’s face indicated that in him I might have found an ally.
The gothic extravagance of Mrs Drummond’s death could not be kept from the people of Maryborough. Friday’s Chronicle didn’t spare its readers the graphic details. The reporter hadn’t gone to the woman who had found the body, but had interviewed instead her ‘close friend’. This person, unencumbered by the trauma and revulsion suffered by the eyewitness, was able to inject into her description a prurient note of shuddery glee which elevated or depressed the report, depending on your point of view, almost to the level of a blackly comic entertainment.
A close friend of the witness said that the deceased’s head had been detached from the body and was found on the other side of the room.
So I had been right about that.
Detective Sergeant Conroy, in charge of the investigation into the disappearance and murder of the deceased’s daughter, Miss Polly Drummond, was not prepared to speculate on any connection between the two crimes. The deceased’s son, Mr Fred Drummond, also died recently in what was believed to be an aircraft accident.
When laid out in cold, black print, the mortality rate in the Drummond family made remarkable reading. The sense of these killings being some kind of vendetta against a particular family was the only thing that stood between the townspeople and panic about a maniac in their midst.
There was nothing in the newspaper report about suspects, and I had come to accept that my role in Polly’s death had not been discussed more seriously than as a piece of idle gossip, and then not very widely. There was certainly no whispering campaign being waged against me. Indeed, on occasions when discussion of the gruesome details by dinner patrons had been overheard by members of the company, the consensus was that it was a simple matter of murder/suicide, with Fred identified as the culprit. Adrian had heard mention of me only once, and not by name. Somebody had said that that drunk actor who had fallen off the stage at the ACF dance had something to do with it. Someone else at the table had said that he wasn’t an actor, that he was with the circus, and that he would have been more interested in Fred than Polly. This was useful misinformation, but it got up my nose nonetheless. I was relieved to have it confirmed that I had been worrying unnecessarily about my notoriety, but I was annoyed to discover myself depicted as an alcoholic circus performer with homosexual tendencies.
With the discovery of Mrs Drummond’s body it was certain that Fred’s reputation would be rescued. That, of course, meant that people would be looking for a substitute suspect — and, despite the hopelessly murky sense in the town of who I actually was, I was in the box seat to be that suspect. This was made clear to me by Annie Hudson, who took me aside at the end of Friday night’s service and said that Topaz was concerned about how people might react to me now. Ill-informed gossip spread faster than cholera, and he could not guarantee that there would be no leaks from the police station about my being questioned in relation to both murders. In fact, Annie said, such leaks were not only inevitable, they were calculated.
‘Peter said that Conroy would have no objection to you being alienated and isolated.’
‘His concern is touching, but I don’t trust him. Am I supposed to believe that he has suddenly developed a fondness for me?’
Annie looked puzzled.
‘Don’t be silly, Will. Peter doesn’t like you. He can’t stand you, really. He thinks you’re a pompous, arrogant, self-serving ponce. But he also thinks someone else is responsible for these crimes, and that Conroy has got it wrong.’
‘How much of this posturing is for your benefit and how much is out of a concern for justice?’
Annie, exasperated, said, ‘Honestly, Will, you are your own worst enemy. Peter is willing to overlook what a prick he thinks you are and try to help you, and all you can do is whinny like some jealous, snotty-nosed schoolboy.’
‘Why would I be jealous of Topaz?’ I asked, sounding perilously like the schoolboy as described.
She avoided answering that, and said instead, ‘Peter is prepared to challenge Conroy directly and appear with you in public. If people see the two of you laughing and acting like you’re the best of friends, the word will spread and maybe take some of the heat off you.’
‘Or maybe he hopes I’ll let something slip if he gains my confidence.’
‘You know, Will, it’s bloody incredible! You really do think that everyone around you is stupid, don’t you? Even if Peter was trying to trap you, there’s nothing for him to catch in the trap.’ She paused, ominously. ‘Is there?’
She was right. The more I resisted Topaz’s efforts, the more it looked like I had something to hide.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘You’re absolutely right. I have nothing to lose and everything to gain. I just don’t like to be taken for a mug. Tell Topaz I’ll meet with him.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘You can sit together and fake friendship. We’ll see who’s the better actor.’
Chapter Six
meeting charlotte
SATURDAY MORNING was warm and still, and by 10.00 am the temperature hinted at the summer ahead. Peter Topaz arrived and we sat for a while with Annie, on the verandah outside her bedroom. The talk was small.
‘Augie is fixing up the Ladies’ Lounge,’ Annie said. ‘Soon there’ll be hoity women in there ordering Pimms and discussing their friends’ taste in hats.’
Topaz laughed indulgently. I was uncomfortable. Quite apart from anything else, An
nie’s assessment of how Topaz felt about me was getting in the way of easy banter. I also believed that we were unevenly matched, in that his dislike of me was greater than my dislike of him. As a general rule I prefer it to be the other way around. It went deeper than that, too. My dislike of Topaz was situational, based on his original supposition that I was a murderer. His dislike of me was personal, and grew out of his strange misreading of my character. He was under no pressure to change my mind about him. I felt, perhaps foolishly, under considerable pressure to change his mind about me. This feeling coexisted, confusingly, with a lingering suspicion about Topaz’s motives. I thought it best to get a few things out in the open.
‘Annie says you think I’m a ponce,’ I said.
He was unfazed by the remark.
‘Well, Will,’ he drawled, ‘that doesn’t make me Sherlock Holmes, does it?’
‘All right,’ intervened Annie. ‘ We all understand that you’re not the best of friends, but let’s get this over with, and Will, stop being such a pain in the arse. Peter’s sticking his neck out for you.’
I raised my hands in acquiescence, but said nothing.
‘We’re going to the Ladies’ Lounge at the Royal,’ Topaz said. ‘The three of us. Then Annie’s leaving, and you and I are going for a friendly stroll around town, stopping at the Engineers’ Arms on the way home.’
‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked. ‘Really.’
‘Conroy’s a smart man, but even smart men have blind spots. He wants to get out of here. Go to Brisbane. If he tidies this case up quickly he’s in line for a promotion and a transfer. It’s hard to get Brisbane to notice you if you’re stuck in a small town where not much happens. A double murder is good for the CV.’
‘You want him to go?’
‘He’s a good detective, but a move to Brisbane for him would be good for both our careers. I don’t want him to screw up this case, and if he keeps going after you he will screw it up.’
‘If you really believe that Conroy’s got the wrong man, you must have some idea of who the right man is.’
