by Robert Gott
‘I am not involved with his wife,’ I lied.
‘Why is she coming tomorrow?’ he shot back.
‘She’s showing me Teddington Weir,’ I said off the top of my head. ‘I expressed an interest in seeing it, and she offered to drive me there. We need to discuss the program for her fund-raiser.’
As I said this I decided that Teddington was, in fact, the ideal destination. On the weekend it was a popular place to swim and court, but it was sufficiently far out of town to ensure that on a weekday nobody would be there.
‘Will, if you don’t want to admit to adultery with Charlotte Witherburn, that’s fine, but it’s perfectly obvious that there’s something going on between the two of you. If I can see it, Harry Witherburn can see it. That’s all I’m saying.’
I was aware that that was not all he was saying. He was exercising his imagined, new-found privilege of casting moral aspersions in my direction. Adultery is such an ugly word, and I was about to say so when the rumble of the truck arriving from Wright’s Hall brought our conversation to an end.
The troupe came into the dining room, but before anybody had a chance to inquire after my health Annie stood before me, arms akimbo, and said, ‘Well?’
‘Well what?’ I gripped my beer, knowing that it was not beyond her to pour it into my lap.
‘Joe Drummond. What are you going to do about Joe?’
‘I’m not going to discuss that with you.’
‘Now, Will.’ Adrian stepped forward. ‘He sat here quiet as a mouse after he shot you. He just waited for the police. He didn’t even drink the beer that Augie got for him. I talked to him and he was quite charming. No one that good looking should be in jail.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Adrian,’ I said. ‘And what was I doing while you were plying him with beer and having a lovely little chat?’
‘You were unconscious. It’s not as if you could have joined in.’
I decided to assert my authority before this became any more exasperating or ridiculous.
‘I’m not going to discuss this any further. I want to meet you all here at 8.30 tomorrow morning to finalise choosing your pieces for the fund-raiser. I won’t be at the rehearsal in the morning. I’ll join you in the afternoon. Thank you.’
Ignoring this clear dismissal, Bill Henty said, ‘And where will you be while we’re working?’ As was usual with him, there was an ugly note of aggression in his voice.
‘I’ll be at the police station laying formal charges against the man who attempted to kill me,’ I said. I looked at Annie when I said this. Henty sniffed and left the room. The others followed, with Annie turning at the door to say, ‘Selfish. Nasty. Vicious.’
‘That’s the title of your autobiography, is it?’ I said.
Arthur remained behind and sat opposite me.
‘I suppose you’re going to tell me now that Joe Drummond is misunderstood, that he’s not a murderous thug. I can’t believe that he was offered a beer.’
‘No, I’m not going to tell you that.’
I was expecting more, but nothing came. He was looking at me in a most disconcerting way.
‘Say it,’ I said. ‘Say whatever it is you want to say.’
‘All right, but let me finish before you interrupt or storm out in high dudgeon.’
I nodded agreement.
‘I don’t know the first thing about Joe Drummond,’ he said. ‘Maybe he’s a maniac. Maybe he’s an arsehole. Maybe he’s distracted by grief. I don’t know and in some ways it doesn’t matter. OK, he shot you. That was foolish and dangerous and criminal, and he should be held to account for it. If you decide to press charges that would be perfectly reasonable and understandable. Don’t pay attention to Annie’s carry-on. She’s responding to his vulnerability. She does that, and just at the moment Joe Drummond is more vulnerable than you are, and Peter Topaz has been softening her up about him. However, and it’s a big however, Joe Drummond is safe when he’s in jail, and that’s bad for you. You need him to be out and unsafe. The next target.’
I signalled that I wanted to interject at this point. ‘And what if he’s got a different idea about who should be a target? He’s already had a practice shot at me. What if he’s after a bullseye?’
‘That’s why you need to talk to him. Obviously you’re not going to take anybody else’s word for it that he made a mistake. You have to hear it from him, and you can judge for yourself whether you trust him or not. I won’t lie to you, Will. Peter Topaz asked me to talk to you.’
I narrowed my eyes as an expression of disapproval.
‘I wouldn’t have agreed to do it if I didn’t think he had a point. Conroy’s not crossing you off his suspect list, and no one’s making much headway in solving this. If it’s someone out to get the Drummond family, having the last one out of reach protects everyone except you. And Joe Drummond has said he’s willing to sit in that house and wait for the killer to show his hand.’
I said nothing, but because this was coming from Arthur the rage that was swelling within me did not spill into the room. What he said made hideous sense. Somehow I had to get past the incredible lack of concern for my welfare which all this interest in Joe Drummond seemed to imply.
‘Well?’ Arthur said.
‘All right, I’ll talk to Drummond. But I’m not promising anything, and I want Topaz there in the room. And I want Drummond restrained.’
‘You could do it now. Topaz would still be at the station.’
‘No,’ I said emphatically. ‘The least Drummond can do is spend one night in the cells. I’m sure it’s not his first and, until I’m convinced he’s not a threat, it won’t be his last.’
The following morning the cast gathered as requested in the dining room. Tibald was there too. He felt that his rendition of Falstaff’s ‘Chimes at midnight’ speech was peerless, and that a one-off at Witherburn would not interfere with his cooking.
‘Perhaps Mrs Witherburn would appreciate a platter of decent hors d’oeuvres,’ he said, knowing that the offer would secure his place. It would also introduce more people to the wonders of the Canty cuisine. Annie had opted for Portia’s ‘Quality of mercy’ speech. She looked daggers at me when she announced her choice, as if I might learn something from the text. Bill Henty had gone for the ‘Band of brothers’ speech from Henry V. I had half thought I might do this myself, but I let him have it. Adrian, who liked burying himself under a mountain of make-up, had settled on Polonius’ ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’ from Hamlet; and Kevin Skakel, oddly, had decided against Shakespeare and wanted to do William McGonagall’s ‘Tay Bridge Disaster’, a poem he considered to be one of the masterpieces in the language. That really tells you all you need to know about Kevin Skakel. As I said later to Arthur, I thought Kevin might have suffered a club brain as well as a club foot. Arthur had chosen two of the sonnets, and I was thinking of something from Coriolanus. The others had gone for crowd-pleasers. I wanted a piece that might challenge an audience.
‘I’ll join you at the hall later,’ I said. I did not tell Annie that I had decided to talk to Joe Drummond. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of supposing, wrongly, that I had caved in to pressure from her.
‘You can drop me off at the police station on the way,’ I said. ‘I just have to go up to my room to get my copy of Coriolanus’.
I took a few minutes to unearth it, and when I returned to the dining room I discovered that they had left without me. I walked to the police station. When I entered, the desk was unattended. I coughed, but no one came, so I went outside and walked down the side of the building to where I presumed the cells were. There were only two cells housed in an outbuilding which looked as if it had been constructed last century, and it probably had been. Peter Topaz was there, unlocking the door. On the ground beside him were two plates of food. Flies had settled on them as h
e grappled with the lock.
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I said.
Most people would have jumped or shown some surprise at an unexpected voice from behind. Topaz didn’t flinch.
‘Good’, he said, and bent down to pick up the plates. ‘If you wait in the office I’ll bring Joe in as soon as he’s eaten his breakfast.’
Topaz came back to the office alone.
‘He won’t be long,’ he said.
‘I want him handcuffed, and I want you in the room.’
‘The handcuffs aren’t necessary, and of course I’ll be in the room. You needn’t worry, he’s not going to jump you.’
‘If he’s not cuffed, I’m not talking to him.’
Topaz sighed heavily, but agreed to constrain Drummond for the duration of our encounter. He led me into the familiar interview room and returned to the front desk, where I heard a muffled conversation between him and whoever had now arrived for duty. When he came back into the room, he sat opposite me and had the decency to ask after my health.
‘How are you feeling, Will? A bit sore, I imagine.’
‘I feel fine. I’ve got a hole in my shoulder which might turn septic, and I’m about to meet the arsehole who put it there. Why wouldn’t I feel fine?’
‘What changed your mind?’
‘Someone whose opinion I respect pointed out that there were advantages in not pressing charges. It’s exactly what you said, of course, but it sounded more reasonable when it came from someone I admire.’
‘How did Arthur lose his arm?’
Topaz had a way of asking questions that came out of nowhere. I suppose it was a technique designed to wrong-foot suspects.
‘You’ll have to ask him yourself,’ I said.
‘Is it a secret?’
‘No, but I don’t like discussing my friends behind their backs.’
‘Fair enough. He’s pretty adept with the one arm, isn’t he?’
I didn’t reply to this. I had no idea whether he was insinuating something or simply expressing admiration. There was an awkward silence. At least I found it awkward. Topaz seemed perfectly at ease. A knock on the door was followed by the entrance of the simple-minded constable who had escorted me to see Conroy a few days previously.
‘I’ve got Joe here,’ he said.
Topaz rose and opened the door fully. I suddenly felt sick with nerves. Joe Drummond came into the room, and his appearance took me by surprise. I was expecting an angry, surly, hostile brute. Joe Drummond, with his hands behind his back and with eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep, did not look dangerous. He looked wounded in some profound way. He sat down and was forced to lean forward slightly because his handcuffs pressed against the back of the chair. I began to feel ashamed that I had insisted on seeing him like this. He was unshaven, and the sour smell of the malodorous cell in which he had spent the night clung to him. His eyes, startlingly blue against the red-streaked whites, met mine without embarrassment. Despite his circumstances, I saw no weakness there, but I saw no danger either.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said simply.
I didn’t know how to respond to this. I had imagined that I would lacerate him with words, but I found myself unable to offer anything more than a small gesture of acceptance with my good hand. I turned to Peter Topaz and said, ‘There’s been a mistake. The incident was an accident. We were fooling around with the gun, and it went off.’
It was clumsy and utterly unconvincing, but it was a legal nicety that Topaz needed to hear.
‘Accidents happen. Of course,’ he said, turning to Joe Drummond, ‘you’ll be charged with discharging a firearm within the town limits, but if Mr Power has no objection, you’ll be released as soon as the paperwork is done. If you stand up, I’ll take off those cuffs.’
As Joe’s hands were freed I wondered for a moment if he would suddenly be transformed into the avenging lunatic I had pictured him to be. He merely rubbed his wrists and quietly said, ‘Thank you.’
He had said four words in all, and he was now a free man.
Within half an hour, Joe Drummond and I left the police station together. Only a few hours previously I wouldn’t have thought this possible. Topaz was not with us. I suppose he wanted to avoid any suspicion that he had been involved in this most irregular state of affairs.
We walked a short way down Lennox Street without speaking. There is a natural social reticence between shooter and shot. I broke the silence by asking him what kind of breakfast was provided by the Maryborough police force. I realise that this was almost perversely banal, considering what might have been said, but I had had very little experience in making small talk with people who had recently wanted to kill me. Joe Drummond circumvented the need for small talk by saying, ‘I haven’t been home yet. I don’t know whether they’ve cleaned it or not.’
It was understandable, I suppose, that his focus should have shifted to what he might find at the Drummond house, but I thought it incumbent upon him to perhaps spend a little more time exploring how I felt about what he had done to me.
‘Mr Drummond,’ I said.
‘Joe,’ he said, without slackening his pace and without looking at me.
‘Joe. There are one or two things we need to discuss, don’t you think?’
He stopped suddenly and turned to me.
‘Yes, there are.’ I could tell that he was gathering strength with every breath he took. ‘Now is not the time. I’m sorry I jumped to conclusions about you, but my family, my entire family, is dead. I’m grateful that I’m out here and not locked up in that shithole, but right now I can’t think straight about anything. I have to get home.’
A block further on I said, ‘I’m going this way.’
He nodded and said, ‘You know the house. Come tonight.’
This struck me as so ludicrous that I actually laughed.
‘Bring someone with you if you’re frightened of me,’ he said. ‘Come armed and point the thing at me while we’re talking. I don’t care, but come.’
I didn’t have the option of saying that this was out of the question because he strode off before I could marshal my response. While I was standing there watching him walk away, he turned and shouted, ‘The breakfast was shit!’
I arrived back at the George just before eleven o’clock. I was on the point of pushing open the door to the dining room when Charlotte’s car pulled up. She was wearing a pale pink, silk scarf, tied under her chin and circling her head, and sunglasses. In profile she looked like a haughty film star. When she turned her face to indicate that I should get in beside her, I could see even from outside the car that her lip was still swollen.
‘Where shall we go?’ she asked.
‘Teddington Weir,’ I said. ‘Do you know the way?’
She laughed.
‘Oh, yes. That’s where my husband raped me two weeks before we were married.’
The car pulled away. She took her hand off the wheel and squeezed my hand. As we drove past the courthouse her hand fell to my thigh and moved without impediment to my groin. The dull ache in my shoulder receded against the rising tide of physical pleasure. Like many of the best things in life, masturbation is somehow more enjoyable when someone else does all the work.
It only took us fifteen minutes to get to Teddington Weir. Once we had turned off at Tinana, the road to the weir was deserted. Cane fields flourished on either side, and an occasional house was visible from the road, but we did not see a single person. The weir had been a good choice. We wouldn’t be disturbed or observed.
Teddington Weir was two bodies of water. The upper reservoir with its fish ladder and brutal concrete water courses was less attractive than the lower reservoir. This was a large body of water fringed on all sides with dense vegetation. To reach it we climbed down an embankment, using the unofficial steps created by f
requent, week-end visitors. A path ran alongside the water, although trees and shrubs obscured it for much of its length. Here and there small areas had been cleared or trampled, and we slipped into one of these. We disturbed a goanna, which climbed a tree in no particular hurry. Halfway up it decided that it had given enough ground and sat quite still, pressing itself against the trunk so that if you looked away and back again, it took a moment to locate it. We were alone, apart from the goanna and a drongo that sat above us on a branch, observing us, with its bright eyes the colour of breathed-on-embers.
Charlotte removed her sunglasses and revealed her bruised eye. I experienced a rush of tenderness and desire so sudden and strong that it made me dizzy. She allowed me to touch her injured face gently and to kiss her damaged mouth with infinite care. The physical urgency between us grew and was satisfied before we had said more than a few words. I don’t think I am deceiving myself when I say that Charlotte enjoyed herself at least as much as I did, and possibly more. I jarred my arm rather. It was afterwards that I began to feel that we were being watched. I looked about, got up, and pushed aside nearby foliage.
‘What’s the matter, Will?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing.’
The sensation that another pair of eyes was observing us was so vivid that they might have been fingers touching me.
‘Will?’
Charlotte put her face close to mine. She kissed my eyelids and my mouth, and sucked gently on my earlobes.
‘Will you help me kill Harry?’ she whispered.
Her words sank into the porches of my ears with the swiftness of the poison used to dispatch Hamlet senior. I pulled away from her. My face must have betrayed my astonishment, not to say shock, at her suggestion, but she remained impassive.
‘We would be happy together,’ she said. ‘We would be rich.’
‘It’s murder, Charlotte.’
‘Yes. The worst of sins. But will God punish the just killing of an evil man?’
‘It’s not God I’m worried about. It’s Topaz and Conroy.’
