by Robert Gott
Charlotte’s eyes filled with tears, and she seemed to suffer a kind of collapse from within.
‘I can’t live like this anymore,’ she said. ‘Every day I’m more afraid than I was the day before. Every day the humiliations grow. I can’t even bring myself to tell you what he does to me.’
‘But murder, Charlotte.’
‘Yes,’ she said, and she bit each word off. ‘Yes. Murder. Revenge. Punishment. Justice.’ Her face softened suddenly, and she added quietly, ‘Salvation. Rescue.’
It may have been that her extraordinary words so electrified my system that every cell was on high alert, but I knew that I had heard a footfall and a rasp that was surely an intake of breath. The sounds came from everywhere and nowhere. They seemed to emanate from the air around us. Had the watcher — for now I was certain that there was a watcher nearby — heard what Charlotte had said? Charlotte seemed unaware of the intrusion. She was searching my face for a reaction to her remarks. I was suddenly overwhelmed by a terrifying sense that a malevolent force lurked nearby, its vibrations spreading like a toxic mist from the trees, the bushes, from the weir itself. The hair stood up on the back of my neck and I felt an onrush of panic. My breath came in short, shallow gasps.
‘We have to leave here,’ I said.
I put my hand on Charlotte’s arm, and my fear spread like a contagion into her body. Colour drained away from her face.
‘What?’ she said, ‘What is it?’ and her voice quavered slightly.
‘There’s something here. Someone. We have to leave.’
With our movements made shuddery and uncertain with inexplicable terror, we scrambled up the incline and made it back to Charlotte’s car. Charlotte fumbled at the ignition. The engine turned over, but it didn’t catch. There was no one outside the car, and no possibility that anyone could emerge from the undergrowth and take us by surprise. Nevertheless the atmosphere was alive with malice. Charlotte tried the ignition again and made a small, whimpering noise when it again failed to catch. The third time, it coughed into action. She engaged first gear noisily, and we pulled away from Teddington Weir.
The further we left the weir behind us, the calmer the air inside the car became. At the turnoff into Tinana, Charlotte stopped the car. Throughout the drive she had checked the rear-view mirror. We had not been pursued.
‘What was it?’ she asked. ‘What was that?’
‘There was someone there, Charlotte, and he wanted to hurt both of us.’ I was aware that I was sounding a little dramatic, but I’d just had the fright of my life.
‘Hurt?’
‘Kill, Charlotte. He wanted to kill us.’
‘Maybe what I said frightened you and then it just took hold.’
I shook my head.
‘No. I felt there was someone else there, watching us, almost as soon as we arrived.’
‘No, Will. I think I frightened you, and panic is catchy.’
She looked straight ahead.
‘I meant what I said, Will. Will you help me?’
Her head fell forward and she began to cry. At first the sobbing was a whimper, but it swelled symphonically into a body-wracking expression of inconsolable despair. I couldn’t bear to see her like this.
‘Charlotte, there has to be another way.’
Her sobs subsided and she turned her face, puffy with tears and battery, towards me.
‘I’ve seen murder in Harry’s eyes, Will. He will kill me unless I stop him. I won’t let him kill me, not like he killed Polly Drummond.’
Even in the midst of the maelstrom of emotion that had enveloped the car, this last statement was a conversation stopper. For a moment the only sound of which I was conscious was Charlotte’s swallowing.
‘Does Topaz know this?’ I asked.
She shook her head.
‘He suspects, of course. But I know.’
‘Can you prove it?’
‘When he kills me, Will, will that be proof enough? I know because he told me.’
There was a steeliness in her voice that I had not heard before. It was the mere glimpse of a ruthless heart, and perhaps I should have taken heed of it then and there. So fleeting was it that I convinced myself that I had been mistaken.
‘Help me,’ she said quietly.
‘Yes. We’ll find a way out of this.’
She must have known that I didn’t mean murder, but Harry Witherburn had less than a week to live from that moment
Chapter Eight
unpleasant encounters
CHARLOTTE DROPPED ME a few blocks from Wright’s Hall. We hardly spoke during the short drive from Tinana to town, and she didn’t kiss me when she stopped to let me out. She touched my hand and smiled. She was concerned about being seen. I didn’t believe that Charlotte really wanted Harry dead. My grasp of Catholic theology might be weak, but I didn’t think that someone who wouldn’t contemplate divorce would choose murder as the less soul-imperilling solution to a bad marriage.
When I reached Wright’s Hall I saw Kevin Skakel limping about outside. He was declaiming the ‘Tay Bridge Disaster’ in an execrable Scottish accent. It was a tragedy that his clubfoot had kept him out of the army, because his personality lent itself to following orders. The revelation that Annie had a brother had set me wondering about the ties that bound the rest of the company. I don’t say that it occupied much of my thinking time, and I suppose if I’d really wanted to know I could have just asked. It never seemed to be the right time to do this though.
‘Kevin,’ I called as I pushed open the gate. He stopped mid-declamation and held his hands up to his eyes against the glare.
‘Will,’ he said when he realised who it was. He came over to me. His olive skin shone with a patina of sweat. ‘I meant to ask you how you were feeling this morning, but I didn’t get a chance.’
It was unusual for Kevin to initiate conversation. The McGonagall must have roused him from his customary reticence.
‘Well, Kevin,’ I said. ‘I’m just about as well as can be expected under the circumstances.’
‘There’s a rosary at St Mary’s tonight. I’ll say a prayer for you.’
It occurred to me that anyone who thought McGonagall was a greater poet than Shakespeare was in more urgent need of celestial help than I was, but I was gracious and said that I was sure God would bend an attentive ear to Kevin’s pleas.
‘I’m not praying to God,’ he said. ‘I’m praying to St Jude.’
‘I don’t understand the workings of the Church of Rome, Kevin, but if my dilemma is part of St Jude’s portfolio, well and good.’
‘He looks after hopeless cases,’ he said, and smiled so ambiguously that I began to think that I had underestimated Kevin Skakel.
He followed me into the hall where Tibald, Annie, Arthur, and Adrian were watching Bill Henty perform his Henry V speech. For some reason he was doing it without his shirt. This was typical. Henty took every opportunity to display the torso he had honed with constant running and endless sit-ups. Abdominal muscles are no substitute for a personality, I thought.
‘“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,”’ he was saying, but in such a lacklustre way that he would encourage desertion among the troops rather than fierce loyalty.
‘Energy!’ I shouted. ‘More energy! You want this tiny army to take on the might of France!’
Henty, who always seemed much older than his twenty-eight years, stopped his recital. He looked at me with those unsettling dual-coloured eyes of his: one green, one brown.
‘Why don’t you show us how it’s done?’ he said, his voice a carefully modulated mix of boredom and resentment.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I will, but I’ll do it with my clothes on, if that’s all right. I don’t think the text is illuminated particularly by doing it topless.’
I performed the speech where I was standing, and I moved through the lines assuredly, gathering momentum as I went until I practically raised the roof with that final cry of ‘St Crispin’s Day!’ All this with the use of only one arm.
My performance was met with a sneer from Bill Henty. Tibald coughed and said that it was, perhaps, too big for such a small hall. I might have said that he was, himself, too big for such a small hall, but I held fire.
‘I thought it was excellent,’ said Arthur.
Annie cast him the kind of look you lavish on a traitor.
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘you feel good after destroying someone’s life.’
‘Joe Drummond is free,’ I said wearily, ‘but you needn’t think it had anything to do with you, or even with him especially. It was purely self-interest.’
Annie’s face lost its rigid, fuck-you aspect immediately, and her features settled back into the cosy, reliable, and undeniably sexy familiarity of Greer Garson.
‘Now,’ I said, ‘let’s see your pieces. Annie, you first.’
‘No, Will,’ she said. ‘You go first.’
I realised that I had left my copy of Coriolanus in Charlotte’s car. I didn’t yet have my piece off by heart, but I improvised where I was uncertain. I may not have had the words down pat, but the emotion was all there. Bill Henty didn’t run through his piece again. He sat sulking by the side wall, occasionally doing an ostentatious press-up. I was happy with them all, except for Kevin Skakel and his ‘Tay Bridge Disaster.’
Oh! Ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.
There were tears in his pale eyes as he finished his recital. How could a man who was not hearing-impaired be so deaf to language?
Although it was only three o’clock, Tibald said that he had to get back to the kitchen. Walter Sunder had been left behind, now that he had resigned from the company, and he ought by now, Tibald said, to have finished the tasks he could do unsupervised. We called it a day. It had certainly been a long one for me.
In the truck on the way back to the hotel I began to grapple with the idea of going to see Joe Drummond that night. I could take Arthur with me and maybe let Topaz know, although I imagined the police would be watching the Drummond house. They would hardly bait the trap and leave it unattended.
I was expecting Arthur to resist my request that he come with me to see Joe Drummond, but he was not in the least reluctant. Annie, who was now all sweetness and light, said that she would cover for him at dinner and we set out for the Drummond place at 8.00 pm. There was a strong wind with the scent of rain on it, but the sky was mostly clear. If there’d been any street trees in Richmond Street, they would have been soughing. There weren’t and, consequently, they weren’t.
When we reached the Drummond gate we, or rather I, hesitated. I was losing my nerve. The house rose behind it, a dense shadow with a presence that was almost animal. I looked across the street, hoping to see evidence of a police observer — the red glow of a cigarette perhaps. There was no one I could discover and, anyway, might it not have been the killer, come to complete his murderous hat-trick?
I am a much braver man in daylight, and I don’t mind admitting it. Coming to see Joe Drummond suddenly seemed like a very bad idea indeed. Even if he had no designs on my safety, whoever was after him would not have to wrestle with his conscience before turning his weapon on me. I muttered this to Arthur.
‘I think Joe might be a little more difficult to subdue than his sister or his mother,’ he said. ‘And if the killer is watching he won’t make any attempt when there are three people he’d have to deal with. Besides, somewhere here there must be a copper. It might even be Topaz.’
We climbed the stairs to the front door and knocked. It opened, but no light revealed the opener. He stood back from the door, in darkness. He made no sound. I felt the familiar fizz of fear begin its rise within me. Was this man Joe? Why had I come here?
‘Come in,’ the figure said. It was Joe. We entered the house and in so doing moved from moonlight into a darkness so complete that the house might have been sitting at the bottom of a well.
‘Wait here,’ he said. A few seconds later the door to the living room opened and a rectangle of pale yellow illuminated the corridor sufficient to light our way. The doors along the corridor were closed, but neither Arthur nor I gave any indication, not even by the smallest glance — not that Joe would have detected it in the gloom — that we knew which room had been his mother’s.
Inside the living room, a single candle provided the only light.
‘Power’s off,’ said Joe.
I introduced him to Arthur.
‘How’d you lose your arm?’ Joe asked bluntly. I had never heard anyone ask this question to Arthur’s face, and to ask it after having been introduced for the first time struck me as singular.
‘In a farming accident,’ Arthur said, and his tone indicated that he thought the question perfectly natural and that he was unoffended by its directness.
‘What a bastard of a thing to happen,’ Joe said. ‘I knew a bloke up north lost both his arms. Had to get his mates to help him take a piss.’
Arthur laughed. ‘The meaning of true friendship.’
Joe sat, and Arthur and I followed his example. It was difficult to read Joe’s expression in the dimly lit room.
‘You met my brother,’ he said, ‘and you had a bit of a fling with Polly. You’re almost one of the family.’
‘Yes, I met your brother and, no, I didn’t have a bit of a fling with your sister.’
‘You took her to the pictures.’
‘Yes. Once. I don’t think that means we’re related.’
‘You know,’ he said. ‘I owe you. I shot you and you got me out of the clink, and you’ve come here tonight.’ He leaned forward, made a steeple with his fingers, and added. ‘I am grateful, but I have to tell you, you’re a bit of a prick. Did you know that?’
‘Well, Joe,’ I said, ‘if you were hoping for a beautiful friendship perhaps you should revise how you introduce yourself. Shooting people is not a social skill.’
Arthur coughed ostentatiously in an attempt to short-circuit what was becoming a pointless slanging match which Joe did not have the vocabulary to win.
‘What did my sister see in you?’ said Joe, with a deliberation that was particularly offensive. I decided to employ the clarifying astringent of truth to this conversation.
‘Polly wasn’t interested in me. She had other, more compelling motives for being seen in public with me. She was engaged to a singularly unimpressive weed called Patrick Lutteral, only he was baulking at bolting down the aisle with her and so Polly thought she might hurry him along by demonstrating that he had competition.’
I gave him a moment to take that much in and then continued.
‘She was in a hurry because she was pregnant.’
I was expecting some protestation at this point, or some indication that the information was startling. I was, after all, speaking about his murdered sister. He did not react in any way that was detectable in the flickering light of the candle.
‘Go on,’ was all he said.
‘Patrick may have been the father, but I doubt it. He’s grimly Catholic. There were other candidates.’
I let that plural sink in.
‘She was Harry Witherburn’s mistress, and she told him that she was carrying his child.’
&nb
sp; I stopped again. I was saving the best for last.
‘If what Polly told her silly friend Shirley Moynahan is true, it’s quite possible that Fred was the father.’
I had thought that this accusation would bring Joe to his feet, but his reaction was shockingly minimal. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. When he opened them, the candlelight caught what might have been tears trapped in his lashes. I regretted then wounding him with what amounted to little more than the gossip of a jealous shop girl. A twinge in my shoulder immediately assuaged my guilt.
‘Do you think Witherburn killed her?’ he asked.
‘Probably,’ I said. I was aware that Arthur had turned his head sharply towards me. There must have been such certainty in my voice that he suspected that I had held something back from him. I had, of course. I had not told him that Charlotte had openly accused her husband of the murder. Her extraordinary and obviously hysterical request that I help her to dispose of the odious Harry Witherburn had made me cautious about sharing her remarkable confidence.
‘I take it,’ said Joe, ‘that you’re not so sure that he killed my mother.’
I resisted the sudden urge to swing round towards the room where Mrs Drummond’s headless body had lain rotting for so many days. Perhaps he sensed my arrested movement.
‘She died in one of those rooms,’ he said, indicating the general direction by lifting his chin. ‘They tried to clean it up, the coppers, but you can’t get rid of a mess like that. You’d have to burn it down.’
‘I don’t think Harry Witherburn killed your mother,’ Arthur said, ‘and I’m not as sure as Will obviously is that he killed your sister either. At least, I don’t think he did it himself. He’s a rich and powerful man. I don’t think he’d get his hands dirty.’
‘He might pay somebody else to do his dirty work for him, though. Is that what you mean?’ Joe asked.
‘If he’s involved, then yes, that’s how he’d do it.’
I saw Arthur’s point, but I knew, too, that Harry Witherburn enjoyed beating up women. I could imagine a scenario where he went too far with Polly and killed her accidentally. Equally I could imagine him losing his temper and simply snuffing out her life in order to remove an inconvenience, permanently.
