by Robert Gott
‘I still think he killed Polly, but I can’t see him disposing of her body. I think he would have had to get somebody to do that for him. And I agree with Arthur that Harry Witherburn would not have risked exposure by murdering your mother in that way. And why would he need to?’
‘Maybe Polly told mum she was pregnant and that Witherburn was the father. Maybe mum let Witherburn know that, and threatened to tell his wife.’
I shook my head.
‘Charlotte already knew.’
Joe’s eyebrows came together.
‘You know Charlotte Witherburn?’
‘Slightly,’ I said. ‘We’re doing a show for her at her fund-raiser. She’s told me a few things.’
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Perhaps it’s my open and trusting face.’
‘You’re fucking her, aren’t you?’
I could not disguise my discomfort at the appalling accuracy of his intuition and so I hurried on, revealing more perhaps than I’d intended to.
‘Fred tried to blackmail Witherburn. He just laughed at Fred. Polly told Char … Mrs Witherburn, about her pregnancy, but she didn’t want anything from her. Charlotte wasn’t surprised. I think, more than anything else, she was surprised that anybody who wasn’t obliged to would have sex with Harry. He’s a truly horrible man, and he’s violent. Capable of murder, certainly, but he’d pay someone to clean up after him.’
‘And what about Fred?’ asked Joe.
‘I’ll be frank, Joe. Your brother was mad as a cut snake. Psychotic, I suspect. On the night that Polly disappeared, the night I took her to the pictures, he had a fight with her. A physical fight. They were rolling around on the floor. Then he attacked me a few days later.’
Joe Drummond stood up and walked the few steps to where framed photographs sat on a table. He put his hands on his hips and stared down at them. The candle threw light on his back so the pictures must have been almost impossible to see in the shadow he cast over them.
‘I didn’t know Fred,’ he said. ‘Not really. We didn’t spend much time together when we were growing up.’
He picked up a photograph and examined it closely.
‘I never liked him much,’ he said. ‘The coppers think the plane crash was an accident, but Peter Topaz asked me if I knew any reason why Fred might want to kill himself.’
He turned to face us, and the feeble light made dark hollows of his eyes.
‘Would he do that? Would he kill himself?’
‘Well, if he did,’ said Arthur, ‘he didn’t just kill himself, did he, he killed his flying instructor as well.’
‘He owed a man named Mal Flint a lot of money,’ I said. ‘Do you know Mal Flint?’
‘I went to school with Flint. He was a moron.’
‘Yeah, well, he grew into a full-sized moron, and Fred got mixed up with him. Flint was anxious to get his money and beat Fred up, just to remind him. Actually, I owe Flint a favour. Fred was attacking me at the time and Flint took him from behind.’
‘Why was Fred attacking you?’
‘He thought I’d kidnapped Polly. I told you he was nuts. He admitted a couple of days later that he was wrong. I saw him, just before the accident and he said he knew who’d killed Polly. He said “they”, like he thought there was more than one person.’
‘Why is it,’ asked Joe, ‘that at every turn, you’re there? You’re there the night Polly goes missing. You’re there when Fred dies. Where were you when mum was murdered?’
This was clearly not the moment to reveal that I’d been right here, in this very room. I ignored the question.
‘The person who actually pops up at every turn,’ I said, ‘is …’
‘Mal Flint,’ said Arthur.
‘Why would Mal Flint want to kill my family?’
‘Maybe he doesn’t,’ Arthur continued. ‘Maybe Fred was the only person he had a grudge against, but maybe he was paid to get Polly and your mother out of the way.’
Joe returned to his chair.
‘Flint is not a nice bloke, I grant you,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t have picked him as a cold-blooded gun for hire.’
‘Maybe you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Flint recently,’ I said. ‘I met him in a toilet just the other day and …’
‘Is Flint queer, too?’ Joe asked.
‘What do you mean, “too”? I have no idea what his proclivities are, although quadrupeds seem possible. I was in the toilet urinating. I was not there hoping to score a blow job from Mal Flint. Now I’ve lost my train of thought. What was I saying?’
‘Flint,’ said Arthur. ‘You were about to say that you met him and that he was extremely unpleasant.’
‘That’s right. He would have no qualms about killing for a fee.’
‘Well, then,’ said Joe. ‘Flint sounds like a good place to start. We need to find something that connects him directly to Harry Witherburn.’
‘We?’ I said. ‘That’s the coppers’ job.’
‘So far they’re not doing a very good one, are they? And we can do things they can’t.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as breaking into Flint’s house and poking around a bit.’
My immediate reaction to this suggestion was to feel sick. I’m not ashamed to admit that the idea of being on the wrong side of Mal Flint scared the shit out of me. I had hoped that Arthur would baulk at the idea and speak strongly against it. When he jumped in and agreed that searching Flint’s house was a good strategy, it brought home to me that I didn’t know him as well as I thought.
‘Tomorrow’s Friday,’ Arthur said. ‘Flint works at Walkers.’
‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘We know nothing about him. We don’t even know where he lives.’
‘I know where he lives,’ said Joe. ‘The Flints lived at Granville, up at the end of Walkers Point Road. He stayed there when his parents died, and he’s an only child. They probably took one look at him when he popped out and never had sex again. We won’t run into anybody. It’s practically the bush up there.’
‘Somebody might be there. Is he married?’
‘Who’d marry that arsehole?’
So that settled it. We agreed to meet the following morning at the Granville Bridge at eleven o’clock. I would plead a sore shoulder in order to avoid tomorrow’s rehearsal. Arthur would stick to his room and get Augie Kelly to tell the others he was ill. He should also, I suggested, let Augie know where we were going, but not what we were doing in any detail. I didn’t like the idea of heading off to Flint’s house without having someone to look for us if anything went wrong.
On the way back to the George from the Drummond house, Arthur could barely contain his excitement about the next day’s burglary — and what we were proposing to do amounted to burglary. I was feeling something closer to trepidation. Our last uninvited entry into someone else’s house had not ended happily.
The Granville Bridge wasn’t far from the George. We overestimated how long it would take us to walk there, and arrived fifteen minutes early. The gates at either end were closed, and the bascule was beginning to open slowly to allow the passage of a timber barge beneath it.
‘What’s Flint look like?’ Arthur asked.
‘You’ve seen him. He was the bloke who stopped and spoke to Polly that day, about the money Fred owed him.’
‘I don’t remember what he looked like.’
‘He looks like he was bashed about the head as a kid. Pug ugly. Peter Lorre, only taller and built like a brick shithouse. He’s like a wild animal. His eyes are as disconnected from compassion as a shark’s.’
Joe Drummond arrived not long after we had. He looked like he hadn’t slept at all. He’d shaved, but carelessly, and he’d cut himself in several places. He’d left home very early, he said, and taken a round
about route in order to lose the copper who’d been assigned to watch him.
We crossed the Mary River into Odessa Street and walked its length until it became Walkers Point Road. The houses in this part of Maryborough were squalid. The crying of a child and the barking of a dog were the only indications that these meanly constructed residences were occupied. Front yards were piled with the detritus of scrounged livelihoods, and the air was tainted with the unmistakable odour of poverty. This did not seem like a part of Maryborough at all. Even small towns harbour an underclass. The houses gave way quickly to unmanaged land.
‘It floods here,’ Joe said. ‘It’s not so bad this far up, but down on the flats it goes under regularly.’
‘I don’t suppose Flint lives on the flats,’ I said. ‘A decent flood is probably the only time he has a decent bath.’
‘That’s his place there,’ he said, and indicated a structure that was more humpy than house. It looked as if it had been built before the turn of the century. It might have been quaint with its high, pitched roof and awkwardly proportioned verandah, if it hadn’t been allowed to head towards its entropic destiny unimpeded by repairs. A lemon-scented gum rose elegantly on one side. The dead trunks of ring-barked trees studded the yard, and whatever greenery there was grew in chaotic, opportunistic clumps. The earth around the house was bare. Rain would turn Flint’s yard into a quagmire.
The house was built close to the ground, although the left side was closer than the right, having subsided gradually in response to water swirling about its stumps. There were no front steps, although there must once have been. Arthur and I stepped up onto the verandah, and Joe went round the back. Several floorboards were missing, and it was bereft of furniture. A pile of rags sat in one corner. They had become the murmurous haunt of flies, to use Mr Keats’ phrase, and I was not in the least curious to discover what lay beneath them. The windows on either side of the door were so filthy that peering into them revealed nothing.
Arthur tried the door. It wasn’t locked. When it was opened fully, the house let out a long-held breath of stale, putrid air. How could anyone live and breathe in this cesspit of a house? We entered and felt immediately in need of a bath. The foetid atmosphere clung to us with the physicality of rancid animal fat. The two front rooms were dark, but it was obvious that one of them was a bedroom. A mattress thrown on the tilting floorboards was proof of this. There was only one other room, which opened out from the short corridor. A door separated it from the front of the house. When I pushed opened this door, the sawmill buzz of blowflies was remarkable in its intensity. The back door was closed, but several missing planks allowed bands of light in and gave free access to the rich variety of local insect life. In the gloom I discerned what they were interested in. A pig’s carcass had been upended and was hanging from a rafter, its head just reaching the edge of the claw-foot bath over which it was suspended. The bath sat opposite a wood stove of primitive design. Flies danced around the stovetop, but it was the dead pig that was the main attraction. Its throat had been cut, and its blood puddled, black and congealed, on the floor of the bath.
‘He must have slaughtered it this morning,’ Arthur said. ‘He’s draining the blood.’
‘It’s disgusting,’ I said. ‘It’ll be crawling with maggots by the time he gets home.’
‘You just pick them off. Maybe he eats them, too. Good protein.’
‘That sounds like the voice of experience,’ I said.
‘Fuck off. What are we looking for, anyway?’
‘I have no idea. A note. A piece of clothing. Something to tie him to Witherburn.’
Looking around this frightful room, I realised the futility of our visit.
‘You hunt about here,’ I said. ‘I’ll check the front rooms. Maybe he stuffed £100 notes under his mattress.’
Flint’s mattress was damp and smelled of stale beer, sweat, and urine. It also smelled strongly of dog. It struck me as I inhaled the odour that no dogs were barking. I knew that Flint ran dog fights and he almost certainly had dogs of his own. The discovery of a wet turd near the door confirmed this, and yet there was silence. This caused my stomach to tauten and a vein in my neck to pulse weirdly. I went back into the kitchen where Arthur was standing in the doorway to the backyard, blocking the light.
‘Where are the dogs?’ I asked, and my voice quavered involuntarily, the way it does when I feel the first tinglings of rising panic. Arthur said nothing, then almost fell through the door into the yard. I was blinded by the sudden burst of light, but I saw his silhouette hurry towards the back of the property. I followed him.
‘Joe!’ I called. ‘Joe!’
‘He’s not here,’ said Arthur, ‘and the dogs are dead.’
I caught up with him in a corner of the yard. In a rough enclosure, three canine corpses lay, their eyes open and swarming with ants and flies.
‘They’ve been dead a couple of hours,’ Arthur said. ‘Poisoned, I’d say. Someone got here ahead of us and didn’t want the dogs carrying on.’
‘Where’s Joe?’
Arthur’s calm in the face of what I was certain was an approaching firestorm of trouble was infuriating and unsettling.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, but we both had a fair idea that he wasn’t playing hide and seek.
‘How can you be so calm?’ I said, annoyed that he wasn’t suffering an alarm at least the equal of mine.
‘I’m not calm,’ he said. ‘I’m terrified.’
Behind the makeshift kennel the thick scrub crouched, drawn in upon itself — enclosed protectively, it seemed, against any further encroachment by slashing and burning settlers. Whoever had been here was probably watching us from its shelter, his presence occluded by ti-tree and wattle, but his menace drifting towards us on aromatic wafts of eucalypt and sweetly scented leaf litter.
‘Maybe he went back around the front,’ I said.
‘Maybe,’ Arthur said, but he stood staring into the bush.
‘I’ll check,’ I said and withdrew to the house. There was no sign of Joe.
When I returned to the yard, Arthur had barely moved. I stood again beside him and, for want of a better idea, began calling into the bush.
‘Joe! Joe Drummond! Joe Drummond!’
‘You’re wasting your breath,’ Arthur said. ‘He’s dead, and dead people have poor hearing.’
‘We should look for him,’ I said, hoping that Arthur would dissuade me from doing so. I didn’t want to move any closer to whoever was lurking in the scrub.
‘Yes,’ he said, and as soon as he’d said it he became resolute. ‘We should stick together. If this prick can take Joe by surprise and overpower him, I don’t like either of our chances on our own. We’ve only got two useful arms between us if we have to defend ourselves.’
We pushed our way through a prickly tangle of under-storey, and were relieved to discover that it thinned a short way in. The air was still, and the hum of insects was the only insistent sound. Occasionally a bird called, and eucalypt leaves clattered together high above us. At any other time this would have seemed a pleasant place. Now, our observations warped by fear, its silence and the sense that it went on forever made it seem sinister and alive with the possibility of sudden and horrifying violence. I began to feel again that profound disturbance of equilibrium I had felt at Teddington Weir.
‘We should leave here,’ I said.
‘There!’ said Arthur, and pointed ahead and to our right. I saw what had caught his eye, or thought I did. There was an impression of a figure moving quickly through the trees. It was no more than a glimpse, followed by the unmistakeable crack of feet treading on dry twigs. Arthur began running towards the place where the figure had been. With every fibre of my being telling me to stay where I was, it took a considerable effort of will to take off after him. I could see Arthur well ahead, barrelling carelessly forwa
rd. He was fast. I fancied, too, that through the rattle of my breathing and the combined racket of our pursuit I could hear the fleeing footfalls of the figure we were chasing. I was gaining on Arthur when he tripped suddenly and fell heavily to the left. With no arm to put out to break his fall, he crashed sickeningly to the ground. I was upon him in seconds. He was lying with his face turned awkwardly, one cheek imbedded in the dirt. He was unconscious, and my first thought was that his neck had been broken.
I was aware of the sound of running up ahead; but as quickly as I noted it, it stopped. Perhaps the sound of Arthur falling had just reached him, and perhaps the silence that followed told him that he was no longer being pursued. Perhaps, I thought, with a dread that numbed me, perhaps he would now come back. With one hand on the back of Arthur’s neck, as if my touch were enough to heal him, I scanned the trees around us. A snapping twig to my right brought my eyes round quickly to that point. Another to my left jerked my eyes there. He couldn’t be in two places at once. My common sense told me this, but I had never before journeyed this far into the wilderness of fear, and I was beyond rational thought. With awful clarity I remembered that Fred Drummond had said ‘they’. He knew who ‘they’ were.
As I was assimilating the hideous possibility of a posse of psychopaths falling upon us, a heavy crunch of leaves behind me and a shadow that swallowed us with the swift and callous certainty of a predator poised for the kill almost stopped my heart completely. Arthur stirred under my hands. He was not dead after all, although I was now certain he soon would be. I don’t know why the realisation that I was about to die released a great calm within me. Perhaps I had exhausted my body’s reserves of adrenalin. Arthur opened his eyes and looked over my shoulder. He would see my murderer — and his — in the few remaining seconds of his life. I simply waited for the blow to be struck, almost impatiently.
‘Who killed my fucking dogs?’
This question, uttered in Mal Flint’s unmistakably plebeian tones, was so bizarre in the context of impending death that it had an hallucinatory quality. It made me think that somehow I had not felt that final blow, but had slipped beyond the veil painlessly and had entered a purgatory where expiation involved eternal conversation with Mal Flint. The sensation was fleeting. Flint put his foot in the small of my back and sent me sprawling across Arthur’s semi-conscious body. I felt the wound in my shoulder open and the sticky flow of blood soaking into my shirt.
