Good Murder

by Robert Gott

  ‘A lawyer has been organised for you. A good one. He’s coming up from Brisbane tomorrow.’

  ‘There’s no money to pay for a good lawyer.’

  ‘You do have friends.’ He paused. ‘And family.’

  I felt ill.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It was Annie who suggested it. The troupe has put money in, but Annie said that your brothers and your mother would want to know, and that they’d probably want to help.’

  ‘What do you mean “probably,” and how does she know they even exist? I have never discussed my family with her or anybody else.’

  Topaz had the grace to blush.

  ‘Well, I’m afraid that’s my fault. When I was checking up on you I found all that out, and Annie …’

  ‘My family as pillow talk. Whatever gets you going, I guess.’

  ‘Maybe it’s me, Will. Maybe I bring out the worst in you. I know that your life has turned to garbage, and I know that you’re terrified, but there you sit, still drawing on your bottomless reservoir of bullshit.’

  I began to protest, but thought better of it.

  ‘Look’, I said, ‘I am under a bit of pressure here.’

  This was as close as I could get to contrition. To give Topaz credit, he had not yielded to what must have been a considerable temptation to gloat over my predicament.

  ‘All right, Will’, he said. ‘I want you to listen to me without interrupting, and I’m asking you to trust that what I’m telling you is the truth. I shouldn’t be talking to you at all. Conroy would spontaneously combust if he knew.’

  I couldn’t help myself.

  ‘Just tell me one thing first. Conroy hates me. Why?’

  ‘Conroy doesn’t hate you, Will. Conroy hates me. But he does believe he’s caught his killer. He really does. He isn’t using you as a convenient stooge. He truly believes you’re guilty.’

  ‘He assaulted me.’

  ‘He thinks you’ve murdered four people. If I thought that I might thump you, too.’

  A great wave of relief washed over me.

  ‘You still think I’m innocent?’

  He leaned forward.

  ‘I don’t think you’re innocent. I know you’re innocent.’

  ‘How?’

  He considered that for a moment.

  ‘I know you’re innocent because I know who isn’t. Now just listen, Will. I’m not going to give you any names. Not yet. Unless I get more evidence, you could still go down for Harry Witherburn’s murder, on Charlotte’s evidence alone.’

  ‘But Conroy made that up.’

  Topaz was genuinely startled, and looked at me as if he thought I might be mad.

  ‘No, Will,’ he said firmly. ‘Conroy didn’t make that up. Charlotte Witherburn couldn’t wait to provide that information. I know this is hard for you to accept, but Charlotte Witherburn is as unpleasant in her way as Harry was in his. It’s no coincidence that they were married. These people find each other.’

  ‘She asked me to kill him.’

  These words tumbled out of my mouth. There was no emotion in them. Some part of me had suddenly and finally surrendered any faith I had left that Charlotte would intervene and recant her testimony.

  ‘She thinks you did kill him, and she’s happy to let you pay for it.’

  ‘She didn’t kill Harry, then?’

  ‘No. No. But she did interfere with his corpse. I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure it was Charlotte who put your name up Harry’s arse.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Will,’ he said, with some exasperation, ‘don’t you get it? She wanted you safely out of the way. She thinks you did her dirty work for her, and she certainly doesn’t want you under foot now. She’s rich and she’s free. She’ll stand up in court, look you straight in the eye, and declare you guilty, and all she’ll feel is relief.’

  ‘OK’, I said. ‘I get it.’ And, for the first time, I really did get it — fully, profoundly. I would wrestle with the consequences of this understanding later.

  ‘What about the troupe? Do they know that you don’t go along with Conroy?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve told Annie, and she’s let them know. They do want to help, Will.’

  ‘No one’s been to see me.’

  ‘No one’s been allowed to see you or to have any contact with you whatsoever. Once your lawyer’s here, that should change. I imagine you’ll certainly be able to see your brother.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your brother is coming here as soon as he can organise leave from his teaching.’

  ‘I don’t want to see him. Things are bad enough without involving my family.’

  ‘Too bad,’ Topaz said with finality. ‘You need all the help you can get, and your brother is willing to help. I don’t give a rat’s arse whether you want him here or not. He’s coming, and that’s that.’

  With the interview over, I began to reflect on the impending arrival of my brother Brian. My relations with my brothers were perfectly civil. Both Brian and Fulton were younger than I was, and I didn’t really have very much in common with either of them. The gap between Fulton and me was so large — he was just twenty — that I thought of him as a child. Brian was closer in age to me, but there was an edge of competitiveness between us that infected our interaction. I also didn’t much care for his drab and silly wife, Darlene. I was aware of an unspoken, simmering resentment which he harbored because it had fallen to him to stay at home and look after our mother. He thought acting was a trivial profession, and in the course of one unpleasant fraternal stoush he had made the ludicrous suggestion that perhaps my ambition was greater than my talent.

  ‘You might have noticed,’ he had said, ‘the dearth of Australian movie stars.’

  ‘Errol Flynn. Merle Oberon,’ I had replied.

  ‘Hardly the last words in great acting,’ he had said dismissively.

  ‘Anyway, I’m not interested in the movies,’ I had said. ‘I am a stage actor.’

  He’d snorted derisively. It had taken a great deal of self-discipline not to suggest that teaching adolescent boys in a dreary high school and curling up each night with an even drearier wife were not exactly the stuff dreams were made on. Not my dreams, anyway.

  A roll of thunder made me jump as the constable took me back to the cell, and great pats of rain began to land with thuds in the dust and with slaps on the iron roof. Inside the cell a pale, low-voltage light, itself imprisoned in a protective cage, had been turned on. Its dimness seemed to accentuate the dark corners, rather than dispel them. An explosive crack of thunder sounded almost simultaneously with a fierce, blindingly white flash of lightning. It had the intensity of an x-ray. The thunder that followed began with a sound like the tearing of some unimaginably vast piece of fabric, and escalated into a boom that rattled the building and rattled me to boot. There was another split-second whiteout and another ear-shattering burst of thunder. The rain was machine-gunning on the roof with mounting ferocity, and I could hear through its rat-a-tat-tat that trees were being whipped about. Somewhere a door was slamming open and shut, and I thought I heard shouting, but I couldn’t be sure amidst the general clamour.

  I stretched out on the bed, conscious now of an ache in my arm, and I experienced a renewed annoyance about the unwanted involvement of my younger brother. The wind blew at a savage pitch for a full hour and then, incredibly, it seemed to surge to an even wilder level. The rain no longer fell noisily onto the roof. It must have been driven almost parallel to it. Then the dim light went out. It is astonishing how even the faintest of light can disguise the black reality of total darkness. I sat up and listened to the howling universe beyond my cell. There were new sounds in it. Iron roofs whined and groaned and clung to their beams, reluctant and complaining as the wind attempted to prise them loo
se and fling them into the night. A crash and scream of metal on metal told me that at least one piece of iron had surrendered and had been thrown against a building nearby.

  The roof came off my cell with the swiftness of a sharply removed scab. One moment it was there; the next, rain was beating down upon me and the cyclone was with me inside the cell. Leaves and whole branches were tossed into the cramped space. I knew I had to get out of there and that the only way was up and over the wall. I turned one of the beds on its end and clambered to the bedhead, where I stood precariously, my good hand gripping the exposed wall-top above me. The bed moved under my weight, but it held and, with a manoeuvre worthy of the circus performer that half of Maryborough thought I was, I pulled down on my arm and swung my legs over the wall. It was unsightly and inelegant but, driven by pure adrenaline, it was successful, and I found myself sitting astride my prison wall. My wound, however, had been torn open, and the pain was excruciating. I waited for a moment to catch my breath, then dropped to the ground on the other side.

  The extraordinary noise and the furious battering of wind and rain, and the realisation that I might be decapitated or cut in half at any moment by flying iron, made careful consideration of what I should do next very difficult.

  I was in no danger of being discovered. No one was out in this weather. I could see nothing. The darkness was relieved only by momentary stilettos of lightning. The pelting rain fell so thickly it was as if Maryborough found itself at the bottom of the remorseless cascade of a mighty and pummelling waterfall. It was through this turbulent submarine world that I made my way towards Charlotte’s house.

  Chapter Eleven

  wild night

  THERE WERE NO LIGHTS on at Witherburn. I could discern its shape dimly when I entered the drive, and then a white blast revealed it, vast and skeletal, like a giant carcass, gleaming, picked clean. Charlotte would, no doubt, be surprised to see me. A part of me was holding on to the absurd hope that there had been a ghastly misunderstanding between us, and that she was in no way implicated in the deliberate attempt to set in motion a series of actions that would lead to me being imprisoned for life.

  I mounted the front steps. Lightning revealed that the furniture on the verandah had been tossed into heaps by the wind, much of it reduced to sticks. I knocked on the front door, but I could not hope that my knocks were audible above the competing hammering of the storm. I turned the handle and it opened. I thought it odd that no one had lit a candle or a hurricane lamp. Somewhere in the house a door slammed and slammed again as the wind caught it.

  ‘Charlotte?’

  I called loudly.

  ‘Charlotte?’

  There was no reply. I took a few steps down the corridor and called again.

  ‘Charlotte?’

  I felt something then. Not a presence. An absence, and I breathed it in like swamp gas. I knew that someone had been here before me, and I knew what I would find behind one of those doors.

  Not expecting the lights to work, I nevertheless found the switch in the hallway and depressed it. I narrowed my eyes against the sudden brightness, and made my way towards Charlotte’s bedroom and knocked pointlessly. No amount of knocking will wake the dead, and I was certain that Charlotte lay dead on the other side of the door. I opened it slowly, allowing the light from the hallway to creep in ahead of me. The sweet, ferrous odour of warm blood reached me. I switched on the light and saw her sitting on the floor, her back against the side of the bed, her head lolled forward. Her nightdress was stained carmine, and a viscous pool of blood spread out around her. It was still flowing. Whatever had happened to her had happened only moments before. That she was dead I had no doubt, but I could not immediately bring myself to approach her body and examine her closely.

  The sound of breaking glass in another room terminated any thoughts that I might have had of doing this. The murderer was still in the house. With me. My hand shot out and snapped off the light. Perhaps I believed that hiding behind night’s skirts might protect me. I kept still for a moment, straining to hear a human sound through the storm’s cacophony. He must know that he was not alone. Of course he knew this. I’d called out Charlotte’s name and switched on a light. He was lying in wait. The glass had been deliberately broken to unnerve me. It had been successful. I was incapable of coherent thought and incapable, too, of action. I simply stood there and waited to be found.

  I can’t remember whether the darkness was so enveloping that not even the vaguest of outlines was visible, or whether I had closed my eyes in some childish belief that if you can’t see anything, you can’t be seen. It was a short, sharp sniff that told me he had entered Charlotte’s bedroom. I reached for the light switch, suddenly determined to see him, whatever the consequences. My fingers found it just as his hand did the same. The sensation of his warm flesh was, oddly, chilling. Neither of us pulled away. For the briefest of moments we were frozen, skin on skin. Then, in one, startling movement, he flicked on the switch and closed his fingers tightly around my wrist.

  I found myself staring into Arthur Rank’s eyes.

  He released his grip.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, as if we had met unexpectedly on a street somewhere. I turned my head to look at Charlotte’s corpse, and his eyes followed mine. He did a passable impression of someone seeing her body for the first time, but I didn’t allow him the luxury of playing out his charade. I slipped my arm out of its sling and brought the full weight of the plaster cast down onto the side of his head. A devastating pain suggested that I had re-broken the bone. Arthur dropped unconscious to the floor. Blood oozed extravagantly from behind his ear.

  Although to some extent I had prepared myself for this ghastly revelation after our encounter with Flint, I nevertheless found it difficult to accept. What motive could Arthur have for murdering Polly, her mother, Joe, Harry Witherburn, and now Charlotte? Was there something in his strange and tragic past that linked him to all of them?

  I nudged him gingerly with my foot. He didn’t stir. When I felt his pulse it was strong, so I hadn’t killed him, thank God. If I was to be cleared of suspicion I would have to deliver Arthur alive to the frightful Conroy. I allowed myself the momentary luxury of imagining his reaction to the news that he had been grossly wrong all along. I would not, I told myself, succumb to any bouts of euphoric forgiveness for his treatment of me, and I would pursue justice for the mortifying slap he had inflicted.

  For now, though, I had no clear idea of what to do next. I tried the telephone in the corridor, but the line was dead. I had to get to Topaz. He suspected already that Arthur was the culprit; and now I had caught him, more or less, in murderous flagrante delicto. I couldn’t afford to wait here at Witherburn for the storm to pass. That might take hours, and I couldn’t face the prospect of speaking to Arthur when he regained consciousness. I didn’t want to risk hearing his desperate lies, partly because I knew how easy it would be for me to believe them. Using a piece of curtain cord, I tied Arthur’s arm to his ankle, and positioned him so that the first thing he saw when he woke was the body of his latest victim. When I stepped into the hallway I thought I saw at its far end a shadow, deeper than those around it, shift. I stared until I had reassured myself that there was nothing to stare at. I then opened the front door, crossed the verandah, and passed through its latticed door into the roiling fury of nature untethered.

  The driveway was strewn with foliage and branches, and the debris leapt about as if animated by internal energies. The street outside Witherburn was alive with rolling, skittering, and flying detritus. And everywhere the wind, not contented with hurling objects willy-nilly, howled its presence with a terrifying voice. The rain fell in sheets still, but the lightning no longer cleaved the air with its hideous illumination. Heavy branches rolled languidly in response to the application of some unseen boot pushing them aside.

  I decided that my best bet was to g
o to the George. There were people there who would be relieved to see me — people who, if Topaz had told the truth, believed in my innocence. I thought it likely that Topaz would be there, taking the opportunity to hold Annie close during the worst of the storm.

  When I reached Queen’s Park I saw people rushing about, oblivious to the danger posed by airborne missiles. They seemed to be mostly military people, and they were shouting, hurrying in the direction of the river. I followed, knowing what this meant, and I had not gone far when I realised I was ankle deep in water. The smell of the Mary River rose to my nostrils from where it swirled at my feet. Here, at the edges of its spill, I could feel the relentless tug of its current, and knew that the George must by now be within its grip. I knew, too, that Mal Flint’s house would be washed by its waters, in some way temporarily cleansed, until the flood’s withdrawal left behind its foul and stinking wrack.

  No one paid any attention to me as I walked to higher ground up Adelaide Street. I thought I would come around behind the George and see how matters stood. When I reached the corner of Kent and March Street, I saw that the Mary River had engulfed the George to a point at least halfway up its lower windows. I imagined the furniture in the dining room and bar floating and crashing against masonry and glass as the river eddied and swished in the unfamiliar confinement of four walls. The sound of its rushing was unearthly to my ears, and triumphant, as if the river were declaring that its banks were a grace-and-favour confinement, and no impediment to the occasional demonstration of its true authority.

  I couldn’t get any nearer to the hotel without swimming, and the current was too swift to allow that. I wondered if the troupe had abandoned the premises. Surely they wouldn’t have retreated upstairs, for they must have known that the very foundations might give way and bring the whole building crashing into the flow.

  A hand placed solidly on my shoulder, with the proprietorial certainty of a walloper nabbing his man, made me jump. I turned, and was relieved to see that it belonged to Augie Kelly. His copper hair was plastered to his head, and his clothes were as saturated as my own.