Good Murder

by Robert Gott

  ‘That was you in that room that night?’

  ‘You knew it was me, Will. I could practically hear your thoughts. I was happy that night, I can tell you. I’d done what you wanted me to do.’

  I shook my head in bewilderment.

  ‘No. I didn’t want that. I didn’t …’

  ‘And then you got rid of Fred Drummond, so I didn’t have to. That was brilliant. I don’t know how you did it. That was when I was absolutely certain that I hadn’t been wrong about you, that we were in this together. Nothing mattered more than our friendship. Fred Drummond falling out of the sky was the greatest gift anyone has ever given me. Right then, I knew our friendship was a sacred trust.’

  ‘I was never your friend, Augie.’

  ‘Of course, you couldn’t let anyone else see it. I understand that. You wanted my protection, though. We looked out for each other. You always let me know somehow where you were going and what you were doing.’

  ‘I didn’t tell you anything.’

  ‘Yes you did, Will, and sometimes you let me overhear things, or got Arthur to tell me. I always knew. You always let me know.’

  Augie seemed to have slipped into an unbordered realm of madness, but his eyes did not glaze over and he was acutely aware of our presence. Annie inclined her head at one stage, and Augie’s weird eyes snapped to her with the concentration and focus of a chameleon stalking a fly. Then they swivelled back to me.

  ‘I messed up with Joe Drummond. I wanted to do something as soon as he shot you, but I didn’t get the chance. Then you gave me the chance when you took him to Flint’s place. That was clever, but Arthur came out of the house too quickly. I know Drummond’s not dead. I’ve been watching out for you ever since you came to me last night at the George.’

  ‘I didn’t come to you. You happened to be there, that’s all.’

  He ignored this.

  ‘I saw them carry you into Topaz’s house. I knew you’d get out. I knew you’d want to find me. I followed you and Topaz to the hospital, and that’s when I guessed that Joe Drummond was still alive and that he’d told Topaz about me. About us.’

  ‘There’s no us, Augie. There’s just you, and you’re crazy.’

  Augie laughed unexpectedly.

  ‘We’re both crazy, Will. That’s why we get along so well.’

  Annie sat down suddenly on the ground. This simple action seemed to ignite something in Augie and, enraged, he threw himself at her. Before I could intervene, he had tossed her bodily into the weir. He followed her but, before he had taken more than a few steps into the shallows, Annie had struck out for deeper water.

  ‘We didn’t want to hurt you, Annie,’ he called. ‘We like you, Will and I. Will jacks off over you, but you see it’s impossible now, don’t you.’

  Annie was waist deep. She stopped, and looked behind her. In a voice of heart-breaking acceptance she said, ‘I can’t swim,’ and waited for Augie to come to her. I had by now entered the water and was gaining on Augie.

  ‘We’re coming,’ he said. My need to silence him, to put an end to this grotesque melding of us into that single, vile ‘we’, was overwhelming. I was concentrating on the back of his copper head and the red neck above the collar when he turned to face me. He smiled as if he believed that I was running to embrace him.

  ‘I did it all for you, Will. All for us.’

  There was a moment when he was smiling at me, and in almost the same moment his smile vanished and was replaced with an expression of puzzlement. His lips were drawn back over his teeth in a grimace that could have been produced only by great pain. Something had happened to him and he was in agony. His hands flew about, and he shuddered and swayed and emitted a cry like a dog caught in a steel-jaw trap. Annie and I watched him in astonishment. His body began to convulse and then he vomited into the water in front of him. Again he cried, held in the tenacious thrall of blinding pain.

  I reached him and he clawed at me, gasping and choking and incoherent. His skin was alabaster and his lips were blue. On his face there was a look of such helpless terror that I almost felt sorry for him. Frothy spittle gathered at his lips as whatever cataclysmic physical event raged within him. He pitched forward, and I caught at his shirt with my hand. Annie had reached us by this stage, and it was she who dragged Augie’s helplessly compliant body to the bank of the weir.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked as Augie continued to shudder and convulse. ‘Is it a stroke? A heart attack? What?’

  Annie walked around Augie’s juddering form, her face a mixture of distaste and nervousness. When she reached his feet, she stopped. The shoeless foot was bleeding through the sock. She pointed at it.

  ‘Pull his sock off,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to touch him. Obviously you’re quite used to it.’

  ‘You didn’t believe any of that crap, did you? Oh, come on. You must know that it’s all in his head.’

  ‘Just take his sock off, will you,’ she said and, because it was evident she was in no mood for listening, I gingerly peeled Augie’s filthy, bloodied sock from his strangely swollen foot. Annie peered at his instep and then looked back at the water of the weir.

  ‘I think he stood on a stonefish,’ she said.

  ‘Is that bad?’

  ‘Yes, Will, that’s bad, or in this case, good. It’s got spines on its back, and it’s just about the most painful venom there is. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy unless, of course, you’d stepped on it.’

  In a way I was relieved to hear this insult. If Annie truly believed that I was Augie’s accomplice, she wouldn’t have taken the chance.

  ‘So what do we do? How do we help him?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll drive back into town. Very slowly. I wouldn’t want him to miss a minute of pain. I’ll get Peter and medical help.’

  ‘So I’m supposed to wait here with him?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But what if he recovers?’

  Annie produced a withering look from her extensive repertoire of such looks, and said, ‘You can enjoy a bit of private time together.’

  Augie was still convulsing as the Bedford drove away. Odd, burbling sounds came out of his mouth. There was nothing I could do for him; nothing I wanted to do for him. I stood in silence, watching him, unwilling to say even a few soothing words. He was unworthy of sympathy. It was beyond my knowledge of human behaviour to understand why someone would offer murder as a token of friendship. As I looked at him I decided that I didn’t want to know the psychiatric cause of his obsession — that, in explaining it, it might somehow be explained away. He was Caliban, gnarled and pinched by poison, and I had no wish to accommodate his sickness by comprehending it.

  I turned my back on him and emptied my bladder. When I had finished, I turned around again and Augie Kelly had died. He was still, with his eyes open. I walked up to where the truck had been parked and waited for Annie to return. I didn’t feel relief but instead a terrible despair, because I knew that Annie would always suspect that I had hastened Augie’s death somehow. A part of her would always wonder whether I had protected myself against any more of Augie’s revelations by silencing him forever.

  Chapter Thirteen

  judgement of errors

  IT WAS FRIDAY, 18 September 1942. Ten days had passed since Augie Kelly’s death. The papers were full of the news that things weren’t going well with our troops in Papua New Guinea.

  I was sitting in King’s Cafeteria, nursing a lime milkshake and trying to avoid the serious conversation my younger brother Brian had been attempting to have with me ever since his arrival four days previously. At my feet was a suitcase, packed and ready to accompany me on the train back to Melbourne. My tail wasn’t exactly between my legs, but there was nothing left for me in Maryborough. I had been cleared of all suspicion in the murders committed by Augie Kelly.
There were no other charges pending. Arthur did not wish to press them, and neither did Mal Flint. Flint still posed a serious threat, in my opinion, although Peter Topaz had assured me that if I kept out of his way there would be no trouble. I had also been cleared of any suspicion arising from the death of Augie Kelly. An autopsy had revealed that he was susceptible to the toxin injected by the stonefish, and that he had sustained such a large amount of it that his heart had given out.

  Arthur and Joe Drummond were not yet out of hospital. Arthur had regained consciousness and was expected to make a full recovery. I had spoken to him on the day that I had gone in to have my plaster reset yet again. He would suffer no ill-effects, but the same could not be said for our friendship. He had revealed an unexpected tendency to bear a grudge, and he made it clear that it wasn’t the blow that bothered him; it was my willingness to believe that he was the murderer. I thought, when he pointed out that he had never for a moment entertained that thought about me, that he was adopting an unpleasant moral tone.

  I attempted to explain myself by insisting that his presence at Witherburn that night would have tested the faith of St Thomas himself. He said, rather coolly, that St Thomas was the doubter, and that he had gone to Witherburn because he had had a suspicion about Augie and had followed him there. He added, unnecessarily, that he had risked his life in the storm to do so, and that he had been motivated by a desire to prove my innocence. I suppose being knocked into a coma by the very person you were trying to help would be something of a disappointment.

  The George was now under Tibald’s direction. Its ownership was uncertain, at least to me. I was excluded from any discussions. From what Brian had told me, I gathered that Tibald and old Walter Sunder had formed a partnership to buy it, with small investments from the rest of the troupe. Of course, I was not invited to join this consortium. I learned later that Brian had been approached, but that he had declined.

  Annie had been even more unforgiving of me than Arthur. She remained convinced that there was some substance to Augie Kelly’s insane infatuation.

  ‘Why would anybody become obsessed by you?’ she had asked.

  ‘Because he was a madman,’ I replied, and saw that the implications of that ill-considered remark were not lost on her. There was a distance between us now that my sincerest expressions of regret couldn’t bridge — and I had tried. I didn’t want to leave Maryborough with the sour taste of broken friendship in my mouth, yet such a sad conclusion had become inevitable.

  The other members of the Power Players followed her lead, and were stand-offish and uncooperative. Working with them had become impossible. They were now, as the Bedford proclaimed, ‘The Annie Hudson Players’. They had ditched Titus Andronicus and were close to opening at the Town Hall with a production of The Philadelphia Story. Unsurprisingly, ticket sales for this lowbrow fare were brisk, and it was expected to return a tidy profit.

  ‘The train leaves in half an hour,’ Brian said. ‘Mother will be glad to see you. And Darlene.’

  ‘Your wife won’t be pleased to see me, Brian. She’s no fan of mine.’

  ‘She never thought you’d done those things, Will. She always said she couldn’t believe you had it in you.’

  ‘That’s because she’s drab and thinks everyone else is, too, not because she’s loyal.’

  This was cruel, and did not need to be said, but I was in no mood to express gratitude for Brian’s presence. I knew that, despite his concern, he was happy to survey the wreckage of my career, and pleased to be escorting me home.

  ‘I won’t be staying in Melbourne long,’ I said.

  ‘Darlene and I are happy to look after Mother. No-one’s asking you to take over.’

  This was a timely reminder that it was inadvisable to assume a lack of astuteness in my younger brother. I was not looking forward to travelling with him. He had heard a great deal from Peter Topaz, and had spoken at length with Annie and the rest of the troupe. They had been wary of him at first, as if being related to me was some kind of disadvantage. Annoyingly, they were soon quite taken with him. Several times over the past few days I had gone into the dining room at the George to find him laughing with Bill Henty, of all people, or Kevin Skakel, or Adrian Baden (God knows what he found to talk to him about). The conversation stopped when I entered. The estrangement from my troupe was irremediable.

  There was no one to farewell us at the station. I half-thought that Mal Flint might turn up to have one last go at me. As the train left Maryborough I could not quite suppress a nagging and dull sensation of failure. Brian sat opposite me, reading that day’s Chronicle. He looked up.

  ‘How’s your arm?’ he asked.

  ‘Better.’

  ‘Darlene’s pregnant,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s the father?’ I asked.

  He didn’t bite. I thought to myself that the chances of Darlene giving birth to a child were slim. Whatever emerged from her womb was more likely to require veterinary than paediatric care.

  ‘I like that Annie Hudson,’ he said. ‘She looks a lot like Greer Garson, don’t you think?’

  I said nothing. He smiled at me and added, ‘She reckons I look a lot like Tyrone Power. What do you reckon about that, Will?’