by Peter Watt
A dark cloud pervaded his thoughts when he reflected on his wife. He scowled and ashed the cigar on the floor. Fiona might be his wife but in name only. She was ‘wife’ to his sister Penelope. At every opportunity Fiona went to his sister’s bed and continued to do so despite the fact that Penelope was now married to Baron Manfred von Fellmann.
Granville did not seem to care anymore that his wife had moved into another room. And he had long resigned himself to losing his wife’s body to his sister’s bed. What mattered was that Fiona had kept her word to be a publicly dutiful wife to him in his ruthless drive for power. He had after all, the solace of the bodies of the young girls he had procured in the Glebe tenements years earlier. A place where life was cheap and the patronage of the wealthy man a matter of survival for the families of the girls. The bestial pleasures he had taken with the prepubescent Jennifer Harris had long been forgotten for the pleasures of young Mary Beasley, eleven years old and already well practised in the ways of his perversions.
For a brief moment Granville thought about Glen View Station, a place he had never visited. Somehow the twists and turns of misfortune in his life could be traced back to a time twelve years earlier when Fiona’s father, Sir Donald Macintosh, had ordered the dispersal of the Nerambura clan of Aboriginals on his property. A fateful day in November 1862 when the Native Mounted Police – commanded by none other than Morrison Mort – had slaughtered men, women and children without mercy. Very few had survived the massacre. And the pitiful handful that did were eventually hunted down like vermin and eliminated.
But from that terrible day rose the spectre of the Duffys. As witnesses and also unwitting victims they had become sworn enemies of the Macintosh family. Had all the misfortune visited upon him been the result of some obscure Aboriginal curse brought on by this slaughter?
The question was ludicrous but stubbornly persisted. As an educated and refined gentleman Granville knew such things were nonsense. But there had been a string of diabolical deaths over the years, albeit a couple he had actually conspired to. Both Sir Donald and his son Angus had died on the spears of a blackfella by the name of Wallarie. And even the hated Duffys had suffered their fair share of tragedy: Michael Duffy’s brother Tom had been killed by the Native Mounted Police, his death graphically recorded in the southern papers weeks later.
If only the accursed Daniel Duffy could suffer some kind of death, he thought bitterly. Life would be much easier without his continuous crusade to bring the Macintosh name into disrepute.
The curse even seemed to reach into his life with his wife refusing her favours to him to procreate a son. Two daughters did not count. Females only counted as objects to serve his carnal desires.
The cigar had shrunk to the wrapper and Granville stubbed it on the window shelf. Outside the office life went on in Sydney. Maybe one day he would travel to Glen View and see for himself the supposed heart of the curse that was said to influence the lives of the Macintoshes and Duffys. He remembered long ago listening to Sir Donald rambling on about a strange cave on the cattle lease. What had amused him at the time was that Sir Donald actually had a look in his eyes as if he believed in the power of the site which was sacred to the Aboriginals.
But Sir Donald was a Scot, he scoffed as he turned away from the window that looked out onto the civilised world of Sydney. And the Scots were just as stupidly superstitious as the ignorant Irish.
~
Captain Mort walked the short distance to his ship. He noticed with some interest men and women clambering for berths on ships heading north to the newly opened goldfields on the Palmer River and the Queensland colony’s far-flung territory on Cape York.
Mort knew about goldfields. He had once served as a policeman on the Ballarat diggings in ’54. The damned miners had built a stockade and resisted by force of arms the British army and police, he remembered bitterly. But the Eureka Stockade – as they called their fortification – had fallen one hot summer morning to the might of British arms. He had been involved in the slaughter that followed.
Since that glorious day of killing Mort had led a colourful career, previously an officer of the Queensland Mounted Police, he was now Captain of a South Seas blackbirding barque. And in all his occupations he had been able to indulge his demonic madness for torture, rape and murder.
He soon walked to a wharf to admire the love of his life: his barque aptly named the Osprey – the sea eagle who had swooped on many an island to take either by persuasion or force of arms indentured black labour to toil in the sugarcane fields of tropical Queensland.
Jack Horton was nowhere to be seen when Mort boarded his ship. Not that he cared. His murderous first mate no longer had a job with the Macintosh companies. All he had to do now was replace him and it would not be hard to find a qualified man for the job as first mate in Sydney Town.
Mort leaned on the rail and gazed over the inlet to the infamous slums of The Rocks. The jumble of old sandstone buildings had fallen into decay over time, moving enterprise away from the western side of the Quay. No doubt Horton was staying at his favourite boarding house. He knew where to find him – and how to terminate his employment.
Before he settled the matter of Jack Horton he knew it was time to visit The Rocks on a very special pilgrimage.
Morrison Mort knew The Rocks even if its residents did not recognise him. Not much had changed in the last twenty years or so, he thought as he casually strolled along the narrow streets. The sun was down and the night people had crawled out from under their sandstone rocks. Whores, sailors, pickpockets, a few well-dressed nervous young men seeking excitement and the surly gang members who ruled the streets.
The young toughs loitering in the dingy streets eyed the Osprey Captain walking amongst them. None attempted to accost him as he had the look of a man familiar with the place and its violence. Although he was a stranger to them he did not appear in any way nervous. Besides, he wore the dress of a sea captain, a man who was one of their own in a district with traditional connections to the sea. Mort had little reason to feel uncomfortable as he had come well-armed. He carried a small calibre pistol in his pocket and a razor-sharp knife inside his boot.
The stench of boiled cabbage, urine, vomit and decay were familiar scents from his childhood. Here he had learned the lessons of the street before he was ten: to steal, lie and keep one step ahead of the police who came from time to time to snatch dangerous felons for the gallows at Darlinghurst Gaol.
He slowed in his purposeful stride in an alley between the close-packed tenements spewing the noises of despair: the constant wailing of hungry babies suffering flea bites in the dirty cramped rooms shared with the flotsam from the sea of poverty; the drunken raised voices of men and women squabbling over nothing and everything, and the occasional raucous, despairing laughter of gin-soaked whores sharing a bottle with customers.
Mort felt the fine hairs of his neck prickle. Although there was a chill in the night air, as he stood and stared into the doorway of the tiny tenement house with its dirt-grimed sandstone façade he was vaguely aware that he was sweating. Why had he let his feet guide him here, he wondered with a dread chill that shivered through his body. Was it that he had a need to face the most terrible ghost of his past and spit in her eye?
He recoiled in horror. The ghost was real! She came silently towards him from the darkness of the doorway and was smiling as she reached for him. ‘Mother!’ he screamed as he stumbled backwards in a desperate attempt to avoid the hands reaching for him. She was going to take him to the hell! A hell to which he himself had sent her so many years earlier.
‘I’m not yer mother luv,’ the ghost said. ‘Me name’s Rosie. An’ I can give yer a good time if yer got the money? Wotcha want?’ she asked, frowning, her arms crossed over small breasts concealed under a dirty cotton dress that was little more than a petticoat.
‘You,’ Mort hissed as the colour returned to his face. No, he thought with great relief, she was not the ghost he feared.
/> ‘Well, come in luv,’ she said, turning her back on him, in order to walk back into the house. ‘A good time will cost yer though.’
Mort followed. It was ironic, he thought, that in this very room he had murdered his mother. It was a tiny room, lit by two candles flickering shadows on a dirty well-used, straw-filled mattress in the corner. The loathing for the many times he had been subjected to the drunken sexual advances of filthy customers welled up in him. Times when his drunken mother had taken their money and laughed at his pain.
The fury was on him like a red haze when he looked down at the woman kneeling on all fours on the mattress, the hem of her dress pulled up over her hips revealing her buttocks.
‘Yer want me this way?’ she asked, looking up at him. For a second she felt a dread she had never experienced before. The pale blue eyes that looked back at her were like the windows to hell. She could find nothing to allay her sudden dread. It was as if she were in the presence of the devil incarnate.
‘How you are will suit my needs,’ the devil said as he let his hand slip to the razor-sharp knife in his boot.
No-one took much notice of the muffled screams that drifted out into the chilly night air.
Rats feeding on the body scuttled into the crevices of the room with protesting squeals at the entry of the two policemen. Sergeant Francis Farrell was a big Irishman and his bulk seemed to fill the tiny room.
He stood and stared at the pathetic body huddled in a corner in a vast pool of congealed blood. Her torn, blood-soaked dress lay in a crumpled pile beside her naked body. He felt little emotion as he stared. As a policeman of thirty years he had long come to accept that crimes of violence were as much a part of life as love and kindness were.
His presence had been summoned by young Constable Murphy who had found the body. The constable had been attending a dispute between barrow vendors at the Quay when a woman told him about a body in a room. The woman was a friend of Rosie’s and Constable Murphy knew her as one of the prostitutes who worked the docks area around Sydney Harbour.
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ the sergeant quietly asked the young uniformed constable who stood beside him.
Constable Murphy grimaced. ‘Maybe it might be that I believe in the Little People, Sergeant, but not ghosts, unless you include the Banshee.’
‘Well, a ghost did this,’ Farrell said, aware that his comments concerning the world of the supernatural were confusing the young policeman. ‘You see Constable, I have been here before. I was about your age and The Rocks was my beat. Old Sergeant Kilford and I got a call to this very house one morning, and in this same room found a body mutilated in the very same way as this poor colleen. That must have been over thirty years ago.’ Farrell frowned as the incident swirled back from almost forgotten memory to clear recollection. ‘There was a boy at the time,’ he continued slowly. ‘A young lad no more than ten years of age. It was his mother who had been murdered.’
‘Was not the murderer brought to justice?’ Constable Murphy asked out of idle curiosity.
The sergeant shook his head. ‘Thought it might have been one of her customers at the time,’ he said. ‘Some sailor, long gone on a ship by the time we found her. It’s like that around here.’ He stood in reflective silence as he tried to recall the boy. A blond-haired boy, he remembered. A boy who had stood in sullen silence in one corner of the room watching he and old Sergeant Kilford that morning. ‘Always wonder what happened to the boy,’ he muttered. The constable gave him a quizzical look and Sergeant Farrell returned his thoughts to the present. ‘Start making notes on everything you see,’ he said, without looking at the constable. ‘Make a note of the poor colleen’s wounds.’
Murphy wet the end of his pencil and commenced to try and describe in writing the hideous slashing of flesh, the frenzied mutilations to the mouth and private parts. So much blood that it splashed every wall of the room.
The Irish sergeant was reading the room with the many years of experience he had in such matters. What he read caused him to shudder, his first real emotion since entering the domain of death. ‘He made her suffer,’ he muttered as his eyes followed an invisible path around the room. ‘Cut her and held her until she bled to death. It took a while and she tried to fight.’
Murphy glanced at the big sergeant. ‘How do you know Sarge?’ he asked, awed by the older man’s perceptive observations.
‘The blood marks tell me,’ he replied. ‘Over there on the mattress he inflicted the wounds, you can see from the way the blood is.’ Murphy followed the sergeant’s invisible chronology of events and began to see what his experienced colleague was unravelling from the blood trails. ‘If you follow the blood you can see she tried to get away. But he held her and they ended up against the wall there,’ he said, pointing to the body. ‘She struggled in her pain and fear but he held her until she died from the loss of blood. He sat behind her and had his arms around her. Her blood soaked his lap.’
‘A crime of passion,’ Murphy commented.
Farrell shook his head. He was puzzled. He had seen many crimes of passion over the years and this was not one of them. Something very strange pervaded the room. The girl’s killer had methodically inflicted the wounds to cause extreme pain and fear and then had remained to gloat on what he had caused. ‘Not a crime of passion,’ he finally said. ‘The bastard who did this is a son of the devil himself.’ He sighed, wanting to be out in the alley where human sounds pervaded the air. ‘Time we informed the detectives. It’s their job to make the investigation.’
‘Think they will catch the bastard?’ Murphy asked as he put away his pencil and notebook.
Francis Farrell bit on his bottom lip. The question was reasonable enough and his reply far from flippant. ‘Only if they believe in ghosts, Constable Murphy.’
Returning to the police station Sergeant Farrell kept remembering the young boy who had stood silently in the room the day they had discussed his mother’s killer. He wished he could remember the boy’s name. Not that it really had any bearing on the events of the current murder. Just something about the boy had haunted him for a long time after.
Ahh, but the old records would tell him who the boy was, he realised with a small amount of satisfaction. Maybe he would have a look at the file next time he was at the Darlinghurst lockup.
EIGHT
Two weeks out from the Palmer on the track to Cooktown and the journey was thankfully uneventful. Kate had decided to take a longer route as the Hell’s Gate Trail was not a suitable track for wagons. The location of the attack on the armed gold escort was aptly named. A dangerously narrow defile on top of the Great Dividing Range overlooking the Palmer River, it was for many miners a tantalising glimpse of the River of Gold that was the closest they would ever get to their dream. For many, Hell’s Gate would end in the nightmare of a spear or stone club.
During the journey a change came over Jenny. The gauntness in her face and haunted look in her eyes dissipated with the distance the lumbering wagons put between herself and the past horrors of the goldfields. The beauty that was her inheritance blossomed like a beautiful tropical lily on a northern billabong.
She also proved to be a capable companion on the slow journey east. She would cheerfully prepare the evening meals while Ben and Kate went about the end of day routine of unyoking the bullocks from the big wagons, and hobbling the beasts for the night. Jenny was an imaginative cook and the teamsters would return to stews seasoned with wild spices. Jenny explained how her father, who had been a gardener for a Mister Granville White, had taught her the use of herbs in cooking. She had found a discarded parcel containing dried herbs left by some weary miner on the side of the track. The lucky find proved better than the discovery of gold as far as Ben and Kate were concerned as they sat down each evening to a meal by the campfire.
During those times Kate noticed that Willie rarely left his mother’s side. He hardly spoke unless it was necessary. She could see how jealously the boy guarded his mother, even against Ben w
hom he had befriended in a strange way. Kate guessed that the boy had witnessed many terrible things happen to his mother during the horrific months of the Wet on the Palmer. Although Willie had a distrust of men he would follow Ben like some faithful dog. Ben would give him meaningful tasks and the taciturn boy would do them with a begrudging gratitude.
The boy was a strange one! Kate reflected as she watched him help Ben hobble the big bullocks that were as good as any watchdogs. The scent of prowling tribesmen would cause the big beasts to become restless. Only once in the two weeks that they had been on the track had the animals alerted them that they were not alone.
It had been just on piccaninny dawn during the previous night when the bells around the beasts’ necks had jangled more than usual. As the animals bellowed nervously both Kate and Ben became instantly alert. Weapons clutched in hands they had peered into the gathering dawn anticipating a deadly shower of spears. But a warning shot from Ben’s revolver soon dispersed whoever lurked in the last shadows of the night and the spears did not fall.
When the sun rose that day Ben decided that Jenny should learn how to fire a gun. At a midday stop he decided to teach Jenny how to use Kate’s rifle and chose a creek a hundred paces or so from the campsite. Kate allocated to Willie the task of finding firewood and issued him the obligatory warning not to stray far from the wagons in his search. The previous early morning incident had reinforced the vital need for alertness deep in hostile territory.
Standing close to Jenny by the creek Ben could smell the musky scent of her perspiration and fresh smell of her clean hair. It was now a familiar scent that he was acutely aware of whenever he was close to the slim young woman. A scent he had come to know ever since Kate had called a halt by a creek where both women had indulged themselves in the luxury of lathering with soap and washing in the creek. Ben had stood guard at the wagons a short distance away and had paused in his task of greasing the wagon axles to listen to the two women splashing and giggling with an uninhibited girlish delight. He could hear Jenny’s laughter – like the sweet sounds of the butcher-bird in the first light of the day – and sighed for his unrequited desire to touch her. He imagined what it would be like to kiss those secret shadows beneath her breasts. Turning, he saw Willie scowling at him, as if the boy understood his lustful thoughts. Guilt flooded him and he had tried to think of something else.
