The Serpent's Sting

by Robert Gott

  Chapter Four

  A WORKING DAME

  ONLY BRIAN REMAINED AT MOTHER’S HOUSE. Mother had hurried round to Drummond Street after taking Peter Gilbert’s telephone call. Apparently, he and Cloris had been home for barely ten minutes when there’d been a knock at the door, and a policeman had told them that the body of a man they assumed was John, based on the papers he was carrying, had been found. It seemed dreadful to me that such ghastly news should be delivered by some police dullard in an absurd white-leather helmet.

  I wondered how Cloris would feel about Mother turning up at the height of the crisis. She hadn’t, to my knowledge, set foot in the Gilbert house, and I couldn’t see how time, or a tragedy, would make her appearance appropriate. Brian knew only the bare bones of the situation. The body had been discovered, as bodies often are, by a man walking his dog. At first he’d thought the figure on the ground was sleeping, and had hurried over to him when his dog had lifted its leg and peed on the man’s foot. He saw quickly that the dog’s misbehaviour was of no interest to a corpse. Apparently, there weren’t any signs of violence, although the face was contorted unnaturally. I thought it possible that John Gilbert’s sour expression had simply been frozen in death.

  ‘Do we know how long he’d been lying there?’ I asked.

  ‘No idea. Mother took the call from Peter, and she told me what I’ve told you.’

  ‘What’s your immediate instinct?’

  ‘What do you mean, “instinct”? Instinct about what?’

  ‘Brian,’ I said with lofty patience. ‘You are trying to be a private-inquiry agent. When a private-inquiry agent is presented with a corpse, he will have some initial thoughts as to its provenance. Given that you don’t yet have any solid information, let alone evidence, let’s call those thoughts “instinct”.’

  ‘You want me to say that I think Peter Gilbert is involved in the murder of his own son? I can honestly say I don’t think that.’

  ‘You’d have to admit, though, that John Gilbert believed that his father was capable of murder.’

  ‘If we’re talking about instinct, my instinct is that John Gilbert was unhinged. And it might be jumping the gun anyway to say that John Gilbert was murdered. We don’t know how he died. It might have been an accident, or he might have taken his own life. You were the one who advised me against jumping to conclusions, Will.’

  He was right, of course, and it would have been churlish of me to deny the fact, so I agreed with him.

  ‘We’ll just have to wait,’ Brian said.

  ‘Private-inquiry agents don’t sit around and wait, Brian. The place where John Gilbert’s body was found is five minutes from here. I think it might be a good idea to have a look.’

  ‘They’ll have taken the body to the morgue by now, surely.’

  ‘It’s only been a few hours since he was found. I think he’s probably still there, while the police do their forensics and photography.’

  ‘In that case, they’re not going to let us get close, are they?’

  I understood Brian’s reluctance to engage with policemen. We’d both had some experience with them, and it hadn’t been pleasant. There were two detectives, Strachan and Radcliff, with whom neither of us wanted further contact. There was a good chance both those men would be dancing attendance on John Gilbert’s body.

  ‘I think,’ I said, ‘that we should at least go up to the cemetery, just to get a general idea of where he was found. I agree with you that getting too close and having to explain ourselves to the police wouldn’t be useful. The last thing we want is to find ourselves among the suspects.’

  Brian looked startled.

  ‘Suspects? Why would we be suspects?’

  I sighed.

  ‘You have to put yourself inside the head of a pedestrian Melbourne policeman. We meet John Gilbert for the first time very recently. The meeting isn’t exactly all wine and roses. He turns up dead, and here we are hanging around the scene of the crime. There are some people, Brian, who actually believe that the murderer always returns to the scene of the crime. Motive, apparently, is less important than proximity.’

  ‘Whatever else I think about Strachan and Radcliff, I don’t think they’re stupid. I don’t want to tangle with them again.’

  ‘Fine. You stay here and do nothing.’

  Stung, Brian agreed to come with me to the cemetery, and in an absurd attempt to disguise our reason for being there, he took flowers from one of Mother’s vases, as if an observer would instantly suppose that we were visiting the grave of a loved one.

  John Gilbert’s body had been found near what is probably Melbourne General Cemetery’s most extravagant private monument. A great angel, its wings partly unfurled, leans, its head bowed on a mighty sword. I’ve never been sure whether this grieving warrior angel was an expression of confidence in the worthiness of the deceased, or whether the family thought it necessary to threaten Heaven with force to ensure certain entry. The monument can be seen at some distance, so we were able to ascertain, without being spotted, that John Gilbert’s body was still in situ.

  There were half-a-dozen men standing importantly around what must have been the corpse. I recognised both detectives Strachan and Radcliff. Neither of them was wearing a hat, an informality arising from each of them doubtless having been called away from a family function. I supposed they had families — I couldn’t expect that my dislike of them would be universal. We would have remained undiscovered had Brian not waved a fly away from his face with his bunch of flowers. The sudden flash of bright red caught Michael Radcliff’s eye. I saw him nudge Strachan, who shaded his eyes and looked in our direction.

  ‘We’ve been spotted, Brian, thanks to your floral tribute.’

  ‘What should we do? Should we scarper?’

  ‘Scarper? What a hideous expression. If we leave, it will look suspicious. I’m sure their eagle eyes have identified us. We shouldn’t wait for them to come to us. I think we should walk over to them. It might minimise the sense that we were skulking.’

  Brian’s face was a portrait of reluctance, but he acknowledged the rightness of my judgement with a slight nod of his head. With as much confidence as we could muster, we headed towards Strachan and Radcliff.

  They remembered us — how could they not? — and there wasn’t much affection in the memory.

  ‘What is it with corpses and the Power brothers?’ Noah Strachan asked.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Brian was staring at John Gilbert’s body. I’d caught a glimpse of it, sufficient to note that it had remained as it had been found. There seemed to be no disturbance of the ground around it. The body had either simply fallen there, or been carefully placed there.

  ‘We know this man,’ I said matter-of-factly.

  ‘So you brought flowers,’ Radcliff said, humorously.

  ‘I brought flowers for our father’s grave,’ Brian said. ‘It’s Christmas Day.’

  I wasn’t sure if this was brilliant or stupid.

  Detective Strachan gave a signal, and preparations were made for the removal of John Gilbert’s body. He stepped into a position that obscured those preparations, and asked us to join him.

  ‘So, if you know him, what’s his name?’

  I have a low tolerance for the plodding facetiousness of policemen. To head off this tendency in Detective Strachan, I answered him at some length.

  ‘You already know his name, detective. It’s John Gilbert. He’s the son of Peter Gilbert, and the brother of Cloris Gilbert. Being in possession of this knowledge is hardly surprising, given that Peter Gilbert is affianced to our mother, Mrs Agnes Power.’

  ‘So John Gilbert would have been your stepbrother.’

  ‘Nothing escapes your sharp, genealogical eye, does it, Detective?’

  ‘Thank you for reminding me, Mr Power, of your effortless ability to be a
pain in the arse.’

  He looked at Brian, narrowing his eyes and turning his head on an angle.

  ‘It’s Brian, isn’t it? There was that recent unpleasantness with your wife.’

  With Brian now wrong-footed, Strachan played his advantage.

  ‘Was John Gilbert a welcome addition to your family, Brian?’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I mean, did either you or your brother murder John Gilbert?’

  The smug smile and the bland delivery underlined how certain Strachan was that his statement would be both offensive and discombobulating. It was annoyingly effective. Despite my knowing exactly what he was doing, the reminder that we would have to account for our whereabouts at the time of Gilbert’s death was an unpleasant check on my general enthusiasm. Brian, who must have remembered suddenly that he was here in a professional capacity, rallied and acquitted himself very well.

  ‘Neither I nor Will would have any reason to murder John Gilbert. We met him for the first time a few days ago, and then only relatively briefly — hardly enough time to build sufficient enmity to dispose of him.’

  ‘Your mother has been engaged to the deceased’s father for how long?’

  ‘I don’t understand the significance of the question, detective.’

  Strachan produced another smug smile.

  ‘You’re not required to grapple with a question’s significance, Mr Power. It would be more useful if you simply answered it.’

  ‘Our mother and Peter Gilbert have had a long-standing arrangement.’

  ‘An interesting choice of words, Mr Power. I would prefer, on the whole, to conduct this interview in less eccentric surroundings. Perhaps I could call at your house this evening.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know if that will suit.’

  ‘Let me rephrase that for you. I will call on you this evening.’

  With that, he turned away and walked back to the place where John Gilbert had lain. The body was being loaded into a van parked nearby.

  ‘That didn’t go well,’ Brian said. ‘I really don’t like those bastards. They think we’re involved in this, don’t they?’

  ‘Either that. or they’re deliberately trying to put the wind up us.’

  ‘Well, I’d say mission accomplished, on that score.’

  Mother returned soon after 7.00 p.m. I picked at the remains of Christmas lunch. The look on Mother’s face suggested that she found my appetite reprehensible, even though I had two performances to give the following day, and neither the demands of my stomach nor the demands of the theatre would halt in some sort of misguided homage to the late John Gilbert.

  She had little to report. The police had conducted a thorough search of the Gilbert house, and had found nothing that might explain John Gilbert’s disappearance or his death. They had turned his bedroom upside down, and took some material away in boxes. They didn’t say what those materials were. The most unsettling thing, Mother said, was that the police made no secret of the fact that victims tended to be murdered by people close to them, and certainly by people they knew. The implications for both Peter and Cloris were unpleasantly obvious.

  ‘Those implications apply to us, too, Mother,’ I said. ‘Until the culprit is unmasked, we’re all persons of interest.’

  It was at this point precisely that a heavy knock on the door announced the arrival of Strachan and Radcliff.

  Neither detective treated Mother to the easy disdain they’d lavished on me and Brian. Mother’s demeanour discouraged poor behaviour, even in smug detectives. They expressed their condolences, and asked politely if they might speak with her in private, just to clarify a few matters. Mother said that she’d give them as much information as she was able to, but that, although she’d known of her putative stepson all his life, she’d only known him, in the sense of having met him, for a few days.

  ‘His father and I had been waiting for Mrs Gilbert to die so that we were able to regularise our arrangement,’ she said, with gob-smacking frankness. I saw Radcliff and Strachan exchange looks, and it seemed to me that they were admiring of Mother’s unselfconscious honesty. Or perhaps they were simply astonished.

  It was Detective Radcliff who interviewed Mother. Detective Strachan sat with Brian and me in the living room, and in the hours since we’d last seen him he must have been briefed by the detectives who’d visited the Gilbert house. His questions were routine, and there was no suggestion in either their tone or their structure that they were designed to inveigle from us information that he suspected we were withholding. His manner with me was familiarly supercilious. I seem to bring this out in people susceptible to this weakness in their characters. When he closed his notebook, he couldn’t resist the observation that it was unusual to find two men in their thirties still living at home with their mother.

  ‘The word “still” is misplaced, detective,’ I said. ‘It implies the arrangement has been continuous since childhood, which is not the case. I’m afraid both Brian and I are constrained by the secrecy provisions of the Crimes Act from saying anything more.’

  This was nonsense, of course. Our work with Military Intelligence was well and truly over. Strachan was annoyingly unimpressed.

  ‘Are you saying that living with your mother is a matter of national security?’

  Brian, who must have been stung by Strachan’s earlier remark about Darlene, entered the fray.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to address that question elsewhere, detective.’

  I was proud of him. He almost brought it off. If he’d been a better actor he’d have struck precisely the right note. As it was, he came admirably close — and I was happy to tell him so later.

  Peter Gilbert didn’t return that night, and Mother stayed in her house. She wanted to join Peter, and Peter wanted her there, but both agreed that Cloris might find her presence an insensitive response to the shared grief between father and daughter. I ungenerously wondered if Cloris was safe in the house with just her father for company.

  Given the range of matters that were troubling me — Geraldine’s inexplicable disappearance, and the possibility that the man who was on the point of marrying my mother might be a murderer — I slept remarkably soundly. Mother had gone round to Drummond Street by the time I’d completed my ablutions and come downstairs. Brian, who’d been out early to get the paper, was chortling quietly as he read a magazine that was in his lap. When I came in, he held it up to me.

  ‘Who the hell is the bloke on the cover?’

  It was the new Listener-In. I wasn’t expecting it to be published so soon, and I certainly wasn’t expecting the photograph on the front to be quite so flattering. Brian handed it to me, and I looked at it closely. It both resembled me and looked unlike me at the same time. The photographer had warned me that he was in the business of creating illusions. I wasn’t sure whether I was pleased to be glamorised in this impossible way, or whether I was embarrassed by the distance that lay between the man on the cover of The Listener-In and the man who looked back at me every day from the mirror.

  ‘They’ve taken a few liberties with your biography,’ Brian said. ‘I had no idea that you were one of Australia’s leading actors, and that you’d unselfishly abandoned your career to entertain the troops.’

  I sighed.

  ‘It’s show business, Brian. As you very well know, it’s all smoke and mirrors. Just a few weeks ago you were shimmying on stage in a white satin sheath dress. I shouldn’t have to point out to you the gap between illusion and reality.’

  He looked wistful.

  ‘Ah, that dress. I enjoyed wearing it.’

  ‘It was probably a lot more comfortable than the one I have to wear.’

  ‘There was certainly a lot less of it.’

  I ran my eye over the article. The writer had played fast and loose with the truth. There were only a handful of people
who’d know this, and although it was gilding the lily to call me ‘one of Australia’s leading actors’, I rather liked it. In fact, seeing it there in black and white made me think that it might even be true.

  The Boxing Day matinee was a full house, possibly as a result of the piece in The Listener-In. There were more unaccompanied adults in the audience than was usual, and a higher proportion of women than was usual as well. Percy Wavel, always reluctant to give praise or credit, nevertheless spoke to me with uncharacteristic civility before I went on.

  ‘What are we going to do about Sophie?’ he asked.

  ‘Perhaps she just needs extra rehearsing. I’m happy to stick around and help with that, however ungrateful she’ll be.’

  ‘You and I both know that rehearsal is no substitute for talent. That girl has the star quality of a potato. If Geraldine turns up in time for Monday’s performance, I might, might, forgive her. If she’s not on stage, then as far as I’m concerned, she’s finished, and I’ll start looking for a decent replacement. I don’t suppose you know anyone?’

  I thought of Annie Hudson, but I assumed that she was still in Maryborough, in Queensland, where the Will Power Players had mutated into the Annie Hudson Players. Even if she were in Melbourne, the idea of working with her again wasn’t attractive. I told Percy that I’d ask around.

  After the performance, which was something of a triumph — if that term could ever be used to describe a pantomime — Roger Teddles and I found Percy Wavel seated in our dressing room. We shed our dame accoutrements under his silent gaze.

  ‘I love watching actors take off their make-up. It’s a kind of miracle in reverse — the shift from the glamorous to the mundane.’

  If this was an overture of friendship, it was an odd one, but everything about Percy Wavel was odd. I’d seen little evidence of his directorial skills, beyond complaining that an actor couldn’t be heard, or that an actress needed to show more bosom. Yet, here he was, nominally the director of a Christmas-season pantomime that was proving to be an unexpected success. Rolled up in his hand was a copy of The Listener-In. He unrolled it, looked at the cover, and then at my reflection in the mirror as I removed the last of the pancake.