The Serpent's Sting

by Robert Gott

  ‘There’s been a development,’ Brian said.

  I drew my brows together to signal that Brian was being indiscreet.

  ‘Cloris knows that I’m a private-inquiry agent, Will.’

  I wanted to point out that he wasn’t a private-inquiry agent; that he was an out-of-work teacher hoping to become a private-inquiry agent. I held my fire.

  ‘Brian has only just told me,’ Cloris said, ‘and I’m so relieved. I feel as if an enormous weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I couldn’t go to the police. It’s too terrible. It would kill my father.’

  ‘I’m lost,’ I said.

  Brian made a show of getting Cloris’s permission before revealing the contents of the letter he was holding. She signalled with a small nod that he could go ahead.

  ‘This was pushed under the door at Drummond Street early this morning. It was addressed to Cloris, and fortunately it was Cloris who found it. It’s from Albert Taylor.’

  He stopped to allow this to sink in. Cloris took over.

  ‘This Albert Taylor person wants money, and what I mean by that is that he wants more money.’

  ‘He’s been blackmailing you?’ I was genuinely confused.

  ‘No,’ Brian said. ‘He’d been blackmailing John.’

  ‘Heroin,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, if only it was that simple.’

  ‘My brother seems to have worked overtime to offer a blackmailer as many options as he possibly could. He seems to have been indiscriminate in his choice of sexual partners, and by indiscriminate I’m not talking about a preference for fat, skinny, ugly, or beautiful women. Well, a picture, as they say …’ She withdrew a photograph from the envelope and passed it to me. Expecting something pornographic, I girded my loins. It was a photograph of John Gilbert, his lips touching those of another man, whose features were obscured. It might have been Taylor. It was suggestive rather than conclusive.

  ‘The letter threatens to deliver the rest, in what is apparently a lurid sequence, to my father and to the gutter press.’

  It was instructive, I thought, that the difference between a sleazy blackmailer and Army Intelligence was essentially, well, none.

  ‘How can all this,’ I asked, ‘flow from a simple bloody lunch on Christmas Day?’

  ‘It doesn’t,’ Brian said. ‘John was already dead on Christmas Day. You know what I think? John died either accidentally, or otherwise, and Taylor was there to see it happen. He got dressed up as a Yank, and with the help of the real Yank, Private Dervian, carried his body, in broad daylight, to the cemetery, dumped it there, and then came to lunch as if nothing had happened.’

  ‘Someone would surely have seen them,’ I said.

  ‘I imagine lots of people saw them. When someone does something in plain sight, no one notices, and besides, have the police actually asked for any witnesses? They decided as soon as they saw the needle in his arm that he’d taken his own life. But why would he do it there, beside that big angel?’

  ‘They wouldn’t know where Mum was buried, thank God. That would have been the final insult.’

  There wasn’t anything more that Cloris could say to help elucidate this ghastly situation. The blackmail note signalled its intention to demand more, without actually demanding it explicitly. Further contact would be made, it said, and this was peculiarly menacing. Brian offered to walk her home, and as she was leaving, Cloris pointed out that the threat of further notes was making her feel vulnerable and watched.

  I don’t like coincidences. In my life they’d been rare and banal, and I understood that they were no more remarkable, really, than the thousand confluent happenstances that occur every day. We only notice them because their convergence takes us by surprise, and there is no reason why it should. I particularly distrusted any coincidence in which Army Intelligence reared its head. With their involvement, whatever looked like coincidence was far more likely to be the result of obscured manipulation. Where was the coincidence here? Was John Gilbert’s connection to Mrs Ferrell’s household a coincidence, given that I, too, had a connection to the house? We’d come to it from different directions — me through Geraldine Buchanan, and he through his drug addiction — but it still constituted a kind of coincidence. Even if Geraldine was working for Intelligence (and I no longer thought this likely), I couldn’t see a controlling hand here. And yet, I knew there had to be one.

  I have to admit, with some small degree of shame, that I was driven more by self-interest than concern about Peter Gilbert learning the whole, grubby truth about his son. James Fowler had been adamant that the destruction of my career had become a personal project of Albert Taylor’s, driven by jealousy about my involvement with his girlfriend, Geraldine. I now saw that it was far more likely that his project was to wear my nerves down and then begin to blackmail me. Blackmail seemed to be his most reliable income stream. In the light of the Gilberts’ experience, this made sense. Brian and I needed to move fast. We needed to find Albert Taylor tonight.

  Having escorted Cloris back to Drummond Street, Brian was gone a considerable time — so long, in fact, that I began to be concerned that something might have happened. Everything seemed fraught. Nothing felt safe. Brian’s lateness in returning ought to have been inconsequential; now I was alert to the awful possibility that Albert Taylor was implicated. Brian had been gone for several hours, and I was on the point of telephoning the Gilbert house when he came through the front door. He seemed agitated, but insisted otherwise. I felt sure that his bravado about seducing Taylor with transvestite prostitution opportunities had evaporated. He surprised me, though, by saying that he’d go upstairs for a bath, and that he’d shave closely, but that he wasn’t prepared to go the distance for one evening and perform a major depilation.

  ‘It will be dark, and our aim is to find him and take him on the spot, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and realised that neither Brian nor I had properly considered what ‘take him’ actually meant.

  ‘Do you remember what we said this morning, Will, that this would take two of us?’

  There was an ominous note in his tone that unsettled me comprehensively. I say comprehensively because I was already quite unsettled, and I now found myself losing my nerve.

  ‘All we have to do is find him, Brian. I don’t think we’re capable of taking him — and if we did subdue him, what would we do with him? Where would we put him?’

  ‘That’s a relief. So maybe we should at least tell the police what we’re doing.’

  ‘Again, out of the question. I want the small victory of having been the one who found Albert Taylor. It’s a mean ambition, but I want to achieve it. I want James Fowler to owe me a favour.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  We agreed that our ambition might not be realised that night after all. Our plan, such as it was, depended on uncertain variables. We had no evidence that any of the girls who trawled the streets near Camp Pell worked for Taylor, and even if we found one, we couldn’t depend on her willingness to pimp for him and deliver Brian into his clutches. If I was wrong about Taylor’s reach in the world of prostitution, we’d need another plan.

  My uncertainties about the whole enterprise grew as the day declined into evening. In addition, our preparations were complicated by Mother’s return to the house in the late afternoon. I could tell that she was feeling the strain of dealing with Peter Gilbert’s grief. She was more than usually distracted when we exchanged a few words. She made no mention of my appearance in the newspapers, and although she must have noticed it, she made no comment about the mark on my neck left by the bullet. I don’t believe, in this instance, that she was being perverse. She seemed simply exhausted, and I wondered if John Gilbert’s death had emptied out Peter Gilbert, and whether it was testing her capacity to offer him comfort. She said she’d come back to the house only briefly. She needed mace to flavour a soup she was making, and the G
ilbert kitchen was bereft of mace.

  ‘They have nutmeg,’ she said dully, ‘but it’s not quite the same, is it?’

  ‘I’ve never been able to tell the difference,’ I said, and Mother’s unfocussed gaze sharpened just long enough to suggest, in the smallest of glimmers, that she found this unsurprising, as if I disappointed her all the way down to the spice level.

  ‘They’re quite different,’ she said. The fact that she barely spoke to Brian, either, underlined the strain she was under. When she’d gone, Brian reiterated Cloris’s concerns about her father’s health, and the urgent need to protect him from the wolfish menaces of Albert Taylor.

  ‘He’s a small-time hoodlum,’ I said. ‘A pimp and a chancer.’

  Brian nodded. ‘He’s an opportunistic little bottom-feeder, and he shouldn’t be able to wreck people’s lives.’

  Brian’s words clarified something for me. He was right. James Fowler had insisted that Taylor was highly intelligent, and that the real risk he posed was to the operatives of the various branches of Intelligence. Be that as it may, it struck me that he was little more than a petty criminal, a weak, morally corrupt little grub who exploited women and the weaknesses he found in others. Thinking of him in this way diminished him and made it seem possible that Brian and I could capture him. Surely the two of us could physically subdue him?

  ‘Have you ever knocked anyone unconscious, Brian?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We need to screw our courage to the sticking place, and if necessary hit Taylor over the head with a blunt instrument.’

  ‘It’s not like in the movies, Will. Hitting someone over the head can kill him. It’s not neat — a single, well-aimed blow so that the victim wakes up later with a sore head. It doesn’t happen like that.’

  ‘All right. Leave that to me. I don’t think Intelligence will care if Taylor is delivered to them dead or with brain damage. We both know how they work, Brian.’

  ‘Have you ever hit a man over the head, Will?’

  ‘Albert Taylor isn’t a man. He’s something lower down on the evolutionary ladder.’

  ‘So we’re going to capture Taylor, dead or alive?’

  ‘Yes, we are.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘Turn out the lights,’ Brian called from the top of the stairs. I did so, and waited for him to come down. A drift of Mother’s favourite perfume, ‘Joy’, preceded him. He’d applied it extravagantly, hoping that the feminine odour would help plug the gaps in the visual illusion he was creating. I couldn’t see him clearly, but his silhouette moved as a woman would move, and when he spoke the effect was dislocating.

  ‘Mother must never know that I used her lipstick and powder.’

  ‘Remarkable,’ I said when Brian stopped at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘This wouldn’t work in daylight, Will.’

  I noticed that he was wearing his own shoes and no stockings. This made practical sense, even though Joycey Dovey had provided a pair of women’s pumps. Brian needed to be well shod if we were to overwhelm Albert Taylor. Carrying his inert body to a secure place — we hadn’t yet discussed where that place might be — would be difficult in women’s shoes.

  ‘How do you feel?’ I asked, as we began crossing Princes Park.

  ‘Surprisingly comfortable.’

  ‘I have a spanner in my back pocket.’

  Realising that this was a non sequitur worthy of Brian, I added, ‘It was the closest thing I could find to a cosh. I also have a piece of Mother’s clothesline to tie him up with if we need to.’

  ‘I have to admit, Will, that I’m feeling more excited than frightened. I think I could get to like this private-inquiry business.’

  ‘Most investigations don’t involve disguising yourself as a woman, and going armed for combat. This is not a typical evening’s work.’

  We passed several people along the path we took. Subdued moonlight allowed me to see that they didn’t do a double-take on seeing Brian. We were a man and a woman out for a walk, and there was nothing unusual in that. As we approached the main gate of Camp Pell, Brian wondered, in a whisper, if we’d left it too late to find any woman unaccounted for. At five hundred yards or so from the gate, it was impossible to tell. I thought I saw shapes moving on the footpaths, but there wasn’t enough light to determine whether they were men or women, let alone prostitutes or innocent sweethearts.

  ‘Stay here,’ Brian said. ‘It’s time for me to take the plunge.’

  ‘Don’t go off with a soldier just because he offers you £10.’

  ‘Very funny. What about £20, though?’

  ‘Yes, also very funny. Good luck, Brian. Seriously, be careful.’

  ‘I’m wearing sensible shoes — what could possibly go wrong?’

  In only a few seconds, Brian was gone from sight. I took the spanner from my back pocket, felt the heft of it in my hand, and returned it. Could I bring this down on the side of a man’s skull? Now that our plan was in motion, I had to believe that I could. I’d certainly have no qualms about it if Brian’s safety depended on it. In my mind, it was so simple. Brian would be waiting outside a house somewhere in Carlton, and Albert Taylor would emerge to discuss his proposition. I would appear behind Taylor, and before he knew what had hit him, I’d have hit him. He would fold neatly to the ground, we would truss him and carry him to … where? Mother’s house. There’d be some poetic justice if we stored him in the bath where he’d deposited Private Dervian’s body. We’d then inform the relevant authorities, and they would come and collect their great failure. What they did with him after that was not my affair.

  From where I was standing, I could see that there was considerable activity around the entrance to Camp Pell. Cars and trucks entered or departed, their headlights narrowed to slits to avoid making them targets for Japanese bombs or strafing. As the war had progressed, this measure had begun to seem like something of an over-reaction, and it was now generally agreed that Melbourne was perhaps unlikely to be the victim of an unexpected and undetected bombing raid. There had been some relaxation of the blackout regulations, but I suppose the government was right to worry that Melbourne’s distance from the enemy might lead its citizens into dangerous complacency. The firefly bobbing of cigarette ends showed where soldiers were walking, and they were in such numbers that I could smell the smoke from their tobacco.

  ‘Can I help you, bud?’

  I jumped with fright. The voice was behind me, to my right. I turned to confront an American MP. His stance was aggressive, and his tone had been equally aggressive.

  ‘No, you can’t help me.’

  ‘Well, if he can’t help you, can I help you?’ said a second, sneering voice to my left and behind me, so that I now found myself sandwiched between two surly military policemen.

  ‘I don’t think you can help me, either.’

  I tried to keep irritation out of my voice. The source of the irritation was the uncalled-for jangling of my nerves by the deliberately stealthy manner in which these two licensed thugs had approached me. As a civilian, I had nothing to fear from them, and I knew how sensitive their masters were to criticism of bad behaviour by American soldiers. The military police, famously brutal to their own men, were, as far as I knew, disciplined about treating civilians with cavalier indifference because of how it might look in the newspapers. I was unprepared, therefore, for the shove from behind that propelled me into the arms of the MP who stood in front of me. He grabbed me by the shirt, turned me round, and pinned my arms behind my back. The MP who’d pushed me turned on a torch and shone it in my face.

  ‘We’ve been watching you for a few minutes, bud. Who was the broad who was with you, and what are you waiting for?’

  It took all my self-control to contain my sense of outrage.

  ‘I think you should get your hands off me,’ I said, with what I hoped was ominous calm, ‘unles
s you want to spend the rest of the war cleaning toilets on some shithole army base.’

  The MP pinioning my arms tightened his grip and said, ‘Fuck you, bud,’ in my ear. The soldier with the torch used his free hand to search my pockets. He found my papers and examined them.

  ‘He’s an actor,’ he said, ‘name of William Power.’

  ‘Never heard of him. He’s got something in his back pocket.’

  The MP with free hands reached behind me and withdrew the spanner. He slapped it against his palm.

  ‘What’s an actor need with a spanner at this time of night?’

  I felt my temperature rise into the dangerous region of high dudgeon. I am conscious of the fact that I have a tendency towards pomposity when I reach dudgeon heights. I was, however, unable to help myself.

  ‘You have no jurisdictional rights to lay a hand on me, let alone search me, or ask questions, the answers to which are none of your business.’

  ‘Oh, but pimps and their hookers plying their trade are our business. Aussie clap is just the same as any other sort of clap, and we don’t want our boys crawling with it. So maybe you’d like to tell us what you and your girlfriend are doing here at this time of night — with a spanner.’

  ‘We are standing on Australian territory. I know for a fact that you’ve gone way outside your legal authority. You’ve assaulted a civilian, and I’m under no obligation to answer any of your questions.’

  The MP holding my arms leaned in once again close to my ear. ‘Is that right? You know all the jargon, don’t you? Sounds like you’ve been in this position before. I think we need to take you inside, sit you down, and find out a lot more about you — and don’t worry, bud, we’ll get the local boys onto you quick enough. I presume your girlfriend is getting slammed up against a fence even as we speak. Knee-trembler? That’s what you call it, right? How much does she charge?’