‘It is my melancholy duty,’ I began with mock gravity, ‘to commemorate in verse the terrible night that the Tay Bridge fell doon.’
As the poem progressed, its absurdities tumbled one upon the other until almost every verse provoked a decent laugh. When I rang out the final couplet:
For the stronger we our houses build,
The less chance we have of being killed
I experienced the most pleasing sensation, hearing cries of, ‘More! More!’
I had no more McGonagall in my repertoire — a situation I intended to address as soon as we returned to Melbourne — and although I was sorely tempted to sneak in something more worthy while they were still well-disposed towards me, I took my bows and handed back to Glen, who asked for more smoke, and sat amongst the four, performing card tricks. Brian and I took the opportunity to move some distance away where we could discuss the pressing matter of our now seriously diminished list of suspects. Before we began, Brian said that he’d never heard the McGonagall performed before — he’d only read it — and that he thought I did it extremely well. I thanked him, and complimented him in return on his mastery of the ‘Geebung Polo Club’. There was an exchange of fraternal warmth between us, and I might have asked him about Archie, but I suspected it would spoil the moment, so I said instead that we had to face the grim reality of having only two people at our disposal who might be guilty of multiple murder — and one of those people was our brother.
‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ Brian said, ‘and I’ve got no doubt at all that Nicholas Ashe was murdered — his gun was in the wrong hand, for a start.’
‘Yes,’ I said hurriedly, not wanting Brian to think he was alone in noticing this. ‘I saw that straight away.’
‘I don’t think we can rule out the possibility that the man who killed Battell and the man who killed Ashe were different people,’ Brian said.
‘Even if he was an accomplice, he was an accomplice of either Rufus or Fulton.’
Brian thought about that for a minute.
‘Yes, there is that. It’s possible, though — I agree it’s unlikely, but it’s possible — that the deaths aren’t related in any way. What if one of the blackfellas killed Ashe?’
I shook my head.
‘Unlikely.’
‘Based on what? If I were a blackfella I wouldn’t mind having a go at someone like Ashe.’
‘We’re getting distracted. We know three blokes were killed before we arrived. Army Intelligence put us where they knew the next deaths were likely to occur — and they did occur. There’s no need to consider any possibility other than the one we were sent to investigate. I agree that either Rufus or Fulton might have an accomplice, but that doesn’t let them off the hook. One of them killed Battell. That much we can be sure of, because there were no accomplices at the West Alligator camp. Of course, Fulton may in fact be Rufus’ accomplice, or vice versa.’
Brian made no reply. I’m sure he was wrestling with the terrible possibility that Fulton was not the harmless and decent companion of his childhood, but a dangerous and violent psychopath.
‘He’s only a half-brother, Brian.’
He lifted the netting around his face so that I could see his furious expression.
‘That doesn’t make him half a brother, and I don’t think Mother considers him to be half a son.’
‘All right, all right. Point taken. I was only trying to say that there might be elements of his personality that flow from an unknown source.’
Brian spluttered his disdain.
‘Flow from an unknown source? What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘What do we know about Peter Gilbert’s background? Who knows what’s lurking there?’
‘And what can you tell me about
our
father’s background, and what’s lurking there? Not much, I’ll wager. I certainly couldn’t. I don’t even know if he had any siblings, and I certainly never met his parents. I assume he had some. They were our grandparents, and we never met them. Don’t you think that’s odd?’
‘Odd is not the same as psychopathic.’
‘Now you’re being ridiculous. You think Fulton has inherited a tendency to kill people from someone in his father’s family?’
I recognised the absurdity of it as soon as it was uttered.
‘I’m just trying every angle, Brian. What we have to do is set a trap, with one of us as the bait.’
‘That would be you,’ Brian said rather too quickly. ‘After all, you’re the one who saw the person kill Andrew Battell, and you were seen. There’s a motivation for disposing of you right there. He’d have no reason to kill me.’
Brian’s reasoning made hideous sense.
‘Fine. I’m willing to be the bait. I wasn’t attempting to manoeuvre you into it.’
‘I didn’t say you were. I was just pointing out the obvious advantage of putting your life in danger, rather than mine. As it were.’
‘Our problem, of course, is that we don’t know the reasons behind any of these deaths. We need to know something about the previous three, and find the thread that binds them.’
We agreed on the importance of this, but were uncertain how to achieve it. We knew that all three earlier deaths had been of Nackeroos from A Company, and we assumed that they’d taken place at Roper Bar, or in a platoon to which either Fulton or Rufus was attached. I thought that it shouldn’t, on the face of it, be too difficult to ask a few questions that would elicit useful responses. We had to be careful, of course, not to arouse suspicions about our investigative role.
‘Archie Warmington must know something about these deaths,’ I said. ‘Even if he was in Ingleburn when they happened, he would have been told blokes had died, but not necessarily that they’d been murdered.’
‘True. I’m sure most people up here just put each of them down to illness or accident, but not murder. Army Intelligence suspects murder, though, which means that they must have someone up here feeding them information.’
‘So why do they need us?’
‘Because whoever it is isn’t in a position to find out the identity of the killer. Do you think Archie is Army Intelligence?’
‘You’d be better placed to know about Archie than I would, Brian.’
He didn’t bite, but simply repeated his question.
‘There’s certainly more to Archie than meets the eye,’ I said. ‘If he’s not Intelligence, he’s more than a humble Nackeroo. When we get back to Roper Bar, I think you should ask him a few questions — in a quiet moment.’
With his veil down, I couldn’t determine his reaction. All he said was, ‘If Archie is Army Intelligence, he already knows about us. If he’s not, he’s too smart not to work out that something is up if I start questioning him.’
‘I wasn’t talking about an interrogation — just an innocent question dropped into a conversation at an appropriate time.’
He shrugged, which I took to mean that he agreed.
In the afternoon we gave the Nackeroos some relief from watching, and took their place. After only half-an-hour I’d had enough. My arms ached from lifting the binoculars, and my head pounded from the glare and concentration. How did these men do this for hour upon gruesome hour? In the dry season, we were told, the mozzies and sandflies weren’t quite so bad, but thirst could drive a man mad. There was no water on Gulnare Bluff — it had to be brought across those stinking mudflats, and the ration was inhuman. At least in the Wet it could be collected daily. We wouldn’t have been sent across to entertain them in the Dry. There wouldn’t have been sufficient water to support such a luxury.
A squall blew in at about three o’clock, and visibility became poor. This didn’t provide any respite from watching. I squinted into the sheets of rain, suddenly terrified that the Japanese might take this opportunity to launch an assault. I almost convinced myself that I could see something, and was about to call out, but when I looked again it was gone.
Rufus Farrell had been in the sig hut since lunchtime. When a Nackeroo came to relieve me I clambered into the ditch beside him. The smoke was suffocatingly thick, but at least it was possible to remove the stifling hat and netting. He was neither sending nor receiving when I joined him, and he seemed grateful for the company.
‘Give me the Alligator River any day,’ he said. ‘This place is a serious shithole.’
I laughed companionably, eager to reassure him that he had nothing to fear from me.
‘I’m sorry that I asked you about Ashe’s death earlier, Rufus. That was thoughtless of me.’
‘Don’t worry about it. I was just a bit shocked by it, that’s all — the suicide thing. I can’t imagine ever wanting to do that.’
‘How old was Ashe?’
‘Nick? He was about my age, I reckon. Twenty-two. Why?’
‘It’s just too young to die, that’s all, let alone like that.’
Rufus scratched at the stubble on his cheek, and shot me a sideways glance.
‘I don’t reckon he killed himself,’ he said. ‘I reckon someone shot him and tried to make it look like suicide.’
He waited to see what effect these words would have on me. I watched his face carefully.
‘What makes you say that?’ I asked calmly. He met my gaze, then shrugged and looked away.
‘Dunno.’
I leaned towards him and whispered, ‘I think you’re right, Rufus. I think someone murdered Nicholas Ashe. I know someone murdered Nicholas Ashe.’
He nodded but was wary, almost afraid.
‘His gun was in the wrong hand,’ I said. ‘That was a careless mistake.’
Rufus began to cough. Had I just pointed out an error he wasn’t aware he’d made?
‘We should tell someone,’ he said.
‘I wouldn’t do that, Rufus. They’ll think it was you.’
A look of genuine fear crossed his face.
‘Why would they think it was me?’
‘Because I’d have to tell them that I think it was you.’
He looked stricken. Before he had a chance to reply, I put my hat back on and said through the netting, ‘I know Andrew Battell was murdered, too. I know that for a fact.’
I climbed out of the sig hut, absolutely confident that Rufus Farrell was a shaken man. If he was innocent he’d do nothing beyond resenting my implications and hating me for them; if he was guilty I was in no doubt that, within a very short space of time, perhaps even in the next few hours, he’d try to kill me.
The meal that night was a particularly disgusting mix of Devon and rice. Devon was, ostensibly, pressed meat. It was greasy and rank, and my mouth felt furred and violated for hours afterwards. Bully beef was prime rump by comparison. Rufus Farrell ate with us, along with two other Nackeroos. The obliterating nature of our clothes meant that I never formed any clear idea of the identities of the men on Gulnare Bluff. It was like living in a bizarre harem where we were all obliged to conform to the wearing of strange hijab. Rufus was seated on my left, but if any of the other three changed places I wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart unless they spoke. It was almost as if one of Glen’s small illusions — which pod conceals the pea — had manifested itself in human form.
‘Got any stories?’ one of them asked.
In a moment of pure inspiration I said, ‘I’ve got a story. It’s about a murder.’
I felt, rather than saw, Brian turn towards me, and I fancy that I felt Rufus Farrell flinch.
‘Go on then,’ he said.
‘It happened in Denmark a long, long time ago.’
I sensed Brian relax, and I told the story of
Hamlet
. They were quiet and they listened, and no one tried to hit me — something I now took as the measure of the success of a performance. I hope I don’t sound too smug if I say that I retold the plot with considerable effect, lingering particularly over Hamlet’s ploy to expose Claudius as the killer of Hamlet’s father. I used the words of the text sparingly but tellingly, and by the play’s end, when all the corpses had piled up, I’d managed to achieve a tiny part of my dream — to bring Shakespeare to a place where he’d never been brought before. It wasn’t exactly the exciting production I might have hoped for, but it was a start. The only hint that the concentration of one of the Nackeroos might have wandered was his query as to whether or not any of this had made it into the papers.
We sat for a little while after the conclusion of the story and made small talk. The squall that had blown in earlier had hung about, dousing us intermittently with showers. Now it settled into steady rain that grew progressively heavier until conversation became impossible below the level of shouted remarks into another’s ear. There was no point trying to sleep under sopping cheesecloth, so we sat with our backs against trees, imagining that the sparse leaf-cover offered some protection from the rain. At least we were able to remove the hats, and we stripped off our clothes as well. It was a blessed relief to feel cool and momentarily clean.
When the rain eased, and then stopped altogether, we put our saturated clothes back on and crawled into the cover of the cheesecloth. I’d become familiar with, and almost indifferent to, the rank smell of mould. I’d also become inured to sleeping in wet clothes, although I had no intention of sleeping that night. I expected Rufus Farrell to make a move, and he wasn’t going to catch me off-guard. Brian, whose sleeping kit was only a few feet from mine, was also on watch, having been briefed by me about my encounter with Farrell in the sig hut.