Good Murder (13 page)

‘Walter has decided to leave us,’ I said, and there was not a trace of acrimony in my voice. This was not news to anybody. Clearly, Walter had let everybody know that he was leaving and he would not have neglected to say why.

‘We wish him well in his retirement.’

He snorted quietly.

‘What will you do?’ I asked.

‘I’m staying here.’ There was more than a hint of defiance in his voice. ‘Tibald needs help.’

‘The company can’t pay your board if you’re not a part of it.’ It was impossible not to sound churlish, but I saw no reason why we had to carry him. The thought of the 25 shillings and ten coupons I would have to pay for new trousers was nagging at me.

‘Don’t worry your head about it,’ he said, and rose to leave. ‘That’s between me and Augie, and it’s taken care of.’

He left the room.

‘This means more rewrites,’ I said, ‘but this afternoon’s reading is still on. I’ll take Walter’s part for the time being. I presume that everybody is line perfect by now. You’ve had plenty of time to get it off by heart.’

‘It’s a bit hard if you keep changing it,’ said Kevin Skakel. Skakel was a dark horse, almost literally. He was in his late twenties, and had thick hair that was ink-black, and olive skin. Pale-blue eyes were thrown into high relief by the colour of his skin and hair. His features were the mismanaged melding of an Irish and continental heritage. At least that was the assumption I made. He was Catholic and attended mass regularly. Individually, there was nothing at all wrong with his features, but together they seemed ill-suited. Annie disagreed. I know this because soon after Kevin joined us she told me that she thought he was interestingly put together and almost handsome.

‘I couldn’t fuck him, though,’ she had said airily. ‘I like men to have two good feet. And I’d prefer that they didn’t go to church. I don’t like the idea of being talked about in Confession.’

Kevin Skakel didn’t speak up much, but his reserve was not shyness. Despite the limp that his clubfoot gave him, he carried himself well. He wasn’t surly, but he was closed off somehow. I didn’t really know him, and I don’t think anybody else did either. He didn’t give off an aura of loneliness, but he spent much of his time alone. He was perfectly happy to engage in conversation, but he never initiated one, and I never heard him offer an observation without first being pressed for one. He gave nothing away, which is why his remark about the changes I was obliged to make to the script were so singular.

‘I can’t force Walter to remain in the company, Kevin,’ I said evenly. ‘We all have to wear the consequences of his leaving, and we still have a show to put on.’

He turned his head slightly to one side and raised his eyebrows fractionally. It was a minimal gesture of disapproval, but also of acceptance. He offered no other comment. Here, I thought, was yet another person I could not trust.

The read-through went surprisingly well. I say ‘surprisingly’ because Bill Henty’s hostility, although unexpressed, was expressive nonetheless, and Kevin Skakel was even more reserved than normal. They were professional, determinedly so, but even Miss Helen Keller would have noticed the
froideur
. I was relieved to discover that everyone had his or her lines down. They had not been slacking off. This was a timely reminder to me that the Power Players were not amateurs. At the end of the read-through the cast dispersed, but Annie Hudson remained behind.

‘That was good,’ she said. ‘I always like this stage. You can see how it fits together, where the relationships are. I’ve got a good sense now of how to play her.’

I didn’t want to deflate this bubble of enthusiasm by saying that the way Annie played her characters was indistinguishable, one from another. Lady Macbeth and Connie, the bad-breath girl? Same person. Until very recently I might have humorously pointed this out, but that was before I had been afflicted with the intensely pleasurable torture of wanting to sleep with her. I would have to seduce her. The thought made my stomach lurch. Did she know me too well? Did she look at me the way a loathsome, annoying brother is looked at? Could I compete with Topaz? My confidence drained away at a rate of knots and I marvelled, not for the first time, at how easily a woman can unman a chap.

‘Will? Why are you staring at me like that? Stop it. It’s giving me the creeps.’

I snapped out of my reverie.

‘Oh, sorry. I was miles away. Looking through you, not at you.’

‘Thanks very much. That’s very flattering,’ she said, and smiled. ‘I’m having lunch out at Teddington Weir tomorrow, with Peter. Why don’t you come, let him get to know you better.’

This was such a remarkable suggestion that I let out an involuntary laugh.

‘You can’t be serious.’

‘Why not? After all, he wouldn’t think you were capable of murder if he could see for himself how …’ She was hurrying to a mildly offensive observation, but stopped short. This left her sentence dangling, needing the descriptor to complete it.

‘So he could see for himself how what? How piss weak I am? Is that what you were about to say?’

‘No. Well, yes, but not exactly. I was going to say how civilised, how decent, you are — how you wouldn’t raise your hand against anyone and especially not against a woman.’

She reached out, put her hand on my neck, and looked closely at my face. Inexplicably, and embarrassingly, my eyes welled with tears. She turned discreetly away, picked up her script, said, ‘Think about it’, and left. Without her knowing it, her tent had been pitched well inside the fortified walls of my emotional keep.

The dining room was quiet. Voices and laughter came from the bar, but here I was alone. In a few minutes the setting up for dinner would begin. I had pushed the vision of the almost decapitated Mrs Drummond into a far corner of my mind, but now it appeared before me, untrammelled and disconcerting. It was after 5.00 pm. Her body must have been found by now. Topaz would turn up soon, and I wondered if I had the strength to tolerate his questions and insinuations without giving something away. And what about Arthur? Would he be steady? My hand began to shake slightly and I felt light-headed, as if I might faint. My body had a tendency to go into delayed shock at moments of high anxiety. As last night’s abattoir colours and odours flooded my memory, a terrifying fact presented itself. There was someone out there who had killed two women. This person had looked through the darkness to the place where I had been standing, and he had decided to let me live.

‘Why?’ I asked Arthur when I went to his room later. ‘Why didn’t he attack me?’

‘I can think of lots of reasons. Firstly, you can’t be sure he really knew you were there.’

‘I am sure. I felt his eyes on me, and they were like dank hands running over my body.’

‘Even if he did know you were there, he couldn’t risk a fight. He might lose, or get hurt. But if you couldn’t see his face, he couldn’t see yours. Besides, having someone else in the house at the time might suit him. Being there doesn’t make you a witness; it makes you a suspect.’

Topaz called for Annie the next day. I was sitting with her and Arthur and Adrian on the second-storey verandah, outside Annie’s bedroom. We were tinkering with the script. Adrian was the first to see Topaz riding towards the George down Wharf Street. The legs of his trousers were sensibly secured with clips. He was out of uniform, but his eyes were always in uniform.

‘Here’s your boyfriend,’ Adrian said.

‘And don’t you just wish he was yours,’ Annie replied.

‘Yes, indeed,’ he said, and they both laughed.

Annie jumped up and waved.

‘Come up,’ she called as he leaned his bicycle against the downstairs railing.

Topaz came through Annie’s bedroom and eased himself out of the low window on to the verandah. His obvious familiarity with the room sent a spasm of resentment through me. He greeted everyone with a wide smile, but when he nodded at me the edge of the smile retreated a little, so that I would know that he did not greet murderers warmly. Annie, feeling perfectly at ease, kissed him on the mouth. He did not resist or make any attempt to disguise the nature of their relationship. He returned her kiss and put his arm around her waist.

‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘It’s a long ride.’

‘Tibald’s made us lunch,’ she said. ‘Isn’t he a dear?’

She turned to me.

‘Will, are you coming?’

Topaz stiffened at these words and shot me a glance that was unambiguous in its intent. He needn’t have worried. I had no desire to join them. The thought of watching them bill and coo made me sick.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea.’

It was only after they had left, as I was watching them ride away, that I realised that Mrs Drummond’s body had not yet been found. My god, how long was it going to take? Was there really no one who would call on her to see how she was doing? A little rush of elation went through me. Maybe it would be days before she was found. With the days getting warm and with the ravenous appetites of Maryborough’s insects, and who knows what else, establishing the exact time of Mrs Drummond’s death would be difficult. With the passing of a few more days, accuracy would be almost impossible.

Chapter Five

so few answers

DETECTIVE SERGEANT CONROY
called at the George on Monday morning. He came into the bar where I was sitting. There was nobody else there, as the George did not serve alcohol until after 11.00 am. When I saw him I assumed that the body had been found, and I girded my loins for the first remark. I half-expected him to arrest me. However, it quickly became clear that Mrs Drummond was still propped on her pillows. This visit was designed to embarrass and unnerve me, but it did neither. He must have been sorely disappointed to find me alone, with no one to witness any discomfort I might feel.

‘Just checking a few details,’ he said.

‘I don’t know how many times I have to repeat it, Sergeant Conroy,’ I said.

‘Detective Sergeant,’ he said, his vanity pricked by my error.

‘When I left the Drummond house, Polly was still alive.’

‘We don’t dispute that, Mr Power. It’s one of the few facts we agree on. It’s what happened next that is of interest to us.’

‘And there our ways must part because I have no idea what happened next, except that I came here and went to bed.’

‘And nobody saw you.’

‘And nobody saw me. It was late. What was I supposed to do — knock on people’s bedroom doors and announce the joyous news that I had got home in one piece from the pictures? If I had killed her, don’t you think I would have organised an alibi?’

‘I never try to second-guess a murderer, Mr Power.’

I shook my head in weary resignation.

‘Is there anything else you want to ask me?’

‘Perhaps tomorrow,’ he said.

‘I’ll be at Wright’s Hall most of the day, rehearsing.’

‘We may require you at the station. We’ll let you know.’

With that, he left. So this was how it was going to be. They had no evidence, but they thought they could harass me into a confession.

I had cancelled Monday afternoon’s rehearsal. I had other plans — like
s
aving my skin. I wanted to speak to the young woman who had given Polly’s eulogy and who had described Polly as her closest friend before breaking down. This was Shirley Moynahan, and she had worked with Polly at Manahan’s, the department store in Adelaide Street. I went in just after the 11.00 am test siren had sounded. I discovered, with a perverse tinge of pique, that I had overestimated my notoriety. I thought that I would draw stares as the man most likely to have murdered Polly Drummond. No one spared me a second glance. My looks had improved, of course. My eye had gone down and showed only faint bruising. The scratches left by Polly’s fingernails had healed, and my other injuries were hidden under my clothes.

I asked at the front counter for Shirley Moynahan. A woman, in her late sixties by the look of her mean, desiccated face, directed me to Ladies’ Lingerie.

‘She’s popular,’ she said. ‘You’re the second person today.’

I took a stab in the dark. ‘I’m just following up some of the detective’s questions.’

‘I told that Conroy not to upset Shirl. She’s had a rough trot. I hope you’re not going to upset her either. You coppers never know when to stop.’