‘We’re just trying to find answers, Mrs …?’
She didn’t provide her name, and I thought that I had overplayed my hand. I should have moved on quickly and not replied to her remark. I did not want to be caught out in a lie about who I was.
‘You’re not from round here,’ she said, and she cocked her head in a way that was skin-crawlingly salacious. ‘Brought you up from Brisbane, have they? That’d be right. Conroy couldn’t work out the size of his underpants without help. I told him, I said, if he wanted to solve Polly’s murder all he had to do was arrest that actor, or was he from the circus? Anyway, the one who took her to the pictures.’
‘Really? What do you know about this … actor, did you say?’
‘I think he was an actor, but he might have come in with the circus. They’re all the same. Well, Shirl said that Polly told her that he was keen on her. She knocked him back and he went berserk. It’s obvious, but Conroy can’t see it.’
‘Berserk, you say?’
‘I’ve told all this to Conroy. Don’t you people talk to each other?’
‘I spoke to him earlier. And no, he didn’t mention it, but we were discussing other aspects of the case.’ This at least was the truth.
A customer took my informant from me and I made my way towards Ladies’ Lingerie, more than a little disturbed by the revelation that I was the front runner as far as this well-short-of-perfect stranger was concerned. If she were representative of the general populace then I was in serious public relations trouble.
I recognised Shirley Moynahan, even though she had her back to me. It was the defeated slump of her shoulders. When she was delivering her eulogy I had noticed that they were rounded, as if the world’s unpleasantness bore down upon her and formed an invisible yoke. She was plain, and that’s all there was to it. Her hair was badly cut in that ubiquitous victory bob, encouraged by propaganda, that suited one girl in a hundred and which depended anyway upon a skilful hairdresser if it was to appear anything other than drab. I didn’t think that even the skills of Mr Sydney Guilaroff himself would have saved her. The overall effect, confirmed when she turned around, was lumpen. Her nose began well but ended badly, and her lips were so thin as to be hardly there at all. Her eyes, which might have rescued her, let her down by being a dull, flat brown with none of the shifting facets of a true hazel iris. They were surmounted by two strong eyebrows, which would have benefited from a judicious shaping and thinning. Clearly, she had decided long ago, even though she was only twenty-four, that trading on her looks was simply not an option. I hoped for her sake that she had a talent in reserve that would assist a visitor in overcoming the unfortunate first impression she couldn’t help but make.
She was assisting a customer, selling her a garment that looked almost orthopaedic in its shapelessness. She took the money and coupons, and then noticed me. Her hand flew to her mouth and she quickly looked away. The customer left, happy I presume, to have purchased a foundation garment sufficiently robust to deal with the demands she would make upon it. I walked to the counter and introduced myself, unnecessarily, as she obviously already knew who I was. I raised my hand in a calming motion, and she flinched as though she thought I might strike her.
‘Miss Moynahan, please.’
I tried to convey in those few words enough information to reassure her that she was quite safe, and that she was not face-to-face with the man who had murdered her best friend. I drew on all my acting experience to get the cadences exactly right.
‘I’ll scream,’ she said.
I took a few steps back.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Look. I’m way back here. Please just hear what I’ve got to say and then I’ll leave.’
She digested this and nodded. Her eyes darted around the lingerie department. There was a well-dressed woman at the far end. A RAAF officer’s wife, probably. Her presence gave Shirley courage.
‘I did
not
kill your friend,’ I said. ‘I’ve never killed anything in my life, not even a rabbit. I was one of the last people to see her alive, that’s true, but I wasn’t the very last person. That was the person who took her life.’
Shirley Moynahan began to sniffle and then to cry. I moved towards the counter and said quietly, ‘Shirley, your friend was a lovely woman, and she deserves to have the person responsible brought to justice. I am not that person. If you knew anything about me you would know that.’
I opened my eyes as wide as a doe’s and filled them with enough tears to make them glitter. She saw then that she need not fear me, not here in the lingerie department.
‘She liked you,’ she said. ‘Polly said that you were good friends with Cary Grant. Is that true?’
I had to think rapidly. Would a harmless lie help put her further at her ease?
‘Well, I don’t know about good friends. Acquaintances, really.’
‘She said you liked her, that she might get to meet Cary Grant.’
For goodness sake!
‘I did like her. Very much. But I didn’t know her very well. We only went out once before …’
She gulped back a sob.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Before she died.’
‘Can I be honest with you, Shirley? May I call you Shirley?’
‘Yes, please.’
She straightened up, prepared to accept the precious gift of my honesty.
‘The police,’ I said, ‘the police think that I’m guilty, and they’re not the only ones. I’m sure lots of people think the same thing. Can you imagine how that makes me feel?’
‘Hunted,’ she said, and her face told me that she had slipped into a melodrama of her own imagining.
‘Yes. Exactly. Hunted. The police are so sure of my guilt that if I don’t find the answer myself they’ll make a case against me and send me to trial. I could spend the rest of my life in prison for a crime I didn’t commit.’
That hand flew to her mouth again.
‘I need help,’ I said, and sounded helpless. ‘I need your help. Please.’
I thought this was nicely judged, a perfect balance of need and determination.
‘How can I help you?’ she asked, with an agreeable note of despair in her voice.
‘We can’t talk here,’ I said. ‘When do you finish?’
She hesitated, and I knew that she was reluctant to meet me privately, despite the softening of her attitude.
‘When you finish work,’ I said, ‘I could meet you in King’s Cafeteria.’
She was visibly relieved. Even if I were the killer I would be unlikely to strike in a busy café.
‘Three-thirty,’ she said. ‘I’ll meet you there.’
‘I’ll buy you a milkshake,’ I said, and bestowed a radiant smile upon her. She took a ball of filthy cloth from her pocket and blew her nose noisily.
With a few hours to spare, I walked to Wright’s Hall, let myself in, and tried to ignore the threat hanging over me by imagining a performance of
Titus Andronicus
here. We had played in less salubrious places, although never with the possibility of arrest hovering in the wings. We were a reduced company, two players short — Tibald and old Walter Sunder. I could collapse several minor characters into one, knowing that the majority of the audience would only understand one word in ten anyway. I was walking back and forth in the area that would be our stage, blocking our movements in my head and configuring one or two dramatic tableaux. So intensely was I concentrating that I did not hear Peter Topaz come in. I discovered him standing at the back of the hall when I whirled around, practising a movement I intended to make in Act 111.
‘I’ve already spoken to Conroy today,’ I said.
His footsteps echoed as he walked towards me. The acoustics were not ideal for Shakespeare. He stopped, and turned his cap in his hands.
‘What if I told you I’ve changed my mind, that I thought you were innocent,’ he said.
‘I’d say that you’ve been listening to Annie, and that your dick and your brain have changed places. Or maybe this is a new tactic. You tell me you think I’m innocent so I let my guard down. Is this one of Conroy’s bright ideas? Get Power’s confidence. Catch him out. Whatever, I don’t believe you.’
‘All right. I can see that this looks transparent. I’m not denying that Conroy thinks we’ve got our man. That’s partly because he thinks you’re an arsehole. All I’m saying is that now I’m not so sure.’
‘About me being an arsehole, or innocent?’
Without missing a beat, he said, ‘Innocent. If you killed Polly, there are too many things that don’t add up.’
All I felt when I heard this was anger. Perhaps I should have been relieved, and grabbed him in a bear hug and told him all about the body of Mrs Drummond growing more putrid by the hour. I did not, however, believe him.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Stop fucking around with me. This innocent bullshit doesn’t wash. So Annie says I’m a nice guy. So what? You know nothing about me. Nothing. What’s my background? Huh? You have no idea. Maybe my past is strewn with corpses. Don’t stand there now and tell me that you suddenly have a gut feeling, or a cock feeling, that I didn’t do it. I don’t actually mind that much that you think I’m a murderer. I do mind that you think I’m a moron.’
He looked down at the ground and fidgeted with his cap.
‘To tell you the truth, Will, Annie has never said that you were a nice guy. She does believe you’re not guilty, though, and she did try to convince me. It wasn’t her who changed my mind. It was Mrs Drummond.’
That pulled me up short.
‘You spoke to her?’ I asked, knowing that the interview couldn’t have taken place recently.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Several times. She’s not a good witness, but she told me something that you didn’t and I wondered why. She said that the night you were there Polly and Fred had a fight, a “rip-snorter” she said. Punches, kicks, the works. Is that true?’
‘What if it is?’
‘I wondered why you didn’t mention it. All you said was that Fred was nuts. I thought Mrs Drummond might have been making it up, but she repeated it to me the next time I spoke to her. She said that you tried to break it up. Fred didn’t mention it when I interviewed him either, but of course he wouldn’t because it makes him look bad. I called on Mrs Drummond the day after Fred died, and she was rambling and said that he was being punished. I asked her what he was being punished for, but that was as much as I could get out of her. She just kept repeating, “punished … punished … punished.” Then she decided I was a papist, and starting screaming at me to get out of the house and that I would join her son in hell. I went back to my notes, and I couldn’t find anything in them about a fight in what you said, and I couldn’t figure out why until Annie said something offhand. She said that it was easy to embarrass you; that you blushed easily. It was a passing remark, but it occurred to me that the spectacle of a woman you were attracted to flailing about on the ground with her brother might be sufficiently mortifying to warrant omission. I don’t mean mortifying for you. I mean that you found it embarrassing for her. If you killed her, why would this small moment of shame still bother you enough to hide it?’
‘Wouldn’t it be nice,’ I said, ‘if you believed any of what you have just said? It has such an authentic ring to it. Considered, logical, in some ways even incontrovertible. It had it all. The initial error, the regretful re-think, the revelation of innocence. I’m looking for a replacement actor. You’d be a shoe-in if you were interested.’
‘You’re letting your feelings for Annie cloud your judgement.’
I betrayed the truth of his acuity by letting out an involuntary gasp.
‘I’m not a moron either, Will.’ He put on his cap and strode to the door of Wright’s Hall. Before he left he turned and said, ‘You were born in Ballarat. Your father was a banker, and died when you were sixteen years old. You have two younger brothers, and you had a sister who died when she was an infant. Your mother lives in Melbourne with your second-youngest brother, Brian, who is a teacher, and his wife. Your other brother, Fulton, is in the army and is currently posted to Darwin. Your mother’s name is Agnes. Her maiden name was Sinclair. Your past is not strewn with corpses.’
With that he walked out, leaving behind the scent of Lifebuoy soap.
‘Arsehole,’ I said to the empty room.
At 3.30 I was sitting in King’s Cafeteria drinking a lime milkshake and waiting for Shirley Moynahan. She still hadn’t shown up at four. I thought she must have lost her nerve, but she came in at five past four and apologised for being late. She had been dealing with a difficult customer who didn’t understand that she couldn’t just hand over coupons and be given underwear in return. This story might have been true, but she had also used the time to inexpertly apply make-up. For my benefit? Well, she wasn’t trying to impress the girl making the milkshakes.
‘I’m sorry about before,’ she said, ‘but I’ve been frightened of my own shadow ever since Polly was killed. I have nightmares.’
She lowered her voice. ‘I sleep with the light on.’
This shared intimacy, if it was intended to titillate, was wide of the mark. I could see no immediate advantage in sleeping with Shirley, and whoever eventually took up that challenge could only be aided and abetted by darkness.
‘Are you frightened now?’ I asked.
‘No, no, I’m not. It was just the shock of seeing you.’ She leaned across the table and in a conspiratorial tone said, ‘I don’t believe that you killed Polly.’ She looked around, anxious that no one should overhear her. ‘I think Fred did, and then he killed himself in that plane.’