‘Oh, Will,’ she whispered, and the pain in her voice was as palpable to me as the pain in my shoulder.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
She moved so that a panel of light fell across her face. One eye was red and bruised, and her lip, oddly swollen, was cracked at one end. Under the pressure of her words a thin ooze of blood had broken through the lipstick she had used to disguise the damage.
‘We’re both in the wars,’ she said, and smiled faintly. I reached up to touch her face, but she pulled away from me and her eyes darted nervously over my shoulder, as if she was expecting to see someone there.
‘The red-headed man,’ she said. ‘I don’t like him. I don’t like the way he looks at me.’
I had seen the way Augie Kelly looked at women, and I could not argue with Charlotte’s revulsion. There was, however, a more compelling issue at hand.
‘Did your husband do this to you?’ I asked.
‘Why, yes, of course,’ she said, and she furrowed her brow quizzically as if she thought the question peculiar or unnecessary.
‘Did he find out about us?’
‘No. I don’t think so. I don’t know. He may have. He doesn’t really need an excuse.’
‘Will you come up to my room? We can talk freely there.’
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Not here. Not in a hotel. I’ll come for you tomorrow at eleven. We’ll drive somewhere.’
She was suddenly anxious to leave. When Augie Kelly entered the room, she said, in a voice pitched too high to be convincingly casual, ‘Thank you, Mr Power. Those pieces sound perfect. I’m sure people will be most entertained.’
With her head lowered she hurried out. A moment later the sound of her car’s engine reached us and then receded as she drove away.
‘Walked into a door, did she?’ Augie said, crassly.
‘The only way her husband can get an erection is by thumping women. Perhaps you’re familiar with the condition.’
‘All right, all right. Keep your shirt on. It’s none of my business.’
I sat down, suddenly tired.
‘Christ, Augie, what a mess, what a fucking mess.’
Augie left but came back almost immediately with a beer.
‘The others will be back soon,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to keep mum about Mrs Witherburn’s visit?’
‘No. Why should you? You heard her. She was here about the fund-raiser.’
‘OK. I’ll be more specific. Do you want me to keep mum about what she looked like.’
I realised that I was being drawn into a kind of intimacy with Augie, but I felt I had to call on him to keep quiet.
‘Yes. If you wouldn’t mind. It’s nobody’s business.’
‘Just ours,’ he said.
I didn’t want to give Augie the impression that I considered him a mate who could expect further confidences from me. Arm’s length was my preferred distance where Augie Kelly was concerned. Charlotte would not have been happy to hear Augie appointing himself as the guardian of her reputation.
‘I know you don’t want to hear this,’ he said, and his tone indicated that, as a friend, he felt able to speak the words I apparently didn’t want to hear. ‘I know you don’t want to hear this, but don’t get mixed up with the Witherburns. You are a trouble magnet, and Harry Witherburn is real trouble. He’s a powerful man, and if he thinks you’re messing around with his wife he’ll squash you like a bug.’
I let Augie run through his gratuitous and impertinent advice without interruption. The fact that he felt able to give it made it clear that he had made the shift from considering me as a client to adopting me as an intimate. I would have to be careful in future not to encourage him further.
‘I am not involved with his wife,’ I lied.
‘Why is she coming tomorrow?’ he shot back.
‘She’s showing me Teddington Weir,’ I said off the top of my head. ‘I expressed an interest in seeing it, and she offered to drive me there. We need to discuss the program for her fund-raiser.’
As I said this I decided that Teddington was, in fact, the ideal destination. On the weekend it was a popular place to swim and court, but it was sufficiently far out of town to ensure that on a weekday nobody would be there.
‘Will, if you don’t want to admit to adultery with Charlotte Witherburn, that’s fine, but it’s perfectly obvious that there’s something going on between the two of you. If I can see it, Harry Witherburn can see it. That’s all I’m saying.’
I was aware that that was not all he was saying. He was exercising his imagined, new-found privilege of casting moral aspersions in my direction. Adultery is such an ugly word, and I was about to say so when the rumble of the truck arriving from Wright’s Hall brought our conversation to an end.
The troupe came into the dining room, but before anybody had a chance to inquire after my health Annie stood before me, arms akimbo, and said, ‘Well?’
‘Well what?’ I gripped my beer, knowing that it was not beyond her to pour it into my lap.
‘Joe Drummond. What are you going to do about Joe?’
‘I’m not going to discuss that with you.’
‘Now, Will.’ Adrian stepped forward. ‘He sat here quiet as a mouse after he shot you. He just waited for the police. He didn’t even drink the beer that Augie got for him. I talked to him and he was quite charming. No one that good looking should be in jail.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Adrian,’ I said. ‘And what was I doing while you were plying him with beer and having a lovely little chat?’
‘You were unconscious. It’s not as if you could have joined in.’
I decided to assert my authority before this became any more exasperating or ridiculous.
‘I’m not going to discuss this any further. I want to meet you all here at 8.30 tomorrow morning to finalise choosing your pieces for the fund-raiser. I won’t be at the rehearsal in the morning. I’ll join you in the afternoon. Thank you.’
Ignoring this clear dismissal, Bill Henty said, ‘And where will you be while we’re working?’ As was usual with him, there was an ugly note of aggression in his voice.
‘I’ll be at the police station laying formal charges against the man who attempted to kill me,’ I said. I looked at Annie when I said this. Henty sniffed and left the room. The others followed, with Annie turning at the door to say, ‘Selfish. Nasty. Vicious.’
‘That’s the title of your autobiography, is it?’ I said.
Arthur remained behind and sat opposite me.
‘I suppose you’re going to tell me now that Joe Drummond is misunderstood, that he’s not a murderous thug. I can’t believe that he was offered a beer.’
‘No, I’m not going to tell you that.’
I was expecting more, but nothing came. He was looking at me in a most disconcerting way.
‘Say it,’ I said. ‘Say whatever it is you want to say.’
‘All right, but let me finish before you interrupt or storm out in high dudgeon.’
I nodded agreement.
‘I don’t know the first thing about Joe Drummond,’ he said. ‘Maybe he’s a maniac. Maybe he’s an arsehole. Maybe he’s distracted by grief. I don’t know and in some ways it doesn’t matter. OK, he shot you. That was foolish and dangerous and criminal, and he should be held to account for it. If you decide to press charges that would be perfectly reasonable and understandable. Don’t pay attention to Annie’s carry-on. She’s responding to his vulnerability. She does that, and just at the moment Joe Drummond is more vulnerable than you are, and Peter Topaz has been softening her up about him. However, and it’s a big however, Joe Drummond is safe when he’s in jail, and that’s bad for you. You need him to be out and unsafe. The next target.’
I signalled that I wanted to interject at this point. ‘And what if he’s got a different idea about who should be a target? He’s already had a practice shot at me. What if he’s after a bullseye?’
‘That’s why you need to talk to him. Obviously you’re not going to take anybody else’s word for it that he made a mistake. You have to hear it from him, and you can judge for yourself whether you trust him or not. I won’t lie to you, Will. Peter Topaz asked me to talk to you.’
I narrowed my eyes as an expression of disapproval.
‘I wouldn’t have agreed to do it if I didn’t think he had a point. Conroy’s not crossing you off his suspect list, and no one’s making much headway in solving this. If it’s someone out to get the Drummond family, having the last one out of reach protects everyone except you. And Joe Drummond has said he’s willing to sit in that house and wait for the killer to show his hand.’
I said nothing, but because this was coming from Arthur the rage that was swelling within me did not spill into the room. What he said made hideous sense. Somehow I had to get past the incredible lack of concern for my welfare which all this interest in Joe Drummond seemed to imply.
‘Well?’ Arthur said.
‘All right, I’ll talk to Drummond. But I’m not promising anything, and I want Topaz there in the room. And I want Drummond restrained.’
‘You could do it now. Topaz would still be at the station.’
‘No,’ I said emphatically. ‘The least Drummond can do is spend one night in the cells. I’m sure it’s not his first and, until I’m convinced he’s not a threat, it won’t be his last.’
The following morning the cast gathered as requested in the dining room. Tibald was there too. He felt that his rendition of Falstaff’s ‘Chimes at midnight’ speech was peerless, and that a one-off at Witherburn would not interfere with his cooking.
‘Perhaps Mrs Witherburn would appreciate a platter of decent hors d’oeuvres,’ he said, knowing that the offer would secure his place. It would also introduce more people to the wonders of the Canty cuisine. Annie had opted for Portia’s ‘Quality of mercy’ speech. She looked daggers at me when she announced her choice, as if I might learn something from the text. Bill Henty had gone for the ‘Band of brothers’ speech from
Henry V
. I had half thought I might do this myself, but I let him have it. Adrian, who liked burying himself under a mountain of make-up, had settled on Polonius’ ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’ from
Hamlet
; and Kevin Skakel, oddly, had decided against Shakespeare and wanted to do William McGonagall’s ‘Tay Bridge Disaster’, a poem he considered to be one of the masterpieces in the language. That really tells you all you need to know about Kevin Skakel. As I said later to Arthur, I thought Kevin might have suffered a club brain as well as a club foot. Arthur had chosen two of the sonnets, and I was thinking of something from
Coriolanus
. The others had gone for crowd-pleasers. I wanted a piece that might challenge an audience.
‘I’ll join you at the hall later,’ I said. I did not tell Annie that I had decided to talk to Joe Drummond. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of supposing, wrongly, that I had caved in to pressure from her.
‘You can drop me off at the police station on the way,’ I said. ‘I just have to go up to my room to get my copy of
Coriolanus
’.
I took a few minutes to unearth it, and when I returned to the dining room I discovered that they had left without me. I walked to the police station. When I entered, the desk was unattended. I coughed, but no one came, so I went outside and walked down the side of the building to where I presumed the cells were. There were only two cells housed in an outbuilding which looked as if it had been constructed last century, and it probably had been. Peter Topaz was there, unlocking the door. On the ground beside him were two plates of food. Flies had settled on them as he grappled with the lock.
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I said.
Most people would have jumped or shown some surprise at an unexpected voice from behind. Topaz didn’t flinch.
‘Good’, he said, and bent down to pick up the plates. ‘If you wait in the office I’ll bring Joe in as soon as he’s eaten his breakfast.’
Topaz came back to the office alone.
‘He won’t be long,’ he said.
‘I want him handcuffed, and I want you in the room.’
‘The handcuffs aren’t necessary, and of course I’ll be in the room. You needn’t worry, he’s not going to jump you.’
‘If he’s not cuffed, I’m not talking to him.’
Topaz sighed heavily, but agreed to constrain Drummond for the duration of our encounter. He led me into the familiar interview room and returned to the front desk, where I heard a muffled conversation between him and whoever had now arrived for duty. When he came back into the room, he sat opposite me and had the decency to ask after my health.
‘How are you feeling, Will? A bit sore, I imagine.’
‘I feel fine. I’ve got a hole in my shoulder which might turn septic, and I’m about to meet the arsehole who put it there. Why wouldn’t I feel fine?’
‘What changed your mind?’
‘Someone whose opinion I respect pointed out that there were advantages in not pressing charges. It’s exactly what you said, of course, but it sounded more reasonable when it came from someone I admire.’
‘How did Arthur lose his arm?’
Topaz had a way of asking questions that came out of nowhere. I suppose it was a technique designed to wrong-foot suspects.
‘You’ll have to ask him yourself,’ I said.
‘Is it a secret?’
‘No, but I don’t like discussing my friends behind their backs.’