Good Murder (22 page)

‘Fair enough. He’s pretty adept with the one arm, isn’t he?’

I didn’t reply to this. I had no idea whether he was insinuating something or simply expressing admiration. There was an awkward silence. At least I found it awkward. Topaz seemed perfectly at ease. A knock on the door was followed by the entrance of the simple-minded constable who had escorted me to see Conroy a few days previously.

‘I’ve got Joe here,’ he said.

Topaz rose and opened the door fully. I suddenly felt sick with nerves. Joe Drummond came into the room, and his appearance took me by surprise. I was expecting an angry, surly, hostile brute. Joe Drummond, with his hands behind his back and with eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep, did not look dangerous. He looked wounded in some profound way. He sat down and was forced to lean forward slightly because his handcuffs pressed against the back of the chair. I began to feel ashamed that I had insisted on seeing him like this. He was unshaven, and the sour smell of the malodorous cell in which he had spent the night clung to him. His eyes, startlingly blue against the red-streaked whites, met mine without embarrassment. Despite his circumstances, I saw no weakness there, but I saw no danger either.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said simply.

I didn’t know how to respond to this. I had imagined that I would lacerate him with words, but I found myself unable to offer anything more than a small gesture of acceptance with my good hand. I turned to Peter Topaz and said, ‘There’s been a mistake. The incident was an accident. We were fooling around with the gun, and it went off.’

It was clumsy and utterly unconvincing, but it was a legal nicety that Topaz needed to hear.

‘Accidents happen. Of course,’ he said, turning to Joe Drummond, ‘you’ll be charged with discharging a firearm within the town limits, but if Mr Power has no objection, you’ll be released as soon as the paperwork is done. If you stand up, I’ll take off those cuffs.’

As Joe’s hands were freed I wondered for a moment if he would suddenly be transformed into the avenging lunatic I had pictured him to be. He merely rubbed his wrists and quietly said, ‘Thank you.’

He had said four words in all, and he was now a free man.

Within half an hour, Joe Drummond and I left the police station together. Only a few hours previously I wouldn’t have thought this possible. Topaz was not with us. I suppose he wanted to avoid any suspicion that he had been involved in this most irregular state of affairs.

We walked a short way down Lennox Street without speaking. There is a natural social reticence between shooter and shot. I broke the silence by asking him what kind of breakfast was provided by the Maryborough police force. I realise that this was almost perversely banal, considering what might have been said, but I had had very little experience in making small talk with people who had recently wanted to kill me. Joe Drummond circumvented the need for small talk by saying, ‘I haven’t been home yet. I don’t know whether they’ve cleaned it or not.’

It was understandable, I suppose, that his focus should have shifted to what he might find at the Drummond house, but I thought it incumbent upon him to perhaps spend a little more time exploring how I felt about what he had done to me.

‘Mr Drummond,’ I said.

‘Joe,’ he said, without slackening his pace and without looking at me.

‘Joe. There are one or two things we need to discuss, don’t you think?’

He stopped suddenly and turned to me.

‘Yes, there are.’ I could tell that he was gathering strength with every breath he took. ‘Now is not the time. I’m sorry I jumped to conclusions about you, but my family, my entire family, is dead. I’m grateful that I’m out here and not locked up in that shithole, but right now I can’t think straight about anything. I have to get home.’

A block further on I said, ‘I’m going this way.’

He nodded and said, ‘You know the house. Come tonight.’

This struck me as so ludicrous that I actually laughed.

‘Bring someone with you if you’re frightened of me,’ he said. ‘Come armed and point the thing at me while we’re talking. I don’t care, but come.’

I didn’t have the option of saying that this was out of the question because he strode off before I could marshal my response. While I was standing there watching him walk away, he turned and shouted, ‘The breakfast was shit!’

I arrived back at the George just before eleven o’clock. I was on the point of pushing open the door to the dining room when Charlotte’s car pulled up. She was wearing a pale pink, silk scarf, tied under her chin and circling her head, and sunglasses. In profile she looked like a haughty film star. When she turned her face to indicate that I should get in beside her, I could see even from outside the car that her lip was still swollen.

‘Where shall we go?’ she asked.

‘Teddington Weir,’ I said. ‘Do you know the way?’

She laughed.

‘Oh, yes. That’s where my husband raped me two weeks before we were married.’

The car pulled away. She took her hand off the wheel and squeezed my hand. As we drove past the courthouse her hand fell to my thigh and moved without impediment to my groin. The dull ache in my shoulder receded against the rising tide of physical pleasure. Like many of the best things in life, masturbation is somehow more enjoyable when someone else does all the work.

It only took us fifteen minutes to get to Teddington Weir. Once we had turned off at Tinana, the road to the weir was deserted. Cane fields flourished on either side, and an occasional house was visible from the road, but we did not see a single person. The weir had been a good choice. We wouldn’t be disturbed or observed.

Teddington Weir was two bodies of water. The upper reservoir with its fish ladder and brutal concrete water courses was less attractive than the lower reservoir. This was a large body of water fringed on all sides with dense vegetation. To reach it we climbed down an embankment, using the unofficial steps created by frequent, week-end visitors. A path ran alongside the water, although trees and shrubs obscured it for much of its length. Here and there small areas had been cleared or trampled, and we slipped into one of these. We disturbed a goanna, which climbed a tree in no particular hurry. Halfway up it decided that it had given enough ground and sat quite still, pressing itself against the trunk so that if you looked away and back again, it took a moment to locate it. We were alone, apart from the goanna and a drongo that sat above us on a branch, observing us, with its bright eyes the colour of breathed-on-embers.

Charlotte removed her sunglasses and revealed her bruised eye. I experienced a rush of tenderness and desire so sudden and strong that it made me dizzy. She allowed me to touch her injured face gently and to kiss her damaged mouth with infinite care. The physical urgency between us grew and was satisfied before we had said more than a few words. I don’t think I am deceiving myself when I say that Charlotte enjoyed herself at least as much as I did, and possibly more. I jarred my arm rather. It was afterwards that I began to feel that we were being watched. I looked about, got up, and pushed aside nearby foliage.

‘What’s the matter, Will?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Nothing.’

The sensation that another pair of eyes was observing us was so vivid that they might have been fingers touching me.

‘Will?’

Charlotte put her face close to mine. She kissed my eyelids and my mouth, and sucked gently on my earlobes.

‘Will you help me kill Harry?’ she whispered.

Her words sank into the porches of my ears with the swiftness of the poison used to dispatch Hamlet senior. I pulled away from her. My face must have betrayed my astonishment, not to say shock, at her suggestion, but she remained impassive.

‘We would be happy together,’ she said. ‘We would be rich.’

‘It’s murder, Charlotte.’

‘Yes. The worst of sins. But will God punish the just killing of an evil man?’

‘It’s not God I’m worried about. It’s Topaz and Conroy.’

Charlotte’s eyes filled with tears, and she seemed to suffer a kind of collapse from within.

‘I can’t live like this anymore,’ she said. ‘Every day I’m more afraid than I was the day before. Every day the humiliations grow. I can’t even bring myself to tell you what he does to me.’

‘But murder, Charlotte.’

‘Yes,’ she said, and she bit each word off. ‘Yes. Murder. Revenge. Punishment. Justice.’ Her face softened suddenly, and she added quietly, ‘Salvation. Rescue.’

It may have been that her extraordinary words so electrified my system that every cell was on high alert, but I knew that I had heard a footfall and a rasp that was surely an intake of breath. The sounds came from everywhere and nowhere. They seemed to emanate from the air around us. Had the watcher — for now I was certain that there was a watcher nearby — heard what Charlotte had said? Charlotte seemed unaware of the intrusion. She was searching my face for a reaction to her remarks. I was suddenly overwhelmed by a terrifying sense that a malevolent force lurked nearby, its vibrations spreading like a toxic mist from the trees, the bushes, from the weir itself. The hair stood up on the back of my neck and I felt an onrush of panic. My breath came in short, shallow gasps.

‘We have to leave here,’ I said.

I put my hand on Charlotte’s arm, and my fear spread like a contagion into her body. Colour drained away from her face.

‘What?’ she said, ‘What is it?’ and her voice quavered slightly.

‘There’s something here. Someone. We have to leave.’

With our movements made shuddery and uncertain with inexplicable terror, we scrambled up the incline and made it back to Charlotte’s car. Charlotte fumbled at the ignition. The engine turned over, but it didn’t catch. There was no one outside the car, and no possibility that anyone could emerge from the undergrowth and take us by surprise. Nevertheless the atmosphere was alive with malice. Charlotte tried the ignition again and made a small, whimpering noise when it again failed to catch. The third time, it coughed into action. She engaged first gear noisily, and we pulled away from Teddington Weir.

The further we left the weir behind us, the calmer the air inside the car became. At the turnoff into Tinana, Charlotte stopped the car. Throughout the drive she had checked the rear-view mirror. We had not been pursued.

‘What was it?’ she asked. ‘What was that?’

‘There was someone there, Charlotte, and he wanted to hurt both of us.’ I was aware that I was sounding a little dramatic, but I’d just had the fright of my life.

‘Hurt?’

‘Kill, Charlotte. He wanted to kill us.’

‘Maybe what I said frightened you and then it just took hold.’

I shook my head.

‘No. I felt there was someone else there, watching us, almost as soon as we arrived.’

‘No, Will. I think I frightened you, and panic is catchy.’

She looked straight ahead.

‘I meant what I said, Will. Will you help me?’

Her head fell forward and she began to cry. At first the sobbing was a whimper, but it swelled symphonically into a body-wracking expression of inconsolable despair. I couldn’t bear to see her like this.

‘Charlotte, there has to be another way.’

Her sobs subsided and she turned her face, puffy with tears and battery, towards me.

‘I’ve seen murder in Harry’s eyes, Will. He will kill me unless I stop him. I won’t let him kill me, not like he killed Polly Drummond.’

Even in the midst of the maelstrom of emotion that had enveloped the car, this last statement was a conversation stopper. For a moment the only sound of which I was conscious was Charlotte’s swallowing.

‘Does Topaz know this?’ I asked.

She shook her head.

‘He suspects, of course. But I know.’

‘Can you prove it?’

‘When he kills me, Will, will that be proof enough? I know because he told me.’

There was a steeliness in her voice that I had not heard before. It was the mere glimpse of a ruthless heart, and perhaps I should have taken heed of it then and there. So fleeting was it that I convinced myself that I had been mistaken.

‘Help me,’ she said quietly.

‘Yes. We’ll find a way out of this.’

She must have known that I didn’t mean murder, but Harry Witherburn had less than a week to live from that moment

Chapter Eight

unpleasant encounters