Good Murder (32 page)

No one paid any attention to me as I walked to higher ground up Adelaide Street. I thought I would come around behind the George and see how matters stood. When I reached the corner of Kent and March Street, I saw that the Mary River had engulfed the George to a point at least halfway up its lower windows. I imagined the furniture in the dining room and bar floating and crashing against masonry and glass as the river eddied and swished in the unfamiliar confinement of four walls. The sound of its rushing was unearthly to my ears, and triumphant, as if the river were declaring that its banks were a grace-and-favour confinement, and no impediment to the occasional demonstration of its true authority.

I couldn’t get any nearer to the hotel without swimming, and the current was too swift to allow that. I wondered if the troupe had abandoned the premises. Surely they wouldn’t have retreated upstairs, for they must have known that the very foundations might give way and bring the whole building crashing into the flow.

A hand placed solidly on my shoulder, with the proprietorial certainty of a walloper nabbing his man, made me jump. I turned, and was relieved to see that it belonged to Augie Kelly. His copper hair was plastered to his head, and his clothes were as saturated as my own.

‘They’ve let you go?’ he shouted.

I shook my head.

‘I’ve let myself go!’ I shouted back. I mimed the roof of the cell being blown off. He nodded.

‘Where is everybody?’ I asked.

‘The Royal. They drove up hours ago when it looked like it was going to flood.’

I caught most of this. He then leaned towards my ear.

‘I stayed as long as I could!’

I began to shout something about Topaz, but gave up as the wind roared with renewed vehemence. I made to move off, intending to find Topaz and the Power Players in the Royal Hotel. As I did so, Augie made a bizarre and disconcerting gesture. He reached out and brushed away a strand of wet hair that was lying across my forehead. I recoiled from his touch, a reaction he seemed to take personally. It was not so dark that I couldn’t see the grimace of anger that crossed his face. He withdrew his hand abruptly, offended that I had misinterpreted his action, turned on his heel, and disappeared up March Street.

I followed, not in order to catch him up, but because it was the quickest way to the Royal. I needn’t have worried. Augie had vanished. I couldn’t gather my thoughts to interpret his action, not with the heavens bent on drowning the earth. Besides, nothing Augie did was without a whiff of creepiness.

I toiled my way to the Royal Hotel, terrified that at any moment something would be dislodged from its resting place and bring my life to a premature end. Somewhere, amid the crowded emotions jostling for position, the sense that my brother would only get the full story second-hand if I wasn’t there to tell it, pushed its way out of the pack. If I died, it was entirely possible that Conroy’s version — supported no doubt by Arthur, who would be free to declare that he had witnessed my killing Charlotte — would gain currency. I could almost hear my brother, even as he identified my body, telling himself, and my mother, that murder and a grisly death involving airborne roofing iron were a natural consequence of choosing acting instead of teaching as a career. I could also hear his pinch-spirited little wife clucking agreement and adding that, while it gave her no pleasure to say it, a person could not go about killing people and expect to die peacefully in his bed. Oh, no. It was of paramount importance that I lived to enjoy the haughty victory of the wrongfully accused.

The street outside the Royal Hotel was deserted. This was hardly a surprise. The only people not indoors were the volunteers who were pointlessly sandbagging the outer spill of the Mary River. Blackouts were in place, so I wasn’t sure whether or not the power had been cut off.

I entered through the main door. The grand staircase, faintly illuminated by hurricane lamps burning in the dining room to its left, swept up into impenetrable blackness. There was a burble of conversation coming from the dining room. The timbre of the voices was familiar, but I could not distinguish individual words. Having arrived, I was not now certain what to do next. Should I just walk into the room and assume that people would be pleased to see me? It sounded as if there were more people in there than the players, though, and perhaps not all of them would be excited by my freedom. And what if Conroy was among them?

A figure emerged from the dining room and saw me before I could decide what to do.

‘What are you doing here?’

It was Bill Henty. He would not have been my first choice as the person most likely to greet me sympathetically, and he didn’t let me down.

‘You’re supposed to be safely locked up.’

‘What do you mean “safely”? I thought Topaz made it clear that I wasn’t their man.’

Henty grunted dismissively.

‘How’d you get out?’ he asked.

‘Never mind. Is Topaz here?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘He’s out sandbagging.’

‘Annie?’

‘She’s in there.’

He stood looking at me out of his different-coloured eyes, or out of the one that wasn’t blind anyway, with that resolute sullenness that was his specialty.

‘Well, would you get her for me?’ I asked, and was displeased to hear the petulance in my own voice. Henty, more than anyone in the company, had a way of bringing out some of my very few less-admirable qualities.

He returned to the dining room, reluctant to tear himself away from the evidence of my discomposure. I must have presented a bedraggled spectacle. A great deal had happened since this morning, all of it calculated to put physical distance between me and my doppelganger, Tyrone Power.

A moment later, Annie came out and hurried to me. Wordlessly, she took me by the elbow and propelled me up the stairs to the point where the light died and where we could not be seen by anybody below.

‘My God, Will,’ she said. ‘Are you mad?’

‘I didn’t have any choice,’ I said defensively. ‘The roof blew off.’

‘And you were sucked out of the room like Dorothy,’ she said sharply.

‘Why are you so angry?’ I asked, dismayed by her failure to show any interest in my welfare.

‘Peter is trying to help you. You’ve only been in the bloody jail for a few hours, and you’ve already escaped. He’s going behind Conroy’s back for you, and here you are giving Conroy more ammunition.’

‘You mean more ammunition to fire at your boyfriend, don’t you,’ I snapped.

‘You,’ Annie said firmly and clearly, ‘are sometimes a stupid, stupid man.’

‘Really,’ I said and prepared to disabuse her of this ridiculous assertion by revealing that I had discovered the identity of the murderer.

‘I know …’ I began, but got no further because the door below us opened and Peter Topaz came in out of the storm. Before I could stop her, Annie had called out to him.

‘Peter! He’s up here. Will’s up here.’

Topaz took the steps two at a time, and was with us in seconds.

‘The roof blew off,’ Annie said, like a school marm rattling off my misdemeanours before the headmaster. Topaz, obviously fatigued by his labours that night, could, nevertheless, barely contain the rage he was feeling when he said, ‘All right. All right. That was a very stupid thing to do, but let’s not panic. There’s no one at the station. They’re all out sandbagging, so you have to go back, like a good little suspect, and climb back into your cell, and I don’t care how wet and wild it is in there. You’re to sit in the corner until someone comes for you. Understand? No one need ever know.’

I said evenly, ‘No. I can’t do that.’

Annie jabbed me viciously in the ribs.

‘Yes you can,’ she said through clenched teeth. ‘Bill Henty won’t say anything.’

I was ready to drop my bombshell.

‘I’m not worried about Henty. I can’t go back because I’ve caught your murderer for you. I’ve got him tied up at Charlotte’s house.’

I could not eliminate the glee from my voice entirely. Topaz’s reaction was not at all what I expected.

‘You’ve been to Witherburn? Tonight?’ he asked, and his voice trembled.

‘Yes,’ I said, disconcerted by what that tremble might herald. ‘I found Charlotte’s body.’

Annie squeaked in horror.

‘And I found her killer. He’s tied up there, waiting for some dim-witted copper to go and arrest him.’

Very, very slowly, Topaz asked, ‘Who have you tied up?’

‘You know who,’ I said. ‘Arthur. Our Arthur. Arthur Rank.’

I didn’t see his fist coming, but I sure as hell felt it when it connected with my jaw. There was a momentary sense of having been hit in the face with a brick, and then the plunge into the familiar deep well of unconsciousness.

Chapter Twelve

errors of judgement

I WOKE WITH THE TASTE
of blood in my mouth and with a suite of pains emanating from various sites on my body: arm, shoulder, jaw, neck, head. Amid this distressing orchestration I detected a new instrument. Acting as a sort of percussive accompaniment a new pain shot up and down my leg. I could see nothing when I opened my eyes, so these sensations assailed me without distraction. For a moment I couldn’t recall what had happened. Then the shape of Topaz’s fist dislodged itself from memory, and I winced at the retrieved recollection. With a nauseating rush of understanding I remembered that he had hit me after I had told him that I had found Arthur out.

They were in this together.

The weight of this realisation kept me pinned to the floor. So breath-taking was it that I was unable, for the moment, to move a muscle. But why? What was the connection between Peter Topaz and Arthur? Their faces swam before me and, in a brilliant, intuitive flourish, I overlaid one face on another in my imagination. Why had I never seen this before? Why had I never noticed that Peter Topaz and Arthur Rank were brothers?

This revelation energised my aching body sufficiently to pull me to my feet. I was in a cupboard of some sort, tall and narrow. Feeling about me, my fingers collided with broom handles and mops. The door, when I found it, wouldn’t budge. A heavy object had been pushed in front of it. I banged on it, but my bangings brought no response. I assumed I was still in the Royal Hotel, secreted somewhere on the top floor, or perhaps in the cellar. The incipient rumblings of claustrophobia began to assert themselves. The last thing I needed was that irrational, but unstoppable, freight train of fear.

As it happened, it was the phobia that freed me. Almost as soon as I had identified its presence within me, it broke free of its restraints and roared through every nerve. I flung myself against the door in a frenzy, oblivious to pain and possible injury. Again and again I threw my weight at it, until it gave way with a crash. The dresser that had been pushed against it fell forward and I burst from the cupboard into a room palely lit by the grey and feeble light of an early, sodden dawn. I didn’t recognise any of its features, beyond establishing that it was not a hotel room. I was in someone’s house.

The noise of the falling dresser brought no one running, so I assumed I was alone — an assumption that was overturned when a voice spoke from a shadowy corner.

‘I wondered who was bangin’ about in there.’

I could only see his muddy shoes and the filthy bottoms of his trousers, but there was no mistaking Mal Flint’s barely human voice. Feeling as if I had somehow slipped into one of Dante’s circles of hell, all I could think of to say was a numbly expressed, ‘Where am I?’

Flint laughed, or at any rate emitted a noise which I took to be laughter. It might equally have been a snarl.

‘You’re kiddin’, right?’

Bereft of a plan, and feeling perilously close to collapsing, I simply sat on a nearby, upright chair. The slump of my body must have convinced Flint that I was not kidding.

‘You’re in Topaz’s house,’ he said, and added, ‘and this is a real bonus. I thought I’d have to come lookin’ for you. Wasn’t expectin’ to find you here, all ready to be dealt with.’

‘Well,’ I managed to say, ‘I think I can honestly say that I wasn’t expecting to find you here either.’

There it was again: his strange, ugly, other-species laugh.

‘Me house has gone under,’ he said.

Why would he think I would be interested in his living arrangements, particularly as he was about to beat me to a pulp? I had lost the advantage of surprise here and, where Flint was concerned, that was about the only advantage one could hope for. If Flint had any lingering concerns about my capacity to overpower him, my appearance and deflated demeanour would by now have dispelled them. I spoke to him simply because there was nothing else I could do, and I was alarmed that any silence between us might encourage him to attack me.