‘You’ve got a nerve, coming here.’
She called this out from the other side of the dining room, and the vitriol that dripped from every syllable ensured that the five previously uninterested occupants were now very interested indeed. Having no wish to become part of a public spectacle yet again, I hurried — an unkind observer might have said scurried — across the room and brushed past Annie into the foyer. Deserted a few moments ago, there were now several people there — wives attended by their air force officer husbands. Annie was not above launching into a tirade against me whether there were people about or not, so it was imperative that I ignore Topaz’s instruction and leave the Royal, at least temporarily. Annie was at my shoulder before I could determine which exit to take.
‘Peter should have whacked you a lot harder last night,’ she said.
I looked at her and noted that a sneer disfigured her Greer Garson face unpleasantly.
‘You shouldn’t do that to your face,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t do you any favours.’
The slap of her palm against my cheek was sharp. The sound rang out in the foyer with the clarity of a gunshot, and all eyes turned to us. It wasn’t particularly painful, but blood rushed to my face so furiously that I thought it might break through the pores of my skin. I suppressed a powerful impulse to strike her back, which is why the second slap took me completely unawares. I should have known that it was not in Annie’s nature to stop at one.
Because I was standing close to the staircase it provided me with the most convenient egress from this ghastly slap-dance. I mounted them quickly. To my dismay, Annie followed. On the first floor I headed down a corridor, with Annie in hot pursuit. I thought I needed to bring this to an end, so I stopped abruptly and faced her.
‘Don’t hit me again,’ I said firmly. ‘I’m a little bit sick of people hitting me.’
‘Not as sick as Arthur is,’ she said.
That was when I lost my temper.
‘Arthur! Arthur! Arthur! I’m sorry. I’m sorry he’s hurt. I’m sorry I hit him. But what was I supposed to do? It looked like no one was helping me. I was going to go to jail for life for crimes I didn’t commit, and the only person interested in doing something about it was me. And don’t tell me your boyfriend was on my side. I was irrelevant. He wanted to solve the case for his own benefit. The fact that I would be released was nothing more than an unfortunate consequence of him winning his precious battle with Conroy.’
‘You ungrateful prick!’ Annie dragged these words up from the pit of her stomach and threw them at me like darts.
‘There’s no point discussing this with you any further,’ I said. ‘Arthur was in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ I don’t know why, but I added for good measure, ‘Unless, of course, he wasn’t.’
It wasn’t until I had spoken these words that it occurred to me that Joe’s identification of Augie Kelly did not let Arthur completely off the hook. With Annie before me, her face mobile with disgust, it was impossible to consider a coalition between Augie and Arthur clearly. I had to get away.
At the end of the corridor a door opened onto a fire-escape, and I pushed through it without further conversation. Annie followed, obviously believing that although she had sunk her fangs into my conscience, she had not yet given it a good-enough shake. She was right. My conscience was well defended by my firm belief in the rightness of all that I had done, and I wanted to explore the comforting possibility that Arthur was not quite the victim my colleagues wanted him to be.
The exterior stairs led into an untidy, unpaved parking area at the rear of the Royal. There were a couple of military vehicles there, a few bicycles tossed carelessly against a wall, and the Power Players’ truck. I headed for it, simply because it was familiar. With Annie yapping at my heels the truck’s cabin seemed like the closest place of refuge. I wasn’t paying particular attention to the sound of her footsteps, so I didn’t notice that they had stopped halfway across the parking area. I reached up to open the truck’s passenger door.
‘Will?’
The sound of Annie’s voice made me freeze. It was stretched taut with fear, and quivered with a panic that passed into me with electric suddenness. I turned and saw that Augie Kelly was holding Annie, one arm around her throat, his free hand clutching a hank of her hair.
‘I’ll break her neck,’ he said calmly, and gave Annie’s hair a little tug to indicate the ease with which this might be accomplished.
‘Why would you do that?’ I asked.
‘Get in the truck,’ he said, and began moving towards me, pushing Annie ahead of him. The look of unalloyed terror on her face made further discussion impossible.
‘The driver’s seat,’ Augie said.
I climbed up, and Augie shoved Annie in at the passenger door and followed rapidly. There was only a moment when he didn’t have both hands on her, but neither Annie nor I was able to take advantage of it. In a most peculiar and awkward way, he placed both hands around her throat and squeezed so that she choked. He then relaxed his grip. The ropey muscles on his hairy forearms jumped.
‘Teddington,’ he said. ‘We’re going to Teddington.’
‘Teddington Weir? Why?’
‘Because,’ he said tightly, and pressed his fingers into Annie’s neck, ‘I want to.’
The Power Players’ Bedford truck was not unobtrusive, and on any normal day its progress through Maryborough would have drawn stares. Today, in the aftermath of the storm, there were more vehicles than usual on the roads as the army and air force pitched in to help with the clean-up. We drove all the way to Tinana without exciting a single glance. When I turned on to the Teddington Road, Augie seemed to relax. He took his hands from around Annie’s throat and put one arm around her shoulders instead.
‘What’s all this about, Augie?’ I asked.
‘Gratitude. It’s all about gratitude.’
With her throat freed from immediate danger, Annie began to regain her customary
savoir combattre
, if there is such a thing. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her turn her head to face Augie.
‘How dare you touch me,’ she said. ‘Peter will hear about this.’
The slightly sulky tone Annie was prone to adopt when arguing was not affected by her proximity to a multiple murderer. Topaz must not have told her about Augie. That would be just like him — a policeman to his boot-heels. He wouldn’t identify his suspect until he had him charged and jailed. He would consider this a virtue. Annie might not agree with him at this point. Telling me about Augie was a special case, and I suppose it rankled with him that he had been obliged to do so.
‘Peter can go fuck himself,’ Augie said, and withdrew his arm. ‘And if you say another word I’ll rearrange your face so that you look like Judith Anderson.’
He laughed at his joke. In other circumstances I might have laughed, too. Annie stared straight ahead, and a slight tremble in her fingers indicated that she knew suddenly that Augie Kelly was a dangerous man. I was afraid to say anything. Augie was so tense I could smell him. The wrong word might trip some wire in his head and unleash the dogs of his psychopathy.
There were no vehicles and no bicycles at Teddington Weir. I turned the engine off, and we sat in silence for a moment. Augie looked around him and, when he was satisfied that there was no one else about, he said, ‘Get out of the truck.’ As he did so, once again he closed his large hands around Annie’s throat. She was now beyond resistance, and passively accepted this necklace of flesh and bone.
Augie pulled Annie down from the passenger seat so roughly that I suspected he no longer had a sense of her as a person. She had become, for him, as insensate as a rag doll or a burlap sack of meat. Her neck was red from where his fingers had gripped her. She choked and bent double when he let her go.
‘There’s no need to hurt Annie,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said, ‘There’s no need at all.’
He turned to her and shoved her to the ground.
‘No
need
at all,’ and he stressed the ‘need’ with the subtlety of a pantomime dame. Annie’s face twisted in pain as her elbows took the brunt of her fall. I raised my one hand in a mollifying gesture, and felt keenly our species’ preference for two in such situations.
‘I don’t understand, Augie. I don’t understand any of this.’
I thought if I was sufficiently insistent about my incomprehension, Augie might take some pleasure in setting me right. ‘I am completely bewildered,’ I added.
‘You fucked up last night. You shouldn’t have done that to Arthur. He’s done nothing to you.’
Without thinking, I said, ‘How do you know about Arthur?’ It sounded horribly like I was goading him, but it did not agitate him.
‘I was there. I saw you,’ he said simply.
I remembered the movement of a deeper shadow within the general shadows at Witherburn, an impression that I had dismissed as fancy.
‘Were you,’ I said matter-of-factly, with no hint of it being a question.
‘She had to be punished,’ he said. ‘I knew you’d want that. You got the blame for killing her husband. She shouldn’t have done that.’
‘She shouldn’t have blamed me, or shouldn’t have killed her husband? What do you mean?’
He furrowed his brow and shook his head, as though he thought I was being deliberately obtuse.
‘She didn’t kill him. I did,’ he said. ‘You know that. He embarrassed you in front of all those people. He deserved to die. But she should have left his body alone.’
He came close to me and leaned towards my ear. I wanted to shrink from him, but I was afraid to upset him. He whispered, ‘She didn’t love you, Will. She might have let you fuck her down there in the trees, but she didn’t love you.’
While he was saying this, my eyes were locked on Annie’s. If she was afraid, it was no longer showing in her face. She was gathering her forces, regrouping in order to give Augie a run for his money. I didn’t like her chances. But there was something in her eyes that disturbed me. From her point of view it must have looked almost as if Augie and I were embracing. His words, ‘I knew you’d want that’ and ‘You know that’, struck me now as they must have struck her when she heard them. Her mouth moved slightly. Augie could not have seen this, but he must have glimpsed peripherally that Annie’s face was not immobile, and he swung round on her.
‘Get up!’ he said savagely.
Annie got to her feet and assumed a pose that left no doubt that this time Augie would meet resistance if he attempted to grab her. The contest was as uneven as that between a wren and a hawk. Augie laughed, and Annie flew at him. This small miscalculation — his assumption that Annie would attempt defence rather than offence — allowed her to reach his face. She grabbed his ears and brought his face down to meet her rising knee. The ensuing contact wasn’t particularly solid, and Augie was more stunned at having been caught off-balance than by the blow. He fell into her, and the two of them began to grapple on the ground. In only a few seconds Annie would be overpowered. I hurried round to the back of the truck and clambered in. There, among the props and costumes of our craft, I found a solid, wooden, stage sword, painted silver to simulate metal. When I jumped down from the truck I saw that Augie had Annie pinned to the ground, her arms outstretched, with him sitting astraddle her, circling each of her wrists with his large, violent hands. He was breathing heavily and staring at her. Fear had reasserted itself in her features.
The prop sword was sufficiently heavy to make wielding it with one hand difficult. I chose instead to drive its blunt point into Augie’s kidneys. He let out a yowl of pain, released Annie’s hands, and fell sideways. Annie was now livid with indignation, and she wriggled out from under him, leapt to her feet, and began kicking him ineffectually in the buttocks. She bent down, pulled off one of his heavy shoes, and began striking him about the head with it. He tolerated this only briefly before rolling away from her and standing up, uttering deep, guttural obscenities as he did so. Neither Annie nor I moved and, as Augie’s voice spent itself, there settled between us a strange, ponderous silence into which only birdsong intruded. The sword in my right hand felt suddenly ridiculous, and the shoe which Annie held seemed incongruous and almost comic. I hoped that my action had dispelled any misconceptions Annie might have been forming about my relationship with Augie Kelly.
Augie spoke while looking directly at me.
‘This is a fine mess, and after all I’ve done for you.’
Implicit in the injured tone of his voice was the notion that I knew what he meant when he spoke of all that he had done for me. This did not seem like the right time to go exploring the surreal and blasted landscape of his mind, so I let his statement go unchallenged. Instead I asked a more practical question.
‘Why have you brought us here?’
‘It’s romantic,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you think it was romantic when you fucked Charlotte Witherburn down there?’
‘Were you watching us, Augie?’ I kept my voice calm.
‘I wasn’t watching you. I was watching over you.’
‘My God,’ Annie said. ‘You killed all those people. It was you.’ She dropped Augie’s shoe, as if this realisation had paralysed her muscles.
‘They chose to die. They all hurt Will. We needed to punish them.’
Annie looked at me, her face rigid with shock.