Good Murder (25 page)

‘I’ll check,’ I said and withdrew to the house. There was no sign of Joe.

When I returned to the yard, Arthur had barely moved. I stood again beside him and, for want of a better idea, began calling into the bush.

‘Joe! Joe Drummond! Joe Drummond!’

‘You’re wasting your breath,’ Arthur said. ‘He’s dead, and dead people have poor hearing.’

‘We should look for him,’ I said, hoping that Arthur would dissuade me from doing so. I didn’t want to move any closer to whoever was lurking in the scrub.

‘Yes,’ he said, and as soon as he’d said it he became resolute. ‘We should stick together. If this prick can take Joe by surprise and overpower him, I don’t like either of our chances on our own. We’ve only got two useful arms between us if we have to defend ourselves.’

We pushed our way through a prickly tangle of under-storey, and were relieved to discover that it thinned a short way in. The air was still, and the hum of insects was the only insistent sound. Occasionally a bird called, and eucalypt leaves clattered together high above us. At any other time this would have seemed a pleasant place. Now, our observations warped by fear, its silence and the sense that it went on forever made it seem sinister and alive with the possibility of sudden and horrifying violence. I began to feel again that profound disturbance of equilibrium I had felt at Teddington Weir.

‘We should leave here,’ I said.

‘There!’ said Arthur, and pointed ahead and to our right. I saw what had caught his eye, or thought I did. There was an impression of a figure moving quickly through the trees. It was no more than a glimpse, followed by the unmistakeable crack of feet treading on dry twigs. Arthur began running towards the place where the figure had been. With every fibre of my being telling me to stay where I was, it took a considerable effort of will to take off after him. I could see Arthur well ahead, barrelling carelessly forward. He was fast. I fancied, too, that through the rattle of my breathing and the combined racket of our pursuit I could hear the fleeing footfalls of the figure we were chasing. I was gaining on Arthur when he tripped suddenly and fell heavily to the left. With no arm to put out to break his fall, he crashed sickeningly to the ground. I was upon him in seconds. He was lying with his face turned awkwardly, one cheek imbedded in the dirt. He was unconscious, and my first thought was that his neck had been broken.

I was aware of the sound of running up ahead; but as quickly as I noted it, it stopped. Perhaps the sound of Arthur falling had just reached him, and perhaps the silence that followed told him that he was no longer being pursued. Perhaps, I thought, with a dread that numbed me, perhaps he would now come back. With one hand on the back of Arthur’s neck, as if my touch were enough to heal him, I scanned the trees around us. A snapping twig to my right brought my eyes round quickly to that point. Another to my left jerked my eyes there. He couldn’t be in two places at once. My common sense told me this, but I had never before journeyed this far into the wilderness of fear, and I was beyond rational thought. With awful clarity I remembered that Fred Drummond had said ‘they’. He knew who ‘they’ were.

As I was assimilating the hideous possibility of a posse of psychopaths falling upon us, a heavy crunch of leaves behind me and a shadow that swallowed us with the swift and callous certainty of a predator poised for the kill almost stopped my heart completely. Arthur stirred under my hands. He was not dead after all, although I was now certain he soon would be. I don’t know why the realisation that I was about to die released a great calm within me. Perhaps I had exhausted my body’s reserves of adrenalin. Arthur opened his eyes and looked over my shoulder. He would see my murderer — and his — in the few remaining seconds of his life. I simply waited for the blow to be struck, almost impatiently.

‘Who killed my fucking dogs?’

This question, uttered in Mal Flint’s unmistakably plebeian tones, was so bizarre in the context of impending death that it had an hallucinatory quality. It made me think that somehow I had not felt that final blow, but had slipped beyond the veil painlessly and had entered a purgatory where expiation involved eternal conversation with Mal Flint. The sensation was fleeting. Flint put his foot in the small of my back and sent me sprawling across Arthur’s semi-conscious body. I felt the wound in my shoulder open and the sticky flow of blood soaking into my shirt.

‘Who killed my fucking dogs?’ he repeated, with a snarl of which his fucking dogs would have been proud.

I turned my head and saw his trouser bottoms and filthy work boots. It was a struggle to get to my feet, having the use of only one arm. (How did Arthur get through life so permanently discommoded?) Arthur had lapsed back into unconsciousness, so I was left to confront Flint alone. When I faced him he was standing with his arms hanging by his sides with the pendulous muscularity of his obviously recent simian ancestors. He was breathing noisily through his mouth, his already ugly features contorted so severely that he was more gargoyle than man.

‘It wasn’t me,’ I said, but I knew I sounded defensive, frightened, cornered and, frankly, guilty. The tensing of his body and a further deterioration in his looks indicated that I had not won his confidence. I took a few steps backwards. He took a few steps forward. I thought he would simply stomp on Arthur’s body, but he lifted his feet and stepped over him without taking his eyes from my face. I had never been looked at before with such unalloyed hatred. Mal Flint was a man with whom negotiation would not be possible. He had the crude, inflexible psychology of a wild animal.

‘We didn’t kill your dogs.’ It was only at this point that I noticed the iron bar clutched in his right hand. He began to raise it slowly, and his features assumed the feverish concentration of a beast energised by the inevitable and unstoppable juggernaut that is instinct. I was frozen in fascination. I noticed tiny things: the spittle that had gathered in small, frothy mounds at the corners of his mouth; the fact that his left eye seemed to be set slightly lower in his face than his right eye; and the small and astonishing vanity of eyebrows that had been clipped to restrain their unruliness. He cocked his head slightly, worried that my failure to move might be a strategy rather than a physiological impossibility. When his arm reached the top of its arc, I think I may even have smiled.

What happened next remains a blur of movement and sound. I was watching Flint’s face, so Arthur’s initial action registered only peripherally. Using his legs with great force and dexterity, he seemed at once to collapse one of Flint’s legs at the knee joint while kicking the other sideways and off the ground. Flint had no time to arrest his fall, and he fell with the graceless, bovine drop of a toppled buffalo. His head struck the ground with the sickening thump of a plummeting watermelon, and he did not stir.

‘Help me get up,’ Arthur said.

I was staring at Flint’s prone form, and Arthur had to repeat the request.

‘I just saved your life. The least you could do is help me stand up.’

Brought back suddenly from the calm acceptance of my impending death, my body reacted in the unfortunate way it tends to when greatly stressed. I threw up. Arthur waited patiently for me to finish and then, sweating and weak, I assisted him to his feet.

‘I thought you were dead,’ I said.

‘I saw Flint when I came to. I thought it might be better to play possum.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘My head hurts like hell and so does my shoulder, but I’m not dead, so I’m ahead. You know, Will, we’re in the middle of a big, big mess.’

Flint moaned and his leg twitched.

‘At least I didn’t kill him,’ Arthur said. ‘He’s going to be pretty pissed off when he comes round.’

‘We have to talk to him,’ I said. ‘Find out what he knows. Convince him that we didn’t kill his dogs.’

Arthur gave me a look that was half pitying and half incredulous.

‘Do you seriously think that this creature, half man, half ape, is going to sit down with you and have a little chat?’

‘Short of shutting him up permanently, we have to try something.’

Arthur indicated Flint’s body dismissively and said, ‘All right, but we need to get him back to the house and tie him down. I’m not going to attempt any discussion unless he is immobilised.’

I nodded. I was uncertain about the legality of tying someone up, but this was no time to be restrained by such niceties. Flint uttered a small, helpless groan of semi-conscious protest as we each took a leg and began to haul him towards his house. The going was awkward. Because each of us had only his right arm with which to manoeuvre Flint’s body, one of us had to face him and the other have his back to him as we dragged him, stumbling as we went. There was nothing we could do to protect Flint’s head from the uneven ground over which we were pulling him. Occasionally it bounced with alarming vigour over a rock or a tree root.

‘Fortunately,’ Arthur said, ‘there’s not much brain to damage.’

I was incapable, at the time, of considering all the consequences of that morning’s occurrences. Thoughts and feelings flew through my mind with the disordered and numbing violence of a blizzard. It was as much as I could do to help Arthur truss Flint securely to the heavy stove in his kitchen. There were no chairs. His head lolled forward onto his chest, revealing that his pate was thinning at the crown. This small exposure lent him a kind of humanity which the rest of him resisted. We stood looking down at him, hideously conscious of the Babel of Beelzebub’s minions behind us.

‘We are now in shit right up to our eyeballs,’ Arthur said. ‘This arsehole is not going to want to cooperate. Christ, it will be like trying to reason with a wounded boar.’

‘Well, we can’t just let him go. Not now. And we can’t kill him.’

With stunning blandness, Arthur asked, ‘Why not?’

‘I believe it’s against the law,’ I said.

‘I hope you’re not expecting that same law to protect you from him.’

He gave Flint a vicious little nudge with his boot.

With a rush of moral rectitude I suggested that just at the moment it was Flint who needed protection from us, not the other way around. I didn’t underestimate the danger he represented, but I had become slightly discombobulated by the topsy-turvy nature of the moral universe I seemed to have been dragged into. Charlotte and Arthur were two people whose characters I thought I understood, and both of them, within twenty-four hours of each other, had advocated the worst of crimes as a solution to an inconvenient problem. And they had both done so with unsettling ease. I couldn’t blame the war for this. Whatever individual and collective suspensions of civilised behaviour were taking place in the Solomon Islands or at Stalingrad, they surely didn’t apply here in Maryborough, where war was felt most profoundly in the unavailability of ice-cream and butter.

Flint began to come round. He gurgled, and lifted his head and shook it from side to side. He could not, initially, understand why he was unable to move his arms or legs. He flailed pointlessly because he couldn’t budge the heavy stove, or loosen the knots Arthur had expertly, if monodextrously, tied. His breath was pushed noisily out through clenched, discoloured teeth, and sounded like air escaping from a small, punctured bellows. When he had gained sufficient consciousness to utter the word, ‘Cunts!’, Arthur took a handful of his greasy hair, yanked his head back, and told him calmly that, as he had only a few more minutes to live, he might want his last words to be a little more substantial. I was mesmerised by a quality in Arthur’s voice that I had never heard before. There was no hint of deference or sympathy. It was calm and steely, and the words slid from his palate with the unctuous certainty of the practised sadist. He was playing the role of his life. Flint, however, did not betray any fear. He looked furious and ill. I don’t see how he could have been anything other than severely concussed given the number of heavy knocks his head had sustained. Flint’s eyes followed Arthur groggily as he picked up a brutal-looking knife from a filthy sill.

‘Is this what you use to butcher the pigs?’

Without waiting for a reply, Arthur moved to the carcass suspended over the bath. With a deft and sure stroke he opened its belly with the knife. The viscera tumbled forth, slick, obscene, and somehow animated in their coiling, glistening release.

‘It’s sharp,’ Arthur said.

Flint looked from Arthur to me, and I didn’t miss the inchoate presence now of fear in his eyes. Arthur came across to where Flint sat propped and restrained. He brought the knife, foul with pig’s blood, up to Flint’s throat.

‘This is what it feel likes to die,’ he said, and drew the knife savagely across Flint’s throat. I let out a cry of disbelief, and Arthur stepped back to admire the effect. For a moment that seemed an eternity, both Flint and I thought that his throat had been cut — but Arthur had used the blunt, back of the knife, not its edge. Arthur laughed.

‘Whoops,’ he said. ‘Wrong side. I’ll have to try that again.’

Flint uttered an involuntary whimper, and the spreading patch at his groin indicated that he had lost control of his bladder. I began to feel sorry for him. Arthur was merciless in his harrying. He leaned down again, but this time he slashed the buttons from Flint’s shirt and gingerly pushed the sides apart to expose his unexpectedly white, hairless chest and belly. He pushed the point of the knife into the soft V of the throat, and drew blood. He then drew the knife down over the sternum, and didn’t stop until he reached the belt of Flint’s trousers. He produced a thin line of blood as he went. At the belt he scratched a line from hip bone to hip bone so that an inverted, red T formed on Flint’s torso.