Good Murder (33 page)

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked, and tried to inject something like menace into my voice.

‘I told ya, me house went under.’

‘And has Topaz offered you his spare room?’

He snorted.

‘You’re a fucking moron,’ he said, obviously unfamiliar with facetiousness as a conversational tool. ‘I’ve got a few things to settle with Topaz.’

‘What sort of things?’

My dismay was subsiding, and as I became more comfortable with my position I began to consider possible ways out of it. Just within reach, on a table, sat a large, heavy glass bowl. Its decorative qualities were less important to me than its potential as a missile.

‘None of your fuckin’ business,’ he said.

‘Is he expecting you?’

‘Nuh. It’s a surprise.’

He stood up suddenly. His face bore the marks of Arthur’s punishing torture three days earlier, and his shirt, with three buttons missing, exposed the narrow scab that had formed over the shallow slash down his sternum. There wasn’t time to ponder choices. If I’d thought about what I was going to do, I wouldn’t have done it — and after I’d done it, I wished I hadn’t. I grabbed the bowl and threw it at Flint, the way one might throw a pie in a slapstick fight. The idea was to knock him to the ground. The idea was not for him to catch it. Which is what he did. He was a little surprised to find himself holding an ornament, but so confident was he of his ability to dispatch me bare-handed that he simply tossed it aside. It thudded against the wall, but did not shatter. There he was before me, poised for violence with an ursine heaviness and assurance.

‘I want you to piss your pants,’ he said.

‘Now that,’ said a voice behind him, ‘is something you’ll have to pay to see,’ and Adrian Baden came into the room. Flint turned sideways to see who had interrupted his pleasure.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ he grunted.

Adrian put one hand on his hip and described Flint’s silhouette in the air with the index finger of the other one.

‘Have you sucked my cock?’ he asked.

Flint’s reaction to this extraordinary question was itself extraordinary. He was flummoxed by it and uttered a strangled ‘Whaaaa…?’

Adrian, with astonishing courage, sashayed to within a few inches of Flint.

‘You look familiar,’ he said, ‘but all you brutes look the same in the dark.’

The delicate touch of Adrian’s finger on Flint’s bare chest nailed him to the spot more securely than if he’d been skewered with a lance. This gave Adrian plenty of time to guide his knee into Flint’s groin with all the force he could muster. Flint doubled over and I winced involuntarily. The blow was so solid that Flint’s testicles may well have been driven back up inside his body.

‘The fear of the queer,’ Adrian said, ‘is a weapon mightier than the sword. Help me lug the guts into the cupboard.’

‘I got out of there,’ I said. ‘He will, too.’

Flint was in no position to resist as Adrian tied his hands behind his back and tied them in turn to his ankles. We pushed and pulled him into the cupboard, and put the dresser back in front of it.

‘Now,’ I said, ‘what are you doing here and what is going on?’

‘I’m supposed to be guarding you, but Peter’s got an outside dunny and I just had to go. You weren’t supposed to escape. Peter is not going to be happy.’

‘You seem very pally with him all of a sudden.’

‘I’ve always been pally with him.’

‘My God, Adrian, do you have any idea what’s happening here?’

He was suddenly serious.

‘Will, the only person who’s got no idea what’s going on is you.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘So where’s Topaz right now, and why do you think he wanted me out of the way?’

‘He’s gone to make sure Arthur is all right, and he wanted you out of the way, because when you’re not out of the way, you’re in the way.’

‘He’s gone to free Arthur? Oh, God. And how did I get here?’

‘Annie drove Peter and me, and we dragged you inside. I think I might have banged your leg on something. Sorry.’

‘Where’s Annie now?’

‘At the Royal, I suppose. Why?’

I began to walk about the room in a cliché of distraction.

‘We have to stop them,’ I said.

‘Who? The Japanese? Who are you talking about?’

Adrian’s flippancy angered me.

‘We have to stop Topaz and Arthur.’

‘Stop them from doing what, Will? You’re not making any sense.’ He chopped the air with his hand. ‘At all!’

‘Topaz and Arthur are brothers.’

His jaw dropped, as well it might have.

‘No!’ he said, with breathy disbelief.

‘Oh, yes,’ I said, in a voice that conveyed my certainty on this point. ‘They’re brothers all right, and they’re in this together.’

‘You’ve lost me. In what?’

‘Arthur and Topaz are responsible for the murders that I’ve been accused of.’

I said this slowly, savouring, in a strange, detached way, the drama of the moment.

Adrian withdrew a few steps from me and narrowed his eyes.

‘You are a lunatic,’ he said.

‘Adrian, I was there when Arthur killed Charlotte Witherburn last night. I was there. There’s a lot you don’t know about him.’

‘I know he hasn’t got a brother.’

‘He hasn’t got two balls either. He lost more than his arm in that accident.’

‘So what? I know that. Everyone knows that. It was one of the first things he told us.’

This took the wind out of my sails, and I was inexplicably wounded by it. I felt cheated of a confidence. My whole relationship with Arthur had been built on a lie. I could see that now. Why should this small revelation about Arthur’s injury niggle so much? I think it was because I realised that I had not been the first person with whom Arthur had shared his little secret. I had been the last.

‘You have to suspend everything you think you know about both Arthur and Peter Topaz. I can’t tell you why they are doing these terrible things. I don’t even know whether Peter is covering for Arthur, or whether he’s actively involved, but believe me Adrian, they’re both in it. We don’t have time to stand here debating the facts. If Topaz has freed Arthur, they’re going to come looking for me and anyone else who might now know the truth.’

I could tell from the blank look on Adrian’s face that he had not believed a word I had said. In one of those frightening flashes of intuition that I had been experiencing lately, it occurred to me that the blankness of his features might not be a measure of his disbelief, but might be indicative of something far more sinister — prior knowledge. Was he involved in this, too? My God, who else? The whole troupe?

Adrian suddenly threw his hands in the air and said, ‘All right. That’s it. I have now officially had enough. Peter asked me to guard you to keep you out of trouble. Fine. I failed. I kneed some Neanderthal in the balls. That was fun. Now you’re standing there saying crazy things and, frankly, Will, I’ve done my bit and I’ve lost interest. I am very sorry that you have become mentally ill, but I’m going now, and if you try to stop me you’ll be adding crushed testicles to your injury list.’

He left the room, and I made no attempt to detain him. I felt that I had entered a bizarre dream world where I alone was innocent of unspeakable crimes, and where everyone I knew was engaged in a conspiracy to pin those crimes on me.

Mal Flint had recovered sufficiently to have begun shouting abuse from the cupboard, and he made ineffectual thumps against the door. I had no doubt that he would get out eventually, and I did not want to be there when he did. I didn’t linger to explore Topaz’s house, although I was sure that I would have found a photograph or some other piece of evidence to support my hunch about his relationship to Arthur. I might also have found something to link the accident that had disfigured Arthur to the Drummond family. I could not begin to imagine what this link might be, or why it would prompt such brutal vengeance, but I knew that the answers lay in Arthur’s and Topaz’s shared past.

It had stopped raining and the wind had died completely. The street had an exhausted appearance, as if it were cowering after a flogging. I looked back at Topaz’s house. It was not raised on disguised stilts like its neighbours, but sat on low stumps. Only a few steps led to the verandah. He was not interested in gardening. There were a few trees — a pawpaw and a bopple nut among them — and a few scruffy, battered shrubs. His red, iron roof, which had survived unscathed, could have done with a coat of paint.

I didn’t know what part of Maryborough I was in. The disarray in the street would have made even the familiar look unfamiliar, but I was sure that I had not been in this street before. A few houses down, a boy of about ten came out to inspect the damage. There was no one else around, and I was glad of it — I could find out where I was, without arousing suspicion. He whistled his surprise at my appearance.

‘What happened to you?’ he asked.

‘The storm,’ I said. ‘I was out helping.’

He seemed satisfied with that.

‘I seem to have got lost. Which way is town?’

He didn’t seem to think the question was in any way unusual. Perhaps he thought that people could be blown off course, like birds.

‘This is Ariadne Street,’ he said. ‘You go down that way to Walker Street, turn left, and just keep walking.’

I thanked him and set off. It was a long walk, and more and more people along the way had begun to emerge to see what the storm had done to their property and their neighbours’ properties. Here and there pieces of iron swung like loose teeth, or were peeled back as if the wind’s fingers had picked at them. A few houses sat shocked and exposed, their roofs completely gone. In one front yard a pawpaw tree lay uprooted, while nearby a straggly rose bush had maintained its grip on the earth. Nature’s awful logic did not extend to an equitable meting-out of destruction.

My appearance, my cuts, bruises, and filthy clothes, made a kind of sense among the scattered wreckage. I was no more remarkable than any other evidence of the wild and ruinous night. Indeed, men returning from the sandbagging of the Mary River looked worse than I did. They were muddied and exhausted, and took no interest in me at all.

I was in a terrible quandary. The person I most needed to talk to — Detective Sergeant Conroy — was also the person least likely to listen. My escape would have been discovered by now, and the entire Maryborough police force, most of whom would have been up all night, would be on full, if bleary, alert. I couldn’t join the troupe at the Royal. The police would be watching for me there. I thought about Wright’s Hall. Today was a Tuesday, so there would be no children there roller-skating. Given all that had happened since Charlotte’s fund-raiser yesterday — my God, was it really only yesterday? — I didn’t suppose that the troupe would go there for a rehearsal. They would have been questioned by now, though, and someone, Bill Henty probably, would have mentioned Wright’s Hall as a possible bolthole for me. I decided that my need for dry clothes was greater than my need for caution, and so I decided to risk going to the George Hotel. As well, I wanted a place in which to assess the damage done to my body. The uninterrupted walk towards the town centre had provided each of my hurts with the luxury of expressing itself freely. The worst of these was now my arm. The deep, dull ache that emanated from it indicated that it would have to be reset. I would have to endure another lecture from the matron about the shortage of plaster.

When I reached Queen’s Park it was obvious that the waters of the Mary River had receded quickly. Clearly, this had not been a major flood, but more like the river heaving its weight on to dry land to remind the people of Maryborough that if they thought the Japanese army was the most dangerous force around, they’d better think again. The smell of river mud hung in the air so thickly that it was as if each nostril had been plugged with it.

The George Hotel had not been swept away, but the river eddied about it still. It could be entered, though, as the water was now at knee level. There were no police that I could see, and I convinced myself that they would have taken one look at this partly submerged hotel and crossed it off their list of possible refuges. I went in through the front door, which had been pushed open by the force of the flood. It is a peculiar and disturbing sensation to walk into a flooded room. It creates an unsettling simmer of impotent outrage. Why should the river wish to poke about in every corner of every room and leave its putrid excreta behind it when it departs?

All the furniture in the bar and dining room had been overturned, and lay crowded against the walls. There was a strange and dismal silence, unrelieved by even a single drip. So much water, and not a sound. This, I thought, is what happens when a building drowns.

Before I could slip any further into the metaphysics of a flood, a crash of metal on metal in the kitchen brought me back to earth. There was someone in there. Cautiously, I made my way towards the door. The last time I had done this I had been covered in yabby bisque, with a roomful of people laughing at my back. Then I had been mortified. Now I was afraid. I listened for a moment, hoping to determine how many people were in there. There were further scrapings of metal and finally a voice, obviously speaking to itself, said, ‘What a bloody mess.’ It was Tibald Canty, come to inspect his precious kitchen. I pushed open the door in relief, forgetting in my haste that I had no reason to trust any of my troupe.