Good Murder (5 page)

THE SECOND NIGHT OF TIBALD’S COOKING
was as smashing as the first, although the entire menu was fish and crustaceans. It was a Friday night — a beefless day. There wasn’t a full house, by any means, but the word would spread and the crowds would come.

The next day I arrived at the Drummond house at midday exactly. I’m a stickler for punctuality, it being the courtesy of kings. I mounted the steps, crossed the verandah, and knocked on the door. It was opened by Mrs Drummond.

‘What do you want?’ she asked. ‘We don’t want papists here.’

‘I’m here,’ I said patiently, aware that I was speaking to a mad person, ‘to see your daughter, Polly.’

‘She doesn’t want papists here either.’

‘I assure you, Mrs Drummond, I am not a papist.’

‘Don’t believe you. You look like a papist. You can tell them by their eyes, and you’ve got popish eyes.’

Polly emerged from the gloom behind her mother and spoke sharply to her.

‘Leave off, mum. Go inside.’

Mrs Drummond spat at my feet. The glistening globule of drool landed on the floor. I was taken aback.

‘Popery!’ she snarled, and retreated.

Arthur was right. This was a mistake, but when Polly slipped her arm through mine and I caught the waft of honey that came from her hair and skin, I rationalised that all I was doing was walking her to the station to see a circus come to town. What harm could flow from that?

We weren’t the only ones who wanted to see the train carrying the circus roll into Maryborough. There were bicycles everywhere, all headed towards the railway station in Lennox Street. We reached it just as the Sole Bros. Circus and Zoo arrived. The place was swarming with children, but there seemed to be an equal number of adults as well. What was the big deal? When we pushed our way onto the platform I saw what the attraction was, or rather I smelled it first. The circus had loaded its motley assortment of wild beasts onto the train. The tigers paced in their cages, and the pungent reek of their urine billowed over the crowd. There were two lions, four camels, a zebra, a black bear, and an elephant that didn’t look happy about its accommodation. Its chains clanked as it strained against its mean, cramped cage. There were several horses that would need to be spruced up before they took to the ring. The journey had been punishing for all the animals. People stared and pointed and squealed with laughter when the elephant drooped its trunk over its barrier and snatched a sandwich from a child who had come too close. The child bawled, terrified, but his mother rapped him on the head with her knuckle, and said it was his own silly fault and that she’d told him not to leave her side.

The circus people left their carriages and started the complicated business of unloading the animals. This would take some time. The good citizens of Maryborough stared at the circus folk with the same fascination they had lavished on the beasts. Here was a species that generated both curiosity and suspicion. All I saw was a group of absolutely filthy men and their equally squalid women. They looked like they shared the same straw as their exhibits and paid no attention at all to the crowd. There was one man — he was obviously the ringmaster, as indicated by his battered top hat — who put a crate on the ground and stood on it.

‘Ladies and gentleman,’ he said, in a voice that fell far short of Barnum and Bailey extravagance. ‘The unloading will take some time, but we will be parading the animals through the town to the showgrounds in two hours’ time. Tell your friends, and watch the spectacle pass by.’

People drifted away. I would have liked to stay to see how they managed to persuade the elephant down from its cage, but Polly wasn’t the slightest bit interested in the mundane workings of the circus. She was there to enjoy the thrill that proximity to a tiger excited. I suspect the frisson produced by proximity to circus people was a drawcard, too. Gypsy lovers with burning eyes were thin on the ground in Maryborough. One of the rouseabouts brushed past us, and the overwhelming impression left by him was not of wild sex but of excrement. Whether it was his own or the elephant’s would be mere speculation.

Polly didn’t want to go home, and from my short acquaintance with her mother I can’t say that I blamed her. We had a milkshake in King’s in Adelaide Street. I felt silly sitting there, slurping lime-flavoured milk like a teenager. Polly wanted to know about the acting profession. It was thrilling, she said (she really did use the word ‘thrilling’), to be talking to an actual actor. What was it like? Had I ever met Clark Gable? What was Claudette Colbert really like? And James Stewart? Was Cary Grant really that handsome in real life? Were the rumours about him and Randolph Scott true? She couldn’t wait to get home and put all this in her diary.

‘I put everything in my diary,’ she said.

I had to admit that I had never met any of these people. She was surprised and a bit peeved, as if I had brought her to King’s under false pretences, even though it was she who had brought me. It was as if she thought the enterprise of acting dissolved geography and disrupted the laws of time and space to the extent that a conversation with Cary Grant in Hollywood in the morning might logically precede a milkshake with her in a café in Maryborough in the afternoon.

‘You look like someone in the movies,’ she said.

‘Boris Karloff?’ I raised an eyebrow to indicate the absurdity of the comparison.

‘No,’ she said, but not before giving it serious consideration. ‘But someone.’

‘Tyrone Power,’ I said and did not raise an eyebrow but brought them together to assist her in the identification. She mustn’t have heard me because, instead of answering, she said, ‘Let’s go to the pictures tonight.’

I should have declined.

Polly didn’t want me to walk her home. She said she was visiting someone first.

‘It wouldn’t be that Smelt fellow, I suppose,’ I said, unable to disguise the pointless, irrational, and ridiculous jealousy in my voice. As if that spotted oaf represented any kind of competition, however far he had managed to get with Polly. His bumbling country advances, and his doubtless rapid, brutal coupling, learned from observation of horses and dogs, were no match for a man with the poetry of Shakespeare at his disposal.

‘Jimmy?’ she said with reassuring dismissiveness. ‘Why would I be calling on him?’

I didn’t press her further.

When I returned to the George, I found Sergeant Peter Topaz at the bar, talking animatedly with Bill Henty. Henty was the only member of my troupe I didn’t trust. As an actor he was serviceable, useful because he was willing to slip into a dress if the part required it. This was something Adrian was reluctant to do, which surprised me. I had made the mistake of expressing this surprise soon after his arrival in the company.

‘I’m queer, not mentally ill,’ he said. Perhaps he wasn’t aware of the great tradition of cross-dressing in the theatre. I didn’t discuss it further with him, but gave those roles to Bill Henty instead. Henty was blind in one eye. When you looked at him, it was clear that there was something peculiar about him. It took a moment to register that one eye was green and the other was brown. The green eye was blind, and he never explained how this came to be so. It didn’t affect him in any noticeable way, and he even drove the truck occasionally. He was no good to the army though. You need two eyes to shoot straight apparently. He was twenty-eight, with thinning, reddish blond hair and an unhealthy obsession with his body. He exercised excessively, seeming to spend every moment away from rehearsals doing press ups and sit ups, and he skipped with the ferocity of a prize fighter. We rubbed each other the wrong way.

‘You won’t run away from anything by running on the spot,’ I told him once.

‘You’re running to fat,’ was all he’d replied. This, I hasten to add, was not true. I knew the value of
mens sana in corpore sano
, but I didn’t confuse it with obsessiveness verging on insanity.

‘Is that right?’ I heard Topaz say as I entered the bar.

‘Too right,’ was Henty’s reply. I presumed they had been talking about me because Henty looked at me with just a flicker of sheepishness, as if he’d been caught out.

‘Don’t believe everything you hear, Sergeant’, I said.

‘I was just telling Sergeant Topaz here what a fine actor you are,’ Henty said as he rose from his stool. His smug satisfaction at his quick-wittedness filled me with annoyance. He left before I could counter it.

‘Sergeant Topaz,’ I said, feigning indifference to Henty’s witticism. ‘What can I do for you, or is this the pub where you drink while you’re on duty?’

‘Will,’ he said with studied patience, ‘a little pomposity goes a very long way.’ Topaz ran his fingers across his close-cropped scalp and scratched at his chest between the buttons of his shirt. ‘I’ve done you a favour, and I’d like a favour in return.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said. Sergeant Topaz had a gift for catching me on the back foot. I was suspicious of him. Why would a local plod in a small town be interested in doling out favours to an acting troupe? I couldn’t guess at his motivation, unless of course it involved Annie Hudson. That would make perfect sense. Perhaps Topaz fantasised about stepping out with the girl who could provide him with a guarantee of both oral and genital hygiene.

‘I said I’d look into the hall rental for you, and I try to keep my word. I spoke to Wrighty, and he’s keen. In fact, he’s not going to charge you a cracker, just tickets to opening night for him and the missus, and one meal a week here. I suggested that, said you’d feel bad unless you could offer him something. I hope I wasn’t speaking out of turn.’

With discounted accommodation and nothing to pay on the hall, we might break even on this part of the tour.

‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ I said, and I was happy with the way I uttered it. I think I managed to express gratitude with the hint of an apology for any earlier rudeness.

‘Call me Peter,’ he said, and held out his hand.

‘Peter.’ I shook it. ‘When can we have a look inside the hall?’

‘Monday. Two o’clock. Wrighty’ll be there to give you a key so that you can let yourselves in whenever it’s convenient. It’s no good on weekends, of course. Skating.’

Topaz thwacked his hat against his thigh and began to head for the door.

‘There is one other thing,’ he said, and turned back towards me. ‘There’s a little favour you can do for me. I’ve been asked to emcee the Comfort Fund dance next Saturday night. I hate that sort of thing, standing up in front of people. I thought maybe you could do it instead. It’d be a good way to get people to know you’re here.’

‘What’s involved?’ I asked, but I had already decided that I would accept even if it involved taking my clothes off and hanging from the rafters.

‘You know, jollying people along. It’s being advertised as a dance and jollification, so you’d be in charge of the jollification bit. There’ll be two orchestras, the Ambassadors and the Brown Out. Tell a few jokes between sets, let people know when supper is ready, that sort of thing. There might be a raffle, so you’ll run that, too. Try to keep everybody happy so that the air force blokes don’t start any fights.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it.’

The relief on his face was touching. It is astonishing that the thought of public speaking can unman even the burliest of thief-takers.

‘Say hello to Miss Hudson for me, will you,’ he said before stepping into the street.

I met Polly at the Embassy Theatre. I’d wanted to pick her up and walk with her, but she’d refused the offer, saying that it wasn’t far and that she was used to walking places on her own at night. I was standing in the street outside the theatre peering into the darkness in the direction from which I expected her to come. There were people everywhere, but there were no lights, and the Maryborough night was deep. She saw me before I saw her. A man standing beside me lit a cigarette, and the flare from his match illuminated my face briefly. She tucked her arm through mine and said, ‘Don’t you just love the movies?’

I wanted to say that my love of the movies didn’t really extend to the two pictures showing that night. I was about to endure
Cowboy Serenade
, a Gene Autry abomination, and something called
I Killed That Man
, starring the oily Ricardo Cortez.

The films were appalling, but Polly was enthralled. I wasn’t expecting any intimate explorations under the cover of darkness, but if I had been I would have been disappointed. Polly was engrossed in what was happening on screen. At interval someone called Happy Jack Clark attempted to entertain the full house with tired music-hall jokes. In Maryborough, the movies meant a big night out, and in keeping with the grandeur of the occasion live entertainment and a raffle were
de rigueur
. This kind of evening seemed to be what most people in this town understood by theatre. The pool of available local talent was neither wide nor deep, as evidenced by Happy Jack Clark’s performance. I thought, as he plodded through his exhausted repertoire, that if I ever ended up doing that for a living, I would appreciate it if somebody shot me. After a few endless minutes he introduced the manager of the theatre, a man named Hennessy. Polly whispered to me, ‘He’s not married to the woman he lives with.’

‘How shocking,’ I said, simply because I thought that this was the reaction Polly was looking for. Hennessy was greeted with hoots and cheers, and bizarrely began throwing packets of biscuits into the audience. People leapt from their seats and squealed with delight when they grabbed one, no doubt crushing the contents into crumbs in the process. He then drew the winning ticket for that night’s raffle, and a severe-looking woman stepped up on stage to claim her prize.