The Serpent's Sting (22 page)

‘No,' I said. ‘I won't help you. I'll tell you what to do, but I won't help you do it.'

I knew even as I said this that this was craven sophistry, and that my moral responsibility wasn't lessened or excused by a squeamish desire not to be present when my plan was put into action. Geraldine saw this immediately.

‘I killed this man accidentally and in self-defence. He looks sweet sitting there, doesn't he? Like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. If you heard the things that came out of that mouth, and if you knew what he tried to do to me, you wouldn't be quite so reluctant to help us. That man is a monster, Will.'

‘What kind of things came out of his mouth?' I asked.

Mrs Ferrell interjected. ‘I heard what he said. I wouldn't expect Geraldine to repeat his words. I, however, am happy to. He was screaming at the top of his voice. He said Eddie Leonski had the right idea about how to treat women. If they knocked you back, you knocked them around, and maybe they'd learn who wore the pants.'

‘I begged him to stop, Will. I asked him to think of his mother.'

Mrs Ferrell laughed. ‘That was a good one, wasn't it? You know what he said? He said his mother was an ugly old cunt and he'd slapped her into line more than once. That's your sweet little soldier boy. What kind of person uses that kind of language about his own mother, let alone hits her?'

‘I won't hang for removing a creature like this from the world,' Geraldine said. ‘I won't.'

Even if all of this was true, civilised society had discarded
lex talionis
— an eye for an eye — because it was a recipe for untrammelled personal revenge. Nevertheless, this version of Private Dervian's life did make it easier for me to give Geraldine a solution to her dilemma.

‘I'll tell you what to do,' I said, ‘and maybe you'll be able to manage it without me.'

‘I'm listening,' Mrs Ferrell said.

‘All right. He has no head injuries. He doesn't have a mark on him. I can't even see where you said his scalp bled.'

‘I'm not sure if it actually bled. Maybe it didn't, after all.'

‘You should take his body to the railway track at Royal Park station. Lie it on the tracks well away from the platform, so that the train has time to pick up speed and not enough time to stop when the driver spots him. The train will do enough damage to the body to make any sort of immediate diagnosis of a cause of death hard to establish. The police will think he was either drunk or suicidal, or both. They won't find any connection to this house or to you. Have you searched his pockets to make sure there's nothing there, like a scrap of paper with this address on it, or your name? Or a sketch?'

‘Would you do that, Will?' Geraldine asked. ‘I couldn't bear to touch him now.'

‘No,' I said, as if this small refusal somehow helped me regain lost ground. Mrs Ferrell, with a huff of impatience, ran her hands over Private Dervian's clothes and searched his pockets. She found his wallet, helped herself to the money it contained, and put it back.

‘That £10 is no good to him now,' she said.

I watched her as she rummaged through Dervian's uniform. Her masculinity was disconcerting. It was clear to me that her relationship with Geraldine was more complicated than that of landlady and boarder. No simple landlady would be comfortable with helping her boarder dispose of a body, and her manner was so assured that underestimating her would be a mistake.

This house in Fitzgibbon Street, despite its malodorous domesticity, held secrets, the nature of which I didn't wish to uncover. I knew, for example, that many houses in Carlton operated as brothels — or so the law would label them, and I suppose that, strictly speaking, this is what they were. In fact, though, it might be the front room of a house in which a woman, abandoned by the hopeless, useless father of her children, might earn a meagre income from the attentions of one of the tens of thousands of American soldiers, far from home and the restraints and censure of small-town morality. Mrs Ferrell didn't strike me as even remotely resembling one of these women, and the idea that Geraldine, despite her louche tendencies (and I could hardly accuse her of lax sexual mores without accusing myself likewise), might be selling her body in the grim space of her bedroom, seemed unlikely. I thought that even the laziest of prostitutes would make her bed between clients. Geraldine wasn't in the habit of making her bed.

‘I have to get to the theatre,' I said, and was conscious yet again of the weird banality of such a remark when standing in the same room as a dead body, especially one that had come to Christmas lunch.

‘You'll come back this evening,' Mrs Ferrell said.

‘I'm sure you know someone who'll do the heavy lifting,' I said.

‘You'll come back this evening,' Mrs Ferrell said, and the precise repetition was something of a full stop to the discussion. Geraldine walked me to the front door. She didn't wish to engage in further conversation, and said no more than, ‘I'll see you this evening,' before ushering me onto the veranda and closing the door behind me. I wondered what those two would now say to each other. And what of Caroline, the other boarder? She'd been on night shift, so I assumed she must have been upstairs, sleeping, and unaware of what was slumped on the Liberty print seat coverings in the front room.

Anyone who knew what I'd been doing in the morning wouldn't have been surprised if I'd turned in a distracted, half-hearted performance. I didn't. I gave one of my best, buoyed by enthusiastic laughter from the audience. Fewer and fewer children were occupying the seats, and the stage-door followers were growing. I spent twenty minutes signing autographs and explaining yet again the cover story for my black eye. When I returned to the dressing room, Roger Teddles was comfortably sprawled in his usual posture. I felt I could ask him a question about drug taking in the company without beating about the bush.

‘Have you ever heard of anyone taking heroin in the company?'

Roger wasn't a man to express surprise easily, and he didn't express the slightest surprise on this occasion.

‘It's difficult to say. I'm sure the acrobats take some sort of pain killer, and the Dunstan sisters surely can't do what they do without taking something to loosen them up. Why heroin specifically?'

‘Well, it's illegal, Roger.'

‘Is it? That can't be right. It used to be in the cough medicine my mother used to take. She used to guzzle the stuff.'

‘Did she have a persistent cough?'

‘Now that I think about it, I don't recall ever hearing her cough.'

‘It must have been very effective.'

‘She certainly thought so.'

‘So who takes drugs in the company, Roger?'

‘I'm too old to socialise with the youngsters, Will, but from what I know of them, they're a staid lot. God, we used to hop into a bit of opium and marijuana in the '30s. If there's any of that about now, I've never seen it. Booze, of course, but not even much of that.'

‘How would you know if someone was taking heroin?'

‘What's with the sudden interest in heroin? Are you interested in getting some?'

This wasn't said with any special emphasis, but my instant response in the negative seemed like a missed opportunity. I didn't suspect Roger of peddling dope. However, had I replied in the affirmative, he might have put me in touch with the right person. When I looked at him, though, I realised that Roger Teddles was the person least likely to know the intimate lives of his fellow cast members. He was separated from them not just by age, but also by thinking and physical health. Roger, with his hydrocele and foot problems, wouldn't have been the natural custodian of anyone's secrets. He wouldn't, either, have been the person someone would come to for advice or to unravel the knots of a private dilemma.

Roger was an actor at the end of his career, glad to be working, and unafraid of retirement. I suspected that he understood without bitterness the narrow limits of his talent. His ambitions would always have been modest, and his achievements on the stage would always have matched his ambitions. He and Mrs Teddles no doubt enjoyed, rather than endured, drab domesticity. Where others found this drabness unappealing in respect of his being a confidant, I, paradoxically was encouraged by it to confide in him.

‘I've seen Geraldine Buchanan,' I said. This provoked a spark of interest, and a surprising admission.

‘People were saying you probably knew where she was.'

‘People? Which people?'

‘Oh, you know, some of the cast.'

I instantly regretted saying anything to Roger. Clearly, some people did speak to him.

‘There's nothing sinister about it, Roger.' I decided to lie, because I suspected my assessment of Roger Teddles was inaccurate.

‘I said I've seen her. I didn't say I spoke with her. I saw her, at a distance, in Princes Park. In fact, now that I think about it, I'm not absolutely certain it was Geraldine. I thought it might be her because of an attitude in her stance, but of course it might have been anyone.'

Roger wasn't sufficiently interested to challenge me. Nevertheless, the arrangement of his face was unequivocal as to his disbelief of all that I'd said.

‘I'm not looking forward to doing two shows tomorrow,' I said. ‘I am, however, quietly confident that the soldiers at Puckapunyal will take to you and me. Soldiers, in my experience, can't get enough of men dressed as women.'

This was transparently an attempt to deflect the conversation away from my ill-judged reference to Geraldine. Roger knew this, but his interest had faded, and he simply grunted in agreement.

There was no one, apart from the stage-door manager, still in the theatre when I left the dressing room. He was such an elderly, hunched, broken figure that I wasn't tempted to ask him about drug use in the company, even though I suspected that he knew a thing or two. I just didn't have the energy to breach his defences when it came to the private vices of cast members. I nodded ‘good night' on my way out, and he acknowledged me with the smallest gesture he could muster.

I was now in a quandary. There were still several hours of daylight left, and I found myself wondering how to fill them before returning to Fitzgibbon Street. I realised with appalling clarity that I would in fact return to Fitzgibbon Street in obedience to Mrs Ferrell's confident instructions. It was 5.00 p.m. The streets were busy with people hurrying away from their jobs, and shop fronts were blacking up in readiness for the night. This created a curious contrast of frantic movement on one side of the windows, and numb lifelessness on the other. There was an hour to go before the hotels closed, so I thought I'd duck into one before walking up to Parkville. I didn't feel like rubbing shoulders with hoi polloi in a working man's establishment. Feeling rather put-upon by circumstances, I decided to treat myself to a little luxury in the form of a glass of wine at the Windsor Hotel. I was sufficiently well dressed to be admitted to the bar, although I had no doubt that the doorman would disapprove of my black eye. But when I approached the door of the Windsor, he addressed me by name, to my astonishment.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Power. How very nice to see you.'

I must have looked bemused.