The Serpent's Sting (24 page)

I didn't lose consciousness, just the ability to remain upright. With my dignity comprehensively compromised, I managed to assume the position of a supplicant, balanced on knees and elbows. I raised my eyes to meet the unsympathetic gaze of three men. The American officer who'd spoken first reached down and put his hand under my arm. This was done roughly. He wanted to drag me to my feet, not help me to them. Despite this, I was glad of the assistance. I stood and tried to marshal some sort of composure. I thought it wise to let them do the talking, at least initially. I knew I was in deep, deep trouble.

‘The United States army doesn't like it when one of its soldiers goes missing.'

The speaker, the soldier with the educated accent, was about my age, thirty-two or thirty. He was dressed with the care and precision of an officer who possibly had a subordinate to maintain his clothes at a fever pitch of cleanliness and razor-sharp creases. He was standing with the dim light behind him, so I couldn't make out his features. I decided to short-circuit this hideous situation.

‘Private Dervian is dead,' I said.

None of the men reacted.

‘I saw him here this morning. He was sitting in that chair, and he was dead.'

I couldn't bring myself to confess to having dressed his corpse, so while what I said next was true, it was an edited version of the truth.

‘When I left here this morning, Private Dervian was wearing his uniform. I can't explain why it's now folded on that chair.'

Still none of the three spoke. I recognised the strategy, of course. They were hoping I'd fill the tense, awkward silence with a gushed confession.

‘Needless to say, I had nothing to do with his death.'

Detective Strachan, who must have noticed the results of his punch, made no reference to it. Instead he began negotiating with the Americans about who was to take me away for questioning.

‘I'm not sure who has jurisdiction here,' he said.

‘We're investigating the disappearance of one of our soldiers, Detective. There is no jurisdictional issue here. Whatever affects our investigation falls within our jurisdiction.'

Detective Strachan exhibited no territorial jealousies. He was happy to hand me over with Pontius Pilate-like ease.

‘This is Captain William Holtz,' he said. ‘The other officer is Lieutenant Masterson. I'm sorry, Lieutenant, but I don't recall your first name.'

‘Marion,' he said, and I would have found this rather singular were it not for the fact that I knew John Wayne's real name was Marion something-or-other. Morrison. Marion Morrison. Americans seemed prone to ignoring the feminine connotations of their family names, and seemed happy to burden their male children with names like Marion, Tracey, and Carroll.

‘Where will you take him? Camp Pell?'

‘We have better facilities for this sort of thing at Camp Murphy,' said Captain Holtz.

Camp Murphy was the name given to the Melbourne Cricket Ground since its reassignment as a US army base.

‘If you'll excuse me,' Strachan said, ‘I have a telephone call I need to make.'

He went out into the hall.

‘Just hang on a minute,' I said. ‘Aren't we missing a few steps here? I have nothing to do with the death and disappearance of Private Dervian. Every minute you spend talking to me is a minute wasted in your investigation.'

‘And yet,' said Captain Holtz, ‘here you are.'

He went on to point out in his patrician drawl — its cadences, at first attractive, now grated on me — that it was incontrovertibly the case that I was a person of considerable interest to them.

‘I'm afraid we must insist that you come with us, Mr Power.'

To underline the true nature of this insistence, Lieutenant Marion Masterson closed his fingers around my upper arm. I was then propelled — there is no other word for it — into the corridor, out the front door, and into a car that hadn't been there when I'd arrived. As the driver turned over the engine, Lieutenant Masterson, who was sitting on my left, lit a cigarette, which was both unpleasant and inconsiderate — two qualities that had perhaps defined him since childhood. Nothing was said during the drive to the MCG. The light had been dim in the front room of Mrs Ferrell's house, and I'd been confused and distracted. Until now, when I looked at each of my guards in profile, I'd had no clear idea of either man's appearance. Captain Holtz had strong, regular features, with a good, square chin, but with already a hint beneath it that it might lose its contours to flesh as he aged. Lieutenant Masterson's chin had already given up the ghost. He'd had acne at some stage, and his skin bore its scars. His dirty, blond hair was thick, and although it was cut short, it was greasy, and not with Brylcreem. I could smell that his oil glands were volcanically active.

I wasn't expecting to be taken to the centre of the oval, but I also wasn't expecting to be parked in a mean, little room that could have been anywhere, and which gave no hint that it was in any way connected to the most hallowed sporting ground in the country — not that this meant much to me. I found neither cricket nor Australian Rules Football engaging. I was left alone in this room for a good half an hour. I'd become so inured to this technique, designed to create anxiety in a suspect, that I was simply bored and irritated by it. These feelings extinguished any trepidation I might have had.

When Captain William Holtz and Lieutenant Marion Masterson returned, they brought with them two cups of coffee. Neither of the cups was for me. The police had furnished them with the material they'd taken from Geraldine's bedroom (which surely couldn't have been legal), and both men examined the sketches, occasionally lifting their eyes from the pages to meet mine. Captain Holtz managed to keep his features impassive. Lieutenant Masterson was unable to control his smirk. His was the kind of face that was in a semi-permanent state of smirking. I folded my arms and looked at the ceiling. Captain Holtz spoke.

‘I understand that you're an actor, Mr Power, and that you dress up as a woman.' As he said this, he produced a copy of
The Listener-In
from among the papers on the table.

‘Very nice,' he said. ‘You seem to be doing quite well.'

I understood the implied threat behind these words. Clearly, detective Strachan had shared his sense that my great weakness was my need to protect my reputation.

‘I wonder if we could stop playing games,' I said. ‘I understand perfectly that I'm in a vulnerable position. I understand that between you and Detective Strachan you have the means to render me not only unemployable, but a figure of shame, scandal, and ridicule. I'm not going to sit here and pretend to bravado I don't have. I have a performance tomorrow afternoon, and another one tomorrow evening. My position in the company isn't so secure that I can miss those performances. Tomorrow night's is particularly important — it's for our soldiers at Puckapunyal.'

Captain Holtz seemed more exasperated by my speech than sympathetic to it. He waved his hand at me dismissively.

‘Yes, yes,' he said. ‘Your career is all that matters to you. Meanwhile, a young man is dead, and his mother must soon answer a knock at her door to hear this awful news. I'm not sure that Mrs Dervian will be much interested in your success.'

‘Mrs Dervian might not be quite so devastated as you think.'

‘What on earth is that supposed to mean, Mr Power?'

‘Private Dervian was hardly a respectful and dutiful son. By his own admission, he used to slap her around when she annoyed him, which, I imagine, was often.'

Lieutenant Masterson narrowed his eyes.

‘Private Dervian made this admission to you?' he asked.

‘No. He made it to Mrs Ferrell and Geraldine Buchanan.'

‘Private Dervian's mother is in a wheelchair.'

‘Well, maybe he put her there.'

‘She was a passenger in a car that was involved in an accident. The driver was her husband. He was killed. She was crippled. Anthony Dervian, who was sixteen at the time, became the person who looked after her. He was an only child. I would suggest to you, Mr Power, that whatever those two women told you was a lie. I'm surprised that wasn't obvious to you at the time.'

‘When you're standing in front of a dead body, Lieutenant, nothing is especially obvious, except the presence of the body. It tends to overwhelm the senses.'

Captain Holtz picked up one of Geraldine's sketches, examined it, and said, ‘Why don't you tell us everything you know about the house in Fitzgibbon Street and the women who run it?'

‘The women who run it?'

This expression was so singular that I didn't immediately grasp its meaning.

‘It was just a boarding house where Geraldine rented a room.'

‘Were you aware that people also rented Geraldine?'

I think I may actually have spluttered, so taken aback was I.

‘Geraldine Buchanan is an actress, Captain Holtz. She may be freer with her favours than would meet with the approval of many people, but to suggest that she's a prostitute is absurd.'

‘Let's not quibble over definitions, Mr Power. If money changes hands, that's prostitution, according to the law.'

Lieutenant Masterson picked up one of the sketches and smirked extravagantly.

‘Those weren't done from life, Lieutenant,' I told him, ‘and I didn't pay Geraldine for sex.'

‘Perhaps she wanted something else from you.'

‘I'm not going to defend Miss Buchanan's reputation. She isn't Snow White. She has, as Mae West once said, drifted. She admitted that the sketches she made were going to be used as blackmail, although she changed her mind once she got to know me.'

I took a deep breath, and decided that any further obfuscation would only prove deleterious to my welfare.

‘Although I had nothing to do with Private Dervian's death, I do know how he died. He was killed in self-defence by Geraldine Buchanan. He was attempting to rape her, and she feared for her life.'

There was no response to this from either of them; not so much as a note was taken.

‘I wasn't a witness to this, needless to say. Geraldine told me, in some distress, about the incident. In her efforts to fend him off, she struck him and he fell, and he was dead. I don't, however, believe her. There was no evidence of any sort of head injury — no broken scalp or dried blood. I thought this was curious at the time, but I wasn't in a position to think clearly. I'd found myself in a situation that was foreign to me. I was out of my depth, and I don't mind admitting it; I may not have behaved as sensibly as I might have under other circumstances. I suspect that there was no violence involved in Private Dervian's death. I think he died of what I believe is called a drug overdose, possibly heroin. You're no doubt aware, having been comprehensively briefed, that my putative stepbrother died recently in just such a fashion.'

‘Putative?' Lieutenant Masterson extruded the word as if it was a bizarre and wildly inappropriate choice.

‘Are you unsure of its meaning, Lieutenant?'

‘I don't have a clue what it means, but I know you sound like a fairy when you say it.'

Captain Holtz shot him a look of displeasure. Such blatant, personal invective wasn't the direction he wanted this interview to go in. It certainly brought out snippiness in me.

‘Perhaps, as an American, the subtle possibilities of the English language are a mystery to you,' I said.

Captain Holtz sighed, as if his lieutenant's undisciplined remark had derailed my confession.

‘Heroin, Mr Power. You were talking about heroin.'

‘All I know is that there were no signs of violence on Private Dervian's body — or not on the parts that I could see,' I added hurriedly, not being willing to admit to having seen all of Private Dervian. ‘He looked more deeply asleep than dead, but I felt for a pulse and there wasn't one — and he was cold, dead cold. I'm only guessing at the heroin angle, and if it hadn't been for John Gilbert's death, it would never have occurred to me.'

Captain Holtz prevented Lieutenant Masterson from saying what he was about to say by placing his hand on Masterson's arm.

‘Which would surprise you more, Mr Power, to hear that Private Dervian was at Fitzgibbon Street to buy drugs, or to sell them?'

I was strangely flabbergasted by this question. It implied that my inquisitors knew much more than I'd supposed — certainly much more than I knew.

‘Private Dervian had a friend,' I said. Captain Holtz looked interested, as if I was about to tell him something that he didn't in fact know.

‘He came to my mother's house with Private Dervian, for Christmas lunch. I'd met both of them, with Geraldine, after a performance one night. I thought at the time that it was by chance, but now I think it might have been by arrangement. His name was Quist. Harlen Quist.'

‘He was a soldier?'

‘Yes. He said he was from Ohio, and that he'd never been out of the state before. He certainly seemed unsophisticated.'