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  Up to this point, I thought the conversation had been going quite well, considering that one of us was unhinged. I thought I would try to shock him into a sort of clarity by confronting head on what was between us.

  ‘Sergeant Topaz thinks I murdered your sister. I didn’t.’

  I waited for the explosion. There wasn’t one. Instead, in a calm voice, he said, ‘Topaz is a dickhead. Polly might be alive. Maybe she took off, like my brother. Maybe you know something about that.’

  ‘Fred,’ I said, growing uneasy and fearing that the temporarily composed person before me might blow up in my face at any moment. ‘I didn’t have anything to do with Polly’s disappearance, and I don’t know where she is now. Why would I come here if I had anything to hide?’

  ‘Because you’re scared of me.’ The mad sometimes speak the truth because they don’t understand the social advantages of lying.

  ‘If that were true, Fred, wouldn’t I stay out of your way?’

  ‘Not if you’re not very smart, but think that you are. Not if you think you can talk me out of thumping you.’

  My good eye quickly glanced from left to right. The fence between us was reassuringly high and extensive. I was safe from Fred’s fists for the moment.

  ‘What’s your name again?’ he asked, and screwed up his face.

  ‘It really isn’t a hard name to remember,’ I said. I did not refresh his memory. That would have felt too much like giving in.

  Without warning, and as if he’d been hit by a jolt of electricity, he leapt to the wire with the speed of a predator and curled his long fingers through it. His hands seemed even more enormous than when I had first seen them at the Drummond house. I drew back involuntarily, the way you do when a caged animal throws itself at the bars in a zoo.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. His tone was now weirdly conspiratorial. This mercurial shift of emotional states was frightening. ‘I was only winding you up, all right? I know now that you didn’t kill Polly. And I know that she’s dead, too. Topaz is right about that. She hasn’t run away. She’s dead. And I know who killed her.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked nervously. I suddenly thought that my original suspicion had been right. He knew who had killed his sister because he had.

  ‘I just know, that’s all, and they’ll pay. The coppers won’t catch them, but they’ll pay.’

  ‘“They?”’

  ‘What?’

  ‘“They.” You said, “they’ll pay”.’

  He smirked at me.

  ‘Bad grammar, huh?’ he said.

  He stepped back from the fence, undid the buttons of his fly, and urinated copiously and insultingly practically at my feet. He did not turn his stream directly on me, but he shook his penis vigorously when he had finished, and in the process — and I’m sure not accidentally — propelled a few drops through the fence. At least one drop landed on my face, at the corner of my mouth. I was rigid with revulsion.

  ‘We only came down to refuel,’ he said. ‘I’m going up again.’ He turned and walked back towards the Wackett.

  ‘Who’s they?’ I shouted after him. ‘Who’s they?’

  Too late, I realised that I had not wiped away the droplet of his piss. It rolled into my mouth, filling it with the acrid taste of Fred’s micturition. I had become a magnet for his disgusting body fluids.

  I watched him speak with his flight instructor before they clambered into the cockpit. It trundled down the runway and climbed into air as if it were stumbling up invisible steps. I retrieved the bicycle from where it was leaning against the fence and threw my leg over it. The Wackett rumbled, stuttered, and was suddenly silent. I looked up, and saw it frozen for a second against the sky. Then it dropped like a stone into the Mary River. It shattered as if it had hit concrete, and the pieces sank from sight.

  The bodies of the instructor and Fred Drummond were retrieved later that day.

  Chapter Four

  so many questions

  IN ORDER TO AVOID THE NASTY SURPRISE of the unexpected visit from Peter Topaz — he seemed to be a master of these — I cycled straight from the airfield to the police station, feeling with each turn of the pedals a growing resentment towards him and the world in general. The fates themselves were conspiring against me, and I allowed myself an absurd little burst of fury, expressed as an obscenity and directed at Fred Drummond, who had had the gall to fall to his death within minutes of speaking to me.

  Topaz wasn’t at the station. The surly creature behind the desk, who was afflicted with an adenoidal problem which only surgery or death could correct, said that he’d been called out to help search a patch of scrub on the outskirts of town. There had been the report of a body of a woman being seen there. This turned out to be mischievous, so Topaz was not in his usual state of half-suspended laconia when he arrived back. He was frankly pissed off. In my increasingly paranoid relations with him I immediately panicked and thought that he would assume I had been responsible for the vexatious false sighting. When he came into the station his anger was still so fierce that he didn’t acknowledge me with the carefully crafted smile I had come to realise was his trademark. He simply indicated with a nod that I should follow him.

  We sat in an airless room where the trivial emotions of small-town criminals had rendered the atmosphere so stale that I found it difficult to breathe. Topaz sat opposite me and waited for me to speak. He didn’t have to wait long. I blurted out, ‘I didn’t make that call.’ I sounded like a frightened schoolboy trying to duck the blame.

  ‘I didn’t think that you did. Why would I think that?’

  I recovered my composure.

  ‘I see. So you’re quite happy to believe that I could kill someone, but you don’t think I am sufficiently anti-social to make a nuisance phone-call.’

  He was not in the mood for conversation.

  ‘Why are you here? Come to confess?’

  ‘Fred Drummond is dead.’

  That stopped him. I didn’t know, until this moment, that news of death could be a mood elevator. Topaz’s annoyance fell away and he leaned forward, his eyes enlivened by the thrill of the hunt.

  ‘What have you done with his body?’

  It was my turn to be pulled up short. My God, what kind of a person did Topaz think I was?

  ‘I didn’t kill him,’ I said, my voice flying an octave above its normal range. ‘I went to the airport, just to speak to him. To clear things up. To get him to see that I had had nothing to do with Polly’s disappearance. Nothing. I spoke to him, and he said that he knew that already, or rather that he knew it now, and that he knew who’d done it and that he was going to get them. He said “them”. Then he pissed, practically on my shoes, and went up for a training flight. The motor cut out and the plane crashed into the river. That’s what I know. And that’s all I know.’

  Topaz stood up and went into the outer office. I assumed he was making a phone call. He returned and said, ‘The RAAF is searching the river.’

  If I’d been able to fold my arms in a triumphant ‘So there!’ I would have done so. I had to settle for arranging my features into a facial equivalent.

  ‘I suppose you think I sabotaged the aircraft,’ I said.

  ‘The RAAF will investigate what went wrong. It’s not a police matter.’

  ‘Poor Mrs Drummond. Who’ll look after her now?’

  ‘There’s another son. He’s up north somewhere. We’ll find him and let him know.’

  Having been energised by the electric possibility that I had been about to confess, he smiled at me before saying, ‘You can go.’

  Before leaving, I turned and said, ‘I’m not guilty of anything, you know.’

  He just made a steeple with his fingers and said, ‘We’re all guilty of something, Will.’

  Two days after Fred’s accident, Polly’s
body was brought down from the water tower. That it might have been a suicide was ruled out of contention. The Chronicle gleefully reported that the ladder that led to the rim of the tower was ten feet off the ground. Another ladder would have to have been used to reach the attached ladder. No such ladder was found lying at the scene, and so it was assumed that whoever had brought it there had taken it away with him after he had dumped the body. Given the weight of a dead body, the suspect must have been strong and, presumably, male. There was an unsubtle suggestion in the report that the murder must have been committed by a newcomer to the town. A local would not have fouled his own water supply. Short of actually naming me, the reporter could not have alerted his readers more obviously to my position as chief suspect. This was what I said when I put the paper down in the kitchen of the George Hotel the morning after the discovery of Polly’s body. Tibald, Annie, and Augie were the only people there to hear my indignation. They had the decency to reassure me, quite firmly, that they did not believe that I was the culprit.

  ‘The town is full of strangers, Will,’ Annie said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Augie. ‘There must be a thousand RAAF people here for a start. We don’t know what that girl got up to or who she knew. Pardon me if that sounds offensive or disrespectful.’

  I looked at Augie Kelly. There was a change in him. The growing reputation of his hotel had propelled him into a fierce regime of personal hygiene — his hair was trimmed and carefully oiled, and his face was shaven with a barber’s professional closeness. He was comprehensively shevelled. Even his shoes were polished, and the hair which spilled from his shirt collar clipped.

  ‘No one here really thinks you’re a killer, Will,’ said Annie. ‘It’s too absurd.’

  She put her hand on my good arm, reassuringly.

  ‘Not even Bill Henty?’ I asked.

  ‘What about me?’ Henty had come into the kitchen just as I had spoken his name. He was wearing khaki shorts and had a towel draped around his shoulders. He had been exercising vigorously, and was sweating profusely.

  ‘They’ve found that girl’s body,’ said Annie. ‘I was just assuring Will that none of us believe he’s got anything to do with it. Not now that, you know, she’s actually dead.’

  Henty wiped his face with one end of the towel and sniffed.

  ‘Like Tibald said, we’re all capable of murder.’

  ‘Bill,’ Annie said. ‘You don’t really think …’

  ‘Let’s wait and see. That’s all I’m saying. What do you say, Tibald?’

  Tibald turned from the stove and said that as far he was concerned a man was innocent until proven otherwise. I was glad to hear him say this — it seemed to be a retreat from his earlier position — but the effect was spoiled when he added that sometimes this tenet was difficult to justify.

  Henty then said, smugly, ‘Augie, get us a beer, will you? I can’t go into the bar like this.’

  I got to my feet, threw Henty a contemptuous if bruised glance, and went up to my room. Before leaving, though, I leaned down and kissed Annie lightly on the cheek.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said quietly. She reached up, covered my hand with hers, and gave it a squeeze. Through all the hideousness, and despite my rising anger at Henty’s words — and, for some reason, his bare, obsessively sculpted chest exacerbated that anger — through all this, that small squeeze sent a charge through me that travelled directly to my private parts. I had to stop myself from saying out loud that Annie Hudson did indeed resemble Greer Garson.

  I lay on my bed, trying to get things in order. I knew that Topaz would arrive soon with more questions and impertinent accusations. I was surprised that he hadn’t come last night. He couldn’t arrest me, although he no doubt wanted to. At any rate, I assumed that he couldn’t arrest me. I was a bit murky on this area of the law and whether it applied anyway in such a remote town. He would surely need some substantial evidence before he consigned me to the earthen-floored hell of a Maryborough jail. I was not, however, confident about this. Perhaps suspects were thrown into prison here as a matter of course.

  My arm was aching, my eye was tender, and I had a headache that felt as if all it needed was a gentle push to result in bleeding from the ears. I also had an erection. The images flooding my brain, and by extension my penis, were, my God, images of me making love to Annie Hudson. What was wrong with me? Was I aroused by a woman’s pity? Knowing that women responded positively to wounded men, I suspected that Annie’s sympathy was partly the result of my injuries. I could not explain my own attraction to her so neatly. She was, after all, receiving the priceless gift of Peter Topaz’s nocturnal emissions. I wasn’t sure of this, but I had every reason to believe that it was so. My sudden desire was not unreasonable, or inexplicable. She was, after all, a woman of considerable charms. My attraction could hardly be an expression of some kind of as yet undescribed fetish.

  I was about to relieve myself of this unwanted, but not unwelcome, bout of erotic yearning when there was a knock on the door. It opened before I had a chance to call ‘Wait!’, and Augie Kelly entered to the sight of me fumbling with my flies. At least I had brought nothing forth.

  ‘It is customary to wait until you’re invited in,’ I snapped. If I hadn’t been so cross, and therefore obviously guilty of something, he would not have realised that he had caught me in flagrante delicto solo, as it were.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, and then, in an attempt at conciliation, ‘It must be difficult with only one hand free. You should get someone to help you.’

  It would be an understatement to say that I was flabbergasted by his lewdness. I suppose he thought he was being blokey, or letting me see that he was a man of the world, unfussed by the libidinous pursuits of others. Well, I wasn’t going to behave like a shy teenager.

  ‘And who would you suggest, Mr Kelly? Do you have a sister who is looking for work?’

  He laughed the laugh of a man who was sisterless.

  ‘I don’t think you need to look any further than Miss Hudson,’ he said.

  Those weird, green eyes missed nothing. I had underestimated Mr Kelly. Perhaps, though, he was alert to what had passed between Annie and me because his own interest in her had not gone unnoticed by me. Jealousy improves eyesight. Indeed, it improves upon eyesight. I pushed the pillows against the bed-head and propped myself up.

  ‘What can I do for you, Mr Kelly?’

  ‘Please, call me Augie. There’s no need for all this formality. I just caught you having a toss, for God’s sake.’

  I coughed uncomfortably, and to cover my embarrassment said, ‘It’s an unusual name, Augie is.’

  ‘It’s short for Augustus,’ he said, letting me off the hook, but letting me know that that was exactly what he was doing.

  ‘Augustus Kelly,’ I said, and thought it was rather too grand a name to wear in a town without trees. I didn’t say so because I didn’t think I had the upper hand. He pulled a chair up and sat at the foot of my bed.

  ‘Even if people stop coming,’ he said suddenly, ‘you can stay here.’

  I was surprised by the intensity with which he said this. There was a tiny, almost imperceptible tremor in his voice.

  ‘People won’t stop coming, Augie. If anything, they’ll come in droves, hoping to get a glimpse of Jack the Ripper. It’s a bargain. They get a good meal and a shiver of horror, and all for a few bob. It’s better than the pictures.’

  ‘I’m just saying, you can stay here, whatever happens.’

  There was that tiny tremor of emotion again. Had he been drinking?

  I felt grateful for this show of support, especially as he seemed so sincere about it, but I changed my mind when I looked into his murky eyes. He was acting. He was good, but he was acting. I knew what Kelly was up to. He thought that I would be out of the way soon, that I would be carted off to jail. That would ensure that
Tibald would stay. Without me the troupe would disband, and they would all need jobs. Augie would have an already broken-in workforce at his disposal.

  ‘To be perfectly honest, Will,’ he said, reading my mind and retreating from his sentiment. ‘Tibald is the real reason you don’t have to go. The man is a genius. I just tasted this soup thing he’s made for tonight. Everyone gets just a mouthful. We’re not even counting it as a course.’

  ‘It’s called an amuse gueule,’ I said coolly.

  ‘That’s what he called it, but I don’t speak Latin.’

  ‘It’s not Latin. Look, never mind.’

  Augie’s frank admission of the basis of my remaining welcome had taken a good deal of the warmth, even if it had been acted warmth, out of the earlier gesture.

  ‘He’s made it out of chokos. Can you believe that? I hate chokos, but this is …’ He groped for the word.

  ‘Sublime?’ I offered, wishing that he would take his hairy arms and return to the kitchen.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said, and his face was lit momentarily by the rapturous recollection of the taste of Tibald’s choko reduction. ‘I’m getting the boiler fixed,’ he added, ‘so we’ll have hot water. Soon.’

  ‘Any moment you’ll be telling me people want to stay here.’

  ‘But they do. I’ve had several RAAF officers interested in moving their wives across from the Royal. But we’re not ready for that yet. It’s all a bit rundown.’

  ‘But it’s good enough for a murder suspect.’ And his leading lady, I thought, but didn’t say it. Augie smiled. Although it wasn’t quite as calculated as the Topaz smile, it lacked the generosity of the real thing.

  ‘Yes, Will,’ he said. ‘It’s good enough for a murder suspect.’ With that he patted my knee, stood up, and said, ‘It’s probably a good idea if you don’t help at dinner yet. Your eye is, well, it’s unsightly and … people eating, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said.

  Augie Kelly had barely closed the door when three short, sharp raps preceded the entry of Peter Topaz. He was brusque and to the point.