Good Murder (12 page)

I didn’t have to wait long. The door to the hallway opened, its whiteness reflecting the minimal light available. I wondered if the sling on my arm offered a pallid sail that would give me away. A figure that was no more than a shadow entered the room. He stood for a moment as if listening. I was certain it was a man. How could he not hear my heart beating? He was like darkness gathered and shaped into human form. I sensed that he was staring into the blackness where I stood, deciding what to do. My eyes lost his outline for a moment. He merged into the night around him and then he was gone. He slipped into the kitchen, and I heard the back door click shut behind him. He made no attempt to soften the sound. I took a few shallow breaths. My extremities had turned cold, and my guts were churning. Nausea flooded my body, and I sat down in the nearest chair. It was the chair Mrs Drummond had fallen asleep in the night I was here.

I willed myself to stand up and enter the hallway from which the bedrooms radiated. Common sense told me to leave, to follow the intruder’s lead and get away from the house. Uncommon sense compelled me to find out what he had been looking for. I switched on the torch again and picked my way towards a half-open door. I edged my way in, and was instantly aware of a concentrating of the odour I had detected on entering the kitchen. There was no sound of breathing, so I supposed that this was not where Mrs Drummond was sleeping. I moved towards the bulky shape of a bed, and as I approached it the smell got stronger and my shoes slipped on something wet on the floor. The weak torchlight illuminated a glistening puddle of a liquid which appeared black, like oil. I knew immediately that it was blood, and dropped the torch as the awful jolt of horror struck me. Without thinking, I dropped to my knees and scrabbled about for it with my free hand. It had rolled under the bed. I could see its narrow beam. Lying flat, I wriggled towards it and grabbed it with fingers now sticky with blood. My shirt and trousers clung wetly to me, having mopped up a good deal of the blood on the floor. I stood at the foot of the bed, my mind blank. I couldn’t shine the torch towards the pillow because I didn’t want to see what I knew was there.

‘Will?’

Arthur’s voice came from the doorway. I could form no words but uttered an incoherent, animal sound. He switched on the light to reveal a tableau of indescribable violence. It took a moment to adjust to the burning glare of the overhead globe, and then the full force of the scene assaulted my eyes. I saw Mrs Drummond, propped on pillows, her throat so savagely cut that her head lolled to one side, attached only by a few tenacious sinews. Her bed was awash with her blood, and the floor ran with it. I also saw Arthur, staring not at Mrs Drummond’s body, but at me. I realised when I looked down at myself that I was drenched with blood, and it must have appeared that I had grappled with the victim.

‘No,’ I said, ‘No. I dropped the torch. See, there. There!’ I pointed to a patch of smeared blood on the floor. ‘It went under the bed.’

There was desperation in my voice. Arthur looked at the smear, then back at me, and I saw that he believed me.

‘Someone came out of the house,’ he said, ‘and brushed past me. I thought something was wrong.’

‘What will we do?’ My voice cracked — the physical expression of how close I was to breaking down.

‘We can’t be the ones to report this,’ he said. ‘They’ll arrest you if they know you were here. We have to make sure they don’t find that out.’

I was powerless to argue or to act. I looked at him dumbly.

‘Don’t move,’ he said sharply. His eyes roamed the room. There was a chest of drawers near the door. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he opened a drawer, using the cloth as a barrier against fingerprints. He pulled out a sheet, folded it into a square, and put it on the ground. He took another piece of cloth — a towel this time — from the drawer, and threw it to me.

‘Take off your shoes, but not your socks, and throw them onto the sheet.’

I followed his instructions, not understanding what he was doing.

‘See where you’ve left shoe prints? Wipe them away with the towel, then wipe your hands as much as possible and throw the towel onto the sheet.’

I mopped away the impressions left by my bloodied shoes.

‘Now, don’t walk in any more blood, but come across and stand on the sheet.’

I followed his directions without a murmur. He examined each foot to see whether or not any blood had soaked through to the woollen socks. It hadn’t.

‘Now listen to me carefully, Will. You have to hold the torch. It’s got blood on it. You mustn’t touch anything on the way out, and we have to wipe every surface you touched on the way in.’

He gathered the corners of the sheet together and wiped the doorhandle and the door’s surface with his handkerchief, then wiped the light switch and flicked it off.

‘Torch on,’ he said.

I tried to recall everything I might have touched, but I was certain that the only surfaces I had come into contact with were the doors and the chair in the living room. He wiped its arms and then all the doors. The handle on the door through which I had entered the house was the last item he cleaned.

‘We’re destroying evidence the murderer might have left,’ I said.

‘Can’t be helped.’

At the bottom of the stairs, breathing fresh, night air, my thoughts became more ordered.

‘This can’t be happening.’

‘You can’t go back to the hotel like that. Someone might see you. The river is at the end of the street. You’ll have to wash there.’

Richmond Street ran down to the Mary River, or rather it petered out in a riot of scrub and riparian vegetation. Getting to the water would mean struggling through the tangle of bushes on its banks.

‘Surely I can wash this off back at the George.’ The sound of the river was intimidating, and the idea of sinking into it at night was unnerving. What predatory wildlife was lurking there? It was not a river that welcomed bathers. Rather, it sought to bar them with its fortifications of roots, vines, and mud — and its occasional shark, swimming into fresh water to rid itself of parasites. Arthur was firm.

‘You’re covered in blood. It’s in your hair, on your face and I bet it’s soaked through your clothes onto your skin. It’s like dog shit. It’s got wings. You look like you’ve been wallowing in the belly of a slaughtered bullock. You can’t risk being seen like that. You need total immersion.’

He laid the sheet on the ground.

‘Get undressed and put everything on the sheet. Everything. I’ll get rid of them.’

‘These are good pants. I’ve only got one other good pair.’

‘I see. Well maybe you can wear them on the way to your jail cell.’

I began to undress.

‘I can’t walk back naked.’

‘I’ll go back to the George, get you a change of clothes, and be back here in half an hour. We don’t have any options, or has that escaped your notice? You must have enough coupons to cover a pair of trousers.’

‘It’s not the coupons I’m worried about. It’s the money. We’re not exactly rolling in it.’

When I had thrown all my clothes onto the sheet, I began to shiver. It wasn’t a particularly cold night, but my thermostat was responding in advance to my body entering the Mary River. I realised that Arthur had been right. The blood had soaked through the cotton of my shirt and trousers. I could feel it coagulating on my skin. Perhaps I was imagining it, but the chill which came up from the river did not settle on my body evenly. The blood, where it had dried, formed a sort of carapace against the cold.

‘Sling,’ Arthur said.

‘What?’

‘Sling. Take off the sling. It’s caked.’

I took it off. The cast felt suddenly heavy. How on earth was I going to keep it dry?

Arthur gathered up the sheet.

‘I’ll get rid of this,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure how, but I’ll think of something. I’ll be back soon. Stay in the bushes.’

‘I wasn’t planning on ringing doorbells.’

Arthur headed off down Richmond Street. I called him back.

‘Hey, Arthur.’

He came back, his bundle tucked under his one arm.

‘Thanks. Thanks. I wouldn’t like you to think I don’t appreciate your help.’

He nodded and turned away again. I pushed my way into the scrub that stood between me and the river, and had gone only a few feet before my vulnerable body was scratched and irritated by branch and sharp-edged leaf. My feet were cut by jagged stones and tree roots. As I struggled towards the water the ground softened and the scrub gave way to grasses. Clay turned to sucking mud, into which I sank up to my knees. When I finally felt the chill of water, I was exhausted. I waded out until the river flowed over my chest. It was numbingly cold and the water tugged at me, wanting to take me with it. I held my plastered arm above my head, and with my free hand began the soapless task of cleaning Mrs Drummond’s blood from my body.

I scrubbed hard, shuddering from the cold, but also from the hideous clarity with which her mutilated image returned. I ducked my head under to clean the matted blood from my hair. My first attempt at this almost unbalanced me. On my second, I simply bent my knees and kept the plaster upright, like a bizarre periscope. I held my breath for as long as I could, kneading my fingers through my hair, and came up gasping. I performed the manoeuvre one more time, and when I thrust my head out of the water it struck, with force, a tree branch being carried along by the current. Temporarily stunned by the blow, I dropped my plastered arm into the water. I felt my scalp release a rivulet of blood. My mind was a crowded, noisy place of panicky voices, and in one corner a sharp, insistent pain was asserting itself against the general clamour. The river was supposed to wash me clean. Instead it had inflicted yet another difficult-to-explain injury.

I returned to the bank the way I had come, sustaining more cuts, scratches, and bruises in the process. I sat down and waited for Arthur — cold, sore, and aching, and harassed by mosquitoes and an entomological encyclopaedia of insects. I was sure my body had become a surveyor’s map of slashes and welts. When Arthur called my name, I don’t think I have ever been more grateful to see a person. The bottom end of Richmond Street does not offer the amenities of Eden and is not the place to spend any more time naked than desperation demands.

I stank of the river, but Arthur cautioned against having a bath until the morning. He was right. The gurgle of pipes would draw attention to the fact that I had not been tucked up in bed — which is where I would be saying I had been when Mrs Drummond’s body was found and the coppers came calling.

At an unsuspicious hour I bathed and shaved and washed my hair, and sluiced out the rank scum left behind. I was annoyed by the number of lacerations my body had sustained. Any one of them might erupt into infection. I would have to keep them cleaned and swabbed with peroxide. Most importantly, I would have to present myself at the hospital and explain how I had managed to saturate the inside of the cast. With teeth gritted I would have to accept the matron’s suggestion that this, too, was the result of drunkenness.

At ten o’clock I endured the disapproval of the matron at the hospital as the cast was cut from my arm with vicious-looking shears. It was reset, and I was admonished that if this happened again I would have to suffer the discomfort and possible ghastly infection that might follow. There was a war on, and plaster didn’t grow on trees. I held my tongue, allowing the assassination of my character as though it were a balm to my spirit. I might accept this woman’s apology when the truth was finally told. Might. Through my indignation, I noticed again that she had splendid breasts.

I called the cast together at midday and told them that there was to be a line reading in the dining room at two o’clock. They groaned. The hall was not available because it was Saturday, and local urchins would be hurtling about its floor on roller skates. It had been days since the last rehearsal, and my troupe had become used to the seductively measured pace of small-town life. It occurred to me as I was talking to them that I had only a vague idea how each of them filled the day. I’d been distracted and hadn’t paid any attention to their activities. I knew what Adrian did at night, but not what he did during the day — he slept, I supposed, like some species of nocturnal marsupial. Bill Henty exercised all day. I’d seen him setting out most mornings on some long-distance run. I hadn’t felt any inclination to join him, despite his snide suggestion that it would do me no harm. Anybody who ran miles every day with nothing to show for it but wiry thighs was running away from something.

I knew what Tibald did. Annie? Trysts with Topaz? I didn’t know for certain whether or not she had seduced him yet, but she’d had seventeen days in which to do it and I couldn’t see either of them holding back. I felt a twinge of new jealousy about their friendship. I thought now that I could rely on Annie being a quiet advocate for me, if only because she thought I was too weak to commit a murder. As I looked at her sitting with her legs crossed elegantly and her neck arched sinuously, I realised that my feelings about her had always been deformed by the pressure I had exerted upon myself to resist being attracted to her. She was a lousy actress, I wasn’t prepared to surrender that assessment, but she had something better than talent. She had the capacity to arouse lust.

Walter Sunder was at the meeting in the dining room. He sat with his arms folded, and he wouldn’t meet my eye. I hadn’t yet had a chance to talk to him about his decision to leave, but the strain of the previous night’s events had exhausted my desire to convince him to stay. I had come to the conclusion, even as I was talking, that we could do without him. He wasn’t a great actor, not even a good actor. He was serviceable, and it was useful to have a man his age to play the porter in
Macbeth
or Polonius in
Hamlet.
He didn’t bring any new insights to his roles, but he said the lines, didn’t fall over, and looked his age. More than that would have required talent he didn’t have.