Good Murder (9 page)

‘Is he any good?’ I was making conversation. Fred Drummond’s machine-gun skills were of no real interest to me.

‘Dunno,’ said the airman. ‘Seems OK. Had no complaints.’

‘You don’t think he’s, well, a bit touchy?’

‘Don’t really know ‘im, mate. He keeps to himself pretty much. We get a lot of blokes through here. He doesn’t stand out. That’ll be him now.’

The rough chug of the Wackett’s engine grew louder as it came into view. It flew in low across the river and wobbled towards the runway. From where I was standing behind the fence I could see Fred clearly as the Wackett passed overhead. In an action that must have been contrary to the regulations, he turned what I thought was the gun in our direction. I threw myself to the ground, painfully jarring my plastered arm. I expected a spray of bullets. When none came I raised my eyes and saw the airman shaking his head in disbelief.

‘Jesus, mate, you’ll break the other one if you’re not careful.’

‘He turned those guns on us. I thought he was going to shoot.’

The airman laughed.

‘Bullshit,’ he said. ‘There are no guns in a Wackett. He must have been mucking about. Maybe you’re just not used to them coming in so low. Got a fright.’

The aircraft landed and came to a stop. I stood up and dusted my trousers with my good hand. I felt foolish. Fred Drummond was nuts — I was sure of that — but even he wasn’t crazy enough to strafe civilians.

‘I’ll tell ‘im you want to see ‘im,’ the airman said, and walked towards the stationary Wackett. Two figures had emerged from its cockpit and were conferring. The airman joined them and pointed in my direction. They were too far away from me to hear what they were saying. I imagine he was telling them the hilarious story of my diving to the ground to avoid being machine-gunned by an imaginary weapon. Fred detached himself from the conversation and headed in my direction. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. I didn’t present a very intimidating figure with my broken arm, my swollen eye, and my bicycle. I was glad that there was a fence between us.

Fred Drummond’s eyes were fixed on mine as he approached. There was something about his eyes that was creepy. They had a dull sheen to them, and there was no warmth there. They were like the unforgiving eyes of a shark or a leopard. When he got to within a few feet of the fence he stopped, laughed like a child, and pointed at my eye.

‘Ouch,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember breaking your arm, though.’

‘You didn’t. Well, not directly.’

‘Yeah. I heard you fell off the stage. That must’ve been funny. Wish I’d seen it.’

‘I guess you were too busy being beaten up yourself.’

‘Those arseholes. They’ll keep. I’ve got big plans for them.’

He shifted gear rapidly, moving from infantile glee to itchy anger with no stops in between.

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.’