Pearl in a Cage (63 page)

He was . . . had been her big brother, but he was sitting at Sissy's side now—as Robert Fulton's fiancée sat at his side, as Jessie Macdonald sat at her boyfriend's side. Jenny had eaten her first ice-cream at Jim's side, had learnt about mirages from him and in turn had taught him the joys of watching bull ants. She'd gone to him on that Sunday after the talent quest and they'd found Norman blind, howling drunk at the hotel. He'd helped her tuck him into the hotel bed, then gone with her to the house to get him a change of clothes. For years, forever, he'd been her big brother.

Saw him too clearly tonight. Saw the folded skeletal length of him, his bony wrists supporting hands too large for those wrists to hold. They sagged to his knees, where his kneebones threatened to cut through the fabric of his trousers, like his jaw and cheekbones threatening to cut through the pale skin stretched tight over his face.

Saw his fate too. He'd end up married to Sissy. She always got what she wanted, had always coveted Vern Hooper's house and indoor lavatory.

Wanted to warn him.

Wanted to warn Norman who seemed to be enjoying the party, sitting on the couch well fed and smiling—a grain-fed steer at the slaughteryards, unaware the butcher was sharpening his killing knife, waiting to turn him into next week's steak.

No use. Some people got what they wanted. Maybe others got what they needed. Jenny wanted . . . wanted to go.

The city police had squeezed that town for information and come up with no answer as to who had murdered, mutilated, little Barbie, or why. A lot of strangers passed through Woody Creek, a lot of forest surrounded it, a lot of roads led into and out of it. Eight-year-old Barbara Jean Dobson had been murdered by person or persons unknown.

There was more distrust in the town now, or distrust of strangers. Denham moved them on, hunted those swagmen from his town. He went to the school to speak about the danger of strangers; he kept a closer eye on his own kids.

They were playing in the backyard the day old Betty, the Duffy matriarch, walked into town. She came in once a week for a few supplies but usually kept her distance from the police station. Not today. She went directly to Denham's door, and the five or six mangy dogs that followed her everywhere proceeded to leave their calling cards on doorstep and wall—and dance back smartly to water Denham's verandah posts when he opened the door.

‘Are them city coppers still hanging around here somewhere?'

Denham stepped back. The Duffy family washed less often than their dogs. From the safety of his doorway, he studied the woman. Betty didn't waste money on corset or underwear but she ate well. Her rag of a dress stretched across sagging breasts, moulded her gross stomach, leaving little to the imagination. Her hair, whitened by the years, yellowed by nicotine, trimmed twelve months back with a carving knife, hung around her neck,
stuck to her sweat-beaded face, caught up in facial crevices. The day wasn't hot but her walk into town had raised a sweat, which at close range was a chargeable offence.

He stepped outside, closed his door, skirted around her and her dogs, and walked down the end of his verandah to the kid-trodden earth between his house and lockup, a natural wind tunnel. Betty followed him, her dogs followed her, peeing as they came. It never failed to amaze him how Mrs Duffy's dogs could keep finding more pee. They didn't look as if they had enough liquid in them to wet a match head.

‘What's your trouble, Mrs Duffy?'

‘I just caught old Albert at Maryanne and I brained him with the backside of me shovel. He could be dead.'

As far as Denham could tell, someone was always getting at one of the Duffy girls. He stood upwind of her, took his cigarettes from his pocket. He knew Albert, known to most in town as old Noah, who was over seventy.

‘He's a bit old for it, isn't he?'

‘His type are never too old for it. I been letting him stay on me land, for his pension like, and the old bastard turns around and bites the hand that feeds him.'

Her hand was out for a smoke. Denham wasn't having her touching his packet; he removed a second cigarette, tossed it, lit his own smoke, then tossed his box of matches.

‘Is he dead?'

‘Bleeding like a stuck pig.' She tapped the cigarette on the matchbox, placed it between toothless gums, lit up, slid the matches into a pocket and spat a tobacco thread. ‘I see the dogs sniffing around Sophie's place and I think the old bastard might have croaked, so I walk down to have a look and I catch him red-handed.' She spat a second tobacco thread. ‘I roll me own,' she said. ‘More horse dung than tobacco in these ready-rolled. Any rate, the kid's got her pants off and she's somersaulting and he's bloody applauding her, so I pick up the nearest thing and give him the back end of me shovel.'

Denham stayed away from the Duffys when he could. There were six or eight women and near-adult girls out there, and the
mental image of any one of them turning somersaults with her bloomers off wasn't pretty. He turned away, turned to her dogs, one of them getting down to some serious foreplay with the wheel of his motorbike.

‘Clear off, you mongrel.' He aimed a kick. It leered at him but kept pumping. ‘What's he doing now?'

‘Me dog?'

‘Your lodger, Mrs Duffy.'

‘He's Sophie's, not mine. She reckons I killed him.' She sucked more smoke, blew it at the gathering flies. ‘As soon as I saw that bastard sitting there smiling, I knew who done young Barbie and that Abbot girl. She's nine year old.'

‘Who?'

‘Maryanne.'

That changed Denham's outlook. He turned to his backyard where his kids had suddenly gone quiet. The little buggers would be standing around the corner listening in to this.

‘One of the children?'

‘Sophie's girl.'

Denham wanted her away from his kids. He started towards his front gate, hoping she'd follow. The dogs followed. And it was a bad move. John McPherson's car was parked out front of Charlie's, his brown kelpie stepping sedately down from the front passenger seat. The Duffy dogs didn't like toffs who rode in cars. As one, they took off across the road to rough him up.

‘Come back here, you mob of mongrels,' Betty bellowed. They didn't come back. ‘Dogs will be dogs,' she said, spitting another tobacco thread. ‘He was the bastard that ruint me, you know.'

Denham was watching McPherson. ‘How did he do that, Mrs Duffy?'

‘How do you bloody well think he did it? I was a fourteen-year-old girl at the time.'

‘Right.'

Charlie White, armed with a heavy broom, was out and attempting to break a few backs. Betty stood sucking her fag,
sucking it down to the bone, sucking it until it burned her fingers, until she was forced to drop it.

‘Where?' Denham said.

‘Where what?'

‘Where did you know old Albert from—when you were fourteen, Mrs Duffy?'

‘Out at Three Pines. Monk's place. Me old man did a bit of work out there and he got me work in the kitchen. That old bastard used to come up there with a mob from the city.'

The dogs came back, one shaking its head, one licking its backside. ‘Mongrels,' she said. ‘They all need a dose of lead but they're not worth the bullets. Give us another smoke to go on with, will you? I'm shook up about this.'

He took two more from his packet. She had the matches. He accepted a light.

‘Your girl all right?'

‘Her mother took care of her with a broomstick. You're not locking me up for it. He deserved what he got.'

Denham had too much respect for his cell. ‘I'll follow you back out, Mrs Duffy.'

He stood on for a time, allowing her to get a head start. He'd signed the papers to get old Albert on the aged pension. Before he'd taken lodgings out at Duffy's, he'd camped from time to time in McPherson's hut. Denham knew him as a harmless old chap, an interesting old chap too if you got him talking. He liked hanging around the park, though. Always kids in that park. He spent time down by the creek. Kids liked hanging around down there too. He was in town when Barbie died. He could have been around when Nelly Abbot was murdered.

He pitched his smoke and walked to his motorbike. It stank of Duffy's dogs. It would stink more before it was much older.

 

Six o'clock and the city police were on their way back to town. Old Noah, known to Denham as Albert Forester, transported in Vern's new car to Denham's jail, had left his blood on the upholstery. Leather washed down smelled of wet cow. Gertrude noticed it when she got in.

‘Old Betty brained her lodger,' Vern explained. ‘She told Denham she caught him at one of her daughter's, or granddaughter's, kids. She's made a decent hole in his head.'

‘I wish she'd done it earlier,' Gertrude said, eyeing the evening sky.

‘Old Betty reckons he did the same to her out at Monk's, back when she was working in the kitchen out there. Do you remember an Albert Forester ever being out there?'

‘There used to be a Forester working for someone out the Willama Road. He married one of the Dobson girls.'

‘It would have been before his time. Betty's damn near our age.'

‘If she says she knew him, she did. She's never bothered to lie.'

Denham's jail was a green ten-by-ten box with a barred window and a solid door. Electricity had been connected but the first globe had blown the second time he'd turned the switch. He hadn't bothered to replace it. There was little light left in the day and not much of it getting through the east-facing door.

They'd placed the old bloke on one of the bunks, on a bare mattress, and wrapped his head in a towel, now bloody.

‘You look like a wounded Arab,' Gertrude said. ‘Can you lift your head?'

He was conscious when she'd walked in. She'd seen one hand moving. His eyes were closed now and he didn't lift his head, so she lifted it and got the towel off. The gash was two inches across, the bone exposed.

‘Has he been talking?' she asked.

‘The women said he'd come around. He's said nothing to me,' Denham said.

She held a clean pad against the wound. His blood was still running. ‘I can put a stitch in it, which might stop him bleeding, but you need to get him down to the hospital. She's probably cracked his skull.'

‘The city chaps want me to hold him until they get here.'

‘He could be bleeding into the brain.'

‘Stitch him,' Denham said.

‘You'll need to turn him around so I can get at him, and get me some light.'

There were two bunks in the cell and little room between them. They got him turned around. With his overcoat off, there wasn't much of him to turn. Denham went inside to steal a light globe from his kitchen. Gertrude put her glasses on, then sat on the edge of the bunk to peer at the wound and the patient.

‘He looks bloodless.'

‘He's always looked bloodless,' Denham said.

That globe was next door to useless. Wherever she moved, her shadow was in the way. Denham went for his flashlight and, with its beam directed on the scalp, she had a good look at Betty's handiwork. If his skull was cracked, she couldn't feel it.

Denham got her stitching thread through the eye of her curved needle. She took it and turned to her patient.

‘This is going to hurt,' she told him. ‘I hope you're not playing possum.' She slapped his face, and maybe his eyelid flickered. ‘You might come over here, Vern, and hold him down.'

Then she lifted an eyelid and a blue, blue eye looked into her own, blue as the sky, blue as the ocean. The mind attempts to hang on to what it's been told, to override what it knows, but reflexes respond. She stepped back onto Vern's foot, dropped her needle and near fell on her face. Vern caught her, steadied her, and caught the look in her eye.

‘He's dead,' she said.

‘He's breathing, Mrs Foote,' Denham said.

Vern knew what she'd seen, and he stepped in to see for himself, to lift that same eyelid. A veiny white eyeball stared back. ‘It's not him, Trude.'

‘Not who?' Denham said, searching for, finding and picking up the needle, wiping it clean on his shirtsleeve.

‘It's him,' she said.

‘He's dead,' Vern said. Died in Egypt, and she had his money to prove it, had his microscope.

‘Who?' Denham asked.

Gertrude picked up a hand, old hand, age spotted, fingernails still neatly trimmed, though not so clean. A bump on the bridge
of his nose. That wasn't there forty years ago. There was one way to prove it. Over his left ear. She forgot the blood, forgot the new gash, and felt for the old, separating that long blood-caked hair, separating it until she found what she knew would be there. And she found it. She hadn't done much of a job on stitching that one.

Only a girl then, twenty-one or two. Blood everywhere that night—trying to pinch the sides of that gaping wound together, struggling to force the needle through his flesh, so much tougher than she'd expected. And his hair in the way. And unable to see for tears, washing that wound with her great dripping tears. Long, long before she'd forgotten how to cry for Archie Foote.

Like a magnet, that man, he'd drawn folk to him; then, like a magnet reversed, repelled them. He repelled her now. Her hands drew back from him, but his blood was dripping. She had to stop it. She had to touch him.

Took up her scissors with a shaking hand, rinsed them in her jar of methylated spirits, and told that hand it had work to do. Hacked off a hank of blood-matted hair and dropped it, hacked through another, and another, clearing the area of hair. She reached for the needle, sank it and its thread in metho.

‘You know him?' Denham said.

‘A relative of Monk's,' she said. ‘I thought he was dead.' And she drove that needle through his flesh and he opened his eyes. ‘Hold his head still, Vern.'