Razorhurst (37 page)

“But the Darcy boy knows how to box. I’m told he was quite the quick one avoiding Bluey’s blows. Mind you, Bluey did have a bullet in him. Slows a man down.”

“If you heard how good he was at avoiding Bluey’s punches, you’ll also know he didn’t lay a finger on him. He could have.”

“That was smart. I wouldn’t feel at all kindly towards him if he’d hurt my Bluey. You looking at this Darcy boy to be your man?” Glory snorted. “Wouldn’t last a day.”

“Oh, no.” Dymphna smiled to show she thought it was absurd too.

Glory clapped her hands. “Right-o then. I won’t touch him.” She stood up. “Almost time to get the party started. Let’s have some sherry.”

Dymphna went to the liquor cabinet. It was made of a hideous dark walnut with red glass behind iron latticework. She opened the doors. There were more than a dozen bottles.

“The ones with
JEREZ
written on them. That’s Spanish for sherry. I want the oloroso. The
seco
one. Had them brought in from Spain, I did. Tried it when I was on the
Strathnaver
. You know, when I went over first-class? Never knew there were sherries that weren’t sweet before that boat ride. Revelation, it was. Much better than the sweet kind.”

Dymphna sorted through the bottles until she found it. She poured Glory a glass and handed it to her.

Glory drained it in one swallow. Dymphna poured her a second. She drained that one too. The third glass she took a sip from and then placed gently on the table beside her.

“Pour yourself one too.” It wasn’t a question.

Dymphna splashed a little into a glass and wrapped her hand around it to prevent Glory from seeing how little she’d poured. She sank back onto the couch and faked taking a large gulp. Kelpie’s eyes fluttered. She looked pale.

“I’ll have Snowy kill Big Bill. That’ll see everything neat and tidy, won’t it? Snowy can prove he’s up to working for me, and Big Bill will pay. What do you think, little puppy dog? Does Big Bill deserve to die?”

“Yes,” Kelpie whispered. “He was going to hurt Dymphna.”

“Well, then,” Glory said, taking another sip of her sherry. “We can’t have that.”

Dymphna’s First Love

The first man Dymphna ever cared about was stabbed to death in the shower at his boarding house.

The killer, who was never caught, dragged Larry Simcoe’s body from the shared bathroom back to his room, leaving a trail of water and blood along the corridor, and shoved the body into the bottom of Larry’s own wardrobe, wrapped in an old sheet stripped from the bed. The door to the wardrobe would not close. Blood and water dripped out onto the floor.

The clothes in the wardrobe, his precious suits and ties and bone-white shirts, the clothes he had been so proud of: they were all of them ruined.

The killer fled, slipping and sliding down the corridor and out the front door, and disappeared.

Everyone in the boarding house had been home when Larry was stabbed twenty-eight times and his body shoved into his wardrobe. The bathroom was opposite the dining room. Around seven o’clock at night it had been, and most of them were eating. None of them saw or heard a thing.

Larry Simcoe was a strong man. He would have fought back. He would have screamed.

A neighbour called the police on seeing a man covered with blood, holding a knife, running out of the boarding house.

When the police arrived, Larry hadn’t been dead more than an hour. There was still blood in the corridor. Had the landlord and his residents really seen and heard
nothing
?

So they insisted.

In the detective’s notebook, scribbled over and over again, were the words
saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing, felt nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing
.

Larry Simcoe was twenty-two. He was one of Glory’s top standovers. Not as big a man as Jimmy Palmer or Snowy Fullerton, but give him a few more years, and he might get there.

He hadn’t been a good lover. His kisses were too hard and too sloppy, and the whole thing was over too fast. He didn’t make her tingle. But he loved to dance. He was good at it too. They were at the
Palais Royale twice a week, dancing and laughing until they barely had the energy to stand up.

Larry also loved to listen, to hear Dymphna’s gossip and her plans, her jokes and observations. They would laugh at Glory and Big Bill together. Dymphna hadn’t known men could be like that: funny and wry and interested in more than sex and killing and drinking. Larry didn’t drink. There were some that held that’s why he was killed: because it wasn’t natural.

Dymphna Campbell loved Larry Simcoe. Though she hadn’t realised that until she heard he was dead.

When they told her, a tear almost slipped from her eye. She and Larry had been together two months.

Her next man, Ray White, was another one of Glory’s. He slotted right into Larry’s place, took over his duties and Dymphna too.

Ray hadn’t liked Larry. There were more than a few to tell Dymphna that, the night of Larry’s death, Ray had celebrated in a little too much detail.
As if he’d been there in that shower delivering those twenty-eight blows with that knife
, they said, looking at Dymphna knowingly.

Ray White lasted less than a week. Perhaps because Dymphna had intimated to whoever would listen that she would not be sorry if Ray were to have an accident.

He did, and she wasn’t.

KELPIE

Kelpie was beginning to trust that Gloriana Nelson wasn’t going to kill Dymphna. Though when Glory put her hands around Dymphna’s throat and began to strangle her, Kelpie had been very afraid. But then Glory was smiling, and Dymphna too, like nothing had happened. So Kelpie let herself relax about
that
. Glory wasn’t going to kill Dymphna.

Or Darcy. Or Snowy. Or Kelpie herself.

Not that minute anyway. But that was about the only thing that was keeping her panic at bay in that stuffy, overwhelming red room.

She tried to attend to their conversation, to concentrate on the whys and wherefores of what they planned to do about Mr. Davidson and Big Bill. But all she could hear was the overlapping voices of all the ghosts in the room.

She’d never seen so many in one house before, almost as if they’d become one huge ghost. Hardly any space in the room wasn’t taken up by ghosts. Kelpie had had to walk through them on the stairs and now in this room.

She wanted to turn and run. She wanted to scream.

So many of them staring at her, and pointing, and too many of them talking at her. Even though she couldn’t tell where one began and the other ended and none of what they said made any sense. She couldn’t even be sure they were real words.

It was like Central Station, only worse because she was inside it.

These ghosts looked like the ones at Central too. Washed out, almost clear, and cobweb grey. Even when Old Ma and Miss Lee had been fading, they were never like this. Stuart O’Sullivan wasn’t like these ghosts, and he’d been dead since before the war. He was even older than Old Ma.

They kept moving through Kelpie, making her insides curl. Her heart was beating too fast, she was sweating, and her stomach would not be still.

Kelpie thought she might be sick. She thought she might die.

Someone asked her something.

Kelpie couldn’t speak.

A face with overly large eyes and wild hair was hovering barely an
inch from her, poking fingers in and out of Kelpie’s face. A cluster of ghosts shadowed Glory’s every movement. When she sat, they sat. Inside and outside of her. As if they were a part of her. Or packed into some other space that happened to be where she was.

It hurt Kelpie’s head to think about it.

She had always been afraid that if ghosts intruded on the space she was in, they could turn her into a ghost. Every part of her they had contact with would turn grey and fall from her body. She couldn’t shake the fear that every time a ghost made her shudder they were breaking her into tiny pieces.

But Glory wasn’t shuddering. Neither was Dymphna. Though the ghosts were pushing through Dymphna’s head.

Kelpie wanted to be deaf to the ghosts, like Glory and Dymphna were.

She wished she could use the knife in her pocket to cut the damn ghosts to ribbons.

“Perhaps if you closed your eyes,” Dymphna said, “and laid down for a moment?”

Kelpie close her eyes. She could still feel them.

“It’s been a long day for the little pup,” Glory said. “Though the pup’s not as little as we thought. Doc says you and her are the same age.” Glory grinned, looking from Kelpie to Dymphna and then back again. “Shows what a good feed’ll do for you. You’ve got a full foot on that one, Dymphna, and Lord knows how many pounds.”

Kelpie had never felt so little, so skinny, so insignificant. If she stayed much longer in this room, there’d be nothing left of her.

“You sure you don’t want to lie down, Kelpie?”

“I’m okay,” Kelpie managed to say. “A bit hungry.” That was a lie. The shudders in her stomach had chased all desire for food away.

“Why don’t you run down to the kitchen?” Glory said. “Have one of the boys give you something. Tell Johnno I sent you. You can eat whatever you like. The icebox is full to the gills.”

Kelpie quailed. She did not know how to leave the room, how to push through all the ghosts. She could barely see beyond them. She would miss a step, fall down the stairs, break her neck, die.

“Why don’t we all go down?” Dymphna said.

“It’s getting on, isn’t it? Sun’ll be setting in no time. You’ve got the right of it. I do need a bit of food to layer me stomach. Though there won’t be as much drinking as I was planning. What with recent events. Got to keep a clear head. We all need that, don’t we, girls?”

“Yes, Glory,” Dymphna said, knocking back the rest of her drink. Many shimmering hands copied the gesture.

These were the ghosts Kelpie’d always avoided. The ones who never helped you. The ones who were so far removed from when they’d been alive that they’d forgotten what it was like. The ones who had nothing left of being human except mischief and spite.

Dymphna turned to help Kelpie up, taking her hand firmly, and she tried to take courage from it. There were even more ghosts on the stairs. They came out of the walls. Thronged on each of the steps, on the railing too.