The Serpent's Sting (12 page)

I didn't look in any cupboards or drawers; that would have been a breach too far. I left Geraldine's room, waited for a moment on the landing, and then descended the stairs. I could have sworn that the door of the front room was open a crack. I left through the kitchen as quickly as I could, and was relieved to make it into Fitzgibbon Street without the hysterical accusation ‘Burglar!' being hurled after me.

I returned to Mother's house, to find Brian in a high state of excitement. John Gilbert's body had been found, he said, lying in the long shadows cast by the wings of a monumental angel in the Melbourne General Cemetery.

Chapter Four

A WORKING DAME

ONLY BRIAN REMAINED AT MOTHER'S HOUSE
. Mother had hurried round to Drummond Street after taking Peter Gilbert's telephone call. Apparently, he and Cloris had been home for barely ten minutes when there'd been a knock at the door, and a policeman had told them that the body of a man they assumed was John, based on the papers he was carrying, had been found. It seemed dreadful to me that such ghastly news should be delivered by some police dullard in an absurd white-leather helmet.

I wondered how Cloris would feel about Mother turning up at the height of the crisis. She hadn't, to my knowledge, set foot in the Gilbert house, and I couldn't see how time, or a tragedy, would make her appearance appropriate. Brian knew only the bare bones of the situation. The body had been discovered, as bodies often are, by a man walking his dog. At first he'd thought the figure on the ground was sleeping, and had hurried over to him when his dog had lifted its leg and peed on the man's foot. He saw quickly that the dog's misbehaviour was of no interest to a corpse. Apparently, there weren't any signs of violence, although the face was contorted unnaturally. I thought it possible that John Gilbert's sour expression had simply been frozen in death.

‘Do we know how long he'd been lying there?' I asked.

‘No idea. Mother took the call from Peter, and she told me what I've told you.'

‘What's your immediate instinct?'

‘What do you mean, “instinct”? Instinct about what?'

‘Brian,' I said with lofty patience. ‘You are trying to be a private-inquiry agent. When a private-inquiry agent is presented with a corpse, he will have some initial thoughts as to its provenance. Given that you don't yet have any solid information, let alone evidence, let's call those thoughts “instinct”.'

‘You want me to say that I think Peter Gilbert is involved in the murder of his own son? I can honestly say I don't think that.'

‘You'd have to admit, though, that John Gilbert believed that his father was capable of murder.'

‘If we're talking about instinct, my instinct is that John Gilbert was unhinged. And it might be jumping the gun anyway to say that John Gilbert was murdered. We don't know how he died. It might have been an accident, or he might have taken his own life. You were the one who advised me against jumping to conclusions, Will.'

He was right, of course, and it would have been churlish of me to deny the fact, so I agreed with him.

‘We'll just have to wait,' Brian said.

‘Private-inquiry agents don't sit around and wait, Brian. The place where John Gilbert's body was found is five minutes from here. I think it might be a good idea to have a look.'

‘They'll have taken the body to the morgue by now, surely.'

‘It's only been a few hours since he was found. I think he's probably still there, while the police do their forensics and photography.'

‘In that case, they're not going to let us get close, are they?'

I understood Brian's reluctance to engage with policemen. We'd both had some experience with them, and it hadn't been pleasant. There were two detectives, Strachan and Radcliff, with whom neither of us wanted further contact. There was a good chance both those men would be dancing attendance on John Gilbert's body.

‘I think,' I said, ‘that we should at least go up to the cemetery, just to get a general idea of where he was found. I agree with you that getting too close and having to explain ourselves to the police wouldn't be useful. The last thing we want is to find ourselves among the suspects.'

Brian looked startled.

‘Suspects? Why would we be suspects?'

I sighed.

‘You have to put yourself inside the head of a pedestrian Melbourne policeman. We meet John Gilbert for the first time very recently. The meeting isn't exactly all wine and roses. He turns up dead, and here we are hanging around the scene of the crime. There are some people, Brian, who actually believe that the murderer always returns to the scene of the crime. Motive, apparently, is less important than proximity.'

‘Whatever else I think about Strachan and Radcliff, I don't think they're stupid. I don't want to tangle with them again.'

‘Fine. You stay here and do nothing.'

Stung, Brian agreed to come with me to the cemetery, and in an absurd attempt to disguise our reason for being there, he took flowers from one of Mother's vases, as if an observer would instantly suppose that we were visiting the grave of a loved one.

John Gilbert's body had been found near what is probably Melbourne General Cemetery's most extravagant private monument. A great angel, its wings partly unfurled, leans, its head bowed on a mighty sword. I've never been sure whether this grieving warrior angel was an expression of confidence in the worthiness of the deceased, or whether the family thought it necessary to threaten Heaven with force to ensure certain entry. The monument can be seen at some distance, so we were able to ascertain, without being spotted, that John Gilbert's body was still
in situ
.

There were half-a-dozen men standing importantly around what must have been the corpse. I recognised both detectives Strachan and Radcliff. Neither of them was wearing a hat, an informality arising from each of them doubtless having been called away from a family function. I supposed they had families — I couldn't expect that my dislike of them would be universal. We would have remained undiscovered had Brian not waved a fly away from his face with his bunch of flowers. The sudden flash of bright red caught Michael Radcliff's eye. I saw him nudge Strachan, who shaded his eyes and looked in our direction.

‘We've been spotted, Brian, thanks to your floral tribute.'

‘What should we do? Should we scarper?'

‘Scarper? What a hideous expression. If we leave, it will look suspicious. I'm sure their eagle eyes have identified us. We shouldn't wait for them to come to us. I think we should walk over to them. It might minimise the sense that we were skulking.'

Brian's face was a portrait of reluctance, but he acknowledged the rightness of my judgement with a slight nod of his head. With as much confidence as we could muster, we headed towards Strachan and Radcliff.

They remembered us — how could they not? — and there wasn't much affection in the memory.

‘What is it with corpses and the Power brothers?' Noah Strachan asked.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Brian was staring at John Gilbert's body. I'd caught a glimpse of it, sufficient to note that it had remained as it had been found. There seemed to be no disturbance of the ground around it. The body had either simply fallen there, or been carefully placed there.

‘We know this man,' I said matter-of-factly.

‘So you brought flowers,' Radcliff said, humorously.

‘I brought flowers for our father's grave,' Brian said. ‘It's Christmas Day.'

I wasn't sure if this was brilliant or stupid.

Detective Strachan gave a signal, and preparations were made for the removal of John Gilbert's body. He stepped into a position that obscured those preparations, and asked us to join him.

‘So, if you know him, what's his name?'

I have a low tolerance for the plodding facetiousness of policemen. To head off this tendency in Detective Strachan, I answered him at some length.

‘You already know his name, detective. It's John Gilbert. He's the son of Peter Gilbert, and the brother of Cloris Gilbert. Being in possession of this knowledge is hardly surprising, given that Peter Gilbert is affianced to our mother, Mrs Agnes Power.'

‘So John Gilbert would have been your stepbrother.'

‘Nothing escapes your sharp, genealogical eye, does it, Detective?'

‘Thank you for reminding me, Mr Power, of your effortless ability to be a pain in the arse.'

He looked at Brian, narrowing his eyes and turning his head on an angle.

‘It's Brian, isn't it? There was that recent unpleasantness with your wife.'

With Brian now wrong-footed, Strachan played his advantage.

‘Was John Gilbert a welcome addition to your family, Brian?'

‘What's that supposed to mean?'

‘I mean, did either you or your brother murder John Gilbert?'

The smug smile and the bland delivery underlined how certain Strachan was that his statement would be both offensive and discombobulating. It was annoyingly effective. Despite my knowing exactly what he was doing, the reminder that we would have to account for our whereabouts at the time of Gilbert's death was an unpleasant check on my general enthusiasm. Brian, who must have remembered suddenly that he was here in a professional capacity, rallied and acquitted himself very well.

‘Neither I nor Will would have any reason to murder John Gilbert. We met him for the first time a few days ago, and then only relatively briefly — hardly enough time to build sufficient enmity to dispose of him.'

‘Your mother has been engaged to the deceased's father for how long?'

‘I don't understand the significance of the question, detective.'

Strachan produced another smug smile.

‘You're not required to grapple with a question's significance, Mr Power. It would be more useful if you simply answered it.'

‘Our mother and Peter Gilbert have had a long-standing arrangement.'

‘An interesting choice of words, Mr Power. I would prefer, on the whole, to conduct this interview in less eccentric surroundings. Perhaps I could call at your house this evening.'

‘Well, I don't know if that will suit.'

‘Let me rephrase that for you. I will call on you this evening.'

With that, he turned away and walked back to the place where John Gilbert had lain. The body was being loaded into a van parked nearby.

‘That didn't go well,' Brian said. ‘I really don't like those bastards. They think we're involved in this, don't they?'

‘Either that. or they're deliberately trying to put the wind up us.'

‘Well, I'd say mission accomplished, on that score.'

Mother returned soon after 7.00 p.m. I picked at the remains of Christmas lunch. The look on Mother's face suggested that she found my appetite reprehensible, even though I had two performances to give the following day, and neither the demands of my stomach nor the demands of the theatre would halt in some sort of misguided homage to the late John Gilbert.

She had little to report. The police had conducted a thorough search of the Gilbert house, and had found nothing that might explain John Gilbert's disappearance or his death. They had turned his bedroom upside down, and took some material away in boxes. They didn't say what those materials were. The most unsettling thing, Mother said, was that the police made no secret of the fact that victims tended to be murdered by people close to them, and certainly by people they knew. The implications for both Peter and Cloris were unpleasantly obvious.

‘Those implications apply to us, too, Mother,' I said. ‘Until the culprit is unmasked, we're all persons of interest.'