The Serpent's Sting (27 page)

‘Yes, I'm here. It's Roger, isn't it?'

‘Roger?' He seemed confused. ‘Oh, that Roger. No, he's fine, or he will be, although I don't think he'll be doing any more stage work. His shoulder's a bit of a mess, apparently. He probably won't have full movement in it ever again. Still, he should have retired years ago. No, that's not what I was ringing about. You need to come in to the theatre this afternoon. Mr Parnell wants to talk to you.'

Given that Wallace Parnell managed the Tivoli, and that he could make or break a career, it would have been unwise to refuse the meeting.

‘I'll be there,' I said, and saying nothing more, Percy hung up. I thought this abruptness boded ill, although on reflection it was perfectly consistent with Percy's reluctance to offer praise. He would have read the papers. He just couldn't bring himself to acknowledge that I was making a bit of a splash.

I put the handset back, and thought about going into the front room where Mother would now be. I decided I couldn't face a conversation with her, and instead went upstairs to shave, bathe, and dress. I left the house an hour later, and walked to the Carlton Police Station at the southern end of Drummond Street. I wasn't expecting a guard of honour, but I also wasn't expecting to have to deal with the oaf on the front desk. I explained that I was there to provide a statement regarding the incident that had taken place the previous day.

‘What incident?' he asked.

‘I was shot.'

‘You don't look like someone who's been shot.'

I pulled my collar down to fully reveal the raw burn on my neck. He snorted.

‘Air rifle, was it?'

I had to discipline myself against correcting this dim-witted dolt. He was at least forty-five, and still a constable. I wanted to tread carefully, because my place in the public's affection was far from secure, and with two bodies and a tranche of pornographic drawings coalescing in my imagination as a sort of sword of Damocles, I felt vulnerable to scandal.

‘I wonder if I might talk to someone above the rank of constable?'

This didn't strike quite the bland note I was striving for, and the constable curled his lip disagreeably before saying, ‘Wait here, your majesty.'

He took my request into a back room and soon re-emerged with a younger but senior officer.

‘Ah, Mr Power. I was told to expect you. Do come through.'

I followed him into a dingy little room, which I at first thought must be the place where low-life was interviewed, but which turned out to be this man's office, and one of the rewards of seniority. The nineteenth-century building hadn't caught up with the 1940s. His name was Senior Constable Murchison, and he was perfectly pleasant. He took my statement, typing it laboriously as I spoke. When I'd finished, he gave it to me to read, and, unsure of the etiquette around correcting his numerous spelling errors, I simply signed it.

‘It seems like a straightforward case of a nutter having a pop at someone in the public eye. The world is full to overflowing with crazy people, Mr Power. It won't come to trial. It's open and shut. He'll plead guilty, and go down for attempted murder. He might die, in which case there'll be a coronial inquest — but again, there's no mystery here. Who knows why he hated you? Envy? Some religious objection to you dressing up as a woman? He might tell us, but I doubt it. You're quite sure you'd never seen him before yesterday afternoon?'

‘Never,' I lied.

‘At any rate, you're lucky he was such a nong. If he'd known anything about guns, you'd be dead man.'

Senior Constable Murchison smiled as if he believed this to be reassuring and not horrifying.

‘Thank you for coming in. If we have any further questions, we know where to find you. This will only be complicated if Mr Gregory Marlow — that's the bloke's name, by the way — pleads not guilty, and I can't see that happening. There were dozens of witnesses.'

I left the Carlton Police Station wondering at how low-key the interview had been. I was used to dealing with the police at a fever-pitch of tension, I supposed because I'd never been a victim — mostly I'd been a suspect.

I found Percy Wavel in his office at the theatre. He looked very pleased with himself.

‘I brought the house down last night,' he said.

‘I suppose it's been a while since anybody's applauded your arse.'

‘It's a mistake to underestimate the Wavel arse. I said that to Mrs Wavel last night. She remains unconvinced.'

I was unused to the lighter side of Percy Wavel, and it made me uncomfortable.

‘Mr Parnell doesn't want you to play Mother Goose in Ballarat. In fact, he wants you out of pantomime altogether.'

I knew Wallace Parnell could be a difficult man, but I was shocked that he might want to dismiss me. Wasn't all publicity good publicity? Did he think that yesterday's incident reflected badly somehow on his company? God knew he was sensitive to public opinion. It had been at his insistence that every Tivoli show had to have some frightful, patriotic theme, lest he be accused of making money out of vulgar trivialities at a time of crisis. I, for one, couldn't anymore hear Jenny Howard singing ‘A Brown Slouch Hat (with the side turned up)', without wanting to strangle her.

‘When can I talk to Mr Parnell?'

‘I'm afraid you can't. He's too busy. I've been told what to tell you.'

‘I see.'

‘You've turned white, Will. Are you all right?'

‘Why does Mr Parnell want to fire me? It wasn't my fault that Roger got shot.'

Wavel laughed.

‘Mr Parnell doesn't want to fire you. He wants to make money out of you. If there's one thing Wallace Parnell knows, it's how to make money, and to quote him, putting you in skirts to prance around a stage in Ballarat is like throwing money into a dunny can.'

‘I'm not really following you, Percy.'

‘Mr Parnell is selling you. Well, not selling — more like leasing you out.'

My heart began to skip a few beats.

‘J.C. Williamson's have bought
Private Lives
, and Parnell has been approached by them to offer you the part of Elyot. I say offer, but that implies you're in a position to turn it down. Mr Parnell has already accepted on your behalf, and negotiated the fee. You're costing Williamson's a pretty penny. You won't see much of that, of course, although you'll be handsomely paid — twice what you're getting now.'

I'd have agreed to play Elyot for nothing, but to preserve some semblance of independent thinking, I made the smallest of protests by saying, ‘Do I have any say in this at all?'

‘None. Did you read the contract you signed recently?'

‘I ran my eye over it.'

‘Perhaps you'll recall, then, that Mr Parnell effectively owns you for the next three years. He owns a house, a car, a piano, and William Power. And he can rent you out, as it were, when it suits him to do so, and it suits him to do so now. I must say, Will, Mr Parnell is very happy with the return so far on that expensive spread in
The Listener-In
.'

‘How much are Williamson's paying?'

‘That, I'm afraid, is none of your business. To mollify them, he's throwing in Angus Winneke to do the sets and the costumes, and, believe me, that's some mollification. Winneke is a genius. Williamson's are almost as excited about him as they are about you.'

I was experiencing a mild ecstasy. Even so, I was conscious of the shadow being cast by looming figures from my private life. Success, real success, was tantalisingly close; the means to wreck it were equally close. Would the fates intervene vindictively and tear me down? Why would they, though? It wasn't as if I'd waded through slaughter to this throne, in Thomas Gray's immortal words. I'd come to this point honestly, hadn't I? Gregory Marlow mightn't agree, but Gregory Marlow was insane. All this flashed through my mind in a few seconds. In that time, Percy had reached into a drawer and withdrawn a hefty script.

‘This is yours. Rehearsals begin at the Comedy Theatre in two weeks from today. I can't tell you who's playing the other parts. It's scheduled to open at the beginning of February. Break a leg.'

I took the script of
Private Lives
, and held it to my chest as I stood up to leave.

‘There's a note inside about whom to talk to at Williamson's. They want to see you tomorrow. I hope that black eye doesn't scare them off.'

I was so happy I was incapable of coherent speech.

‘You haven't asked who's replacing you in
Mother Goose
. You don't care, do you?'

‘No, I don't care. I'm looking forward to wearing trousers on stage.'

‘Like I said, Will, break a leg.'

A broken leg might have rescued me from a great deal of trouble.

Chapter Eight

ANOTHER BAD TURN

WITH MY SPIRITS SOARING
, I resisted the temptation of opening Noël Coward's script. Before I allowed myself the luxury of savouring Elyot's lines, I needed to see Roger Teddles. Failure to visit the man who'd taken the bullet intended for me would have been high-handed at the very least. I found him propped up in bed in a crowded and noisy ward in the Royal Melbourne Hospital. This was convenient, because where it sat on the corner of Swanston and Lonsdale Streets was close to the Tivoli. He looked unwell, but not unhappy. There was a woman seated by the bedside, and she was holding his hand. I presumed she was Mrs Teddles. Roger managed a smile when he saw me. He introduced Celia, his wife, who smiled at me, too, so it seemed that neither of them felt any antipathy towards me. Indeed, Celia Teddles expressed some concern about the burn line on my neck, and recommended a regular dousing with carbolic.

‘That could turn nasty,' she said. ‘The neighbour two doors down, a mechanic he was, cut his arm, and he just bandaged it up with some old rag. It turned septic, and he was dead within the fortnight.'

‘Go and rustle us up a cup of tea, will you, love?'

Celia stood up, and on her way past me, leaned in, squinted, and said again, ‘Nasty. You really want to be careful with that.'

When Celia had disappeared in search of tea, Roger said, ‘The police have been in. I didn't say anything about the heroin business.'

I was puzzled, and must have looked it.

‘Well, I mean, one day you're asking me about drugs, and the next day some bloke shows up and wants to shoot you. I'm just joining some dots.'

It seemed pointless trying to explain that one had nothing to do with the other, and Roger wouldn't have believed me anyway, so I let it go.

‘I'm very sorry you got hurt, Roger. It's a bastard of a thing. You're not in pain, are you?'

‘I am, actually. There's a shortage of morphine, so the bloody nurses won't give me any until I start screaming the place down, which I feel like doing right now. It's bloody awful.'

‘But you'll make a full recovery?'

‘The shoulder will never be the same. My acting days are over. Stage acting, that is. I might be able to get some radio work.'

‘How are you off for money? You said your wife had an annuity.'

‘Mr Parnell has been bloody generous, Will. I thought he was a Pommy prick, but he's looked after me and Celia.'

‘He's quite sentimental about his performers.'

I forbore telling Roger that Mr Parnell's generosity might have been influenced by the swelling of his coffers as a result of his leasing me to J.C. Williamson's. I was suddenly oppressed by the smells and echoes of the hospital ward, and I asked Roger to pass on my apologies to Mrs Teddles, but I really had to go. He was a little miffed at the brevity of my visit, but we weren't friends and we had nothing in common outside the theatre. I wished him well and I left.

Outside the hospital, I opened the script and read: Cast: Elyot, Amanda, Victor, Sybil. Williamson's might bring an English actress over to play Amanda, although this was unlikely, given the danger involved in taking to the oceans. Who'd play the thankless parts of Victor and Sybil? Oh, it didn't matter. I was to be Elyot, and that was all that mattered.

As soon as I reached the Melbourne General Cemetery, my spirits came crashing down to earth. The mystery surrounding John Gilbert's death, and his role in his mother's death, pushed over hideous little dominoes in my head, and each tile that fell clattered out a sort of Morse code that spelled all the individual failures of the past year. The last of these imagined tiles tapped out the name of Private Anthony Dervian. Geraldine Buchanan had killed him. This astonished me now more forcefully than it had when she'd first told me. Now that I knew that she was working for Intelligence, did that make Dervian little more than an acceptable casualty of war? The US army had snaffled his body with the collusion of our police, and no doubt they'd create a credible, and tragic, and possibly even heroic, death — all for the benefit of his wheelchair-bound mother. It wouldn't do for her to know that he'd died in a grubby, small-beer brothel in Melbourne, with heroin, or some other drug, coursing through his veins.

When I entered Mother's house, I sensed that it was empty. Both she and Brian must have been at Drummond Street. I knew that I needed to talk to Brian about the amount of time he was spending with Cloris. He couldn't afford to begin an affair with her; that would be unseemly as well as unwise. Unfortunately, Brian wasn't a stranger to either of those qualities.

I was at a loose end, so I thought how marvellous it would be to lie on my bed and read through
Private Lives
. I took the stairs two at a time, and threw open my bedroom door with a flourish. Stretched out on my bed, with his hands behind his head, was a man in a cheap suit. He hadn't bothered to take off his shoes, so the possibility of some sort of urban ordure being transferred to the bedspread was high.

‘Mr Power, I presume?'

No sense of menace came off this man, so I wasn't afraid — just very, very annoyed.

‘Would you please take your feet off my bed, and who the hell are you, and how did you get in here?'

He swung his feet off the bed and sat on its edge.

‘My name is Gary, and the back door was open.'

‘What's your full name, and the back door was not open.'

‘It was by the time I'd picked the lock, and Gary is more than enough for our purpose.'

I recognised in the educated roundness of his vowels that he was a product of the Army Intelligence finishing school.

‘I was expecting to see you in my dressing room.'

‘The best-laid plans,' he said lazily. ‘I'm here now, and I'm here to claim the favour that James Fowler spoke to you about. I was at the stage door, by the way. I saw the whole thing. The papers went a bit overboard, don't you think?'

There was a superciliousness in his tone that revealed the role Intelligence had played in the placing of those articles.

‘You wrote those pieces, didn't you?'

‘No. Not me. I'm no wordsmith. Nigella Fowler wrote them. She wanted me to let you know that.'

He drew his fingers across his neat Ronald Colman moustache. This might have been an elegant gesture, except that it focussed attention on his dirty fingernails. He was an odd melange of the neat and the seedy. His shoes were scuffed, but his suit was well pressed; his shirt was rumpled, with the first three buttons undone to reveal a bony, sparsely lawned sternum; his moustache was carefully managed, but his hair could have done with a wash and a trim.

I was deflated by the news that my publicity had been orchestrated by Intelligence. Puffery put about by the theatre seemed less tainted than that placed by Intelligence.

‘The name Albert Taylor won't mean anything to you, Will, but it means a great deal to us, and you are the last person to have had contact with him — at least, we think you are.'

‘I have no idea what you're talking about.'

‘On Christmas Day, two American soldiers came to this house for lunch. There was Private Dervian, now deceased, and Private Harlen Quist.'

He paused, so I gave him what he wanted.

‘That's correct.'

‘The thing is, Will, only one American soldier came to lunch that day. Harlen Quist is an absurd alias of Albert Taylor. We're not one hundred per cent sure of this. You can give us certainty.'

He pulled a photograph from his pocket and handed it to me.

‘Is that the man who called himself Harlen Quist?'

The man in the photograph wasn't wearing a uniform, but the face that stared out at me was definitely Harlen Quist's.

‘That's him. No doubt about it. Is that the favour?'

Gary shook his head slowly.

‘That's a small down-payment on the favour. Let me tell you about Albert Taylor, and how lucky you are not to be as dead as Anthony Dervian. Taylor is sad proof that our recruitment filters don't work as well as they should.'

‘He's in Intelligence?'

Gary raised his hand to indicate that he would prefer to finish his monologue without interruptions.

‘He looks younger than he is. He's twenty-nine, and can easily pass for twenty-two. He came to us from civilian life, not from the army. This was well before the war. He was smart and ambitious, and he proved himself a capable,' he struggled for the right word, ‘… employee. He spoke German, French, and Italian. He has one of those brains that take up languages with astonishing ease, and he has a gift for fluency. You don't come across many people in this part of the world with that facility, and his superiors, foolishly, made allowances for poor behaviour on account of it. Australians think being able to speak a second language, let alone a third and fourth, is akin to magic.

‘He started quite well, but he soon developed a reputation for unreliability. He missed training exercises and briefings, and eventually he was given an ultimatum — clean up your act, or be faced with disciplinary action that could include a prison sentence under the Crimes Act. He cleaned up his act, and for two years he was an exemplary member of the unit. People forgot that he had started badly. Early this year, he walked out of Victoria Barracks, and he hasn't been seen since. We don't think he took anything with him — no files are missing — but he has a phenomenal memory, and he knows things that would be of interest to our enemies. We don't believe that he is a traitor. Yet.'

Gary cleared his throat, as if what he was about to say was slightly embarrassing.

‘We think he might be a drug addict.'

He indicated that I could ask a question.

‘That's all very interesting, but it's an imaginative leap to get from Harlen Quist to Albert Taylor. How was that made?'

‘No leap required. Private Dervian kept a diary. The Yanks found it among his things. He fancied himself as a writer. We won't be passing it on to his mother — there's not a lot in it that would make her proud. He was young, and far from home, and sex and drugs were an intoxicating mix. He dresses it all up in purple prose, but what it comes down to is that he fucked a few girls and tried some marijuana; nothing more than that. The diary wouldn't warrant a second look, except that one afternoon he met an Australian bloke at the house in Fitzgibbon Street, and this bloke introduced himself as Albert. No second name. Just Albert. This Albert took Dervian under his wing, and maybe introduced him to something stronger than Mary Jane. He certainly introduced him to his girlfriend, Geraldine Buchanan, and Dervian was swept off his feet. He'd been at the house to buy the favours of the other woman.'

‘Mrs Ferrell?'

‘No. The other one.'

‘Caroline.'

‘Correct.'

Gary was obviously maintaining Geraldine's cover by not telling me everything. I let him go on without challenging his assertion that she was Albert Taylor's girlfriend.

‘You feature in his last entries, in a supporting role. Albert got it into his head one night, under the influence of God knows what, that he should dress up as a Yank soldier to meet his girlfriend after her show. That's when they met you, and you invited them for Christmas lunch. Apparently, Albert thought this was hilarious. They didn't intend to come, but Dervian notes, in a particularly florid passage, that Miss Buchanan discovered that you were a private-inquiry agent, and that the interest you were showing in her was more likely to be professional than personal — you can make of that what you will. So she made herself scarce.'

‘She didn't discover anything. I told her that I'd done a bit of work as a private detective.'

‘Well, she was spooked, and left what was probably quite a remunerative market for her drug peddling.'

I felt obliged to leap to the defence of the company.

‘I saw no evidence of drug taking in the
Mother Goose
company. None whatsoever.'

I realised as I said this that I was buying into this Gary person's fictional rendering of Geraldine. Of course she wasn't peddling drugs. I imagined that she'd been put there by Intelligence to uncover who the real dealers were, and if performing the role of Albert Taylor's girlfriend was necessary to bring him in, and perhaps even bigger fish with him, well, that's what she'd do. They struck it lucky when they'd recruited Geraldine. Not every girl would be so sexually accommodating, even for the good of her country in a time of war.