The Touch (47 page)

Jade waited for several minutes, then reached into the tiny drawer beside the bed and took out the gauze muzzle and the bottle of chloroform. When she put the muzzle over his mouth and nose and started to drip the fluid on to it, he began to struggle, but the laudanum held him still enough until the anesthetic took effect and he went completely limp. A few more drops to make sure, then Jade let the muzzle slip from his face, busy unearthing a heavy leather jacket from beneath the bed. Working with the wiry strength of a woman in the pink of health, she maneuvered his arms and trunk into the device, buckled its straps tightly across his back and attached it by other straps to the iron struts connecting the top of the bed to the foot. After which she took stout leather cuffs and wrapped them tightly around his ankles, buckled them and tied them to the bed frame.

All of this was done in a way that saw Sam O’Donnell fixed in a semi-recumbent posture, his shoulders and upper chest elevated on several hard bolsters so that, if he had been conscious, he would have looked down on himself lying on the bed. One last task: Jade took a needle and thread, picked up one eyelid, pulled it back until it touched the brow, then sewed one to the other with a dozen quick stitches. She sewed the second eye open.

Around the room she went to light all the lamps, their wicks trimmed to give off brilliant flames without any smoke. She dressed herself in her ordinary black trousers and jacket, and sat on the chair to wait. He was breathing, but stertorously, and the open eyes were oblivious, unseeing. It took half an hour for him to rouse, which he did retching. But he hadn’t eaten since lunch time and his digestion was excellent, so the retching remained dry.

He came to stupidly, thrashing vainly for leverage until his eyes encountered Jade sitting on the chair. Quietening, he let his hands and fingers fiddle inside the home-made straitjacket, wondering fuzzily why he couldn’t seem to free them from restraint. In all his life he had never seen a garment like the one that now wrapped him around from neck to waist and confined his arms inside sleeves that crossed over each other, blind ends sewn together so there was no way out. Nor could he free his legs, their ankles tethered to the bottom of the bed. Or blink his eyes—why couldn’t he blink his eyes?

“What?” he gasped, trying to focus on Jade. “What?”

She rose to her feet and stood over him. “You have to answer, Sam O’Donnell.”

“What? What?”

“It is too soon,” she said, and returned to the chair.

Only when he opened his mouth to scream did she move again. She popped a little cork ball between his lips, then tied a piece of cloth across his mouth to keep the ball inside it. Screaming was impossible; he had to save all his energy to breathe through his straining, flaring nostrils.

Back to the bed came Jade with a thin filleting knife. “You ruined my baby,” she said, fingering the knife. “You took an innocent little child and raped her, Sam O’Donnell.” She sneered. “Oh, yes, I know what you’d say! That she asked for it, that she wanted it. And her with the mind of a little child. You raped an innocent, defenseless child, and you will pay.”

Frantic mumblings poured from his gagged mouth while his head rocked from side to side and his body heaved, but Jade took no notice. She lifted the knife, passed it many times in front of his gaze, and smiled the smile of the tiger.

His horrified, bulging eyes could only watch—what had she done to them, that he couldn’t close them? Instead of closing them, he had to follow her movement as she went down the bed two feet and picked up his genitals in her left hand. She took a long time to perform the amputation, teasing his flesh with the knife, beading a red bubble, withdrawing, teasing again, cutting off the scrotum first, then the penis as he thrashed and silently howled his anguish to nothing, to no one. Jade let her grisly trophy bleed out on to his chest, then stepped back, penis and scrotum in her left hand, the knife in her right dripping blood on to the floor. Blood spurted, but not with the crazy jet of a severed arm or leg; powerless, Sam O’Donnell could only look at the red pit in his groin where his genitals had grown and watch his life force drain away until sight was stripped from his still open eyes.

All night Jade sat holding her sticky prize while Anna’s seducer slowly bled to death. Only when light stole through the cracks in the shutters did she move, get up from the chair and go to the bed to look down on the ravaged face of Sam O’Donnell, his eyes rolled back in his head, the gag soaked with his saliva, tears and snot.

Then she left the room, closed the door behind her and looked for the dog. There! Stiff and stark, it lay beside the poisoned meat she had left for it. Goodbye, Sam. Goodbye, Rover.

She took the snake path down to Kinross and walked into the police station to slap the knife and the genitals on the counter.

“I have killed Sam O’Donnell,” she said to the paralyzed constable on duty, “because he raped my baby Anna.”

HOW DOES an ordinary sergeant of the country division of the New South Wales Police go about this? asked Sergeant Stanley Thwaites of himself as he stared at the jellified mess on the station counter, more fascinated by it than by the knife or the Chinese girl, now sitting on a bench in the corner. The testicles in their sack were nondescript, whereas the penis was unmistakably what it was. Finally his eyes lifted and turned to Jade, whose head was down, her hands folded peacefully in her lap. Of course he knew who she was: Anna Kinross’s nursemaid. Patiently waiting outside St. Andrew’s every Sunday for Lady Kinross to reappear with her mental daughter in tow. He knew her name was Jade Wong.

“Are you going to give us any trouble, Jade?” he asked.

She looked up, smiled. “No, Sergeant.”

“If I leave the manacles off, will you try to get away?”

“No, Sergeant.”

Sighing, he went to the wall and plucked the telephone earpiece from its cradle, then depressed the cradle several times. “Put me through to Lady Kinross, Aggie,” he shouted.

Too public, he thought; Aggie listens in to everything.

“This is Sergeant Thwaites. Lady Kinross, please.”

When Elizabeth came on the line he simply asked if he could come and see her immediately. Let Aggie stew a while longer!

He assembled his party efficiently; if there was a body, he would need at least two other men—oh, and Doc Burton just in case Sam O’Donnell was still alive. Kinross had no coroner, that function relegated to Dr. Parsons in Bathurst, where the district courts were located.

“There’s been an accident at Kinross House, Doc,” he said above the sound of Aggie’s heavy breathing. “I’ll meet you at the cable car—no, there isn’t time for breakfast.”

So the party set off bearing the hollow covered stretcher of the dead, Jade in their midst, to find Doc Burton waiting grumpily at the terminus; while they ascended, Thwaites informed the doctor of Jade’s confession and the proof she had slapped down on the police station counter. Flabbergasted, Doc stared at Jade as if he had never seen her before, but she still looked what he had always thought she was: a loyal and loving Chinese servant.

They went first to the house, where Elizabeth received them.

“Jade!” she exclaimed, bewildered. “What’s the matter?”

“I killed Sam O’Donnell,” Jade said calmly. “He raped my baby Anna, so I killed him. Then I went to the police station and gave myself up.”

There was a chair nearby; Elizabeth sank on to it.

“We’ll have to look, Lady Kinross. Whereabouts, Jade?”

“In a shed in the backyard, Sergeant. I’ll show you.”

The dog lay dead not far from the red door. “Its name was Rover,” Jade said, poking it with a foot. “I poisoned it.” No fear or remorse on her face, she led the way inside.

Only one of the two constables had had breakfast; that he lost the moment he saw the contents of the bed, which had soaked up Sam O’Donnell’s blood so greedily that the only traces on the floor had dripped off Jade’s knife. The smell had worsened, incense and old excreta now intermingled with stale blood. Hand over his mouth, Doc Burton leaned over the body briefly.

“He’s dead as a doornail,” said the doctor, and remembered a word from student days. “Exsanguinated.”

“Ex-what?”

“Bled to death, Stan. Bled to death.”

Another huge sigh erupted from the sergeant. “Well, there’s no mystery involved, as the murderer has confessed. If you’re happy to write a report for the coroner in Bathurst, Doc, then I suggest we slide him into this here dead man’s stretcher and take him to Marcus Cobham’s funeral parlor. He’ll have to be buried quick or all of Kinross will smell him. No air in here.” He turned to Jade, who hadn’t taken her eyes off Sam O’Donnell, nor stopped smiling. “Jade, are you sure you killed him? Now think before you answer, because there are witnesses.”

“Yes, Sergeant Thwaites, I killed him.”

“What about the—er—missing bits at the station?” asked Doc Burton, whose own private parts felt numb, shrunken.

The sergeant rubbed the side of his nose reflectively. “I daresay that as they belong to him, they should go to Marcus as well. Can’t be stuck on again, but they’re still his.”

“If he really did molest Anna, he deserves this,” said Doc.

“That we have to find out. All right, Doc, you and the boys take the body back down the mountain. I’m taking Jade to see Lady Kinross and try to get to the bottom of this.” One hand detained Constable Ross. “When it’s done, Bert, better go out to O’Donnell’s camp by the dam and see what you can find. Like evidence that he knew Miss Anna. After that, all of you can take turns to question everybody in Kinross.”

“They’ll know,” Doc Burton said.

“Of course they’ll know! What difference does it make?”

Jade walked beside Sergeant Thwaites across the backyard and led him into the house through a service door, thence to the library, where Elizabeth waited. This was the first time she had ever used Alexander’s domain for her own purposes, but somehow she couldn’t bear to see Jade’s face in the brighter light of the other rooms. The sergeant too felt the significance of the business, and was grateful for the dimness.

Jade sat on a straight chair between Elizabeth and Stanley Thwaites, her face enquiring.

“You say that Sam O’Donnell molested Miss Anna Kinross,” the sergeant began, “but how do you know that for certain, Jade?”

“Because Anna knew the name of his dog. Rover.”

“That’s pretty thin sort of evidence.”

“Not if you know Anna,” Jade answered. “She doesn’t learn names unless she knows people awfully well.”

“She never gave a name to her attacker, Lady Kinross, did she?” Thwaites asked.

“No, she did not. She referred to him as ‘nice man.’ ”

“So the only thing you had to go on was the name of his dog? Rover? It’s about as common a name for a dog as Fido.”

“A blue cattle dog, Sergeant. When Anna saw Mr. Summers’s blue cattle dog, she called it Rover. Its name is Bluey. Sam O’Donnell’s blue cattle dog was called Rover,” said Jade firmly.

“The breed is quite new,” Elizabeth ventured. “In fact, as I didn’t know this Sam O’Donnell or his dog, I thought that Mr. Summers’s Bluey was the only specimen in Kinross.”

“There must be something else,” said Thwaites, despairing.

Jade shrugged, unimpressed. “It was all the proof I needed. I know my baby Anna and I know that man raped her.”

Though he persisted for a further half an hour, Sergeant Thwaites could get no more from Jade.

“I can hold her in the Kinross cells tonight,” he said to Elizabeth as he prepared to leave, “but tomorrow I’m going to have to send her to Bathurst, where she will be charged. There are facilities for women prisoners at the Bathurst Gaol. You’ll have to apply to the Bathurst authorities for bail, but there’s no resident judge, just three stipendary magistrates who can charge her, but can’t otherwise deal with a capital crime. What I do suggest, Lady Kinross, is that you engage a legal firm to help you and Miss Wong.” Sudden formality.

“Thank you, Sergeant. You’ve been very kind.” Elizabeth shook his hand, then stood at the front door watching his burly bulk roll across the lawn toward the cable car, Jade’s slender little figure walking passively beside him.

A telephone call to the Kinross Hotel told her that Miss Ruby was on her way up the mountain.

“Jesus, Elizabeth!” Ruby cried, erupting into the library, where Elizabeth was still ensconced. “The news is all over town that Jade cut off Sam O’Donnell’s private parts, stuffed them in his mouth and forced him to eat them before giving him the Chinese Death of a Thousand Cuts! Because he raped Anna!”

“The essence is true, Ruby,” said Elizabeth calmly, “though the deed wasn’t quite as macabre as that. Macabre enough. She did cut off his private parts, but took them to the police station and confessed to murder. She’s convinced that it was Sam O’Donnell got at Anna. Did you know him?”

“Only in passing. He never drank at the hotel—didn’t drink at all, people are saying. Theodora Jenkins is a cot case—he was painting her house, and she thinks the sun rises out of his arse. Denies he could have had anything to do with Anna. A real gentleman, wouldn’t even come inside to wash his hands. The C of E parson is up in arms too, prepared to go to the stake that Sam O’Donnell was an absolutely upright citizen.”

Ruby’s hair was falling down, so hastily had she dealt with it, and she hadn’t stopped to lace her corsets; did I not know what a wonderful woman this is, thought Elizabeth, horribly detached, I would deem her a blowsy tart, mutton dressed up as lamb.

“Then there will be trouble in all directions,” she said.

“It’s dividing the town down the middle already, Elizabeth. The miners and their wives are on Jade’s side, all the spinsters, widows and Bible-bashers have lined up behind Sam O’Donnell. The refinery and workshop people are going either way. Not everyone has forgotten that he tried to stir up trouble here last July and August,” said Ruby, rubbing a shaking hand across her face. “Oh, Elizabeth, tell me that Jade killed the right man!”

“I am convinced of it because I know how close Jade’s always been to Anna. Every look, every word, every gesture that Anna makes tell Jade stories that even I cannot plumb.”