‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that, old dear,’ said Jonathan. ‘Someone might mistake your malady for food poisoning.’
Rebecca slurped her soup. Nothing was going to distract her from eating. While Jonathan and Leong continued to trade insults, the others silently sipped their sherry and averted their eyes. It started to reach a crescendo when Jonathan became equally shrill and brought up Leong’s past indiscretions.
‘Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. You are a whore! How many men have you bedded in the past year? How many affairs have you had, not even caring if I knew or not? And you have the temerity to have a go at me for having an innocent flirt with Gary. Well, I will tell everyone here and now, on my mother’s grave, I’ve been true to you. I haven’t slept with anyone else since we’ve been together. I’ve been loyal!’
Rebecca thought it was now getting awkward, when Nick interjected with, ‘There’ll be tears before bedtime if this keeps up.’
Jonathan and Leong both looked at Nick, rather stunned. Leong snapped back, ‘Well, that’s a bloody stupid thing to say.’
Jonathan burst into tears.
With that, Leong rose from the table. ‘I’m checking on the next course.’
Rebecca, having finished her soup, rose from her chair and yelled after Leong, ‘You’re a disgrace, Leong. How dare you treat Jonathan so appallingly!’
Leong ignored Rebecca’s indignation and continued to walk out of the dining room.
Rebecca staggered around the table and flung her arms around Jonathan, saying, ‘Don’t worry about that bastard. You’re better than him. He doesn’t deserve you!’
Jonathan used his napkin to wipe away his tears and to blow his nose. ‘Thank you, Rebecca dear.’
Rebecca sensed an awkward silence, and lost for what to say next, she said, ‘Anyone for charades before the next course?’
There was a collective groan around the table.
Rebecca unwrapped her arms from around Jonathan, declaring, ‘Well, I know one thing—if I don’t get more food soon to soak up this booze, I’m in trouble.’
Rebecca staggered back to her chair as the soup bowls were cleared and the seafood compote was brought to the table.
Rebecca noticed Gary’s eyes on her. She refused to look at him.
The room was quiet as they used the crab crackers to break open the crab legs. Dorothy was the first to try the broth.
‘Oh my goodness,’ she sputtered. ‘This is dreadful.’ She lunged for her water glass and gulped down the whole glass of water and declared, ‘There’s something wrong with this broth!’
Francois took a small sip and exclaimed to Leong, who had just returned to the room, ‘Are you trying to kill us? This is disgusting!’
Leong quickly tasted the broth for himself. He turned crimson and managed to splutter, ‘But I don’t understand. I had only just tasted it for seasoning.’ He rose from his chair and stormed off to the kitchen, yelling, ‘What have you done to my seafood? None of you will ever work anywhere in the food industry again, not even as dish pigs!’
Leong’s yells could be heard clearly in the dining room. He was using every expletive under the sun, and it appeared that, rather than calming down, he was getting more worked up and insulting to his staff.
‘What do you think is in it?’ asked Dorothy.
‘Probably cayenne pepper—and a heap of it. That’s what it tastes like to me,’ said Nick, taking another tiny sip. ‘Leong probably gave instructions for more pepper after he tasted it, and some poor sod’s mistaken the cayenne for pepper. They are, after all, working in a foreign kitchen. Still, it is a terrible mistake. Something that should never happen.’
Thinking it would be a disappointingly long time until the next course arrived, Rebecca stood up and strolled over to the fireplace. She rested her hand on the mantel and gazed into the flames licking the slow-burning mallee roots.
As Rebecca looked down at the fire, she caught sight of a big toe. She looked up to see Gary’s dazzling white teeth.
‘Fires are wonderful things. I can gaze at them for hours. That’s one of the things I love about weekending up here. Open fires. Or lighting a bonfire in the paddock to get rid of all the old stuff,’ said Gary.
‘What about the environment?’ said Rebecca. ‘What about the destruction to native habitat from clearing trees, or worse, collecting dead wood? Do you know dead wood is the home to a whole host of native Australian animals, not to mention reptiles and insects?’ She knew she was conveniently ignoring the fact that she too loved wood fires and had an open fire at her own home.
‘You do impress me,’ said Gary ‘I didn’t realise you were a conservationist. You may be interested to know that I’ve planted over one thousand native species on my land in the past two years, Rebecca. I’ve a wood lot that I grow purely for my own firewood, and I selectively cull. I don’t collect dead wood. I understand its role in the ecosystem. Nonetheless, there is a certain amount of clearing I do have to do around my cottage to make sure that it’s bushfire safe in summer. That and wood from my wood lot is the stuff I burn in the open fire, not the fallen logs.’
‘Oh,’ said Rebecca, feeling chastened and once again confused as to why she went on the attack and tried to find fault in the first place.
There was a moment’s silence as they both looked into the fire. Gary said, ‘Sorry to hear about you and Rodney.’ She quickly looked at him to see if she could read his expression. He looked compassionate enough. In fact, she noticed how gentle his face was.
‘Oh, don’t be,’ Rebecca answered. ‘It was for the best. It just didn’t work out.’
At that point, she was dying to ask Gary about his own circumstances. But she couldn’t think of a way to phrase it that didn’t seem either too forward or too desperate. But she needn’t have worried.
‘Yes, both partners don’t always want the same things. I haven’t found any woman yet that wants what I want,’ said Gary.
Rebecca couldn’t help herself. ‘What do you want?’
Just then, Dorothy came up. ‘Apparently Leong’s sorted the kitchen staff out. It was cayenne pepper. It was that poor Will Oliver’s fault. He’s been with Leong for ten years, but Leong just sacked him. He’s gone. But the next course is ready.’
The three of them resumed their seats, and the rest of the meal was eaten in a subdued atmosphere.
It was midnight before Rebecca fell into bed. She didn’t bother to take her makeup off or brush her teeth. She just threw her dress over the back of a chair and let her black superlift bra and black G-string fall to the floor.
Getting into bed in the raw, she couldn’t stop thinking of Gary and wondering if he would have admired her new underwear. She hadn’t gotten to speak to him at all for the rest of the night. Dorothy had monopolised Gary, and then he had left about eleven thirty, when the State Emergency Service blokes had phoned and said the ford was down and they could get through to help out. With polite goodbyes and a thank you, Gary was gone.
In what was left of the evening, the rest of the group was entertained by Jonathan’s drunkenness. At one stage, there was a real possibility of Jonathan falling headfirst into the apple tart, and he would have done so if Leong hadn’t swiped the pie from under him just before Jonathan’s head hit the table.
During pudding, cheese, and chocolates, the conversations had to be conducted at a sufficient decibel level to be heard over Jonathan’s snoring.
The Cottage
Rebecca awoke to a cacophony of magpies and kookaburras in the blue gums outside her French doors.
Despite the heavy curtains being drawn, she could see daylight teasing through their folds. She leaned over to the bedside table to look at her watch. It was nearly seven in the morning. The limo was due at ten twenty. She calculated she could take a nice long walk to check out the surrounding gardens, vineyards, bush, and orchards and still have time for a hot shower before breakfast.
She wondered what Gary was doing now. Had he been able to make his roof water
tight? She pulled open the curtains to reveal a foggy morning, more of the same. She could make out a sweeping lawn with a hedge of hydrangeas with hundreds of blue flowers edging the verandah.
Across the other side of the lawn, she could see wattle trees, which presumably gave Wattle House its name. The wattles were in bloom with their bright-yellow pom-pom flowers glowing through the mist. Rhododendrons were interspersed between the wattle trees, and Rebecca wondered what colour their blooms would be in spring, imaging that the display would be spectacular.
She pulled on her jeans, a T-shirt, an overly large red wool jumper, and a pair of socks. Rebecca always carried casual clothes when staying anywhere overnight, as she liked to go on early-morning walks to check out her surroundings and get a hint of exercise. She called them her long, muddy walks.
Rebecca had noticed a line of Wellington boots on the far edge of the front verandah when she arrived last night, and she thought one pair was bound to fit her. She had also noticed some well-oiled RM Williams Driza-Bone coats hanging in the front hallway. They were probably meant for guests, so surely it would be okay to borrow one.
As Rebecca stepped out onto the front verandah, having slipped on the longest Driza-Bone, the cold air hit. She guessed it was only a couple of degrees. Rebecca adored a winter’s day in the Adelaide Hills. Everything was a little bit magical. The heavy fog was not likely to burn off until at least ten o’clock.
She slipped on a pair of wellies that looked about right and made her way across the lawn and through the wattles and rhododendrons to the bush. A stand of ghost gums loomed out of the fog. The trunks of the gums were translucent, with large, vein-like branches. There were also stands of ribbon gums.
As Rebecca approached the ribbon gums, she could make out sections of bark hanging like spaghetti. They were planted closely together along the fence line and looked spindly in comparison to the ghost gums. She walked alongside them for a while, then turned to look back at the outline of Wattle House through the fog. It was an imposing building. She guessed the house was built in the style of the Regency Period. It definitely resembled Ayers House on North Terrace. She wondered if it, like Ayers House, had been designed by George Strickland Kingston.
The building had a deep verandah that wrapped itself around two sides of the building, finishing at one end with a curved wall that housed the bay window to the dining room, where they had enjoyed such a decadent dinner the night before.
On the verandah was a series of sea-grass chairs she imagined would be particularly inviting on a warm summer’s evening with a cold glass of Adelaide Hills pinot grigio, looking over the lawns to the bush beyond.
Rebecca continued on her walk, crossed over a dirt road, and came to an enormous cypress hedge that ran for about 600 metres, with a stand of pencil pines poking their way skyward from behind the hedge.
The smell of eucalyptus gave way to the smell of pine as Rebecca reached the end of the hedge and turned the corner.
The valley dipped down, and the fog now fell away and lay as a cloud below her. On the far side, undulating hills penetrated the fog. The hills were covered with an orderly patchwork of barren vines. Above, the sky was deep blue.
After a few minutes of taking the scene in, Rebecca brought herself back to the reality of the day. She needed to get on if she was going to complete her walk, shower, and breakfast before the car left.
Rebecca hurried on, crunching through the bracken of the bush, and walked down into the valley, following a little-used track. She estimated she’d been descending for about thirty minutes before she came to a fork in the track. As she contemplated whether to continue or simply go back the way she’d come, something caught her eye.
It was yellow, a colour that cut through the fog better than any other. Whatever it was appeared to be flapping. Rebecca walked toward it and eventually made out a large plastic tarpaulin stretched over the roof of a small cottage.
Her heart missed a beat. This must be Gary’s cottage.
She walked down the gravel pathway and stepped up onto the small wooden verandah. The verandah was only about two metres deep and about ten metres wide across the length of the building. Two threadbare, khaki-coloured canvas chairs sat on the verandah. A chipped and dirty mug was placed next to one of the chairs. The view from the verandah took in the surrounding bush. The area immediately adjacent to the cottage was cleared of trees and laid with rubble, except for a few clumps of ground where Gary had planted old man saltbush and myrtle wattle. There were native grasses scattered around the base of large boulders.
Rebecca knocked on the cottage’s wooden door. She heard someone move in the cottage before the door opened. Gary stood in the doorway with wet hair, holding a towel around his waist. It was obvious he hadn’t expected to see Rebecca. He looked momentarily stunned before he managed to stammer, ‘Hello,’ and then, ‘Won’t you please come in?’
Rebecca smiled, more to herself than at Gary, rather pleased to see so much of him, and slid past into the small and very sparsely furnished lounge. The room took on the yellow glow from the tarpaulin that was stretched over this section of the house, making the room lighter than what it would normally be at this time of the day. Despite the extra light, the room felt cosy. A fire was burning in the open fireplace. Mallee roots were piled in a large basket next to the hearth, with kindling and newspaper in an old fruit box. There were only two chairs in the room, both chocolate-brown leather club chairs. One had a turquoise blanket scrunched up on it, and Rebecca was struck by how the bright blue of the blanket lifted the browns of the room. The only other pieces of furniture were two side tables strategically placed next to each chair, a bookcase filled to overflowing to the right of the fireplace, and a standard lamp next to the chair closest to the bookcase. A large red Turkish rug lay on the floor. Rebecca thought how comforting it would be to curl up on one of the chairs, wrap herself in the turquoise blanket, and read a book under the light of the lamp and the glow of the fire.
While she was taking in the room, Gary had excused himself to quickly dress and was now back wearing a conservative grey suit, white shirt, black tie, and black winged brogues. His hair had been combed but was still a little dishevelled. Rebecca, surprised to see him in a suit, said the obvious, ‘Off to work?’
‘Yes, I had planned to take the day off and make a long weekend of it, but I received a call from work about half an hour ago. They need me in on a job that has just come up. There’s a few guys away at the moment, so I will just have to get to the roof and other jobs later. Hopefully I will still get the weekend. In the meantime, this tarp should do the trick and at least keep the place dry until I can get to it.’
‘Oh,’ said Rebecca, not quite sure what to say next. ‘I was just having an early-morning walk, and I stumbled across your place. I think the yellow tarpaulin gave it away.’
After an awkward silence, Gary said, ‘Look, I’m really sorry. I’d offer you a coffee or tea, but I have to get going, or I’ll be late.’
‘Sure, sure,’ said Rebecca, making a bolt to the door. ‘We must catch up sometime. Enjoy your policing.’ Not waiting for a goodbye, she took off back up the gravel path and retraced her steps.
Gary yelled out, ‘Goodbye, Rebecca.’ Rebecca heard but didn’t acknowledge his goodbye.
Just over an hour later, Rebecca had showered and dressed and was walking down the long corridor of Wattle House, wondering whether breakfast would be served in the dining room or if the building had a sunroom. It would be too cold to sit out on the verandah, although she imagined it would be beautiful in spring and summer to breakfast there.
Rebecca entered the dining room and found Dorothy, Francois, Nick, and Jonathan already seated and enjoying a fully cooked breakfast.
‘Mmm, that looks yummy,’ she said, helping herself to an enormous portion of eggs, bacon, and toast from the sideboard.
‘Where’s Leong?’
Jonathan replied, ‘Leong had to leave early to supervise the food prepar
ation for the program launch on Popeye. He told me before dinner last night that he hoped to be gone by six at the latest.’
With that, Jonathan rose from the table and wiped his mouth with his napkin and threw it on the plate. ‘Indeed, I’m off myself. This thing is going to start at eleven, and I want to get down and help Leong. Don’t want any stuff-ups like last night, do we? See you all there by eleven, and don’t be late!’
Jonathan headed out the door, and Nick yelled out after him, ‘Hey, wait up. I’ll come with you. I was going to wait and go in the limo, but I probably should check everything is going as per my instructions.’
‘Looks like all is forgiven, at least on Jonathan’s side,’ said Rebecca as she grabbed a piece of toast from one of the china toast racks on the table and poured herself a cup of tea from a pear-shaped Alessi teapot.
Rebecca began to daydream. She wondered when she would next see Gary. She knew she would see him again, but she would have to engineer a way that didn’t look too desperate. It was amazing what a turn-off desperation could be. Rebecca felt that this morning’s adventure had had an odour of desperation. She needed to be careful.
Popeye
The limousine turned up just before ten thirty, and Francois, Dorothy, and Rebecca seated themselves while the driver loaded their overnight bags.
Rebecca wore narrow-legged moleskin pants with polished brown ankle boots, a woollen black turtleneck jumper, a soft thigh-length alpaca jacket, and brown leather gloves.
They drove down to the city in relative silence, gazing out of the windows at the valleys and hills dotted with gums and occasional vines or fruit trees. It had stopped raining sometime late the night before, and while the creeks were still flowing swiftly, they were no longer raging torrents.
As the car swung around the tight bends on the descent, they could see, spreading out before them, the city and suburbs all the way to the sea. The weather was sunnier down on the plains. While it was still cool, there wasn’t the heavy cloud of the hills, and it would definitely be a few degrees warmer once they hit the suburbs.
The Popeye Murder Page 3