by Meg Keneally
Eveleigh, for once, was not sent reeling back from some document or other when Monsarrat entered. Nor was there any work in progress in front of him.
‘Monsarrat. Good morning. On time, I see, and that’s all to the good, as it happens. Thank you for your punctuality.’
It was still strange to Monsarrat, being thanked, being spoken to as if his presence was a matter of pure choice. But while he was now an emancipist, and not of a mind to leave Eveleigh’s employ, he was not quite free. His ticket of leave had come with the precondition that he serve this man, and with more than his immaculate copperplate writing.
Ralph Eveleigh was one of the few in the colony whose pale skin had, for the most part, escaped discoloration by the sun. A formidable intellect in a frail, sandy-complexioned body, Eveleigh never stepped outside without a hat, and never rolled up his sleeves, even in the worst of the heat. To do so would have creased the fabric, something Eveleigh couldn’t countenance. He had enough to deal with as it was, with a crop of hair so unruly that he’d told Monsarrat he had considered having it shaved.
But for all his fastidiousness, Eveleigh didn’t share the prevailing view that a convict was rotten to the core by nature. Informed by his master that his request for an additional clerk had been approved, that he would have charge of one with special investigative skills which could be brought to bear from time to time on what the colonial secretary had described, on a visit to Parramatta, as ‘more delicate matters where a galumphing police investigation may not produce the desired result’, Eveleigh intended to utilise these skills, both investigative and clerical. Monsarrat was a refined tool, and as long as he performed he would be treated well within the walls of the offices where Eveleigh reigned. Yet Monsarrat knew that his deductions, which had brought a killer to justice in Port Macquarie, owed much to the perceptiveness of the woman who now ruled his kitchen. Thus access to first-rate tea was the least of his reasons for employing her.
‘I had your morning planned, you know,’ said Eveleigh now. ‘Preparing the Parramatta tickets of leave for our friend the colonial secretary.’
‘Ah,’ said Monsarrat. Tickets of leave. The laborious process of trawling through the records to find the ship, crime and transportation date which matched a name he’d been given, the owner of which was about to be released from penal servitude.
‘Tedious work, I know. But at least you already have one. It would be something of a cruelty to make a Special write the words which will give freedom to another.’
When Monsarrat had been a Special – a convict with skills beyond muscle, which could be put to use by the government – the chief clerk of the day had not displayed a similar sensitivity, and he had spent years writing freedom for others while the prospect of his own had remained impossibly remote.
‘As you wish, of course,’ Monsarrat said. Not quite an ally, Eveleigh was nonetheless civil. That fact, and his position, made him someone Monsarrat was anxious to please.
‘Well, I have a different wish now. I have been informed of a particular incident,’ said Eveleigh.
‘Incident?’
‘Yes, although that’s a rather inadequate term. More accurately, I suppose the word would be murder. And a fierce one, not that any of them are tame. So it seems, Mr Monsarrat, that I’ll have to find someone else to scribble out those tickets of leave through half-closed eyes, while I finally have a chance to use your … more unique skills.’
Chapter 2
The top half of Robert Church’s right eye was pristine, white, and seemingly unrelated to its lower extremity, which was punctured beyond repair.
‘Precision, then,’ Monsarrat said. ‘Almost as though he stood still for it.’
‘Actually,’ said his new friend, ‘I’ll wager that’s precisely what he did.’
Dr Homer Preston had been transported for stealing the purses of his patients while they were under sedation in his surgery. There was also a certain amount of talk of grave robbing, with Dr Preston thought to be the nexus between the disinterrers and the more conscientious students at the school of anatomy, though nothing had ever been proven.
Unlike Monsarrat, Preston had served his first sentence and had not reoffended (or at least been caught doing so), so had not needed to endure years at a place of secondary punishment. Just as well – he would have made a very bad medical orderly, being more intelligent than most colonial surgeons and lacking the tact which would have prevented him from sharing that opinion.
Monsarrat had met Preston a month ago, shortly after his own return to Parramatta, when a clerk was needed to transcribe a statement on the death of a woman at the Female Factory. She might well have been a victim of the man lying here. Monsarrat hadn’t seen Emily Gray’s body, but Preston’s description had been more than enough detail for him. ‘Of course one frequently sees people who can stand a bit more food. Describes the vast majority of people here. But this woman – someone had taken a hide and stretched it over a bundle of sticks, or so it seemed. Starvation while under the care of His Majesty.’ The inquest had returned a verdict of death due to hunger and ‘hard treatment’, a mundane phrase which could be used to stand in for a variety of lurid abuses.
‘It’s an incision, there’s no other word for it,’ Preston said now. ‘Can you imagine trying to do that to someone who was crashing about, running, turning their head, trying to deflect you in some way? Had he offered any resistance, his eyeball would look like Napoleon’s regurgitated lunch.’
Napoleon was probably asleep under Preston’s desk at the hospital back in the town, and Monsarrat doubted the cat would lower himself to something as indelicate as an eyeball. Monsarrat was one of the few who knew the creature’s name – it might have been considered a little incendiary, a decade after Waterloo, so Preston didn’t make a habit of telling people, or indeed of sharing the fact that there was a cat in the hospital at all. In any case, Napoleon did not seem to think that knowledge of his name should entitle Monsarrat to any more consideration than he gave anyone else.
At least the hospital had a clear function: to keep people alive or to ease their dying. No one Monsarrat asked had yet been able to define concisely the Female Factory’s purpose. Not that it had no purpose. Quite the reverse – it had several, and they frequently collided in a manner which made the place an administrative headache.
It was a place of incarceration, but with only a fraction of the beds – or mattresses, or area of floor – it needed to sleep all of its inmates. It was a marriage bureau and employment agency, where convict women accepted masters, or husbands they had known for just an hour, purely to get away from the place. It was a business, intended to be self-sufficient and perhaps even to contribute to the colony’s coffers by selling the women’s sewing and skills as laundresses, yet where inmates went unshod and unfed, their food sold in the free community to fatten the superintendent’s purse. And it was a place of asylum, intended to protect vulnerable women from the men in the colony, who outnumbered them at least five to one, exposing them instead to one of the worst examples of the male population – the man who now lay on a table in a stone outbuilding of the Factory.
On the plans, the building in which Monsarrat and Preston were examining Church was called the Room for Useful Purposes. But it was more commonly known as the Dead House as it was the room in which corpses were stored. Its sandstone walls tempered the summer heat, yet before long other smells would mix with the odour of baking dust.
The Dead House was tucked into a corner of the Female Factory’s drying grounds, where the cloth woven by the inmates was stretched out and subjected to the sun’s full force, watched by the First Class prisoners from their sleeping quarters on the second floor of a long, thin sandstone structure. The superintendent’s residence lay on the other side of the drying yard, at the front of the building, near a gleaming clock, a gift from a king who seemed to believe that allowing the women a means of counting out the hours of their incarceration was more important than clothing the
m properly. The thing had been sent from England by ship, and there were few such pieces in this, until recently, apparently timeless country.
‘And was the weapon … Well … all the way in?’ Monsarrat asked.
‘Oh yes. It seems so.’
‘Would have taken a fair amount of strength, I imagine.’
‘I expect so. Whoever it was started low – clearly they were trying to use an upward thrust, put their body weight behind it. But then … Look here, Monsarrat. Notice how the upper edge of the puncture has pulled away a little? They hit the skull, you see. Needed to stand up straight so they could get it through the optic foramen – that’s the hole in the skull that leads to the brain. And that’s most certainly where the tip ended up, as the man’s dead.’
Monsarrat wasn’t squeamish – the squeamish didn’t survive here. But he was astonished that Preston could speak with such detachment. ‘Did you know him at all?’ he asked the doctor.
‘Only to nod to. His wife, now, I did know. The matron. They allow us to use this place, you see, from time to time, when the hospital can’t cope.’
‘So Church’s wife has assisted you?’
‘She’s let me in – we’ll leave it at that. I did treat her once, though. For a sprain. Brought about by liberal quantities of rum, judging by the smell of her.’
Over the years, Monsarrat had developed his own shorthand, together with a certain amount of skill in writing without his eyes on the page, so those whose words he was capturing were only peripherally aware he was doing it. He lacked, here, his customary weapons of pen and ink, reduced to a stub of graphite pencil which he carried, wrapped in an old handkerchief, for the purpose. He scratched on a piece of paper as Preston spoke, his eyes dividing their time between Preston’s face and the corpse.
‘Now,’ said Preston, taking Monsarrat’s elbow and urging him towards the door, causing him to smudge his shorthand in the process. ‘You’re going back to the office?’
‘Yes. I’m to transcribe the details of our interview.’
‘Very well. You may wish to add this. Perhaps the reason Church didn’t struggle was that he didn’t expect an attack from the person who killed him.’
‘Why wouldn’t he? I know him by reputation. I imagine it would be relatively easy to find people who believe that the world without Church would be significantly improved.’
‘I have no reason to disagree with that. But the angle – I mentioned before, as you recall – it’s possible that someone crouched and drove the weapon up into his eye, before standing to their full height and completing the job. There’s another possibility, as well.’
‘Which is?’
‘Which is that whoever did this didn’t need to crouch to drive upwards. Perhaps they were already standing at their full height. There are short men, of course. Or the murderer could have crouched. Or a tall man could have dragged Church down to meet the point that ended his life. But it’s also possible, barely possible, that the killer was a woman.’
It was time, Monsarrat thought, to go. A mundane decision, but he still relished his unaccustomed liberty – to go where he pleased, and engage in any activity as long as it was lawful, of course. He had no intention of engaging in anything unlawful, having only just acquired his second ticket of leave.
It was crucial, he thought, to start transcribing his scratchings immediately – however effective his method of shorthand (and he fancied it far exceeded that used by other clerks), there was still the issue of language and the connective tissue which needed to be laid over the bare facts, which resided only in his memory, and which smudged as easily as the graphite did.
They would need, however, to remain smudged for a short while longer. He had just settled at the small, unpolished desk in his whitewashed workroom, completed the ritual of laying out blotting paper, pens, and ink, when Ralph Eveleigh appeared.
‘Daly’s here,’ Eveleigh said, turning. He knew that Monsarrat would follow.
Daly was a man of little imagination and even less humanity, in Monsarrat’s view. He had an almost perfectly square face that was overlaid with a net of small red lines, his blood vessels having given up the fight against the dual onslaught of alcohol and sun. The sun was one of the inevitable inconveniences of life on the rim of His Majesty’s influence – you couldn’t avoid it, just as you couldn’t avoid convicts, especially in a town where barely one in ten of the inhabitants had arrived free. And Ezekiel Daly hated convicts.
Nor did he make any distinction between Specials and those who were ticketed versus those who were still serving their sentence. Daly considered that the felonious stain could not be removed by a bit of paper, and Monsarrat knew that he was an example of the kind of convict Daly most detested. An educated man who should have known better. Who thought his letters gave him liberty to live a kinder life than those who worked on the road gangs or cut lumber. Who had the hide to act as though his ticket of leave gave him the right to stand equal with free men.
Daly’s was a reasonably common perception and Monsarrat had quickly become inured to it – failing to do so would have sent him mad. But as much as he would have liked to discount the man’s opinion, he couldn’t. Because Ezekiel Daly was the Superintendent of Police.
There was an extra seat facing Eveleigh’s desk, a surface which seemed to exist on a different plane to Monsarrat’s own, reflecting shapes in its gleaming, polished wood while squatting on ornate, carved legs. But Monsarrat wasn’t invited to use it – Eveleigh saw no advantage in needlessly provoking Daly and felt that Monsarrat’s continued upright posture was a small price to pay.
‘I understand you’ve spoken to the doctor,’ Daly said, ignoring Monsarrat and addressing his question to Eveleigh.
‘Yes. Mr Monsarrat, as you know, has considerable experience in taking down depositions and the like. I was given to understand that Dr Preston was at the Female Factory, so I felt it best to have somebody there with him.’
‘I know about Mr Monsarrat’s experience,’ Daly said. ‘What I don’t know is how much of it – if any – is legitimate.’
‘I assure you, superintendent,’ Monsarrat said, ‘that I am more than capable of accurately reflecting Dr Preston’s opinion of the deceased.’
‘Be kind enough to share that opinion with us, then,’ said Daly, still staring at Eveleigh.
Monsarrat did as he was asked, dwelling on the detail of the injury to Church’s eye in the vain hope of unsettling Daly, though he suspected the man saw worse every day before breakfast. ‘Judging by the angle, Dr Preston seems to believe the assailant could have been a woman,’ he said. ‘Or at the least someone of short stature.’
‘It’ll be that O’Leary bitch, then,’ said Daly. ‘As I thought. I’ve had her moved to solitary confinement as a precaution.’
Eveleigh drew back his shoulders. Monsarrat knew he didn’t approve of such language, even in relation to a convict.
‘I assume you mean Grace O’Leary, superintendent,’ he said. ‘The riotous Irish woman.’
‘It’s no coincidence, Eveleigh, that things have been quieter since Church put her into the Third Class penitentiary. Moral decay spreads like a disease, you know. You must know – you must’ve seen it.’
It was perhaps unwise to question Daly’s unthinking condemnation of this woman, but flawed logic offended Monsarrat every bit as much as a false lawyer walking free offended Daly, and Monsarrat couldn’t help himself. ‘You mention she’s in the penitentiary, superintendent,’ he said. ‘How, then, could she have gained the freedom to commit this act?’
Daly thrust out his lower jaw slightly, an unconscious act which heightened the resemblance between his head and a wooden block. He addressed himself to Eveleigh again.
‘You know security in the penitentiary is next to non-existent. Church’s own wife is frequently reported to be the worse for drinking sessions with the convicts. We all know about the riot, too. God alone knows how O’Leary got out, but I’ll warrant she did. Perhaps she o
ffered the only asset she has to one of the turnkeys.’
‘You are indeed an astute judge of human character, having been exposed to it in its least edifying forms,’ Eveleigh said. He had a narrow mouth that rarely smiled, but those who saw it every day, as Monsarrat did, became adept at noticing a slight twitch in the right-hand corner, which was as close as Eveleigh came to indicating amusement.
‘Nevertheless, I imagine a man of your rectitude will wish to make sure that the evidence is beyond reproach before proceeding to trial. Efficiency is dear to you, I know, and the most efficient way to proceed would surely be to close off other possibilities. I believe it’s fair to say that Church was not endeared to a great many people.’
‘That would be wonderful, Eveleigh, if we all had an army of clerks at our disposal. I, however, am in the unfortunate position of commanding eight mounted troopers and a handful of convict constables of varying quality, from the corrupt to the assiduous. They all have quite enough to do maintaining order on a daily basis – including amongst each other – without being required to exonerate all manner of refractory creatures before the one who is patently guilty is brought to trial.’
‘My dear superintendent. You do a remarkable amount of work, given the woeful privations you suffer. And, as you say, you do not have the luxury of an army of clerks. Nor do I, but I daresay I could spare the one I have. Perhaps you would do me the honour of allowing me to dedicate Mr Monsarrat to the task of taking statements. It’s the least I can do, especially as your department bore part of the cost of building the Factory in the first place.’
‘He is a convict, Eveleigh.’
No, he’s not, thought Monsarrat. And he happens to be standing a few feet from you.
Eveleigh echoed his thoughts. ‘Mr Monsarrat is no longer a convict, as you know, having been granted a ticket of leave for his role in solving a vile crime in Port Macquarie, which took the life of a woman gentle by birth and, I understand, by nature. If I may say, he has a forensic approach to an interview. I believe I could spare him, barely, from the daily onslaught of paper generated by this office, and certainly his temporary loss to our functioning will not weigh nearly as heavily on the order of the colony as would the diversion of a trooper or two.’