Love, Honour & O'Brien

by Jennifer Rowe

  ‘Yes,’ Holly said. ‘But, Ms Maggott—’

  ‘Eric will be with you in twenty minutes,’ the woman snapped. ‘That will be . . . at three-thirty. Be waiting outside. Eric might have trouble parking. He usually does.’

  She paused as somewhere in the background a door slammed in an echoing space, and there was the dim sound of voices, one high and one low.

  ‘Three-thirty,’ she said rapidly, and hung up.

  7

  At twenty-eight minutes past three Holly was standing on the kerb outside the door of 16A, waiting for Eric. A brooding stillness had descended on the street. The footpaths were deserted. The accordion player had abandoned his post by the chemist’s shop. The thick grey sky hung low overhead like a sagging ceiling. The only sounds were a monotonous thumping emanating from the two-pump garage across from the war memorial, and a lone dog barking mindlessly somewhere in the distance. The whole place looked like a stage set waiting for the cleaners to move in.

  Holly felt lightheaded but strangely calm after twenty minutes of intense activity. She had filled the parrot’s water container and topped up its seed, ignoring its demand for biscuits. She had moved her car to a spot outside the bookshop, and carried her quilt and one of her cases up to O’Brien’s flat. She had stripped off her jeans, struggled into pantyhose and shoes with heels, and put on the most presentable of the skirt and jacket outfits that had been her standard wear at Gorgon Office Supplies.

  In the bathroom, sternly impervious to the maniacal shrieking and cage-rattling drifting through the wall, she had done miracles with her hair, and applied mascara and lip-gloss with a steady hand. When she had finished, her reflection in the spotted mirror had been surprisingly satisfactory. The hectic flush on her cheekbones rather suited her, she thought, and if the glitter in her eyes made her appear slightly manic, that was probably all to the good. The parrot had been impressed, anyway. It had stopped screeching and sulkily watched her leave, its spiked crest the only sign of defiance.

  The photograph of Andrew behind bars was in Holly’s shoulder bag, and so was O’Brien’s phone, prudently turned to ‘silent’. She had thought of leaving the phone behind— had gone so far, in fact, as to plug it back into its charger, guiltily rub it all over with the edge of the bedspread to remove her fingerprints, and slide it back under the bed. But at the last minute she’d retrieved it. A stolen mobile phone was better than no phone at all. After all, who knew what would happen when Una Maggott realised that her visitor was not O’Brien’s partner, but Andrew’s?

  Holly watched the top of the road, waiting for a gleaming car to nose past the war memorial and cruise down in search of 16A. Una Maggott, with her bossy, English-sounding voice, her air of authority and her crisp ‘I’ll send my driver to fetch you’, had sounded like someone whose car would gleam. Just as, Holly thought grimly, she had sounded like someone who lived in a great big pretentious house with a black wrought-iron fence.

  There was no doubt in Holly’s mind that her search for Andrew McNish was about to reach its tacky climax. Making her rapid preparations for the confrontation to come, she had warned herself not to jump to conclusions. Frowning into the bathroom mirror, ruthlessly pulling her lank hair into shape, she had forced herself to consider other possibilities.

  None of them was convincing, for two reasons. The first was the way the woman’s confident voice had softened when she spoke Andrew’s name. The second was the fact that Andrew had never mentioned Una Maggott to Holly, as he certainly would have done if his relationship with the woman had been innocent—if she’d been a client, for example. Andrew thought odd names were hilarious, and wouldn’t have been able to resist making a joke of a name like ‘Una Maggott’.

  So Una was one of Andrew’s secrets. And O’Brien had found it out. He had found out about Una Maggott, and a couple of days later he’d made contact with her. In her present mood, Holly could think of only one reason for that: blackmail. O’Brien had tracked Andrew down, seen him at that big house, and sniffed money. He had then done a little more research and found out the extent of Andrew’s financial problems which, for all Holly knew, were far greater than a bit of back rent owing. For all Holly knew, Andrew had embezzled money from his clients’ accounts as casually as he’d taken her money from the bank.

  It was sobering to realise how very likely this seemed to her, and how little it surprised her. In a way, she was more disappointed in O’Brien for deciding to sell out on her by offering to keep Andrew’s hideout a secret in return for wads of Maggott cash. For some reason she had believed that O’Brien, sly, tired and egg-stained though he was, had retained a worn core of professional pride. Well, she’d been wrong about that, apparently. But she hadn’t been wrong to trust O’Brien’s expertise. She’d trusted O’Brien to find Andrew. O’Brien had found Andrew. And fate, in the form of O’Brien’s phone, had delivered Andrew into her hands.

  Holly watched the war memorial, running over her plans for a ruthless pumping of Eric on the drive to the Maggott love nest. Eric, who usually had trouble parking, sounded elderly. He was probably some respectable retiree making a few extra dollars to supplement his pension. It was possible he actually lived on the Maggott property, providing driving and handyman services in return for free accommodation.

  Coldly Holly reflected that while her success with men her own age had always been variable, she definitely had a way with old codgers. Being smallish and blondish and depressingly wholesome-looking, she seemed to bring out their protective streak. If all went well, Eric would be putty in her hands and she’d know all there was to know about Andrew’s relationship with Una Maggott before arriving at the house. She’d know what approach to take. She’d be more than ready to ‘negotiate terms’.

  ‘Welcome, Carmel!’ trilled Abigail Honour’s voice behind her. Holly jumped and turned just in time to see a stocky, bristle-haired woman in camouflage pants and battle jacket disappear into Abigail’s sanctum. She was rather startled to realise that she hadn’t heard the woman approaching or entering the doorway of 16A.

  Neither had she sensed the presence of the bald man in the bloodstained striped apron who was leaning against the tiled green wall of the butcher’s shop behind her, yet he must have been there for quite a while because the cigarette he was smoking had burned down almost to its filter.

  ‘One born every minute,’ said the butcher, apparently referring to the woman in camouflage pants. ‘Can you believe a bloke was in there just before, making an appointment? You wouldn’t read about it! A bloke ! Didn’t look like a pansy, either. Still, you can’t always tell. Some of them look just like you or me.’

  He sucked the last bit of nourishment from his cigarette, dropped the butt on the footpath and ground it out with his heel.

  ‘Filthy habit,’ he commented.

  He seemed to expect a response, so Holly murmured and smiled.

  ‘Oh, I know all about that,’ said the butcher argumentatively. ‘But what I say is, everyone’s got a right to go to hell their own way, and it’s my choice.’

  Holly nodded and kept smiling.

  ‘People should keep their beaks out of other people’s business, is what I say,’ said the butcher, his voice rising. ‘Bloody do-gooders are ruining this country. Don’t eat this, don’t drink that, this’ll give you cancer, that’ll give you a heart attack—carrying on like two-bob watches, nagging at a bloke every minute of the day. It’s what’s causing all this depression if you ask me.’

  He jerked his thumb at the maw of 16A. ‘Bloke topped himself up there this morning,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t take it anymore, I s’pose. Carried out in a plastic bag, poor bastard. Still, it comes to us all in the long run.’

  He fell silent. A strange expression crossed his face, which then became quite blank. Holly stared at him. He moved uneasily and nodded at a point over her right shoulder.

  Holly spun around.

  A huge, gleaming black vehicle was sliding noiselessly to a halt exactly opposite the doorwa
y of 16A. Holly blinked, desperately tried to make herself believe that it was a vintage stretch limousine adapted for the transport of the handicapped, then focused on the silver rails that adorned its roof and forced herself to admit the truth: the vehicle was a hearse.

  A man with slicked-back black hair, his eyes shielded by sunglasses, his plump body encased in a white sequinned jumpsuit, slid out of the driver’s seat, slouched around the enormous bonnet and opened the passenger door.

  ‘Miz Cage?’ he drawled.

  ‘Crikey,’ said the butcher.

  Holly moved between the parked cars and climbed into the hearse. The door shut on her with a quiet, expensive thunk, sealing her in with the smells of leather, musky men’s cologne, sweat and hair oil.

  The driver got back in, checked his reflection in the rearview mirror and put on his seatbelt, adjusting it carefully to avoid the stand-up collar at the back of his neck and the deep V of chest hair exposed by his jumpsuit’s plunging neckline. He waited, staring moodily through the windscreen, while Holly put her seatbelt on too. Then he released the handbrake and the hearse moved on up the street.

  Holly glanced back. The butcher was staring after her. She hoped he had taken the hearse’s number.

  She cleared her throat. ‘Are you Eric?’ she asked brightly. The driver nodded slightly, turning left at the war memorial.

  Holly wet her lips. ‘Ms Maggott said you might have trouble parking,’ she said, trying to sound casually interested. ‘I didn’t realise why until I saw the hearse. It’s very big, isn’t it?’

  Eric said nothing.

  Holly abandoned subtlety. ‘Why does Ms Maggott drive a hearse?’

  ‘She don’t drive her,’ Eric drawled. ‘No one drives her but me.’ He turned right and picked up speed.

  Holly noticed that her knuckles were white, and deliberately released her grip on her shoulder bag. She pressed her lips together to stop herself asking any more questions. Questions weren’t working. Maybe silence would.

  Her instinct was right.

  ‘Ol’ Maggott held on to the hearse when he sold the business,’ Eric volunteered after a few minutes. ‘Miz M’s daddy, you know? He was Aristo-crat Funerals. Family business, but they never used their own name. Thought it might put people off.’

  ‘Oh,’ Holly said weakly. ‘Right.’

  ‘That was before I knew him, o’ course,’ said Eric. ‘When I knew him he’d been re-tired for years.’

  Holly cleared her throat. ‘I gather he’s . . . no longer with us.’

  ‘I drove him to the cem-er-tery a year ago on Thursday,’ Eric agreed. ‘Rest his soul. He left me this old lady in his will. She was a be-quest.’

  He glanced in the rear-view mirror and adjusted his sunglasses. The hearse slowed. Holly looked ahead and saw to her astonishment that they had already reached the railway underpass. When the underpass had been negotiated and the hearse was proceeding serenely towards the highway, she played the only card she had.

  ‘You look amazingly like Elvis,’ she said.

  Eric didn’t turn his head, but his full lips twitched with gratification. ‘That’s what they say.’

  ‘Awfully like,’ said Holly earnestly. ‘It’s quite eerie, really. I’ve never met an Elvis impersonator before.’

  ‘Tribute artist,’ Eric corrected with a slight frown.

  ‘Oh, right. Sorry. Tribute artist.’

  ‘Comes natural to me,’ said Eric. ‘Always has. I got the spirit.’

  ‘Do you sing?’ asked Holly, hating herself.

  ‘Got a little gig once a month at Twitches in Katoomba,’ Eric said modestly, his Southern drawl slipping a bit. ‘Friday nights. Nothing much. Forty-minute set. Few of the King’s hits. Requests. You know. But people seem to like it.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Holly gushed. ‘I had no idea. I’m new to the Mountains. I’ll have to come and see you one night.’

  ‘Y’all let me know and I’ll get you in on the door,’ Eric said grandly. ‘You got a favourite number?’

  ‘“Love Me Tender”,’ said Holly. She hoped that was an acceptable choice. It was the only Elvis song she could think of at short notice.

  Eric smiled. ‘I get a lot of requests for that one. We always do it with the spot.’

  They reached the highway. Eric waited for a break in the traffic, tapping his pudgy, heavily be-ringed fingers on the wheel. Holly looked at the fingers, and a scrap of TV-gleaned Elvis trivia floated to the top of her mind.

  ‘You’ve even got the horseshoering,’ she said.

  Eric actually grinned. ‘Never take it off.’

  A gap appeared in the traffic and the hearse turned majestically right and headed up the highway.

  ‘I do parties too—birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, stuff like that,’ said Eric. He seemed very relaxed now. The recognition of the horseshoe ring had done the trick. Holly decided it was safe to try to extract some real information.

  ‘I don’t even know where we’re going,’ she said girlishly. ‘I’ve got the address somewhere.’

  ‘Medlow Bath,’ said Eric. ‘Next village up from Katoomba.’

  ‘Oh, yes, Medlow Bath, I remember now. Number 9 Something Street, Medlow Bath,’ Holly burbled.

  ‘Horsetrough Lane,’ said Eric, looking tolerant.

  He hadn’t corrected the house number. Holly felt a stab of fierce triumph, which was immediately followed by a wave of nausea. She’d been right. They were heading for the house in the photograph. And Andrew.

  The hearse swept along doing a steady eighty kilometres an hour. Holly noticed that the other cars on the road were giving them a wide berth.

  ‘It runs very well, doesn’t it?’ she said, to break the silence.

  Eric nodded, glancing in the rear-vision mirror. ‘Not bad for an old girl,’ he said. ‘I been driving her nearly eleven years—ten of them for Ol’ Maggott. Started driving for him after they took his licence off him for being a nutter.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Don’t know how he kept it as long as he did,’ said Eric, who was now so relaxed that his drawl had almost completely disappeared. ‘From what I hear he’d been a sandwich short of a picnic for years—even before he sold the fu-neral home. There were a few stories about him getting funny with the corpses and all that.’

  Holly’s stomach churned.

  ‘He had these ob-sessions,’ said Eric reminiscently. ‘Corpses. Egypt. Snakes. Steam trains. Teeth. Spooked people, you know? But I could manage him all right. You just had to humour him.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘He spent a fortune on the Egypt thing after he sold the business. Bought a lot of statues and stuff—real anti-quities, some of them. Built little pyramids and temples in the yard, even. But after he hired me he got to be a big Elvis fan. Started collecting the King’s LPs. Liked me to wear the gear all the time. That suited me. This—’ Eric tapped the wheel ‘—this is my living. Being a tribute artist is my life.’

  Holly found herself warming to him, and fearing for him too. It was extraordinary that snooty Una Maggott had kept him on after her father died. She could just imagine what Andrew thought of him. Yet Eric seemed sublimely unaware of how precarious his sheltered existence was. Maybe he was on some sort of contract, and Maggott was just counting the days until his time ran out.

  ‘He loved “Blue Suede Shoes”, Ol’ Maggott,’ said Eric. ‘I must have sung that number to him a thousand times. I’d knock myself out doing it for him and in half an hour he’d have forgotten the first go and be pestering me to sing it again.’

  He laughed with real affection. Holly laughed too, and for a moment the hearse was a warm, safe place, spinning along the highway between walls of secret, grey-green bush.

  They passed the Katoomba hospital, a cluster of signs on the next corner ominously directing the way to Casualty, the cemetery and the tip. They passed Katoomba’s unlovely skyline pierced with occasional, breathtaking views of green-fringed pink cliffs rearing through blue mis
t. The highway began winding upward to Medlow Bath.

  Time to get some hard information, Holly thought. Easy does it. She gave a little stretch and pretended to smother a yawn.

  ‘The old man sounds like a real character,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose it’s as much fun for you, working for his daughter. Especially with Andrew McNish . . .’ She paused invitingly.

  Eric glanced into the rear-view mirror and cleared his throat. ‘Look,’ he said abruptly, ‘how about I take you back to Mealey?’

  ‘What?’ Astounded, Holly turned to look at him.

  ‘I’ll tell Miz M you couldn’t make it—had to go out of town,’ he said, staring straight ahead. ‘You don’t want to get mixed up in this thing. It’s not worth it to you, believe me.’

  A prickling sensation ran down Holly’s spine. How much did this man know? Was he threatening her?

  ‘The place is full of bloodsuckers as it is,’ Eric said, his lips barely moving. ‘How about we just turn around? You could be home in fifteen minutes.’

  It was strangely tempting. Half an hour ago Holly would never have believed that the idea of returning to the sordid apartment on the top floor of 16A Stillwaters Road could have so much appeal. But Stillwaters Road wasn’t home. Thanks to Andrew McNish, Holly didn’t have a home anymore.

  ‘I’d rather go on, please, Eric,’ she said stiffly.

  Eric’s face darkened. Suddenly he looked more like Elvis than ever—Elvis on a bad day.

  ‘It’s your funeral,’ he said. He hunched his shoulders, tapped his rings on the wheel, and drove on.

  8

  Eric preserved a forbidding silence for the rest of the journey, and Holly was left to her own thoughts, which were uncomfortable.

  Clearly, unlikely as it seemed, Eric was in Una Maggott’s confidence. He knew about O’Brien’s blackmail attempt— the contemptuous reference to bloodsuckers couldn’t mean anything else. He had given Holly the chance to turn from her wicked, bloodsucking ways and she had rejected the offer. Now he thought she was the lowest of the low.