The Serpent's Sting

by Robert Gott

  ‘Good. You don’t want to compromise your own investigation. Cloris would have gone straight to her father. What’s the time?’

  ‘It’s 3.00 a.m. Should I wake Peter? Cloris thought we should leave it until morning, in case the police are right and he turns up.’

  A spiteful part of me thought that disturbing Peter Gilbert’s sleep was the least we could do, but a more selfish part of me wanted to avoid the consequent rumpus.

  ‘I think you should take your lead from Cloris, and let Peter get a good night’s sleep.’

  My own night’s sleep had been irremediably disrupted, but I closed my eyes when Brian had left to approximate its benefits.

  It was cowardly of me, but I left the house very early. I told myself it was reasonable to do so because I had bought no Christmas presents, and it was Christmas Eve. By the time that afternoon’s performance had finished, the shops would be shut. The real reason for leaving early was to avoid being involved in breaking the news to Peter Gilbert that his son had gone missing. I took the easy way out with presents, and called into the Leonardo Bookshop, where I bought three detective novels, and remembered just before leaving that Cloris — and, if he turned up, John — would be at lunch, so I bought another two.

  I had no idea what to buy for Geraldine, and as I was pondering this I thought I’d better contact her at Puckapunyal to clear up the misunderstanding between her and Percy Wavel. There were telephone booths in George’s department store, and I only had to wait a short time for one of them to become available. There were two women who were next in line to use the telephone, and they looked resentful of my presence, as if I’d stumbled into the women’s lavatory. The booth afforded some privacy, and I turned my back on the women to escape their disapproving eyes. I placed the call and waited for the operator to connect me.

  ‘Putting you through now,’ she said. I was surprised that getting through to a military establishment was so straightforward.

  ‘I don’t know if this is possible,’ I said humbly, ‘but I’m wondering if I might speak to Geraldine Buchanan.’

  ‘Section?’

  ‘I don’t know its proper title. She’s a civilian, a camouflage artist, and I understand she’s painting trucks.’

  ‘Just a minute. I don’t even know if that happens here. A civilian, you say? Seems bloody unlikely. I’ll check.’

  There was a lengthy, and expensive, silence, and when he returned he said, ‘You there? There are people here doing that, but they’re not civilians, they’re certainly not women, and no one’s heard of a Geraldine Buchanan.’

  ‘She must be there. She’d have arrived on Friday afternoon.’

  ‘I’m sorry, mate, there are no women in that section.’

  ‘Maybe she was redirected.’

  ‘There’s no record of anyone of that name at Puckapunyal.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘No record, mate. Sorry.’

  He hung up. I wasn’t immediately concerned. Puckapunyal was a big place with, I imagined, hundreds of people coming and going each day. It would be easy for an administrative error to misplace Geraldine. She might have been recorded as ‘Gerald’. I ignored the impatient rapping on the door of the booth, and placed another call to the army base. The same functionary rather crossly reiterated that neither Geraldine, nor Gerald, nor any other person with a diminutive ending in Buchanan, was now, or had never been, within the perimeter of Puckapunyal.

  ‘This is the army,’ he said. ‘We don’t lose people.’

  He hung up, and the click of disconnection, although it wouldn’t have been any different from the earlier one, sounded peeved and final.

  My performance that afternoon was slightly off, as distracting doubts about Geraldine ruined my timing. Roger Teddles assured me that no one had noticed. Afterwards, Percy Wavel came into the dressing room, and as with any visitor, Roger made no move to protect his, or the other person’s, sense of decorum.

  ‘Christ, Roger,’ Percy said. ‘Put some clothes on, for fuck’s sake. I’ll have nightmares.’

  ‘Wet dreams, more like,’ Roger said, and remained obscenely splayed.

  ‘Did you talk to Miss Buchanan?’ Percy asked.

  ‘I telephoned Puckapunyal.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And they’ve got no record of her ever having been there.’

  ‘If she thinks she can just waltz back in here and have a job, she’s mistaken. The understudy can keep the part, as far as I’m concerned, even though she’s no good. Miss Buchanan has blotted her copy book, and you can tell her that from me.’

  ‘I can’t tell her anything if I don’t know where she is.’

  ‘Well, Merry Christmas to you both, at any rate,’ he said absently.

  There was a great deal of activity at Mother’s house. It was mostly to do with the preparations for next day’s lunch, although the tension in Peter Gilbert’s face was caused by more troubling concerns than whether or not we had sufficient potatoes.

  ‘Brian said he spoke to you late last night,’ he said. ‘So you know about my son?’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll turn up before tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to the police, and they’re of the same mind. I hope to God they’re right. I wouldn’t put it past John to be doing this to punish me for some imagined wrong.’

  I didn’t challenge his use of the word ‘imagined’, despite feeling that his adultery and Fulton’s illegitimacy were hardly figments of anyone’s imagination.

  ‘You haven’t heard from him, have you, Will?’

  ‘No. Why would John contact me?’

  ‘The other day, I thought I saw …’

  I looked quizzical.

  ‘Never mind’, he said. ‘I’m trying to keep a lid on my worry.’

  ‘Do you really think he’d be so cruel as to worry you half to death at Christmas?’

  ‘John always chose big occasions as the backdrop for his biggest tantrums.’

  He looked at his watch.

  ‘Cloris will be here soon. She wants company, and she’s more than happy to help Agnes with the cooking.’

  We had a scratch dinner of sandwiches in the kitchen. Peter Gilbert, Brian, and I sat at the table while Mother and Cloris continued peeling, pounding, and grating. The atmosphere was tense, and the tension was exacerbated for me by my concerns about Geraldine. Mother asked if she was still coming for lunch, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that I was unsure of her whereabouts. It would look like I was offering her disappearance as competition for John’s.

  ‘She’s camouflaging trucks for the army. I’m sure they’ll release her for Christmas Day.’

  ‘I expect John will appear in time for lunch,’ Peter Gilbert said. ‘He knows we’ll be so relieved he’s all right that we won’t make a scene.’

  I could tell from the strained look on Cloris’s face that she didn’t believe this for a minute. Brian had said that she was sure that he’d been taken. The investigator in me wondered idly where her certainty about this came from.

  That night, Peter Gilbert went back to his Drummond Street house with his daughter. She was understandably nervous about being there on her own, given the signs that violence may have been committed there. After Mother had gone to bed, I went into Brian’s bedroom to speak with him. The room had been his and Darlene’s, and I hadn’t been in it since her committal to a psychiatric institution. There were reminders of her everywhere, and the room retained the particular feminine quality she’d imposed upon it. There was only one photograph of her, the wedding photograph, with her and Brian standing stiffly in a photographer’s studio. The paintings on the walls were cloying prints of Landseer dogs, a dull still-life, and above the fireplace a monochrome engraving of Friedrich Schenck’s Anguish — a painting I’d always found repellent, but which made Darlene weep, apparently.

 
Brian was already in bed.

  ‘There’s something going on with you and Geraldine, isn’t there?’

  He could be exasperatingly perceptive, although it was usually at times that were of no practical benefit to me.

  ‘Geraldine has done a runner from the production; at least we think she has. She told me she was going to Puckapunyal, and she didn’t turn up there. I checked. I’m not worried. It is mysterious, though.’

  ‘So she won’t be here for lunch tomorrow?’

  ‘I think not. I’m sure she has her reasons for going away.’

  ‘It’s strange, don’t you think, that Geraldine and John Gilbert should both go missing?’

  ‘There can’t possibly be a connection between them.’

  ‘I suppose not. Why does this have to happen at Christmas?’

  ‘Damaging revelations? Complete upheaval of family life? That’s what Christmas is all about, isn’t it? It makes up for the lack of decorations this year.’

  With scant relevance to the subject at hand, Brian said, ‘I like Cloris Gilbert. I know I need to stay at arm’s length. Still, she’s got something. She’s lively and attractive. I don’t think she’s the type to have sex before marriage, though.’

  ‘She mightn’t be the type to have sex after marriage, either. I do have one small question. Has she shown the slightest interest in you?’

  ‘I’m being careful not to enliven any, and she is a little distracted at the moment. I don’t think she’s inclined to think romantically between bouts of frantic worry about her brother.’

  ‘You need to get a decent look inside the Gilbert’s house.’

  He nodded.

  ‘What am I looking for?’

  ‘Poison, Brian. Poison.’

  Christmas lunch wasn’t the success it ought to have been. We’d only just sat down when Peter Gilbert was overcome with distress and announced that he couldn’t eat a thing and that he needed to be at Drummond Street. John clearly wasn’t going to show up at Mother’s house. Cloris couldn’t abandon her father, and she went with him. Mother was surprisingly calm about this disruption to her lunch. Even after they’d left, the pall of John’s disappearance, and for me, Geraldine’s, hung over the table. Mother had just put a leg of roast chicken on my plate when there was a knock at the door.

  ‘That’ll be Geraldine,’ I said with poorly suppressed excitement. I opened the door to find two American soldiers standing there, who looked deflated when I didn’t immediately recognise them. They were spic and span, with crisp, starched uniforms and freshly shaven cheeks.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said, as it dawned on me who they were. ‘Harlen Quist and Anthony Dervian. Please, come in. You’re expected.’

  The Americans, who’d brought chocolates and whisky — they also brought cigarettes, but no one in the Power household smoked — were introduced to Mother and Brian, and some effort was made to make them feel welcome. The dark mood at the table wasn’t explained to them, and they must have wondered at our grim stabs at being cheerful. It wasn’t until that lunch, and the reminder of Geraldine’s energy and presence on the night we’d met Quist and Dervian, that her absence began to strike me as sinister. My effort to jolly the lunch along evaporated, and I only half-listened to the general conversation. The doughboys were encouraged to tell stories of Christmas at home in America.

  ‘I’m Jewish, ma’am,’ Anthony said. ‘So we just do the presents.’

  ‘And there’s Hanukkah not long after Christmas,’ Mother said.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’ He seemed delighted that Mother knew about the celebration. Harlen began a long story about Christmas in Ohio, but my attention drifted until I heard Geraldine’s name.

  ‘We were hoping to see Miss Buchanan again,’ Harlen said.

  Mother, who’d been discreet about Geraldine’s absence, now felt able to express her view on the matter.

  ‘I don’t know what it is about Will,’ she said, in a tone that approximated but fell well short of humorous, ‘but women just don’t seem to stick.’

  ‘I’m sure if she’d been able to, she would have been here,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps a telephone call to say she wasn’t coming would have been a basic courtesy,’ Mother said. She was right, of course, and I was sure that Geraldine would have made such a call if she’d been able to. Her failure to call alarmed me.

  Christmas lunch would normally extend late into the afternoon. There was no impetus to encourage this, and Privates Quist and Dervian took their leave at 2.00 p.m. I was embarrassed that their Australian Christmas experience had been rather dismal. I had no desire to remain in the fraught atmosphere of Mother’s house, so I offered to walk with the Americans across Princes Park, towards Camp Pell. While I was in the area, I thought I might as well knock on the door of Geraldine’s boarding house. Geraldine had warned me that her landlady was fiercely disapproving of men calling at the house, and I was reluctant to make trouble for Geraldine, but her disappearance was beginning to feel like an emergency.

  Private Dervian made polite noises about how pleasant lunch had been. I thanked him and assured him that Christmas lunch wasn’t usually so dire. In a rush of guilt about having let them down in some way, I told them that I could organise for two tickets to be available for the Boxing Day performance of Mother Goose. Private Quist said that he’d be on duty, but Private Dervian accepted the offer with some enthusiasm. He’d never seen a pantomime, so I thought it politic to outline its conventions. As we reached Royal Parade, he said he was looking forward to seeing me in a dress. We parted company.

  I stood outside Geraldine’s boarding house for some minutes, wondering if knocking on the door was a good idea after all. The curtains in the front room twitched, as if my presence had been noted. I decided to screw my courage to the sticking place and approached the door. I knocked. There was no response. I knocked again. No one answered. Perhaps I’d been wrong about there being someone in the front room. It was Christmas Day, after all, and it was very likely that the residents, including the landlady, were elsewhere. Having come this far, I was reluctant to leave without exploring further. I tried the front door. It was locked — hardly surprising, given that the panic about the recent murders by the American soldier, Eddie Leonski, hadn’t yet abated, and one of his victims had been found quite close to this house.

  There was a gate that protected the sideway to the house. I turned its handle and found that it, too, was locked. In frustration, I pushed against it, not vigorously, and the rotten wood in which the lock sat gave way. The gate opened, and came off its hinges as it did so. The sound of its fall was muffled by rampant grass and weeds. There was no turning back now, so I made my way to the rear. The garden was a disordered mess. Some teatowels and female underwear hung from the clothesline. The door to the dunny was open, and I could see that a vase of long dead flowers might once have provided a feminine touch.

  To my surprise, the back door was open. I entered the house, and found myself in a laundry that smelled of mould, sweetened with notes of Sunlight soap. I listened for any sound. Nothing. The laundry was attached to a kitchen, which smelled as if no decent meal had been cooked in it for a generation. This gave on to a corridor, on the left of which were two rooms, their doors closed. These belonged to the landlady, and I suppose I ought to have knocked on each of them to see if she was home. I didn’t, because I imagined that she wouldn’t take kindly to finding a man inside the citadel.

  On the right, a staircase rose to Geraldine’s room and the room of the other boarder. Again, I listened for any sound. Again, nothing. I didn’t call out. The sound of a man’s voice would alarm anyone who might be home. I climbed the stair and knocked gently on Geraldine’s door. When there was no reply, I turned the doorknob, and the door opened. What should I do now? I found myself suddenly in a complicated position as far as etiquette was concerned. How would Geraldine react when she discovered t
hat I’d let myself into her room without her permission? This was undoubtedly a breach of privacy. The situation, however, was unusual, so I believed I could argue that the rules which govern such things needed to be temporarily suspended.

  I entered Geraldine’s room and closed the door behind me. It was in much the same state as the last time I’d seen it. The sheets hadn’t been changed, and there was no evidence of a hasty departure. The only remarkable thing was a drawing sitting on Geraldine’s easel. It was a finished, charcoal portrait of me. I stood before it and was, on the whole, pleased with it. It’s always both enlightening and faintly disturbing to see the details of one’s face that an artist perceives as being essential to a good likeness. My lips, for example, were surely slightly fuller than Geraldine had drawn them. It didn’t matter, I suppose, given that this was a private picture, that I’d been drawn shirtless to the waist, especially as my torso was more sketchily rendered than my face. Being bare-chested made the intimacy of the portrait unambiguous.

  The presence of this drawing on Geraldine’s easel was reassuring. It suggested that whatever her reasons for temporarily absconding, she had every intention of returning. A family crisis seemed the most likely explanation, although her claim that she’d been expected at Puckapunyal was odd. Or was it? I’d spoken to one person at the base, and I’d certainly had enough experience of the army to know that its left hand and its right were often ignorant strangers.

  I didn’t look in any cupboards or drawers; that would have been a breach too far. I left Geraldine’s room, waited for a moment on the landing, and then descended the stairs. I could have sworn that the door of the front room was open a crack. I left through the kitchen as quickly as I could, and was relieved to make it into Fitzgibbon Street without the hysterical accusation ‘Burglar!’ being hurled after me.

  I returned to Mother’s house, to find Brian in a high state of excitement. John Gilbert’s body had been found, he said, lying in the long shadows cast by the wings of a monumental angel in the Melbourne General Cemetery.