The Serpent's Sting

by Robert Gott

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I won’t help you. I’ll tell you what to do, but I won’t help you do it.’

  I knew even as I said this that this was craven sophistry, and that my moral responsibility wasn’t lessened or excused by a squeamish desire not to be present when my plan was put into action. Geraldine saw this immediately.

  ‘I killed this man accidentally and in self-defence. He looks sweet sitting there, doesn’t he? Like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. If you heard the things that came out of that mouth, and if you knew what he tried to do to me, you wouldn’t be quite so reluctant to help us. That man is a monster, Will.’

  ‘What kind of things came out of his mouth?’ I asked.

  Mrs Ferrell interjected. ‘I heard what he said. I wouldn’t expect Geraldine to repeat his words. I, however, am happy to. He was screaming at the top of his voice. He said Eddie Leonski had the right idea about how to treat women. If they knocked you back, you knocked them around, and maybe they’d learn who wore the pants.’

  ‘I begged him to stop, Will. I asked him to think of his mother.’

  Mrs Ferrell laughed. ‘That was a good one, wasn’t it? You know what he said? He said his mother was an ugly old cunt and he’d slapped her into line more than once. That’s your sweet little soldier boy. What kind of person uses that kind of language about his own mother, let alone hits her?’

  ‘I won’t hang for removing a creature like this from the world,’ Geraldine said. ‘I won’t.’

  Even if all of this was true, civilised society had discarded lex talionis — an eye for an eye — because it was a recipe for untrammelled personal revenge. Nevertheless, this version of Private Dervian’s life did make it easier for me to give Geraldine a solution to her dilemma.

  ‘I’ll tell you what to do,’ I said, ‘and maybe you’ll be able to manage it without me.’

  ‘I’m listening,’ Mrs Ferrell said.

  ‘All right. He has no head injuries. He doesn’t have a mark on him. I can’t even see where you said his scalp bled.’

  ‘I’m not sure if it actually bled. Maybe it didn’t, after all.’

  ‘You should take his body to the railway track at Royal Park station. Lie it on the tracks well away from the platform, so that the train has time to pick up speed and not enough time to stop when the driver spots him. The train will do enough damage to the body to make any sort of immediate diagnosis of a cause of death hard to establish. The police will think he was either drunk or suicidal, or both. They won’t find any connection to this house or to you. Have you searched his pockets to make sure there’s nothing there, like a scrap of paper with this address on it, or your name? Or a sketch?’

  ‘Would you do that, Will?’ Geraldine asked. ‘I couldn’t bear to touch him now.’

  ‘No,’ I said, as if this small refusal somehow helped me regain lost ground. Mrs Ferrell, with a huff of impatience, ran her hands over Private Dervian’s clothes and searched his pockets. She found his wallet, helped herself to the money it contained, and put it back.

  ‘That £10 is no good to him now,’ she said.

  I watched her as she rummaged through Dervian’s uniform. Her masculinity was disconcerting. It was clear to me that her relationship with Geraldine was more complicated than that of landlady and boarder. No simple landlady would be comfortable with helping her boarder dispose of a body, and her manner was so assured that underestimating her would be a mistake.

  This house in Fitzgibbon Street, despite its malodorous domesticity, held secrets, the nature of which I didn’t wish to uncover. I knew, for example, that many houses in Carlton operated as brothels — or so the law would label them, and I suppose that, strictly speaking, this is what they were. In fact, though, it might be the front room of a house in which a woman, abandoned by the hopeless, useless father of her children, might earn a meagre income from the attentions of one of the tens of thousands of American soldiers, far from home and the restraints and censure of small-town morality. Mrs Ferrell didn’t strike me as even remotely resembling one of these women, and the idea that Geraldine, despite her louche tendencies (and I could hardly accuse her of lax sexual mores without accusing myself likewise), might be selling her body in the grim space of her bedroom, seemed unlikely. I thought that even the laziest of prostitutes would make her bed between clients. Geraldine wasn’t in the habit of making her bed.

  ‘I have to get to the theatre,’ I said, and was conscious yet again of the weird banality of such a remark when standing in the same room as a dead body, especially one that had come to Christmas lunch.

  ‘You’ll come back this evening,’ Mrs Ferrell said.

  ‘I’m sure you know someone who’ll do the heavy lifting,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll come back this evening,’ Mrs Ferrell said, and the precise repetition was something of a full stop to the discussion. Geraldine walked me to the front door. She didn’t wish to engage in further conversation, and said no more than, ‘I’ll see you this evening,’ before ushering me onto the veranda and closing the door behind me. I wondered what those two would now say to each other. And what of Caroline, the other boarder? She’d been on night shift, so I assumed she must have been upstairs, sleeping, and unaware of what was slumped on the Liberty print seat coverings in the front room.

  Anyone who knew what I’d been doing in the morning wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d turned in a distracted, half-hearted performance. I didn’t. I gave one of my best, buoyed by enthusiastic laughter from the audience. Fewer and fewer children were occupying the seats, and the stage-door followers were growing. I spent twenty minutes signing autographs and explaining yet again the cover story for my black eye. When I returned to the dressing room, Roger Teddles was comfortably sprawled in his usual posture. I felt I could ask him a question about drug taking in the company without beating about the bush.

  ‘Have you ever heard of anyone taking heroin in the company?’

  Roger wasn’t a man to express surprise easily, and he didn’t express the slightest surprise on this occasion.

  ‘It’s difficult to say. I’m sure the acrobats take some sort of pain killer, and the Dunstan sisters surely can’t do what they do without taking something to loosen them up. Why heroin specifically?’

  ‘Well, it’s illegal, Roger.’

  ‘Is it? That can’t be right. It used to be in the cough medicine my mother used to take. She used to guzzle the stuff.’

  ‘Did she have a persistent cough?’

  ‘Now that I think about it, I don’t recall ever hearing her cough.’

  ‘It must have been very effective.’

  ‘She certainly thought so.’

  ‘So who takes drugs in the company, Roger?’

  ‘I’m too old to socialise with the youngsters, Will, but from what I know of them, they’re a staid lot. God, we used to hop into a bit of opium and marijuana in the ’30s. If there’s any of that about now, I’ve never seen it. Booze, of course, but not even much of that.’

  ‘How would you know if someone was taking heroin?’

  ‘What’s with the sudden interest in heroin? Are you interested in getting some?’

  This wasn’t said with any special emphasis, but my instant response in the negative seemed like a missed opportunity. I didn’t suspect Roger of peddling dope. However, had I replied in the affirmative, he might have put me in touch with the right person. When I looked at him, though, I realised that Roger Teddles was the person least likely to know the intimate lives of his fellow cast members. He was separated from them not just by age, but also by thinking and physical health. Roger, with his hydrocele and foot problems, wouldn’t have been the natural custodian of anyone’s secrets. He wouldn’t, either, have been the person someone would come to for advice or to unravel the knots of a private dilemma.

  Roger was an actor at the end of his career, glad to be working, and
unafraid of retirement. I suspected that he understood without bitterness the narrow limits of his talent. His ambitions would always have been modest, and his achievements on the stage would always have matched his ambitions. He and Mrs Teddles no doubt enjoyed, rather than endured, drab domesticity. Where others found this drabness unappealing in respect of his being a confidant, I, paradoxically was encouraged by it to confide in him.

  ‘I’ve seen Geraldine Buchanan,’ I said. This provoked a spark of interest, and a surprising admission.

  ‘People were saying you probably knew where she was.’

  ‘People? Which people?’

  ‘Oh, you know, some of the cast.’

  I instantly regretted saying anything to Roger. Clearly, some people did speak to him.

  ‘There’s nothing sinister about it, Roger.’ I decided to lie, because I suspected my assessment of Roger Teddles was inaccurate.

  ‘I said I’ve seen her. I didn’t say I spoke with her. I saw her, at a distance, in Princes Park. In fact, now that I think about it, I’m not absolutely certain it was Geraldine. I thought it might be her because of an attitude in her stance, but of course it might have been anyone.’

  Roger wasn’t sufficiently interested to challenge me. Nevertheless, the arrangement of his face was unequivocal as to his disbelief of all that I’d said.

  ‘I’m not looking forward to doing two shows tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I am, however, quietly confident that the soldiers at Puckapunyal will take to you and me. Soldiers, in my experience, can’t get enough of men dressed as women.’

  This was transparently an attempt to deflect the conversation away from my ill-judged reference to Geraldine. Roger knew this, but his interest had faded, and he simply grunted in agreement.

  There was no one, apart from the stage-door manager, still in the theatre when I left the dressing room. He was such an elderly, hunched, broken figure that I wasn’t tempted to ask him about drug use in the company, even though I suspected that he knew a thing or two. I just didn’t have the energy to breach his defences when it came to the private vices of cast members. I nodded ‘good night’ on my way out, and he acknowledged me with the smallest gesture he could muster.

  I was now in a quandary. There were still several hours of daylight left, and I found myself wondering how to fill them before returning to Fitzgibbon Street. I realised with appalling clarity that I would in fact return to Fitzgibbon Street in obedience to Mrs Ferrell’s confident instructions. It was 5.00 p.m. The streets were busy with people hurrying away from their jobs, and shop fronts were blacking up in readiness for the night. This created a curious contrast of frantic movement on one side of the windows, and numb lifelessness on the other. There was an hour to go before the hotels closed, so I thought I’d duck into one before walking up to Parkville. I didn’t feel like rubbing shoulders with hoi polloi in a working man’s establishment. Feeling rather put-upon by circumstances, I decided to treat myself to a little luxury in the form of a glass of wine at the Windsor Hotel. I was sufficiently well dressed to be admitted to the bar, although I had no doubt that the doorman would disapprove of my black eye. But when I approached the door of the Windsor, he addressed me by name, to my astonishment.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Power. How very nice to see you.’

  I must have looked bemused.

  ‘You were kind enough to give me your autograph, just the other day.’

  ‘Oh, well, thank you so much for coming to see the show.’

  ‘That was a very great pleasure, Mr Power.’

  There was something rather lewd in the way he said this, and I moved quickly into the bar. I enjoyed no further recognition, and experienced both relief and disappointment in equal measure. I paid far too much for a glass of truly dreadful wine. The barman boasted its French credentials and claimed it had been in the Windsor’s cellars since before the war. Which war?, I wondered It had long since lost its girlish laughter, and tasted of socks. I lied about its qualities to the eager barman, rather than complain and be accused of allowing success to go to my head.

  There was a scattering of American officers in the bar. In fact, they were the only people there. I’d have thought that parliamentarians or their functionaries would have gathered here, given its proximity to the House, but perhaps ostentatious displays of privilege — and drinking at the Windsor doubtless fell into that category — were frowned upon when everyone was supposed to be doing his bit. The Americans didn’t coalesce. They sat in discrete groups of two, or three at the most. I presume this reflected the vast size of the US forces. There was no reason to suppose that these men had anything in common beyond their uniform. I tried to find in them, as I swept the room, the glamour that allegedly attached itself to them. They were well turned out, and each of them was neatly shaved, with his hair, if he had sufficient, carefully Brylcreemed. Beyond this superficial tidiness they were no more remarkable in the charismatic force of their presence than their Australian counterparts.

  They paid no attention to me. Had I been female, this would have been different. If the thundering Protestant preachers were to be believed — those same Puritan busybodies who’d put an end to Sunday entertainment — Melbourne’s girls and women gave themselves far too freely to the American visitors. Consequently no woman, even a good woman, could meet the Yankee gaze without feeling his expectation that she would offer unseemly intimacy as part of the war effort.

  I drank my wine slowly, not because it was pleasurable to do so, but because it was barely potable, and taking it in small sips was the only way to get it down. I was determined not to leave a drop, if only because of the absurd amount of money I’d paid for it. Each sip gathered the mouth, and I was careful to disguise my distaste, conscious as I was that the barman was watching me. Although he hadn’t indicated the fact, I was sure he’d recognised me and was waiting to catch me in the act of behaving with theatrical self-importance. At least the slow imbibing of this oxidised, vinegary mess gave me an opportunity to gather my thoughts. There were two performances remaining of the Melbourne run of Mother Goose — tomorrow’s matinee and tomorrow night’s Puckapunyal show. We then had Friday and the weekend to rest before opening in Ballarat on Monday 4 January. The sets would be carted by truck to Ballarat on Saturday, and put in on Sunday, ready for our arrival. I thought giving us just two days off was rather mean, but Mr Wallace Parnell didn’t believe in holidays, nor in the need for his performers to rest and recover.

  The performances in Ballarat would at least give me the opportunity to distance myself from the house in Fitzgibbon Street, which had become a sort of Promethean punishment for me. I kept being drawn back to it, against all good judgement and common sense. It had assumed the same ghastly magnetism as a painful tooth, which one kept pressing as if reassurance was needed that, yes, it really was painful. If Geraldine and Mrs Ferrell hadn’t organised to have Anthony Dervian taken to the railway line, was I prepared to help them move him? I’d been manoeuvred, and I’d manoeuvred myself, into a position where I’d engaged in actions that the law would find reprehensible and actionable. Mrs Ferrell would turn me in without any compunction, and so, it grieved me to admit, would Geraldine.

  The bar closed at 6.00 p.m., and I emerged into Exhibition Street, having been obsequiously farewelled by the doorman, who’d insultingly slipped me his address as if I might be tempted to call on him. I walked north as the shadows lengthened in the slowly dimming gloaming, and began to feel sure that I was being followed. Once in Carlton, where foot traffic was thin, I was certain I had a tail, and either he wasn’t good at his job or he was so brazen that he was indifferent to discovery. At one point, he closed the gap so significantly that I could have turned and spoken to him.

  I decided against going to Mother’s house before crossing the park to Fitzgibbon Street. I didn’t want this person knowing where I lived, and I believed I could lose him once I’d entered the dark recesses of Princ
es Park. From the glimpses I caught of him, he was short, slight, and on the wrong side of fifty. Was he a policeman? Or was he someone from Military Intelligence? Surely not. The thought that he might have something to do with that unpleasant organisation made me uncharacteristically furious. They’d done their best to kill me, and here they were still interfering in my life. Did Brian have something to do with this? This thought made me even more furious, because this man’s presence meant that Brian thought that I needed to be babysat, or worse, that he didn’t trust me and wanted to keep tabs on me. This had to be nipped in the bud.

  I stopped suddenly, in Lygon Street, a few yards from where the cemetery began, and waited for the tail to catch up. I turned to face him, and to my astonishment he actually hurried towards me. He didn’t look like the criminal type, so I surmised that he was indeed a frank annoyance from Military Intelligence, boldly reminding me that I could never fully and finally escape their thrall. He stopped a few feet from me, put his hands on his knees to catch his breath, straightened up, and reached inside his suit coat.

  With no time to think this through, I supposed that what he was reaching for was a gun. I leapt at him, grabbed his coat lapels, and kneed him in the groin. He doubled over and collapsed on the nature strip, where he drew his knees up to his chest and moaned terribly. As he did so, he dislodged what he’d been reaching for. A notebook, with a fountain pen attached to it, fell to the ground. I picked it up, expecting to find his impertinent notes about my comings and goings. I opened it to the page secured by the fountain pen’s clip. There was my name, neatly printed, and beneath it was the space allocated for my autograph. I flicked through the pages of the notebook to find autographs of radio and theatre stars, including Gladys Montcrieff and the Great Levant.

  The man at my feet was copiously sick, and I had to step quickly back to avoid getting the contents of his stomach on my shoes. He looked up at me, his eyes wide with horror. This wasn’t how he’d expected his hunt for my autograph to end, and this wasn’t a situation I’d encountered before, so I had no idea what to do next. Any explanation would be hopelessly inadequate, and adding my signature to his collection would hardly mollify him now. What if I’d injured him? He gurgled and kept his hands at his groin. Should I apologise? I experienced a complete failure of nerve, which I later put down to the number of stressful events that had crowded in on me, and which were continuing to crowd in on me. In the face of this prone, writhing creature, I reverted to childhood and ran away. Well, I walked away very quickly, knowing full well that that was the worst thing I could do, and yet I did it anyway.