by Joy Dettman
‘I never did. I never went near her house while I was pickin’ out there. Never once. I only sighted her twice, comin’ and goin’.’
‘So, last night you see her coming, then you watch her going. You heard her telling her boyfriend that she had seventy quid on her, and you thought all your Christmases had come at once.’
A reflex jerk of his foot, then he sat back, grinned again. ‘You’re fishin’ with stale bait, you overgrown bastard. I never did nothin’, I never saw nothin’. I’ve broke no law in this town and you got no right to arrest me.’
‘Clarrie Morgan wants you bad enough to come up here and get you. Projected time of arrival…’ Tom looked at his watch. ‘Soon.’ He’d heard no more from Morgan, and had stopped willing breakdowns. He wanted him here. Vern didn’t. The mention of Morgan and Melbourne wiped that grin right off his face.
‘So what time did you leave the pub last night?’
‘I told you I don’t know what bloody time it was.’
‘Kurt Reichenberg found that girl around four-thirty. What were you doing around four-thirty this morning, Vernon?’
‘Whatever I was doin’, I’ve got witnesses to prove I was doin’ it.’
‘You left the pub at dawn and walked back to the camp, so how come you didn’t find that girl?’
‘We cut down through Kennedy’s short cut. Any rate, there wasn’t enough light.’
‘Plenty of moonlight earlier – when she went walking off to the railway station. Did you take a bit of a stroll in the moonlight, follow her up there, Vernon?’
‘I never did, and my name is bloody Vern.’
‘A forward-thinking woman, your mother, whoever she was. It suits you, bloody Vernon. You weren’t too forward thinking, though, were you? I would have thought you’d have been on that train this morning.’
‘I got no reason to leave town. I’m pickin’ tomorrow at Kennedy’s.’
‘You were supposed to be picking there today too, but of course you couldn’t front up there, not after robbing and murdering his little wife.’
‘You hate my guts and always did, you cow-eyed bastard. You bloody hounded me when I was a kid. I didn’t touch that girl, and you’re not goin’ to pin this on me.’
‘Be that as it may, bloody Vernon, and stop interrupting me. So you dragged that girl into the station garden, raped and murdered her, then carried her down to her boyfriend’s place. Is that the way it went?’
‘I went to the pub when it got too dark to pick and I didn’t leave until Red and that one-armed bastard kicked us out. And you arst her if you don’t believe me. And she’s sellin’ grog down there today too, not passing out cups of tea and stale scones – if you’d like a bit of free information on what goes on in your bloody shit-hole town.’
‘There you go. I knew you had a song or two left in you. So where does she hide the keg?’
‘It’s past my eatin’ time.’
‘I eat late so you eat later.’
An eerie light filled the office, now that the sun had worked its way around to the rear of the house. Tom walked to the door, lifted the brown blind while Vern examined his filthy fingernails.
‘You would have recognised Kennedy’s wife when you saw her down at that pub last night.’
‘I saw some tart standin’ outside in the dark, just for a second –’
‘So you did see her?’
‘I said it was dark, that I sighted a young tart standin’ outside in the dark. You’re the one tellin’ me who I saw. And you can’t bloody hang a man yet for noticin’ a bit of skirt as it sashays past, can you?’
‘Depends on what you did to that bit of skirt later on, Vernon. You’ve got a bad reputation for roughing up the ladies.’
Again that flinch of the foot. The blue tongue licking, flicking. ‘When I last seen that tart, she was talkin’ outside with her boyfriend, then she goes and he stays, and I don’t know a bloody thing about where she went to or what happened to her. All I know is, I didn’t touch her. I didn’t lay one finger on her, so you bloody charge me with whatever you think you got, or get that cuff off me.’
Tom, on the go since four-thirty this morning, had spent most of his day feeling useless. He was feeling good now, feeling like a copper in control as he propped his backside against his desk and studied Vern’s swinging shoe. It was a fancy shoe, expensive, a black and white brogue, probably nicked – that little mongrel had never worked an honest day in his life. One bird-boned ankle was visible, and filthy above his sagging sock, but that wasn’t the ankle Tom was interested in. Sooner or later those knees would swap over and Tom might get to find out what was causing Vern’s limp.
‘I haven’t ate since last night and me stomach thinks me throat’s been cut.’
‘Feeling the hangman’s rope maybe, Vernon. The murdered girl’s father is a big wheel, you know. He’s got friends in high places – very pally with a city judge. They’re up here visiting every month or two. No doubt they’ll be up here for the girl’s funeral on Tuesday. You picked the wrong girl this time, Vernon.’
Two feet on the floor now as Vern tried out his whistle, then the left knee crossed over the right and the left brogue swung and Tom pounced, caught the ankle and twisted it. No more whistling, and no scream of agony either.
‘No swelling? Amazing what a bit of exercise will do for a sprained ankle.’
‘It’s inside, in the sinews.’ Vern tried to pull his foot free, and as he did the shoe came off, a filthy toe protruding through a hole in an equally filthy sock. And he was up, coming after his shoe and dragging his chair with him. ‘You can’t search me. I know my rights. You haven’t charged me so you can’t search me. Give me my bloody shoe.’
‘Searching you? Not me. I’m just admiring your shoe.’
At close quarters, Vern smelt rancid, stale sweat mixing with the new, brewed up with the filth of months. His shoe smelt worse. Tom peered into it, gave it a decent shake. No reward. Definitely something foreign in it, though – some sort of inner sole, cut from a wheat bag. Gingerly, his fingers reached into the shoe, and no wonder Vern had been limping.
‘That’s a flamin’ expensive way to keep your feet out of the muck. It would have been cheaper to buy a new pair of socks, wouldn’t it?’ Tom commented, unwrapping the piece of wheat bag and exposing four five-pound notes.
Vern looked from the banknotes to his shoe to his big toe, stepped back, stood his chair on its legs and sat on it. ‘You try livin’ in a pickers’ camp and see where you hide your bankroll.’
‘I’m in the wrong profession, by the bejesus. I ought to be out there picking peaches.’ Tom’s hand moved up to scratch at his jaw but he remembered in time where it had recently been and changed his mind. Instead, he helped himself to Vern’s second shoe, which required some force and left Vern sprawled on his back, legs in the air, the chair on rather than under him.
He was fast on his feet, though, looking shorter without his shoes on, and not so cocky. ‘I don’t trust the banks. You arst anyone that knows me.’
‘You’ve got more in common with Dave Kennedy than his bankroll then, eh. He doesn’t trust banks, though I’ll bet he’s having second thoughts today.’ Nothing in the second shoe. Tom picked up the four fivers, waved them in front of Vern’s nose. ‘You know what I reckon I’ve got here, don’t you? I reckon I’ve got close to one-third of Dave’s stash, and I reckon you took it from a dead girl’s handbag. So who’s got the rest? You’re an insult to a runt. You didn’t murder that girl up at the railway station then carry her down to where she was found. Not by yourself, you didn’t. Did you and the big Pommy take turns on her – before you murdered then robbed her?’
That got the little mongrel looking at his toes. ‘You’re barkin’ up the wrong tree, you bastard.’
‘So the Pommy took the lion’s share, did he?’
‘I don’t know any Pommy and I don’t know nothin’ about anyone’s stash. That money come with me from the city and I didn’t touch that ta
rt – didn’t lay one finger on her, so either charge me or let me go.’
Tom wasn’t going to get anything out of him. A lot of blokes carried money other than in their wallets. He’d known a bloke once who’d stitched his wad inside his vest’s lining, known another who’d tucked it under his hat lining, known a woman who’d stitched a pocket into her corset; however, Morgan had shown interest in Lowe, and Tom had him, and was planning to keep him, even if all he could go him for was abusive language – even if the abusing had only started after Tom had started his arresting.
A car pulled in out the front. ‘That will be Morgan now.’ He straightened his shoulders and walked to the door, opened it. It wasn’t Morgan.
Vern didn’t want to go back to his accommodation; he near wrecked that chair with not wanting to go. Tom ended up charging him with destruction of property, abusive language and resisting arrest. Five or six blowflies weren’t to fussy about where they found their shade; they followed Vern in.
‘Watch out they don’t blow you, Vernon.’ Maybe they liked his stink.
‘Where is my smokes and me water, you fat, cow-eyed bastard?’
‘Morgan will bring them in when he gets here. And by the living Jesus, he’ll be pleased to see you.’
insanity
Not a tear left in her now. They’d congealed. Helen felt congealed – as if that scream jammed in her chest had spread, filled her ears, her throat, her head, so that her insides were now a gummy mess of solidified scream.
She’d been crying when her father told her to change her frock and go with him and Arthur to take the flowers to the cemetery – or that’s where she’d thought they must have been going, or to Willama where Rachael was.
He’d come to her room and again taken that grey frock from the wardrobe, but she’d snatched it from him, thrown it on the floor, stomped on it and bawled so hard she lost her breath. He must have thought she’d gone insane with grief because he tried to make her take a spoonful of Arthur’s medicine. Never, never would she let him put that in her mouth. Never. She’d hit that spoon, splashed that medicine all over his shirt, so he was the one who’d had to change.
Olivia helped herself to a dose of that medicine, and instead of fixing her hair as she’d been told to, she went to bed. Nicholas ended up driving off with only Arthur and that huge bunch of roses.
That’s when the scream congealed. She was standing at her window, watching Nicholas’s car raising dust all the way up to Bridge Road, and suddenly her head felt hot and heavy, and that heaviness crept down her chest to her legs until she felt too heavy to ever move again – so she moved fast, ran down to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and stuck her head inside it – until Mrs Johnson and Tilda had come walking in talking about Rachael.
‘She said she was found outside the Reichenbergs’ gate at dawn, and she was –’ Then Mrs Johnson noticed the refrigerator door was open. ‘What on earth are you doing, Miss Helen?’
Had to move. Had to get out of there. Had to make her brain make her feet move. Read. Get a book. Make her brain move. She raced up the passage to the library and found her father’s The Home Doctor on his desk.
Like a sign from God telling her she’d gone insane, her father’s bookmark had been left open at a page on insanity: . . . The loss of so many of our mentally strong sons, the intermarriage of the degenerate classes, is producing families more degenerate than themselves, and in more vast numbers than the mentally strong in our society …
Olivia was not mentally strong. Nicholas blamed her for Rachael’s disobedience, which he considered a symptom of instability. And Freddy too had been unstable because he ran away to war at seventeen – which probably meant he and Rachael had been mentally strong, not weak. Helen, too scared of her father to be disobedient, knew she was the mentally weak one. Also, Rachael remembered things from when she was three years old. Helen could barely remember anything that happened before she was five.
She was insane enough to go through Nicholas’s drawer of old letters again, and she found Freddy’s – and was halfway through reading it when she heard the car return. She put it, and the envelope, in The Home Doctor, and ran with the book up to the front of the house, out the main door, right around the west side and down the back to the quince tree, which was a totally insane thing to do. The book was too big. She’d never be able to smuggle it inside, and she’d ripped a page when she dropped it in her struggle to get into the old cubbyhouse.
Safe in there, though. Safe enough to read Freddy’s letter.
Dear Mother,
I board the boat tomorrow to do my bit for old England. There is little more to say, other than to ask your forgiveness for the upset my leaving caused to you.
Aunt Bertha and Grandmother must not be blamed for my decision. If blame is to be apportioned, then let it be placed where it justly deserves to be placed – on his shoulders.
Grandmother is unwell. Your company would be appreciated here, as it should be appreciated. And that’s all I’ll write on that subject.
Pray for me, and don’t let the girls forget me. Tell them to keep watching the sky, and one day they’ll see their big brother flying home to them.
As always, my best love to you, to my little imp, Rachael, and to sweet, sweet Helen. My regards to Arthur and Jennifer.
Your loving son, Freddy.
She read that letter four times, and it calmed her because her brain understood every word of it, and she could even almost remember him – or remember the way he’d spoken, because that letter wasn’t one of those empty, meaningless things full of empty, meaningless words. A real person had written those words and he’d said what was on his mind, be it polite or not – like Rachael, so much like Rachael.
Sweet, sweet Helen, he’d written. He had known her and loved her. Maybe it was he who had shown Rachael the tunnel into the quince tree, and maybe he’d guided Helen here today so she could read his letter and know him.
The old tree grew alongside and over the washhouse, shading it in the mornings, and shaded by it in the afternoons. A cool place, and within its interior, when she and Rachael were small, they’d made a fine cubbyhouse.
She wasn’t small now, and it was a totally insane place for a grown woman to be sitting, but all day she’d wanted to crawl into a deep black hole and die, so coming in here was a better idea than that – like crawling back into the womb of the great earth mother, still safe from life, until she was ready to be born as who she was meant to be.
Safe enough to read her father’s book too: In a careful examination of 1500 school children in New York City, 90 percent were found to be mentally, physically defective or both. Reading what Nicholas had just read was almost like taking a peep inside his head. There was no way to discover what really went on in his head. If it was anything like her own, it spent its life circling, always searching for a safe place to rest. Rachael had been Helen’s safe resting place. Where did Nicholas rest?
Probably in books. Every night he read late. Every morning he sat at his desk, updating his account books and writing letters. Had he not been born Nicholas Squire, he might have been a schoolteacher, or a bookkeeper. Every item purchased on the estate was recorded, every penny listed in his account books, every move he made controlled by his own unbreakable rules. His inability to control Olivia’s drinking frustrated him, and Rachael’s dogged disobedience had near driven him to distraction.
Which is why Helen obeyed him blindly, because hand in hand with fearing him, she pitied him. When he sang Percy’s praises, she agreed. If he told her to change her frock, she changed it fast; if he told her she couldn’t have her hair cut, she didn’t cut it.
Rachael had cut her own hair two years ago, and laughed when she made a mess of it. Nicholas hadn’t laughed, but that ragged look not fitting the image of a Squire daughter, he’d driven her to Willama to have a professional haircut before locking her in her room for two days.
Mustn’t think of her. Mustn’t. Mustn’t think of Mrs Johns
on and Tilda coming on her with her head in the refrigerator. Mustn’t think of anything.
One factor in the increase of insanity is the –
If Nicholas could see her now, he’d be convinced she was insane. She was sitting in the dirt, in a very inappropriate way, shoes off, stockings off, knees up, ankles crossed, the skirt of her gold frock hitched high because she didn’t want to soil it.
The quince tree was an overgrown tangle of interwoven branches that swept the ground. Access could be gained to its centre by climbing over one of the lower branches alongside the washhouse and crawling beneath others into a space large enough for two little girls and their dolls. Not so large now, but very safe from watchful eyes. No one had seen her crawl in, and if she was silent, it would be the last place in the world her father would look. He wouldn’t be looking anyway; he’d be sipping scotch on ice with Father Ryan. The Johnsons’ dogs might sniff her out if they were let off their chains, except they wouldn’t be let off because Father Ryan didn’t like them and they didn’t like him.
The young person feels cravings which cry out for satisfaction but society and the demands of religion forbid them… That may have been fact. Rachael had immoral cravings for Chris, but she’d satisfied them. No chance of her ever going insane – though it had been totally insane trying to run away with Chris that night.
They’d packed their cases, just the little ones, and counted Helen’s money about six times. She’d saved eight pounds and seven shillings, only because she never wanted anything enough to spend her allowance. Rachael hadn’t been able to save sixpence.
That night they’d waited until Nicholas went to bed, then Rachael climbed down a rope ladder Chris had made for her and Helen passed the cases out, but when she tried to climb down, every time she put her foot on the rope it swayed. She told Rachael to pass her case back up, and to go. She wouldn’t go. She found a proper ladder and dragged it to the window, giggling as she climbed up it and guided Helen’s feet backwards onto the rungs.