by Maris Morton
He leant back with a smile that was heavy with irony. ‘Just goes to show, doesn’t it, money can’t buy you happiness. Now’ — he was all business again — ‘what do you think happened?’ He nodded in the direction of the front room.
Mary was taken aback. It seemed clear to her. She had to remind herself that this man didn’t know anything about the Hazlitts, except that they were rich.
‘I think Clio Hazlitt shot herself.’
‘I didn’t see a note. Did you find one, by any chance?’
‘No.’
‘If she offed herself there should be a note. Usually is.’
She remembered the crumpled sheets she’d burnt in the stove last night. Had those pages contained any messages? If they had, it was too late. They were all reduced to ashes. She felt as if her heart had swollen until it was too big to stay inside her chest.
The policeman looked as if he might have some understanding of how she was feeling, and after the silence had stretched for what seemed like hours, he rose to his feet. The constable had come back and was standing just inside the back door. He’d been so quiet she hadn’t noticed.
‘You want a cuppa, Dan?’
The younger man shook his head. ‘No, thanks. They’re on their way. Jandakot, too. They’ll hold him.’
‘Good.’ The sergeant glanced aimlessly around the kitchen. ‘There’s not a lot we can do till they get here. All right if we take a look round outside?’ He stared out through the bay window. ‘Rain’s easing up.’
‘Sure,’ Mary said. ‘Whatever you like.’ She wanted to be on her own for a while. It would be bad enough when the next lot arrived, when she’d have to go through it all again. As an afterthought, she added, ‘The wethers are in the sheds: the ones —’
‘The million-dollar ones?’ Matt Norrish grinned. ‘We better go and check them out.’
They’d been gone for no more than a few minutes when there was a quiet knock at the back door. Garth was standing there, his hair and overalls soaked. ‘You all right, Mary? What do the coppers want?’
‘Oh, Garth!’ Relief washed over her; with Garth here, she didn’t feel alone. ‘The most dreadful thing’s happened. Come in. No, better not … let’s go into the sleepout.’
‘I thought I heard the Piper?’ he said, trailing after her. ‘I thought they were going tomorrow.’ He stopped, leaning against the doorjamb. ‘What is it, Mary? What’s happened?’
Mary sat down on her bed, and the tears started running down her cheeks as if they were never going to stop. ‘Clio’s d-dead.’ She was having trouble controlling the trembling of her mouth.
‘What? She’s dead? Glory said she was really crook …’
‘No. No, she’s been sh-sh-shot!’
‘Shot!’ Garth echoed.
She could feel the tear tracks cold on her cheeks. Garth was silent while he took in the enormity of this. ‘Jesus! What the hell happened?’
‘Last night …’
Garth couldn’t understand. ‘What, someone came in?’ Another possibility occurred to him. ‘You don’t mean … Paul?’
Mary shook her head. ‘Clio … She had cancer. She was dying.’
Garth stood in silence, his face still blank with shock. ‘What happens now?’
Mary hadn’t thought past the immediate situation: the Albany police coming, the frightful thing inside. She found a tissue and mopped her face.
‘Can I do anything?’ Garth said
Mary heard the goodwill behind his words and bowed her head. ‘Thanks, Garth.’ She was uncertain what she should be doing. The only thing she was sure about was that she didn’t want to go into that bedroom again.
‘What’s the time?’ she said, standing up. ‘Detectives are coming from Albany. How long will it take them to get here?’
‘Albany? If they get a move on, maybe an hour, hour and a half.’
Mary tried to calculate. ‘Then they’ll be here over dinnertime. Should I offer to feed them?’ She had no idea of the etiquette of such situations. But if she made a big pot of soup, and toast, then they could help themselves. She moved towards the kitchen, feeling a stiffness in her body that must be the effect of shock. ‘I’ll make something.’
Garth hesitated at the back door, as if undecided whether to leave her. ‘That’s right, Mary. Keep yourself busy. Come over when they’ve finished.’
In the kitchen, Mary made herself concentrate on the familiar routine of selecting and chopping vegetables, finding stock in the freezer, putting together a pot of soup that, under the present circumstances, was the best she could do. Having this task to focus on would keep her mind away from the horror waiting in that room.
34
FOR A WHILE, THE HOUSE WAS FULL OF PEOPLE, and afterwards Mary couldn’t put a name to any of them. One of them brought out a handgun enclosed in a plastic bag and laid it on the kitchen table.
‘You seen this before?’
‘No,’ Mary said. ‘Where did you find it?’
‘It was on the floor in there, almost under the bed.’
It didn’t look like the weapons Paul and Martin had been cleaning only the other night on this same table. ‘What sort it is it?’
‘Webley thirty-eight. Never seen it round here?’
‘No, I don’t think so. Paul and Martin had … Walthers, I think they said. They didn’t look like that one … I’m no expert.’ She remembered Clio talking about the handgun Steve and Ellen had used to put the burnt sheep out of their misery. ‘I think Mrs Hazlitt had another one …’ She searched her memory, clouded by the morning’s events. ‘Steve — a man who used to work here — gave her one. A long time ago. He’s dead now. She said he’d brought it back from the war.’
‘That’d be right. The Webley was British Army issue. You know where she kept it?’
‘No. Somewhere in her room, probably.’
‘We’ll be checking it for prints.’
Why? Mary wondered. What had happened seemed perfectly clear to her. Was it possible that Paul could have killed his wife? He obviously disliked her, but was that a reason for murder? It seemed improbable.
While Clio’s body was being carried down the passage, Mary kept her face turned away, but she couldn’t avoid hearing the heavy tread of the men carrying it, or the rustle of the plastic shroud, clear over the sound of the rain.
When they’d gone, at last the house was still. All that was left was a peculiar feeling of emptiness, as if all the life had been sucked out, trailing after the disappearing ambulance and police vehicles like a will-o’-the-wisp.
MARY WAS TIDYING the kitchen, trying to keep her mind blank, when Garth came back. He hovered in the doorway. ‘I told Cec what happened. He’s pretty upset. Glory said for you to come over for tea tonight.’
‘Thanks. I don’t really know …’
‘Angus won’t be back till tomorrow.’
Mary nodded acknowledgement. ‘It’s not that.’ Garth was still standing at the door. ‘Come in. Don’t worry about your boots. At this moment, I couldn’t care less about mud on the floor.’
He edged into the room and Mary went back to her cleaning.
‘I was thinking, Mary. Wondering what sort of a mess …’
Mary looked at him, not comprehending. ‘Mess?’
‘Where the … you know, blood and that?’
‘God!’ Since the body had been taken away Mary hadn’t given this matter a thought. Again, she cursed Paul, whose responsibility this was, for leaving her to deal with it.
‘I could give you a hand.’
It would still be there, the blood …
Suddenly, Garth’s support was the most precious gift she’d ever been offered. ‘Thank you, Garth. That would be tremendous.’ She was embarrassed to hear the quaver in her voice.
‘Nobody’s going to want to sleep in that bed again. We could burn the whole bloody lot. It’s stopped raining.’
‘They’re Paul’s things.’
‘Paul’s not bloody well here,
is he. It’ll be putrid by the time he gets back. If he decides to come back.’ As the Downe slaughterman, Garth knew about such things.
For a moment, she was tempted to leave everything for Paul to deal with, putrid or not, but it wouldn’t do. ‘You’re quite right. We’d better burn the lot. Where?’
‘I thought just outside. The ground’s wet and there’s nothing there to catch alight. I’ll give you a hand. You’ll never manage the mattress on your own.’
While Mary finished washing up, Garth went to collect old newspapers, kerosene and matches. Then the moment came when they had to go into Clio’s room.
Most of the blood was confined to the pillows. Clio must have used them to muffle the sounds of the gunshot, but they would also have absorbed the explosions of blood and brains. Garth picked them up by their corners and carried them out to the bonfire site.
The duvet seemed to have come through unscathed, and Mary put it aside before stripping the sheets and the soiled mattress protector, wrapping the bloodstained sections in the clean parts. The crocheted rug was lying across the foot of the bed, and she debated whether to add it to the fire; it seemed unmarked, but Paul wouldn’t want the reminder of Clio. In the end she laid it, neatly folded, on the blue velvet chair. It was a lovely thing, and maybe someone, somewhere, would value it.
Garth gathered the bundled bedding and took it outside. When he returned for the mattress, he reeked of smoke and kerosene: the fire was alight.
Together they heaved the mattress out, bumping it through the doorways and down the back steps and carefully positioning it on the fire so that the weight of it didn’t smother the flames.
They stood and watched the choking smoke coiling upwards into the humid air, the furnace-glow at the fire’s heart flaring orange and yellow in the draught created by its own burning. The sky overhead had darkened again. Mary was in a kind of limbo, cold air at her back and the fire hot on her face, her mind quite blank. The stink of the smoke was gradually replacing the smell of death that had been in her head all day — and, unpleasant as it was, that was a real relief.
A fire is so cleansing, she thought, it’s a kind of closure, a symbolic cremation. This fire is burning up all Clio’s pain and anger, transforming it into … into some other form of energy… Heat and light.
Mary stood in silence for a while, then she went back into the house, up the passage to Clio’s room, where she found what she was looking for and carried it out to where Garth was standing.
‘What’s that you’ve got there?’
Mary laid the viola case on the trampled grass while she fumbled to undo the latches. ‘Clio’s viola.’
The firelight flickered over the varnished surfaces. ‘What? That is?’ He indicated the fragments tangled in the blue-lined case.
‘Paul smashed it.’ She lifted the bow, still intact, and lobbed it onto the fire. The horsehair sizzled, and the flames, as if glad of fresh fuel, leapt to envelop the varnished wood. Mary picked up piece after piece of the broken instrument and tossed it into the heart of the fire. The gut strings writhed and curled as if they were alive. The piney, resinous smell of the burning was almost pleasant. Mary hesitated for an instant; the fragment in her hand was the curved section that had formed part of the instrument’s back. Maple, hadn’t Clio said? In this light, she could just make out the faded writing on the label. More than two hundred years ago somebody had written his name on this scrap of paper. Still more centuries ago, this burning wood had been spruce and pine and maple trees, thriving in some far Italian forest.
When the last of the viola was alight, she tossed on the case. The flames licked over the velvet lining and caught at the edges, where the wood was thinnest, and soon it, too, was glowing, at first holding its form then melting, melding into the pile of hot, fragrant, silvery ash.
When she looked away from the fire at Garth, his face was set. ‘He did that, did he,’ was all he said, but Mary could see shock on his face.
‘Years ago. I don’t think she ever forgave him.’ Garth could have had no idea of how much Clio’s music had meant to her.
‘I don’t blame her,’ Garth said. ‘What happens to him now?’
Mary felt a smile begin. ‘The police were going to be waiting for him at Jandakot. I expect they’ll be asking him a lot of hard questions.’ She tried to picture the situation up there. ‘Questions that Paul won’t know how to answer. For one thing, he had no idea how sick Clio was … they’ll think that’s rather strange.’
THE EVENING MEAL with the Graysons had a surreal air. When the boys had been sent off to get ready for bed, Garth answered Gayleen’s unspoken question. ‘Mrs Hazlitt’s dead.’
Gayleen’s eyes rounded. ‘What?’
‘Nothing for you to worry about,’ Gloria said. ‘You saw how sick she was, poor thing.’ She glanced over at Mary’s white face. ‘We’re all pretty upset.’
After a long silence, Garth cleared his throat. ‘You’ll be wanting to get back to Perth, eh Mary? No use hanging round here.’
‘No, you’re right. There’s nothing for me to do here now.’ The problem of her transport back to the city loomed, still unsolved, but she pushed it aside: tomorrow she might be able to think straight.
Garth’s voice interrupted her reverie. ‘If you like, I could drive you back?’
It took her a moment to grasp what he’d said. ‘Could you? Oh, Garth, that would be marvellous.’
‘Tomorrow morning suit?’
‘Tomorrow morning would be perfect.’
MARY WALKED BACK to the homestead for the last time, her way lit by a torch whose beam caught the falling raindrops and turned them into a cloud of diamonds. The remains of the fire still glowed red in the darkness. The smell of burning bedding lingered, mixed with the scent of wet earth and a fugitive whiff of citrus blossom. There would be no more early morning trips out to the orange tree, through the icy dew or the rain, to fetch fruit for Clio’s drinks.
Mary was conscious of being alone, yet not alone. While the ghost of Clio had been borne into the sky on the smoke of the bonfire, the house still felt inhabited.
Garth’s offer had been a godsend. It would be wonderful to put Downe and all its unhappiness behind her. Away from here, in her own place, she felt as if she’d be able to process her grief for Clio.
Packing didn’t take her long. Soon her bags were lined up on the back verandah ready for the morning.
With that done, Mary braced herself and went into Clio’s room, switching on the light. She had to swallow the dread that rose in her throat while she fought to rid herself of the memory of Clio’s wrecked face on the pillow.
The little red eye of the CD player was still glowing, and she turned it off. A disc was inside, and she took it out. Schubert, Quintet in C major. Clio must have loved it to have chosen it to be the last music she’d ever hear. She clipped the disc back into its case and put it with the others on the bedside cabinet. The gold-flecked glass of orange juice was still beside the bed. She felt tears build behind her eyes.
Clio’s ugg boots lay on the floor, waiting for her feet to find their way into them. The bed base was neat, bare, clean, stripped of all the horror. The rest of the room was like it always had been, elegant, spare and beautiful. Mary pulled the sheer curtains over the french doors and made certain the latch was secure, then went into Clio’s little bathroom, neat as a ship’s cabin, and made sure all the taps were turned off properly, and the toilet flushed. She noticed a piece of paper lying almost invisibly on one of the sheepskin mats; it must have fallen from among the bedding when she and Garth had been carrying the mattress outside. She stooped to pick it up and carried it out with the juice.
In the kitchen, she washed the glass and put it away, then took the paper over to the stove to burn it, as she’d burnt those other sheets Clio had given her. Then she noticed her name. The writing was almost indecipherable, like the meanderings of a sick spider, but with an effort she could make out the words.
Mary, than
k you for being a friend; I didn’t expect that. Goodbye. Be happy.
Mary read the words again.
She had no doubt now, if she ever had, that Clio had killed herself. Her heart ached for the woman, but at the same time she understood that Clio had done the right thing, given the circumstances of her illness.
Then she remembered Martin’s story of Clio’s midnight visit. Would Clio really have killed her son, to save Alyssa from the marriage? It seemed so unlikely. But when she’d spoken about the death of her music, Clio’s pain had been so palpable, that maybe … maybe she would have. Nobody would ever know.
Should she keep the note? Show it to the police? You couldn’t really call it a suicide note. She thought of Paul up in Perth, being interviewed by the police, and pictured his discomfort. No, she wouldn’t give the note to anyone; it had been meant for her alone.
She opened the door of the stove’s firebox; the fire had burnt down to embers, but there was enough heat to make the edge of the paper curl, then singe, then burst into flame.
Too restless to sleep, Mary went into Ellen’s room to play the piano. She played scales until her hands had warmed up and the sound of the instrument was ringing in her head. This time there was no Clio listening to her from the other room. Nobody could hear her.
Then she began to play the Chopin nocturne. The quiet melancholy of the minor key exactly suited her mood.
She concentrated on reading the printed score and getting her fingers on the right notes, as she had done every time she’d attempted it so far. But after the first minute or two, she realised that she knew this piece. She’d come to understand its song, and could sense it in her mind and hands. Chopin’s music was speaking to her, heart to heart. She recalled the conversation she and Clio had had, about the language of music, and how much more meaning it carried than mere words could convey.
Some of the stress eased, and Mary stopped playing. She flexed her fingers and started to play the nocturne from the beginning again, as beautifully as she could, thinking, as she played: This music is for you, Clio. An elegy for you.