The Ink Stain

by Tom Keneally

  ‘Your first thought,’ said Mrs Mulrooney. ‘There will be a second thought, then.’

  ‘Ah, you’re right, my lady. My second thought was that, at least from behind, the man doing all that hammering looked an awful lot like Frankie Gleeson. As he was in Sydney, though – or so I thought – I presumed it was a passing similarity.’

  ‘But you went back there this week,’ said Monsarrat.

  ‘Yes – well, I had been given the task by this lady here,’ said Lethbridge. ‘And I know better than to deny her. And when I knocked on the door – not too hard, mind, didn’t want to send the place crashing down – Gleeson answered.’

  ‘Happy to see you, was he?’ asked Monsarrat.

  ‘Hardly. Tried to close the door again. But wardens don’t make that much money, particularly when they have deserted their posts and are not being paid, so the offer of a few free pies was enough to get me in there.’

  ‘What was he doing there in the first place, though?’ Monsarrat asked. ‘And what did he tell you?’

  ‘Not a lot,’ said Lethbridge. ‘I have to say, the man seemed frightened. And miserable – getting cold at night now in mountains, and he only had a bedroll and a little fire. He was cooking a bandicoot over it when I arrived. Not terribly good eating, those creatures – not all the pastry and gravy in the world could disguise their stringiness. Believe me, I tried.’

  ‘Do you think we’d have any luck if we went out to see him?’ Monsarrat asked. ‘Or would that send him further into his burrow?’

  ‘I can’t answer that. Nor will I need to – he will be here this afternoon.’

  ‘Why on earth would he come back to Sydney if he is so frightened?’

  ‘I think he is beginning to fear starvation more. And I did tell him that I would conceal his return. Gave him the address of an inn near Camperdown. Told him that you will have paid his lodging by the time he arrives, so you’d best hurry.’

  Mrs Mulrooney gave Lethbridge a loud kiss on the cheek. He blushed, rubbing the spot. ‘Very forward of you, Mrs Mulrooney.’

  She laughed, but the sound faded quickly. ‘You’ve … you’ve no news of my Padraig?’

  Lethbridge frowned. ‘I’m sorry, no. You mustn’t assume anything, though – my range only extends so far.’

  For a moment, Mrs Mulrooney looked on the brink of tears. Then she swallowed, straightened.

  ‘May I ask,’ said Lethbridge, ‘how you are getting on with Miss Henrietta Duchamp?’

  ‘How am I … an odd question.’

  ‘Allow me to explain. The staff at Government House are not immune to the charms of my pies, although woefully ignorant of philosophy. I let it be known that you are well regarded among the Irish aristocracy. That despite your humble pretensions you are a wealthy woman, much sought after for your wisdom. Thought it might help, and I hope it has.’

  Mrs Mulrooney seemed to be struggling to suppress a smile.

  ‘And you’ll be taking something for your trouble,’ she said.

  ‘I certainly wouldn’t reject it. An offer to pay for the pies I gave Frank would be met with acceptance as well. That’s the only problem shared by pies and philosophy – there’s not a lot of money in either of them.’

  Chapter 21

  ‘I was rather surprised to receive your letter of the third instant,’ Eveleigh had written in a hand which bore none of Monsarrat’s curlicues or flourishes. It was practical but unadorned, like the owner of the hand it had come from.

  I know you are keenly aware of the condition attached to your continued freedom – the discreet investigation of matters of sensitivity. I know you appreciate that this investigation has to occur at arm’s length from myself and this office.

  You were also warned, as I recall, to expect obstacles, and that there would be little I could do to intervene. I have faith that you will find a way through your current difficulties and bring this matter to an acceptable end, and I look forward to hearing of your success.

  There were none of the usual niceties. In the world in which Eveleigh moved, it was highly irregular to begin a letter without a flowery declaration that the writer was honoured. And the fact that this letter was signed only with the initials R. E. told Monsarrat more about the fastidious Eveleigh’s irritation than any words could have.

  Monsarrat looked over the top of the letter and across the table towards Mrs Mulrooney.

  ‘From himself?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, as it happens. We are on our own.’

  ‘When have we not been? The rest of the colony need not know that, though. As far as everyone else is concerned, you have the colonel’s blessing to carry out this investigation in whatever way you see fit. If one were, say, one of the colony’s administrators, one would be used to keeping secrets – and flattered to be trusted to do so.’

  ‘I suppose, but who are you –’

  It made Monsarrat slightly nervous that Mrs Mulrooney never allowed her fan to stray too far from her. It sat on the breakfast table at her elbow now, and she snatched it up quickly and administered a sharp rap to his knuckles.

  ‘Honestly,’ he said, rubbing his hand, ‘I feel as though I’m back in the schoolroom.’

  ‘Perhaps you should be, Mr Monsarrat. Perhaps then, you’d remember to think. You would also remember a certain gentleman we met at the garden party. One who is a great admirer of your hand, and one who can give you access to more documents than anyone else in the colony. At least he may if he hasn’t read this morning’s Flyer.’

  The Colonial Secretary’s Office was housed in one of the colony’s finer buildings. Its striated sandstone blocks were all completely flat where other buildings bore the protrusions and chisel marks of those who had taken the rocks from the earth.

  Inside, a clerk sat at a desk, a large ledger open in front of him. ‘Sir, I am sorry but nobody can be seen without an appointment,’ he said when Monsarrat confessed that Alexander Hawley was not expecting him.

  ‘You may find he’s willing to make an exception on my behalf. We met at Government House.’

  The clerk paused. Hawley no doubt mentioned his invitation there at every opportunity. ‘It is most irregular,’ the clerk said, ‘but I shall ask him, if you care to wait.’

  He was back within a few minutes, with Hawley beetling along in his slipstream. ‘Mr Monsarrat!’ The chief clerk grabbed his hand, shaking it vigorously. ‘I was telling Thompkins about you – wasn’t I, Thompkins?’ The junior clerk looked up, gave a tight smile, and fixed his eyes back on the letter in front of him. ‘Wonderful for someone like him to know that it’s possible to rise from a mere desk clerk to working at the highest levels, doing … what is it that you’re doing, actually, Mr Monsarrat?’

  Monsarrat allowed himself to exhale slowly. Either Hawley had not seen the paper, or it didn’t matter to him, or, better yet and as Mrs Mulrooney had suggested, it burnished the position he already held in this man’s eyes.

  ‘It’s on that point I’ve come to see you, Mr Hawley.’

  Hawley smiled expectantly.

  ‘I’m afraid that as it’s a matter of state, we will need to have this discussion somewhere more private.’

  ‘Of course, of course!’ said Hawley. ‘Right this way. Hold the fort there, Thompkins. You heard Mr Monsarrat – I have affairs of state to attend to.’

  ‘It’s of the utmost importance that you don’t speak about this to anyone,’ said Monsarrat. ‘Even Colonel Duchamp would deny knowledge if you asked about it – while marking you down as someone who can’t be trusted. Discretion is rewarded.’

  Hawley was nodding so quickly that his spectacles threatened to slide off the end of his nose. Monsarrat shifted uncomfortably in the small chair he had been offered. Hawley’s office was small, and overrun by journals, ledgers, and sheets of yellowing paper rolled up and bound with red ribbon. There was barely room for a second chair, and Monsarrat’s knees were pressed uncomfortably against Hawley’s desk.

  ‘I wonder, Mr Hawley – giv
en your knowledge of the place, you’re probably the only person who can help me. Could you tell me where I might find land grants? And house deeds.’

  ‘No trouble at all, though it would help if you could tell me which land grant or deed you’re looking for.’

  ‘I would if I were able to. But I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to give out that information.’ In a way, it was true: he was not authorised to be having this conversation at all.

  Half an hour later, Monsarrat was sitting at a small table among rows of shelves, hemmed in by a fortress of ledgers. Hawley had given a tour, telling him where the information was filed. It was a convoluted filing system, though, and he would have dearly loved to tell Hawley precisely what he was looking for. That, of course, was impossible, so he had to flick through hundreds of lists of names.

  It seemed Hallward had been right in criticising the administration for patronage. Three times since he’d taken office, the governor had made substantial grants of land to Duchamp – enough to make the man rich, if he had any facility at all with agriculture, or the sense to hire someone who did. It was pleasing to have the information, but not really revelatory – Monsarrat had believed Hallward’s writings on the subject. He knew that the colony, so distant from its mother, operated like this.

  It was when he turned the page of the ledger of title deeds, though, that he knew his trip had been worthwhile. It turned out that Albert Bancroft had sold the house opposite the gaol three months earlier. And in the column next to the address, a clerk had written the name of the new owner: Gerald Mobbs.

  Emerging from the room, rubbing his eyes, he did not immediately notice Hawley was standing right near the door.

  ‘Has that effect on me too,’ Hawley said. ‘There’s only so long one can stare at writing on a page, no matter how fascinating one finds it.’

  ‘Fascinating, but sadly not fruitful in this case,’ Monsarrat said. ‘However, I did think of a question I wanted to ask you. Gerald Mobbs. You know him?’

  ‘Ah, yes, the editor. The only one now. He was at the garden party, of course. Very interested in my file room. Can’t say I blame him.’

  ‘No, indeed. So he was here on the day Henry Hallward was killed?’

  ‘Quite. He wanted to fossick around – among the property titles actually, same as yourself. Only, he didn’t get much of a chance. He needed a bit of a rest when he got here. He arrived in a lather, as though he’d run all the way. And he left as soon as the word of Mr Hallward’s murder came.’

  ‘So what time did Mr Mobbs arrive? Must have been late morning – I believe the murder occurred around ten?’

  ‘Ten? Oh, I don’t think so. It’s only five minutes quick walk from the gaol and our messenger was here with news of the shooting just after Mobbs arrived. That was a little after half past ten.’

  ‘Well, various sources have said Hallward was shot around ten,’ Monsarrat said, puzzled. ‘Mr Hawley, are you sure?’

  Hawley pointed to a clock on the room’s mantelpiece. ‘You can rest assured that this is one of the most accurate clocks in the colony. I checked the time that day so I could enter the events in my log.’

  Monsarrat thought of the clock in the gaol, and felt something flop over in the pit of his stomach. Hawley trusted his clock, Monsarrat thought. Just as those at the gaol had trusted theirs.

  Taking his hat from the table where he had laid it, he bowed to Hawley and strode to the door, breaking into a run the instant it closed behind him.

  He had no memory of most of the journey and did not slow as he approached the gaol, almost slamming into the door, raising his fist to hammer on it. It occurred to him he must be the only former convict trying to get in rather than out.

  The door was cautiously opened by Chancel.

  ‘I won’t take much of your time,’ Monsarrat said, pushing past him.

  Chancel followed him into the entrance room. ‘I can’t let you go any further,’ he said.

  ‘Fine,’ said Monsarrat. He stared at the clock, then opened the register underneath it, turning to the page which recorded the gaol’s comings and goings. ‘Chancel, look here.’ He tapped his finger on the time of the arrival of the prison cart. ‘The cart was early that day. And the few days around it. Why?’

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t, although the driver caught an earful from Mr Crowdy at the time,’ said Chancel.

  ‘He wasn’t early?’

  ‘No, sir. Not as it turned out. A few days later, you see, the surgeon came. Got out his pocket watch. Showed it to me. The clock was half an hour slow. I changed it back immediately, sir.’

  ‘So Mobbs owns the house from which the murder was committed, and arrived at the Colonial Secretary’s Office flustered and bothered only a short time after we now think the murder happened,’ Hannah said. ‘No mistake in Hawley’s clock, I’m sure.’

  ‘None at all,’ said Monsarrat. He was in the same state Mobbs was on the day of the murder, having run to the boarding house to find Mrs Mulrooney. ‘Chancel said that when Duchamp inspected the gaol, he took an interest in everything, including the clock. But if we act now, the colonel could have us both in gaol with a nod of his head, and Peter would likely be lost forever. All we have is a slow clock, an exerted newspaper editor and the deed to a house. Even though Mobbs owns it, we could not irrefutably prove he’s been staying there, much less shooting people from the attic. We need incontrovertible evidence. Frank Gleeson might be able to give it to us.’

  ‘Well, someone lives there, or at least is there at night,’ said Hannah. ‘And Emily was delivering food. Who was it for, if not Mobbs and Henrietta?’

  ‘We should visit the house on the way back from seeing Gleeson,’ Monsarrat said.

  ‘And I might be able to make another small expenditure on behalf of the investigation,’ said Hannah. ‘Mobbs and Henrietta would expect us to travel on foot, or perhaps in a small cart. If they saw a coach and wondered at its occupants, the last people they would think of would be us.’ She reached into a pocket and pulled out a small cloth bag that jingled as it moved. She pressed it into his hand. ‘Mr Monsarrat, I have an errand for you. Go out and rent a coach. A good one, but not …’ She held up a finger, extracted her little book from the other pocket, and flipped through the pages. ‘Ostentatious – yes, I think that will do very nicely. Off you go, Mr Monsarrat.’

  ‘Very well,’ he said, standing. ‘I believe I know just the man to help us.’

  McCarthy’s coach was perfect, declared so by Mrs Mulrooney. It was a demure dowager, so comfortable in its standing that it didn’t need to display itself by decking itself with baubles. The coach was black, with gold pinstripes around the doors, the paint unchipped and the seats inside comfortably stuffed. Monsarrat worried, though, that even an understated vehicle might find itself an object of interest in the part of town he had visited earlier that day to pay in advance for the room where Frank Gleeson was hopefully waiting for them.

  It was early evening when they arrived in Camperdown. The sky looked like slate, and it would be dark by the time they emerged. Monsarrat got out and offered his hand to Mrs Mulrooney, who ignored it and jumped lightly down to the pavement.

  ‘I’m not sure how long we’ll be,’ Monsarrat said to McCarthy. ‘Will you be all right here?’

  ‘You needn’t worry about me – it’s not my first time in this part of town,’ McCarthy said, opening his jacket.

  Monsarrat could see a pistol in his belt. ‘Does everyone in Sydney own a gun?’

  ‘Only the intelligent ones.’

  The oldest of Sydney’s buildings had been constructed when Monsarrat was a child. After arriving from England he had missed, at first, walking through squares and doors that had stood for centuries, or down corridors in the Temples by the Thames whose walls had absorbed the whispered conversations of Tudor courtiers. This was, of course, the least of his worries at the time, and not something he had thought about for over a decade.

  The building they entered now, though, looked
as though it had been standing for a century or more – and didn’t appear to be in a fit state to last much longer. Its roof bowed alarmingly in the middle, and Monsarrat saw a few broken shingles, no longer able to hold on to the steep slope, littering the pavement. The place didn’t appear to have been painted since it was built, with large patches of raw wood showing through a colour that was probably once white. Windowpanes that had been broken – perhaps by weather, but more likely with the assistance of locals – had not been replaced, and planks had been nailed across the openings. A parlour of sorts was downstairs, with an extinct fire and a grate out of which ashes were raining onto the floor.

  Monsarrat turned to Mrs Mulrooney. ‘I know what you’re thinking, and we don’t have time.’

  ‘If I can find a brush, I can at least deal with those smuts.’ She nodded at the fire.

  ‘And they’ll be back by next week,’ said Monsarrat. ‘Come along. McCarthy may have a gun, but I’d rather he not have to use it.’

  The stairs were uneven, covered with a torn rug that seemed designed to trap an unwary toe. At the top of the stairs, two doors faced each other. A small amount of light was leaking from beneath one of them.

  Monsarrat looked at Mrs Mulrooney, raised his eyebrows and knocked. ‘Frank Gleeson?’ No one answered, but Monsarrat heard the creaking of bed springs as somebody shifted around. ‘It’s Hugh Monsarrat,’ he called.

  ‘And Hannah Mulrooney,’ Mrs Mulrooney said. ‘Stephen Lethbridge’s friends.’

  More creaking, and the door was opened by a man in shirtsleeves, without a cravat. ‘You were followed?’ he said, peering around the door as though anticipating an ambush.