Dust Off the Bones

by Paul Howarth

  And now Noone had visited. Sitting on the other side of the table, legs crossed, sipping his brandy, body angled toward the sea. MacIntyre took a drink, his hand trembling, though it did that anyway.

  “What have you come for, Edmund?”

  Noone drew a long breath and let it out in a sigh. “I have run into a spot of bother, Spencer, for which I’m afraid I need your help.”

  “Oh, aye?” MacIntyre said hopefully, straightening a little in his chair.

  “It’s that bloody McBride business, from Bewley, seems we aren’t quite done with it yet. Honestly, of all the dispersals I led, all the work I did, those Kurrong bastards won’t be silenced—it’s like they don’t know they’re dead.”

  “Why, what’s happened? What now?”

  “You’ll remember our mutual friend in Brisbane, the lawyer, Henry Wells? It seems he and Billy McBride are cooking up some plan to reopen the case, a Royal Commission or some such horseshit, I’m not entirely sure. They are coming for me, personally, Spencer. Me! The commissioner of police!”

  “Some balls on the pair of them.”

  “Quite.”

  “You know, Billy’s a rich man. Powerful friends.”

  “I’m sure he thinks so. But most rich men are fools.”

  “Aye, well, I’m sorry to hear it. I always thought Billy had more sense.”

  “Oh, he has no proof of anything, none of them do—it was twenty-one years ago, for God’s sake. No, the risk for me lies in the reputational smear these rumors can bring. Times have changed after Federation. The past is an inconvenience people would rather forget. The origins of this country . . . they do not want to be reminded of what happened twenty, thirty, fifty years ago. Nobody cares. Would rather enjoy the spoils in peace. Which means, of course, that when weasels like Henry Wells start clamoring for justice, a sacrificial lamb must be found. Someone to blame so the rest of them can wash their hands of history and claim they have done nothing wrong.”

  “And this is you you’re talking about? The lamb?”

  “If Henry Wells had his way, yes.”

  “So, what are you going to do?”

  Noone’s gaze wandered to the ocean. He sipped his drink. “Billy McBride is dead. As is his little brother. As is Henry Wells.”

  MacIntyre spluttered laughter. “Bloody hell. That’ll work.”

  Noone didn’t say anything. His gaze on the ocean, steady and cold.

  “I don’t have much influence nowadays,” MacIntyre said, such relief, such optimism in his voice, “but I can probably put a word in, help cover things up?”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “Do you need an alibi, maybe? I can say you were here the whole time?”

  “No.”

  “Well then,” he said, chuckling, “I don’t much see how I can help you. Seems you’ve taken care of it all yourself.”

  Noone turned to look at him. The chair quietly creaked. “What I need for you to do, Spencer, is to die also. Today. This afternoon. Now. You are the very last of them, the people who know the truth. I cannot allow any witnesses. This Kurrong business risks becoming the thread that could unravel me. It is time to cut it off.”

  MacIntyre forced a nervous laugh that foundered as quickly as it began. “Hell, don’t go making jokes like that to a man of my age.”

  “Your wife will be home later. I have chosen to spare her, you understand, since I assume she doesn’t know. Or, we can wait for her return, and you can go together, whichever way you prefer.”

  “Christ, Edmund, after all I’ve done for you.”

  A twitch of a shrug as Noone saw off his drink.

  “The reports I doctored, the crimes I overlooked—I fixed that bloody inquest for you, despite your own best efforts at buggering the whole thing up.”

  Noone checked the time on his pocket watch. “Is that your answer?”

  “You know I’d never say anything! I’ve stayed quiet twenty years!”

  “You are testing my patience here, Spencer. I am trying to be kind.”

  “Kind? You’re on about killing me!” MacIntyre’s eyes flicked to Noone’s empty glass. “How about I get us another drink and we’ll talk it over?”

  Noone smirked. “Where is it?”

  “Where’s what?”

  “The gun you are planning on fetching. The dining room, wall mounted, or do you keep one in the nightstand by your bed? Think about it, Spencer—how do you want to be found? Lying shot in a pool of your own shit, piss, and blood, or peacefully slumped in that chair there, your body having just . . . given up?”

  MacIntyre flinched like the thing had burned him. “This chair right here?”

  “The very same. Enjoying your idyllic view.”

  “You’re a fucking monster.”

  Noone walked around the table, looming down upon MacIntyre, who watched him with bulging eyes. “If you make this difficult,” Noone said, “Margaret will suffer. Look at it this way: after all your years of struggle, your time has simply come.”

  His gaze slid past Noone to the horizon, and when he spoke there was a crack in his voice: “The last thing I said to her was to remember my humbugs.”

  “Humbugs!” Noone roared. “What a wonderful final word!”

  Down he lunged, clasping the back of MacIntyre’s head with one hand, clamping the other over his mouth. The magistrate struggled pitifully; Noone knelt his weight upon him and the fight was soon done. With his thumb and forefinger, Noone pinched the judge’s nose and cupped his palm to form a seal around his lips. A terrible empty sucking sound. MacIntyre’s chest heaved up and down. In his bulbous eyes thin veins began appearing like the reveal of hidden ley lines. The gasping faded. The eyes dulled. Noone brought his face so close they were almost nose to nose, and watched as the life snuffed out. He removed his hand. The lips were already blue. He eased himself off the chair and flicked a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped off the mucus and a trace of blood. He checked his skin for a break but found none. MacIntyre must have bitten his own tongue. Noone tilted the judge’s head back, walked around the table and picked up his brandy glass, and checked the deck for anything else amiss. Only his jacket—he draped it over his arm and tucked in his chair and went into the kitchen to wash up the glass. He dried it and returned it to the drinks cabinet, aligning it neatly with the others. He paused in the hallway a moment. One last look over the house. Doilies on the surfaces, decorative china pots; it was a pathetic little life, no loss. Through the window MacIntyre sat with his head tipped backward, might have been fast asleep. “Humbugs,” Noone said, chuckling, pushing open the fly-screen door. He closed it behind him and skipped down the steps, crossed the road and disappeared into the field, whistling.

  Like he’d never been there at all.

  Chapter 40

  Tommy McBride

  The train hissed to a standstill at Roma Street station in Brisbane and had disgorged most of its passengers and luggage before down from the first-class carriage limped a feverish Tommy McBride. He swayed on the platform, clutching his duffel bag. Sweat glazed his forehead and neck. He’d hardly slept at all during the journey: heavy eyes scanned the bustling station as if expecting trouble to come. It didn’t. The odd frown at his appearance, the incongruity of him traveling first class, but nobody was waiting to accost him, there was no threat in their stares. Falteringly he began moving, unbalanced by the bag at his side. His left arm was in its sling still, but there was now a dark stain on his shirtsleeve—somewhere north of Sydney he’d peeled back the collar and been hit with a smell of rot. His catgut stitches were puckering. His wound was beginning to weep.

  He pushed through the crowd on the concourse and winced into the sunshine outside, where the bustle and heat of Brisbane assaulted him from all sides. He hailed a cab. A struggle to clamber up. From his pocket he pulled the crumpled sheet of Bellevue notepaper he had found among Billy’s things and gave the driver the address for this lawyer, Henry Wells.

  Tommy collapsed a
gainst the backrest and watched the shops and pavements and pedestrians slide by, the buggy climbing up into the Valley until at the head of an alleyway the driver halted and announced, “Down there.” Tommy paid him and got out and stood looking along a seedy side street as behind him the buggy clattered away. He walked forward, frowning. No place for a law office, this. There was shit on the pavement and litter blown into drifts, most windows were either papered or boarded up. A cat picking at a flattened bird carcass hissed at him, its hackles raised. A baby wailed high above. A man shouted. Glass smashed.

  He almost missed the office at first, since it looked no different from the other shopfronts: the door graffitied, the window sloppily papered with pages from the Brisbane Post. But there was a little brass nameplate, the only one on the street; Tommy wiped the sweat from his eyes and found Henry Wells’s name stenciled there. He dropped his bag and appraised the building anew. The red door had been scrawled with the word fairy in black paint, and it was the same headline on all the newspaper pages, he now realized, pasted in a repeating pattern over the entire windowpane. Tommy leaned closer to read it: double jeopardy! two city lawyers found dead! And with growing despair he scanned the story underneath: perverted misadventure . . . fetish gone awry . . . fatal internal injuries to the disgraced barrister, Henry Wells . . . his lover, Jonathan Stevenson, solicitor in the attorney general’s office . . . suicide with a bullet to the brain.

  Ha! Ha! had been daubed on the window, the paint running. Ha! Ha!

  Reeling, Tommy turned away. So the lawyer was also dead. He clutched his head with a clawed hand and closed his eyes in despair. What was he even doing here? What did he think he could accomplish, going after a man like Noone? He’d told Billy, he’d warned him, he’d known what would happen, and it had. Wildly, Tommy lunged forward and kicked the defaced red door, planting his boot into the lower panel and swinging again and again, crying out and hammering the wood until it broke. He stepped back, panting. A ragged, frenzied stare. The door panel was hanging by only the thinnest of fibers; Tommy nudged it and it fell. He hesitated, knelt down, checked the alley in both directions then reached through and flicked the door latch. He stood, collected his duffel bag, turned the handle, and slipped inside, through a gloomy waiting area, the daylight shrouded by the papered windowpane, and into the back office beyond.

  Tommy closed the door behind him, put down his bag, surveyed the ransacked room. Carefully he picked his way toward the desk, scanning the scattered piles of documents as he went, moved the chair aside and leafed through the papers strewn on top. Nothing. He didn’t really know what he was looking for. Anything about Billy, the inquest, Noone. Anger flared in him. He tossed the papers aside. To think Billy had trusted this man with their secret, that he’d placed all their lives in his—

  Tommy halted. There were two drawers in the desk stanchion, little brass handles, a keyhole in each, both locked. He sifted the desktop and found a letter opener under a stack of sealed deeds, slid it into the first drawer and prized it, pulling the handle gingerly with his left hand, until the lock popped and the drawer opened and Tommy peered inside. Again, nothing. Stationery, an address book, cigarettes, and a bottle of unlabeled liquor, for fuck’s sake. He slammed the drawer closed, gave the bottom one a try, and found on top of a stack of notebooks a little black snub-nosed revolver and a box of cartridges, half-filled.

  Tommy slid over the desk chair, flopped down, mopped his brow with his cuff, the leather cold on his clammy shirt-back, the fabric soaked through with sweat. It peeled from the chair as he leaned to the drawer, fished out the revolver and cartridges and placed them on the desk. The gun was already loaded. Not for protection, given the drawer was locked: the day when it all got too much.

  Tommy pocketed the shells and sat looking at the chair opposite, across the littered desk. Billy must have sat there, maybe as recently as a few days ago. Cooking up their little scheme together, convincing each other they had a chance, Billy spilling all their secrets—Christ, had he told this lawyer where Tommy lived? Was that how Noone’s man had known?

  He wrenched open the top drawer again and snatched up Wells’s address book. Flicking through one-handed until he reached the letter M, and sure enough there was an entry for McBride. But this was only Billy’s address: Broken Ridge Cattle Station, Bewley. Tommy snorted and shook his head. He still wasn’t used to it. This person Billy had become. Idly he flicked back and forth through the pages then froze with one half-turned. He opened it very slowly. Staring in disbelief at what he’d found. He smoothed down the spine and picked up the revolver, weighing it, toying with it in his hand, for the home address on the page before him belonged to Edmund Noone.

  * * *

  The sun was low and searing as he staggered along the road that wound sharply up the steep hillside, through a patchwork of enormous mansions and empty building lots, views of the city in the west, the bend of the river below. All a blur to Tommy, his eyes fixed on the road, his bag slapping hard against his calves, breath seething, a struggle planting one foot after the next. Sweat poured from his hairline and dripped off his jaw and a rusty stain bled through his sleeve.

  Finally, a set of black double gates, the last house at the end of the street. Ivy covered the walls on either side of the gateposts, save a cutout for the brass nameplate: yarraville. Tommy dropped the duffel bag, grabbed a railing, hung his head. He couldn’t get his balance; his heart pounded, his vision swam, like standing on that beach near Adelaide, seeing the sea for the very first time. He pressed his forehead against the railings and managed to focus on the house. It was grotesque. A sprawl of turrets and terraces, pavilions and verandahs and mismatched gable ends, a Frankenstein of a building, experimental, obscene, surrounded by a shingle driveway lined with sapling trees, with a grand series of stepped and sun-bleached lawns sloping to the river below.

  Tommy tried the gate but it was locked. Not too high, though, and neither were the walls, but he couldn’t climb either in this state. He rattled the gate impotently and laughter sounded somewhere, like the house was mocking him, until across the lawns he noticed a group walking back up the hill: three women, a gaggle of children, servants carrying picnic things. The children were running and playing, falling over each other as they went; the women smiling and chatting beneath the brims of their sun hats.

  Noone’s family. Wife, daughters, grandchildren. All of them happy as larks.

  One of the children noticed him. He pointed with an outstretched hand. Over marched a butler, striding between the saplings, shoes crunching the shingle stones, Tommy all the while simply standing there, waiting, no thought in his mind to run.

  “Can I help you?” the man shouted as he neared.

  “This Noone’s house?”

  “Police Commissioner Noone, yes.”

  “He here?”

  Scowling, the butler approached the railings. “And you are?”

  “I need to see him. Is he here or not?”

  “No, he’s—” Now the butler noticed the state of him. How he trembled, the untethered stare. “Are you unwell, sir? What are you doing here?”

  “I just told you, I need to see him . . . when you expecting him back?”

  “Well, that’s hard to say. Particularly since—”

  “He at work or something?”

  “Particularly since you’ve not even given me a name.”

  The women were watching from the lawn, shielding their eyes, the children running about their legs. Tommy butted his head against the railing, his and the butler’s faces only inches apart, and when Tommy looked at him again the butler asked, “Do you know the commissioner from his service days, perhaps?”

  “From his service days?” Tommy pleaded, suddenly close to tears.

  “Only I thought, a little like Sergeant Percy, you might have . . .”

  Tommy was no longer listening. He reached behind him, into the damp waistband of his trousers, felt the warm metal of the revolver, its deadly weight. Visions o
f sliding it through these railings, the butler going down, the entire family lying slaughtered on the drive.

  “I will kill the both of you and your families and anyone else you hold dear. There will be no warning. One day you will simply look upon my face and know what the other has done.”

  Noone. In the Broken Ridge atrium all those years ago. He had tried to turn Tommy into a monster back then, poisoning him, seducing him, recruiting him to the cause. Tommy let go of the revolver. Even now, he refused.

  “If you’ll just give me your name, sir, I will tell him that you called.”

  Woozily Tommy waved a hand and peeled away from the gates. He picked up his duffel bag, turned, managed a couple of teetering steps forward, then collapsed facedown in the road.

  Chapter 41

  Tommy McBride

  Bright white ceiling above him, bright white bedsheets and walls; with a stab of horror Tommy woke in the featureless room and believed he was inside Noone’s house. Silently panicking. Wide eyes darting about. The bed was iron-framed, with a hoodlike canopy blocking his view on either side; he was wearing somebody else’s nightclothes. But on the opposite wall was another bed, empty, and there was a low hum of voices somewhere. Grimacing against the pain, Tommy levered himself onto an elbow and realized he was in a hospital ward.

  Down he sank, onto his back. The last thing he remembered was speaking to that butler—he had no memory of falling, or of how he got here. He opened his nightshirt gingerly. Peeked at the wound on his arm. It had been cleaned, and resutured, and looked a lot healthier than before. He checked the bedside for his possessions but there was no sign.