Death of an Old Goat (18 page)

Royle gave a grunt of self-pity, and was just proceeding in the direction of his office when he felt his shirt-sleeves being tugged from behind. Sensing an affront to his cloth, he turned and was annoyed to see a thin, old, tiny aboriginal
woman. He had noticed and not noticed her as he came in, in the way that one does notice and not notice old aboriginal women. She had been sitting over by the door, but now she had come up to him. She was looking straight into his red, blotchy face, and seemed fairly used to the sort of stench that he emitted from his mouth. It momentarily flashed through his mind that there could be no reason for the way his wife flinched at the smell of his beery breath.

‘That's my son,' said the old woman, pointing towards the room at the back of the house.

‘Is it, now?' said Royle unsympathetically. ‘Well, he'll know better in future, won't he?'

‘He ain't done nothing,' said the woman.

‘If he's innocent he has nothing to fear,' said Royle. It was a phrase he had read somewhere and thought might be useful. A scream from the back room immediately proved him wrong. Apparently Royle's mates were having a last fling before giving him his peace for meditation, for immediately afterwards silence descended.

‘You make them stop doin' him over and I tell you sumpen,' said the old woman urgently.

‘What could you tell me, for Chrissake?' said Royle, looking at her with contempt and trying to shrug her off. His present investigation gave him an immense disgust for the world of petty Abo crimes which had previously occupied his time and skills. But she kept her fingers on the sleeve of his shirt.

‘That ther murder,' she said. ‘I can tell you sumpen about that.'

‘What murder?' said Royle. ‘Has there been another knifing down at the reserve? Anyway, if there has, I don't want to know about it. Tell the sergeant here, when he comes back. I've got my hands full at the moment, thank you very much.'

‘That murder at the Yarumba,' said the woman insistently. ‘Old white man.'

Royle stopped in his tracks, but his congenital disbelief of the non-white soon reasserted itself.

‘Bloody likely you'd know anything about that,' he said. ‘That's no Abo case. You're just shamming to get your son out of a beating-up.' He paused. ‘Not that anyone's beating him up,' he added virtuously. ‘I expect he attacked them in there, and they're having trouble in restraining him.'

Aboriginals were very prone, single-handed, to attack six or seven enormous Australian policemen, and so furious was the struggle that they often got considerably damaged in the process of being restrained. Everyone had considerable sympathy for the police in their difficult job.

‘Them big fellers in it,' said the woman cunningly. ‘Missa Turberville, Missa Lullham, Missa McKay. All them big boys. They say you go and see all them people.'

Royle didn't think it necessary to correct her as to whom he had gone to see.

‘Well, so what?' he said.

‘They all in sumpen together,' said the woman. ‘Ah don't know zacly what it is, but it's sumpen 'portant. Them big fellers they got hold of Johnny Marullah up at the camp.'

‘That sort of person,' said Royle with dignity, ‘wouldn't touch Johnny Marullah with a bloody barge pole. Come off it.'

‘You go see. Tomorrow night. They all go out to the Turbervilles'. Two o'clock in the night, all them big fellers. They doin' sumpen there. You go see.'

‘What — Turberville, McKay and Lullham?'

‘Yeah, them and some others: Nolan, Coogan, some more.'

‘Take something to get all that lot friendly with each other,' said Royle thoughtfully. ‘Where is this thing, whatever it is, taking place? At the house? It's a big property that.'

‘Don't know, sah.'

‘Strikes me you don't know much about it at all,' said Royle. ‘If you're wasting my time . . .'

‘You tell them stop hit my boy,' said the woman, coming unpleasantly close.

‘OK,' said Royle, pushing her away and going towards his office. ‘OK, but don't you stay around this town if you've made a fool of me, because that boy of yours life won't be worth five cents.'

He slammed the door to his room, and got on the phone to his colleagues in the back room.

‘Here, lay off that Abo, can you, Fred? I don't know what he's done, but can you just let him go?'

He screwed up his face at the surprised response from the other end. No one likes being unjustly accused of softness.

‘Yeah, I know I'm not an Abo-lover as a rule, but I've got my reasons . . . OK, OK, just another five minutes. Don't want to spoil your fun. But somewhere it doesn't show, can't you? And then let him go. Right?'

He banged down the phone, and sat back in his chair, puzzling his brain into a beery, speculative, questioning doze.

O
VER THE
grey-green Australian landscape there hung an immense darkness. It was now nearly one o'clock, and an almost complete silence reigned. Up to an hour or so ago there had been sounds from occasional cars driven along and around the main road by drinkers returning from Drummondale to their insufficiently grateful wives and children, and from these cars had come the sounds of
badly-changed gears, snatches of alcoholic song and occasional curses before they faded into the stillness. Now, even these typical rural noises were stilled, which made the tentative bleats which now and then escaped the dreaming sheep in the vicinity doubly eerie. At one point the hoot of an owl very close to his shoulder had nearly made Royle jump out of his skin.

He was in any case in a quite unnatural condition of wakefulness. For a start he had had nothing to drink. Then he had not only slept at home the night before, but had remained much of the morning as well, having rung up Mrs Beecham (whose turn it was) the day before to say that the romantic highlight of her week would not be taking place. His family was greatly surprised and not at all pleased by this change in his habits. He had sworn at his wife when she asked for the fourth time whether she should call the doctor. Once he had got himself up, he spent most of the rest of the day glowing with virtue, though by eight o'clock virtue was fighting a losing battle with thirst. When the proprietor of Mackinnon's, the rival establishment to Beecher's, had hailed him as he walked along the main street and invited him in for a schooner it had required an effort almost supernatural to refuse, but refuse he had. To compensate he had explained that duty was, for this one night, imperative, but that he would be taking up the offer in the very near future. The proprietor had retreated, puzzled, into the saloon bar, where Royle was a regular. It was the general opinion there that something very big must be on that night.

By rights, then, Royle ought to have been in tip-top form; but the way his hands shook, and the desperation with which he was dragging on his Pall Mall filter, both suggested that he was far from happy in his mind.

For a start, though he thought of himself as a man of the great outdoors — as all Australians do — he did not, in fact, like it much, especially after dark, and especially once
you got off the main road. He had planned the operation very carefully, and had decided that the best place for his car was in the little spinney half a mile from the main road on the track to Kenilworth, the Turberville property. It had seemed ideal in prospect, but now, hidden by trees some yards from the dirt track, and with a funny feeling that beasts of various sorts were looking at him (and perhaps laughing at him as well), he wished he were a good deal closer to civilization, with a few of his mates within cooee in case of an emergency. They weren't much use, but they were better than this damned solitude. And then, though he had tried to work up a fug in the car by smoking incessantly, he was distinctly cold. At least, he kept shivering, and that must mean that he was cold.

In point of fact he was in the sort of situation in which a man wonders whether he is being a bloody fool. Certainly he felt he had taken every precaution to see whether he was doing the right thing or not. The trouble was, he couldn't bring in the Abo and thump the truth out of him, since what he wanted was a dramatic, red-handed catch — of whoever it was, doing whatever it was. He knew Johnny Marullah vaguely — a smart little near full-blood who did occasional jobs on the Turberville property. He was considered something of a character, and was much in demand from the idiots out at the Uni who were supposed to be investigating aboriginal languages, which Royle thought the biggest bloody waste of bloody tax-payers' money he had ever known in all his bloody life, as he had frequently said to an admiring audience in various places of alcoholic refreshment throughout the town. But he had not often been through the hands of the police, and therefore he knew little about him beyond this. It taxed his small imagining powers well beyond their limits to think what Turberville and the rest could want with him, and what whatever it was could have to do with the murder. He just had to hope and pray that the old crone hadn't been seizing at a
straw. By now she and her goddamned son would have gone walkabout well out of reach of his revengeful fist if she had been having him on.

Failing a talk to Marullah, he had done the best he could. He had talked to all the other policemen he could lay his hands on (except those superior to him in rank, to whom he was afraid of exposing himself in some sort of silliness) to see if he could get any kind of line as to what was going on among the grazing fraternity. He got little more than that most of them had been seen drunk and disorderly at various times over the past month, and that some of them had gone on a lavish spending-spree when their drought-relief cheques had arrived. There was nothing out of the ordinary there. Not worth the trouble of asking.

However, Sergeant Brady had been able to provide something a mite more tangible. Like most policemen, he found out what was going on in the town not through his own efforts — he was occupied for much of the day in poker at the station — but through those of his wife, a sharp little woman with too much time on her hands. She was not only a one-woman bush telegraph, but she was generally held to have rendered bugging devices an unnecessary luxury for the Drummondale force. She had been standing at the drinks counter in the Darcy supermarket the day before, immediately behind Mrs McKay and Mrs Dutton, another grazier's wife. She had been able to pick up very little of their conversation, because she was well known even outside her own circle as the longest pair of ears in town, and the two women, who were well outside her class, shut up as soon as they spotted her. But she gathered, putting two and two together, that they were talking about their husbands going out at night. Not going out in the evening, which would be too normal for remark, but at night. And she had been struck by the unusual earnestness of the two women.

‘
Several
times in the last month,' Mrs McKay had said.
The other woman had whispered, in a rather bewildered way, that all she had been able to get out of her husband was that he had been ‘rehearsing', but she thought she must have misheard, because he certainly wasn't one for the amateur dramatics, and it seemed much more likely that what he had said had something to do with ‘horses'.

‘I heard mine make an appointment for Friday,' said Mrs McKay. ‘But God knows he's never at home, so it could be something else altogether. All I know is, there's something up, but I can't for the life of me think what it could be.'

They had then caught sight of Mrs Brady's ears, and an iron curtain had descended. It had not been much to go on, but it was something. That evening Royle had got in touch with some of the Turberville station hands — by drinking at their expense in the Beecher's public bar — and had tried to milk them of anything they might know. He found them willing enough to talk without feeling any compunctions of feudal loyalty. They said that they had heard Turberville driving from the big house in the middle of the night, but that the general conjecture had been that he was going to sleep with his daughter-in-law, a luscious young Queenslander who generously made herself available to anyone who showed an interest. There seemed to be little evidence for this assumption except that she was there, she was willing, and what else would a man be doing in the middle of the night? But this didn't account for the rest of the grazing fraternity being involved. Royle was willing to believe that particular young woman would take them all on, but surely not all at once?

Some of the men from the Lullham property who had been in the bar were also questioned in Royle's ham-fistedly casual way, and they had also thought that their lord and master might have been driving around in the middle of the night. But when Royle had got interested they had got increasingly cussed, for Royle had not been
willing to buy them drinks in return for whatever information they could provide. They didn't know whether he'd been driving home or driving away from home, they didn't remember exactly what time it was they'd heard him, and anyway it was his bloody business and what's it bloody matter to you? Royle had damped down his inclination to thump them since he was conserving his strength, and had left the bar. That had been the night before, and that was all he had to go on. Sitting there shivering in his large dark police car, surrounded by bats and caustic-sounding birds, it did not seem much.

At least he wasn't the only one suffering, he thought. Dotted around the surrounding emptiness were other cars, more or less well-hidden — or so he hoped. You never knew with the subordinates he had got: they could have put themselves in the wrong spot, they could have downed too many beers and dozed off, they could have got side-tracked by a variety of amorous adventures offered by Drummondale. They could even simply have forgotten. Luckily he could be fairly sure of Sergeant Malone, who lived near the road to the Lullham and McKay properties. He had merely been detailed to skulk in his front garden all night. On the roads to six or seven other fair-sized properties in the vicinity, or just off them, he had posted men with walkie-talkies, either in police-cars or on foot, depending on whether there was suitable cover or not. He had already heard from several of them, but he was keeping communication down to a minimum. Heaven help them if they got caught. The last thing he wanted to jeopardize was the relationship between the police and the grazing community. It was, to his mind, the rock on which Australian civilization was built. Not even his own promotion would be worth any disruption of the bond, since the likely increase in his salary would certainly not equal the amount he every year screwed out of the rural gentry for one reason or another.