Wanted Dead (13 page)

The shanty itself was full of whirling couples, so full it seemed impossible that they could move. But the whole room was a mass of movement. The fiddlers were on their stand. He couldn't tell whether they were the same ones or not; but there was something massively absent from that shanty that night. The old man wasn't behind the bar.

It wasn't all that remarkable, thought Riley. There had been no logic behind his impression that one of the few permanent things in this world was old Dan Cabel's presence behind his bar. The noise was so great that Riley seemed to be moving inside it as he wriggled through to the corner of the bar, where a man in a white apron was drawing beer from a barrel.

Riley wondered whether perhaps old Dan Cabel had
sold the shanty and left. In that case Jane probably wouldn't be here either.

The man in the white apron looked at Riley inquiringly and he ordered whisky.

The man gave him beer and Riley said he'd wanted whisky.

The man smiled amiably and nodded. There was no hope of anybody hearing any spoken word until the dancing ended, so Riley paid for the beer and sipped at it.

Someone plucked at his arm and he turned and jumped so violently he spilled his beer when he found Jane Cabel at his elbow. She really was a very pretty girl, in her own wild way, was his first thought. What the hell did she want with him, was his second thought; had she recognised him without his beard after all? He almost raised a hand to touch the place where his beard had been.

She was speaking to him, but there was no earthly hope of hearing her. Riley smiled vaguely down at her. She was smiling at him, standing a little away from him in a peculiarly inviting manner. That was it, she was asking him to dance with her.

Riley smiled and shook his head, pointing towards his leg as though to indicate that he was lame. He had no intention of getting involved in that fracas that passed for a dance in the shanty, and he didn't want her to feel the revolver he was wearing under his coat.

Besides, he couldn't dance.

Nevertheless he didn't want her to get away. If this were a coincidence, it was a piece of good fortune for him and as such a most unusual thing, not to be treated lightly. If it was not a coincidence he wanted
to find out more anyway. The thing was to keep her in conversation. How did you keep a strange woman in conversation under circumstances in which she couldn't hear a word said anyway?

Then suddenly the fiddles and the dancing stopped, just as Riley leaned forward to shout in Jane's ear: “Won't you have a drink?” which caused a burst of laughter in Riley's corner of the shanty. He heard someone shout, “Good on you, Janey!”

“Thank you, a half pint,” said Janey.

She was wearing a long black skirt with a white high necked blouse with long sleeves which was perfectly decorous in itself, but which virtually forced upon Riley the conclusion that Janey was very prettily built. He wondered whether perhaps the black skirt was some local concession to mourning. Although there was nothing of mourning in the flushed lips and vivid eyes of the soft young face smiling up at him. Incredible that a girl like this could have been involved with a bushranger's gang. It was probably her brother more than herself. Careful Riley, there's no need to reach conclusions; just observe.

“You're Dermot Riley, aren't you?” she said.

Riley very nearly dropped his beer. His utter confusion was so apparent that there was no point in trying to hide his identity.

“I beg your pardon?” he said, foolishly.

“You're Dermot Riley aren't you, the man who nearly blew up Jimmy Hatton?”

She was talking quite loudly and Riley was frankly terrified that she'd been overhead. God alone knew how many bushrangers were amongst that mob now surging out of the shanty.

“You remember me,” she said, laughing directly
into his face, but perfectly amiably Riley perceived in his anguish. “It was my face you slapped on top of the cave.”

Why, grieved Riley silently, was he ever under the impression that he had any sort of control over his affairs. He was the merest wisp in the winds of fate. Still, there was nothing for this now but to put a brave face on it.

“Yes, Ma'am,” he said smiling gallantly. “I remember you very clearly. I have never regretted any act more in my life.”

“Oh that's all right,” said Jane,” you didn't hit me very hard. You had to do it anyway.”

“That's a very tolerant point of view.” He saw a shadow in her eyes and realised she didn't understand the word “tolerant”. He could hardly explain it. Better just convey by his expression that it was complimentary.

“But why did you shave your beard, I hardly recognised you?”

Irresistibly, Riley's hand went up to his face. So much for the perfect disguise. What a waste of a thoroughly good beard.

“You were in the shanty earlier that day, weren't you?”

“Yes. As a matter of fact I was,” said Riley, quite aware that there was nothing to be gained by any form of dissimulation.

“Pity you didn't blow that cave up on them. It was my fault wasn't it? I turned up at the wrong time, didn't I?”

Riley had seldom felt so at a loss in any conversation.

“Well now,” he said, “I suppose it was a little
awkward.” Why was the girl so extraordinarily open about her relationship with the bushrangers?

Her expression changed, by no means to sadness, but to a sort of reflective gravity.

“It's funny to think . . . but if I hadn't barged up there my brother Johnny would be alive today. Did you know they killed my brother?”

“Yes. I… had heard about it.” Then she hadn't recognised him by her brother's body that night. But then that wasn't remarkable, the poor child would hardly have been in a condition to recognise anybody.

“Are you still trying to catch Jimmy Hatton?”

“Well now, I . . .”

“I hope you catch him,” she said, dropping her voice and speaking fiercely through her teeth. “I hope you catch him and I hope they hang him. Want to watch 'em hang him and I want to dance on his grave.”

Which no doubt were sentiments very proper to a recently bereaved sister, thought Riley, but he wished she wouldn't utter them so publicly. The shanty was by no means empty yet, and he had no wish to defend himself and this bush waif from the vengeful onslaughts of colleagues of James Hatton.

“Look,” he said, “is there anywhere quiet here that we could talk?”

“Depends what you mean by talk,” she said, raising an eyebrow at him.

“Oh no, I assure you, I simply mean talk,” said Riley, embarrassed, but realising immediately that her coquettishness was purely automatic. This would be her stock reply to any man who asked her the same question.

“Come into the kitchen,” she said, picked up her half pint of beer and led the way round the bar. Riley,
following with his own pint of beer, heard a faint “Good on you, Jane” as he went through the hessian curtain. How many men, with less innocent intent than his own, he wondered, had been led into the kitchen. Not necessarily any of course, he told himself. These rough peasantish types were often coarse in their manners, but very restrained in their actual behaviour.

The kitchen was a small dark room, lit only by what light managed to filter through the hessian curtain. There was a heavy smell of meat and grease. Some dark shapes that were probably a table, a cutting block, some cupboards.

“There,” said Jane, leaning against the table. “That's quieter isn't it?”

“Not appreciably,” thought Riley, and it certainly wouldn't be when the dancing started again, however

“Now look Miss Cabel . . .”

“Oh, why don't you call me Jane?” He could almost see her pouting. Just how automatic was this coquettishness?

“No, I think I had better call you Miss Cabel,” said Riley gently, “It's an old Irish custom.”

“Oh, are you Irish then. I wouldn't have thought so. My dad came from Ireland.”

“How is your father by the way?” asked Riley, out of genuine curiosity.

“Oh, he's dead, didn't you hear? He died last week. Couldn't get over Johnny dying like that. Just grieved away, poor old Dad did.”

“Oh, I'm sorry.”

“Oh well, he was very old. What was it you wanted to talk to me about, eh?” She spoke distinctly invitingly.

This girl might reasonably be described as cold blooded, thought Riley, her brother murdered and her father dead of grief and her main interest seemed to be a flirtation with a stranger. Perhaps cold-blooded wasn't the word.

“I was just wondering,” said Riley, “how serious you were about wanting to see James Hatton caught.”

“I want that more than anything in the world,” and Riley, hearing the deep loathing in her voice, believed her.

“Could you find out where he is for me?” he asked casually.

“Oh yes, easily,” she said eagerly.

“How could you do that?”

“Oh I couldn't tell you how, I couldn't do that. But I could find out, really I could.”

Why couldn't she tell him how? Actually there might be some reason in that; she'd be willing to betray the man but not the elaborate system through which he made his contacts. That would be the final disloyalty to the tableland people.

“All right, when?”

“I don't know. Soon. Where are you camping?”

“Oh I move about,” said Riley vaguely, “I'll contact you here? When would you say?”

“Day after tomorrow. Monday?”

“Fine, I'll come back about this time.”

“All right.”

“Good, well I'll be off then.”

“Oh no, stay and talk for a while.”

“No thank you Miss Cabel, I'm sorry, but I must be off.”

“Did she walk over to your horse with you?” said Collingwood.

“Yes,” said Riley. “As a matter of fact she did. Why do you ask?”

“Then she knows where you're staying, or has a pretty fair idea.”

“How?” said Riley, bewildered.

“She'd know the brand on the horse.”

“Would she really?”

“Everybody within fifty miles of here knows the brands on my horses.”

“Oh. And you think that's why she walked out with me, to find out?”

“No. She wouldn't have known then that you weren't riding a police horse. All I'm saying is that she certainly knows now.”

“And do you think she's genuine?”

“She might be. It's very hard to tell. She's lying in one thing though, she certainly didn't recognise you.”

“Then how did she know me?”

“Obviously if she didn't recognise you somebody must have told her.”

“But how do you know she didn't recognise me?”

“Because, it was obvious, as you said, that she didn't recognise the man who was standing over her brother's body.”

“But surely,” said Riley reasonably, “under the strain of a moment like that . . .”

“Under the strain of a moment like that,” said Collingwood, “the senses would be heightened to such a degree that even if she didn't recognise you at the moment she would remember having seen you as soon as she calmed down. She did neither. Obviously then she didn't know you at that time. She did later.
She hadn't seen you since, so someone must have told her. Really, you may be a brilliant tactical man but you're a bit weak on deduction. Here, have some more whisky.”

“Yes,” said Riley sadly, both to the observation and the invitation. He thought he'd been rather clever about the whole thing.

“Of course, none of this necessarily precludes her being genuine about wanting to see Hatton caught,” he said.

“Exactly,” said Collingwood. “You can't afford to ignore the situation, and you can't afford to act as though she were in absolute good faith.”

“I wonder who could have told her who I was?”

“Could have been anybody.” said Collingwood. “That's the trouble with this part of the world, it's impossible to keep anything quiet for more than a week.”

Riley wished Collingwood had thought of that before he suggested he shave his beard off; he'd seemed much more confident of the soundness of the disguise then.

“Well,” he said. “I suppose all I can do is go along with things and see how it turns out.”

“Yes,” said Collingwood, “but I'd be very careful when you go back to see Jane.”

The shanty seemed inordinately quiet, ominously quiet in fact; although that was almost certainly only because there was no dance on. There was no-one at all in the yard, no horses outside. The only sign of life was the yellow square of light in the doorway. Be careful, Collingwood had said, but how did one be careful? He had to go into the shanty. If Jane had
been laying a trap for him, entering the shanty was the most reckless thing he could do, so the idea of being careful was just a hopeful fiction.

Riley tethered his horse in the scrub a good hundred yards from the shanty. He had a breech loading rifle of Collingwood's in a saddle holster and he considered taking it with him. He would have liked to, but couldn't bring himself to walk through the door of the shanty with a rifle in his hands. He had two revolvers under his coat and they would have to do. They would probably be more than enough, he reflected wryly, to deal with one eighteen year old girl.

He hesitated outside the door of the shanty. Would it be feasible to call the girl out here? Feasible, but pointless. If there were men waiting for him they'd have their guns trained on him by now. And if they had any sense there'd be more of them posted in the scrub. Besides, the idea of standing out here in the night and bellowing “Janey” would make him feel altogether too foolish. Then at least it wouldn't be a bad idea to charge through the doorway, a revolver in each hand, ready to shoot should there be an ambush.

But how would he feel after such an entrance if all there was inside was one demure eighteen year old girl, and possibly one or two highly amused drinkers? No, there was simply nothing else for it. He had to go in as though he was utterly confident that Jane Cabel could be trusted; as he would have been if Collingwood hadn't raised doubts. Personally he was still quite convinced that Jane Cabel sincerely wanted to help him track down Hatton. In that case, he told himself, show the courage of your convictions and go on in.