‘Just add them to the long list of the like-minded.’
‘Don’t be so glum. It’s just that things were rather stacked up against you.’
‘Frankly, Archie, I think I’ve got you to blame for that.’
His raised his eyebrows.
‘I didn’t put you in solitary confinement, Will. You did that all by yourself, and I didn’t decapitate poor, bloody Rufus Farrell.’
‘
Neither
did I.’
Archie sighed, folded his arms, and shook his head.
‘I know that, Will. Freak accidents happen. Admittedly, that kind of freakishness strains credibility, unless one knows the people involved. But that’s its great strength as an explanation for what happened. Besides, the sheet of iron has been found and examined and, despite the rain, there was enough of Rufus’s blood underneath it to support your story.’
‘You needed evidence rather than my word?’
‘I’m here to take you away from all this. Maybe you shouldn’t be fighting me.’
‘Over the past few days, Archie, I’ve been locked up, ritually humiliated, shackled to a dead man, subjected to impertinent and hostile questioning — not to mention vilification of the most odious kind — and you waltz in here and expect me to be pathetically grateful because you, and the powers that be, have finally accepted facts that were presented to you, by
me
, practically tied up with a ribbon and bow.’
‘And what facts might they be?’
I was flabbergasted.
‘The facts about Rufus Farrell.’
‘Ah.’
Archie took the opportunity to light up a kretiek.
‘You know, Brian is terribly fond of you, Will. He really is, but he has pointed out that you have something of a record in backing the wrong horse.’
I was too tired to struggle, so I simply said, ‘How fascinating. If you’d ever met his wife, Darlene, you’d know Brian has his own track record in that department — only he didn’t just back the wrong horse, he rode it.’
Archie laughed.
‘Are you saying,’ I added, ‘that you still don’t believe that Battell and Ashe were murdered?’
‘No, I’m not saying that. What I
am
saying is that Rufus Farrell didn’t do it.’
‘So you’re accusing my brother Fulton.’
‘No. Fulton isn’t guilty of those crimes.’
‘
Those
crimes? Who are you, Archie?’
‘I’m your commanding officer, although in Intelligence we don’t insist on such distinctions, and you’re not really a soldier anyway.’
I kept the expression on my face neutral, suspecting that this was some kind of trap. Was he trying to get me to admit that I was working for Intelligence? Was he trying to lull me into trusting him? Did people really just come right out and announce that they were Intelligence agents?
‘You work for Intelligence? Is that what you’ve just admitted, Archie?’
‘Why, yes, of course. There’s no reason for you to be kept in the dark about that any longer.’
‘Prove it.’
‘You’ll just have to trust me.’
This was where he lost me. He could have proved his connection with Intelligence in Melbourne simply by mentioning James Fowler’s name. He didn’t do it because he couldn’t do it. Was he working for the Japanese? My mouth became dry, and I was careful not to let him see that my hands had begun to tremble slightly. Archie Warmington, it occurred to me, was the ideal fifth columnist — urbane, intelligent, above suspicion. I decided I wasn’t going to play games.
‘What’s in it for you, Archie? What have they offered you? Money? Some kind of high rank in whatever mediaeval regime they impose?’
Even through my fear — and I was afraid — I managed a pretty decent sneer.
His eyebrows drew together in a heavy frown, and his hand stopped in midair on its way to deliver the kretiek to his mouth.
‘What?’ he asked, and the frown deepened. ‘What?’
His voice rose half an octave on that second ‘What,’ and I felt some satisfaction at having taken him by surprise.
‘Wait here,’ he said, and left the room. I knew before the door had closed that I’d been sent by Army Intelligence to unmask him. It made perfect sense. Rufus Farrell was an accomplice; but Archie, with access to high-level information about the
NAOU
and its positions across the north, was the traitor. Bali? Where else in Asia had he spent time before the war? James Fowler and his cohorts in Melbourne must have had their suspicions about Archie, and I could now deliver him to them.
I had no intention of waiting for him to return, and didn’t believe that he
would
return. Without knowing how I would stop him, I opened the door. All I knew was that he mustn’t get away. I knew all about him, and I wasn’t going to let him simply vanish. He would be brought to justice for his treachery. Armed with the information he’d passed on to them, the Japanese might even now be preparing to invade at a vulnerable point identified by Archie Warmington as undefended. Doubtless, he’d helpfully supplied them with maps of the terrain; maps surveyed under appalling conditions by Nackeroos whose lives he held cheaply. It is always, always, always the person you least suspect.
When I emerged from the room I saw Archie walking almost casually towards a small, battered truck that was parked outside the gates of Brocks Creek. I hurried after him, silently. I had no clear idea what I was going to do. The imperative was to prevent him from getting into that truck and driving away. He’d passed through the gate when I began to run. Off to my left I saw the figure of an inmate, trotting from one side of the compound to the other, and on the road I saw a car approaching. Archie stopped to allow it to pass, and I saw my opportunity. I threw myself at him, putting my full weight behind the leap. When I hit him he lurched forward, and both of us stumbled into the path of the oncoming car. Its horn blew, and it struck us with the blind, impersonal force of the machine. I’d never been hit by a car before, and I was strangely aware only of a painless thud, the sensation of flying, the taste of dust, and a slide into unconsciousness that was achieved with the efficiency of an anaesthetic.
When I woke I was lying on my back in the dirt, and I was dimly conscious of someone at a great distance saying, ‘They came out of nowhere. I didn’t see them. I couldn’t have stopped. It wasn’t my fault. It’s that bloke’s fault.’
I knew the voice, but in my dazed state couldn’t place it. Was he referring to Archie or to me? A moment later, I was left in no doubt. Glen Pyers leant over me and said, ‘You’re not badly injured, Will. What the fuck did you think you were doing?’
‘Spy,’ I managed to say. ‘Spy. Archie Warmington. Spy.’
‘Nong,’ he said. ‘Nong. Will Power. Complete, total, utter nong.’
Clarity returned when the generalised throbbing in my body narrowed itself down to the left hip and leg. I moved my toes and flexed my fingers, and assured myself that nothing was broken. Archie Warmington lay on the ground beside me, and his groans indicated that he’d suffered more serious injuries than I had. I propped myself up on my elbows and saw Glen kneeling beside Archie, who was only semi-conscious. Several guards from Brocks Creek had gathered around the scene, and a stretcher had been produced.
‘His leg’s broken,’ Glen said, ‘and maybe a couple of ribs. We need to get him back to Katherine.’
He nominated two men to take Archie to the Brocks Creek infirmary — a place I immediately imagined as solitary confinement with a bed.
‘We’ll stabilise him there and get him out of here as soon as possible.’
The medical authority in Glen’s voice was surprising, given his squeamishness about blood and injury generally. I didn’t feel sufficiently confident to stand up, so remained, like Gwendolyn in
The Importance of Being Earnest
, in a semi-recumbent posture while Archie was carried away.
‘I’m not authorised to talk to you,’ Glen said, ‘except to point out that you’re a very special breed of dickhead, and that people are going to be very, very angry when they find out that you threw Major Archibald Warmington under a car.’
‘People? What people? Tojo?’
‘I’m not authorised to talk to you.’
He helped me to my feet roughly, shaking his head all the while in exaggerated ruefulness.
‘Are you authorised to shake your head in that incredibly irritating way?’ I asked.
‘I’m not authorised to tell you.’
A few minutes later, I found myself again sitting before the blackboard in the Brocks Creek induction office. This time I wasn’t a prisoner, and it was Glen Pyers sitting opposite me rather than a maniac with a piece of dowel. He remained stubbornly uncommunicative, except to tell me that the Melbourne Cup was being run that afternoon, three weeks late, and on a Saturday owing to a string of government-enforced race-free days. I had no interest in horse racing, and asked him if he thought the information I had about Archie Warmington might be more pertinent to the prosecution of the war than the Melbourne Cup.
‘You don’t have information about Archie Warmington,’ he said. ‘You have misguided, silly, and bizarre misconceptions. They are not the same as information. The fact that you think they are is something of a nuisance. Now, I don’t want to get into an argument with you, or antagonise you. Unfortunately, we need you and, believe me, that’s not an easy thing for me to say.’
‘We? You work in vaudeville. Who’s we? The chorus line?’
A faint, roseate blush on his face indicated that he was fighting an urge to express anger.
‘Archie should be sufficiently comfortable by now to speak to you. I hope so, because if I have to listen to you much longer, I’ll kill you.’
I followed Glen, reluctantly, across the parade ground, past compounds one and two, and entered the barracks in compound three. These weren’t salubrious by any means, and they smelled the same as the barracks in compound one, but at one end a section had been closed off. This was the infirmary. Archie was lying on a bunk, his leg immobilised in a rough splint, and his chest wrapped in bandages. He’d obviously been given a palliative shot of morphine — enough to take the edge off the pain, but insufficient to send him into a pleasant, dopey daze.
‘Why?’ he asked when he saw me. ‘Why did you try to kill me?’
It was such a blunt question that the least I could do was give him a blunt reply.
‘I wasn’t trying to kill you. I was trying to stop you from escaping. I didn’t see the car.’
The look on Archie’s face was blank, as if I’d just spoken to him in Swahili.
‘I’m sorry, did you say “escape”?’
I nodded.
‘I know, Archie. I know who you are. I know you’re a fifth columnist. I know you’re spying for Japan.’
‘Ah.’ He drew the word out. ‘And is Glen spying for the emperor as well? He was driving the car I was attempting to escape in.’
I hadn’t considered the peculiarity of Glen’s presence, and I wasn’t able to offer an explanation for it on the spur of the moment. With an attempt at insouciance, I said, ‘I have absolutely no idea.’
‘Nong,’ I heard Glen say behind me. ‘Nong, nong, nong.’
‘That sounds almost Japanese, Glen,’ Archie said. ‘Has another piece of the puzzle fallen into place, Will?’
I wanted to face Glen, to see whether his expression was betraying anything, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn around. I’d had enough of his special brand of ruefulness for one day.
‘I’d laugh, Will, but I’ve been told it might lead to a punctured lung. Was it really only a few minutes ago that we were discussing your predilection for backing the wrong horse?’
‘You sound like a trapped and desperate man, Archie.’
‘Archie, please,’ Glen said. ‘Tell this fool of a man what’s going on before I clock him.’
‘All right. Now, Will, before I say anything else, I want to assure you that the only thing standing between me and fury about what your actions have done to me is morphine. I feel quite chirpy, but when it wears off and I appreciate fully how much damage you’ve inflicted, both to me and to this operation, I advise you to be several hundred miles from me.’
‘It’s probable that you’ll be locked up here, Archie, so you don’t need to worry about that.’
He closed his eyes in an ostentatious display of mastering his exasperation.
‘I am not a Japanese spy, and Glen is not a Japanese spy. As I told you earlier, I work in Intelligence, and it should come as no surprise to you — although no doubt it will — that Glen also is in their employ.’
I opened my mouth to speak, and he held up his hand to silence me.
‘Let me just say, Will, that despite every wrong supposition you’ve made, we do appreciate the fact that you have preserved your own Intelligence role, despite what must have been severe temptations to rescue yourself by announcing it. In all of my discussions with James Fowler I’ve been most complimentary about that aspect of your character. In an absolute sense, you can be trusted. You just can’t be trusted to get anything right.’
I remained silent.
‘On the fifth of October, you and Brian had a meeting at Victoria Barracks in Melbourne with James Fowler and his sister, Nigella. At that meeting you were told that someone up here was killing members of a secret unit, the
NAOU
. You were told that Intelligence needed you to go undercover and find out what was going on. It all had to be hush-hush because the
NAOU
was hush-hush — and it still is, I hasten to add. The civilian population doesn’t know it exists, and neither do most other sections of the military. At any rate, they don’t know exactly what it is or what it does. At some point, you were introduced to Corporal Glen Pyers here, and you were led to believe that he was a humble magician whose job was to entertain, and that was all. We were, I have to say, surprised that it didn’t occur to you, or to Brian, that Glen might be in Intelligence, even though you were introduced to him in James Fowler’s office. Again, the fact that you never made an attempt to quiz him on this, or to confide in him, remains, despite everything, an impressive demonstration of loyalty to Intelligence and to your idea of what was expected of you.’