One Sunday (25 page)

She auditioned her pear tree roosters, negotiated a mutually satisfying arrangement with Len Larkin, local agent for the Willama SP bookie, then she'd thrown a party, a celebration of Harry's life. Every Saturday night since there'd been some reason for a party, and any of the local chaps coming up with a reason got free drinks. Her Sunday afternoon get-togethers were tame affairs – tea and scones served to those who made a donation to the orphans.

The padlock off, she opened the heavy door, bobbing her head as she stepped in and down. Four deep, steep steps to the floor. Dark in there, cool. She lit the lamp, set it on her piano beside a folded tablecloth, one of the previous Mrs Dolan's hand-embroidered things. She spread a second cloth over the table, set a plate of stale scones in the centre, placed a vase of paper flowers on the piano, then headed back to the hotel for her teapot, taking a look out through a front window while she was there.

She couldn't sight her lookout roosters. Those pear trees, planted in the days of the coach trade, were the size of elms, and at this time of year they supplied good cover. Most of what was in that front garden had been planted in the coach days. Someone had set up a statue of a half-clad, well-built woman then circled her with belladonna lilies. Those bulbs multiplying as they did, there were flowers eight feet deep around her now.

An interesting plant, the belladonna, full of surprises – the way the winter greenery died, and just when you'd given them up for dead, a hundred spikes rose out of the earth, like a field of blood-tipped spears marking some ancient battle site, the hafts growing longer each day, until the spikes burst open to reveal clusters of large trumpet shaped pink blooms that saturated the land with perfume.

‘That little mongrel. Is he back here?' she muttered, sighting Vern Lowe standing within the circle of belladonnas, looking like an evil troll wearing a wig.

He could move like greased lightning, that little coot; he was in the cider pit when she returned with the big enamel teapot and her cups.

‘The word is, you open up down here at three on Sundays,' he greeted her.

‘You've got a nerve coming back here after last night. You were told to get out and stay out.'

‘I knew you didn't mean it, Red,' he said, offering his open-mouthed grin, showing a blue tongue framed by venomous fangs.

‘My name is Mrs Dolan, and you're not welcome here.'

‘Don't go gettin' too high above yourself now, Red. Don't you go forgettin' that I knew you when you wasn't so high.'

‘And don't you go forgetting either that I knew you when you were lower than a snake's backside, Vernon Lowe, and you're not much taller now.'

Skinny as a snake and half as trustworthy, he'd probably been the one who smashed her window last night. He was small enough, but she didn't want him flapping that mouth around town, and he knew it. Maybe it was better to keep on his good side. He'd be gone soon. The teapot set down, she walked to her piano and sat, lifted the lid. Having spent a thousand hours at Mr Bowen's piano, she could get most tunes out of those keys.

O'Brien and his pickers wandered in, followed by one of the Murphy boys. They all looked the same: black hair, black eyes, heavy eyebrows, all steps and stairs of young Mike. She never tried to remember their names.

‘Want to man the keg, Murph?' she asked. ‘Two free drinks, and no more.'

He saluted, made himself comfortable on the upturned tea-chest and started squirting beer into glasses.

O'Brien and his pickers moved close to the keg, crowding her piano. Vern Lowe stood back until Murph was free.

‘Have you got change of a fiver? I need smokes too,' he said, offering the note.

‘We don't run the bank from down here,' she said.

‘I'll take a couple of hundred, Red – make it worth your while cashing it.'

Two hundred smokes might make a dent in his fiver. She took his money, gave the note a sliding glance as she left her piano, gave it a decent scrutinising while walking across the yard to the hotel for the necessary change and his fags. It was neither old nor new, and no fake. She added it to her cash box, took out a few smaller notes and returned to her cider pit, counting out three singles, a ten bob note and coins, attempting not to breathe as she did so – Vern's sweat smelled bad.

Always the runt of the pack, he was around her age, one of the urchins she'd run with for a time. She'd fed him a few crusts once or twice, when she was at Sam's first establishment. She'd run into him again when she could be bought at that last city place, though he'd never tried to buy her.

He took his two hundred smokes, gave her a grin, picked up his beer and moved away, his stink moving away with him.

Other drinkers crowded the piano now, glasses filling and emptying to the hum of conversation, laughter.

‘So, who does the copper think done it? Ma was saying you were getting pretty pally with him this morning, Mrs Dolan. Did you find out anything?'

‘They're whispering in town that there was going to be a grandchild.'

‘And who was whispering that?'

‘Jeanne Johnson.'

‘If she said it, it would be fact. She could worm information out of a stale loaf of bread, that girl.'

Mr Croft, the dairyman, took his time coming down the steps. ‘The sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generations. It's written clear in the good book,' he said, buying directly into the conversation. He had to be eighty years old and had long since gone beyond male to that shrunken, bird-boned sexless place where age sends many. He always popped in for one drink on Sundays; having cleaned himself up for church, he liked to get a bit of wear out of his ancient Sunday suit – always dropped a coin in the collection tin too.

Voices rising, falling, the piano tinkling, the dairyman's ongoing monologue like waves slapping ineffectually on sand. The air grew warmer each time the door opened, but with most of the pit's construction being below ground level, it was still ten degrees cooler in than out.

‘Someone left flowers down where the Squire girl was murdered,' a new arrival offered.

‘I saw Squire and Arthur putting them there half an hour back.'

‘You know how Rachael was carrying that brown handbag last night? Well, it's supposed to be missing. Old Jessie Martin accidentally overheard Thompson telling one of the city coppers on the phone that the handbag with seventy-eight pounds in it has disappeared.'

‘Accidentally on bloody purpose, she heard it. It's a fact, though,' one of station master Wilson's boys said. ‘The copper was speaking to my old man about a handbag this morning.'

‘I heard her last night telling Chris Reichenberg she had money and was going to Melbourne. She was trying to talk him into going with her.'

‘She's been on with him for years. Dave was a fool for marrying her.'

An itching between her shoulderblades, the piano player shrugged, reached an arm up her back, scratching, while her eye searched for Vern Lowe. He was too low, his greying woolly head now lost in the crowd.

‘There's talk going around that Chris Reichenberg killed her and that the copper is only waiting for the city blokes to get here before he makes the arrest.'

‘It's Squire who reckons Chris killed her, not the copper. Chris was down here, drunk as a lord when I left at two. He was having trouble killing mosquitoes.'

‘Poor bloody Gimpy, losing his wife and his kid, eh?'

Len Larkin entered, closing the door behind him. ‘I didn't think you'd be opening. Move your arse, Murph, or I'll just open my mouth and you can squirt it straight in.'

‘Did you know that Dave's wife was expecting? Or so Jeanne Johnson says.'

‘And Jesus turned rainwater into beer,' Len said, claiming his seat on the tea-chest.

‘He's probably killed her himself. He's found out that she's played him for a sucker and he's done his block and killed her.'

‘Sucker, my backside. All of a sudden he's got that truck, he's got that house. Where the hell do you think he came by that sort of money? He sold his sheep to make the payment on his loan last year. If he married her to get at Squire's money, then he's not going to kill the goose that lays the golden egg, is he?'

‘He might've, if he found out his Squire goose was planning to fly the coop.'

‘Squire? He's got no more right to that name than me or you, laddie. It was old Murph, who owned the punt back then, that gave the old trollop her name – as a joke, mind you, when she had all of those builder chaps living over there building her manor house – and a few of them taking their wages where they could too. Old Murph spent half his life ferrying them and Moll's building supplies across that river. ‘Morning, Squire Molly,' he'd say. ‘And how is your charming daughter?' So everyone started doing it. And now the joke's on us.'

‘You're pulling our legs.'

‘No such thing, I'm not. It's all fact.'

‘Then why name the town after her?'

‘That was the copper's doing, the year that Merton died and we were overrun by drunken diggers. They sent three burly coppers up here –'

‘Speaking of burly coppers,' Len Larkin interrupted. The roosters up the pear trees were crowing.

Len placed the money bag on the keg, picked up the tea-chest he'd been sitting on and up-ended it over keg and money bag. ‘Glasses,' he yelled. ‘Empty them and get them under fast.'

Glasses and mugs drained, many hands collected the empties, placing them beneath the tea-chest, then a large, white, hand-embroidered cloth was tossed over the chest and the vase of paper flowers set on top. They had it down to a fine art. Maybe a minute had passed since that first rooster crow. They were still crowing too, each trying to out-crow the other, which meant the law wasn't too close yet.

‘Some of you pour yourselves a cup of tea. And don't eat those scones.' The last bit was added for the laughing pickers' benefit. This was new to them. A few got into the game and fixed themselves up with teacups as Mrs Dolan placed her collection tin, half filled with coins, beside her vase of paper flowers.

The dairyman had plenty of listeners sitting or standing, nursing cups, a few balancing a scone on their saucers, when Tom Thompson's helmet-clad head bobbed low through the cider pit door.

‘Good afternoon, officer,' the widow said. ‘Welcome to our little gathering. Any donation to the orphans entitles the donor to a cup of tea and one scone. Money in the tin on that table, and remember, even a penny counts to a little orphan child.'

Tom stepped down to the floor, picked up the donation tin and rattled it, his eyes scanning the dark room. No big bloke with a gingery mo and yellow hair. Still shaking that tin, he worked his way down to the corner where Vern Lowe was trying to remain invisible.

‘Ah, and if it isn't my old mate, Vernon. Just the feller I was looking for. Outside, Vernon.'

‘What for? I didn't do nothin'.'

‘You'll find out what for.'

Vern wasn't leaving his corner. ‘You can't charge a man yet for doin' a good deed and gettin' a free cuppa tea for doin' it, can ya?'

‘It's too hot to argue, Vernon. Out that door!'

‘I can't walk. I sprained my ankle somethin' chronic. That's why I'm drinkin' tea instead of pickin' today.'

‘I can arrange for you to be carried.'

‘Uphill? On your handlebars?'

That one raised a few sniggers, which Tom didn't like much. He stood looking at the smiling faces and playing with that tin.

‘I haven't found a lot to laugh about myself, chaps, not today. I've been pushing those pedals up and down that bloody hill since before dawn, and I pushed those pedals down here in the hope of getting a bit of help in finding out who murdered a lovely eighteen year old girl last night. I didn't think I was going to have to twist any of your arms into helping me but, believe it or not, I am still capable of twisting arms – when necessary. I want to see all of you, on my veranda, by the time I get up there.' He turned to the widow. ‘You too, Mrs Dolan. I'll give you half an hour to wash your pretty cups and saucers, fold up all of your pretty tablecloths, take your flowers and donations up to your parlour, then you can join the queue on my veranda.'

‘You don't run Squire in when he throws his fundraising garden parties,' she said.

‘No. Well, you might plan on having a garden party next Sunday, Mrs Dolan, because I'll be putting my own padlock on that door tonight, and it won't be coming off in a hurry. Now get going, all of you. Righto, Vernon, make your donation, then out that door – if you don't want to be carried out.'

 

The sun in Vern's eyes wasn't doing his aching head a lot of good, and the hot road beneath his feet was doing them the same amount of good. He was limping badly before he reached Dolan's gate and started pushing the bike he was cuffed to up that bloody hill. He should have known better than to come to this tin-pot town. Should have known better than to go down to the pub today too. He hadn't been planning to when he'd walked off, but he'd needed smokes and that hill had looked long, so he'd walked down it, knowing where he could get smokes and a beer to fix his headache.

At the Reichenbergs' gate he stopped for a breather in the shade of a golden elm and, with difficulty, took a fag from his tin and lit it. ‘I told you already, I never saw nothin' last night. I never saw no girl, and you've got no right to cuff me when I never done nothin' in your bloody town. I know me rights.'

‘You were resisting arrest, Vernon.'

‘I wasn't bloody resistin' nothin'. What were you arrestin' me for, I kept arstin' you. If you'd told me what you wanted me for then I would'a come quiet. I didn't know you could run a man in for havin' a bloody cup of tea.'