CHAPTER 30
PARTAGEUSE HAS ONLY so many people, and only so many places those people can be. Sooner or later, you’re bound to bump into someone you’d rather avoid.
It had taken days for Violet to persuade her daughter to leave the house. ‘Come on, just come for a walk with me while I pop into Mouchemore’s. I need some more wool for that bedcover I’m doing.’ No more sweet cardigans. No more diminutive Liberty lawn dresses. These days she was back to crocheting blankets for the last of the wretches languishing in the Repat home. Well, it kept her hands busy, even if it couldn’t always occupy her mind.
‘Mum, really, I don’t feel up to it. I’ll just stay here.’
‘Oh, come on, darling.’
As the pair walked down the street, people tried not to look too obviously. A few offered polite smiles, but there was none of the old ‘How are things, Vi?’ or ‘See you at church on Sunday?’ No one was sure how to treat this mourning that wasn’t for a death. Some crossed the street to avoid them. Townsfolk read the newspapers to extract what gobbets they could, but things had gone quiet of late.
As Violet and her daughter passed through the doors of the haberdasher’s, Fanny Darnley, on her way out, gave a little gasp, and halted outside, wide-eyed with alarm and relish.
The shop smelled of lavender polish, and old roses from the potpourri set out in a basket near the cash register. High up the walls on all sides ranked bolts of cloth – damasks and muslins, linens and cottons. There were rainbows of thread and clouds of balled wool. Cards of lace – thick, thin, Brussels, French – lay on the table where Mr Mouchemore was serving an elderly woman. All the way from the counter at the far end, a row of tables lined the store on each side, with chairs for the comfort of customers.
Seated at one of the tables with their backs to Isabel were two women. One was blonde; the other, who was dark-haired, was considering a bolt of pale-lemon linen unrolled before her. At her side, glum and fidgeting with a rag doll, was a little blonde girl, immaculately turned out in a pink smocked dress, her white socks trimmed with lace.
As the woman examined the cloth, asking the attendant questions about price and quantity, the little girl’s eyes drifted up to see who had come in. She dropped the doll and scrambled down from the chair. ‘Mamma!’ she called, dashing to Isabel. ‘Mamma! Mamma!’
Before anyone could take in what had happened, Lucy had wrapped her arms around Isabel’s legs and was holding as fast as a crab.
‘Oh Lucy!’ Isabel bundled her up and hugged her, letting the child snuggle into her neck. ‘Lucy, my darling!’
‘That bad lady took me, Mamma! She did smack me!’ the child whimpered, pointing.
‘Oh, my poor, poor sweetheart!’ Isabel was squeezing the girl to her, sobbing at the touch of her, the legs fitting snugly around her waist and the head slotting automatically into the space beneath her chin, like the final piece of a jigsaw. She was oblivious to anything and anyone else.
Hannah watched, stricken: humiliated, and despairing at the magnetic pull Isabel exerted on Grace. For the first time, the enormity of the theft came home to her. Right in front of her was the evidence of all that had been stolen. She saw the hundreds of days and the thousands of embraces the two had shared – the love usurped. She was aware of a trembling in her legs, and she feared she might fall to the ground. Gwen put a hand on her arm, unsure of what to do.
Hannah tried to fend off the humiliation, and the tears it brought. The woman and child were knitted together like a single being, in a world no one could enter. She felt sick as she fought to stay upright, to maintain some fragment of dignity. Struggling to breathe calmly, she picked up her bag from the counter and walked as steadily as she could towards Isabel.
‘Grace darling,’ she tried. The child was still burrowing into Isabel, and neither moved. ‘Grace dear, it’s time to come home.’ She reached out a hand to touch the little girl, who screamed: not a squeal but a full-throated, murderous cry that bounced off the windows.
‘Mamma, make her go ’way! Mamma, make her!’
The small crowd looked on, the men perplexed and the women horrified. The little girl’s features were distorted and purple. ‘Please, Mamma!’ She was begging, a tiny hand on each side of Isabel’s face, shouting the words at her as though to overcome distance or deafness. Still, Isabel remained mute.
‘Perhaps we could—’ Gwen’s sentence was cut off by her sister.
‘Let her go!’ Hannah shouted, unable to address Isabel by name. ‘You’ve done enough,’ she went on more quietly, in a voice edged with bitterness.
‘How can you be so cruel?’ Isabel burst out. ‘You can see the state she’s in! You don’t know the first thing about her – about what she needs, how to look after her! Have some common sense, if you can’t have any kindness to her!’
‘Let go of my daughter! Now!’ demanded Hannah, shaking. She was desperate to get out of the shop, to break the magnetic hold. She pulled the child away and held her around the waist, as she resisted and screamed, ‘Mamma! I want Mamma! Let me go!’
‘It’s all right, darling,’ she said. ‘I know you’re upset, but we can’t stay,’ and she went on, trying to soothe the child with words while keeping a strong enough grip on her to stop her wriggling out of her arms and running away.
Gwen glanced at Isabel, and shook her head in despair. Then she turned to her niece. ‘Shh, shh, love. Don’t cry,’ and she dabbed at her face with a delicate lace handkerchief. ‘Come home and we’ll find you a toffee. Tabatha Tabby will be missing you. Come on, darling.’ The words of reassurance, from Hannah and from Gwen, continued in a gentle stream as the trio made their way out. At the door, Gwen turned again to behold Isabel, and the desperation in her eyes.
For a moment, no one stirred. Isabel stared into thin air, not daring to move her limbs so as not to lose the feel of her daughter. Her mother eyed the shop assistants, defying them to comment. Finally, the boy who had been unravelling the linen picked up the bolt and started to re-roll it.
Larry Mouchemore took that as the cue to say to the old woman he had been serving, ‘And it was just the two yards you wanted? Of the lace?’
‘Ye— yes, just the two yards,’ she replied, as normally as she could, though she tried to pay him with a hair comb rather than the coins she had meant to extract from her handbag.
‘Come on, dear,’ said Violet softly. Then louder, ‘I don’t think I want the same wool this time. I’ll look at the pattern again and then decide.’
Fanny Darnley, gossiping to a woman beside her on the pavement, froze as the two women came out, only her eyes daring to follow them down the street.
Knuckey walks along the isthmus of Point Partageuse, listening to the waves launch themselves at the shore on both sides. He comes here to clear his head, in the evenings after tea. He’s dried the dishes his wife washed. He still misses the days when there were kids around to do it with them, and they’d make a game of it. Mostly grown up, now. He smiles at a memory of little Billy, forever three years old.
Between his finger and thumb he is turning a shell, cool and rounded like a coin. Families. God knows what he’d be without his family. Most natural thing in the world, it was, for a woman to want a baby. His Irene would have done anything to get Billy back. Anything. When it comes to their kids, parents are all just instinct and hope. And fear. Rules and laws fly straight out the window.
The law’s the law, but people are people. He thinks back to the day that started the whole sorry business: the Anzac Day when he was up in Perth for his aunt’s funeral. He could have gone after the lot of them, the mob, Garstone included. All the men who used Frank Roennfeldt to take the pain away, just for a moment. But that would have made things worse. You can’t confront a whole town with its shame. Sometimes, forgetting is the only way back to normality.
His thoughts returned to his prisoner. That Tom Sherbourne was a puzzle. Closed as a Queensland nut. No way of knowing what was inside the smooth, hard shell, and no weak spot to put pressure on. Bloody Spragg was desperate for a go at him. He’d stalled him as long as he could, but he’d have to let him come and question Sherbourne soon. Down in Albany, or in Perth, who knew what they’d make of him. Sherbourne was his own worst enemy, the way he was carrying on.
At least he’d managed to keep Spragg away from Isabel. ‘You know we can’t compel a wife to talk, so stay away from her. If you put pressure on her, she could clam up for good. Is that what you want?’ he’d asked the sergeant. ‘You leave her to me.’
Christ, all this was too much. A quiet life in a quiet town, that’s what he’d signed up for. And now he was supposed to make sense of all this. A bastard of a case, this was. A real bastard. His job was to be fair, and thorough. And to hand it over to Albany when the time came. He threw the shell into the water. Didn’t even make a splash, drowned by the roar of the waves.
Sergeant Spragg, still sweating from the long journey from Albany, flicked a piece of fluff from his sleeve. Slowly, he turned back to the papers in front of him. ‘Thomas Edward Sherbourne. Date of birth, 28 September 1893.’
Tom offered no response to the statement. The cicadas clicked shrilly from the forest, as though they were the sound of the heat itself.
‘Quite the war hero, too. Military Cross and Bar. I’ve read your citations: captured a German machine-gun nest single-handed. Carried four of your men to safety under sniper fire. And the rest.’ Spragg let a moment pass. ‘You must have killed a lot of people in your time.’
Tom remained silent.
‘I said,’ Spragg leaned towards him over the table, ‘you must have killed a lot of people in your time.’
Tom’s breathing remained steady. He looked straight ahead, his face expressionless.
Spragg thumped the table. ‘When I ask you a question you’ll bloody well answer it, understand me?’
‘When you ask me a question, I will,’ said Tom quietly.
‘Why did you kill Frank Roennfeldt? That’s a question.’
‘I didn’t kill him.’
‘Was it because he was German? Still had the accent, by all accounts.’
‘He didn’t have an accent when I came across him. He was dead.’
‘You’d killed plenty of his sort before. One more would have made no difference, would it?’
Tom let out a long breath, and folded his arms.
‘That’s a question too, Sherbourne.’
‘What’s all this about? I’ve told you I’m responsible for keeping Lucy. I’ve told you the man was dead when the boat washed up. I buried him, and that’s my responsibility too. What more do you want?’
‘ “Oh, he’s so brave, so honest, copping it sweet like that, prepared to go to gaol,”’ Spragg mimicked in a sing-song. ‘Well it doesn’t wash with me, mate, you understand? It’s a bit too much like you’re trying to get away with murder.’
Tom’s stillness riled him even more, and he went on, ‘I’ve seen your type before. And I’ve had enough of bloody war heroes. Came back here and expected to be worshipped for the rest of your lives. Looking down on anyone who didn’t have a uniform. Well the war’s long over. God knows we saw plenty of you get back and go right off the rails. The way you survived over there isn’t the way to survive in a civilized country and you won’t get away with it.’
‘This has got bugger all to do with the war.’
‘Someone’s got to take a stand for common decency, and I’m the one who’s going to do it here.’
‘And what about common sense, Sergeant? For Christ’s sake, think about it! I could have denied everything. I could have said that Frank Roennfeldt wasn’t even in the boat, and you’d have been none the wiser. I told the truth because I wanted his wife to know what had happened, and because he deserved a decent burial.’
‘Or maybe you told half the truth because you wanted to ease your conscience and get let off with a slap on the wrist.’
‘I’m asking you what makes sense.’
The sergeant eyed him coldly. ‘Seven men, it says you killed in your little machine-gun escapade. That looks to me like the work of a violent man. Of a ruthless killer. Your heroics might just be the death of you,’ he said, gathering up his notes. ‘It’s hard to be a hero when you’re swinging from a rope.’ He closed the file and called to Harry Garstone to take the prisoner back to the cells.