Dark Fires Shall Burn (18 page)

The door opens a little after dawn, and Mrs Roberts enters behind a tray of tea and toast, wearing an entreating and yet wretchedly heartbroken expression. Nancy quickly shuts her eyes again and burrows into her pillow.

She hears a throat being cleared gently. ‘Oh. That's kind of you,' Kate says, looming in the corridor behind her, but makes no move to take the tray. Nancy hears Mrs Roberts set it at the foot of the bed.

‘Still sleeping? Poor lamb.'

‘Yes. She tossed and cried all night.'

A warm palm strokes her forehead. Nancy smells Mrs Roberts' milky breath close above her face. ‘The Lord bless thee and keep thee,' Mrs Roberts recites. ‘The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.'

Nancy tries to lie still under Mrs Roberts' touch, feigning sleep, and, despite her initial compulsion to squirm, the loving pressure of the hand and the voice do give her comfort.

‘There's more news! Paper's just come,' Izzy's voice carries up the stairs. She had stayed over, spending the night in Aunt Jo's room. She exhales, reading as she walks. ‘They've got the mother's statement. That poor woman. My goodness, I cannot even imagine …'

Nancy's eyes flick open, but Mrs Roberts and Kate are looking at Izzy.

‘Peggy! Oh my goodness. She must be beside herself,' Kate says with a gasp.

‘Should I?' Izzy glances meaningfully at Nancy.

Kate turns. ‘Morning, biscuit. Oh yes, Izzy. Do. It's too late for that.' Kate lifts her hands resignedly. ‘She'll only read it herself later.' She holds the crumpled copy of the newspaper Nancy had seized in the night as though it were condemning evidence.

‘I suppose. If you'll allow it,' Izzy says grimly. ‘
When she did not return in reasonable time
— this is Mrs Reed speaking, of course —
after I had sent her for a loaf of bread, I had a presentiment that she had been murdered
.'

‘What?' Mrs Roberts says with a low whistle. ‘What a jolly strange thing to say! What kind of a mother says that, I ask you? You send your child out on an errand and if they're belated you have a “presentiment” they've been murdered?'

‘Why would she say that, Mum?' Nancy asks. ‘Why would Mrs Reed say something like that about Frances?'

‘I don't know, Nan. I just don't know.' Kate shakes her head. ‘Sometimes shock makes people say queer things. And she's always been a strange one.'

‘If I may,' Izzy interrupts, clearing her throat. ‘The rest says,
Frances loved to mind babies, and she was popular among her classmates at Enmore Public School and around the neighbourhood
.'

‘That's a lie!' Nancy bursts out. ‘Frances hated babies! She didn't care a jot for Thomas.'

The adults ignore her.

Kate takes the paper and skims it before she reads aloud. ‘This is … this is what Mrs Reed said to the police:
If I could only get my hands for two minutes on the fiend who killed her, there would be no need for a court to deal with him
. Oh, I know exactly what she means.'

EIGHTEEN

Dot and Roberta and Templeton lie in the park off Enmore Road, nestled under a horse blanket, by the time the sun finally relinquishes the sky. The night air smells of squashed figs and smoke and their warm, beery breath. Dolly has given everyone the night off — unexpectedly — but Templeton is growing accustomed to her whims and the unpredictability of her fancies. Why Frances' death upset her so, he can hardly begin to imagine. This evening Sally and Annie went to the pictures, Lorraine to bed, and the three of them to get good and drunk.

The Reed mother's statement in the morning's papers set everyone talking, and Newtown is feverish with gossip. More than one hundred men had already been questioned, people said, and yet still no one had been charged with anything more than vagrancy. The crowd waiting outside the police station for news grew so dense and raucous that the police filed out, grim-faced, to push them back and then closed off the road. Premier McKell had announced a five-hundred pound reward for information. Wild theories ricocheted around the pubs: it was a Yank who had killed before in Melbourne; it was a member of the police force; it was a soldier; it was the father — no one knew where
he
was, did they?

Templeton necks his near-empty bottle, drinking in the last warmish bubbles, and re-reads the paper aloud, although he must have read it three times already.
‘A woman caller said she saw the girl with a man on the corner of King and Georgina Streets near 8:30 p.m. and heard the man say: “Come on, we'll go down there now,” and her reply: “We can't go to the party yet, I haven't got the bread.”
'

‘Why would she go to a party at nighttime with a man she never met?' Roberta props herself up on her elbows and takes hold of the news sheet. Templeton didn't want to hear more speculation — he was sick to death of it — but they could think of little else to talk about. Murder talk ran hot. Everyone had a theory to declaim or their own private suspicion to coddle. Roberta reads aloud. ‘
The Chief of the C.I.B., Superintendent Malcolm, gave the man's description.
' Her face is illuminated eerily in the submarine glow of the streetlight as she sounds out the words with some effort. ‘
A
bout
twenty-seven or twenty-eight, five feet eight inches, medium build; fair, suntanned complex— complexion; dark or brown hair; full face; wearing a military overcoat, dirty grey trousers, open neck shirt, and a grey felt hat
.'

‘Well, fuck me if that is not near every man in Newtown.' Dot laughs coldly. ‘A man, average height, with brown hair, wearing a uniform? You mean a needle in a stack full of needles! They will have to interview the entire forces.'

‘Dirty grey trousers? They'd only have said that if they were real dirty, not just regular dirty. Must'a been a tramp, don't you think, Dot? Some bloke sleeping rough?' Roberta looks at her.

Merv
, Templeton thinks instantly, and draws his coat around himself tighter. In his imagination he sees those iris-less eyes, reflective in the dark.

Dot drapes an arm around her. ‘They
want
us to think it was a tramp.' She strikes a match, its smoke tail pluming. She looks leonine in this light.

‘What do you mean?' Templeton asks.

‘They do not want us to think that such a thing could be done by an ordinary soldier, a brother, somebody's son. Whoever he was. They want us to think he is not one of us. Not an
Aus-sie
.' She fractures the word into two and stumbles on it. ‘
Rozumiesz
—
understand?'

‘Surely it couldn't have been one of us.' Roberta's pupils are inky saucers. She looks up at the sky and shivers.

Dot sweeps Roberta's fingers up in hers, rubbing them against the cold, and bundles them under her coat. ‘Surely it could indeed.' She exhales, keeping the ember of her cigarette clear of Roberta's loose hair. ‘People are stupid.'

‘But she was just a child. And it was so … Who could do that? It must have been a stranger passing through.' Roberta shakes her head, not wanting to believe it. ‘Personally, I think it was the Yank. Like that lunatic from the US army they hanged in Melbourne a couple of years back for strangling those three broads. What was his name?'

‘Leonski. I will bet you one hundred Yankee dollars it is not.'

‘What makes you say that?' The hairs on the nape of Templeton's neck are erect. His hands twitch in his lap. ‘Dot? You don't think that maybe Jackie —'

‘Lucky!' Roberta rounds on him, using the nickname he hates. ‘What would make you ask such a thing?'

‘No reason.'

Dot says nothing and won't look at him.

‘Well, you hush your mouth!' Roberta chides. They lie on the blanket, each bundled in their overcoat, just their faces peeking out, breath emerging as steam. No one says anything for a while, and the only sounds are the draw of cigarettes and the swallow of beer.

‘Do you see that bright one up there?' Dot takes Roberta's hand out from her coat and lifts it in the air. ‘That's Alpha Centauri.'

‘Which one? There's millions.' Roberta laughs. ‘They all look the same.'

‘At the top. Do you see? It's like a diamond tipped over on its side. Alpha Centauri's the top, then Beta Centauri.' She points with Roberta's finger and sketches a long kite shape. ‘Acrux at the bottom.'

‘That's the Southern Cross,' Templeton says.

‘Oh yes, smarty pants! And how do you know that?' Dot props herself up on her elbow and pokes him.

‘Our father taught us,' he replies. ‘Not much to do at night on the farm.'

He catches himself as a memory surfaces: the sweet, thick stink of the wattle on a muggy night, a tawny frogmouth somewhere, his tall sister and taller father reciting constellations as he looked up at them.

He has not seen his Dad since just before '40, when everyone was already sick of the war: the enthusiasm had waned from the weeks when all the folks had crowded around the wireless in the church hall and cheered at that voice saying, brassy and full of bluster, ‘The lion has roared, the cubs are with you!' That day he had thought not of war but only of Daniel and the meaty perfume of a cat den, and of the angel God sent to shut the lion's mouth so that Daniel might survive. He remembered a page in his lettering book, the words he had traced over and over again, in pencil before pen, and how they had frightened him:
The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them
.

He did not know what those words meant, but his gut told him it was an invitation to catastrophe. Not that war had touched them much, out in the sticks, back then. They were out on the Parramatta River, in a timber shack with some chickens and a trench yards away for a shitter. He had never even been to Sydney, but he could point which way it was — east, where the sun rose. But when the Japs had looked about to march on the Top End, it wasn't any longer a phony war, taking place far away in Europe. Nor when men started dying and the papers had nothing else on the front page but lists of names, lists so long they made your eyes swim.

‘It was your sister that taught me!' Dot laughs, delighted, looking at the stars. ‘But she said that she learnt it from a book.' She lies back down, her eyes glassy and distant.

‘Annie doesn't like to talk about Dad,' Templeton says and Dot nods. ‘He's in Long Bay for a smash and grab.' He hesitates; he has never told anyone, but the words feel good as they come out. ‘But he might as well be dead. Armed robbery on the letter they sent, but we hadn't heard from him for six months before that. He cleared off, left us. We thought he was dead anyway.' He goes quiet, looking at the sky.

‘The sky looks different here to where I was a girl.' Dot, sensing Templeton's sadness, changes the subject. ‘All the stars are in the wrong place, like a kaleidoscope.' She makes a window through her fingers and mimes shaking it.

‘Did Annie tell you the names of the others?' Roberta wriggles so she can be closer to Dot. She offers Dot her hand, but Dot does not take it.

‘Yes, she did, on one of our first nights together. She told me the names of lots of them. So many I thought she must be making it up. Now I know she was not telling falsehoods.'

Templeton smiles in the dark at the old-fashioned word.
Lies
, he wants to tell her, but does not.

‘How did your father come to know them all?' Roberta asks him.

‘He told us his father was a sea captain. Before he came to Australia to look for gold. I don't know if that's true.'

‘I wish my dad had told me things like that,' Roberta remarks.

‘What did he teach you?' Dot asks.

‘Well, I'm from up north. My dad taught me how to ride a horse without falling off. He taught me how to build a solid fence, and how to tie a bow-line and a sheepshank. He taught me how to cut a piece of sugarcane so you can suck out the raw juice. He showed me where to kick a bloke who was messing with you so he couldn't keep
messing with you. But I haven't seen him for a while. I came down here after Darwin got bombed.
Go down to Sydney
, he said.
Be safe,
he said. Been working for Dolly since — ever since I was seventeen.'

‘What do you think of her?' Dot turns so she can see her face.

‘Who? Dolly?'

‘Is she as bad as Lorraine made out?'

Roberta considers the question. ‘Yes and no. She's a queer fish. That story about Edith is true. But then, other times … well, she does things that I just can't fit with the rest of her behaviour.'

‘Like what?' Templeton asks.

‘Like every Christmas she makes an anonymous donation to Royle-ston Boys Home — you know, the orphanage on Glebe Point Road.'