Hanney looked at his colleague. Then back to Tim. “Kind enough to accompany us to the police station?”
It seemed too hot for the execution of the law. Above one hundred and five degrees, who wanted the literal justice whose minister Hanney had decided to be?
“Go easy, constable. I have deliveries to do today.”
“Bugger your deliveries.”
Tim found himself looking at Bandy for directions. Bandy had hung his head. Why not? He had to show himself humble before the ways of superior authority. Tim himself had used them on him.
“There’s nothing you can have at the police station which couldn’t be had here,” said Tim. “If you want to charge us for visiting the passengers, you can do it here and leave our day free. I confess that we visited the camp, and that Mr. Habash did, though not for trade. Purely out of kindness towards me.”
“You weren’t so bloody keen on him the last time we met,” said Hanney.
“Well, I was more ignorant then. Surely you don’t want us to follow you through the streets of town?”
“I think that’s what we’d like, Mr. Shea.”
“I’m a man in business.”
“Something you should have thought about at dusk last night. Follow us, and bloody shut up.”
Fortunately though, even by the time they crossed in the punt with the constables and followed them up Belgrave Street towards West Kempsey, where the Majesty of the Queen abided in the office beside the courthouse, the commercial day had not begun in Kempsey.
The passage through town didn’t take so long. A young woman watched them from the upper verandah of the Commercial. She might carry the news. Bandy’s horses seemed to keep right up with the police mounts, and to be pleased for the company, and Tim hoped that this implied to onlookers a lack of coercion in the whole arrangement. Arriving in Kemp Street, they all trotted into the police yard together. But Tim had no doubt that the pegged and markered world ceased at the gate, and that as the constables ran their mounts in under the shade of their stables, he and Bandy had placed themselves profoundly under the dominion of power exercised fancifully.
Yet as if they had freedom, Bandy and Tim rode their horses up to a post and rail. Now everyone dismounted. He and Bandy and the constables walked together like friends across the barren yard to the station. As Constable Hanney opened the unlocked door—who would be silly enough to steal from a police station?—and led everyone in, he took it as read that Tim and Bandy would follow. On the doorstep Tim saw in Bandy’s eye the intention to decamp. To horse and to buggery! How Hanney would adore that.
“Let’s put up with it,” Tim counselled the hawker.
Inside the warm air which reached for Tim smelled of official ink and carbolic. Hanney opened the flap in the counter, and facing to the interior, kept it negligently open with a hand held behind him. Sure of their obedience. The habits necessary to an officer of the law.
“Get yourselves chairs,” he said.
There were three desks in here, in the joyless interior. On the wall the main poster was a paltry ink sketch of Missy marked Unknown Female.
Tim and Bandy fetched two chairs from their place against the back wall and bore them to Hanney’s desk, while the senior constable himself wiped his sweaty hands on his tunic, saying, “God, bound to be a stinker!”
He was looking around for writing materials. He found some sheets of notepaper with V R on the top and the lion and unicorn. Astounding creatures! Their bite as strong here as anywhere.
The younger constable had already sat at his own desk further back in the room, and was engaged at once in documents which seemed to have no bearing at all on Bandy or Tim.
Dipping his pen in the inkwell, Hanney said, “Bugger this heavy air!” and began to write. He asked Tim what his second name was, and Tim said Edmund. Hanney wrote that down. He asked Bandy for his second name.
“I am not aware of any second name,” said Bandy.
Hanney looked up, considering this departure from the given.
“All right then,” he conceded at last.
Reading upside down what the constable wrote, Tim saw Hanney put down Solus after the word Bandy and before Habash. This perhaps to save magistrates asking the question or presuming that Hanney hadn’t asked. They were deep in the moils of the thing now. They were being prepared to appear in Court Notes in the Chronicle.
“Constable,” said Tim, “with the greatest respect, I will not be signing any documents before I have spoken to Mr. Sheridan.”
The words sounded momentary to Tim, fugitive birds uncaged. Hanney looked up at him. Barely a dent made on the air.
“I’m not accusing you of murder, Tim,” he said with a painful grin. “I’m accusing you of violating the New South Wales Quarantine Act.”
Bandy watchful beside him, expected something clever of him, just as he’d expected a horse of Bandy.
Tim said, “Isn’t that a matter for the sanitation officer to report to you?”
“Jesus, you are a bush lawyer, Mr. Shea. It’s like the bloody Impounding Act, Tim. I can impound wandered cattle and lay a charge, and so can the impounding officer. And now I can impound stray citizens under the Sanitation Ordinance and under the Act.” Hanney shook his head. He found Tim hugely eccentric. “You’ve got deliveries to make, Tim, and I have a day’s work. Do you mind if I expedite matters?”
He continued writing, muttering, “You’re lucky I caught you. If I was in this game for the sake of persecution, I could keep you buggers here all day, ruin your business, confuse your children, leave you spare of anyone’s trust.”
“I have no children,” said Bandy, speaking in defiance for the first time.
“That’s what you say, you black bastard.”
“Brown bastard, constable.”
The second policeman laughed in the dimness of the office, of the eucalyptus shade which fell over the back of the police station.
Tim consulted the watch in his fob. Nearing eight o’clock. His schoolboy son would be along soon, going to Imelda.
Hanney turned the document to them at last. It said,
“I, Timothy Edmund Shea, and I, Bandy Solus Habash, freely admit that each in the company of the other in violation of Section 17 of the New South Wales Quarantine Act and of Macleay Shire’s Sanitation Ordinance 8 illegally travelled to and entered the quarantine camp at the New Entrance, thereby placing ourselves and the community in peril and making ourselves liable to sentencing and a fine before the Macleay District Police Magistrate’s Court.”
He wrote that stuff well, Tim saw. Dressing up a mean intent in flowing terms.
“You both sign at the bottom,” Hanney told them. He turned the inkstand to them so that they could conveniently sign.
Tim said, “Just charge us and let the magistrate decide. You’ve said already it’s not like we committed murder.”
Hanney tilted his chair back, “Is that your casual attitude too, Mr. Habash?”
“I would rather await the settlement of the question before the court,” said Bandy, grandly but looking away.
“Well, I think you two fellows should know that some of us think that as a whole there’s a stink of murder or near-murder about you two. There—yes you, Brownie!—there is a fellow, a herbalist, who supplied specifics to Mrs. Mulroney the abortionist. We found quarts of his arsenic remedy on Mrs. Mulroney’s premises.”
Bandy sat forward and his delicate little hands came passionately into play. “My arsenic tonic is quite harmless, constable, and could not be blamed for anyone’s ill-health let alone demise. The same prescription has a renown absolutely everywhere—from the Alps to Turkey, and from Persia to China, as a specific for rheumatism, anaemia and weak nerves. Mrs. Mulroney was one of my customers, but used the tonic you refer to for her own purposes.”