The hated look from Hanney, snide in the heavy, heavy way of lesser yet total power. “Where’d you get him, Tim? Talks like a bloody professor. Look, cases could be bloody made, Habash. I could consider going lenient on you if you sign up here and avoid court squabbles. But if you bloody rile me…”
With a dry mouth, Tim said, “I won’t advise my friend to sign a confession for something as silly.”
Bandy had gone as pale as a European, but it was clear he was resolved to stand solid. Tim wondered too how he could have been blind to his fellow prisoner’s qualities, the courage and the loyalty. Just the same, there was a sort of plea in Bandy’s eye. Just remember, things will always fall more heavily on me than on you. Police magistrates will believe you more than me.
But not by too bloody much of a margin, Tim wanted to tell him.
“Let me show you something,” murmured Hanney. Standing, Hanney moved to a storeroom and past the junior policeman’s desk. Tim could not think of anything to say to Bandy in the man’s absence. After a time, Hanney emerged, oh Jesus, with the basket covered by the checked cloth. The letter Tim had risked writing had been futile. Had it gone astray or been lost by a clerk? Had the Commissioner lost interest in the young woman’s name?
He placed it all on the table, removed the great flask, took the checked cloth off it. A glimpse showed Tim that Missy leaned here, brow first, in hostage to Hanney. Tim felt his blood abandon him, fleeing this sight. The fixity of dimmed and barely brown eyes more open than at last viewing. Unblinking. Disconnected from the intent of her heart.
“There you are, you black bastard,” said Hanney. “Would you like to come clean that this is what your rheumatic mixture did.”
“Untrue, untrue,” cried Bandy. “My mixture could not achieve this horrible thing. Dear heaven!”
Bandy averted his eyes. You could tell that as much as any North Corker farmer’s son, he was seized by Missy’s unreleased spirit.
“My mixture is nothing,” said Bandy in a thin voice. “A tiny, kindly ripple, constable, on the huge ocean of human pain.”
He stood up, his mouth warped.
“Not this,” he said, trembling. “This is not my tradition or my father’s.”
He fell. His legs gave way. One delicate groan as he dropped like a thrown-off garment.
“What do you think that could mean?” Hanney—looking over his desk at the stupefied Bandy—asked Tim.
Tim had begun to rise to assist Bandy…
“Leave him. Leave him! Tell me what you think it bloody well means?”
“It means he hasn’t seen her before.”
“Well, you wouldn’t find a woman like her messing around with a black hawker.”
“But you said you’d shown him! You told me that. You showed it to cow-cockies but not to Bandy!”
“Are you dissatisfied with my investigation, Tim?” Hanney opened his desk and took a letter out. “Read that, eh.”
It was a letter on the stationery of Ernest Malcolm and Company, Accountants. It was addressed to the Commissioner of Police for New South Wales. “I would be remiss not to commend to you the work done by way of the present enquiry into the identity of the unfortunate young woman by Constable Hanney…” It was signed by Ernie, along with a list of all his secretaryships and posts as treasurer.
Hanney took the letter back. “Bloody nice to be appreciated by a pillar of the community. Now, tell me what you think it means, this bloody fainting?”
“It’s the bloody horror. It’s not guilt.” Another glimpse of the child in the flask. “I feel the same as Habash.”
“So you’d say you are similar characters, would you?”
So tediously Hanney fancied himself as cornering a man whatever way he turned. Were coppers like that as babies? Or did the uniform do it?
“Well?” Hanney insisted. “Similar types, would you say?”
“Will you let me pick up my friend? Fainted people shouldn’t be left lying like that.”
“Just sit there.” Again Hanney craned over his desk and surveyed Bandy. “Look at him there. You’d be bloody surprised, Mr. Shea, by the numbers of women upriver who’d do him favours. The old cow-cockies mistrust him, but the women think he’s a bloody darling. They let him camp near the homestead, and when their old man’s snoring, they go creeping down to his wagon.”
Why would Ernie praise methods like those of Hanney? “If Habash is the sort who gets round to the women, why didn’t you show him Missy earlier?”
Hanney did not answer, but went back to the matter of Bandy the seducer. “You’d be astounded. Even your sister-in-law and that step-niece. He’s the sort of little bugger women like to take on their knees. Look at that! Hands and arms like a bloody cherub.”
Bandy began to cough. Tim got up now and helped him to his feet, and sat him in his chair again. Bandy fluttering his lips like a man about to be sick. He seemed to be unsure of what had befallen him.
He saw the flask again but closed his eyes then.
“Can’t you put that bloody thing away?” Tim asked Constable Hanney. It was not of course a bloody thing. It had a holiness.
The policeman said, “You keep pestering me. Has she been recognised? Buying me drinks, getting me pissed. Were you her bloke, Tim? Where did you meet her? Was it Sydney on some trip?”
Tim writhed. The copper’s profane ideas were a torment.
“I haven’t been to Sydney in five years.”
“So why are you so fussy about Missy’s name? Hoping it’ll come out. Or hoping it won’t.”
Try the truth out on him. Defy him with it. “She’s in torment until she’s named. Any idiot can tell.”
“How do you know, in torment?”
“That’s the way it strikes me. Again and again. If it doesn’t strike you and spur you on, I bloody pity you!”
“Is this some potato superstition you’re into, Tim? Some spuddy thing?”
“I think it’s bloody called using your imagination.”
“Ah,” said Hanney, setting his big jaw. “I’m sorry, my imagination’s not up to scratch with yours. But there’s something all the old coppers in Sydney used to tell me. That if there is a person who hangs around and ask lots of questions, he’s generally the bugger.”
Bandy had placed his hands on the desk.
“And my God,” he murmured. “Woman’s fine features.”
“What do you say, Tim? Don’t wait for others to do it. You give me her name.”
“Get me a Bible. I’ll swear. I just don’t bloody know!”
“Sign this then,” said Hanney, sighing in a concluding manner. “You’ll both receive a summons to answer the charge.” He nudged the flask. “The charge of visiting the quarantine. You do remember that one, don’t you?”
“It’s hard to remember anything with that on the table.”
“You remember some things, son! You couldn’t wait for your wife to be home in two days. So you went up the river to get your end in. You remember that.”
Tim burned but leaned forward in his chair.
“There is no plague,” Bandy murmured to reinforce Tim.
“This isn’t what all the messages off the wire say, but you two smartalecs know better. Sign the bloody thing here.”
But neither of them moved to sign, so Hanney put on a sour mouth and said, “Go and sit down the back of the office there, the both of you.”
Tim, still blazing as any man would from that accusation of lust, one he didn’t want mentioned in court, stood up, helping Bandy by the elbow and grabbing the backs of the two chairs with his free hand. They passed the younger constable’s desk and Tim repositioned the chairs against the back wall and eased Bandy into his.