“I thought you were on Terara,” said Tim. Don’t let him show me the murdered girl’s face, on top of everything else!
“No. Sergeants go off on steamers. Mug coppers stay at home. Got to get that statement from you, Shea. You have the children? Good. I need to talk to the girl. Poor bastard. Might have got his leg over with Mrs. Sutter. Not now though.”
Tim led him into the dining room. The girl put her bread down and observed the policeman.
“Oh dearie,” said Constable Hanney. “Dr. Gabriel says your papa died straight off. He did not feel any of the pigs. In heaven he’s got everything.” Hanney made a sort of inventory with his fingers of his own forehead, his eyes, his nose, his cheeks. “Your papa is a glorious young fellow in heaven.”
She opened her mouth but did not weep. She rubbed her jaw with her seamed little hand.
She said, “The horse shied at a heap of gravel. Hector fell out when the wheel went off the edge. My dress got caught on the footboard and I cut my leg. Papa fell too. I saw the wheel go over his head.”
Hanney took notes and questioned Tim, who felt grateful for the constable’s official compassion.
The child had gone back to her bread. Hanney and Tim could have been speaking of a separate tragedy from hers.
Hanney said at the end, “You should see if Mrs. Sutter will take them. She’s got an income, you know. Her husband left her land upriver, and she sold it and lives off the interest. She and Rochester spoke of buying a pub somewhere, Kew I think, by the bridge there. We have not here a lasting bloody city, eh. Did that bloody ruffian Habash behave himself?”
“He behaved well,” said Tim at once. “He fixed up Rochester’s horse very humanely. Then brought the children here while I took the father…”
Why such a defence of the hawker? he asked himself. The bugger had flogged the grey. Yet Tim didn’t want him punished for that any more. The horror of the forenoon had been enough punishment.
“You couldn’t have the kids go with him,” said Hanney. “Not into a Mohammedan household. Do you have any brandy?”
Tim admitted he did.
“What if you get one for yourself and one for me?”
“Do you think I need it? I don’t think I need it.”
This request for a stimulant was faintly surprising to Tim. Hanney did not look like a cadger of drinks. He lowered his voice. “I brought the young woman with me. Saves me coming back tomorrow.”
“Oh God,” said Tim, getting up. He went and took the Old Toby brandy out of the encyclopedia bookcase in the living room. He poured two hefty glassfuls.
“Whoa!” cried Constable Hanney, smiling slightly. “I don’t have much of a head for liquor.”
The little girl had finished eating and had folded her arms. “To your papa,” Hanney told her, hitching his glass up and beginning to sip. The child watched him with indifference or lack of forgiveness.
“Yes,” was all Tim could think to say. He drank in uneven gulps. He did not savour it like Hanney did. He noticed though, as the liquor went trembling through him, that his fever was gone.
“But you didn’t know him,” said the girl evenly.
Hanney half-smiled but Tim thought Lucy Rochester should be answered. “We know you and Hector,” he said. “We feel for you.”
He put his glass down and went and got a bound volume of the Sydney Mail of ten years past out of the front room. He brought it back in to Lucy Rochester.
“You might find that interesting to look through,” he said. She began to do it. With her yellowed, seamy, little fingers.
In front of Tim, Hanney walked a bit unsteadily but like a man mellowed. Out through the store, opening the front door for himself. The day had settled sweetly and thickly in Belgrave and Smith Streets, and there was a hint of blueness, of the advancing satin of the wide-open night. The populous frogs of the Macleay had already started up.
Hanney inexactly gestured him around to the passenger side of the trap. A fruit basket lay under the seat there, holding something wrapped in blue and white cloth.
“All right then!” he said, closing his eyes for a second and shaking his head. “This is the woman they found in the bootbox washed up at Sherwood.”
“I know, I know,” said Tim.
“We call her Missy. She was only young. Just go easy with it, Shea. You’ll see, she was lovely in life.”
The empty town’s air spoke of all the lovely dead, including Mr. Albert Rochester who showed his young man’s face forth now only in heaven. Tim gripped one of the handlebars on the trap and Hanney dragged the basket forth and lifted the cloth. Inside was a huge preserving jar. Hanney raised it with care, his great hand with fist and fingers spread wide to keep it steady.
The head of a girl of perhaps twenty years sat crookedly in there. How piteous that crookedness, as if the surgeon hadn’t taken enough pains. Barely a complaint on that face, the eyes nearly shut, the lips of what had been a small mouth slightly parted. The docked but trailing hair was light brown. No shallow, no vulgar plea there, in the way she presented herself. This was a serious child, making serious claims. Tim felt them at first sight.
“Nothing but heads today,” he said in confusion. “Bert’s and hers.”
“Steady, old chap,” said Hanney, who didn’t seem steady himself. “Someone must know her. She must have a mother or father somewhere. Or of more interest to me, she’s got to have had a lover. Probably here—I bet she got Mrs. Mulroney’s name from him. He could settle the matter. Then she wouldn’t need to be called Unnamed Female in court.”
No question this was at once the chief question. Bigger than raising regiments. The girl or young woman not to be Unnamed Female. Her unnamed state was the shadow over things. The shadow over him.
Tim swallowed and looked away at the violet evening settling on the river. So bloody hard to make any easy connection between the dusk splendour and that face separated from its heart.
“See I thought she might’ve made a purchase, Shea. The day it happened. She may have had a craving say. Wanted chocolate. Have a good look.”
Tim drew his eyes down again from the lavender southeast, the bluest quarter of the evening, and took a further stare. The demand on him was still there behind the lowered lids. And why not? Such useless and terrible beauty, beauty lopped from its roots. And in new and desperate alliance with him. Begging for the mercy of an identification. Aching for his word. “Yes, I did see her.” Or the supremely exorcising sentence, “Yes, that’s…” Waiting to be liberated from the constable’s fluid.
Tim would have made a name up right then if it could have helped her.
Hanney said, “Showed her to Captain Reid of the Burrawong, but he swore she hadn’t travelled with him. I showed it to the people at Keogh’s and Naylor’s coaches, thinking she might have come into town on them.”
Hanney staring at him. Was this stare totally kind?
Tim said, “Never seen her. I wish I could put a name to her. I’d be very damn happy to.”
Hanney took the flask into the crook of his right arm and whacked his police trousers sharply with his left hand. He still looked calm enough though.
“Bloody all beats me,” said Hanney. “If we can’t identify her here, I’ll have to go on the road with her.”
“For God’s sake,” Tim asked, “why in the age of the photograph wasn’t a picture taken?”
“There was one. And a sketch. But the Commissioner in Sydney says nothing has ever worked like this method. Pierces the imagination, see. Gingers up the memory. It’s an old Scottish method.”