The Last Magician (30 page)

She screamed most violently, and swore that no one should cut off her hair … She then entered my Sitting Room screaming, swearing, and jumping about the Room as if bereft of her senses. She had a pair of Scissors in her hand and commenced cutting off her own hair … Coming before the window of My Sitting Room [she] thrust her clenched fist through three panes of glass in succession …

Proof enough, as the superintendent pointed out, of dementia.

Proof enough, said the Brisbane police and the Brisbane courts and the guardians of the Holy Family School for Little Wanderers. Proof enough, they said, when Cat, caged and shorn, carved herself with broken glass. Perhaps she was simply following a recipe handed on by Ann Bruin, a pattern that came down in the blood.

Or consider the account of convict Françoise-Maurice Lepailleur, French-Canadian political prisoner transported to Botany Bay in 1840, fresh from ructions in Lower Canada:

During the afternoon a drunken woman, just come from the factory [for convict women] at Parramatta, began to abuse the woman who lives in the small cabin in front of the gate. After she had sworn a lot, cursed and blasphemed … [she] turned her back to us, lifted up all her clothes and showed us her bum, saying that she had a “Black Hole” there and slapping her belly like the wretch she was. Nothing more vile than that tribe, animals are more decent than they. I would say much more but it would dirty my little journal to go on.

Quite so.

The woman who shaved her own head in Hobart and the woman from the female factory in Parramatta kept no journals, unfortunately. Neither did the woman in Brisbane, the one on Brunswick Street station, the one who pointed to her own black hole and shunted my life onto different tracks.

Neither, alas, did Cat.

But the police did keep photographs.

What is the reason for your interest in this woman? they wanted to know And when did you first notice the disappearance of Gabriel Gray, son of the eminent judge? When did you first notice the disappearance of the Chinese proprietor of the restaurant known as Charlie's Inferno? What was the nature of your relationship to these men? Anything you say, they cautioned, may be used as evidence against you. Anything you say is bound to lead you into our web. Let us go back to the beginning, they said. Let the inquisition begin.

When did you first become aware of the disappearance of Gabriel Gray?

When did I first become aware of a growing inner emptiness that was the future absence of Gabriel? Oh, long ago. He was still Gabriel Brennan to me then, and I was a barmaid at The Shamrock in Brisbane. I should have trusted my instincts then. I could have escaped relatively unscathed. How stupidly, haplessly, we head for grief the way moths head for the flame.

“I didn't know he had disappeared,” I said faintly. “Actually, he hasn't disappeared. He's gone to Brisbane.”

When did you last see him?
(The voices of policemen always seem disembodied, reverberating, magnified by the echo chamber of official power.)

“Let me see. If this is Friday … is this Friday?” (The voices of those who answer the police seem small, like the whispers of guilty mice.) “Yes, Friday. Well, let me think … Sunday, last Sunday, we both worked in the restaurant.” (Behind a smokescreen of words, I was stalling, watching for clues.) “And then after, when the restaurant closed at 2 a.m., Gabriel and Charlie went off to The Shaky Landing, they'd been doing it every night for several weeks.”

The policemen exchanged a look. This was damaging information, the look implied.

“And then Monday,” I said, reading their look, thumbing through meanings and translations — almost anything you say, the translation read, will be used against you and is evidence of guilt — “let me think. Monday? Umm, Monday night Gabriel was here. Yes. And they were planning to leave for Brisbane the next morning.”

Is that so?
(You can smell entrapment on a policeman's breath, you can smell their watchful spider sweat, you can taste your own haplessness.)
And Tuesday?

“Tuesday,” I said carefully. “Tuesday. That was the burglary. I went to work as usual — at the SBS studios — and when I got home … I
did
report it. I reported it immediately but the police never came. I suppose these days, with break and enter so terribly common -”

At what time on Tuesday did you last see Gabriel Gray?

“At what time on Tuesday?” I parroted stupidly There was a vague unlocatable pain; my lungs perhaps? I could feel myself going under the question, sinking, beginning to gulp panic, but I managed to surface again with words. “I didn't see him on Tuesday. They got away early, they left for Brisbane at the crack of dawn.”

Is that so?
(There were two of them of course, two cops. There always are. And one is always nicer than the other.)
A very interesting claim
, they said,
since they were both seen in Sydney on Tuesday night.

Then the nice cop asked gruffly: “Are you all right, Miss?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Just give me a minute.” (But I was winded, I'd plummeted right through four days, I'd freefallen straight back to Monday when I'd thought
Good riddance
and then lain awake all night. I'd pictured them at the crack of dawn, I'd watched them getting into Charlie's car, I'd followed them getting out of the city before the traffic, heading up the coast road, maybe taking the Brisbane hooker and the Brisbane cop, two old bawds hitching a free ride and necking in the back seat of Charlie's car, oh yeah, I'd pictured that, I'd been seeing them all week burling along past Newcastle, Taree, Port Macquarie, Coffs Harbour, Grafton, Byron Bay, Tweed Heads, watch out Queensland, here we come, maybe reaching the border Tuesday night, depending on stops. Wednesday, Thursday, and now all day Friday in Brisbane, what did I care that Gabriel hadn't even phoned? What did I care? Cat's got their tongue and she can bloody well keep it, was what I thought.)

What exactly was the nature of your relationship with these two men?

(Oh,
there
was a question, and the answer hit me as vertigo.) “They are part of me,” I said, though I hadn't meant to say it aloud.

The policemen exchanged another look.
You had sexual relations with both men?
(What they didn't say, what I could see in their eyes:
And a couple of hundred other men besides. Upstairs at The Inferno. We know all about you.)

“No,” I said, dignified. “Not with both men.”

You had sexual relations with Gabriel Gray.

“Yes.”

On the night of his disappearance?

“Not on Monday night,” I said wretchedly “No.” (Oh, if only we were given advance notice of which words could become our famous last.)

The night of his disappearance was Tuesday night. Did you have sexual relations Tuesday night?

“No.”

You didn't see him the night he disappeared?

“He hasn't disappeared, he's gone to Brisbane.”

You didn't see him Tuesday night?

“No.”

You haven't seen him since Monday night?

“That is correct.”

This is Friday and you haven't seen him since. You weren't alarmed?

“I would be if he hadn't gone to Brisbane.”

These all-night junkets in the quarry, you didn't find them alarming?

(How much can you explain to the police? What can you say about the kind of dread that seeps into dreams?) “Yes,” I said. “They worried me. It's not the safest place in the world, is it? But they always did come back.”

The police produced photographs of the bar at The Shaky Landing.
This is where Chang and Gray were on Tuesday night. The camera doesn't lie.

I looked at the photographs. “I don't see them,” I said. “I don't see Gray or Chang.”

We have black-and-whites at the station, surveillance stills, a number of frames, we didn't happen to bring them along.
(Oh, right. They just forgot to bring those particular shots.)
And we have evidence on videotape. You can take our word for it.

(I didn't. Though if Charlie and Gabriel were there, it meant they had needed to see the Brisbane hooker or the Brisbane cop again. Perhaps the hooker or the cop had contacted
them.
We've got more information, they might have said. Or perhaps they said: we've arranged a meeting with Cat. She's not in Brisbane, she's here, Mr Chang was right, we just wanted free transport up the coast, but we do know where she is, and we'll take you to her in the quarry for a fee. Or else: she is in Brisbane, but we've had a spot of difficulty, we've had to do some fancy footwork, it's been nip and tuck, but now we've set up the place and time. And all Tuesday Gabriel would have been obsessed, he would have been much too obsessed to phone, or he could have been still hurt because I'd pulled away from him Monday night, and then by Tuesday night they wouldn't have wanted to wait, they would have left the minute they had definite word, and then in Brisbane they may have had their hands full with Cat herself …)

Do you recognise this place?
The police fingers jabbed at the black-and-white Shaky Landing stills.

“Yes.”

Have you ever at any time visited this place?

“Once. I was there a couple of weeks ago. We all were.”

We all?

“Gabriel and Charlie and Catherine Reed and myself.”

Catherine Reed? The one with the interview show on TV?

“Yes.”

And what was the nature of the business that would take you all to a place such as this?

“We were looking for someone,” I said. (What was safe to tell or not tell? Answer: it makes no difference; everything is evidence of guilt.) “There was a woman we thought might be there, a friend of Charlie's, that's all. We had some photographs.”

Are these the photographs?
And there were the prints that had so recently disappeared from our burgled flat.

“Jeez!” I said. “Whew.” This changed things. I thought I knew how to handle this, I could pull those policemen out of their echo chamber now, I could turn their amplifiers off. They were just ordinary human cops again, cruising, off-duty, out for a little provocation and harassment on the side, you scratch my corruption, I'll scratch yours. Hey, I was an expert. “You blokes take what you want pretty fast, don't you?” I laughed. I used my teasing
let's make a deal, guys
voice. I get on with moonlighting cops very comfortably and always have. The barmaid instinct, the hooker's stock-in-trade, a skill I picked up from Sheba, I suppose. “You got a warrant to raid his things?” I demanded.

They grinned at me. “Stroppy little tart, aren't you? We
have
got a warrant, as a matter of fact. Whenever there's evidence of foul play.”

I blinked then. My heart skipped a few dozen beats. “What evidence of foul play?”

“A violent brawl at The Shaky Landing late Tuesday night. Around 3 a.m.”

“But there's a violent brawl there every night.”

“Mayhem this time,” the cops said. “Bodies all over the place. Some of them so badly hacked they haven't been identified yet. Your boyfriend could be one of them. And so could the Chinaman.”

“Charlies Australian,” I said. One is curiously precise about details when one is in shock.

“Whatever,” they said. They flashed some very gruesome photographs. “Any identifying marks or signs?”

“No,” I said, turning away, my hand over my mouth. “I feel sick,” I said.

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“Do you mind if I …?”

I had to lock myself into the bathroom for a while. But I knew Gabriel's body intimately, and it was not in the photographs. Nor was Charlie's. I took some deep breaths and began to feel better. Then I went back.

“Okay,” I said. “I'll be okay.”

“The thing is,” they said. “There were bodies that disappeared before we got there, according to witnesses. Whisked away for reasons interesting to speculate on. Any ideas?”

“No,” I said faintly, feeling sick again.

“We'd like you to look at some more photographs,” they said. “Know anyone in this one?”

I stared at it. I felt very calm now, I felt no anxiety at all, I felt as though I'd dreamed the police up, I felt as though this wasn't really happening at all, which is one of the minor blessings of shock. “Yes,” I said indifferently I could see Charlie and Gabriel at a table with a woman. The woman had her back to the camera. “There,” I said. “Those two. Gabriel and Charlie.”

“You're positive?”

“Positive.”

“That was Tuesday night,” they said. “Just before the fight broke out. We can assume they were there for the big bang.”

“Oh,” I said in a faint voice, and I felt something like needles reaching me through the buffering pillows of shock, but they went away again and nothing seemed real. It is curious, however, the way a detached analytical part of the mind keeps watching, keeps making comments. In fact, stripped of all emotional reaction, details actually seem to take on a sharper edge. “You said you didn't have this evidence with you.”

“Interrogation technique,” the nice one shrugged, grinning. “Have to catch you off guard, don't we, love?”

And since they had me off guard, they produced the documentation on Cat, the files, the photographs. It is astonishing, the details of a life on film and microchip. I sifted through the folder and they watched me, but it must have been disappointing for them because my gaze was blank, I felt nothing, I had no reactions at all. No doubt the information logged itself somewhere in my brain, willy-nilly, as I've read that it does, but it didn't get through to
me.