He smoothed his hair carefully, flicked out his longcoat, unhooked a polished foot-long police truncheon from its belt loopand thwacked it hard against his palm, at which Henry began struggling wildly like a chained and muzzled dog.
“They will assume your paramour did it. Sodom, exposed. Then, unable to live with himself, your friend takes his life withthat little pistol there; a rather neat explanation, don’t you think? I will make sure the papers have all the juicy details—imagineyour father’s reaction when he reads the story in the press!”
Chapter 36
Tommy McBride
Tommy dismounted short of the house and, hidden by the hedgerow, led Lady up the hillside through the rain. Lashing down now,his shirt soaked through, water running off his hat brim and trickling in little rivulets down the sand-and-pebble road. Thepitch of the roof peeled into view, then the gate posts, the path, the corner of the verandah . . . and an unfamiliar horsetied to the balustrades. Tommy froze. Inching through the swirling mud. He peeked around the hedgerow and saw in the glooma hunched figure smoking on his front steps, tall, broad, dark-haired, wearing a longcoat that pooled at his heels. As hesmoked, he cast irritated glances around the front yard; Tommy couldn’t make out his face. But there was something in hismannerisms, in how he held himself, the inverted grip on the cigarette, that sent the memories tumbling, his entire past cascadingdown. All the air emptied out of him in a gasp.
That was his brother up there. Billy, at last.
Tess jumped down from the verandah and came bounding along the path. Startled, Billy looked up. He saw Tommy, flicked away his cigarette, rose stiffly to his feet, reached for his hat, squared it on his head, and trudged down the steps into the rain, while Tommy stood rooted on the track, clutching Lady’s bridle, Tess happily circling his legs. Billy waved at him, then when he got no response impatiently opened his arms. Tommy’s head hung. He’d never walked so slowly up his own path before, halted ten yards away. It felt close enough. Billy grinning stupidly through the rain: dark eyes, dark beard, crooked nose, the threat of a chin. The resemblance to Father was chilling. He was Ned McBride in a good year.
“Hello, brother,” Billy said.
He took off his hat and stepped forward, swallowed Tommy in an embrace, Tommy standing rigid in his arms, paralyzed by thecontact, the enormity of it, and by the little details too: he was taller now, he realized; the flowery whiff of Billy’s cologne.Billy kissed him roughly on the cheek. The intimacy felt obscene. They parted and Billy was frowning. He put on his hat again.
“Hell, Tommy, will you say something? I’m stood here like a limp dick!”
But what could he say? What, after all this time? It was unreal he was even standing here—over the years Tommy had imaginedtheir reunion so often, the things he would yell at him, the blows he would land, but now that Billy was in front of him ithad the quality of a dream.
“I traveled a week to see you. It’s been twenty bloody years!”
“Twenty-one,” Tommy corrected, his voice near-drowned by the rain.
“There you go now, that wasn’t so hard.”
That grin again—it sickened Tommy, a glimpse of who his brother was now. He knew him. Knew exactly the kind of man he wouldbe. He was Billy at his worst back when they were children, full of cocksure arrogance, treating everything like a game. DaringTommy to do whatever he wouldn’t, mocking him if he refused, then afterward, when it went wrong, when someone got hurt orthey got in trouble, laughing off the consequences, no fucking worries mate.
“Is that it then?” Billy asked him. “You don’t got nothing else to say?”
“How . . . ?” Tommy began, then faltered. He slicked water from his face. “How did you find me?”
“I hired a man. More than one. Took them long enough, but here I am.”
“But . . . why?”
“What sort of a question’s that?”
“What are you doing here, Billy?”
“Shit, I wanted to see you. Figured maybe you felt the same. If you like I can head back to Queensland, try you in another twenty years’ time?”
They stared at each other through the rainstorm, all trace of the grin gone. Two men, brothers once, taking the measure ofeach other again.
“Stables are this way,” Tommy told him, leading Lady up the hill.
In silence they saw to their horses, furtive glances back and forth between the stalls. Billy seemed a little rusty. Lookedlike it had been a while. When Tommy had finished he leaned on the partition, watching him struggle. “Hell,” Billy grumbled,“this ain’t even my damn horse.”
On the back verandah Billy slid off his coat and hung it on a peg beside their hats, a puddle collecting on the boards below.They peeled off their boots and stood them in pairs against the wall: Billy’s knee-highs, glossy leather, alongside Tommy’smud-caked work boots. His trousers were twill, his shirt was fine cotton, the silk lining of his coat likely cost about asmuch as Tommy’s house.
“Nice little place,” Billy said, looking the yard over. “Land any good?”
“Wouldn’t have bought it if it wasn’t.”
“Bought, not leased?”
Tommy paused with a hand on the door. “That so hard to believe?”
They went inside. Tommy lit the stove while Billy rubbed the raindrops from his hair and appraised the little room. “So what’sthe acreage?” he asked.
“Enough.”
“Just the cattle? No sheep?”
“No sheep. Tea do you?”
“Appreciate it.” He idled while he was waiting, fingering the books on the dresser, the few ornaments on the shelves. Tommycould guess what he thought of the house, of him. Billy said, “I don’t run sheep no more neither. Too much bloody work, whatwith the droughts we get up our way, and the dogs.”
Tommy stalled and looked at him. “You’re
