His gaze slid past Noone to the horizon, and when he spoke there was a crack in his voice: “The last thing I said to her wasto remember my humbugs.”
“Humbugs!” Noone roared. “What a wonderful final word!”
Down he lunged, clasping the back of MacIntyre’s head with one hand, clamping the other over his mouth. The magistrate struggledpitifully; Noone knelt his weight upon him and the fight was soon done. With his thumb and forefinger, Noone pinched the judge’snose and cupped his palm to form a seal around his lips. A terrible empty sucking sound. MacIntyre’s chest heaved up and down.In his bulbous eyes thin veins began appearing like the reveal of hidden ley lines. The gasping faded. The eyes dulled. Noonebrought his face so close they were almost nose to nose, and watched as the life snuffed out. He removed his hand. The lipswere already blue. He eased himself off the chair and flicked a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped off the mucus and atrace of blood. He checked his skin for a break but found none. MacIntyre must have bitten his own tongue. Noone tilted thejudge’s head back, walked around the table and picked up his brandy glass, and checked the deck for anything else amiss. Onlyhis jacket—he draped it over his arm and tucked in his chair and went into the kitchen to wash up the glass. He dried it andreturned it to the drinks cabinet, aligning it neatly with the others. He paused in the hallway a moment. One last look overthe house. Doilies on the surfaces, decorative china pots; it was a pathetic little life, no loss. Through the window MacIntyresat with his head tipped backward, might have been fast asleep. “Humbugs,” Noone said, chuckling, pushing open the fly-screendoor. He closed it behind him and skipped down the steps, crossed the road and disappeared into the field, whistling.
Like he’d never been there at all.
Chapter 40
Tommy McBride
The train hissed to a standstill at Roma Street station in Brisbane and had disgorged most of its passengers and luggage beforedown from the first-class carriage limped a feverish Tommy McBride. He swayed on the platform, clutching his duffel bag. Sweatglazed his forehead and neck. He’d hardly slept at all during the journey: heavy eyes scanned the bustling station as if expectingtrouble to come. It didn’t. The odd frown at his appearance, the incongruity of him traveling first class, but nobody waswaiting to accost him, there was no threat in their stares. Falteringly he began moving, unbalanced by the bag at his side.His left arm was in its sling still, but there was now a dark stain on his shirtsleeve—somewhere north of Sydney he’d peeledback the collar and been hit with a smell of rot. His catgut stitches were puckering. His wound was beginning to weep.
He pushed through the crowd on the concourse and winced into the sunshine outside, where the bustle and heat of Brisbane assaultedhim from all sides. He hailed a cab. A struggle to clamber up. From his pocket he pulled the crumpled sheet of Bellevue notepaperhe had found among Billy’s things and gave the driver the address for this lawyer, Henry Wells.
Tommy collapsed against the backrest and watched the shops and pavements and pedestrians slide by, the buggy climbing up into the Valley until at the head of an alleyway the driver halted and announced, “Down there.” Tommy paid him and got out and stood looking along a seedy side street as behind him the buggy clattered away. He walked forward, frowning. No place for a law office, this. There was shit on the pavement and litter blown into drifts, most windows were either papered or boarded up. A cat picking at a flattened bird carcass hissed at him, its hackles raised. A baby wailed high above. A man shouted. Glass smashed.
He almost missed the office at first, since it looked no different from the other shopfronts: the door graffitied, the windowsloppily papered with pages from the Brisbane Post. But there was a little brass nameplate, the only one on the street; Tommy wiped the sweat from his eyes and found HenryWells’s name stenciled there. He dropped his bag and appraised the building anew. The red door had been scrawled with theword fairy in black paint, and it was the same headline on all the newspaper pages, he now realized, pasted in a repeating pattern overthe entire windowpane. Tommy leaned closer to read it: double jeopardy! two city lawyers found dead! And with growing despair he scanned the story underneath: perverted misadventure . . . fetish gone awry . . . fatal internal injuries to the disgraced barrister, Henry Wells . . . his lover, Jonathan Stevenson, solicitor in the attorney general’s office . . . suicide with a bullet to the brain.
Ha! Ha! had been daubed on the window, the paint running. Ha! Ha!
Reeling, Tommy turned away. So the lawyer was also dead. He clutched his head with a clawed hand and closed his eyes in despair.What was he even doing here? What did he think he could accomplish, going after a man like Noone? He’d told Billy, he’d warnedhim, he’d known what would happen, and it had. Wildly, Tommy lunged forward and kicked the defaced red door, planting hisboot into the lower panel and swinging again and again, crying out and hammering the wood until it broke. He stepped back,panting. A ragged, frenzied stare. The door panel was hanging by only the thinnest of fibers; Tommy nudged it and it fell.He hesitated, knelt down, checked the alley in both directions then reached through and flicked the door latch. He stood,collected his duffel bag, turned the handle, and slipped inside, through a gloomy waiting area, the daylight shrouded by thepapered windowpane, and into the back office beyond.
Tommy closed the door behind him, put
