Only Killers and Thieves(81)

Noone raised his palm, took another drink of wine. “No, no, we must talk about something and it’s preferable to the last line of inquiry at least. I have two daughters, Mrs. Sullivan. Ophelia and Bryony. They are, let me see, twelve and nine years old.”

“Two daughters. Beautiful. If only we were so lucky.”

Sullivan coughed and said quickly, “Problem with daughters is they grow into wives. Pity the poor bugger comes asking you for their hands.”

Again Noone forced a smile. Mrs. Sullivan gestured to Tommy and Billy. “Two potential suitors sitting right here perhaps?”

Noone looked dead-eyed between them. “Perhaps.”

“And how do they like living out here, Mr. Noone? All the dirt and heat and flies?”

“No, they’re in Melbourne. A much more civilized place.”

Sullivan pointed his fork at his wife. “That’s where I found this one. To hear her talk about the place you’d think the streets were paved with gold, not the shit of a thousand Jimmys come fresh off the boats. I’ve never liked cities. Living arse to cheek like that, it’s not natural. A man needs space, land.”

“You must miss them,” Mrs. Sullivan said. “Being away for so long.”

“The work is important. It’s a small price to pay.”

“Then perhaps the better question is that they must miss you?”

Noone stared at her. “They understand.”

“As we all must, of course. It is an age of abandoned wives.”

She said it evenly, unaffected, but Noone’s eyes twitched.

“I provide them with a very fine life, Mrs. Sullivan. The best of the schools, house help, a substantial property in Kew.”

She looked up sharply. “Didn’t they build a lunatic asylum in Kew?”

Locke sniggered. Noone said flatly, “Cassandra has no cause to complain.”

Mrs. Sullivan squared her cutlery on her plate, dabbed her lips, then folded her napkin and laid it aside. “Well, I have to say I had no idea policing paid so well. John, I fear you’re in the wrong field.”

Sullivan glared at her. She ignored him and sipped her wine. Locke said, “It ain’t the policing that keeps him—” but Noone clicked his tongue and Locke fell silent and went back to his food. The others did likewise. Tommy glanced along the table at Mrs. Sullivan sitting straight-backed and formal with her hands in her lap, but there was an air of mischief about her, a smirk playing on her lips. Maybe the wine had done it, but in that one small exchange she’d said more to Noone than Tommy would ever have dared. Than any of them, in fact. And yet when he thought about it she’d not really said much of anything at all.

*

Shaken roughly awake, he came lunging out of the wallow of sofa cushions and grabbed Billy by his jacket lapels, pulling himself upright, their faces very close.

“Easy now. He wants to talk, said to wake you. Come on.”

Tommy let go of Billy’s collar and slumped back onto the sofa, peering around the empty drawing room. The fire was low, the candles too, the windows turned to mirrors by the darkness outside. There were crystal tumblers on the tables and ashtrays of burned-out cigars: the last Tommy remembered was accepting a drink but refusing a cigar, and the drone of their voices as he fell asleep.

He coughed and cleared his throat. “What time is it?”

“Late. He’s waiting. Got a proposal for us, he says.”

Billy stood over him, his body all atwitch. Tommy’s eyes drooped and he let them close. “I don’t want to hear it,” he said.

“He says we both need to agree.”

“Fuck him. You go. Crawl in on your knees.”

“He’s giving us Glendale, Tommy. We get to keep the run.”

Tommy jerked awake and clambered to his feet, the two of them facing each other in front of the dying fire.

“Since when was Glendale his to give? What’s he want in return?”

“I don’t know. Got a plan, he says.”

“I’ll bet he fucking does.”

Tommy glimpsed their reflections in the window. Like he was on the outside and two other boys were confronting each other through the glass.

“Look,” Billy said. “You don’t have to like the bloke, but let’s at least hear him out. Everything’s different now, Tommy. Everything’s changed. You couldn’t hardly eat tonight—how d’you think you’ll go getting work somewhere else? Who’d take a cripple with eight fingers over a bloke with all ten?”

Tommy looked at his hand—that word, cripple—then back at Billy again. “Rather lose two fingers than my own bloody mind.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Means it’s not just me that’s changed. You’re blind to it, to everything, to what’s happened, to how things are between us now.”

“Which is how exactly?”

“You’ll make me say it?”

“Only way I’ll understand you.”

Tommy threw up his hands. “Fucking . . . me and you, I don’t hardly know you anymore. Laying with natives, shooting them, anything Sullivan says.”

“You weren’t no different. I counted at least three.”

“And I can’t hardly stand myself for it. You act like we’ve been out mustering, not killing a hundred blacks.”