Sugar Town

  When I approached, he threw his arms in the air as though I was an especially important part of an orchestra that he was conducting. A far cry from the finger of doom he’d pointed at me last time we met!

  “Miss McFarlane!” he slobbered with happy mock formality, and I crossed my arms to warn him off touching me. “Aaahh!” he faltered. “Here you are then! Good! Good! Knew if anyone could get you here, it’d be this handsome young buck!”

  He was determined, it seemed, to be buttering someone up. And Dale, I noticed, was content to be buttered, nodding sombrely, as though the mayor had just said the wisest, most obvious thing since Confederation.

  “Yeah.” I said. “As if! So why am I here? What’s going on?”

  “Well!” The mayor waggled his eyebrows and winked exaggeratedly. “That’s for you to find out!” He opened the door to the caravan and bowed me a welcome.

  It was a moderately sumptuous caravan, as you’d expect for a man with the Mayor’s inflated sense of self-importance. Three people sat uncomfortably at a table that could easily have fitted five more: Frieda, looking as focussed and grim as ever; Bessie – back straight, hands folded in her lap’ looking like she felt like someone’s poor cousin; and Mister Bandini, sprawled half onto the table, caught in the midst of a vigorous discussion.I stood, hesitantly, in the doorway, not a all certain that I wanted to go in.

  A fourth person was also in the room, standing off in one of the doorways, still looking whipped and close to vomiting – Franz Hoggitt. I gave him a cold nod, thinking that, quite rightly, he must be nobody’s favourite person at the moment. The mayor, however, edged past me, went straight to him and began guiding him gently through the door to the outside.

  “Okay now, mate,” the mayor said, speaking as though Hoggs was mentally deficient which I thought, in the light of recent events, could well have been the case, “you’re the front man, right? Anyone comes asking for anything, they gotta go through you! You tell ‘em the mayor’s indisposed; working in flagrant delicto for the good o’ the community, okay? But if you think it’s important, you call me, right? You use your judgement, okay? I’m counting on you, son.” He tossed a thumb toward Dale and added, “The big fella here’ll keep ye company, eh?”

  Dale shook his head and rumbled shallowly, “I don’t think so!” Obviously none too impressed with Hoggs’s effort to incriminate him over the knife.

  I didn’t care about their friendship but I was secretly pleased that Dale was staying. I had a very prickly feeling that I was about to be leaned on and, though I didn’t actually think Dale was on my side, I was also fairly certain he wasn’t on the Hoggitt’s side either.

  So when the mayor looked to me for support in his bid to get rid of Dale I said, “He’s a suspicious character, Mr Hoggitt. I’d like to keep him where I can see him if that’s okay.”

  The long and the short of it was that the mayor (he claimed the idea was his but it had Frieda’s mark all over it) had devised two schemes, he said, to ‘clear up the air’, he said, about both recent and long-past events in Sugar Town.

  The first scheme involved the gathering campers. Having been made aware of threats implied against Bessie, he said, (‘to wit, tampering with a gas bottle and leaving it in a parley-voo state’) – Bessie, whose only crime had been to come back to her own home town and attempt to do her little part in righting an ancient wrong! (the wrong being ‘the murkification of details surrounding an attack on Bridie McFarlane eleven years ago’), he had sent out a call for volunteers to rally around Bessie and her friend, Arturo, to ensure their continued safety and to demonstrate to anyone, anywhere, that Sugar Tonians would not be tolerating any kind of threatening shenanigans. Hence the instant village taking shape outside.

  “And there’s more where they come from!” Frieda promised us all. “If we want ‘em! All volunteers! Marybeth might take a group over to Amalthea’s place, as well, to camp in the yard, because obviously someone’s got it in for her too; doing for that poor goat and all!” She gave Dale a filthy look then. The stolen knife, it seemed, had already become part of the town’s lore, as had suspicions about who might have used it on Rosemary.

  She went on, “I said to Marybeth, I said, ‘Don’t be mad, woman! The girl’s got a man with a gun there now!’” She waggled her eyebrows at me as though something secret had passed between us, but I knew full well that she’d have screwed every detail out of Hoggs about his treatment at Amalthea’s – including references to Isak.

  “Of course,” the mayor went on breathlessly, “if Amalthea wants extra eyes and ears around, she’s only got to say so! Send half this mob over right now, if she wants ‘em! Maybe even a brand new mob! No troubles! Gonna get Marybeth whether she wants her or not, o’ course! She’s that frantic about getting close to young Asael’s space thing!”

  Somewhere along the way, it seemed, Asael had become Queenie’s official keeper!

  Anyhow, the instant village was one scheme. The second was a plan, once and for all to, as he said, ‘de-murkify’ events, both recent and ancient. It was understandable, he declared, that things might ‘slip out of mind for a bit’. (Another instance of truth being in the eye of whoever’s fabricating it.)

  “But it’s a thing,” he went on, “that’s never been far from my mind, I can tell you! Part o’ me mayoral responsibility, as I see it! An’ if it’s the last thing I ever do, I’m going to see the smoke o’ this terrible eructation blown away. Isn’t that right, love?”

  So there it was! My family’s woes, such as they were, had suffered the final indignity of becoming part of a re-election campaign!

  The mayor drew an expansive breath and Frieda dove straight into his wake.

  “That’s right!” she crowed. “As first family, we owe it to the town, we do! And to your people o’ course, Ruth! Sugar Town may’ve let you down before – misdirected good will and all! But we’ll get it right this time, you mark my words! Only person we’re waiting on,” (she leaned back to look out a window), “is walking up to the door right this minute!”

  She rose just as Hoggs opened the door. “Cops’re here, dad!”

  Morrow’s entrance was quick, deliberate and unsmiling, causing us all to shuffle ourselves into slightly smaller packages – leaving as much space and air as possible for him. Without pause he pulled out a chair, straddled it, dropped a small notebook and the nub of a pencil on the table and, making no effort to disguise his contempt for amateur sleuths, muttered, “This better be good.”

  One of the best things about policemen is that they like full pictures. Morrow gazed at each of us in turn, silently warning that the full picture better be exactly what we were prepared to give. When no one spoke, he pointed to Bessie.

  “Go.”

  “Why me?” she stuttered.

  “Because,” he snarled, thrusting a thumb over his shoulder, “I got shit goin’ on in my town that no one’s okayed with me! Because yez seem ta think yez can take things inta yer own hands, which I’m here ta tell yez, yez are sadly fuckin’ wrong about! An’the French is instructional! Now I want this business done, see? I want yez back about yer own business an’ I want my town quiet again! That means layin’ open this little bastard of a story so’s ye can all be satisfied it’s received professional attention, right? So it’s from the beginnin’! And the beginnin’ is you!”

  She nodded. Hers, it was true, were the oldest ‘insider’ memories. But put suddenly on the spot by Morrow’s impatient harangue, she shivered down into herself and remained quiet. It wasn’t until Mister Bandini began rubbing her back and the rest of us muttered small encouragements that she finally began, bringing to life a Sugar Town that no longer existed in the real world of 2008.

  She started with Les.

  “Well, ‘s no secret he was a committed drunk,” she said, and several heads nodded in affirmation. “And a mean one, too! Not to his mates, us’ally, but . . . for his mates, often enough, ‘f ye know what I mean. Some men, you know ??
? don’t know the difference between being a man and being one of the blokes! Les was one o’ them.”

  “Man was a bloody nightmare was what he was!” Morrow declared. “I coulda charged him rent, all ‘at time he spent in the tank!”

  The picture that Bessie painted for us was of a restless, violent man who would fall in with random groups – anyone who was shouting rounds or seemed to be settling in for a session. And having no close friends, too often he was the evening’s entertainment as his fellow drinkers egged him on, promising him that strangers were laughing at him or that so-and-so reckoned he was a creampuff. Pushing Les until he cracked was a joke that only Les never caught onto.

  On the afternoon of that Harvest Festival Saturday in 1997, he’d told Bessie, he’d met up with a group that included some of the town’s leading citizens – Johnathon Cranna, Roger Dabney, Lyle Hoggitt (seven months into his first term as mayor), Brian Johanson, who was Les’s boss at the Weekly, and several other prominent citizens. Johnathon was shouting rounds in celebration of his first ever lolly drop and the session had stretched out. Inevitably, though, by ones and twos, they’d all drifted off to whatever other forms of fireworks the night could provide.

  Les had come home, fiercely drunk. According to accounts of the time, he’d staggered there on his own, his path, probably through nothing more than bad luck (both his and Bridie’s), having crossed that of a little girl walking in the dark. Maybe he’d spoken to her. Maybe he’d recognised her. Or maybe not. Maybe he just tore into her at the blind urging of some manic demon in his head.

  That was as much of a picture as she, or anybody else, had been able to piece together back in 1997 and even that was seven-tenths guesswork, arrived at several months after the fact when Les, once again blind drunk and inadequate, had made stupidly revealing comments in the bar, to grandma Gracie who was found next day, senselessly beaten in her rented home (now Amalthea’s rented home). And Les had disappeared off the face of the earth.

  Only bits were indisputable facts. That Les had woken up to the danger he’d put himself in and gone to try to quench whatever fire he’d ignited in Gracie; that his well-known violent streak had emerged; that he’d done her a damage, either intentionally or accidentally – that was all speculaton.

  “ ‘At’s what happens,” Morrow said sternly, “when folks don’t have proper appreciation for us professionals, see? If she’d come to me straight away and tol’ me what Les said, none of ‘at ever woulda happened! See what I’m getting’ at? Wi’ sensitive information like ‘at, ye hesitate an’ yer done for.”

  “But why wasn’t Les a suspect before that?” I found myself asking. “Why wasn’t he picked up for what he did to Bridie?”

  “Don’t start me, girl! Every man-jack in this town was a suspect! Cause ‘at’s the start o’ good policin’, see? Not bloody vigilante camp-outs like you lot got goin’ on here! Wunt a one I didn’t quiz about that – including Les. Including all the blokes he was drinking with! Even including the mayor, here. Got nowhere at all.”

  “But there must have been . . . I don’t know . . . DNA evidence or something?”

  Morrow shook his head. “Now see, here’s another example o’ what I’m talkin’ about! Your ol’ man! Now it’s not my place to judge a man for what goes through his head when his kid’s been hurt. But the poor bastard jus’ couldn’t bring himself to accept what had to be done. Didn’t even get to discussin’ a Morning-After Pill!”

  “Why, for cryin’ out loud! Why not?”

  “Well there ye go, ye see! Seems he mighta kinda unintentionally been put off.”

  “Put off? How? By who?”

  “You list’nin’ to what’s bein’ said here, or what? The Doc’! We jus’ tol’ ye, Doc’d had a couple in wi’ them others at the pub! Not ‘nough to interfere with his doctorin’, they reckoned; an’ ye can’t blame a man for havin’ a bit o’ down time now an’ again! But no way your ol’ man’d let ‘im near that girl! Wouldn’ let him examine ‘er proper like, ye see? All jus’ bad news ‘n’ bad luck!”

  Bad news and bad luck? I could have filled a page with sharper comments than that – most of them on my father’s choices. Not that I wished she’d been given a Morning-After pill! That just would’ve meant no Asael! I pressed on to other issues.

  “What about Isak’s claim?” I asked, “ . . . that there were others involved besides Les? He says Les . . . !”

  I pulled myself up, realising that I was on the verge of revealing both Isak’s whereabouts and his possible role as Les’s murderer. I fully believed he had murdered Les but, if that was the only form of justice Bridie and Grandma G were ever going to get, I wasn’t going to go lifting any lids! (Which, now that I think about it, was exactly the same position Sergeant Morrow had found himself in with Isak eleven years earlier!) So I finished weakly, “Did anyone look into that?”

  Morrow squinted down his nose at me and I knew he was trying to picture what opportunity I’d had, to have that conversation with Isak. It was obviously a new consideration that he took a moment to file away in his head. Then he looked carefully around the table, assessing each one of us, perhaps imagining the secrets each of us had a stake in hiding.

  “Right!” he said at last. “Between these walls, and I mean only between these walls . . . I can confirm that, before Les disappeared, he had what you might call a ‘conversation’ with Isak Nucifora. Might be that Isak was the last person he talked to before . . . leavin’ town. I got no details an’ I can’t say what passed between ‘em. But I do know Isak brought up the idea o’ more ‘n’ one attacker shortly after that conversation. I followed that up as best I could, but it never was backed up by any evidence. Or by the victim, who – and you have to think it was for the best – never remembered even one man, let alone two or three!”

  Never remembered, I thought, until this week! And I wondered again what might have come back to Bridie. Were there faces in her mind now? Faces she’d have to meet again in the light of day?

  “So the answer to your question,” Morrow said to me, “is, like I said, I questioned everyone – most especially and carefully, the boys Les was drinking with that night. Everythin’ I heard pointed to Les. An’ only Les! Innat right, Lyle?”

  All eyes turned to the mayor, who nodded nervously. “I was behind the mike at the Festival by the time of the attack! Hundreds o’ witnesses!”

  “That’s right,” Frieda assured us. “That was his first year announcing the Harvest Festival Queen. Lot o’ firsts, that year! First for the lolly drop; first for the Grand Gourd! I remember Lyle come galloping in at the last minute. Full as a coot, but still managed to carry it off!”

  Then Dale’s voice rumbled in. “You musta been one o’ the last to leave the pub then, Mister Hoggitt! Crowning the Queen comes late – after dark! Who stayed on?”

  “Whaddya mean?”

  “Fair question,” said Morrow. And to the mayor, “He wants to know who was there when you left, Lyle. Who finished the night with Les?”

  You could see from the way the mayor’s eyes shifted about that his plan of exposure hadn’t included being put under the spotlight himself.

  “We sorted this back in the day, Mash! Remember?”

  “Yair, I remember, Lyle. But these folks don’t. And we’re puttin’ it all out there this one last time, aren’t we? To make sure it’s finished. So jus’ tell ‘em, right!”

  “Oh, right, sure! Well let me see! I guess at least Johnathon, Roger, Alf and Les were still there when I left. But folks were comin’ an’ goin’ real steady all afternoon, ye see! Someone else coulda joined in after I left! I wouldn’t know about that!”

  “Alf?” I said. “Why was Alf there? He doesn’t even drink!”

  “Not ‘ny more, he doesn’t! Back then, that man was a walking sink!”

  Then it was Bessie’s turn again. “I know it’s a long time ago, Lyle, but . . . I sometimes wonder what you were all talking about that night. Before you left, when there was j
ust the five of you!”

  “Jesus, Bessie!” He waved a hand dismissively. “What do blokes talk about when they’re pissed? Rubbish! Tits ‘n’ bums! Who knows?”

  He grinned foolishly and, I thought, a little slyly. Morrow, happily, his professionalism already having been undervalued by this group, wasn’t about to let even a guilty smirk slide past.

  “What you gettin’ at, Bessie?”

  “It’s only just . . . whenever I think back to it I think . . . there was something strange about how mad Les was when he come home! Liquored to the gills, but poppin’ out of his skin, he was! I know now he was hypered up about little Bridie and what he done to her. But he was on an’ on about the Reverend and Rita! I sometimes wondered how they got into his head, ‘cause they were never pub-goers! I wondered could there o’ been a connection, between what was said and what Les done! Because, I gotta say even now! I knew that man had a misery in him but, before that, I never woulda pictured him harmin’ a child!”

  It had taken a lot, I think, for Bessie to mount even that little defence of Les and I, for one, had my first small surge of appreciation for what it must have cost her to live with him.

  “Fair point!” said Morrow, and turned to the mayor, as we all did – no one more keenly than me. “Whyn’t ye jus’ take another minute, Lyle. Think hard on it.”

  He used the full minute, figiting and hemming and hawing. But the pressure of our combined expectancy eventually poked a hole in his resolve and he began, slowly, to let some information flow.

  “I ain’t swearin’ to it, mind – so many years on!”

  But now that Bessie’d mentioned it, he did seem to recollect a conversation touching on my family. If memory served him, it might have seemed that ‘some folks’, whether seriously or just rambling with the booze, had given the impression of having ‘a bit of a bug up their asses’ about the Reverend.

  “Some folks?”

  “Yeah, well. Maybe Johnathon in particular!”

  “Now Lyle!” Morrow interrupted him straight away. “This ain’ gonna be helpful if you go getting creative on us! Common knowledge is that Cranna and Jacob lived in each others’ pockets that last year or more! Couldn’ put a crawly-bug between ‘em. Everyone knows ‘at!”