The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [170]
For he looked horrible. Whatever he’d once been—in the spring of their fraudulent affair, when he’d wooed Margaret with smoke and mirrors—she never would’ve wanted this filthy thing, that’s certain. He was dressed in a torn robe, dirt-stained and spattered with blood and tied with bits of rope knotted together, and he wore a single, broken boot, his other foot just a mass of crusted, yellowing bandages. His beard and hair were matted, and his face was tanned unevenly, and simply covered with dirt elsewhere, and one of his eyes was blackened and swollen, and his cheek and forehead bruised and cut quite badly. I nearly pitied him, Macy, but then I was put in mind of the filthy home where a promising young Aussie boy had grown up, the same boy murdered by this pom sitting in front of me. And my pity vanished.
My God, how he stank, Macy. He stank of rot, of tombs, of his own filth, I don’t know. Probably of his ghastly, bootless leg. At the end of our talk, when he stood and hobbled away, he was practically a one-legged man. Yet, for all this horror, most maddening of all, most certain to eliminate any trace of pity I might possibly have felt for him, he still spoke as if he were completely unaware of his appearance, with all the dismissive bite and insane, unjustifiable snobbery of the English upper classes, all that distaste for real people, the generations of congealed hatred he’d been born with in his blood, that made him feel superior to the rest of us. You could hear what this stinking criminal thought of us Aussies: that pom bastard voice that makes colonials act like servants and servants act like blacks and blacks pick up rifles and revolt. And of course there was absolutely that something extra in his manner: the peculiar singsong of the invert, although it was greatly subdued, no doubt from the habit of hiding his nature.
The questions crowded my head, and I had to take a moment to organise my thoughts, so I told him to order me a beer, which he did in the local lingo. And then I plunged in, asking questions as they occurred to me, all my clients’ interests mixed up, and the criminal answered each one so rapidly that I knew he’d been prepared for me. Finneran had betrayed me to this filthy wreck, no question. There must’ve been heaps of gold, that was sure.
Now recall my position as I circled Trilipush: I couldn’t hope he’d quickly confess to the killings, reveal the whereabouts of the bodies. Four years on, he was too set in his lies, relying on the passage of time, the weakness of pressing physical evidence. No, instead I had to provoke him, like a bull, until in his anger he wrote his crimes on his face. Snares had to be laid, and in my words (transcribed only a few hours later, so I don’t doubt their accuracy for an instant), you’ll see those snares tightening around our hare. Note that I do not hesitate to transcribe his every insult and verbal charge at me: you must see in them his thrashing against the hook setting deeper in his lip. His arrogance undoes him, so I include every word, no matter what he throws at me. You must understand, as a man of the investigative sciences, that I extracted my own feelings from the proceedings, allowed him to fire off at shadows. A good lesson for you, Macy: the detective uses his own hollowed-out form as bait, makes of himself a tarman against which the criminal rages, ensnaring himself in the process.
“Strangest thing, Mr. Trilipush. I try to understand your life story, what I’ve heard from your friends and admirers. I can’t follow it. I keep putting two and two together and stubbornly getting five. Now how do you explain that?”
“Perhaps your maths tutor spent too much of your study time buggering you, ducks.”
“Very good, and an interesting choice of verb, from what I hear of you.”
“Are we almost through, Mr. Ferrell?”
“Did Mr. Finneran find you last week?”
“He did. How did you know he was here?”
“Where’s Mr. Finneran today?”
“We