'How should I know? Perhaps they taste of beets. Perhaps their G.o.d has red hair. You think Charley Boule makes a study of such things?'

He's winding himself up to a state of exasperation, which is only mildly entertaining. He seems to have forgotten he was the one who brought up the subject in the first place. He slams both hands on the table and stands. I have to keep the conversation going; my fishing trip isn't complete yet. I need to find out for Captain Roberts if Charley is planning another trip north.

'I'm touched by your concern. But I'll leave Heccy with you, if you don't mind, and take my chances. Will there be an investigation into Nicole's murder?'

He shakes his head slowly. 'That useless sack of bones Fitzgerald is not due back until tomorrow. Brooke, that little deputy of his, struts around like a peac.o.c.k, asking stupid questions that make him look like a big policeman rather than uncovering the truth.'

As much as I hate to agree with Charley about anything, his precis of Jocelyn Brooke is spot on. Thin, nervy, officious and incompetent in equal measure. Unlike Fitzgerald, who is merely incompetent and, on the whole, far less trouble because of it.

I wander over to Charley's shelf of maritime memorabilia and hear him sink his considerable bulk into his flatulent chair again. I pick up an old compa.s.s, turn around to hear its history. He twists the wick on the lamp higher to get a better look in the darkening room.

'Grimenza, 4th July 1853,' he says. 'Peruvian barque. Wrecked Brampton Reef, six hundred and fifty lives lost.'

I put it down. Pick up a rusted cleat.

'Ah, your namesake: Mary; schooner, wrecked 26th May 1821. Driven ash.o.r.e at Twofold Bay.'

I pick up a torn piece of timber, knowing full well which wreck it's from.

'Maria,' he says curtly. 'February 1872. Wrecked east of Bowen. Forty-nine lives lost.'

'Maria?' I pretend to ponder the name for a few seconds. 'Wasn't it heading north to New Guinea on a gold expedition?'

He's far too interested in his hobby not to answer. I've set the words down like a trap on the branch a possum habitually scampers over. And here comes the possum.

'Stupid plan,' is all he says. 'What imbecile sets sail in cyclone season?'

I put the wood from the Maria's hull down on the shelf. Say, with my back to him, 'Didn't you fund an expedition to New Guinea, Charley? I'm sure someone said you did. Of course, it would have been a better-planned trip than Maria's. Better chance of success. Earlier this year, wasn't it? Before I came to Cooktown?'

I turn around, a look of interest on my face, to see suspicion pulling a st.i.tch tight at the corner of each dark eye. Too fast! I should have eased into it.

'Why the sudden interest in gold prospecting, cherie?'

I shrug. 'I'm not interested. I'd have to be deaf, however, not to hear the rumours that your expedition was similarly flawed. Not by embarking in the wrong season, but by having not enough picks and shovels. Not to mention a crew more interested, when they got to Port Moresby, in the local women and alcohol.'

Royal flush.

'Quelle absurdite! I pick the best men. Plenty of equipment. It is not my fault they get sick. Not my fault that ...' His face is as red as a fiery dusk in the lamplight.

'What, Charley? What wasn't your fault?'

'Rien!'

'Why don't you try again?' I ask evenly. 'Send another expedition. The gold must still be there. That is, if the Germans haven't dug it all up and sent it home to gild chamber pots for Bismarck.'

'I do not have the means for another trip north.' The words are tight with impatience. 'And I do not talk shipwrecks with you. You know nothing about them. Nor Germans.'

'Yes, Charley.' I'm the epitome of a demure young lady now, having received all the information I need. I've observed Charley's altercations with the miners who have come back into town. They don't have the money he demands of them. An expedition to New Guinea would require serious cash and I'm fairly sure that, for the moment, he hasn't got it.

'Any idea who killed Nicole? Who was she with last night?' I ask.

Charley rubs his forehead. 'After closing, I do not know. As you are aware, she has ...' He pauses to correct himself. '- had a tendency to conduct her business outside. Were you with Watson last night?'

'No. Why?'

'I tell you already and you do not listen. He has a dark side.'

'So dark that he saw fit to murder a prost.i.tute?'

He stands abruptly and paces over to one of the windows that looks out on Charlotte Street. The twilight is the colour of mustard paste. 'Why is it inconceivable to you that Watson could have strangled her?'

'Nothing's inconceivable, I suppose, but what would be his motive?'

Charley sighs as the sky's first sweat-drops fall. 'More sticky rain. How I hate Cooktown.' He whips around. 'What would be any man's motive? Why shoot the horse that you want to ride?'

'To avoid paying the stable owner. Perhaps you should lower your prices. And stop taking your customers for complete fools.'

Charley raises one eyebrow. His look is so patronising it annoys me into being specific.

'Drugging gold-diggers with your alcoholic concoctions, then allowing the girls to go through their pockets while they sleep. That's a recipe for murderous intent.'

Now the mouth twitches upwards at the sides, but not in amus.e.m.e.nt. 'Speaking of avarice, cherie, there is, in addition to the inconvenience of being one girl short tonight, five pounds missing from my drawer.'

'When did you notice it was gone?' I ask calmly, knowing that the money is not part of the business as such, and so is not counted regularly. In addition, his illicit cargo is delivered no more frequently than once a month. That's why I took the money. I felt confident he wouldn't bother checking until the next time he had to make a payment. And by then, many other people would have been in his office.

'Not for some weeks,' he admits, looking disgruntled that I don't confess. 'I do not understand. I always lock the drawer.'

'Are you sure? I've seen you get your cigar pinch out of there. Do you sometimes forget to secure it again?'

'Charley Boule does not forget something of such importance!'

'Well, I'm sure I have no idea. If you haven't left the drawer unlocked, how could money be missing? Perhaps you miscounted in the first place.' I touch his desk lightly. 'I could deposit your cash for you tomorrow, if you wish. Or do you mistrust me as much as you mistrust the Bank of Queensland?'

'Au contraire. I mistrust you more than every bank in the colony stood end on end.'

But it's all wind and red pepper. He waves me away abruptly. Outside, the rain is winding up to what will be a prolonged crescendo.

14.

No blackfellow too wild! No pretence too flimsy!

Thank G.o.d for the protection of a worthy constabulary.

From the secret diary of Mary Watson 14TH DECEMBER 1879.

Bob's gone fishing. To give us both time to think, he says. And thinking is all that I've been doing. With a dollop of worry thrown in for good measure.

My palms itch madly. The most tormented of the two gets the attention of fingernails. I've scratched so much the skin looks like I've been dragged behind a wagon. What's their problem? Hanging on the ends of my arms like two malcontents, complaining that they can't catch everything that's been thrown at them since that fateful afternoon in Brisbane. If I've coped, why haven't they?

Haven't you heard the one about itchy palms meaning money soon to come? I tell them, but they refuse to answer. Just glare at me like two handfuls of scarlet fever.

I hear the footfalls of horses first. Shortly afterwards, Fitzgerald's posse gallops out of a shimmering steam-pot to the south.

From the boarding-house verandah's wicker chair, I watch the native troopers dismount. First their legs, iron-windmill thin, in tight black trousers. Then their torsos in dusty green shirts. The horses' pelts shine like polished timber as they're led to the trough where they bend their heads in unison. A dozen hinged and bristly coconut halves open and close, scooping water.

It's barely past noon. Two black c.o.c.katoos shriek in the melaleuca, ripping out beak-sized bandages of bark. b.u.t.ter's melting in the icebox. No one's got rid of the cat that crawled under the boarding house and died; the aroma of maggoty flesh rises up in sick, sweet waves.

Through the shimmer of heat, I see Fitzgerald climb onto a box that's materialised from nowhere. He's readying himself to address a handful of wilting spectators on the subject of his latest foray into cannibal country. He takes off his hat to reveal a tideline of dirt.

'We've accounted for the Merkins responsible for the wounded digger on the Deighton. Sadly, at that same camp we found further evidence of outrage.'

His dentures seem to be holding today. Only a small gap between gum and prosthetic betrays him when he attempts clipped consonants. He reaches into a reed-woven dillybag and pulls out first a length of blonde hair, then a pair of lady's cotton drawers. He acknowledges the rising tide of gasps with a few serious nods. Adjusts his teeth with a hand on his cheek.

'We caught one of the young girls of the tribe. After questioning, she confessed that this hair and these undergarments belong to the lady of the missing family shipwrecked near Cape Melville last month. You need only imagine what those poor wretches went through at the hands of such savages. Needless to say, we'll leave no stone unturned.'

Another waft of dead cat reaches my nose. It goes well with Fitzgerald's speech. Questioning, I know, is a euphemism for torture. The natives would confess to anything if it meant a shorter gruelling. The leafy branch in my hand picks up its fly-swishing pace. The wicker chair squeaks in response. My palms throb.

The crowd is mesmerised. I can tell by the vigorous head-jerking that Fitzgerald's words, plus the heat, have softened the arithmetic in their heads. There were four Europeans in that family shipwrecked at Cape Melville: a husband, wife and two sons. Yet Fitzgerald will come back in a week or so with a report of two dozen blacks killed in response and no one will think to question it.

'Inspector.'

I catch up with Fitzgerald half an hour later, outside the Commercial Hotel. It's too early for drinkers. The limp rugs of a few stray dogs drape over the wooden boards. An old Chinaman with a hunchback and broken sandals sweeps the doorway with a moulting broom. Fitzgerald's talking to the water police magistrate, Bartley Fahey. At a guess, I'd say acquiring sanction for his next punitive expedition into the bush.

Fahey has a moustache in the American style so popular in the cities. It sticks out horizontally either side of his upper lip like a bundle of kindling. He's dressed in soft serge trousers, vicuna vest, calf-leather leggings and a camel-coloured linen hat. He apparently never sweats. Is never caught in a downpour. Never attracts splashes of mud ... moral or otherwise.

I wish they'd hurry up. I want to ask Fitzgerald if he knows when Captain Roberts will next be in Cooktown. Through some bizarre principle I can't understand, the inspector's apathy attracts information. He seems to hear a lot about what white-skinned citizens are up to and when and where, but he neither cares nor bothers to put the information to any useful purpose.

He turns his head in my direction. 'Young Mary.'

He hasn't had a chance to clean up yet. There are dark stains that look like old blood on his britches. A long purple scratch down one cheek. He's rubbed the skin at the brim line of his hat, but it hasn't improved matters. The lines across his forehead are filled with a murky slurry.

'Miss Oxnam.' Bartley Fahey nods in my direction perfunctorily, as befits his estimation of my position: equidistant between lady and prost.i.tute. Then proceeds to ignore me while he has his final words with Fitzgerald.

'So, Harvey, don't forget we're expecting you and Clara for the boating picnic on New Year's Eve.'

'No, indeed.' Fitzgerald straightens his hair. Dusts off his dirty trousers. 'And about the blacks, sir?'

'Dreadful business.' Fahey looks into the middle distance, then back at Fitzgerald. 'But don't overdo things.'

His voice is weighted with distaste for the good inspector's professional misconduct in the past: flogging an elderly black woman with a stockwhip at the Burdekin River crossing, for instance, for no reason other than that she didn't move fast enough out of his way.

'Wonderful fellow,' Fitzgerald says as Fahey strides away in the rippling sun. 'He understands the frontier problem so well, and yet manages to keep himself above it all somehow.'

'I imagine living on the Hill helps,' I say tonelessly. 'Inspector, I need to ask you something.'

'Let me guess. About Watson and that mess twelve months ago?'

The bush telegraph is working overtime. How long has Fitzgerald been back in town? An hour?

I trot out my old, tired defence. 'He says it wasn't him, but another fisherman from Barrow Point.'

'Well, he would, wouldn't he?' Fitzgerald smiles with fatherly concern. 'How could he hope to snare a decent girl otherwise?'

He lifts a hand to the driver of a bullock team as it pa.s.ses. I step back to avoid the worst of the mud the hoofs throw up. The wagon is only carrying half a load: a modest supply of food, drink and ammunition; and probably a small sack of mail for the few foolhardy diggers left scratching for gold on the Palmer. It sounds like there's a mouse under each pressure point of the tie-ropes - every time the wagon hits a depression in the road, there's a corresponding squeak.

Fitzgerald's in the mood for reminiscing. 'You know, back in the rush, four times as many teams went out to the fields. Charlotte Street was just one long coming and going.'

'We must all accept change, Inspector. Better still if we leap before we're pushed.'

His eyes, overbright in his dirty face, give the impression he's thinking carefully on the matter. But it seems he's just trying to remember what we were talking about before.

'Watson just wants to impress you, that's all. It's every man's right to try, and every woman's prerogative to pa.s.s judgement.'

'I'm flattered, Inspector, but hardly illuminated. It's vexing not to know what one's prospective husband is capable of.'

'Men are capable of anything, particularly away from the public eye.'

I look carefully at his face, and he looks back, guileless, saddened by the fatal flaw afflicting all males. Except him.

'And keep in mind,' he adds, 'with the blacks, it's not killing. More like self-defence, or bad luck. That should set your mind at rest.'

'Well, I can't say it does.'

Through the trees, just past the sh.o.r.eline, terns drop like miniature folded umbrellas on a patch of baitfish. The breeze has the bite of hot, white teeth in it. I hear a snuffling rustle and look up to where a puff of air harries the curtain of an open window.

'Look at it this way,' Fitzgerald says. 'If she'd made it back to her tribe, they would have killed her themselves. The smell of civilisation was on her, you see.' He blinks. Even his eyelids are dirty. 'To tell the truth, most men in Cooktown are partial to a cup of black coffee every now and then. Even those upstairs on the Hill. They're usually just a little more discreet about it.'

'Is that a confession, Inspector?'

He shakes his head. 'Haven't the stomach for it myself. Now, a nice cup of white tea ...'

When I just stare at him, he has enough good grace to look abashed.

'On an entirely different note,' I say, 'the owner of Blackbird, Captain Roberts, has left something valuable in French Charley's. I picked it up under one of the tables. Would you know when he's next due in port? I should like to return it to him in person.'