The young clerk nibbles at the end of the pen, and she can see he’s trying to decide whether he has the authority to help her.
‘Please, sir?’ Jessica begs again, tilting her head slightly to one side and pouting her lips the way she’s watched Meg do in the company of young blokes. What surprises her is how naturally it all comes — her duplicity requires no effort on her part.
‘Hey, aren’t you the one, you know, what brought the murderer in on the horse?’ he asks suddenly.
Jessica nods, then drops her eyes modestly, deliberately averting her gaze.
‘That was very brave,’ the young clerk says, frowning down at the ledger, and Jessica notices that while he now holds the pen poised over the ledger, there is no ink-pot anywhere to be seen and the nib is brand new and bone dry. She knows nothing about hotels but she’s been around a few young stockmen and ringers in her time and she reckons she’s just about got the measure of this bloke.
‘Thank you, but I’m sure a big strong bloke like you would have done the same.’ She pauses and smiles again, and the reedy young man blushes profusely and looks down at the ledger again.
‘I don’t think so,’ he mumbles, but she can see he’s dead pleased.
‘No, I mean it,’ Jessica lies. ‘You can always tell when a bloke’s got guts, isn’t afraid to do something. It shows in his eyes,’ she pauses, ‘a sort of faraway, squinty look.’
Joe would have said ‘when a young bloke’s got balls’, but she knew she couldn’t get away with saying it without him shying at her words.
The young clerk — though Jessica was beginning to seriously doubt this was his true vocation, for he was now nervously cleaning his nails with the nib of the pen — answered shyly, ‘It were a brave thing to do, him killing them three women an’ all.’
Jessica knows she’s won. ‘I need to see Mr Runche at once. It’s about the murderer. Things he has to know,’ she adds darkly.
Just then an older man walks in through a door directly behind the young desk clerk, his beetle-black hair parted down the centre and pasted down on either side of his head, shiny as a sergeant-major’s toe-cap. He is short, narrow about the shoulders and hips, and with a head too big for his torso. To complement his hair he sports a black moustache tweaked a good two inches at each end and curved upwards towards his ears, giving him what Jessica supposes is meant to be a fierce look. Looking closely, she sees that he has a soft and slightly dainty manner about him, not in the least frightening. He walks on his toes with his bum tucked in and his chin held high, as though denying his nose the right to smell things.
‘That will do, Jimmy Jenkins. Back to your work, chop chop!’ he says, clapping his hands twice then holding one hand out for the pen. ‘We haven’t got all day here, my lad. The banister brass has dirty great fingerprints all over it and the front steps must be swept before the morning train comes in from Sydney. Hurry, hurry, we’ll have no idle hands, if you please!’
Once he hands back the pen to the older man, Jimmy Jenkins loses his authority and is suddenly transformed from desk clerk back to hotel rouseabout. He grins sheepishly at Jessica. ‘Yes, Mr Snibbs,’ he says meekly, lifting the counter bar and stepping to Jessica’s side of the foyer.
‘And who’s this?’ the man asks, looking at Jessica with one eyebrow slightly arched.
‘She’s an old friend, Mr Snibbs,’ Jimmy says quickly, ‘come to visit me.’
‘Cat
brought her in from the bush, eh?’ Snibbsquips. Then, feigning no further interest, he turns to the ledger, his pen running across the scribbled lines as though searching for some important piece of information.
You’ll keep, mate, Jessica thinks. The bastard wouldn’t have said that if Joe had been with her.
‘Come, miss,’ Jimmy Jenkins whispers out of the corner of his mouth.
Jessica follows Jimmy across a square of black and white marble tiles towards the entrance of the dining room. ‘Brasses, Jimmy! Brasses, my boy!’ Snibbs calls after him.
‘Yes, Mr Snibbs, right away, no problems!’ Jimmy calls back, touching his finger to the side of his head.
Then in a voice meant only for Jessica, he says, ‘Bloody old nancy boy’, but Jessica has no idea what it means.
Jimmy Jenkins leads her past several of the breakfasting guests and over to the lawyer’s table, which is situated in the .darkest corner of the large room, behind a magnificent stand of aspidistra and a second, almost as impressive, of cascading fish fern. It is a setting concealed from all the other tables and in the natural gloom created in part by the plants it appears almost like a dark corner of an overgrown garden.
‘It is a propinquity,’ Richard Runche KC later explains to Jessica, ‘that has been created for one by a sympathetic and very decent hotel management. They have thought it most conducive to the amelioration of a severe hangover.’ He sighs, wiping his brow with his napkin. ‘My dear, I don’t know how I should possibly manage without such kind and dear friends.’
Jimmy later tells Jessica, though, that the management’s kindness is strictly confined to the till in the club lounge. Richard Runche KC, alias Liquid Lunch, is worth four times the bar takings of any other regular guest and is, to boot, an excellent drunk who always staggers outside to throw up. ‘You can’t ask no more from a guest than that, now can yiz?’ Jimmy whispers proudly to Jessica.
Jessica has never been in a room as large or a public place as grand and she feels more than a little intimidated by the clatter of cutlery, clink of porcelain plates and the rattle of teacups, not to mention all the finely dressed folk around her.
The table occupied by Billy’s barrister possesses only one chair. Jessica is not for one moment expecting to be asked to sit down, but there’s hardly enough room for her to stand, and she can feel the leaves of the aspidistra pressing into her back. There is certainly no place for Jimmy Jenkins, who is forced to peer through the fish fern, where his face, draped in fronds, looks like that of a monkey in a forest.
It’s indicative of Mr Richard Runche’s severe hangover that he completely fails to recognise Jessica, even though she has appeared in the witness box, sometimes for extended periods, on six occasions over the past three days.
He squints at her through rheumy eyes, cupping his hand to the edge of his brow to dissuade any ray of light that might think to intrude. Before he can bring himself to speak, Jimmy makes the necessary introductions from the fernery. ‘Sir, I have the honour ter introduce .. .’ He looks up at Jessica in a panic, having forgotten to ask her name.