Good Murder by Robert Gott

instructor and Fred Drummond were retrieved later that day.

Chapter Four
    so many questions

    IN ORDER TO AVOID THE NASTY SURPRISE of the unexpected visit from Peter Topaz — he seemed to be a master of these — I cycled straight from the airfield to the police station, feeling with each turn of the pedals a growing resentment towards him and the world in general. The fates themselves were conspiring against me, and I allowed myself an absurd little burst of fury, expressed as an obscenity and directed at Fred Drummond, who had had the gall to fall to his death within minutes of speaking to me.
    Topaz wasn’t at the station. The surly creature behind the desk, who was afflicted with an adenoidal problem which only surgery or death could correct, said that he’d been called out to help search a patch of scrub on the outskirts of town. There had been the report of a body of a woman being seen there. This turned out to be mischievous, so Topaz was not in his usual state of half-suspended laconia when he arrived back. He was frankly pissed off. In my increasingly paranoid relations with him I immediately panicked and thought that he would assume I had been responsible for the vexatious false sighting. When he came into the station his anger was still so fierce that he didn’t acknowledge me with the carefully crafted smile I had come to realise was his trademark. He simply indicated with a nod that I should follow him.
    We sat in an airless room where the trivial emotions of small-town criminals had rendered the atmosphere so stale that I found it difficult to breathe. Topaz sat opposite me and waited for me to speak. He didn’t have to wait long. I blurted out, ‘I didn’t make that call.’ I sounded like a frightened schoolboy trying to duck the blame.
    ‘I didn’t think that you did. Why would I think that?’
    I recovered my composure.
    ‘I see. So you’re quite happy to believe that I could kill someone, but you don’t think I am sufficiently anti-social to make a nuisance phone-call.’
    He was not in the mood for conversation.
    ‘Why are you here? Come to confess?’
    ‘Fred Drummond is dead.’
    That stopped him. I didn’t know, until this moment, that news of death could be a mood elevator. Topaz’s annoyance fell away and he leaned forward, his eyes enlivened by the thrill of the hunt.
    ‘What have you done with his body?’
    It was my turn to be pulled up short. My God, what kind of a person did Topaz think I was?
    ‘I didn’t kill him,’ I said, my voice flying an octave above its normal range. ‘I went to the airport, just to speak to him. To clear things up. To get him to see that I had had nothing to do with Polly’s disappearance. Nothing. I spoke to him, and he said that he knew that already, or rather that he knew it now, and that he knew who’d done it and that he was going to get them. He said “them”. Then he pissed, practically on my shoes, and went up for a training flight. The motor cut out and the plane crashed into the river. That’s what I know. And that’s all I know.’
    Topaz stood up and went into the outer office. I assumed he was making a phone call. He returned and said, ‘The RAAF is searching the river.’
    If I’d been able to fold my arms in a triumphant ‘So there!’ I would have done so. I had to settle for arranging my features into a facial equivalent.
    ‘I suppose you think I sabotaged the aircraft,’ I said.
    ‘The RAAF will investigate what went wrong. It’s not a police matter.’
    ‘Poor Mrs Drummond. Who’ll look after her now?’
    ‘There’s another son. He’s up north somewhere. We’ll find him and let him know.’
    Having been energised by the electric possibility that I had been about to confess, he smiled at me before saying, ‘You can go.’
    Before leaving, I turned and said, ‘I’m not guilty of anything, you know.’
    He just made a steeple with his fingers and said, ‘We’re all guilty of something, Will.’
    Two days after