Title: Jessa Called Jay
Chapter 4: Rainbow In A Snowstorm
Author: Elliott Silver
Summary: "Come after me, Jack Robinson," she'd said, but when he tries, she doesn't answer. Three years later, Phryne Fisher returns to Melbourne.
Note: I will be away from internet access for the next weeks, but will try to post the next chapter as usual, in about two weeks' time. In the meantime, I seem not to be receiving notifications/reviews from FF so readers are welcome to contact me directly if they wish, via PM.
/ - / - / - / - / September 1930, two years earlier / - / - / - / - /
"Go away."
Jack Robinson's first words to her are not at all auspicious.
But she's been told worse, and Jay Tayler has never been one to turn away from a challenge.
The Melbourne hospital room swims around her, dull and dismal as a fishbowl. Outside spring rain blows hard against the windows, splashing misshapen reflections against the glass like ghosts and dead dreams. There are no flowers, no cards, just the bitter scent of antiseptic and bleached cotton.
The man in the bed hardly looks like a man at all. In fact, she can hardly hide her surprise that he is even alive. He certainly doesn't look it, and if he hadn't just spoken, if she hadn't just seen his chest rise with the effort, she wouldn't have believed it.
His thin body is jack-knifed under the sheets, the threadbare hospital shift barely hiding the layers of bandages over his chest. His right leg is pulled upright with a sling, holding the broken bones in traction against their will, trying to heal the misshapen lump that must be his knee. His head is swathed with bandages, almost like a halo, and one eye is still swollen shut, the other sunk into a vivid purple bruise that fades to his jaw, old blood pooling under his skin like nightshade. His hands are wrapped too, hiding knuckles that are split and oozing through the cotton wadding and perhaps the useless splints of broken fingers. They will not heal happily she knows from experience, a part of the body that bends and prevents itself from mending.
"My name is Jay Tayler," she states plainly, coming to the side of his bed. "I'm from the Sydney Herald newspaper."
"I don't care," he says without looking at her. "Go away."
"I'm here to talk to you about your arrest," she continues. "About what happened."
"There's nothing to say."
The man on the bed turns away as much as possible, which is to say not far, rolling towards the dreary window.
His refusal is not unusual. As a crime reporter she is used to such recalcitrance, bound into the anxiety of deep suspicion or the battered wounds of trauma. Her job is simply to make people talk, to make them find the words they didn't know they had, usually by cracking open those wounds and lavishing them with salt.
The truth is rarely pleasant, and lies rest easier on weary hearts.
In point of fact, she probably wants to be here even less than this injured man does. She too hates hospitals but today she hates Melbourne even more. Its dusty skies opened like demented sluicegates as soon as she alighted from the train station, soaking her linen suit so that the fabric has stretched out of form and drenching her hair so that her chignon keeps dripping cold water down her back. More damagingly water has permeated her travel bag so that her paper disintegrated into swirls of cellulose and blue ink, tattooing her fingertips with melting words.
No, it is safe to say that the Herald's News Correspondent does not want to be here.
It had taken a few weeks, but the story about a respected detective of the Victoria Police being charged with murder had made its way across the continent. In Sydney, the brief note is passed over by most, except by her editor.
"Cops go bad all the time," Jay argues. "What's different about this one?"
After all, things these days turn rotten quickly: fruit left in the sun, meat left in the heat, cops changing sides in the Depression. It's not unusual, and certainly not worth the sixteen-hour overnight train from Sydney.
"Something," Peter Jessup says mysteriously, betting on one of his infamous (and invariably misplaced) hunches.
Here, now in the grayness of the hospital room and this man's breath, she curses that hunch.
Jay raps sharply on the railing of the bed with her knuckles.
"Tell me what happened."
The man shrugs, as much as one can in such traction, and winces as he regrets it.
If he is guilty of these things, such pain is small recompense for his actions. As befitting the punishment for 1930, if he is found guilty, his former occupation will not save him: he will be put to death like any common criminal by hanging. He will be lashed to the gallows in front of the Old Melbourne Gaol and swung until his neck breaks or he strangles. If the latter, he will have some twenty minutes of hell to contemplate his crimes before his body is sucked empty of air and, at last, in agony he perishes.
"I want to know why you did it," Jay insists. "Why you killed a young girl?"
"Look," he rages suddenly, turning to her with such ferocity in his one open eye that she is taken back, "I did it!"
He breathes like it hurts, and she thinks, it probably does.
"I'm guilty."
/ - / - / - / - /
She sits at the Melbourne train station and fumes.
The Sydney train is late.
(Of course it is.)
She flips through the Melbourne papers, but they aren't very good and she is quickly bored of the never-ending rote of petty crime and hard times. The Depression has seen a sordid bloom in news reporting, as lost jobs and hungry mouths drive even the most honest people to break the law. Prices skyrocket, savings evaporate, catastrophe seethes like sweat on dynamite.
She herself isn't above the effects of the crisis.
Despite her initial petulance, she can't afford to thumb her nose at a decent job. She worked hard to get where she is, knows there are scores of unemployed writers just waiting to take her place, and realizes very clearly that she can't afford to return without a decent story.
Jay thinks about the damaged man on the bed, Jack Robinson. She thinks about what she has been told, what others have so easily accepted, but the timeline of events, as she understands them, does not make sense.
She pulls out her damp paper, uncaps her pen, and begins to write.
On the night of August 17, 1930, former Victoria Police Detective Jack Robinson went to a South Wharf warehouse. Later identified as a member of an illegal opium ring, he had ostensibly gone to take revenge on a fifteen-year old drug snitch (her name not given) who had turned evidence to the police. Around eleven o'clock, two constables patrolling the area heard a gunshot and arrived at the location to find the girl dead and the detective with gun in hand. Their discovery was paralleled by the arrival of the Chief Commissioner and a police team tipped off to the operation, who then took Detective Inspector Robinson into custody on the charges of murder and trafficking.
Jay looks at her notes and frowns.
Instead of clarity, she is left with questions.
None of this explains why the man was beaten within an inch of his life. From what she understands, he was found on the scene with such injuries. If the police didn't beat him, then who did? And why beat him with such specific methods – breaking fingers and battering his knee – over and over, a method that speaks more to interrogation than revenge?
It doesn't make sense, and Jay hates that.
Perhaps Peter's hunch was right. There is a first time for everything, after all. There may be something here, something to this story, and, if so, she will find it.
When the train to Sydney arrives, she is gone.
/ - / - / - / - /
Jay Tayler is patient when she has to be.
She spends long days in the Melbourne Public Library searching through back issues of newspapers and public records. Under the skylights of the beautiful dome, she learns the detective's story.
John "Jack" Robinson was born in 1895 and grew up in working-class Richmond before joining the Victoria Police. He became a Senior Constable before the war called, a rather early decision that seems to have been determined by his prominent father-in-law. In 1915 he joined the army, became a Lance Corporal, and served with distinction in the Dardanelles. He returned from the war, where sides were fuzzy, to face the police strike in 1923, where sides were much more clearly defined. He chose his, and rose quickly to the rank of Detective Inspector.
By 1928, he seemed to have achieved something of a charmed life, his name appearing regularly in the local papers for a slew of notable achievements such as recovering pirate gold in Queenscliff, ending the trafficking in young girls from the Magdalene laundry, and settling scores of the Camorra crime syndicate.
After 1929, though, his name appeared less and less in the columns before it was gone completely, only to reappear again in the morning editions of August 18, 1930.
Jack Robinson was a good cop, she thinks, one of those individuals rare as a rainbow in a snowstorm.
But then something had happened, and she can't fathom what.
/ - / - / - / - /
She returns to the hospital to find out, but a fierce red-haired doctor blocks her way.
"Oh no," she says, white coat sweeping out like an avenging angel's wings as she stands between Jay and the room's door. "I don't know how you got in the first time, but you're not getting in again."
"Why not?"
"Orders of the Chief Commissioner," she answers, hands on hips, clipboard at the ready like a gunslinger.
They face off, but Jay speaks first.
"Do you think he's guilty?" she asks, motioning to the unseen man in the room.
It clearly isn't the question the doctor expected.
"That's what they say," she replies as if it has been rehearsed, though it doesn't look like she believes a word of it.
Jay switches track.
"How bad are his injuries?"
The doctor snorts, a highly unladylike sound.
"You've seen him."
She has. She's seen his fingers, his black eyes, what used to be his knee.
"Injuries like those take time," Jay says. "You can't beat a man like that in five minutes."
"No," answers the doctor slowly,
"And they're painful – "
Jay finds she's thinking out loud, putting together the pieces that don't fit into place.
"Obvi – "
"So if the injuries occurred before, not after, the shooting – as it's said they did – and they were painful, as we know they must be – and he was hit in the head, perhaps multiple times, certainly causing dizziness if not disorientation – "
Jay takes a breath before leveling her last question at the doctor. "How was he able to shoot someone?"
The doctor stares as if measuring her. Jay reads the tag with her name: Elizabeth MacMillan. It's a good name, a solid name, befitting of someone with a steady hand and sharp scalpel.
"It would have been hard to see straight anyway," the doctor finally relents, "as pissed as he was."
"What?"
"That night Jack Robinson was dead drunk."
/ - / - / - / - /
Jay knocks smartly on the door of the small Collingwood cottage.
The early spring weather is now cool and clear, so the windows are open, breeze fluttering the lace curtains within. A spate of daffodils blooms happily in the tidy garden.
Footsteps echo inside and the door sweeps open.
The man facing her is handsome in an honest way, with dusk-colored eyes and hair like candied ginger-root. His broad shoulders practically take up the entire entrance-way.
"Constable Hugh Collins?" she asks, and he nods. "My name is Jay Tayler, from the Sydney Herald."
The door closes again just as quickly, the brass knocker missing her nose by a hair.
Jay sighs.
Well, she is used to this too.
She raps again with her knuckles.
"I'd like to talk to you about Jack Robinson," she continues, speaking to the wood frame.
"Go away," comes a muffled voice from within.
She can hear movement inside.
"Hugh – "
"No, Dottie – "
Jay takes the moment to interrupt whatever's happening on the other side. "I want to help."
There's a breath of silence.
"But if – "
"Dottie, I said – "
"Maybe she can – "
"Look, reporters lie all the time – "
Jay frowns. "I can still hear you – " she says, though she's ignored.
"But he – "
"We can't – "
"Elizabeth Macmillan told me to come – "
There's a muffled thump from the other side, and then the door opens again and she stares straight into the very determined face of a very pregnant young woman, hazel eyes blazing against the porcelain pink of her skin and the curling waves of her caramel hair.
Behind her, the young constable wheezes, holding his side as if he's just been neatly elbowed. He most certainly has been.
"Hello," Jay says.
"Mac told you to come?"
She nods and is motioned in.
The constable stands protectively behind his wife, still wearing his police trousers as if he's just returned home. They don't ask her to sit, so she doesn't.
"What do you want?"
"I want your help," she answers, turning to him. "You were Jack Robinson's constable. You worked with him every day. You knew him." She breathes. "Was he the kind of man to do this?"
"I'm not allowed to talk about it," he answers stiffly.
"Why not?"
"Commissioner's orders," he replies flatly. "I could lose my job."
His arm comes around his wife's back as she rests her hands over the curve of her belly. Jay feels their resistance building. They have so much to lose, and the truth is sometimes such an unaffordable luxury.
So she asks the only question she has left.
"Do you think he's guilty?"
In their silence, she answers, surprising both them and herself.
"I don't."
The constable still says nothing, but his wife's face changes.
"Help me understand," Jay asks, and then a word almost unfamiliar to her.
"Please."
/ - / - / - / - /
It's late.
Visiting hours are long over, but she stands outside his door looking in. Jack Robinson is asleep, or doing a fine job pretending.
She hardly knows this man, yet she feels he is different. She can't say why exactly, but she just does. She is so lost in thought about him that she hadn't even heard the doctor come up behind her until she speaks.
"Hugh?"
Jay nods, turning. Under considerable duress from his wife, the constable had procured the police files for the murder, as well as the ones Detective Robinson had been working on for the last six months.
"Why do you need those files?" he'd asked.
Because everything has a past, she'd wanted to say, and I need to know his.
But she says nothing as he leaves the bulk of files with her and then disappears as if he was never there, because he never was.
It's tedious; this real work of reporting always is, sifting through the dusty backlog of the past to find those precious kernels of truth. Her eyes sting, her nose turns red, and she sneezes constantly with the dust; but she reads on.
"I know why he went to the warehouse that night."
Dr. MacMillan glances around, then takes her arm and draws her into an empty adjoining room, closing the door carefully behind them.
"The girl that he's charged with killing," Jay continues in the dim light. "Her name was Annabelle Charles. She had come to him in June when her sister Ava was found dead at South Wharf."
She takes a short breath and then continues.
"He –Detective Robinson – found three other similar suspicious deaths," she carries on. "Young girls, no families, flush with cash, suddenly found dead on the docks."
The doctor folds her arms across her chest as if to brace herself.
"The girls were drug runners, part of an opium ring here in Melbourne."
"Annabelle?"
"No," Jay says, "but her sister was, and I think she must have told her, and when her sister was found dead, Annabelle told Jack."
The still air of the room presses heavily on her skin.
"I don't think he went to that warehouse to kill Annabelle," Jay says. "I think he went there to save her."
The doctor nods and looks down as Jay speaks.
"I know how," she says, "but I don't know why."
The doctor raises her startling blue eyes.
"I need to know what happened before," Jay asks her. "I need to know why he was drunk that night."
Elizabeth MacMillan, to her credit, knows exactly what she means and does not evade it.
"She happened," the doctor answers simply, as if it is. She sits down on the edge of the empty bed, as if she herself is injured now, as if she too has been hurt by the shrapnel of unseen lives and requires treatment to draw poison from the hidden wound.
"Phryne Fisher, lady detective, my best friend."
Jay sits next to her and listens.
The Hon. Miss Phryne Fisher, even her name exotic and enticing. The dark-haired woman was terribly fashionable and unmistakably glamorous. She had come back to Melbourne in 1928, reckless now with a title and a fortune, determined to see her sister's killer brought to justice. Murdoch Foyle was, Jay remembers, thanks to the help of Detective Inspector Jack Robinson.
Phryne had stayed after that, dabbling in detective work as the year turned over into 1929. She and Jack had grown close, as the doctor remembers it, working together to solve murders at docks and dancehalls, at fashion houses and football pitches, battling Parisian artists and Russian anarchists, infiltrating circuses and brothels and magic shows (her, not him).
They were partners, but not lovers.
For Phryne, these were mutually exclusive terms; for him, they were absolutely essential.
Coming from so little and going so far, Phryne, for better or worse, would never relinquish her hard-won independence. She cherished it too much to settle with one man, with any man.
"It was hard for him, I know," the doctor says, "Terribly hard. To watch her with so many other men and never have a chance of his own."
It was the worst kind of back-handed compliment, to love him so and never have him. Phryne Fisher would share her mind with him (which she shared with no one else), but not her body (which she did).
Her heart was always – and would be – her own.
"And then she left."
Without warning or planning, Phryne Fisher flew off in September 1929, taking her father back to England without so much as a glance back.
"We never heard from her," the doctor tells her. "I wrote, I know Dottie telegrammed, and Jack – " she stops here. She doesn't have to say more but she does.
If they were hurt by this silence, he was hamstrung. It was as if a part of himself had been carved away, leaving him less of a person, leaving him desperate for any way to dull this visceral pain, this sharp and involuntary severing, to somehow unfeel the world.
He'd turned to whisky first, according to the doctor, but whisky is a fickle friend. Instead of sleep, it gave him dangerous dreams. Sometimes he'd wake in sweat, calling her name as if to bring her back. Other times, he'd wake sure she had never left, to realize only too late the cruel and empty truth.
It was a slippery slope, that descent into his own personal hell. They – herself, Hugh and his wife, the few friends he'd had – were too bound in their own grief to save him from his own. And once started, it had been impossible to stop.
Hugh had tried to cover for him as much as possible, but such intent destruction could not be hidden. There had been public remonstrance for drunkenness, two suspensions, and what was labeled as an inevitable but convenient crash, in the dark hours of August 17.
/ - / - / - / - /
The man on the bed does not turn when she enters.
He is used to it, Jay thinks, to nameless, faceless persecutors revolving in and out of his dark dreams, the inevitable enter and exit of nurses and doctors, of prodding and poking a human husk, all that's left of a man when bones are shattered, blood is spilled, flesh battered and soul beaten.
"Tell me what happened," she asks again.
Both of Jack Robinson's eyes are open now, his bruises healing so that the colors of his face have shifted from blue-purple to yellow-green. His skin is the rather unappealing color of rotten eggs.
He doesn't move, doesn't even seem to breathe. He doesn't look at her.
"I don't know."
"I think you do," she counters, "I think you know exactly why you went to that warehouse and what you would find there."
"I don't know."
"Yes, you do."
"I don't."
"You do."
"I don't!" he roars hoarsely, anger bursting like a blister. "I don't know, and I can't remember. I killed someone and I can't remember!"
Dr. MacMillan rushes into the room, taking in the red color suffusing her patient's pale face, and then walks straight back out. The doctor knows what she does too, that there is nothing left in the pit of this man but ash and anger. And when the anger is gone, there will be precious little else.
"You don't remember because you didn't do it."
His eyes are grey-blue, Jay decides, as they settle on her, dark as a thunderstorm in the mountains.
"So tell me what you do remember," she says. "Tell me the truth."
She waits in a silence starched stiff by fear, punctured only by the rustle and remembrance of their breath. At last he speaks.
"I remember the darkness," he begins. "I remember knowing it was an opium warehouse because I could smell it, sweet, like breathing incense. I remember someone hit me as I came in, straight on the head –" he reaches up and gingerly feels his scalp where there are undoubtedly still-oozing scars. "I remember waking in a chair, tied there, and someone wanting to know who told me about the place. I remember they took the jimmy bar to my knee so I would tell them. I had a flask of whisky, and it burned when they threw it in my eyes so I would stay awake. I remember the bones popped in my fingers when they broke."
Breath rattles in his chest.
"I didn't think bones made that sound."
In the dimness of the room his bandaged hand reaches for hers. She doesn't even think he realizes he's done it, but he presses their skin together, wrapping bone into bone, so someone might believe him. His skin is dry and cold, his palm soft without calluses, as if the world has rubbed every bit of skin and scale away leaving only the rawness of his broken and bleeding heart.
"And the girl?" Jay asks softly. "Annabelle?"
"I remember they brought her in later," he continues. "I never told them, but I remember her screaming, and then – " He stops. "One shot, just one."
He looks at her now and realizes belatedly that he is holding her hand.
"I remember laughter, and then someone cut me free and put a gun in my hand. I was dizzy, I couldn't see, but I swung at them, and I thought I hit them – " he stops, flinching involuntarily. "But then I remember it felt like a razor came down my back, and it went – dark."
Jay freezes.
"Sit up," she says and surprised, he does.
Indeed the bloody bandages on his back belie his injuries, a swipe of long, deep gouges that runs from shoulder to hip. In her chest, her own heart stops, blood turning to ice in her veins.
In the thick warmth of the room she shivers.
"I never knew flesh could scream," he finishes, "and I remember thinking thank God I was dead, until I realized that I wasn't."
/ - / - / - / - /
In all her life, Jay Tayler has never been one to shy away from the truth, but here, now, confronted with the scabs of her own past, of everything she has tried so hard to forget, she hesitates.
And yet, she knows this: she can't go back, but she can go on. She must.
In the light of her hotel room, she unpins her hair and unfurls its long lengths.
She lets out the breath she didn't realize she'd been holding and takes up the scissors.
/ - / - / - / - /
"Get out."
The woman who ventures into the Melbourne dockside at nighttime looks nothing like the reporter who arrived in the city two weeks ago. Her face is darkened, and her razed hair greased back under a ratty tweed cap. She looks for all the world like one of the dock boys, engulfed in a dirty shirt and patched jacket – ragged, hungry, volatile, a live wire of menace and mayhem.
She yanks the man from the car without waiting and isn't at all gentle about it. He is heavy but she holds the scruff of his jacket as he stumbles out, his head swathed in a black burlap hood, his hands knotted together with rough twine.
His body sways against hers, seeking balance, and then somehow rights itself without assistance.
"Walk."
"I can't."
She hears the intransigence in his voice, and jerks the burlap from his head.
Jack Robinson blinks in the darkness as his eyes try to focus in the black alley.
Without waiting she presses a series of sharp points at the heart pumping furiously beneath his shirt. Brass knuckles rim her fingers, topped with bottle caps whose points have been filed to razor tips.
They glitter with each beat of his pulse.
He straightens as he feels the metal bite into his chest, this time pressed to the front of him rather than the back where a similar weapon has already left its vicious mark. Muscle memory is strong and undeniable; bodies remember how they have been hurt before and seek to avoid pain again.
"Walk," she says, once more.
Jay puts her hand on his arm. He can hardly move, his knee bent in a damp cast, but she spares no sympathy as she pushes him on.
"Let's go," she orders. "They're waiting."
They are, the group of them, perhaps twenty or so. The warehouse smells like rotting fish and shit, and underneath, the heady musk of dark drugs. Two boys are smoking, green at the gills with it.
She knows only the dark-haired one, her contact, and goes for him first.
"Here he is," she states, "Jack Robinson as promised."
"We'll take it from here," the boy says breezily, reaching for Jack's arm.
"That's not the deal."
She shuffles the man beside her backward so fast that his knee buckles and he rasps in pain, sagging limply against her so that she wonders for a moment if he's passed out. But he hasn't.
"I told you," she repeats clearly so that everyone can hear. "I want in."
Jay flexes the brass knuckles on her fingers and lets them glitter darkly in the light.
She hears the silence of the space roar to life. They may not know her, but they recognize this rare bright weapon, the coveted emblem of only the most prominent Black Stars, that dark and dangerous cabal of opium sellers about which the only information is that there is none at all.
"I bring your witness, you bring your leader," she says. "That was the deal."
There is a lapse, a momentary pause where life spins to a sharp focus, where everything becomes exceedingly detailed, where she can hear the idle scratch of shoe leather on cement, knows she could touch the fear as it pulses through the dark man before her, can smell the tang of hospital soap from the battered man at her side.
Jay can feel her own heart, hear the blood rushing in her head, the swirl of it screaming through her veins.
She breathes and does the impossible – she waits.
"Yes, it was indeed," says an older man at last, walking out into the light. "But I doubted you could keep up your end as promised."
Chief Commissioner Donald Davies stands before her blandly, backed by several men, two in police uniforms. She hardly knows George Sanderson's replacement, except by name and photograph in the paper, but the man next to her has worked with him and knows him far better.
"You?" Jack manages as she holds him up. "You're the – "
"For some time now," the Commissioner nods his head. "And why not? Police work surely doesn't pay as it used to."
The realization dawns late and bright in Jack's eyes.
"You killed her," he says. "Annabelle – and Ava, and all the other girls."
"She knew too much," the man answers, distinguished in his smart dark suit, "She knew the trade, she knew you , and she knew – me."
Jack swings towards him, but the Commissioner dodges away and the former detective crashes to his knees. The cast cracks opens and his scream echoes in the warehouse as the stone floor blooms poppy-red with split wounds.
"Opium is expensive," the Commissioner confirms, with a blasé shrug, "and girls are cheap."
The rumble in Jack's throat sounds like a growl, one of anger and pain.
"Did you think it was you, after all?" The Commissioner laughs. "Perhaps we did our job well enough then, if only you hadn't remembered it was us."
"But I didn't – "
Jay cuts him off.
"Tell me about the opium."
"We run it, and it makes us rich," he responds. "What else do you need to know?"
She doesn't need to know anything more. She knows it all already and far too well.
"I know it kills," Jay answers. "As do you."
The room freezes, air pulled so taut that it must nearly crystallize between them, that it must harden so as even emptiness can be broken.
"Do I know you?" Davies asks, peering closely at her.
She smiles disarmingly.
"You should," she replies. "Because I know you."
Now Jay feels all eyes upon her, including the heavy weight of Jack Robinson's as he finally recognizes her, as he realizes who she is, and that she is not, could not be, the innocent reporter he'd thought.
"We met on a night like this in Sydney, don't you remember?"
She moves closer to Davies.
"I was one of those girls," she declares. "And you tried to kill me too."
The Commissioner stands back and considers her. She holds his gaze even though it's like looking into the devil's eyes and seeing hell.
"Ah, yes," he sees at last. "You were Lee Turner's little wildcat."
She nods. "I was the one that got away."
"But not before I marked you first."
At her feet, Jack winces, perhaps feeling his own scars, the marks raked down his back as he looks at the sharpened knuckles on Jay's hand, and the larger ones Davies spins slowly around his own fingers, points black and sticky with opium – or old blood.
The Commissioner rocks back on his feet.
"Lee was a troublemaker, you know," he announces. "He didn't like using the girls. He stopped the Hongkong routes and threatened to go to the cops." He shakes his head. "It was very bad for business. I had no choice but to kill him and start over here."
"The same as you killed all those young girls?"
He leers towards her but she doesn't move away.
"The same, I expect, as I'll kill you."
"You can try again," Jay says graciously, and smiles at him as if she means it. "But you're not very good at it."
She doesn't even hesitate as she swings, knuckles cased in brass smashing into the smirk on his face. She doesn't break his jaw (at least she doesn't think so), but certainly it rattles a few molars as the spikes shred though the flesh of his check and sink deep into his gums. Blood spurts from his ripped mouth, his split nose, from the lip that will heal crooked, as he falls.
Now he too will be forever marked.
At his scream Hugh Collins and every police officer of the Victoria police come flooding into the space, shouting and surrounding them in general chaos.
The young City South constable comes over and yanks Davies to his feet.
"Did you get all that?" Jay asks him.
"Every word," Hugh answers.
"Good," she replies. "Because I'm going to write about it."
Blood drips from her hand onto the white press of the Commissioner's shirt as she smiles into his mangled face.
"I promise you I'm going to write all about it."
"Bitch."
"Not killing me was your first mistake," she tells him. "Not killing him – " she points to Jack, still on the floor, " – was your second."
"And, truth be told," Jay finishes, "I'm glad you made both."
/ - / - / - / - /
"How is he?"
Jack's eyes roll open as Dr. MacMillan bends over him, checking his pulse.
Shock, the doctor had confirmed, along with a good bit of blood loss and overexertion. She's re-sewn his stitches, scrubbed his wounds against infection, and topped him off with a strong dose of morphine.
"He'll live."
Is that all, Jay wonders. Is it enough?
The hospital whirls quietly around them. On the outside, Jack Robinson seems no worse for the wear. But on the inside, Jay knows, is another story.
The doctor tosses her stethoscope around her neck. She touches Jay's shoulder gently, and they move to leave as he is pulled to sleep, lids and dark lashes sliding over his ash and ocean eyes.
"Don't go," he says suddenly, struggling awake and reaching for her. "Please."
Dr. MacMillan shrugs and then leaves them alone, closing the door behind her.
Jay comes back to the bed, resting her hands on the cool railing.
She thinks he will look at her differently now, that he must as everyone else has. But he doesn't, and when he speaks, it isn't at all what she expected.
"Your hair," he says.
"It will grow," she answers, feeling the short ragged ends, because sometimes bodies recover so easily when our minds and hearts do not.
"I like it."
It's just the medicine speaking, Jay knows, but she smiles at the small kindness of his words.
"How did you know?" he asks.
The smile fades as she wonders how to answer his question, as she wonders if she even can.
"We all have scars," she says in the end. "It's just that most people can't see them."
/ - / - / - / - /
A week later Jack Robinson is a free man.
It is a miracle few people, if any, thought would come to pass, so there's a general air of upendedness about it, about where he's going, and where he'll stay. According to Dr. MacMillan, with whom no one dares argue, he'll stay in the hospital for the next several weeks to allow his knee to heal as best it might, which is to say, not very.
Jay seems to have started a chain reaction in the press, with every two-dog-town newspaper sending their agents for the scoop. So far, they have all failed where the Herald has been triumphant. Reporters, even the clever ones, have found themselves barred from the hospital (except the one that tried to climb a ladder to the detective's second story room, falling off and breaking his arm in ignominy). She, however, has been able to waltz right in, so four of her exposés have appeared the last week alone, including an exclusive interview with the man of the hour himself (even if he didn't know he was being interviewed at the time).
A crowd waits impatiently at the front entrance, but she knows where to go; she knows his secrets.
Dr. MacMillan appears at the back door and holds it open as an attendant wheels out the former detective, rolling him down the winding pathway to where she is waiting on a bench in the October sun.
"Avoiding the press?" she asks as the attendant parks him into place.
"What have you done?" he asks in serious consternation. The bruises on his face have almost faded completely to the odd yellow-brown of winter potatoes. He is dressed in trousers and a pull-over, so that an onlooker might think him completely healed. They would be so wrong, though, Jay knows, because the real healing has yet to come, if even it can.
"Normally people say thank you in these situations," she says, "so, you're welcome."
Jack flaps open the Sydney Herald, as if she didn't know what it already says.
Melbourne Police Detective Receives Victoria Star for Bravery, it reads. The charges against Jack Robinson have been dropped, the opium ring destroyed, the Commissioner imprisoned. Justice has been attained, as much as it might ever be.
"The Mayor came," he tells her. "Even the Governor!"
She knows all this, has already put it into print, so she waits for him to continue.
"They called me a hero."
She hears the bitterness in his voice.
"Perhaps you are."
"I'm not," he refutes, "And I don't deserve it."
"Bravery is in the eye of the beholder."
They sit in silence for a moment, listening to the crash of garbage being collected, of laundry being loaded into vans, of deliveries of medicine and flowers. Two corpses are brought out on stretchers and loaded into a hearse for burial.
"I did what anyone would do," Jacks says at last, the sun bright on his pale skin.
"No," Jay answers him. "You did what no one would do."
/ - / - / - / - /
.