Pritam moved his knight to threaten the Right Reverend’s bishop.
“You dirty black bastard,” muttered Reverend Hird, wiping his spectacles on a handkerchief. The old man was swaddled in a padded robe, his striped pajama pants just poking from beneath it. Pritam could see that his flesh between the pant cuffs and brown slippers was swollen as tight as a sausage and marbled with veins. Hird moved his bishop.
“Is that why you never let me play white?” asked Pritam. “So you can slag off at me?” He saw that the white bishop was now stalking his one rook; Hird was the superior player. “You degenerate old chiseler.”
Hird shrugged. “Now you’re blackening my good name.”
Pritam advanced a pawn. He looked at the mantel clock; it was nearly midnight. They often played till one or later, discussing the foibles of the congregation, the vagaries of the synod: serious matters couched in trivialities as the old man groomed the younger to take his job.
“And I feel compelled to point out, yet again, that I’m not black. Of course, if I were black, I’d be proudly black. But I’m Indian. Subcontinental. Hindustani. Whereas you are the ill-favored offspring of deported criminals.”
“Touché,” replied Hird. “And, in response to your brassy defense of your low-slung heritage, let me just say this: check.”
Pritam sighed and took a sip of sherry. He could now save his king and lose his bishop, or resign. Just once he would love to see the old man’s face in defeat. He scoured the board for alternatives that he knew would not be there.
“Who were your visitors earlier?” asked Hird.
“Never mind.”
“Well, I do mind. What if they were more Hindustanis? Unwashed half-breed cousins you’re trying to slip in under the radar? You breed like frogs. Or worse: what if they were Liberal campaigners? Soliciting your venal, oily hide for your curry-fingered vote?”
Pritam looked up at the old man. His eyes were sparkling with delight.
“You met one of them at Gavin Boye’s funeral,” he said.
Hird’s white eyebrows knitted together. “In the church?”
Pritam nodded. “And his sister.”
Hird thought for a moment. “Here to discuss the suicide?”
“I resign,” said Pritam.
“At last!” crowed Hird, then sobered slyly. “Oh, you mean the chess game. No, I won’t let you. Always to the death.” He looked at the younger man. “Well?”
“They were talking about the murder of the young Thomas boy.”
The older reverend nodded. “And?”
“And nothing.”
“My friend Bill Chalmers baptized Nicholas Close. The boy’s agnostic, like his mother and, I presume, his sister. Their father was a dodgy bastard: turned to drink, left his wife in the lurch with the kids, wrapped himself round a power pole. And then, of course, when Close was a boy his young mate, the other Boye lad, got done in …” Hird carefully cleared one nostril with a thumbnail, and looked up over his eyeglasses at Pritam. “I might be old and foolish in my choice of successors, but I still have capacity to wonder why two agnostics would come to see an Anglican reverend on a rainy winter’s night.”
Pritam waited. There was no getting around this. Hird would harass and hassle him into answering as inevitably as he would extract a victory on the chessboard. He sighed.
“They mentioned a Mrs. Quill. A dressmaker, I think.”
The older reverend nodded, very slightly. “And?”
“And, nothing. I didn’t want to worry you with this sort of nonsense, John.”
Pritam fell silent, and Hird watched him over his spectacles.
“I know English isn’t your first language, so take your time.”
Pritam threw up his hands. “Fine! He wanted you to look at the photograph of Eleanor Bretherton and then for me to ask you about this Quill woman.”
Hird looked over his shoulder at the old photograph of the church’s construction, and wearily got to his feet.
“And now you’re going to do it?” asked Pritam, incredulous. “Is this your way to draw out my misery?”
Hird winked and hobbled over to the picture. He adjusted his glasses.
“I remember Mrs. Quill,” he mumbled.
Pritam returned his attention to the board. If he couldn’t find a graceful way out of this game, he could at least backtrack and see the mistakes that had led him to lose.
“Did you learn to play in Korea? John?” Pritam looked up at the old man. Hird was staring at the photograph. His face was white and his hand shook with a palsy.
“John?”
Hird looked at Pritam and shook his head slowly.
“She’s …”
Then he dropped to one knee and slumped onto the floor like a shot beast.
“John!”
Pritam ran to the old man. His breaths were shallow and fast, and his mouth formed silent, unknowable words. Pritam scrambled for the telephone.
The rain had finished, and the clouds were leaving like concertgoers after the final curtain. A beautiful night: chill and clear, moonless; the sky was a dark glass scrubbed clean and waiting.
The suburb of Tallong eased itself to sleep. House lights switched off one by one, two by two, by the dozen, until it seemed only the bright pearls of streetlamps strung their beads around the dark folds of the slumbering suburb. The narrow roads were glossed with the rain, and tiny streams chuckled in the gutters and fell with dark gurgles into stormwater drains to rush underground toward the nearby river. No cars disturbed the stillness. Only the trees sang softly their night-breeze song, whispering.
The woods were all shadow and moist as private flesh.
At their heart, a fire flickered. In a cottage that had been long built even before the suburb’s old Anglican church had been started, flames licked fallen twigs in a stone-lined fire pit. The fire cast tall, thin shadows that jerked and clawed up the timber walls as if desperate for escape.
Over the flames hunched an old woman. Her withered lips moved, but her words were soft; intended, perhaps, for the flames, or for something unseen already listening for her offer. Her hands, more like bone than flesh, moved quickly. In the uncomforting flicker of the hungry flames: a flash of silver, a splash of dark liquid, the ash of something crumbled through deft fingers. Then a final item, and the old woman’s hands slowed and moved with care. Tweezered in her skeletal fingers, a few long hairs joined by a small patch of blood-crusted skin. In went the hair and skin.
Her lips moved again.
The fire rose.
Outside, a chill wind grew, as if to carry across the night treetops, along the empty streets, and into the slumbering suburb a dark gift, urgent and baleful.