The Serpent's Sting by Robert Gott Page B

if she’d been able to, she would have been here,’ I said.
    â€˜Perhaps a telephone call to say she wasn’t coming would have been a basic courtesy,’ Mother said. She was right, of course, and I was sure that Geraldine would have made such a call if she’d been able to. Her failure to call alarmed me.
    Christmas lunch would normally extend late into the afternoon. There was no impetus to encourage this, and Privates Quist and Dervian took their leave at 2.00 p.m. I was embarrassed that their Australian Christmas experience had been rather dismal. I had no desire to remain in the fraught atmosphere of Mother’s house, so I offered to walk with the Americans across Princes Park, towards Camp Pell. While I was in the area, I thought I might as well knock on the door of Geraldine’s boarding house. Geraldine had warned me that her landlady was fiercely disapproving of men calling at the house, and I was reluctant to make trouble for Geraldine, but her disappearance was beginning to feel like an emergency.
    Private Dervian made polite noises about how pleasant lunch had been. I thanked him and assured him that Christmas lunch wasn’t usually so dire. In a rush of guilt about having let them down in some way, I told them that I could organise for two tickets to be available for the Boxing Day performance of Mother Goose . Private Quist said that he’d be on duty, but Private Dervian accepted the offer with some enthusiasm. He’d never seen a pantomime, so I thought it politic to outline its conventions. As we reached Royal Parade, he said he was looking forward to seeing me in a dress. We parted company.
    I stood outside Geraldine’s boarding house for some minutes, wondering if knocking on the door was a good idea after all. The curtains in the front room twitched, as if my presence had been noted. I decided to screw my courage to the sticking place and approached the door. I knocked. There was no response. I knocked again. No one answered. Perhaps I’d been wrong about there being someone in the front room. It was Christmas Day, after all, and it was very likely that the residents, including the landlady, were elsewhere. Having come this far, I was reluctant to leave without exploring further. I tried the front door. It was locked — hardly surprising, given that the panic about the recent murders by the American soldier, Eddie Leonski, hadn’t yet abated, and one of his victims had been found quite close to this house.
    There was a gate that protected the sideway to the house. I turned its handle and found that it, too, was locked. In frustration, I pushed against it, not vigorously, and the rotten wood in which the lock sat gave way. The gate opened, and came off its hinges as it did so. The sound of its fall was muffled by rampant grass and weeds. There was no turning back now, so I made my way to the rear. The garden was a disordered mess. Some teatowels and female underwear hung from the clothesline. The door to the dunny was open, and I could see that a vase of long dead flowers might once have provided a feminine touch.
    To my surprise, the back door was open. I entered the house, and found myself in a laundry that smelled of mould, sweetened with notes of Sunlight soap. I listened for any sound. Nothing. The laundry was attached to a kitchen, which smelled as if no decent meal had been cooked in it for a generation. This gave on to a corridor, on the left of which were two rooms, their doors closed. These belonged to the landlady, and I suppose I ought to have knocked on each of them to see if she was home. I didn’t, because I imagined that she wouldn’t take kindly to finding a man inside the citadel.
    On the right, a staircase rose to Geraldine’s room and the room of the other boarder. Again, I listened for any sound. Again, nothing. I didn’t call out. The sound of a man’s voice would alarm anyone who might be home. I climbed the stair