Batchelors of Broken Hill b-14 Read online

  Batchelors of Broken Hill

  ( Bony - 14 )

  Arthur W. Upfield

  Arthur W. Upfield

  Batchelors of Broken Hill

  Chapter One

  The Place of Youth

  LONG, LONG ago the aborigines came and called it Wilya-Wilya-Yong. It was a dark, barren hill formed like a scimitar, its back broken, its slopes serrated and pitted and scarred, naked, sunburned, and wind-seared. One day a white man talked with a black man and learned that Wilya-Wilya-Yong meant the Place of Youth.

  White men brought their sheep and a poor German named Charles Rasp was employed to herd them. Rasp gazed at the Place of Youth, climbed the slopes, and found what he found. He knew nothing of precious metals, and so travelled to the nearest city and purchased a copy ofThe Prospector’s Guide. On his return he broke off a piece of the Place of Youth-it didn’t matter where-and experts declared it to be loaded with silver-lead.

  The fame of it sped across the surrounding sea-flat plains to the distant coasts of new-found Australia, and men came on horseback and on foot, in wagons and Buffalo Bill coaches, and they sank holes and rigged machinery. Others came and built a mining camp about the Place of Youth, which they called the Broken Hill. The camp became a shanty town named Broken Hill. Paupers became rich overnight, and rich men became paupers in a matter of minutes. Champagne was a flood; water but a trickle.

  Rasp and his partners faded out. Men were buried hastily in shallow graves: those who were lucky. Yet more men came to Broken Hill, lingered, departed-generations of them-and the shanty town became the third city in the state of New South Wales. Famous men came-engineers, scientists, industrialists; and eventually, in their turn, there came Jimmy the Screwsman and Napoleon Bonaparte, DI, CIB Queensland.

  Broken Hill wasn’t Jimmy’s objective when he left Sydney on completion of a burglary, the planning of which had called for mental concentration over a period of three weeks, and Jimmy had looked forward with keen expectancy to a long holiday. He had arranged with a transport driver engaged in black-marketing to convey him to Melbourne-trains and aircraft being out owing to expected rigid police inspection at the state border. Then when the transport was nearing Albury and the driver stopped to converse with another of his gang bound in the opposite direction, he learned that, because of the escape of the Great Scarsby, all road transport between the capitals was being checked.

  On the outskirts of Albury three utilities had met the transport, and into them went part of the cargo. With it went Jimmy the Screwsman, who eventually found himself at the inland town of Balranald.

  In Balranald a newspaper informed Jimmy that the Great Scarsby was still at large, and police of three states were looking for him. He had been incarcerated during the Governor’s pleasure in a criminal lunatic asylum, following trial for abduction in 1940, and as he had been a world-famed magician, hope of recapturing him was not high-in the view of the newspaper. Melbourne was now ‘hot’, even for Jimmy the Screwsman, and Jimmy decided to go west and take his vacation with a married sister in distant and far-away Broken Hill.

  He arrived at Broken Hill on 2nd October, entering the city on the mail car from Wilcannia, and there, sick of big cities and tired by his mental activities, he proceeded to relax.

  There is nothing parochial or bucolic about Broken Hill. There is no city in all Australia remotely like it excepting perhaps the golden city of Kalgoorlie. There is nothing of thesnobocracy of Melbourne, or the dog-eat-dog taint of Sydney, in the community of Broken Hill, and there is no thoroughfare in Australia quite like Argent Street, Broken Hill’s main shopping centre.

  Argent Street is unique. Besides being a street of shops it is the universal place of rendezvous. ‘Meet you down Argent Street’ is the phrase employed by husband to wife, by friend to friend. You may pause before a building erected in mid-nineteenth century; proceed and gaze at a section of a mining camp of the 1870s; stay at a hotel the exact replica of those from which emerged the American Deadwood Dicks; eat at ultra cafes run by smart Greeks and Italians; hire a gleaming automobile and shop at lush emporiums.

  Down Argent Street, Mr Samuel Goldspink had begun business in the clothing trade when Queen Victoria found little at which to be amused. He had prospered less because of his own acumen than by the growth and the wealth of the city he had watched mature. He was an ingratiating little man, having an infectious chuckle and a store of jokes against himself, so that his customers found it pleasant to be overcharged.

  Mr Goldspink was fifty-nine and a bachelor, seemingly hale and hearty, yet he collapsed and died inelegantly right in front of his own haberdashery counter. The doctor was dissatisfied with the manner of his passing, and the post-mortem revealed that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning; and, as it was quickly established that Goldspink had been in no mood to commit suicide, the effect was not dissimilar to that of a stick thrust into a bull ant’s nest-Detective Sergeant Bill Crome being the chief bull ant.

  Crome hadn’t had a murder for three years, and to the unexpectedness of this one could be attributed his failure to net the poisoner.

  On facts being winnowed from confusion they formed the vertebra of a common enough background.

  The time of the tragedy was three-twenty, or thereabouts, on a Friday afternoon, the busiest time of the week. The shop was crowded, and the eleven assistants were all hard at it, the most experienced serving two customers at the one time. Goldspink seldom served behind the counters. He was his own shopwalker, receiving his customers as his friends, talking volubly, escorting them to the departments they needed, and seeing to their comfort if they had to wait to be served.

  From three o’clock every afternoon all the assistants in turn were given the opportunity to slip away to a rear fitting-room for a cup of tea and a sandwich served by Mr Goldspink’s housekeeper. Like the farmer who believes that a well-fed horse will work harder, Mr Goldspink believed in looking after his assistants, but in addition he had long proved himself a kindly man.

  On her return to the shop, one or other of the assistants would carry a cup of tea and a biscuit to Mr Goldspink, and sometimes he would invite a valued customer to join him.

  Mr Goldspink this Friday afternoon was chatting with a woman choosing handkerchiefs, and he told the girl to put the tea cup on the counter as he was himself displaying handkerchiefs to the hesitant buyer, adding his persuasive powers to that of the girl actually serving.

  The assistant said that the customer was seated at the counter and that her employer was standing beside the customer. She could not describe the customer save that she was elderly and a stranger. She remembered this because Mr Goldspink put several artful questions to the customer in an effort to elicit her address. Eventually the customer chose her handkerchiefs, paid cash for the purchase, and departed without the receipted docket. Mr Goldspink then had taken up the cup of lukewarm tea and drunk it. Whereupon he had turned half round to the main floor of his shop, staggered, arched his back, slumped, and collapsed.

  Mrs Robinov, the housekeeper, then had taken charge. She cleared the shop, locked the street doors, and called for the doctor who had been attending Mr Goldspink for some time. The body was taken into the fitting-room and placed on the dressmakers’ table. The doctor, being aware of the condition of Mr Goldspink’s heart, had not arrived until a full hour had passed.

  The cup and saucer had been washed with the other utensils.

  No cyanide was found in the shop or anywhere on the premises. As Mrs Robinov was her late employer’s sole beneficiary, she reopened business the day following the funeral.

  The inquest was adjournedsine die.

  The affair made Detective Sergeant Bill Crome
most unhappy, owing to the fact that for the first time since being promoted to senior constable he had failed to produce results.

  Old Goldspink had been cyanided on 28th October. On the afternoon of 10th November the wife of a mine manager reported the theft from her home of jewellery which she valued at sixty-five pounds. Senior Detective Abbot took charge of this case.

  It appeared that the woman left her house on a shopping expedition down Argent Street, locking the front door and placing the key under the porch mat. On her return she retrieved the key, entered the house, and found ‘slight’ confusion. Thereupon she discovered the loss of the trinkets she was positive she had left in an unlocked drawer of her dressing-table. A trifling case compared with murder, and yet perplexing because it was not stamped with the usual methods of any known local criminal. Abbot decided that the confusion was the result of a sudden decision to leave housework and go shopping, and that eventually the jewellery would be found by the owner, who had temporarily forgotten where she had put it. No one knows better than the experienced detective how frail is the human mind.

  Frail! Crome’s word for it was ‘barmy’.

  Early in December four hundred and seventeen pounds disappeared from the safe in the office of the Diggers’ Rest. There were no signs of the safe’s having been tampered with. There were no unauthorised fingerprints on the safe. The key had never left the trousers pocket of the licensee, save when he went to bed, and it was then transferred to the pocket of his pyjamas. Drink! The licensee had been up to the hospital on the hill several times with delirium tremens.

  Yes, Sergeant Crome was in no light mood as he strolled down Argent Street on the afternoon of 23rd December. The pavements were thronged with Christmas shoppers, and the street was alive with traffic flowing between the borders of parked cars, utilities, and horse buggies. Miners sagged against the veranda posts, weighted with parcels bestowed on them by their wives. Women gossiped in small parties, and their children tugged at their skirts in frantic demands for ices and toys.

  Crome met and nodded to Luke Pavier, the Superintendent’s son and reporter on the staff of theBarrier Miner. He met, and did not salute because he did not know him, Jimmy the Screwsman arrayed in tussore silk and a white panama hat.

  From a jeweller’s shop issued Dr John Hoadly, who was large and young and damnably energetic.

  “Day, Bill! Nothing to do?”

  Sergeant Crome widened his mouth, pushed his felt hat to the back of his head, and then drew it forward to ride on an even keel.

  “You’d be astonished at the work I get through while you squander your ill-gotten fees. How’s the wife and the baby?”

  “Fine, Bill, fine. Just bought her an opal pendant and the kid a gold christening cup. Be up the pole this Christmas, with the wife in hospital, but it’ll be worth it. The boy’s a beaut.”

  “Naming him?”

  “John. Wife insists.”

  The doctor’s happiness lightened Crome’s mood, and the sergeant smiled. “Nice work, Jack, but don’t be a mug,” he added seriously. “Make sure little John has a mate. An only child is a lost soul-I know…”

  A slight man wearing a white drill tunic and black trousers appeared, grasped the doctor by the arm, and regarded Sergeant Crome with black eyes tinted with indignation. He shouted:

  “Acustomair! In mycafee! He stand, he bend backovair one of my tables. He fall andbreakitda table-smashoh. I go to him. I ask him ‘What the hell?’ He say nothing, nothing at all. He is dead.”

  “Your job, Doctor,” Crome said.

  Dr Hoadly nodded. With the little Italian’s hand still clutching his arm as though to be sure he would not run away, they entered the cafe, which was next to the jeweller’s establishment.

  The cafe was narrow and deep. People were standing with the startled irresoluteness of kangaroos warned of danger by one of their sentinels. Between the groups, like a ship steering between the islands of the Barrier Reef, the cafe proprietor led the doctor, Crome coming up astern.

  An elderly man lay upon the wreckage of a table. The face was stained faintly blue. The dilated eyes tended to turn inward, and the bared teeth were irregular and tobacco-stained. Crome knew him-a retired miner living with his niece and her husband in South Broken Hill.

  The customers were leaving the cafe, the sensation over and the prospect of being tabbed as witnesses enlarging. Crome was not particularly interested in them. Heat apoplexy. Many of these old chaps could not stand what in their youth they ignored. Old Alf Parsons was for it. Good way to go out-like a light.

  The doctor made a superficial examination, and then crouched low and sniffed at the dead man’s mouth. On rising to his feet, he dusted his trousers and wiped his hands with a handkerchief. He told the distracted Italian he would send for the ambulance, and Crome he drew aside and whispered:

  “I’m not stating he died of cyanide, Bill, but I’m thinking he did.”

  Crome grabbed Favalora, the cafe proprietor.

  “Where was he sitting?” he snarled.

  There was cyanide in the dead man’s tea cup, which Crome presented to the analyst.

  Crome kept on his feet for sixty hours. Asking questions, questions, questions. Statements, reports, theories, argument. Crome was semi-conscious when Inspector Stillman arrived from CIB, Sydney. Soft-spoken, sarcastic, bitingly insulting, Stillman caused Favalora to scream with rage, Mary Isaacs to weep, Mrs Robinov to order him from the shop. Stillman caused Bill Crome to come within an ace of smashing a fist into his sadistic mouth, and Abbot actually formed his lips to give forth the raspberry.

  A damn-fool woman complained that during her absence from home at North Broken Hill someone had stolen one hundred and eighty pounds she had kept in the American clock on the sitting-room mantel. Barmy! Served her right. What the hell were banks for? Stillman, the swine! Ha! Ha! The wonderful Stillman was bogged down too. The mighty brain from Sydney wasn’t able to produce any results.

  Leads… blanks. Theories built… and pulled down. Questions, and ever more and more questions, leading nowhere, giving nothing. Stillmancrawfishing out from under, pulling strings in Sydney to let him out and so leave the bag with Crome. Statements… reports… theories… conferences… disappointment… hope… disappointment… patience… patience.

  The inquest on Alfred Parsons adjournedsine die.

  Chapter Two

  Conference

  IT WAS a large room overlooking Argent Street, and only when the heavy door was open did the clacking of typewriters penetrate. Through the wide-open windows drifted the distant noise of mining machinery and the nearer sound of trams and cars. A room befitting the senior officer of the South-Western Police Division of New South Wales.

  Superintendent Luis Pavier had never been known to betray irritability. He seldom smiled, and when he did the placid features blurred like a pond disturbed by a stone. There was a stillness about Pavier which had nothing to do with physical control.

  One after another he was lifting reports from his ‘in’ basket, reading and initialling, and dropping them into the ‘out’ basket. It was routine work, the pulse of a virile community with his finger ever on the pulse, the patient mostly normal, and occasionally revealing bouts of fever. There remained three documents on his blotter when he pressed his desk bell.

  The door opened to admit his secretary, who came to stand at his elbow and remove the contents of the ‘out’ basket. Pavier took up the documents from the blotter and turned slightly that he might look at the girl. She was young and good to look at.

  “I must ask you to do these again, Miss Ball,” he said, his voice placid as his face, and, like his face, betraying nothing. “You have a dictionary?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir, if I’ve made mistakes.”

  “I have underlined them.” He saw the mortification in her eyes. “You are doing quite well in Miss Lodding’s place, and I don’t expect to have from you Miss Lodding’s efficiency. You will only gain that by experience-and
perseverance. You are still attending night school?”

  “Oh yes, sir.”

  “Stick to it. All right, Miss Ball.”

  “Excuse me, sir. The duty constable says there’s a man waiting to see you. The name is Knapp. He won’t state his business.”

  Superintendent Pavier glanced at his wrist watch, frowned, again looked up at his temporary secretary.

  “Knapp!” he echoed, and then added: “Bring him in.”

  Coincidence. Must be coincidence. Plenty of people called Knapp. An entire nation once called a foreigner that name. A face he had seen at a police conference a few years back danced among the leaves of memory, and then the living face was beaming at him in his own office.

  “Why, Inspector Bonaparte! How are you?”

  “Well, Super. And you?”

  “Quite a surprise. Sit down. Glad you called in on me.”

  The man dressed in an expertly pressed light grey suit sat on the indicated chair and crossed his legs. The amazingly blue eyes in the light brown face were friendly and happy, and from the inside pocket of the double-breasted coat came a long official envelope.

  “In Sydney yesterday I lunched with your Chief,” Bony said, toying with the envelope. “Among other matters we discussed was that of two poisoning cases which friend Stillman failed to finalise. I took it on myself to apply to my department for leave of absence to see what I can do about them, and I’ve been granted a fortnight. I have here a letter from your Chief. The matter is left entirely to you, as I made it plain that I had no wish to intrude into your domain save with your sanction.”

  Pavier accepted the proffered envelope, slit it open with a nail file, and extracted two letters. The topmost informed him that Inspector Bonaparte had been seconded to the New South Wales Police Department for fourteen days, and the other letter was a private epistle in which the writer explained that Queensland having loaned their ‘precious’ Bonaparte for fourteen days, would he, Pavier, see to it that Bonaparte was back with his own department at the expiration of that period, said Bonaparte being a notorious rebel. Dropping the communications to his desk, Superintendent Pavier said: