Death of a Swagman Read online

  “The cortege has not yet assembled,” Mr Jason said as loudly and with emphatic disapproval.

  “But we can go on,” argued his son.

  “Wait.”

  “Oh, all right, blast it,” growled his son.

  Sergeant Marshall came driving out to the street in his car, and he waved to Mr Jason to proceed, but Mr Jason was adamant. He remained standing, posed as though gazing upon the figure of grief recumbent on the roof of his hearse, but actually glaring at the sergeant, who drove his car in a circle to bring it to the rear of the hearse where the bearers got in with him.

  Again Mr Jason surveyed the throng. Then he turned to the front, raised his hand with the tall hat clenched in it, nudged young Jason with his foot, and before he could sit down nearly fell over the seat when the driver viciously let in the clutch and accelerated down the street at unseemly speed.

  Just beyond the township the minister’s car shot out to the street from the parsonage, thence to keep a respectable distance to avoid much of the dust.

  “Young Tom’s making no bones about this planting,” observed the yardman. “The old bloke will be rampant mad time we hit the cemetery. He likes to enjoy his funerals.”

  “He enjoyed giving me ten days,” Bony said lightly.

  “Takes ’imself seriously, does old Jason,” asserted Hudson. “Not a bad fault, either. Used to be an actor, once, in his young days. Tom once told me that his old man still has albums full of press notices about his acting, and every Sunday evening he reads ’em all through. Funny old bird, all right.”

  “Got a lot of good points,” remarked the sergeant. “Remember how he helped Ma Lockyer and her kids when her husband was rolled on by his horse?”

  “Yeh. And that never come out till long afterwards, did it? An’ I understand that he acted as nurse for old Doc Scott when Boozer Harris nearly died that time with whiskeyitis. I was working on Tintira then. I ain’t saying anything against old Jason.”

  Presently the hearse reduced speed and entered the cemetery and drew up beside the grave dug that morning. Mr Jason dismounted, carrying his hat in the crook of an arm. They removed the coffin from the hearse whilst he uttered little cries in a soft voice:

  “Steady now! Slowly does it! Honour the dead! The dead know all things and we nothing. Gently now!”

  The hot north wind teased his black hair and played on his moustache like invisible fingers on a harp’s strings. His white face emphasized the dark eyes which gleamed with the anger his voice did not betray. When he stepped back Mr James stepped forward.

  The wind also played with the unruly brown hair of Rev. Llewellyn James, and with the skirt of his crepe gown. The light blue eyes had not failed to notice Mr Jason’s anger, the sergeant’s stiff military bearing, the unassuming figure of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the loose stance of the bushmen bearers.

  He produced a book, coughed, began to read the burial service in his singsong nasal voice, and Bony wondered why a man should adopt such a voice when conducting a religious service. Mr James read rapidly. He made no pauses between sentences. It might have been he who had promised old Sinclair his truck by five o’clock.

  Mr Jason placed his top hat on the ground, and upon it placed a stone to keep it there. He removed his frock coat, took up one of the shovels and assisted his son to fill in the grave. The minister joined the policeman and began to ask questions concerning the dead man, to which Marshall returned evasive answers.

  “Give us the shovel, Mr Jason,” suggested Harry Hudson. “I’m used to hard yakka.” And the filling in proceeded apace, young Jason working with evident haste to get the job done Mr Jason came to stand with the sergeant and the minister, anger still smouldering in his eyes.

  “Will you relieve my son, Ted?” he asked the yardman. “We have a pressing job to get out.”

  “Righto, Mr Jason. Give us your shovel, Tom.”

  Young Tom ungraciously flung down his tool. The yardman grinned without mirth. The young man ambled to the hearse, started its engine, and roared away out to the road and up the gradient towards the town.

  “Your son needs a little tighter rein, Mr Jason,” remarked the minister undiplomatically.

  “There are more than my son in this district, Mr James, who need to have faults corrected.”

  “Meaning, Mr Jason?”

  “That people who live in glass houses should not throw stones, Mr. James,” replied Mr Jason. “Pray, do not let us wrangle here among the dead.”

  “But, Mr Jason—”

  “Please!” cried Mr Jason commandingly.

  On the homeward journey Mr Jason sat beside the sergeant, and Bony occupied the rear seat with the yardman and Harry Hudson. They left the cemetery without speaking, but when on the track the sergeant said conversationally:

  “We all seem to have been kept pretty busy lately.”

  “To be sure,” responded Mr Jason. “Three deaths and three burials all within five weeks, and that after several years with no deaths. The vagaries of life are often mystifying. As Longfellow wrote:

  “There is a Reaper whose name is Death,

  And, with his sickle keen,

  He reaps the bearded grain at a breath,

  And the flowers that grow between.”

  “Death is certainly a reaper,” murmured Marshall, and Mr Jason stretched forth his right hand and quoted with rich articulation: “‘O mighty Caesar! Dost thou lie so low? Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, shrunk to this little measure?’”

  “I think we could do with a drink,” announced the yardman, sotto voce. “The day’s getting warm. Give me a coupler deep-nosers, an’ I’ll recite ‘The Passing of Dan McTavish’ in eighteen verses and a bit.”

  They all went into the hotel—even Sergeant Marshall and Bony, the jailbird. And everyone at the bar delayed drinking until Mr Jason had loaded his pipe, lit it, and had inhaled with tremendous satisfaction. No longer was he angry, but to Mr Watson’s great disappointment he did not beat his previous record.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Battle of Pros and Cons

  “WE SUFFER from a number of disadvantages not experienced by crime investigators in a city,” Bony said in that quiet, unassuming voice of his. He had completed the making of half a dozen cigarettes, and now he glanced up at Sergeant Marshall, who was seated on the far side of the office desk. The door was closed and the windows were closed, too, although the evening was warm.

  “One of those disadvantages,” he went on, “is seldom recognized by the unthinking. The unthinking immediately rush to the conclusion that a killer is more easily discoverable in a small community than in a large one, whereas in fact the smaller the community in which a killer has operated the greater the difficulty in locating him—that is, if he has a brain. Fortunately you and I have opposed ourselves to a killer having a brain, and, also fortunately, we have to locate him in a small community. Those two facts give us cause for self-congratulation, eh?”

  “Well, if you know where we are or what it’s all about, I don’t,” grumbled Marshall. “And I can foresee trouble in that letter of yours to D.H.Q. telling ’em in most uncivil-service-like manner to keep out.”

  Bony leaned back in his chair and chuckled.

  “My dear man, we don’t bother about D.H.Q. when we’ve got such a splendid job like this on our hands. Don’t worry so. We can’t help little Mr Watson telegraphing the account of the hanging to his papers, to be followed by the certainty of city reporters barging in and messing around when we want everything to go on quietly. And if Pro Bono Publico writes to the local press and demands to know why the killing is not being investigated by a Redman or two from Sydney, well, we must shut our ears to the clamour. It might force me out into the open through an announcement that the great Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte is on the job, but that is a fence we will take when it is reached. This is my case and yours, and no one is going to be allowed to interfere with it or with us.”

  “But my distr
ict inspector—”

  Bony waved his hands.

  “Copy my example,” he urged. “Never permit yourself to be concerned with inspectors and chief commissioners and people of that class. They are all right in their places.”

  “So am I ... so far. Anyway, it’s your funeral.”

  “Not quite so morbid ... after this afternoon,” Bony implored. “Now let’s get down to a battle of pros and cons, and when we have finished you will see that matters have not been allowed to slide as much as you think. To begin.

  “You are not aware that I sent those door handles to Sydney from Mildura Post Office, are you? How do we know that the killer is not a member of the post office staff? Already I can see that you appreciate the significance of hunting for a killer in a small community like Merino. There are only a hundred and fifty people in all your district, and only eighty persons, including children, living here in Merino.”

  “How did you get those handles away?”

  “I addressed them, together with a long covering report, to a friend of mine in Sydney who will himself deliver the package and report to headquarters. I stuck up a commercial traveller and gave him five shillings to cover registered postage. I should get back the receipt tomorrow.”

  Bony inhaled deeply. Then he placed the cigarette on the edge of the desk—the ash tray was a jam tin—and, interlocking the fingers of both hands, rubbed the palms together and beamed at Marshall.

  “We’ve got a hold on a first-class murder investigation,” he said softly and with tremendous satisfaction in his voice. “The killing of Kendall and that swagman, together with the possible intended killing of old Bennett is not the work of a man who kills his nagging wife, or another who slays his sweetheart because she has been untrue to him. This feller you and I are after is in the same class as Jack the Ripper. He’s an aristocrat, not a sniffling lounge lizard.”

  “Damned if I can see anything to be cheerful about,” snorted Marshall. “Still, tell me some more, and then I might.”

  “Now I have been through Redman’s collection of statements and his long general report. What he knew when he left Merino is only a fraction of what I know, and you know but a fraction of what I know. From Redman’s material, I cannot see how Redman came to suspect young Jason above others. Because a man fights with another who is subsequently murdered, we cannot even assume that he killed him, even although he was licked in the fight. In actual fact a man who fights is less likely to kill than one who declines to fight. What is your opinion?”

  “I never considered young Jason,” replied the sergeant.

  “Did you ever employ your mind with the motive for Kendall’s murder?”

  “Yes. Loss at cards. Kendall was a bad man. He might have cheated that night, but not so’s an accusation could be made against him. Remember the statements made to Redman by the men who played against him?”

  “I do. They both stated that Kendall won over fifteen pounds in less than two hours, and that they thought he cheated but weren’t sure. I have given those two statements some consideration, but we have to offset them by police reports on the characters of those who signed them. Both are well known in this district; both are stated to be good citizens.

  “I haven’t concentrated on the killing of Kendall as much as I would have done had it not been for subsequent developments. I began with the most remarkable feature of Kendall’s death; then got myself ten days in your lockup because that remarkable feature goes to prove that Kendall’s murder was out of the ordinary and was done by a resourceful man. I saw, before I left Sydney, that I would require absolute freedom to make inquiries among people who did not know me.”

  “What is the remarkable feature?” asked Marshall, impatiently waiting for Bony to get to the meat. Bony grinned mirthlessly:

  “The game of noughts and crosses on the door of the hut at Sandy Flat,” he said.

  “Ah! I remember you mentioning that more than once.”

  Bony abruptly leaned forward and began to shuffle the pile of documents on the desk between himself and the sergeant. “Here it is—this photograph of the front of the hut,” he said. “See the drawing of the game with chalk on the hut door. It is done with white chalk, and not the red or blue raddle with which sheep are marked, indicating that the chalk was carried about for just that purpose by the man who drew the game. Take a glance at it.”

  Marshall studied the now familiar picture.

  “Observe closely that game of noughts and crosses,” urged Bony. “The assumed players did not complete it, for there is neither a nought nor a cross in the centre of the left-hand section. See the position of the ticks and the little curved lines and the dot at the right extremity of the lower horizontal line. Those additions to the game itself are done but roughly as though carelessly by a player when pondering on his move to be. Consider the number of variations which could be made with the crosses and the noughts and the small additions. Why, one could concoct a cipher with such material. And that, my dear Marshall, is just what it is.”

  “You can read this cipher?” he asked, less as a question than as a statement.

  “I can read it,” claimed Bony. “I have seen that cipher on homestead gates, on telephone posts, and burned on chips of wood or bark and left in the vicinity of homesteads and near small townships. There is one on the gatepost just the other side of the town dams which states that you are not a hard policeman but are given to charging swagmen in order to get work done by them whilst in custody.

  “The cipher is used by only the genuine swagmen. As you are aware, a goodly proportion of the men travelling these outback tracks are honest station hands looking for a job, or going back to a job from a bender at a wayside or town hotel. There is, however, a minority of swagmen, better known as sundowners, who never work and who must walk hundreds of miles in the year tramping from station homestead to homestead, where they obtain rations or a handout. It is this minority who have evolved the noughts-and-crosses cipher to leave information for others of their class.

  “You see how it goes. A sundowner arrives at a gate in the fence enclosing the homestead area or the township area. He looks for the cipher on that part of the gate or telephone post which the road user would never see, telling him that the station cook is generous, or that the station owner should be avoided.

  “Mind you, that cipher is not now universally used, and with the passage of time it has become more complex, so that it is almost as difficult to read by one familiar with the original cipher as it is to read fortunes from the cards. However, to revert. That particular example scrawled on the door at Sandy Flat hut comprises a statement both clear-cut and definite.”

  “Go on,” urged Marshall. “How do you make it all out?”

  “It would take a long time to explain, and the necessity doesn’t arise now. I will, however, point out a few simple things. The semicircle at the left extremity of the top horizontal line means meat. The quarter circle connected to the top horizontal line and the left-hand perpendicular line means dead or death. The short line drawn at an angle at the top of the right perpendicular line represents brought—brought to this place. And the V at the bottom of the same line represents police, or a policeman’s helmet. And so on and so forth, including the positions of the noughts and crosses.

  “A most important meaning, or message, is conveyed in the central square, where the cross is overlaid by the nought, or the other way round. That is the clear danger sign: get out, clear out, don’t be seen hereabouts. In effect the cipher reads: ‘A dead body has been brought to this hut for the police to find. Danger. Clear out. Touch nothing.’”

  When Marshall again looked up from studying the photograph, he said admiringly:

  “Where did you learn it all?”

  “Oh, from a swagman who thought I was another of his clan. To proceed. We may presume that the man who scrawled that game of noughts and crosses on that door had seen someone take the body of Kendall into the hut, and then had watched that somebody k
ill one of Kendall’s ration sheep, catch the blood and pour it on the floor about the head of the man, and hang the carcass in the meat house. The first part of the presumption I adopted when first I saw that photograph, the second was yesterday when I learnt that a fresh and uncut carcass of a sheep was hanging in the meat house the following morning. Scott supports the second part. He says that, in his opinion, the sample of blood he scraped from the floor of the hut where the body lay is animal blood, not human.

  “Recall. The drawer of the game of noughts and crosses states clearly that a dead body was brought to that place. He doesn’t state that a dead body is in it. It was brought there. Therefore he must have seen it brought there, and most likely he saw the face or recognized the figure of the man who carried it into the hut. However, I am breaking away from fact to supposition when I say it is likely that the watcher recognized the man who brought the dead body and placed it in the hut.

  “Given two facts, an investigator is entitled, pro tem., to assume a third with which to connect them,” Bony went on. “My assumed fact is based on this deduction. The man who saw him who brought the body to the hut knew him and subsequently began blackmail. He arranged that that same hut should be the place of meeting of himself and his victim, or that it be the place where the money was to be deposited by the victim.

  “That swagman, remember, did not leave the station homestead until after ten o’clock at night. That was the night of December fourth, three nights before the full moon. When he walked into the hut to meet his blackmail victim, or to obtain the blackmail money, he walked into death. For he was strangled with a strip of hessian and his body was hanged with his own swag straps. But, Marshall, remember that the motive for the killing of that swagman, our assumed motive, is merely supposition, and we may yet be grievously wrong. Interested?”

  Sergeant Marshall’s despondency had long since vanished. He said: