Bony and the Mouse Read online

  There Esther Harmon was talking with Joy Elder. They were facing each other across the table, and in Joy’s left hand was a rumpled handkerchief. Bony knocked on the back door, and it was opened by the girl.

  “Why, Nat Bonnar!” she exclaimed, dully. “Miss Esther, it’s Nat.”

  “Ask him in, Joy. I’ve been expecting him.”

  “Good evening, Miss Harmon! So, you’ve been expecting me.” Unsmilingly, Bony crossed to the window and drew down the blind. “The neighbours, you understand,” he said calmly, and seated himself at the long side of the table. “No word yet from your brother?”

  “As though you wouldn’t know,” replied Esther grimly, and Joy broke in with:

  “You don’t think Tony’s the murderer, do you? You can’t believe that. I know he isn’t. He couldn’t be. You found him with me that afternoon, and know he couldn’t even bring himself to take out the splinter.”

  “I’ve been telling Joy that it couldn’t look blacker against Tony Carr,” interposed Esther Harmon, dark eyes like beads. “But I don’t think he’s the murderer, and I’ve been telling Joy so. The shoes could have been planted on him and all. But...”

  “Yes, the ‘but’, Miss Harmon. There is the ‘but’. May I smoke?”

  “Everyone does without asking me, Nat. Tell us what you came for.”

  “Well...” Bony slowly rolled the cigarette, and deliberately struck the match and applied the flame. “I’ve been wondering about Tony and your brother. Your brother couldn’t be called a dill, and Tony Carr is a hefty young feller with strong hands and fairly thick wrists. It would seem that the window bar to which his handcuffs were attached by a spare cuff must have been weak, and that he wrenched himself free from the bar and then gripped the steering-wheel with the cuffs still about his wrist. Don’t you think that’s how it must have happened?”

  “Could be. I don’t know, Nat. I haven’t thought about it.”

  “There is, of course, another picture,” Bony went on, a smile about his mouth which wasn’t reflected in his eyes, dark-blue in the lamplight. “It’s likely there was fat along the edges of the meat in the sandwiches you cut for Tony’s lunch today. With the fat he could have greased his wrists and be able to work his hands from the cuffs. But even so, that little ‘but’ enters again. Tony’s hands and wrists are large, and the police cuffs would surely fit the wrists and leave nothing to spare. You didn’t provide anything else with the sandwiches, did you? Or add anything to the jug of tea?”

  “I added mustard and salt to the sandwiches, and sugar and milk to the tea.”

  “Thoughtful of you, Miss Harmon. But then that is what almost any woman would do. Don’t you agree, Joy?”

  “Of course. Yes, of ... but why all this silly talk? Tony got away, and that’s the main thing. They’ll never catch him. At least I hope so ... I wish I knew.”

  “It would have been very much better for Tony if he hadn’t escaped,” Bony said. “He would have been safe in a nice comfortable cell in Kalgoorlie. Now he’ll be hunted like a rabbit. And Constable Harmon is going to come home a very angry man. And if Tony didn’t gain freedom by wrenching away the window bar, then Constable Harmon is going to ask a lot of questions in a nasty manner.”

  “Such as, Nat?” challenged Esther.

  “Such as, when addressing himself to his special constables, who assisted him to remove Tony from the cell to the car, demanding to know which of them passed to the prisoner a spare key to the handcuffs.”

  “Well, if that was how it happened, I hope George takes it out of them, Nat. A policeman has enough to do without people giving handcuff keys to prisoners. Now you answer my questions.”

  “With pleasure. And when you’ve done, I’ll ask you some more.”

  “How is Melody Sam making out?”

  “Sound asleep. Sister Jenks plus Mr MacBride fixed that.”

  “And the hotel closed, or you wouldn’t be here. Who’s over there beside the cook and that Kalgoorlie girl who’s the maid now?”

  “No one else when I left. The two women ought to be all right. They’ve locked themselves in, and besides, the murderer is caught, isn’t he?”

  “No, he isn’t,” protested both women in unison, the elder vehemently, the young tearfully. Joy Elder’s reaction Bony could understand. They knew that Kat Loader had been lured to that side door, and, before she could step from the portal to the soft sandy ground, had been caught by the murderer’s hands and killed when her naked feet were clear. The main argument in favour of Tony’s innocence was that he didn’t have the strength to do just that.

  Aware that the feminine mind will seek any prop to maintain a preconceived notion, Bony proceeded with them along their road, and had to admit that they were not entirely without logic when Esther Harmon said:

  “You men make me tired. You’re all like children singing a nursery rhyme. Now be your age, Nat. There’s Kat Loader. You knew her better than you know me. Without taking into account that she wasn’t a lightweight woman for any man to hold up by the neck like a chook, can you imagine her leaving her bed for someone who knocks on her window, and going to the side door to meet him, unless she knows him extra well?”

  “Go on,” invited Bony.

  “Thank you. You’re not telling us that Kat Loader was so friendly with Tony Carr that she’d open the side door in the middle of the night to gossip with him. Whoever that man is, he was on a better footing with her than that. As good a footing as, say, you, Nat Bonnar. If that’s your name, which I doubt.”

  “It’s one of them,” admitted Bony. “Have you forgotten that Mary, the maid at the Manse, also went outside to meet the man who murdered her, and who must have been well known to her?”

  “I haven’t forgotten, Nat. Where were you at that time?”

  “Away across in Queensland. Can prove it, too. What say someone makes a pot of tea? I’ve been here nearly an hour, and no one has proved to be very hospitable.”

  “Make a pot of tea, Joy,” said Esther, and to Bony: “Can’t rile you, can we? One of these days I’m going to take you to pieces to find out how you breathe. D’you believe Tony Carr is the murderer?”

  “I followed the tracks of the man who killed Kat Loader,” Bony replied sternly. “The tracks led me to rock where that man changed his sandshoes for boots, and the boot tracks led me to Tony Carr’s shack. The sandshoes were on the roof, and the boots were at the foot of his bunk. Tony Carr walks like the man who wore the sandshoes and the boots. The black trackers who followed those tracks say the same thing.”

  “You’re not answering my question,” objected Esther, and Joy Elder paused with the teapot in her hands, and held her breath.

  “Which was?” mildly countered Bony.

  “Do you, or do you not, believe that Tony Carr murdered Kat Loader?”

  “Sister, I cannot tell a lie. I cut down the pine tree.”

  “Joy, throw that pot at him,” commanded the policeman’s sister.

  Joy Elder dropped the metal teapot to the table and ran to clutch Bony by the arms.

  “Don’t fool around, Nat. Don’t keep on like that. Tell us! Go on, tell us!”

  “Of course I don’t believe Tony did it,” Bony told her gently, and felt no embarrassment when she clung to him and wept. “It’s why I’m so sorry that someone gave him the key to the handcuffs and so let him escape, when he ought to be in a nice warm jail until all this nastiness is over. Actually, Joy, you should scold Miss Harmon for planting the handcuff key among the sandwiches she cut for Tony.”

  “How did you know about the key?” asked the girl, looking up into the blue eyes now so benign in the brown face. Bony, gazing past her at the crippled woman, clashed with defiance in eyes as steady as his own.

  “Brain, just brain power,” answered Bony lightly. “We leave here and find the street outside wet, and so we know it rained. Cause and effect. Tony frees himself from the window bar and drives the car through the gate obligingly opened by Constable Harmon
. That was an effect, the cause being a key which unlocked his handcuffs. There must have been a key, because only the other day I was talking with Constable Harmon when he was in the car, and I tested that window bar without conscious reason.”

  “Doesn’t follow that I gave Tony the spare key,” insisted Esther Harmon. “Do make that tea, Joy. The kettle’s boiling its spout off.”

  Bony sat at the table and rolled a cigarette, a man exposed to the inexplicable workings of the female mind. He said:

  “Miss Harmon, don’t you realise even now that your act could have resulted in tragedy? That either your brother or his prisoner might have been killed? There could have been a fight in the car. The car could have been wrecked. Or your brother ... he was armed with a revolver, and entitled to use it.”

  “Wouldn’t have been any good to him, Nat. I took the bullets out before he left.”

  “You did what?” Bony sat back, poise almost unseated. He retired to colloquialism. “Go on, tell me more.”

  Esther Harmon moved in her chair, lifting the crippled leg with her hands, nodded to Joy to bring cups and saucers from the cabinet, and smiled sweetly at Bony.

  “Very well, Nat, I’ll tell you something more. No one knows my brother but me. He’s a good policeman, the sort of policeman needed for these outback stations. He knows the Book, and he’s able to balance the Book with the character of the people he’s got to deal with, and live with, too. That accident you know about burned a blot on his mind, just a little blot making him hate lads round about Tony Carr’s age. That’s why he hit Tony with his revolver. Not because he was suspected of murder, but because he is the same age, and the same type of lad that killed his wife and did this to me.

  “I’ll tell you more, as you asked for it. No one knows Tony Carr but me. No one, Nat, no one at all. I know all about him from the time he was born. I know all about his beatings, all about his crimes; and all about the crimes committed against him. I know all about the hurts, all about the insults by ignorant people who imagine they themselves are spotless.

  “So there are the two of them, both strong, and, as you might say, both a little wrong in the head, hating each other like ordinary people could never do. My brother didn’t have to take Tony down to Laverton. He asked Headquarters to let him, and he persuaded whomever he was talking to down there in Kalgoorlie. I knew then that he would pin Tony to that window bar, and what he would be doing to Tony with his tongue all the way, and perhaps with his fists, too. I had to give the boy a chance, so I put the spare key in between the sandwiches with a little note telling him what to do, and when. And, as I told you, I took the bullets out of my brother’s revolver. To make those two men equal.”

  To make them equal! Bony thanked Joy for the cup of tea she placed before him, and said to Esther Harmon:

  “And so young Carr freed himself from the cuffs when your brother was opening the road gate, and then tried to run your brother down in the gateway?”

  “That I’ll never believe,” Esther retorted. “I told Tony not to harm George because George is my brother. No one knows those two like I do. And if you go on sitting there like that, just watching me like a kooka-burra on a tree watching a snake, I’ll know you like no one else does.”

  “Then I’ll leave at once,” Bony returned, lightly. “Before I do, tell me how you know that Tony Carr didn’t murder Kat Loader.”

  “I will, if you’ll tell me why you know he didn’t.”

  “I know he didn’t, well, just because I know he didn’t, Miss Harmon.”

  “That’s how it is with me, Nat.”

  “Miss Harmon, I don’t believe you.”

  “Nat, I don’t believe you, either. Hark!” In the ensuing silence they could hear the murmur of an approaching car. “That’ll be George. Out with you, Nat. You too, Joy. Out the back way.”

  Bony continued to sit, now shaking his head doubtfully, and Esther Harmon read his mind at that moment, and smiled, grimly, saying:

  “You needn’t worry, Nat, I can manage George. Go quickly. He’ll be here in five minutes.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  A Feather Bed for Tony

  CONSTABLE HARMON was accompanied by Inspector Mann, Detective-Sergeant Wellings, and young Doctor Flint, all of Kalgoorlie. Daybreak received the party with blank silence, most all the inhabitants lurking in the abysmal gloom beneath the pepper trees. They had watched the car coming along the back of Bulow’s Range, saw its headlights bathe with brilliance the stone image of Melody Sam, chuckled when the party gathered outside the main door of the hotel and someone struck a match to read the notice: “Closed. By Order.”

  “What the hell!” murmured Inspector Mann. “’Tisn’t Sunday, is it?”

  “Thursday when we left Kal this morning,” claimed Sergeant Wellings. “What’s to do, Harmon?”

  “Ruddy soon find out,” exploded Harmon, and proceeded to pound on the door. “Shut. By Order! What a tale to tell in Daybreak!”

  They could hear feet scuffing over the linoleum of the passage beyond the door, which had been built long before egg-box architects designed houses of glass and slats in hot Australia. They heard a heavy bolt being eased, and witnessed the door opening, to reveal the barman holding aloft a kerosene lamp, and arrayed in skyblue pyjamas.

  “Police here,” snarled Constable Harmon. “What’s the meaning of this notice?”

  “What it says,” replied Bony. “Place is closed. By Order.”

  “Closed my ... foot,” Harmon argued, and proceeded to wave Bony back as he advanced, followed by the party. “Light up, Nat. The inspector and the sergeant and the doctor require accommodation and refreshment. Where’s the licensee?”

  “In his room. The Reverend put him to bed, and the Sister provided a sedative. Shock, and all that. Mr Loader put me in charge. Said the hotel was to be closed. Said I had to provide refreshment. We have cold goat and bread and butter. And tea. The stock belongs to the licensee, and he isn’t compelled by law to dispense it to any traveller. So he said. There’s plenty of vacant rooms.”

  “What a pub!” moaned the doctor, and the sergeant groaned and waited on the inspector to voice comment.

  “What’s your name?” asked the inspector, and Bony gave his alias. “All right, Nat. Light up and get us a cold snack. Don’t bother to make tea. You’d like to see the body, Doctor?”

  “I don’t like seeing bodies at any time,” the doctor said as though he meant it. “I’ll examine it now, of course.”

  Bony called for the cook, and lit the ceiling lamps. The cook appeared in her dressing-gown, and, not forgetting the power of cooks in general, Bony politely suggested she might set a light supper-table for the late guests. He indicated Melody Sam’s room, and repeated the bulletin concerning his health, asking for reasonable quietness. The sergeant snorted. Constable Harmon glared. The inspector looked vacant.

  They all entered the dead woman’s room, were there fifteen minutes. Bony then showed them to the bedrooms and the bathroom, and he was waiting, now dressed, in the dining-room when they sought refreshment.

  “Look, Nat,” said the doctor. “We’re perishing. What about opening up?”

  “Certainly, sir. What’ll it be?”

  They named their drinks, and even Harmon, who ate with them, relaxed a little. Bony heard them discussing a plan of operations, which was to remain in abeyance until daylight the following morning; and shortly after that, Harmon left for his own quarters.

  It was past one o’clock when Inspector Mann requested a few moments of the barman’s attention in his room.

  The inspector was over six feet tall. His cranium was long and narrow, crowned by sparse black hair machined very short. He was next for promotion to superintendent, the senior officer of the Goldfields District of Western Australia. At this time he controlled the Northern Division of the Goldfields District, and had he ‘arrived’ fifty or sixty years earlier, there would now be fewer wealthy families living in and about Perth, whose fortunes were foun
ded on gold-stealing.

  An expert on gold, its recovery, uses and illicit markets, Inspector Mann would have succeeded in any calling, because of ability to recognise his own limitations. It was why he felt no jealousy of Bonaparte, when, he having failed to locate the murderer of three persons at Daybreak, this expert bush investigator was seconded from Queensland. These two hunters now sat on the edge of the bed, the better to converse without possibility of being overheard.

  “Not so cut and dried as Harmon believes, eh?” opened Mann, filling a pipe which should have been incinerated a generation ago. “Your remaining on the job points to it, anyway.”

  “Daybreak is an oyster which can be opened only by the oyster itself,” Bony said. “To carry the simile further, if the oyster is transferred from salt to fresh water, it will open without outside force. I have changed the water.”

  “You don’t think young Carr is the man we want?”

  “I’m sure he is not.”

  During a full minute Inspector Mann merely sucked noisily on his pipe before asking:

  “Mind telling me why? This is your assignment. We know how you work, and I have neither desire nor intention of interfering with you or your methods. You’ll grant me, however, a degree of curiosity when you permitted Harmon to arrest a man you believe is innocent.”

  “Being sure that one man is innocent doesn’t prove that another is guilty. Had I stepped forward to prevent Harmon arresting the wrong man, the right man, like my oyster, would have remained closed up for a very long time, perhaps always. I have no proof of who he is. I have evidence that he has carefully built up spurious evidence against Carr. The arrest and detention of Tony Carr is a factor I had to accept as the lesser of two evils, the major evil being the escape of a multiple killer.”

  “I see your point. Well, what clears Carr?”