Murder down under b-4 Page 12

  “That will be lovely. Will he wait to bring us home?”

  “Certainly. And we will not come home until you are tired or the dance stops for the night. If you will excuse me for a little while I will go along and invite your father.”

  “Father!”

  “Of course. We must persuade Mr Jelly to come along too.”

  “If only he would!”

  “He’ll come after I have invited him.” Bony rose to his feet. “I’ll not be long,” he told them smilingly. “When I return to you we’ll arrange the dances you will give me, for if we leave it until we reach the hall other men will quickly snap them up.”

  Yet the lightness of his voice failed to bring back the happiness his mention of Mr Jelly had banished. In their eyes was expressed horror when he slowly backed towards the passage leading to the farmer’s den. Whilst he walked the short passage to the door at its farther end cold rage entered his heart against the man whose extraordinary behaviour was blighting the lives of his two daughters. On the closed door Bony knocked peremptorily, as though the law itself knocked.

  No sound came from within the room.

  Again he knocked, as the law impatient of denial.

  “Lucy-goaway!” ordered Mr Jelly in his low, tuneful voice.

  “It is I, Mr Napoleon Bonaparte,” Bony said loudly. “Let me in, Mr Jelly. I wish to speak to you.”

  “Go away!”

  “Open the door, please, Mr Jelly.”

  “Go away! D’youhear?”

  “I will not go until I have talked with you on a most important matter. I am a persistent man, Mr Jelly.”

  To this last statement Mr Jelly made no answer. Bony waited for ten seconds.

  “You must have heard me, Mr Jelly,” he said, and there was just that hint of a threat in his voice to tell any man that he was not to be turned away.

  With startling abruptness the door was flung back. The soft lamplight silhouetted the cigar-shaped proportions of Mr Jelly’s tall figure. Vicelike hands gripped the detective’s arms. He was swung round like a weathercock. Cunning hands pinioned his wrists with steel handcuffs. He was dragged into the room. The door was shut with a crash.

  The red-shaded lamp on the table appeared as a lighthouse amid the raging sea of albums, newspapers and clipped cuttings, a pot of paste and scissors, two empty bottles and one partly full, several glasses and a water jug, enlargements of photographs and picture frames, and slices of bread and butter on a plate. The tinted light above the shade appeared to magnify Mr Jelly’s proportions to an alarming degree.

  The farmer was dressed only in his shirt and trousers. The halo of grey hair was a tangled mass. His complexion was as white paint patchily laid over dead features, and whilst he regarded the manacled Bony his light blue, red-rimmed eyes were the only indication that he lived. In his voice, when he spoke, there was no anger, and because there was none, Bony sensed the man’s dangerousness.

  “Now that you are here, say your little piece,” Mr Jelly commanded.

  “Sit down and let us talk,” Bony urged him quietly.

  “It would be for your ultimate good to lower your dignity a little,” the farmer said, as though explaining a difficult point. “Like all your kind you are too presumptuous. When white people are foolishly decent to your sort you think them weak enough to put up with unlicensed impertinence. You will say why you have forced yourself on me, or-”

  “Sit down and let us talk,” Bony said for the second time. “I came here as a friend, so let us remain friends.”

  The corners of Mr Jelly’s mouth were sucked slightly inward. During a period of ten seconds he examined Body as one might a horse at a show. Then he turned back to the tallboy chest of drawers, rummaged among the contents, and brought out a tapered whip of rhinoceros hide. Returning to Bony, he said:

  “Will it be necessary for me to persuade you?”

  Bony stood up. Mr Jelly took another step towards him. Slowly Bony’s hands came round his sides, and casually he tossed on the table the pair of handcuffs.

  Mr Jelly’s steady gaze at the detective’s face wavered and fell down to the glittering steel bands. They were, he saw, still locked-he had locked them on Bony’s wrists. Without haste the half-caste backed round the table, but Mr Jelly did not follow. He stood looking at his own handcuffs as though the gleaming points of reflected light hypnotized him. Silence and absolute cessation of movement for several seconds, and then Bony walked round the table back to Mr Jelly’s side, when he reached away for a chair and drew it opposite that on which he had been forced to sit.

  For the third time he said:

  “Sit down and let us talk.”

  The farmer’s gaze lifted from the handcuffs to the detective’s face. They stood staring into each other’s eyes as might two boxers before a bout. Mr Jelly was on the brink of a mental breakdown brought on by some strange excitement and hard drinking. The man’s nerves were all quivering, jerking little patches of skin on face and neck. He was as one coming out of a terrible fit of masked epilepsy; presently his muscles began to tremble in all his limbs. For the fourth time Bony said:

  “Sit down and let us talk.”

  Now he deliberately turned his back on the farmer to clear a space on the table and reach for whisky and glasses, expecting to feel leaping agony beneath the stroke of the whip. The weight of a hair would decide the scales in favour of Mr Jelly becoming a madman or a cowed, prostrate man. Bony began to pour whisky into the two glasses. The drinks he set, one at each end of the cleared space, and the water jug exactly between them. Slight movement behind him was almost too great a temptation to turn and fight for his life before the dreadful whip fell, and he could have sighed audibly when the following movement told him that Mr Jelly had collapsed into the chair Bony had placed for him.

  Without looking at the farmer, he produced tobacco and papers, sat down, fell to making a cigarette. Not till the lighted match was held against the tobacco did he look at Mr Jelly, encountering then the pale blue eyes regarding him with an admixture of astonishment and curiosity. Bony leaned back in his chair with the freedom of one who had known Mr Jelly for a very long time.

  “I used to do a lot of tracking for the Queensland police a few years ago,” he said easily, thankful that he was mastering this extraordinary man. “Sometimes they played jokes with me, catching me unaware and securing me with their handcuffs. The regulation bracelets used here are better than the American type. Yet I agree with you that yours of the new French pattern are superior to both. Here’s luck.”

  Mr Jelly continued to stare.

  “Drink up,” Bony said persuasively, examining an unmounted enlargement of a portrait study.

  When Mr Jelly did speak his voice betrayed the struggle to regain composure.

  “Why have you come here?” he asked.

  “Because I am the father of three boys.”

  “What have your boys got to do with your being here uninvited?”

  “I don’t know how old you are, but I am forty-three,” Bony told him, puffing at his cigarette. “I married young, and my wife and I and our three sons form an exceptionally happy family.”

  Abruptly he leaned forward and pointed beyond the other. Their eyes clashed. He went on. “The other side of that closed door your two children are living in fear for you because of you. They were kind enough to ask me in to tea last Saturday. I was here when you came home. This evening, in order to repay their kindness, I called to invite them to a dance at the Jilbadgie Hall next Saturday evening, and Mrs Saunders tells me that since you arrived home you have not left this room or permitted the members of your family to come into it. As a man and as a father, it was my duty to force myself on you for the purpose of telling you to your face that you are behaving shamefully.”

  “You have plenty of nerve, haven’t you?” Mr Jelly said grimly.

  “Little Sunflower gave me nerve enough tonight.”

  “And plenty of curiosity, eh?”

  “I have alwa
ys been of a curious disposition,” was Bony’s admission.

  The farmer’s hand, which had been idly fingering the glass of his untasted whisky, suddenly fell on Bony’s right wrist. The half-caste made no effort to free his wrist from a grip which was as firm and as unbreakable as a clamp of bar iron. Instead he inquired:

  “What prison were you in?”

  Had he released a powerful spring beneath Mr Jelly the effect could not have been more startling. In the space of a fraction of a second the farmer was on his feet, glaring down at the detective, whose wrist he continued to hold in his enormously powerful hand. Bony noted with prideful pleasure that the result of his bombshell was to produce honest anger in the place of cold, simmering fury. Jelly’s voice was harsh when he demanded:

  “What do you mean, you coloured rat?”

  “My question was but the logical outcome of the dexterity with which you handcuffed me, hustled me into the room from the passage, and the precise manner in which you are now gripping my wrist. If you so flagrantly betray your old profession, how can you blame me for correctly guessing it?”

  “You seem to know a deal about my old profession,” the other said.

  “As I told you, I have mixed a lot with policemen and warders. However, we are drifting from the subject of ourselves as family men. Cannot you understand that your remarkable behaviour is really causing your girls much distress?”

  If the former question had jerked the farmer to his feet like the spring beneath the jack-in-the-box, this last question acted like the box lid which compresses the spring and imprisons the jack. Mr Jelly dropped into his chair, fell forward over the littered table, buried his face in his arms, and began to weep. The following minutes were the most terrible Bony ever had experienced.

  The pointed, hairless head of the crying man touched the enlarged photographic print of a young man about twenty-five years of age, clean-shaven and by no means ill-looking. The hair was ruffled as through by a sea wind, and the widely opened eyes looked out with charming frankness. Bony took it up the better to examine it, and presently, in idle curiosity, he reversed it and read in Mr Jelly’s handwriting:

  “CharlesLaffer. Hanged, Fremantle-”

  It appeared probably that Mr Jelly was about to add the date ofLaffer’s hanging when Bony disturbed him by his insistent knocking. The morbidity of the farmer’s hobby caused Bony to shudder, and after a little while he began to speak in a low voice, urging Mr Jelly to give it up. He described the effect this passion for collecting details of murderers and of their executions was having on the other’s mind and what the probable end would be if it were continued. He spoke of the unhappiness it was causing Lucy Jelly and Sunflower but said nothing about the mysterious journeys undertaken at the call of mysteriously sent messages. Presently Mr Jelly became calmer, and when he raised his head his expression was bitter.

  “I am an old woman, Bony,” he said. “Sometimes I think I am a little mad. I am sorry for what I said about your colour. I have been mad for several days lately, and because you have come here pluckily to beard me in my own room, I will tell you a little of my life’s tragedy.”

  Again he crossed to the tallboy, and when he returned to the table he carried a small silver-framed picture. Laying it down before Bony, he said:

  “That is of my wife, taken about a year after we were married.”

  Whilst Bony was looking at an older edition of Sunflower the farmer took from the wall one of the framed photographic reproductions. When he laid this beside the picture of his wife he said in explanation:

  “And this is the picture of Thomas Kingston, who murdered her whenDulcie was ten months old.”

  Bony turned in his chair to stare up at Mr Jelly.

  “Then your name isn’t Jelly,” he said.

  “No. Afterwards I took my mother’s maiden name. I had to, you see. I gave up my position in the prison service and finally settled here when the country was new. Like you and your wife, Hetty and I were sweethearts. I was lying on her grave, unable to shed any more tears, the minute they hanged Kingston, who walked to the trap singing hymns. They are dead, but old Bob Jelly lives on and interests himself in every swinewho kills: sad when the alienists cheat the law, glad when the law cheats them.”

  “Nevertheless, you should give thought to your girls,” Bony said sympathetically. “It is your duty to live for them and their happiness. Don’t you see that by giving most of your thought to this strange hobby of yours you are enabling Kingston to strike at them through you? Let the past fade and the future shine brightly for all three of you.” Mr Jelly’s face became buried again on his arms. “When I asked your girls and Mrs Saunders to come with me to the dance their eyes sparkled at the prospect, and when I said I would see you and invite you, too, I saw uneasy fear replace their joy. Give all this up. Let us now collect all this material, all those pictures, and take the collection into the garden and burn it.”

  “No.” Mr Jelly was emphatic. “But I am in the mood to compromise. I will cease to collect when I have filled the frame with the picture of George Loftus’s murderer, and that will be directly he is hanged.”

  “You mean that the killer of Loftus will provide the final item?”

  “I mean that; just that.”

  “Very well,” Bony said, sighing. “You are, I think, a man to keep your word. And now shall we both go along to the kitchen and tell them that you have accepted my invitation to the dance?”

  Mr Jelly raised his head.

  “Not now,” he begged. “I am unwashed, unshaven.”

  “I will bring hot water and towels,” Bony declared, rising. “You and I will hear Sunflower laugh before another hour has gone.”

  Leaving the farmer still protesting, Bony passed out of the room, walked the short passage. When he entered the kitchen three pairs of eyes regarded him steadily, entreating him to speak quickly.

  “A jug of hot water, a wash-basin, and a towel, please,” he said.

  “Father! Is Father hurt?” Lucy asked sharply.

  “No, no!” replied Bony, laughing softly. “He is quite all right, and he will be with us in a few minutes as fresh as Peter Pan.”

  Mrs Saunders could not refrain from smiling at Bony’s linking of that gay figure of childhood with the cigar-shaped Mr Jelly. The three assisted each other to supply Bony’s wants, and in less than two minutes he re-entered Mr Jelly’s den to see the farmer standing at the window and pouring whisky from the remaining bottle on a quite innocent flower plant. When Bony set down the basin and the water on the plain washstand Mr Jelly said, with wonder in his voice:

  “You are a very strange man. Somehow I think I shall get to like you.”

  “Everyone gets to like me in time.”

  “Here, strop my razor. My hand shakes.”

  Yet, despite his shaky hand, Mr Jelly shaved with great care and thoroughness. After he washed the grey fringe of hair and combed it, when he had put on a clean shirt and over it a well-brushed coat, the transformation from the dream-haunted, drink-sodden man was amazing. But he said:

  “I feel ashamed. I’d rather meet them in the morning.”

  “We will meet them together,” Bony said firmly, adding in lighter vein: “Tell you what! Let’s climb out through the window and go in by the kitchen door, as though we had been out to lock up the fowls.”

  For three seconds Mr Jelly gazed at Bony as though he was seeing him for the first time. He nodded his big head solemnly and crawled through the open window, as a little boy robbing the pantry. Together they reached the veranda steps; together they entered the kitchen dining-room. Beyond the threshold Bony halted. Mr. Jelly took one further step forward. His eyes were bright, and he blinked rapidly.

  Sunflower, who was standing by the sofa, held by amazement, suddenly ran to him, oblivious of her bandaged foot. A little more sedately Lucy followed her, so that there stood Mr Jelly holding a daughter in each of his massive arms, kissing them in turn, whilst the tears ran unchecked down his weather-b
eaten face.

  Bony wrote on a leaf torn from his notebook:

  “Will call for all at half-past eight Saturday.”

  Slipping the note on the dresser when sure that Mrs Saunders observed him, he nodded to her, pointed to the note, placed two fingers against his lips to enjoin silence, and silently walked out of the house.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Mr Thorn’s Ideas

  ALL DAY Thursday Bony cut and carted fence posts from the dense timber covering the eastern half of the government farm. For years posts had been cut from that area of timber when required, and he found that the posts suitable for the rabbit fence were not so plentiful as the uninitiated might think; for many trees, when dry, would easily become destroyed by the omnipresent termite.

  Because he would need the horse for the afternoon trip to the timber, Bony stacked the posts among the trees near the gate beside the railway. He then parked the dray in deep shade, and, taking the horse out, tied it to a tree to eat its midday feed. Finally he made a fire, filled the billy with water from his canvas water bag, and set it against the flame to boil for tea; for no Australian could possibly eat a meal without the accompaniment of several cups of tea.

  Trucks passed towards Burracoppin loaded with wheat and returned empty. The sun flooded the road with heat and seemed to hold the white dust level with the treetops. A long train came roaring down the grade to the fence, Bony observing with interest the long rake of wheat-loaded trucks on its way to the seaport.

  Whilst waiting for the water to boil he leaned against the fence, near one of the new posts he had erected. The wheat train having passed, his gaze dropped to the flame-wrapped billycan and from it to a number of blowflies settled on the ground at the base of the post. When he moved his foot near them they took wing, but immediately his foot was withdrawn they settled again.

  The question arising in Bony’s inquisitive mind while he waited for his billy to boil was: Why were those flies so much attracted to the earth around that one post? There was not at that place more moisture than anywhere else. So absorbed was he by his problem that he automatically flung a handful of tea into the boiling water and omitted to remove the billy until the question had been answered several minutes later, when the liquid had become blue-black.