The Devil's Steps Read online

  “I don’t know, marm,” he said. “I’ve only just noticed ’em.”

  “Only just noticed them!” echoed Miss Jade. “Why, you have been cutting this section of the lawn all the afternoon. What d’you mean—you’ve only just noticed them?”

  It was a difficult question to answer and Fred made no attempt. He gazed sadly down the slope at the marks laid upon the velvety green in almost a straight line. Then, as though relieved of great responsibility, he walked on down behind Bony, who was slowly moving away, his hands behind him, his head bent forward.

  The marks of the boots or shoes were as distinct as though they had been made on soft sand. The size of the footwear which had made the marks was number twelve.

  Each stamp of the boot or shoe was almost perfect, almost, but lacking in several important essentials. Such a mark made on sand would have revealed to Bony peculiarities such as areas of greatest pressure and the exact manner in which the person who had made the marks lifted his feet off the ground. Those peculiarities were the vital tell-tales. The grass was not able to reveal the vital peculiarities—it could only register the flat impression of the soles of the boots or shoes.

  Arriving at the edge of the still-uncut portion of the lawn, Bony saw how he had come to miss seeing the marks when walking up the path before lunch. The uncut grass was approximately two inches in length and was lying at various angles from the perpendicular. The “burned” patches could be seen among this uncut grass, but not so clearly as when the grass was cut. Bony could see that the man whose feet had made the marks had gone on down the lawn to the bottom, and then had turned abruptly to reach the path just above the wicket gate.

  Along the inside of the wire fence running above the top of the road bank there was left a strip of some four feet which had never been cut by a mower, and the grass along this strip was high, about nine or ten inches, and very rank and coarse.

  Bony stood on the inside of the wicket gate and regarded the surface of the ramp leading down to the road. It was fairly soft. He saw his own foot-marks made this day. Those left when on his way from the house were overlaid by others, but those made on his return were undamaged right down to the road, indicating that he had been the last to come up the ramp to the gate. He saw the foot-tracks left by Mr. and Mrs. Watkins, by Fred, by Lee and Sleeman, and by people he did not know, and later he learned that the strangers to him had been four people who had called to visit the Watkins couple.

  Miss Jade and her several guests were still standing in a group at the top side of the lawn. Fred was standing aimlessly beside his lawn mower. Downes was mid-way between Fred and himself, walking slowly beside the line of tracks. And slowly Bony began to walk to meet him.

  “Mighty strange,” observed Downes a moment later, when they both returned to the edge of the uncut portion of the lawn.

  “Very,” Bony agreed. “I don’t understand it. Do you?”

  Downes shook his head.

  Bony sank to his knees to bring his eyes nearer one of the tracks. The grass was not burned, it was merely dead—quite dead, dead right down to the soil. All over the lawn the grass was growing thickly. Bony took a pen-knife from a pocket of his coat and with its point began to loosen the earth at the roots of the dead grass. Then, with his fingers, he teased upwards several roots, to find that near the surface they were also dead. Only down at a depth of an inch and a half did he discover living roots.

  He rose to his feet and walked down to the uncut portion of lawn, and again went to his knees beside one of the tracks. Here he moved aside the slightly overhanging living grass, laying bare the dead herbage. A blade of this he picked, finding it exceedingly brittle but not to the degree that he could powder it between the palms of his hands. It had certainly not been burned with heat or with acid. It had merely died like ripe wheat stalks.

  Plucking a handful of the dead grass, he rose to his feet and presented the grass for Downes’s inspection. Downes took some of it, held it closer to his eyes and felt it with his fingertips.

  “It doesn’t look as though it had been burned by anything, does it?” he said in his cold and precise voice.

  “No,” Bony agreed. “It appears to have died quite naturally. Yet it cannot be a natural phenomenon for it to have died in areas like those which obviously are shaped like a man’s boot soles. It lies outside my experience.”

  “And mine, too,” Downes said, and dropping the grass he had taken from Bony’s hand, he turned to walk up towards Miss Jade and those with her. Bony ostensibly tossed away the grass he had plucked, but he concealed a quantity which he thrust into a pocket.

  Fred proceeded with the cutting. Several of the group at the same time asked for the answer to this riddle, and neither Bony nor Downes could supply it.

  “It’s the most remarkable thing I’ve ever seen,” Sleeman burst out. “Must have been the Devil who rose straight up from Hell to take a walk on your lawn, Miss Jade. And what large feet, too!”

  When he placed one of his own shoes over a mark there was a wide edging left all round it.

  “What size do you take?” asked Downes.

  “Seven,” Sleeman replied. “Oh, I didn’t make those marks. You can all see that.”

  “It’s a man’s foot-marks, isn’t it?” shrilled Mrs. Watkins, and her husband assured her that it was.

  “Wonder when it was done?” asked Lee, the squatter. “I’ve never seen the like of it. Why, a man having that size feet must be bigger than I am.”

  “Or a man smaller than you but having deformed feet or diseased feet,” added Downes. He noticed George standing at the top of the veranda steps. “Just a moment, George!” he called.

  The steward came down the steps to them. His face was as politely placid as always.

  “Know anyone with feet as big as those?” Downes asked, pointing to the marks.

  “No, sir, I don’t,” replied George, looking steadily at the questioner. He placed one of his shoes over a mark, and to Downes said: “I take a size seven.”

  “I’m curious to know when it was done, too,” Downes said. “You being a countryman, Lee, ought to be able to tell us that.”

  “Yes, Mr. Lee, you should be able to give an estimate,” Miss Jade added.

  Lee looked a little uncomfortable.

  “When was the lawn mowed last?” he asked.

  “Let me think,” pleaded Miss Jade. Then: “Yes, I remember. The last time it was cut was last Saturday week.”

  “Well, then, the marks weren’t made before last Saturday week,” Lee grinned. “Helpful, aren’t I? What about you, Bonaparte? Can you give an opinion?”

  “Lawns are outside my general knowledge,” Bony said. “That at my place is of buffalo grass, and a steam roller would not injure it. I think that those marks have something to do with frost.”

  That brought further questions, but Bony evaded giving a plain answer to any of them. He had evolved a theory which might explain how those footprints came to be so ineradicably imprinted on Miss Jade’s lawn, and he was strongly inclined to the belief that they were made on the night that Grumman was murdered.

  Of momentary interest was the reaction displayed by Dowries, Miss Jade and the steward. Subtract the natural annoyance in anyone owning a well-kept lawn, and still Miss Jade’s anger appeared to be unnecessary. Bony thought that perhaps her anger was assumed to hide another emotion, or it might be to conceal an expression of knowledge, say the knowledge that the marks had been made by the feet of Clarence B. Bagshott. It would certainly be a remarkable coincidence if there were two men living on Mount Chalmers who wore boots or shoes size twelve.

  The interest displayed by Dowries might well be based on the type of mind called scientific. He wondered what Downes was, where he came from, and he determined to ask Bolt to establish all that could be established about him.

  As for George, well, George had become somewhat of a mystery. On first seeing the marks, the man had suddenly stuttered and looked ill. He had explained that he h
ad a slight headache, but he had not shown any indisposition when he arranged the chair for Miss Jade and the table.

  And now, dash it! further to complicate the matter, Fred was actually almost running to and fro across the lawn with his mower and was whistling: “The Campbells Are Coming.” And that followed the scolding he had had from his employer.

  After dinner, Bony announced to those in the lounge that he was going for a walk, and he passed out from the lounge through the reception hall and the front entrance, and then walked down the drive, humming a tune. Arrived at the open gates, he returned up the drive, keeping off the gravelled surface and under the bordering trees. Before coming to the open space at the front entrance, he veered towards Bisker’s hut, passing that at its rear, and noting that the interior was in darkness. In this way he came to the rear of the garages and eventually to the open gateway leading to the top road.

  To avoid sound, he walked along the edge of this road down to its junction with the highway. Then he continued up along the highway past the junction of that road at the bottom of which Fred lived and opposite which was the fruit shop where he had called earlier in the day.

  Presently he came to the service garage and the Police Station. Here there was an electric road-light, but there was no way of avoiding anyone seeing him enter the Police Station. In the office, he found Sub-Inspector Mason, and Mason jumped to his feet and welcomed him with a smile.

  “How’s the world treating you?” asked Mason.

  “Fairly easy. And you?”

  “Fairly hard,” replied Mason, “Chair?”

  “Thank you. Kindly shut the door and lock it. Any of your men about? ... Good! Ask him to lounge about the front gate while I’m with you.”

  On returning, Mason found Bony occupied in making several of his cigarettes.

  “Now, what’s the latest?” Bony asked.

  “Nothing of much importance, I’m sorry to say. I was wondering how to contact you, though, because I have a letter for you from Headquarters. Here it is.”

  Bony ripped open the envelope, to find enclosed a note from Superintendent Bolt, saying that a plaster head had been made from the photographs of Marcus in the possession of the Victorian Police. They had been assisted in this work by a Professor of anthropology who had stated that the result, whilst not completely accurate in measurements, was sufficient to give a picture of the head of the photographed man which could be added to other data confirming identification. When the photos arrived from London, they would be checked with the bust and alterations, if necessary, made.

  Bony passed Bolt’s letter across the desk to Mason, and smoked whilst the Sub-Inspector read it.

  “How has the search gone up here?” he asked.

  Mason pursed his lips.

  “We’ve made a thorough job of it, I think,” he replied. “We have gone into everyone living up here permanently, and have examined all the persons renting furnished houses. We found a sly-grog joint, four gambling joints, and a man wanted for theft, but not a trace of friend Marcus.”

  “H’m! Disappointing! You have a neighbour named Bagshott. Know anything of him?”

  “Plenty,” Mason answered, smiling broadly. “Read all his books, know all about him from a cousin over in W.A. in the C.I.B. in Perth. Called on him three days ago to get him to sign a paper. He’s a Justice. When I mentioned the cousin whom he knows very well, he called for afternoon tea. I was in a hurry, and he said if I didn’t stay and meet his wife he’d read the Riot Act.”

  “Notice his feet?” Bony asked.

  “Not particularly. Why?”

  “You should always notice people’s feet—particularly, Mason. They tell more about the character of a man than does his face. Then, again, people cannot get around without their feet. Some people’s feet even scorch a perfectly green and virile grass lawn.”

  “How so?”

  “Take pen and paper and write a few notes whilst I describe what has happened on the lawn at Wideview Chalet.” When he had described the foot-marks, and Mason had jotted down memoranda, Bony went on: “I have a theory about those marks, but as it is merely a theory please keep it to yourself. Your notes on the marks I want you to present to one of the City Park curators and obtain his opinion of their cause. It might be necessary to obtain the opinion of two such men. You remember that the body of Grumman was dressed in pyjamas under a dressing gown, and that it was evident that the body had been laid in that ditch and an attempt made to conceal it. It is my theory that the marks on the lawn were made by the feet of the man who carried Grumman’s dead body from his room down to the ditch, and that the double weight on grass made excessively brittle by the severe frost that night, followed by a very rapid thaw just at sunrise, so crushed the grass stems and the surface roots that life became extinct. If that is so, then those boot-marks were made by Grumman’s murderer. And I am beginning to think Grumman’s murderer is Clarence B. Bagshott.”

  “Eh!” exclaimed Mason.

  “Bagshott wears a size-twelve shoe,” stated Bony. “And the size of the shoe which burned its outline on Miss Jade’s lawn is number twelve. You will admit that so large a foot is rare. Remember, however, that I said I am beginning to think, not that I do think, that Grumman’s murderer is Clarence B. Bagshott. I have to check up on Bagshott’s tracks against others I have observed in the grounds of the Chalet. So you see the importance of obtaining expert opinion how those marks came to be made on the lawn.”

  Mason leaned back in his chair and regarded Bony with raised brows.

  “Well, that’s strange. We live and learn, don’t we?” he said slowly.

  “We are always learning, Mason, those of us who are intelligent. There is something else I want done. I am not quite satisfied with what Bolt has concerning Miss Jade and the steward, George. Without doubt the information about themselves given to you people will have been checked over, but I suggest a re-check. Then there are two guests who interest me. One is an artist fellow named Leslie. He’s been living up here for some time, and he knows the district in and out. Get me all you are able about him, in addition to that obtained from him the day Grumman’s body was found. The day following Grumman’s murder four new guests arrived at the Chalet. Note their names, please.” Mason did so at Bony’s dictation. “Of these four, Downes appears to be the least frank about himself. Lee may be more clever than he appears. The Watkins couple talk ever-lastingly about their travels, but that weakness may be assumed. Oh, by the way! Give me an envelope.”

  From his pocket Bony took the quantity of dead grass taken from Miss Jade’s lawn and placed it in the envelope provided by Mason.

  “The curator might like to examine this grass, as it was taken from one of the boot-marks,” he explained. “Tell the Super I’d like him to send the bust of Marcus’s head up here for me to see. Also tell him that I am thoroughly enjoying the restful holiday and do not wish to be disturbed. Can I use your telephone?”

  “Certainly.”

  Bony called for Windsor 0101. He had to wait three minutes before contacting Colonel Blythe. Then Mason heard him say:

  “Evening, Colonel! This is Mr. Boniski Spiffoski speaking.... Yes, the Russian-iski investigatoriski.... Didn’t you know? ... I beg your pardon! ... Oh! Colonel Spendor is annoyed about something—especially about me.... Yes. You tell him I’ll be back one day soon. I am having a wonderful holiday. I thought you’d like to know that and to hear my sweet voice. Now please don’t worry about Colonel Spendor.... Yes, I know.... You apply to your wife. She knows how to calm down the old boy.... A plane! ... But I am not returning to Brisbane by plane.... No, I am going back via Wanaaring.... Yes, by car. I’m going to have a month on the beer with a friend of mine—I hope.... Good night!”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Fungi and Swordfish

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, being Sunday, the traffic on the highway was heavy all the morning, and particularly so after two o’clock in the afternoon. It was a day which was to be remembered by Bony for
a long time.

  Firstly, a frost fell and whitened all the open places. Miss Jade’s lawn was whitened but not the shrubs growing here and there on it and this latter fact recalled to Bony’s mind that Bisker had said that the shrubs were covered with frost on the early morning when Grumman’s body had been found. Since that morning there had been no frosts.

  The valley was hidden beneath a thick, still fog, a fog declared later by the weather man as being at least a thousand feet in depth. When Bony stepped out upon the veranda of Wideview Chalet, the sun was well above the range of distant mountains, and the scene held him spell-bound.

  Over the valley floor the fog-clouds were massed into an unbroken pseudo ice-pack. Above the ice, far to the northwest, was an island, the top of Mount Macedon, Eastward of it, jutting in to the ice-pack, lay a giant’s finger joined to a long arm of Mount St. Leonard. From Mount St. Leonard, the range swept in a great arc round to the Baw-Baws, a blue coast beneath a low-angled sun which had painted out all its minor features with a broad brush of indigo. The ice field appeared to come within a stone-toss of Miss Jade’s front fence. Its surface was varied in shape but uniform in its brilliant white. Far away to the south there sailed as though upon its surface huge icebergs which accepted the light of the sun in a glory of shimmering daffodil-yellow. Over upon the far coast the ice-pack was curled like curling white waves about to break upon the rock-armoured land. A square mile of it lay as flat as damask cloth. Yet another square mile of it was rumpled like the train of a bridal dress.

  Where Bony stood the sunlight was warm. No current of air disturbed one leaf of the nearby trees. As though from the sky above, not from beneath the ice-flow, the hoot of a train cried its pitiful blindness.

  Two hours later, the southern bergs were melting as though they floated in a sea of warm milk, and the waves curling upon the coast of the distant mountains had become gigantic. Seeming vast upheavals were tossing the ice-flow into hillocks and miniature mountains, and the flow itself was sliding past the Chalet, sliding away over the City of Melbourne and into the Bay. There came a wind which lifted stupendous masses of ice into towering ramparts, and which dug enormous and dreadful chasms into an ink-black darkness.