The Mountains Have a Secret Read online

  Shannon nodded agreement a trifle too casually to satisfy Bony and at once proceeded to demonstrate his bushcraft by disappearing into the scrub. Bony went forward, keeping roughly parallel with the dray’s tracks, for him broken bush and scrub being a clear guide.

  It was quickly evident that Simpson had not led the horse towards the hotel, but had skirted the foot of the range, reaching the elbow of the side track where it left the vineyard, and then, on that track, had passed through the white gates he had left open. Keeping wide of the track, Bony found the horse and dray standing on a small cleared space, and the licensee sitting with his back against a stack of some six tons of cut firewood.

  Bony concealed himself in a patch of low bush at the edge of the clearing, and he, too, made himself comfortable, envying Simpson his opportunity to smoke. He had seen and heard nothing of Shannon.

  The stack of wood was significant and confronted Bony with a problem. Should he prevent the destruction by fire of the yardman’s remains? Where lay his duty? If the body was destroyed by all that wood, what then? Fire does not completely destroy a human body. The calcined bones remain among the ashes, and teeth, natural or artificial, and such items as metal buttons and boot nails.

  Because he felt that O’Brien’s murder was the outcome of others, because he felt that through Simpson and his crime he would penetrate the mystery covering the fate of the, two girls, he decided again to lie low, like Br’er Rabbit.

  A full hour passed, and he was fighting off sleep and yawning for a cigarette, when he heard the sound of horse’s hooves coming down the road from Baden Park. Simpson did not budge, although he must have heard the approaching horseman. He did not rise until the horseman reined off the road and dismounted beside the dray.

  The rider was tall and lean and slightly grizzled. Bony had seen him twice before, seated with a woman in a magnificent Rolls-Royce.

  Chapter Twenty

  The Man from Baden Park

  THERE was no friendliness in the greeting. Simpson stood before the horseman with a scowl on his face. The horseman regarded Simpson with a steady glare in agate-hard blue eyes, and there was a tautness in his body foreign to the Australian pastoralist whose garb he wore. His voice was resonant.

  “You brought the body?”

  “Yes. It’s in the dray. I rolled it in canvas.”

  “Place it on the heap of wood and unroll it that I may inspect it.”

  “Oh, I brought it all right,” Simpson snapped, rebellion in his eyes.

  “That I may inspect it,” repeated the horseman.

  Simpson shrugged, and from the dray drew the corded bundle on to a shoulder and carried it to the woodstack. The stack was four feet high, and he heaved the bundle upon it, sprang to the top of the stack, and, cutting the cords, obeyed the order. There was none of the horror in his eyes and on his face Bony had seen in that dark hour before the dawn. There was now rebellion and anger that his word had been doubted. The sun was shining. The birds were awake and excited. And there was a living man beside him, the horseman having agilely mounted the woodstack.

  “Satisfied?” Simpson flung over his shoulder.

  No alteration occurred on the face of the horseman. He replied:

  “Proceed with the burning.”

  He jumped to earth and Simpson followed. The horseman strode stiffly to his horse and led it farther from the dray and nearer to Bony. From the dray Simpson took a four-gallon tin and proceeded to pour the contents on the woodstack along that side facing the wind. With a match he fired a piece of brushwood, and this he tossed against the petrol-drenched wood. Then, placing the empty drum into the dray, he led the horse a little way down the road.

  The wood had been cut perhaps two years and was overcured for cooking purposes. After the first emission of black smoke it sent up tenuous blue smoke, which the wind carried to the range and dispersed against the granite face.

  The horseman relaxed, standing on the road with the bridle rein looped over his forearm and watching the mounting fire. He must have seen Simpson approaching from the parked horse and dray, for without speaking he produced a cigarette-case and proffered it. The licensee accepted a cigarette from the gold case, which sparkled with a bluish light of diamonds. Neither spoke as they watched the woodstack burning.

  The pyre presently became a great, slowly-subsiding mass of coals. There was no smoke, only the hot air rising in a long slant. The object of bringing the body all this distance to burn was plain. The wood of the stack was dust-dry and no longer contained gas, and thus gave off a minimum of smoke, it being the end of summer, when smoke is likely to bring a spotting aeroplane.

  Carl Benson broke the long silence, and from his voice had gone the brittleness.

  “The work is well done, Jim. An unpleasant episode is almost finished. You must attend to the final details tomorrow morning.”

  “You going to trust me to do it, or are you coming along to watch me?” Simpson almost snarled.

  It did seem that Carl Benson was impervious to the other’s mood, for neither his face nor his voice changed by a fraction.

  “I am not sorry that I spoke coldly,” he said. “You must not resent my orders or my displeasure, because our trust is too great to permit our reactions to situations to affect it. Yours was the mistake, mine and yours the task of rectifying it.”

  “All right, Carl. I’m sorry I was huffy. It was a filthy job and, I now see, necessary. You can depend on me to recover the bones in the morning and put them through a prospector’s dolly-pot and toss away the dust.”

  “Of course, it was a horrible business, Jim, but there was nothing else for it. I was angry because you did not report at the time the removal of that old fool, and for dealing with the corpse in the way you did and thus creating danger to the consummation of The Plan.”

  “The chance of finding the body where I planted it was a thousand to one.”

  “Agreed, Jim. But the one chance in the thousand could not be accepted in view of the Trust laid upon us. And, further, I am not pleased by the manner in which you got rid of that American. You acted hastily and without proper thought, when you should have accepted my guidance. However, have you seen or heard anything of him?”

  “No, not after Amos reported that he had left Dunkeld and taken the road out this way. It’s likely that he went to Hall’s Gap.”

  “We cannot be sure of that,” Benson said. “We have no one there now to report, since Lockyer left. And thus we have to proceed with extreme caution until the culmination of The Plan on the twenty-eighth. Come over tonight and play for us. The company will help the music to get this business out of your system.”

  “But I will be with you tomorrow night,” Simpson objected half-heartedly.

  “No matter. Come tonight too. There are one or two items I would like to arrange before tomorrow night.”

  “All right! Thanks, I will. I’ll be in the mood for Wagner.”

  Benson flicked the reins over the horse’s head. He held out his left hand and Simpson accepted it.

  “We have both made one very bad mistake,” he said. “Yours was the old yardman, mine was in acquiescing to Cora’s demands. Your mistake will have been completely eliminated tomorrow morning, when you dispose of the residue of that fire. My mistake still waits to be rectified. We will discuss the matter this evening.”

  Mounting, Carl Benson nodded down at Simpson, and Simpson raised his right hand in partial salute, nodded in return, and strode away to the dray. The dust of the road rose in little puff-balls behind the departing horseman.

  Simpson returned to the fire, which he circled slowly and with evident satisfaction. There was no need to push inward unburned ends of wood, for the stack had burned evenly and now was a low mound of white ash and overlying red coals. By nightfall it might be sufficiently cold to prospect for items similar to those which in the past had brought men to the gallows. Of a certainty the harvesting could be done on the morrow.

  Bony wondered where, preci
sely, Shannon was at that moment. Although from concealment anywhere near the clearing he could have seen and recognised the horseman, he could not have overheard the conversation. That was just as well, for the American could not be permitted to enter upon a private war before all the threads of this tangled skein were in his, Bony’s, hands.

  The implications of the recent meeting in conjunction with the pyre were truly tremendous. That Simpson, a hotelkeeper, should murder his yardman was astonishing enough, but that the owner of Baden Park Station and the famous Grampian strain of sheep should be associated with murder caused Bony to compel himself to relax in order to accept and assess it. The man had spoken of two mistakes as one speaking of betting mistakes, and one of the mistakes was not being informed of a murder that he could have guided the murderer in disposing of the body. He had mentioned a trust which was his and Simpson’s, responsibility to which overshadowed a murder, and which was so great that a murderer was forced to dig up his victim in the night and transport the remains to destroy them with fire.

  What Carl Benson’s one mistake could have been in surrendering to some demand made by his sister was beyond the power of Bony’s imagination.

  There were those other men, the riders who had met at the gate to return in company to the homestead. The picture of the younger man talking to Simpson in his car flooded Bony’s mind. Simpson had been angry. He had complained of something to the rider, who had nodded in sympathy and who, as the car moved away, had called: “I don’t envy you your job.”

  The job! Had Simpson gone that afternoon to Baden Park to confess his mistake? Had Benson then ordered him to disinter the body and transport it to the woodstack for destruction? If so, if that was the complaint made by Simpson to the rider, then the rider was aware of the trust which so affected both Benson and Simpson. And, likely enough, the other fellow also was aware of it, and still others in Benson’s employ.

  It was big, very big. If those two girls were killed because they learned something of this trust, if that woman artist was insulted in order to persuade her to leave or give the excuse for ordering her to leave, and himself assaulted to be rid of him, if Price had been killed because he had discovered something of vital importance, then anyone discovered investigating too closely would meet ruthless treatment, not at the hands of one man, Simpson, but at the hands of Benson and perhaps a dozen of his riders.

  He felt that Shannon was capable of looking after himself, although not sufficiently a bushman to conceal his tracks from the average bushman. He himself would be able to outwit a dozen riders, given just ordinary luck, but assuming that during a moment of ill luck he was discovered and either captured or killed, to whom would pass the information he had gathered? Ought he not to leave a record of what he had discovered with Groves, the policeman at Dunkeld, to circumvent the possibility that he fail?

  No horse shied away from a fluttering rag as violently as Bonaparte shied away from this word “fail”. To fail meant damnation, sure and complete. Failure would dethrone Pride, when nothing would be left him.

  Pride drove him on to withstand the idea of reporting his progress to the police. Pride lured him onward to battle alone, promising great rewards, blinding him to the several results to others should he fail.

  He saw Simpson walk away to the horse and dray and, glancing at the sun, noted the time. He was suddenly conscious that he was both hungry and in need of a cigarette, and it was when Simpson began to lead the horse down the road towards the gate that he himself began the manufacture of a cigarette.

  The dray wheels creaked, and Bony knew that if he lived for a hundred years he would feel his blood chill by a similar noise. He smoked and watched the man and dray pass through the gateway, saw Simpson lock the gates and pocket the key. He heard the creaking wheels for some time after man and dray had disappeared.

  For another hour he remained in concealment, watching the birds to tell if Shannon were close. And then, as cautiously as he had hitherto moved through the bush, he made his way back to the nest of rocks where the swags had been left.

  Shannon’s swag was gone. His own was there, and against it was tilted the partly filled bottle of brandy.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The Frightened Man

  BONY slept for six hours, despite the stealthy March flies and a few inquisitive ants, waking when the sun was setting in a hot sky and the birds by the whispering creek were expressing satisfaction with their day. Having made a smokeless fire and placed thereon his billy for a brew of tea, he shaved and then stripped and bathed in the creek, returning to his cooking fire refreshed physically and mentally and tempted to whistle to express his satisfaction with his day.

  Shannon loomed as prominently in his mind as Carl Benson. His liking for the American was begotten in the main by the sentimental streak in his make-up, played upon by the romance of a young ex-soldier setting out alone across the world to prove what had happened to his sweetheart. Beyond the sentimentality of that, Bony, the police officer, could not approve of “private wars” and civilian citizens “mooching” around, when loaded heavily with pistols and throwing knives. The knives displayed in the hotel and the pistol with its ungainly silencer attachment more recently displayed caused him to be thankful that Shannon was not on the warpath against him.

  That Shannon had not been sufficiently close to overhear the conversation between Simpson and Carl Benson, if, indeed, he had actually witnessed the burning of the body, was cause for satisfaction. Like all official investigators of crime, Bony felt aversion to amateur detectives.

  A greater problem than Shannon, however, was O’Brien’s skeleton buried in the cooling ashes of Simpson’s fire. On the morrow Simpson would remove the remains and pound them to dust in a prospector’s dolly-pot, a utensil shaped like a gun shell, in which stone is reduced to dust and then washed to ascertain its gold content. Once the licensee had done that with the old man’s bones, evidence of the crime would be merely circumstantial, resting on the word of two witnesses, plus the possible salvage of clothes buttons and the metal eyelets from the victim’s canvas shoes.

  The result of moving the dead man’s remains from the ashes was obvious. Simpson would report the removal to Carl Benson. They would know that the crime had been discovered, and whatever it was which motivated them would be destroyed, rehidden, or otherwise placed far from them. Bony decided that to remove the remains from the ashes would be a mistake, but just how serious he could not estimate. On the other hand, to leave them for Simpson to destroy might also be a mistake subsequently to be regretted. The issue was decided by the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s advice: “When in doubt, do nothing.”

  That Simpson had murdered the old yardman without the knowledge of Carl Benson, that Benson was an accessory after the fact, and that Simpson was so controlled by Benson as to obey that order to disinter the body and burn it had been made perfectly clear during their meeting at the pyre. And, finally, what actuated a man like Carl Benson to be implicated in murder must be unique in motives. The Carl Bensons of this world and time do not become accessories after the fact—of murder—unless governed by an extremely powerful motive.

  It was when rolling his swag that sight of the brandy decided Bony to call on old Simpson and endeavour to extract from him further information concerning the owner of Baden Park, and when he seated himself with his back against that tree which Shannon had employed for a knife-throwing target, the world was dark beneath a sky still containing a little light.

  It was twenty minutes after eight when Simpson passed in his car on the way to spend the evening at Baden Park, and it was nine o’clock when Bony circled the hotel, mystified because it was entirely empty of illumination.

  As the Buick had passed him he had observed Simpson at the wheel, light from the instrument panel bringing his face into sharp relief. He had not seen passengers, but Mrs. Simpson and Ferris could have been in the rear seat. That they had retired to bed and were asleep thus early could not be assumed.
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br />   Quite without sound Bony mounted the front veranda steps, and he was proceeding soundlessly along the veranda when the cockatoo said sleepily, but distinctly:

  “Get to hell outa here!”

  On reaching the corner, Bony waited, listening, one hand resting against the roof support. He remained there for five minutes, hearing not a sound to indicate movement within the house, the night itself containing only the croaking of frogs along the creek.

  Soundlessly, he left the veranda corner and moved to the open french window of old Simpson’s bedroom. On the threshold he halted, listening and hearing nothing within, not even the old man’s breathing. He took one step into the room. He raised his right foot to take the second step when he was stopped by a thin scream of terror, which faded into a struggle for articulation.

  “No—not now, Jim! Not now, Jim! Leave your old father be. I done nothing wrong, son. I said nothing, Jim, not a word, not even a whisper. Don’t stand there like that. I can see you, Jim, standing against the windows. I been asleep, Jim. I been_____”

  The voice from the bed was cut off, and Bony knew that air was being taken into the old lungs to be again expelled in the scream. In that moment of silence he said as he strode to the foot of the bed:

  “Stop it! It’s John Parkes. It’s all right. Jim’s gone to Baden Park.”

  The old man began to sob, and his sobbing was almost as bad as his screaming. Bony returned to the french windows, to stand there listening for sounds of human movement without and beyond the bedroom door. When the sobbing stopped, the silence was a weight.

  On returning to the bed, Bony asked the whereabouts of the invalid’s wife and daughter, and when the old man replied terror haunted his quavering voice.

  “They’re away,” he said tremulously. “They went off yestiddy. Jim sent ’em to Melbun for a week. Hey! You sure you’re John Parkes? You—you’re not Jim, are you? Go on, talk. Let me hear your voice.”