Bony - 15 - The Clue of the New Shoe Page 3

  Their gaze clashed, and the old man closed the lid when the air faintly hissed at the final compression. Again he raised and closed the lid, and again there was the sound of air being caught in a trap. The lid was raised yet again and poised on the side to which it was hinged, and Bony bent to see into the in­terior and to note the curved floor to take the back and the curved rest for the neck. Finally, he stood away and gazed at the coffin maker without speaking.

  “Inside is only the natural gloss,” Penwarden said. “I do a lot to the outside to bring up that colour in the wood. Nothing wrong with her to sleep in for a long time, is there?”

  “Nothing,” softly agreed Bony.

  Penwarden caressed the lid before closing it, and his hands fluttered like butterflies as he wiped away the finger marks and drew the cover over the casket.

  “Got two like it at home,” he said, cheerfully. “One for me, and t’other for the old woman. They rest under the bed. Our shrouds are in ’em, too. Now and then the old woman opens ’em up and airs the shrouds and pops a bit of lavender in. My father and mother had their coffins waitin’ for ’em, and my grandfather brought his’n with him on the ship from England. Ah yes, times is changed, but us Penwardens don’t change, and there’s others what don’t change, neither.”

  “They must be rare, these people,” Bony commented, when following the craftsman back to his bench.

  “You say true, Mr Rawlings, sir, you say true. And gettin’ rarer.”

  “How long does it occupy to make a coffin like that in the other room?”

  “Well, it would be guessing. I don’t work on one continuous. Tallying the time, I suppose it’d take me thirty ten-hour days … I must have begun that one three months back. You see, there’s them other jobs to slap up with glue and tacks. I’m always be­hind orders with them.”

  “And the cost?”

  “Depends,” replied the old man, and the note in his voice barred further questioning on this angle.

  Pensively, Bony watched the plane glide to and fro along the red-gum board, and the shavings which fell to the floor, already deep with shavings, were wafer-thin. The over-long white hair tended to obscure the workman’s vision, and now and then he would toss back his head. The bare arms were fat­less and hard, the legs encased by drill were sturdy and strong. Bony wanted to ask how old Penwarden was, and remembered he had said he had built the shop when twenty-one, nearly sixty years ago. From the firm throat issued a deep chuckle.

  “Got to fit me special customers, you know. Generally takes a fittin’ afore I puts the boards together, and then again just after I lays the bed to make the lying nice and comfortable. Nothing worse than an uncomfortable coffin you have to lie in for years and years maybe. That casket inside is for Mrs Owen. She be getting on, too, and for years wouldn’t have no coffin to lie alongside Tom’s under the bed. Took him a time to persuade her to take a first fitting. Then one day he brings her along, and we talk and talk persuadin’ her to lie atween the boards I just leaned together, sort of. Got her legs straight at last, and her arms nice and cosy, and I’m making me marks when up she jumps screeching like a hen what’s laid her first egg. Took Tom a long time to quiet her down, and my old woman had to lend him a hand. Now we’re waitin’ for the final fitting, but we don’t have no hope of getting her again.”

  Bony was quite sure that no amount of persuasion would induce him to “take” a fitting and he said:

  “Old English name, Penwarden, isn’t it? Cornish?”

  “Devonshire, me father came from. There’s people here called Wessex. That goes way back. Used to be a part of England called Wessex. Had its kings, too. This local Wessex was born here. His father took up land in them hills back of the Inlet. The Owens lives this side of the Wessexes. Dearie me! The Lord blesses some and thrashes t’others. He blessed the Owens and thrashed the Wessexes, and with us Penwardens, He seemed to take turn and turn about.”

  The plane was placed carefully away, and the coat was taken from the nail in the wall at the end of the bench.

  “Time for grub,” announced the old man. “Staying up at the hotel, eh? Sound people, the Washfolds. Ain’t been there long, but they’re sound.”

  “Thank you for being so neighbourly, Mr Penwarden,” Bony told him. “I’ve really enjoyed talking with you and viewing your work.”

  “ ’Tain’t nothin’, Mr Rawlings, sir. Come along again some time. Allus glad to see you.”

  Bony strolled back to the hotel, undecided whether to chuckle or to be horrified by the picture of Mrs Owen undergoing the trial of being fitted.

  Chapter Four

  The Glass Jewel

  BONY FOUND A tall and weathered man seated at his lunch­eon table. Mrs Washfold bustled in to introduce them.

  “This is Mr Fisher from the Navigation Department,” she said, “Going to work at the Lighthouse. Thought you two might like to sit together. Meet Mr Rawlings, Mr Fisher.”

  “Working at the Lighthouse, eh!” exclaimed Bony. “I’d like to go over it.”

  “Any time you like,” assented the engineer. “I’m startin’ work about two. Walk right in. I’ll leave the door open for you.”

  “You take them steps easy, Mr Rawlings,” interposed the licen­see’s wife. “There’s about a hundred and twenty of ’em, so they say, and when you’re not used to it the climb will make your legs ache that much you won’t get no sleep for nights. A little vegetable soup, now?”

  It was easy and quite natural, and every time Mrs Washfold appeared they were talking about coastal lights and of Fisher’s experiences in many of them.

  Towards three o’clock, Bony left the private entrance and at once was joined by the hotel dog. Stug, it was called, and when Bony had asked for the meaning, he was advised to reverse the letters. The name, in reverse, was well chosen in view of the animal’s condition. He wanted to be acknowledged and greatly appreciated Bony’s attention.

  With the dog who kept with him all the way, its interest in this new friend never obscured by the alluring scents it came across, Bony arrived at the gate in the Lighthouse fence, paused to examine visually the heavy padlock attached to the chain, and passed inside, closing the gate after him and the dog. With­in the enclosure stood a forge and bags of fuel, and to one side against the iron fence was a lean-to shed.

  The fence, the yard, himself and the dog were, of course, dwarfed by the mighty structure towering to the cloud-flecked sky. On glancing upwards, the overhanging balcony prevented him from sighting the windows of the Light and the red dome surmounting it. It had been painted recently, and Bony won­dered how the painters had done their work.

  The yard interested him particularly and for one purpose. When above-surface objects such as the forge and the shed might have interested the city detective, it was the ground which auto­matically claimed this man’s attention.

  Since the last of the police investigators had been here, rain had wiped clean the ground within this yard, and since the rain had fallen there was one set of footprints between the fence gate and the Lighthouse door. Obviously they had been left by Fisher.

  The Lighthouse door was open, and on entering the building Bony found himself in a narrow chamber flanked by rows of tall steel gas cylinders. Beyond this small chamber was the bot­tom of the spiral staircase, and on the bottom step sat Fisher.

  “Ah, there you are, Fisher,” Bony said, and drew forward an empty case to sit with him. “Don’t move. I’ll smoke a cigarette and we’ll talk before going up. How’s the leg?”

  “The leg, Inspector! All right. How did you know I’d damaged my hip a few years ago?”

  “Little bird. Right hip, wasn’t it? Caused a limp.”

  “Yes, it did. But I don’t limp now.”

  “Just a little. Spent most of your time at sea?”

  “That’s so. All us Lighthouse men have been seamen in our time.”

  “Well now, let’s get to work. First, you played your part well at lunch. Superintendent Bolt talked to you?”

  “Yes, Inspector. Told me not to give you away as a detective.”

  “Then forget I am one, and remember that my name is Raw­lings … that I’m a sheepman. Are you the man who found the body?”

  “Yes. It was crook because I wasn’t thinkin’ of the naked and the dead. I was thinkin’ of sun-valves at the time.” A humourless chuckle rose from the vicinity of the man’s belt. “Bodies in lighthouses aren’t so thick as daisies in a paddock. I walked in here to do a job to one of the spare cylinder connexions, and I found the sun-valve …”

  “Wait. We’ll come to that. I understand you have been with your department for nine years. You would know the routine. This Lighthouse is inspected four times annually, is it not?”

  “Yes, as near as possible in the first week in February, May, August and November each year. It happens that this is inspec­tion time. In fact, Superintendent Bolt only just told me in time about you being here. I was due the day after tomorrow.”

  “Did you inspect the Light in February, the usual routine time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then your visit here on March the First was not a routine visit?”

  “No, it wasn’t. When I was down here early in February, I couldn’t finish a job, so I fixed it up pro tem, and reported to the office that it might last all right until the next inspection. The office said it should be looked at before then, and that’s why I was sent down three weeks later to fix it properly.”

  “Anyone outside your office know you were coming?”

  “No.”

  “Therefore, anyone familiar with the inspection periods would not anticipate anyone coming here again till early in May? Many local people know the inspection periods?”

  “All of ’em would know.”
>
  “Apparently the police did not know it,” Bony said, and Fisher caught the note of satisfaction. “They understand you came here on a routine inspection.”

  “Well, they asked me why I came down, and I told ’em I came on inspection duty. That’s what I am … engineer-inspector of automatic coast lights.”

  “Ah, I can see where the slight discrepancy occurred. Don’t worry about the matter, now we have it clear. Let me look at the keys.”

  Fisher produced a bunch of keys and selected one which fitted the yard gate padlock, and another which fitted the lock in the Lighthouse door. Both keys could quite easily be duplicated. Without comment, Bony returned them.

  “I assume you Navigation men have to know several trades,” he said.

  “That’s so, Inspector. Rigging and welding and the like. Have to be used to heights, too. The d’s seemed to have an idea that a Navigation Department man could have done the murder. They checked up on us all pretty thoroughly.”

  “Matter of work,” murmured Bony. “Now show me over. I want you to proceed exactly as you did when you came here in March, beginning from where you opened the door and ending at that place where you found the body. I am not questioning your statement made to the detectives: it will be to my own advantage to follow you on the course you took that morning.”

  Fisher stood with Bony.

  “When I opened the door,” he said, “the first thing I did was smell for escaping gas, and then I looked at the pressure gauges on the cylinders and saw that the pressure was OK. You see, although I had that special job to complete, the ordinary inspec­tion had to be done even though I’d done it three weeks before. So I ran my eye over the cocks and connexions down here and then I went on up.”

  He proceeded to mount the stairway, Bony following. Their shoes rang metallically on the iron steps centred to the spiralling iron handrail. Thirty-one steps brought them to the first land­ing, occupying a half-circle. It was almost dark, the handrail gleaming like pewter in the faint light thrown up from the bot­tom and passed down from the distant upper floor.

  A further series of thirty-one steps brought them to another landing, and Bony’s thigh muscles were beginning to complain. On reaching the third landing, he was thankful he hadn’t five hundred steps to mount, and after leaving this landing the light rapidly became stronger till they reached the top floor.

  They were now at the summit of the main stone and cement structure upon which rested the cupola housing the Light. To reach the Light was a further flight of fifteen-odd steps, and a steel gangway circled the Light similar to that from which a ship’s engine is served. The engineer went up, and Bony fol­lowed.

  The daylight entering through the outside plain glass “face” of the Lighthouse illumined the shell of prisms making of them a jewel deserving the softest plush for background. The beauty entranced Bony, so entirely unexpected was it.

  In the centre of the prisms and almost at their base nestled a cluster of ordinary acetylene gas jets, and in the heart of the cluster lay another burning a tiny light. The engineer turned a small cock outside the prisms, and the cluster of jets flamed, magnifying the light to ten thousand candle power. The light went out, then flamed again. There was an eclipse, and this was followed by four flashes covering a period of twelve seconds prior to the next eclipse.

  Bony found the engineer watching him, and he nodded, whereupon Fisher turned the cock and the flashing lights ended.

  “Having tested the Light,” he said. “I went outside to take a look at the sun-valve, not that there could be anything wrong with it because the jets were operating.”

  Bony followed him down to the main floor, and Fisher opened a door in the circling iron wall and passed outside. Bony fol­lowed, finding himself on the narrow steel balcony, and at once thought of how much the policeman suffers to maintain law and order.

  He closed his eyes and held tightly to the railing of the spidery balcony. The narrow overhang of ledge beneath prevented any­one from looking directly down the white wall, and not for several moments did he ascertain that fact for himself. On open­ing his eyes, he gazed determinedly out over the Inlet to the mountains, and then at the highway and the bridge where the man Owen had waited for him.

  He followed Fisher round the balcony, and there was nothing other than the blue and shadowed sea, until he ventured to look down and courageously gazed upon the paw and the wide talons of Split Point. The white-washed rocks and the sandy beach seemed not half a dozen feet below the edge of the headland.

  “Long way down,” said the engineer, and Bony turned to look at him. The man’s eyes were dark and seemed full of meaning. The hands resting on the cobweb of balcony rail were like the hands of a giant. For them to pick up a man and toss him over would require no great effort. Bony decided he had never really adored heights.

  They passed on round the balcony, and when Fisher again stopped, he reached up and touched a cylinder of glass about twelve inches long and metal-capped at both ends.

  “This is the sun-valve,” he explained. “The mechanics are simple when you know. The interior is extremely sensitive to light, but the light must contain heat. Sunlight contains heat, moonlight doesn’t. When the sun rises, no matter what clouds there are, its light acts on the valve and the valve automatically turns off the supply of gas to the jets, and when the sun goes down, the gas is automatically turned on again. The pilot light in the middle of the jets is a permanent light, and the mechan­ism operating the jets to make them flash is another piece of mechanism.

  “Now I came out here to take a look at the sun-valve, as usual, and I found the glass was cracked. Can’t make out what cracked it. Anyway, it was cracked, and I went inside for my bag of tools and took it off, intending to take it back to Melbourne, and knowing there was a spare valve down below.”

  “All right. I’ll follow you,” Bony said, slightly impatient to get off that balcony.

  He was glad to be inside again, and see Fisher close the iron door and bar it. Once he glanced upward at the jewel set in steel, and then proceeded to follow the engineer down the spiral­ling steps.

  Just before they came to the lowest landing, Fisher stopped and switched on a flashlight, waiting for Bony to stand with him. He then opened a door in the wall to reveal a cavity ap­proximately four feet thick and four by four feet high and wide.

  “There used to be a window on the outside of this chamber,” he said. “Before the Light was automatic, the red danger lamp was installed here, and because nothing was done with the space after the lamp was removed, the foreman of a repair gang made the door to fit so that the place could be used as a locker for spare parts.

  “The spare sun-valve was kept here. I opened the door, and even put my hand inside for the valve. Then I switched on the torch and saw it. Not the sun-valve. I thought it was a sort of octopus. My torch beam was aimed straight at the face, and the eyes were wide open and the mouth was sagging. I hadn’t sort of expected to see that.”

  “Certainly unlikely,” Bony said, dryly. “It must have hit you hard.”

  “It did so,” agreed Fisher. “How I went down to the bot­tom I don’t recollect. Could have been head first. I was down and out of this Lighthouse in two ticks, and even now I don’t like coming back to it, or stopping here by this locker.”

  “Then let us go on down.”

  It was dark when the engineer switched off his light.

  “Thought we left the door open,” he said, turning on the torch. “Didn’t you?”

  “We did,” assented Bony. “Actually, I left it open before sitting on the case and making a cigarette. Wind must have blown it shut.”

  “Not likely. Too heavy.”

  The door hinges were certainly too resistant for the slight wind to move the heavy door. The dog waited in the yard, and he was panting. Bony saw that the yard gate was shut as he had left it, and saw, too, that between the entrance to the Light­house and the yard gate there was a third set of footprints made by a man’s shoes. Watched curiously by Fisher, he sauntered to the gate without letting the engineer know he was gazing at those prints, which here and there overlay their own. He opened the gate and looked out, saw no one and closed it again.