Bony - 20 - The Battling Prophet Read online

  The partnership was broken when Wickham inherited his father’s estate known as Mount Mario, at the time when the motor truck was banishing bullocks to the abattoirs. Mr. Luton decided to buy a small grazing property, and Wickham took up his inheritance and his meteorological ambitions. What Bony knew of him were tiny pen strokes which brought him into clear perspective in this large picture he was now studying.

  That Wickham had been a truly remarkable man was un­arguable. He broke away from the orthodox science of meteorology, which was getting nowhere very fast and could only advise my lady what clothes to wear the next day, the airman what conditions he could expect to fly into during the next two hours, and the seaman whose barometer and radio contact with other ships could tell him more.

  Like Sister Kenny, he battled with obstruction, a professional jealousy and spite. From a low percentage of accurate fore­casts, he had ultimately claimed accuracy of one hundred per cent, and the two years before his death had proved his claim. Without doubt, Ben Wickham had been greatly admired and greatly hated. Twenty thousand people watched the plane rise from the airfield with his ashes to scatter them over the place where he had worked and fought and triumphed.

  There was, of course, part of the picture so exceedingly blurred as to be almost undecipherable. Mr. Luton’s idea, if it could be so named, that every spirituous liquor has its own distinct effect on the mind subject to its power—it could be accepted only as an idea, barely as a theory. Who on this earth, other than Mr. Luton, with the possible exception of Knocker Harris, would accept as fact that hallucinations created by whisky were distinctly different from those created by gin? Who else would be even faintly interested by this subject, this idea, this theory, this utter rot? A man aged seventy-five existed on gin and nothing else for three weeks. Of course he would have delirium tremens. What was more remarkable was that he didn’t die before reaching that stage. He had had a sick heart. The doctor had warned him.

  And still Mr. Luton stood forth in the picture, clearly sane, mentally virile, without question speaking of something in which he believed and of the truth as he understood it. He had sent for Napoleon Bonaparte, believing that only one reared in and habituated to the bush could be expected to believe that Wickham had not died of too much gin.

  Well, it would be something to exercise the mind while he was fishing, and there were ten days of fishing ahead, a leave long due and, in his own opinion, well deserved. Ah … Then Mr. Luton’s booming voice issued from the front door, calling him to dinner.

  The kitchen was bright and warm, and Mr. Luton, wearing a cook’s apron, was serving fillets of fish, surrounded by crisp potatoes and garnished with lemons, from the Darling River. They discussed fish and fishing, when Bony learned that the Cowdry River was short and deep and wide, that it was not actually a river, although two streams entered it. In the long ago the sandstone cracked open to let in the sea and admit the kingfish, the flathead and the bream.

  Cooking fish is an art distinct from cooking, and Mr. Luton was an artist. He certainly knew how to brew coffee, well laced with brandy.

  “That was a truly satisfying meal,” Bony told him when they lazed at table, and the black-and-white cat stretched on the hearth footing the hot stove.

  “Plain and good,” agreed his host. “You know, us old geezers in the old days lived on damper bread and meat, and nothing else except tomato sauce, black tea and pain-killer, and got along very well. Ben often trotted down here for a simple plain feed away from his own table, where only high-falutin muck was fed to him. One morning he came in and said: ‘I’ve come down for a beer out of a tin pannikin. You got pint pannikins, haven’t you?’ “

  “He liked everything plain?”

  “Yes, took him back to the old days. In his own house he wasn’t the boss, you understand. His sister was and still is. Sour old bitch about sixty. Only one man ever got into bed with her and he dropped dead the next morning.

  “Not that she didn’t run the big house all right. She always did that, the servants and all, including Ben when he was there. In the house he was a mouse. Outside he was a lion, and wouldn’t allow her or anyone to say how he should manage his office and his staff. Give her her due, she always did believe he’d win out. She married a Parsloe, of Parsloe Jams, but, as I said, he couldn’t stand it and shuffled off. There’s others as well.”

  “Tell me,” Bony prodded when Mr. Luton was about to remove the dinner crocks.

  “Well, there’s a sort of retired parson. Been there for a couple of years. Mrs. Parsloe invited him and he stayed on. Ben hated the Reverend, name of Weston. Supposed to be writing a book or something. Then there’s Mrs. Parsloe’s husband’s niece, Jane. She married a doctor and kidded Ben to fork out the money to buy the practice at Cowdry.”

  “The same doctor who signed the certificate?”

  “The same. Shire councillor. Runs the golf club. Knows everything—in his own mind. Name’s Maltby.”

  “And they live at Mount Mario?”

  “Been there for four years. Surgery is at Cowdry, only four miles down-river.”

  “Oh! Anyone else?”

  “One more. Lass by the name of Jessica Lawrence, Ben’s secretary. He thought a lot of her. She’s in love with Dr. Linke.”

  “One moment, please,” interrupted Bony. “You said that Ben thought a lot of his secretary. Kindly be precise. In what way did he think a lot of her? For her work?”

  “For her work and because he found her straight and easy to talk to. She even gets round me. About twenty-four or five. Started working for Ben four years ago last Easter.”

  “And this Dr. Linke?”

  “Ben’s chief assistant. Was with him five years. He and the second assistant lived in a house separate from the big house, and they was looked after by Mrs. Loxton.” Mr. Luton chuckled. “If ever I’d have married I’d have chosen her sort.”

  “You imply that the assistants do not now live apart from the big house?”

  “Correct. After Ben died, the second assistant was sacked by the Parsloe woman, so I understand. Dr. Linke’s still there, and now lives at the house. He’s fallen for Jessica, the secretary. Foreigner. Comes from Germany, so Ben told me. Clever feller, again accordin’ to Ben. Been here once or twice with Jessica. Very interested in the Outback.”

  While Mr. Luton was at the wash-bench, Bony pencilled notes in a slim pocket-book, and when Mr. Luton returned to the table he asked:

  “Did your friend ever say his life was threatened?”

  “He named no name, but you only had to read the papers and talk to people in Cowdry to know he was hated enough for some madman to be mean enough to kill him. Even the local Member of Parliament last year said Ben ought to be gaoled for what he was doing, arguing in the House that the country would lose heavily if Ben was wrong and had led the farmers and graziers to sort of go on strike.”

  “Who inherits the property?”

  “Don’t know yet. Haven’t heard about a will so far.”

  “Did Wickham ever mention to what degree he had taken his assistants into his confidence?” pressed Bony. “I’ll put it another way. Did his assistants know Wickham’s ultimate cal­culations or formulæ, or whatever it is, making his forecasting a hundred per cent accurate?”

  “I can answer that one, Inspector. No. That was his secret he kept to himself. Dr. Linke didn’t tell me in words when he was down here a couple of nights back, but from what he did say I think they’re looking for those calculations.”

  “You tell me you believe Wickham was murdered. Why was he murdered? To suggest that someone paid by the finance corporations, or by a big business concern, murdered him is really fantastic. If it was murder, there must be a motive. Was the motive to benefit from his estate? Was it to prevent him continuing his forecasting—which, as I have just said, is really fantastic? Was it to gain possession of his weather cal­culations? And that is more feasible. Are you a beneficiary under his will, do you know?”

  “Cou
ld be, but I don’t think so,” replied Mr. Luton. “Ben wanted to put me down for twenty thousand quid, and I told him I had twenty thousand of my own and a bit more.”

  “You didn’t quarrel with him during that last bender?”

  “Quarrel with him! Me and Ben never once quarrelled.”

  “Did you and Wickham, or Wickham himself, ever quarrel with Knocker Harris?”

  “Never. Knocker’s always easy to get on with. Used to nurse us with food and soups and things.”

  “I have yet to learn this point, Mr. Luton. Did Harris drink with you and Wickham?”

  “No. ’Cos why? Because he’s got stomach ulcers and can’t take it without sufferin’ like hell. In fact, I don’t think he ever took a drink in this house.”

  “You like him, I should think.”

  “Why not? Harmless sort of bloke. Always ready to oblige or do a good turn. Lives quiet and don’t want for anything.”

  “Then it would seem that we have a murder without a motive, Mr. Luton. And we have a murder because you believe that when Wickham died he wasn’t having an attack of the right kind of hoo-jahs. His body has been cremated and the ashes scattered over Mount Mario, so that the remains cannot be pathologically examined. What have we left?”

  Mr. Luton frowned. He said:

  “Gumption.”

  “That might be the right answer, Mr. Luton.”

  Chapter Four

  The Conspirators

  THERE was that about John Luton, ex-bullock-driver, D.T. expert, which forbade familiarity. It was the character of the man as presented in his eighty-fourth year, and was due only in part to his age. Seated in a high-back chair to one side of the sitting-room fire, he appeared to be relaxed though he sat upright, like a king on his throne. His eyes were steady. His great gnarled hands were passive. The expression on his large face was of calm confidence in his body and mind. It seemed that the natural form of address to this man, in acknowledg­ment not only of his age but of the inherent strength of character, was Mister Luton.

  A man can be great though a bullock-driver. A man can be a king and yet a weakling. Mr. Luton had gained and was to retain Inspector Bonaparte’s respect.

  Bony sat on that side of the fireplace having his back to the outer wall, in which was the door and the window. The black-and-white cat lay curled on the rug, its broad back pressed against the carpet slipper of Mr. Luton’s right foot, and not for twenty minutes had Mr. Luton moved that foot, that the cat be undisturbed.

  He spoke of Ben Wickham as an equal, evincing no in­feriority to the famous meteorologist, and Bony knew that this was the result of the man’s distant background where all men were equal, and all men were respected, provided they were not damned by meanness of thought and of act. All else was merely incidental.

  Speaking of Wickham disclosed Mr. Luton’s deep affection for and loyalty to the dead man. And there was the wisdom of the old, which isn’t tainted by intolerance, smugness, bigotry.

  He talked about those old days, revealing to Bony a picture of a young man who was lost to himself—a self he could not understand, and another of that young man grown tanned and physically strong, striding the length of fourteen pairs of bullocks, and wielding an eighteen-foot whip swung from a twelve-foot heavy handle, and able to flick the thong against any chosen inch of hide, to contact the animal like a fly or a flail; a third picture, that of a heavier man, of flowing white hair and dark eyes alive with ambition and the joy of achieve­ment, the square face and alert eyes of the man who learned to fight only late in life; and the last picture of a man wearied less of fighting than of the astounding mental narrowness and crass stupidity of those in political power. These pictures made vivid all those blurred sections of the greater picture Bony had studied earlier this evening, and now he was impressed by Mr. Luton’s beliefs if not convinced by their relationship with fact.

  “Ben Wickham was sleeping in this room, was he not?” he asked when Mr. Luton fell silent.

  “Yes, on a stretcher by that wall where the whips are,” replied Mr. Luton. “Camp stretcher.” He nodded to the position and Bony noted it was opposite the front door and the one window and that a few feet from it was the door to the living-room.

  “The table. In the same place then as now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was there a chair or a stand at the head of the stretcher?”

  “Low packing case I’d covered with a cloth. It had a jug of water on it and a glass. And Ben’s watch and a wallet. Of course, there was his pipe and tobacco pouch and matches.”

  “The front and back doors were locked when you retired?”

  “Yes. But that window was up. Ben couldn’t abide a room without a window open.”

  “When you sent Knocker Harris for the doctor that morn­ing, it would be shortly after eight o’clock, I take it?”

  “Would have been, because I came in here with the dose exactly on time. I’d be talking with Knocker within five minutes of eight.”

  “He walked to Cowdry for the doctor?”

  Mr. Luton nodded, and Bony asked why Cowdry, when Dr. Maltby lived at Mount Mario, and that eight o’clock in the morning would hardly find the doctor at his surgery in the town. The point brought a glint of approval into the hazel eyes, and Mr. Luton replied:

  “When I got to Knocker’s camp he’d just come back from looking at a set-line below the bridge, and when there he’d seen the doctor’s car headed for town. Being that early in the morning, he half expected to meet Maltby coming back.”

  “At four in the morning, when you went to Wickham with the dose, was the light on?”

  “Yes. Both of us slept with the lights on. Y’see we couldn’t stand waking up in the dark, and find we couldn’t sort of glimpse the things we knew were stalking from behind.”

  “And the light was on when, you went to him at half-past six … when you heard him laughing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he speak when you went to him with the dose at four?”

  “Said it had been a hell of a time between drinks. Give me a ‘thank-you’ and then was willing to lie down, and closed his eyes.”

  “He appeared to be quite normal … in view of the, ah, circumstances?”

  “Yes, nothing wrong at all.”

  “The dose. Did he take it with or without water?”

  “Neat. We never ruined good grog.”

  “Why the jug of water on the packing case by the bed?”

  “When you’re sufferin’ during a cure, a drink of water about an hour after a dose often gives the dose a renewed kick,” grimly replied Mr. Luton. “I noticed the next morn­ing when I was cleaning up ready for the quack that Ben had half-emptied the jug.”

  “You left the jug and the glass on the case, or had you removed them when the doctor came?”

  “The jug, yes. The glass I took to the sink and cleaned it properly, knowing that Maltby would be bound to sniff at it, and took it back to the case and poured a little water in it. You see, when the quack came, all the empties were in the river, and the remainders put back in the cellar.”

  “Oh! Not a real cellar?”

  “ ’Course. Under the floor. I dug her out and carted the mullock down to the bottom of the garden. The cellar’s sort of secret.”

  “Answer this carefully, Mr. Luton. Had you gone to your friend, say at three o’clock in the morning, and suggested a drink, would he have accepted it?”

  “Perhaps yes: perhaps no. I’d never tested the point. Having agreed on the cure, we never suggested to each other a drink between drinks.”

  “Yet you said that when he was laughing later, and you went in with tea, after he stopped laughing, you took the bottle as well, thinking he might be in such bad shape as to need a drink most specially.”

  “If I had told him then that he’d have to take a snort, Ben would have drunk it, knowing I’d not say so if I wasn’t worried about him.”

  “Then, Mr. Luton,” Bony pressed, “had you taken a drink to
him at three o’clock, he would have accepted it.”

  Mr. Luton flushed slightly, whether from annoyance or embarrassment Bony could not decide.

  “I think he would,” he admitted. “You see, in the old days I was always the boss, and when I came down here to live because he wanted me to, he let me be the boss again. What I said regarding the grog always went with him.”

  “Did he drink when at home?”

  “A glass of beer sometimes. Cocktail before dinner. Port after dinner. The Parsloe woman said it was the social thing. If it was social to drink coffee out of an old boot, they would have had to drink from old boots.”

  “Precisely, Mr. Luton. One more question I want answered with care. After you gave Wickham the dose at four o’clock, could he have obtained more gin without you knowing it? Assuming that you slept soundly. Or another kind of spirit, from what you had above floor, or even from the cellar?”

  “Yes. I sleep in a room off the far side of the living-room. Ben could have gone into the living-room and had a swiftie from the stock in the cupboard by the stove. He didn’t. I knew how many full bottles there were. They were all there when I looked. The tide in the opened bottle hadn’t gone down since I’d lowered it at four. He could have gone down to the cellar and helped himself, but he didn’t, because nothing had been opened. And I didn’t sleep soundly. No one does when having the hoo-jahs.”

  “Thank you for your patience, Mr. Luton.” Bony stood. “Let us make a call on Mr. Harris.”

  Mr. Luton was obviously astonished, but he stood without commenting and went for a muffler and hat. Bony followed him to the clearing and along the path he could but faintly see, which wound under the great gums and avoided dense clumps of brush.

  Ultimately the path passed from thick timber to a small clearing bordered by the river to one side. From the middle of the clearing issued music, and, with startling impact, a dog barked ferociously. An oblong of light confronted them, and framed within stood Knocker Harris and the dog, the smallest Australian terrier Bony had ever seen.