Murder down under b-4 Page 4

  “I take it that you believe that murderers are mental defectives?”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “And, as insane people, should not be hanged?”

  Mr Jelly was emphatic when next he spoke.

  “Let us get down to brass tacks, as my old father used to say,” he went on. “In the bad old days, when they hanged a man for looking crossways at the squire, it was considered that man was a free agent, able to distinguish right from wrong. In these days if a man brains his wife with a beer bottle, and more especially if the man belongs to the professional class, and he acts mad, the alienists will prove that he is, and their opinion is taken as accurate. You see, we have swung right round to the opposite outlook or viewpoint of crime and criminals.”

  Mr Jelly crossed his legs. Enthusiasm for his subject was warming him.

  “The only man who ever really understoodcriminals was Lombroso, the Italian. He said, and could prove what he said, that a murderer, or any felon guilty of brutality, inevitably bore certain physical marks. These people can be picked out as easily as he picked ’emout in his day. I can pick them out: a very shrewd man, who wasn’t a doctor, taught me how. Never mind who he was or where he taught me. The fact stands that Lombroso was right as regards killers. I give in to the oh-my-poor-brother fools when dealing with lesser criminals, because stealing and like offences are the result largely of environment; but, as I have said, if a man or a woman is a potential killer, either or both can be detected by physical abnormalities. So that, assuming you were branded, as God branded Cain before and not after he killed Abel, as many people think, you should be put away before you cut my throat, not after, because when my throat has been cut it can never again be uncut.”

  “But the difficulty would be in setting up the authority in the first place, and, in the second place, the examination of the people,” Bony objected.

  “I realize that,” Mr Jelly agreed thoughtfully. “Still, the fact remains that many murderers should never have been allowed outside a lunatic asylum. Nonning and Fling, Wells and Mann were mentally unbalanced. I visited Wells and Nonning in jail and found theLombrosian brand on them. Wilde, the burglar, was sane, but he was branded too. Like many criminals, his final crime was the culmination of a life of crime.”

  “You do not believe in the death penalty?” asked Bony quickly.

  Mr Jelly’s grey eyebrows became one straight bar. He said sternly:

  “Every right-minded man must believe in the extinction of killers. The death sentence is a tremendous deterrent. It bulks large in the mind of a man who would like to kill, or who regards killing lightly, but himself fears death. No punishment would ever stop the subnormal or the abnormal, but abolish the death penalty and murders committed by sane men will increase mightily. No, what I think is that many murders need never have happened at all. I believe that penal control should be exercised over potential killers who have once come into a prison to serve a sentence for a lesser crime.”

  Mr Jelly was now fingering idly the empty picture frame. He talked on and on about his killers, interesting Bony with his wonderful memory of their trials, with, now and then, grim allusion to the manner in which it was reported that they died. Presently the detective’s mind was jolted back to his business at Burracoppin.

  “Yes, I am sure poor Loftus was murdered,” Mr Jelly was saying. “He would not have disappeared voluntarily. I have got my own ideas, of course. It will all come out some day. Someone will find him under a stone or in a hole. I am a great believer in the saying ‘Murder will out’, and I am going to put the picture of Loftus’s killer in this frame, after he is hanged. Poor old Loftus! He didn’t ever do anyone a bad turn.”

  Yes, Bony was extremely interested in Mr Jelly. He thoroughly enjoyed his visit at the farm, and when he and Hurley reached the Rabbit Department Depot he said as much.

  “I am glad you enjoyed yourself,” Hurley said with a yawn. “I did-thank you!”

  Chapter Five

  Theories

  THE MORNING of the fourteenth day since the disappearance of George Loftus witnessed Bony dump a load of posts near the wrecked car. Somewhat to his annoyance Eric Hurley’s dog accompanied him, the boundary rider having departed on his long northern trip of inspection.

  It was a superb day-warm, cloudless, brilliant. What little wind there was came from the east. The air was filled with a low pulsating sound produced by the combined action of harvester machines and tractors in the wheat paddocks far and near. Already so early in the season the bags of wheat were being rushed by truck and wagon to the rail sidings. The land, having peacefully dozed for nine months, had quickened to feverish life.

  To Bony, used to the solitudes of the eastern side of the great heart of Australia, this bustle and noise of Western Australia’s wheat belt seemed to push him spiritually farther away from his aboriginal ancestry than at times had the roar and the bitter grimness of the cities. Here was the white man’s life in all its naked virility, all its indomitable courage, its inventive genius. From the spot on which he was standing he could see mile beyond mile of land, which had been abandoned in its desolation by the hardy nomadic aborigines and now was one huge chequered garden. This morning Bony was proud that he was half white and wistfully longed to escape the environment of the mid-race for the upper plane of the white.

  He had thoroughly examined every inch of the ground, giving only five minutes to the hunt for clues between spells offencework in order not to raise unnecessary comment from the drivers of passing traffic. With hope in his heart he searched for the bones of recent history. He saw the masses of impressions made by motor tyres and the boots of those who had been attracted to the scene. He saw dog tracks, the tracks of a goanna, two snakes’ tracks, and tracks left even by a centipede. He found a cigar end which at one time had been soddened by rain and now was tinder-dry and brittle. Matches, cigarette ends, an old boot, a half-inch spanner, and an old felt hat provided him with quite a collection.

  Yet definitely nothing of importance. Bony hummed lightly whilst he cut out the old decayed posts, dug from the ground the rotted butts, and placed the new posts in position, rammed firm the earth, and bored the wire holes. The disappearance of Loftus presented possibilities of surprise and drama that made him happy. Now and then Ginger departed on a hunt for rabbits and was made happy, too, by the absence of restraint. He returned from these expeditions with heaving sides and lolling tongue and stretched himself in the shade to regain bodily coolness. A blowfly sometimes hummed near him at which he snapped, and always there was the higher, more persistent note of the machines stripping the wheat.

  A goods train passed with roaring wheels towards Burracoppin, and the driver waved a friendly hand to Bony. The truck drivers who were forced to stop to open the gates in the longest fence in the world-1,350 miles-conscientiously closed them on seeing Bony working there. They were addicted to leaving open those gates, provingthemselves good gamblers in betting against being caught and subsequently fined by a police magistrate.

  At noon Bony filled his billycan from a tap at the government farmhouse and brought it near his work to boil for tea. The time he allowed the tea to “draw” he spent seated behind the steering wheel of Loftus’s car. With the front wheels on level ground and the back wheels resting on the huge water pipe below ground level, the position in which he then was, although not comfortable, was not precarious. For a little while he imagined himself George Loftus, partly drunk, realizing slowly the stupid thing he had done.

  As the farmer probably did, Bony groped over the back of the front seat and took from the car floor the two empty beer bottles he had obtained from John Muir. He pretended to drink from a bottle, tossed it to the ground as might a drunken man. He repeated the act with the second bottle before clambering out of the car to see then how easily Loftus could have swayed into the pipe trench, resulting in injury.

  Retrieving the bottles, he passed over the road to his dinner camp, selected the shady side of a gimlet tre
e up which swarmed no ants, and sat down with the tree as a back rest. The lunch Mrs Poole had cut for him he opened on his lap and ate. Ginger had departed on another hunt.

  Experiencing a real mental pleasure, the detective surveyed the disappearance of George Loftus. At the worst it certainly was no stereotyped murder case, with a dead body, a bloodstained knife, and fingerprints offering a dozen clues. It might not be-it probably was not-a case of homicide at all. Possibly Loftus had reasons for disappearing and had carefully planned his disappearance. Other men had disappeared from the impulsion of reasons to them of the utmost importance. Mr Jelly disappeared for varying periods, and no one knew where he went or why.

  He was then sure that within a radius of one hundred yards of the wrecked car there was not to be found any object which could have become detached from the person of a human being through violence. He had found a once-sodden but now tinder-dry cigar end. It was not a very important clue, but it certainly formed a tiny brick of the structure Bony was building with his imagination. He had found the cigar end nine feet four inches from the car. It appeared to be about one-third the total length of the cigar. It added its quota to the imaginary history of Loftus’s acts that night of rain.

  With the extinguished cigar clenched between his teeth Loftus had driven his car. The rain on the windscreen obscuring his vision, his sight blurred by alcohol, and his mind heated by the recent argument, the farmer had not seen the fence gate in time to avoid a collision. The injury to the gate had been severe, but not sufficiently severe to prohibit repairs. The car’s bumper bar was broken, and the front mudguards as well as the radiator damaged. Of course the car was stopped by the impact.

  Loftus then had the choice of two courses of action. He could have driven on for three hundred yards where, reaching the entrance to the government farm, he could have turned the car, or he could have backed the car from the gateway along the road he had come far enough to give him sufficient room to take the right-hand turn south along the fence towards the old York Road and his home.

  He had elected the second alternative, but in his then mental confusion had backed the car along a left-hand curve which brought it into the pipe trench. Once there it was impossible to get it out under its own power or withhis own strength. Most probably Loftus cursed himself for a fool, yet made no immediate attempt to climb from his seat to the ground. Knowing the locality, being acquainted with the proportions of the pipe and its trench, and, therefore, having precisely the measure of his predicament, Loftus would experience a sense of anger. Then he would remember the extinguished cigar between his lips, and failing to light it, would fling it far from him. Possibly for a minute he then remained physically inactive and mentally struggling to regain equipoise. Memory of the beer decided him to drink. Still resenting the awkwardness of his plight, he had emptied both bottles and flung each from him with a vicious curse.

  And so he arrived at the moment when he had clambered from his seat, possibly to sway on his feet holding the car for support, observing the danger of the yawning trench and summoning sufficient will power to lurch safely away from it.

  Had Loftus been attacked whilst backing the car or when considering what he would do when he had backed it into the pipe trench, there must certainly have been a struggle, for he was a big and activeman. And had there been a struggle, some object or some article of clothing would have been detached from the persons of the combatants to fall to the ground for the trained vision of the half-caste to discover. Whilst he rolled a cigarette the dog came back carrying a dead rabbit which it laid at Bony’s feet. To Ginger, Bony summed up:

  “Friend Loftus was not foully done to death at this lovely spot, my dear Ginger. We may decide that that is certain. He did one of two things. Either he walked on to his farm or he carried out the second part of a plan to disappear, the first part being the wrecking of the car, although why he should do that is not yet clear. I wish I possessed your keen nose. With your nose and my eyes I could perform wonders, despite the fact that fourteen days have gone by.

  “With your permission we will now proceed to establish the man’s preference in smoking. How often has tobacco hanged a man! We must remove the labels from those bottles and, if possible, establish the particular hotel from which they came. Our future activities will be directed to picking up tracks-if they exist-down along this fence which will prove one way or the other whether Loftus walked home as a dutiful husband should have done.”

  The dinner hour over, Bony went back to his work, the dog following with the dead rabbit in his mouth. Ginger really was over-conditioned to weather an Australian summer, yet, after laying the carcass at Bony’s feet, he ran off on another hunting expedition. It was when Bony had dug out the old stump of the post he had last cut from the fence that Ginger returned with a second dead rabbit. He was reproved for his murderous appetite, and, before filling in the earth round the new post, Bony dropped the first of the dead rabbits into the hole and buried it.

  Both Mr and Mrs Wallace were behind the bar of the Burracoppin Hotel when Bony entered at eight-thirty in the evening. They were waiting on a motley crowd of farmers, wheatlumpers, and government employees, who, after the first swift appraisal, took no further interest in the stranger. With a glass pot of beer before him, Bony lounged against the counter there to enjoy the study of humanity, always to him a subject of exhaustless interest.

  Mr Leonard Wallace, of course, came first. The licensee was short of stature, grey of hair and moustache, weak of feature. He was an insignificant rabbit of a man, at first sight precisely the type cartoonists love to marry to an outsize woman. Yet even to the novice the first impression of Mr Wallace was superficial, for there were two points in his make-up oddly at variance with his general appearance. The hard black eyes belied the lack of intelligence indicated by the low and sloping forehead, and the deep tone of the voice was not congruent with the visible marks of timidity.

  It was natural, because familiarity with the idiosyncrasies of our species make it so, that Mrs Wallace should be a woman weighing fourteen stone, yet handsome despite that and her forty-five years-despite, too, the stern forbidding expression in her dark eyes, which gleamed beneath straight dark brows. She watched her husband very much as a goanna watches a trapdoor spider.

  Mr Wallace attended the main-bar customers, and his wife waited on the wants of several men standing at the slide counter in the parlour. To these customers her expression was one of demure coquettishness, but often she turned her head to look down on her husband, when into her eyes leapt contemptuous disapproval that was at once dispersed when she caught the eye of a visitor. Obviously little Mr Wallace’s life was not a happy one.

  “See you working on the rabbit fence today,” a man said to Bony. “Have one with me?”

  “With pleasure. Yes, I am now working for the Rabbit Department.”

  “Hi, Leonard! Acuppler pots.”

  Bony’s new friend was prosperously stout, middle-aged, mellow-aged, pleasant -faced.

  “Hi! Buck up, Leonard! Acuppler pots,” he repeated in a voice that wheezed.

  Mr Wallace then was drawing pots for a party of men at the far end of the bar. He was doing his job in the manner of an expert. Even so, Mrs Wallace thought otherwise.

  “Oh, get out of the way, you slow-coach,” she hissed, pushing him from the pumps. Winter then was vanquished by spring with amazing quickness: “Two pots, Mr Thorn,” she exclaimed gaily, placing the drinks on the counter and accepting the shilling with a smirk.

  Mr Thorn smirked also. When she turned her attention to the parlour customers he said to Bony, sotto voce:

  “Poor ole Wallace! But don’t you run away with the idea that Wallace is allmouse. He stands a lot over a long time and then suddenly bucks. When he does there’s ructions; mybloomin ’ oath, there is. I wasworkin ’ latelarst night, and when I got back to town about eleven the pub was shut. Any’ow, I sneaked over to see if I could rouse Wallace on the quiet and could ’ear her going off
like a packet of crackers. She was telling ’im’owshe knew he had murdered George Loftus, and he wastellin ’ ’erthat if she didn’t shut up he would murder ’er. No, by no manner of means is Leonard a nice little gentlemanorl the time.”

  “Mrs Wallace must know something, surely?”

  “She might, but I don’t think so. That’s just ’ernasty ’abitof mind. Now, if ’e murdered ’erit would be more like it. She’s the sort of woman who gets surprised when’er throat is cut slowly.”

  “It is very strange George Loftus disappearing like that, isn’t it?” Bony remarked thoughtfully.

  Mr Thorn became confidential. He breathed beer affectionately into Bony’s face.

  “There’s nothing strange about it,” he whispered. “He done just wot I’d ’avedone in ’is place. If you justthinks, it all comes plain. Orl these detectives and things makes a hash of jobs like thisbecos they ’aven’tgot no imagination. Now, I ’avegot imagination. I could write books about this township and the people in it. There’s somebloomin ’ characters ’ereorl right. No, ole George Loftus disappearedbecos ’e wanted to disappear. He wasunfinancial. No, ole Loftus wanted the chance to get out, and ’e took it. ’E disappearedbecos ’e was broke and saw the chance to get out with some cash. He went down to Perth to argue with ’is creditors, and then, likely enough, wangled acuppler ’undredquid from them or the bank to carry on over the harvest.

  “Two ’undredpounds sounds a lot to a manwot’s broke, but it don’t sound so much to a manwot’s married and ’as a hungry farm waiting to swallow most of it. Says Loftus to ’isself: ‘Well, ’ere’sthe boodle, and I’morf. If I fades away, the bank’-or whoever lent him the money-‘will sool the Ds on to me, and medinah will sool ’emwhen the bank gets tired. Igotta use me brains. I’ll stage a nice mysterious disappearance, an’ whiles they’re all ’untin’ for me corpse I’ll do a get-over to the eastern States.’ ”