Bony and the White Savage Page 5

  At first Bony could see no change in the water level at the west entrance past the Door. Then it did appear to rise relatively to the coastal rocks. He saw the wave sweeping in behind the Door, coming with astonishing speed to encircle it It welled upward above the edge of the sand flat, rose many feet and rushed landward so high and so fast as to give him a spasm of fear although he was ten feet above the sand.

  “If you was out there, it would knock you flat,” Matt cried. “Ain’t she a beaut?” The sneaker rushed upon their rock, swirled in foam about it, sped on to the cliff base where it seemed to tear at the barrier with futile, frantic rage. The pause preceded the retreat, the mad rush of water speeding back towards the channel behind the Door, and presently the sand flat was again bare. “Fall into that and you’d find yourself at the Door right close,” Matt asserted quite unnecessarily. “I wanted you to see that. Just to prove you can’t ever trust this sea. Looks innocent enough a day like this, but you take your eyes off it, and it’ll get you sure enough.”

  “Must be terrific when it’s real rough, Matt.”

  “Safer when it’s blowing a gale. It’s so nasty then that no one would take a chance with it. And don’t you, ever.”

  Bony, curious about the ode to Australia’s Front Door, asked what happened to it. This brought a chuckle from Matt.

  “After he cleared out, the poem came back from a lit’ry magazine he sent it to. They said the poem was too imperialistic. You see, Marvin in the poem said the north of Australia was Australia’s backside pointing at the Asians. Well, we’d better shift off this rock, with the tide coming in, or stay on it like a couple of shags till the tide goes out again. We’d better take some fish home. I know a place where we can get a ute load.”

  The wind was in the hair and in the dark eyes of this man who could hate for thirteen years, making of him at this moment a youth who would adventure go. They caught a dozen two-pound blackfish in fifteen minutes, and then climbed the cliff behind the Door. The way was steep but easy for active men. It was a test for the lungs, and the cigarette smoker breathed harder than the addict to the pipe when they reached the top.

  Here, too, were the clumps of tea-tree bordering the cliff. Not to be confused with the ti-ti tree, the tea-tree clumps are similar to the Eskimo igloos if painted dark-green. The leaves are small and compact forming a close-knit covering erected by the twisting boughs. Often the clumps were separated, each being a hundred feet in circumference. Some overhung the cliff face; others were joined in larger masses among which an armed man could defy authority for weeks.

  The place where Bony and Matt reached the top of the cliff was a confined grassy space, the grass tough and the ground hard. They sat on the cliff verge mainly to admire Australia’s Front Door in its setting of blue ocean reaches either side, and the lazy surf caressing the black rocks as though lulling them into the belief that never again would there be a furious sea onslaught. The gulls were white patches on the summit of the mighty rock, and seals basking on a rocky headland beyond which Matt said was the whirlpool, were hard to distinguish until one ‘flopped’ into the water.

  “What d’you think of this coast to hide away in?” Matt asked, and waved at the tea-tree skirting their picnic ground, and then pointing downward. “And the Police Heads in Bunbury thinking all Sasoon had to do was bring his offsiders and arrest Marvin.”

  Bony poured tea from the thermos into enamel cups before saying, with a shoulder shrug:

  “It could never be done. That is other than with a Trojan Horse. The coast to the west looks to be even more rugged. A frontal attack on this Rhudder problem would certainly fail. Would you know all the caves and warrens in these Cliffs?”

  “No.” Matt was grim, but abruptly he smiled. “When old Jeff and me were kids we had to work long hours, and we didn’t have much time to go exploring, or fishing. Not like the next generation what wasn’t expected to do any work outside their schooling. Likely enough Marvin and the gang knew these cliffs and coast a thousand times better than Jeff or me. I’d say that if we searched the place yard by yard, Marvin could be watching from a cave we searched a couple of hours back. He was watching us all the time we were down below, I’ll bet on that.”

  “Nevertheless, not being the hermit type he won’t stay here for years,” predicted Bony. “His kind must have the bright lights, and the darkness of ill-lit streets, and unwary victims. With him the stalking and the anticipation are more thrilling than the victory. He could have moved on already.”

  “He could have, Nat. More blame to me. I should of told Sasoon about him days before I did.”

  “You should have done so but you did not, and it’s useless to look back. We accept the situation as it is and start from the present.” Bony struck a match and lit the cigarette, and when Matt applied a match to his pipe there was no fighting with the wind. “One thing we may be sure about is that Marvin, if still here, is bound to visit his home for tucker and human contact, or someone at the homestead is bound to come out with supplies for him. And that is the link in Marvin’s chain we have to find.”

  Matt nodded agreement, and Bony noted the smoke puffed from his mouth rising for several feet before the wind captured it. The explanation was simple. The breeze meeting the cliff-face continued upward beyond the cliff top before being driven inland and by this rotary action drawing inland air forward to the cliff edge. Where Matt was sitting with Bony the air was not quite still, and it brought the waxy scent of the tea-tree, and the scents of the tiny blue flowers sheltering in the tough and taller grass.

  “You know of his record, I suppose?” Bony asked.”

  “Some of it. Perhaps enough of it to make me ashamed of being a man.”

  “Pity all men don’t feel the same, Matt. His second crime in Sydney, or rather the second crime for which he was imprisoned, was stalking a couple in a Sydney park. Public park, you know. Lit with scattered lamps. Time, shortly after ten o’clock. They were an engaged couple, and were planning the house they would purchase. Friend Marvin bashed the man insensible and raped the girl. The stratum of morons in the community declared that the couple were in error in sitting in an illumined public park at ten o’clock on a hot night, and that by doing so they tempted overwhelmingly a mentally sick man.

  “Marvin was sentenced to five years’ gaol for rape. He was let out on a bond after three years.”

  “Why? You tell me that?” Matt said, fiercely. “Would he have got a longer term if they’d known about our Rose?”

  “Probably a longer term, but doubtless he would have been released after serving three years. The psychiatrists all said he was suffering from a moral defect, not a character defect.”

  “Well, what’s the difference?”

  “Ask the psychiatrists. I don’t know. Anyway, it was an excuse for the Parole Board to keep in favour with the Government, which likes to proclaim its merciful policy to criminals and thus hope for the votes of religious cranks and others. And the result of Marvin’s second crime was that the man has been in a mental hospital ever since, and will surely remain there, and the girl walked over the Gap to her death a year later.

  “To proceed with Marvin’s career of bestial crime is nauseating. The highlights are those acts of bashing and rape for which he was given prison terms, and do not include those crimes for which he was strongly suspect, or when there wasn’t sufficient evidence against him. During the space of thirteen years he was convicted five times and released on each occasion before the stupidly short sentence was served.”

  Bony lit another cigarette, and curiously watched the smoke being wafted to the cliff edge where it was caught in the uprush of air. He went on:

  “We must render credit to Marvin where credit is due. From what you and others have told me of him before he went off the rails, he is a very clever man. He would stage his acts of piety at the correct moments. His behaviour in prison would be faultless. He would know the right answers to return to the psychiatrists, for when arrested in hi
s room at one time he was found in possession of several standard works on psychology and psychiatry. And he must be given credit for choosing New South Wales in the era and place most favourable to his hunting instincts.”

  Bony stubbed the cigarette end against the heel of his shoe, and Matt saw him sniff as though suffering from sinus trouble.

  “You and Jeff Rhudder aren’t the only people who have threatened to shoot Marvin,” Bony said, softly. “The same threat has been uttered in public by the father of the little girl who was attacked one night when returning home from buying a comic at the corner shop. I understand he was very keen, and perhaps he had some influence behind Marvin’s decision to leave the safety of New South Wales for South Australia.

  “I am telling you this because this Marvin Rhudder isn’t the brave, the fearless leader, the intellectual, the good-looking boy and young man known to you up to the day he became Mr Hyde and ravished your daughter. There had to be a first. As a police investigator, I must obey the rules and the law, but as a private person and the father of three boys...”

  Bony suddenly went over backwards, gained his feet and raced out into the open behind the line of tea-tree. Astounded, yet Matt’s reflexes were instant and he was almost beside him when Bony halted.

  “What the hell!” he exclaimed, regarding Bony’s flaring nostrils and wide, brilliant blue eyes. He felt Bony’s restraining hand on his arm, and he stared in the direction of Bony’s unwinking gaze. He knew Bony was concentrating beyond the nearest arboreal igloo, beyond it to the next, and then he noted a small area of movement on its painted covering.

  “For a moment I saw only his back,” Bony said, breathing hard. “I saw that he was armed with a rifle. He went into the tea-tree almost as though diving. Wait!” What Matt did not observe was the grass which had received the man’s footprints, visibly rising to its original position. After so short a period it was hopeless to track. Concerned more with this minor problem than with the larger, Bony urged Matt to the cliff and out of sight of the man with the rifle.

  “If he’s in that bush why don’t we get him?” Matt almost shouted. “He can’t get away. He must be Marvin, the dirty swine.”

  “Calm down,” ordered Bony. “We can’t do any shooting with fishing-rods, and with the thermos for a bullet. Besides, I’m no hero.”

  “Nor me,” agreed Matt, flexing his great hardened hands. “But we got to do something.”

  “We surely have, but what we have to do we do in our time, not his. What on earth would the Brass do if I suicided by walking against his rifle?”

  “Nothing to be funny about, but I see your point.”

  “Good! We’ll get along to the ute and then home. The sun’s westering.”

  Matt slung the load of fish over a shoulder and Bony picked up the rods and thermos.

  “When did it rain last?” he asked.

  “Rain! We had two drops and a half a week ago. Haven’t had a decent rain for five weeks.”

  Slowly, because Bony maintained attention on the ground, they proceeded between the tree-clumps or around the larger masses, sometimes able to skirt the sheer cliff drop. They came to an area where rabbits burrowed and, although the rodents hadn’t fed on the grass, they had worn it away by their eternal skittering. Bony quartered it, halted, asking:

  “None of the Rhudders has small feet, I take it. Here’s a print made by a rubber-soled shoe size six. Could be made by the girl, Sadie. What would she be doing out here?”

  “Collects sea-shells,” informed Matt, and Bony countered him with:

  “Hardly the place to find sea-shells, up on these cliffs.”

  “Easier travellin’ up here than down below. Farther west, beyond Australia’s Front Door, there’s better hunting grounds for shell, and less dangerous, too. She’s got a great collection, has Sadie. Writes pieces about ’em to the Perth papers, too.” Bony broke into cheerful whistling, for he found prints of heavy male boots or shoes. “We call in on old Jeff?” suggested Matt.

  “Not today,” decided Bony. “Growing late and your Emma will be waiting for the fish, remember.”

  Chapter Seven

  Nights Are for Blood-and-Gutzers

  THERE WAS now no one on the veranda of the Inlet homestead, and the red and blue Holden standing outside the motor-shed belonged to Luke.

  “Mark’s got a flash red sports,” Matt further mentioned. “And the Starks get about in a Vauxhall.”

  On the way to the coast Bony had been too interested in the plan of the homestead to take much notice of the rough but sturdy boat-shed opposite the front gate. He saw within it a boat, and Matt informed him it was a twelve-footer powered with an engine.

  “Do you have one?” Bony asked, and Matt said, not since the children grew up.

  All the gulls were afloat with the swans and the pelicans, and the ducks worked close inshore and took little notice of the utility. The wind had weakened and the sun was about to set, and Bony occupied these quiet moments to enlarge on his previously expressed warning.

  “It’s a pity you didn’t obtain a clear picture of that man, Matt, but I believe we can be confident he was Marvin Rhudder, and we must proceed as though certain. Remember what I said about him, and also that Sasoon advised you to keep close to Emma. It was because I overheard you giving orders to Karl to repair a shed roof that I suggested our trip this afternoon.”

  “Marvin wouldn’t have the gall to come to our place,” asserted Matt, and Bony was impatient because in spite of the man’s hatred of his daughter’s ravisher, he did not even now, understand the menace.

  “If subject to unfavourable circumstances, he might well do so,” Bony persisted. “Marvin’s a psychopath as well as a paranoiac. He’s as dangerous as a tiger all the time, and a gorilla some of the time. He has what is necessary to think with, and in high degree, and thus he must be regarded as being always as dangerous as a gorilla and a tiger combined. That last woman he attacked in South Australia was sixty-eight. Age isn’t important to him.”

  Following a prolonged silence, Matt said:

  “D’you reckon he heard what we were talking about up on the cliff?”

  “No. The back draught of air brought the smell of man to me, but it wasn’t strong enough to indicate he was close enough to overhear. Now nothing of this to Emma or Karl.”

  The Inlet had been left behind and they were passing through a forest denuded of big trees, when Matt asked caustically:

  “Aside from being a detective, you talk sense, Nat. What do we do if Marvin should appear at home?”

  “Meet him with a gun, and, if you have to shoot, aim for his legs. Keep in mind always that to anticipate being hanged isn’t conducive to mental relaxation. I keep in mind the poor lunatic in the asylum, the little girl, the other victims, and most especially, the possible victims-to-be.”

  Never doubting that her husband would return with fish, Emma had made the necessary preparation to include fish on the menu. She knew, too, that a two-pound blackfish nicely steamed and served with oyster sauce plus vegetables is enough for the average hungry man.

  For Bony it had been both a varied and strenuous day, and when after dinner, the Jukes insisted he sit on the bench outside whilst the dinner chores were being done, he was more than ready to relax and meditate.

  Where he sat he could hear the bustle and the conversation in the kitchen. In a yard calves bellowed for their mothers, and farther away pigs grunted or squeaked, and hens argued with whom they should roost. And now that the day was ended the karri tree was even more impressive as the lord of this world. Its trunk split the crimson western sky, and its mighty arms supported the celestial roof over the homestead. From far away, the restless ocean voiced its detestation of the grinning rocks.

  Bony had achieved something this day. He had calmed the emotional tempest in Matthew Jukes. He had brought a measure of peace and thankfulness to the small woman who loved flowers and helpless things, and shrank from evil and violence. He had, during dinner, a
dmitted his mission to the hired hand who was no hired hand in this household, and to Karl had given slight ease of mind. Now he was established, accepted, and their voices told him of what he had given.

  Matt presently joined him, saying he had to lock up the poultry against the thieving foxes, and feed the calves with skimmed milk to keep them quiet for the night. His passage under the karri seemed to arouse the birds, because a magpie began softly to warble, and its song was taken up by several others. Butcher-birds in a tree robust but dwarfed by the karri joined in for a few moments. Emma and Karl came to sit with him and listen, too.

  When the evening chorus was ended, Emma said faintly apologetic:

  “We have an arrangement, Nat. Karl does the washing-up after dinner, and then for an hour I read aloud one of his books. It wouldn’t disturb you, would it? You see, Matt likes to hear the readings as well.”

  “I should be disturbed if I were left out,” protested Bony.

  “Then, when Matt comes in, we’ll begin.”

  “What kind of books are yours, Karl?” Bony asked, and after waiting for help from Emma which perversely she didn’t render, he said:

  “Oh, all sorts, Nat. Blood-and-gutzers, you know. Can’t afford real books with proper print and proper covers to ’em. You see, when I go across to Albany I calls in at a bookshop and buys up our stock for the year. This time I bought Wuthering Heights and a couple of Edgar Wallace’s and a beaut looking job called Ivanhoe. The woman who runs the bookshop knows we don’t go nap on the sexy stuff, and I got to rely on her what I bring home.”

  “I’m going to enjoy myself,” decided Bony. “What is the book you’re reading now, Emma?”

  “Ivanhoe, it’s a lovely tale.”

  “Better’n that Wuthering Heights one,” Karl inserted. “Matt went off to sleep twice on that one, so we give it away for the Green Archer. Finished that a coupler nights back.”