The Mountains Have a Secret Read online

  What Bony had learned, and what was not contained in the statements, was that Ferris Simpson had been dressing her father when the two girls were about to depart, and that her brother had been insistent that she leave the old man to join him in farewelling the guests. After they had left, so all the statements agreed, Simpson had started on a repair job on the garage which had occupied him for the remainder of that day.

  Bony had scouted along the track from the hotel to the guest-house. He had repeatedly left the track to explore the natural paths through the scrub. With the patience of his maternal forebears, he had hunted for signs imprinted on this page of the Book of the Bush five months before. His task was more difficult than that of the geologists who came to study these mountains and could say how they had been formed ages since.

  Despite the passage of five months since the girl hikers had left the hotel, the lack of clues was becoming significant. Normally they must have left clues for such as Bonaparte to discover and so reconstruct their fate as geologists are able to reconstruct the formation of mountains. In his field Bonaparte was equally a scientist.

  It was the afternoon of the eighth day of his stay at Baden Park Hotel. He had slipped away shortly after lunch when aware that Simpson and the yardman were repairing the pumping engine up the creek, and for the twentieth time he was examining the ground on either side of the track to Lake George. Today, as previously, he could find nothing and he was now convinced that the two girls had not become lost in the bush.

  A possible lead to their fate might lie upon an area of small shingle over which the track passed about a mile from the hotel. Bony was approaching it now on the return walk to the hotel, his deep blue eyes ceaselessly alert.

  On reaching the shingle, he sat down with his back to a boulder and rolled a cigarette. Where the shingle lay, nothing grew. A few feet to his front the track crossed the shingle, the motor traffic laying down twin ruts like the lines of a railroad track. Despite the successive weights passing along the ruts, they were barely two inches deep, so firm was the ground beneath.

  At some time in the past a motor vehicle had been turned here. It had come from the hotel, had been driven off the track, backed across it, and then angled to run into the ruts and to be stopped just before it would pass on to the softer earth. The marks made by the turning were so faint that Bony had crossed and recrossed the area on several occasions before he sighted them, and so followed their story-telling curves.

  According to the gathered statements and the Official Summary, no vehicle had passed the hotel during the visit of the hikers and the following two days and nights. When the two hikers left the hotel they passed out of sight round that first bend which was but a hundred yards or so from the watching Simpsons on their veranda. They would walk on and pass that old turn-off to Baden Park Station marked on Bony’s map and subsequently disused in favour of the track down by the hotel and its vineyard. Eventually they would arrive at this shingle area. Supposing that on that day they came to a halted motor vehicle facing towards the hotel? Supposing they were seized, assaulted, killed? Leave motive alone for the nonce. Concentrate on that picture five months old.

  Well, having arrived at the waiting motor vehicle, nothing would have persuaded the girls voluntarily to enter it. It wasn’t going their way—or had it been turned after they were kidnapped and thrust inside it? Bony was not sure about this, but inclined to believe the turn had been made before they arrived.

  When people are struggling items become detached from them. The more severe the struggle, the greater the number of items. Buttons, hairpins, dress ornaments, and even hairs. The struggle would occur in the vicinity of the parked car, and that portion of the shingle area would now receive his concentrated attention.

  Take another step. Assuming the girls had been assaulted at this place and either killed or abducted to be killed elsewhere, how had the car passed the hotel that day? Old Simpson, James Simpson and his sister, Mrs. Simpson and O’Brien, the yardman, all had stated that no car passed the hotel that day—or on either of the two following days and nights.

  But what if the car was Simpson’s Buick? That would not pass the hotel. In the minds of all those questioned would be the picture of a visitor’s car, a passing tourist’s car. It could be a car from Baden Park Station, and still the people at the hotel would answer in the negative: Did any car pass that day or the day after?

  But it was silly to prognosticate further. It was not Simpson’s car. Simpson was not in it, anyway. After the girls had left the hotel he was known to have worked about the place. Did he, however, know what waited on the track for the hikers? And, knowing, did he provide an alibi by insisting on his sister’s leaving their father’s dressing to stand with him and wave farewell to them? If only the evidence of a struggle could be found where the car had waited!

  The air was heavy with eucalyptus. The dominating mountain watched. One could not get away from those grey-and-brown granite eyes. Even in the dense scrub they sought one out. The impression they created was strong with Bony when he rose and sauntered over the loose shingle. Most of the shingle comprised white quartz, a carpet of some two inches thick. The sunlight was reflected in snowy whiteness, causing his eyes to contract to mere pin-points. The hours passed, and square foot by square foot the carpet all about the position of the parked car was diligently examined.

  A grey fantail came from nowhere to watch and chirp and dance. The ants were diverted by quartz chips being disturbed. Once a bull ant crouched back upon its hind legs and glared at the man with cold, agate-hard hate. The shadows lengthened, but the passing of time was shut out of the mind of this man whose patience could accomplish the finding of a needle in a haystack.

  He did, indeed, make an interesting discovery. He found a splinter of pink quartz in which was embedded a tiny shot of gold. The splinter was dropped into a side pocket with the nonchalance of a boy finding a rusty pocket-knife. The fantail continued to dance and flirt. Twice it flew into the bordering scrub and danced on the boughs and gave the alarm to anyone not preoccupied with gazing upon shingle square foot by square foot.

  Of no interest to the crouching Bonaparte was a nut discarded by a car or truck, a half-smoked cigarette upon which no rain had fallen and therefore had not lain there longer than eleven days, and the remains of a glass bottle which had certainly been there for several years.

  A detective who has no luck is sooner or later returned to the uniformed branch and the street beat. For an instant Luck smiled at the implacable Bony.

  Now gold embedded in quartz is a natural phenomenon, but rubies are not found amid quartz shingle. Deep between two pieces of quartz a crimson eye stared out at Bony. On moving his head the merest fraction it vanished. Then he saw it again. He stretched forth a hand and lifted the quartz guarding it.

  It was a ruby, or a stone remarkably like one. The tips of Bony’s long fingers went down to it. A man said:

  “What the hell are you looking for?”

  With the ruby, the fingers took up a piece of quartz, and the hand became still. Bony looked up. On the track just off the shingle stood James Simpson. He had a double-barrelled shotgun nestling in the crook of his arm.

  Bony stood up and tossed away the piece of quartz, with the tip of one finger imprisoning the ruby against his palm.

  “Gold,” he said lightly. “Likely-looking quartz around here.”

  Simpson’s lip lifted, and he came forward on to the shingle. The fantail almost alighted on his felt hat and then flew on to dance on a boulder.

  “You must be an optimist,” sneered the licensee, and there was something in his eyes akin to that in the eyes of the bull ant. Bony chuckled. He conveyed the ruby to a side pocket and took from it the splinter of quartz.

  “What would you say that is?” he asked, proffering the quartz to Simpson.

  Simpson thrust forward his left hand, his eyes as hard as those of the mountain. Then his gaze fell to the piece of pink stone, and the rigidity of his bod
y subsided.

  Chapter Seven

  Prospecting

  WAITED upon by Ferris Simpson, Bony ate in meditative mood the excellently prepared dinner. At the other table old Simpson twice attempted to break into the general conversation and was pointedly ignored by his son, who talked with Glen Shannon of gold and its incidence in their respective countries.

  Simpson was dressed in an old but well-pressed dinnersuit, and the starched collar and shirt cuffs emphasised the weather-darkened skin of face and hands. His brown hair, parted high up, lay close to his head, which added strength to the face when in profile.

  The man’s reaction to the gold-shot quartz had been slightly baffling, especially in view of the general knowledge of gold being now revealed in his conversation with the American yardman.

  When returning to the hotel with Bony, he had asserted it to be a “floater” brought away from the range in the distant past by, probably, water from a cloudburst. He had never found gold in the district, and no one ever had. It was the strangest fluke that Bony had found it, and then had come the pressing questions: Had Bony prospected for gold? Where and when? Had he ever staked a claim? All questions which could have been intended to get farther into Bony’s background.

  Simpson had said he was out after rabbits for the table, but Bony saw by his tracks that he had stood for several minutes watching him before he spoke, and before that he had advanced spasmodically from a point where first he sighted him, advanced as though desiring to do so without being noticed.

  Rabbits! No, not along that road. Along by the creek there were rabbits. There were rabbits in the abandoned vineyard. It appeared as though Simpson had been looking for him, which would indicate that he was suspicious.

  Throughout the meal Detective Price tried to emerge from the back of Bony’s mind, being frustrated only by the interest in Simpson and his reactions. The old man was wheeled away in his chair by his daughter, out through the door leading to the hall and the front veranda, and when she returned she brought the coffee and Bony lit a cigarette. It was then that Price won.

  In Bony’s mind the death of Detective Price had for some time been disassociated from the mystery of the hikers, but in view of what he had discovered this afternoon it demanded reconsideration. If Price had been killed by some person or persons responsible for the vanishment of the hikers, whereabouts along the chain of his investigation had he discovered a clue, or a link, which had made him an acute danger to those responsible for the vanishment? The subject was like a dog’s curly tail which, on being smoothed straight, swiftly returns to the curl.

  The same thing followed when the supposition was raised that Price was murdered because he had discovered a vital clue leading to the discharged yardman, Ted O’Brien. Old Simpson was so sure that the man would not have departed without saying good-bye to him. Supposing O’Brien had seen something, or discovered something concerning the two girls, and had been effectively silenced, and then suppose Price had discovered something of the yardman’s fate, and himself been effectively silenced? That appeared to be a more reasonable hypothesis than that Price had found such a clue to the fate of the girls as Bony had that afternoon discovered.

  It was not a ruby but a brilliant which had had a setting. Neither of the girls had worn hats when they left Melbourne, and one, Mavis Sanky, had worn a hair-clip studded with ornamental ruby-red brilliants. Her companion had been wearing a similar ornament decorated with emerald brilliants. The setting of both ornaments was nine-carat gold, and therefore the ornaments were not cheap and the stones would not easily fall out.

  Bony decided he was licensed to assume that his picture of the car waiting on the shingle area was authentic. There had been a struggle during which the hair-clip worn by Mavis Sanky had dropped from her head, had been trodden upon as it lay on the shingle, had been picked up minus that one brilliant which had dropped down between the pieces of quartz and remained unseen.

  Had the persons concerned in the struggle retrieved the hair-clip before they drove off with their prisoners, or had it been found by either the old yardman or by Detective Price?

  Assumptions only, but they were all that Bony had gained, and as he passed out of the dining-room, already evacuated by the others, he determined to press forward with his interrogation of old Simpson.

  On the few occasions he had been able freely to talk with the old man he had been unable to elicit anything further to the remark about the body in the spirit store. Old Simpson was deeply cunning or slightly decayed mentally, in either case aggravatingly so, and Bony was given the impression that he was being bargained with. If he wanted information he’d have to buy it with a drink or two. And with this in his mind, he passed on to the front veranda and was ordered to:

  “Get to hell outa here,” by the cockatoo.

  “Don’t you take no notice of that ruddy fowl,” snarled the old man. “Come on over here and have a talk before they dump me into me cot like a body into a coffin. Where you get that floater, eh? I can’t make head nor tail of it the way Jim tells it.”

  Having settled himself near the invalid, Bony described the shingle area and proffered the quartz for examination. Old Simpson held it to the light and squinted at the golden speck.

  “I know the place,” he said. “Might be as Jim said about being washed down by a cloudburst. It’d have to be that. Ground ain’t low enough to have been the bed of a river.”

  “The quartz might have worked up from a reef underneath the shingle,” Bony suggested, and the old man nodded quick agreement. He said:

  “Pity Ted O’Brien ain’t here. He’d have an idea or two. He done a lot of prospectin’ around Ballarat in the old days. How long you staying on?”

  “Few days, I expect.”

  The weak eyes peered at Bony and then were directed along the veranda to the caged bird. Bony could almost see the mind working.

  “You pull out tomorrer,” the old man said, hope in his voice. “You go down to Hamilton and find Ted’s sister and from her find out where Ted is. Show him this bit of quartz. Back him with a grub-stake and arrange to go partners with him. I’d like to see Ted again.”

  “Perhaps O’Brien didn’t go back to Hamilton.”

  “Perhaps he never did. I ain’t sure. I’d like to be.” The old man’s voice sank to a whisper. “The winder behind me—is it open?”

  Bony brought his gaze upward to pass swiftly across the window next to that of his bedroom. He shook his head and then crossed to his bedroom window and, sweeping aside the curtains beyond, leaned inward to take a box of matches from the dressing-table. The door was closed and the room was empty.

  On resuming his chair, he said:

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “A drink, that’s what’s on my mind. That and old Ted who uster talk to me. You try and find Ted and hear what he says about that piece of quartz. Don’t you tell Jim about it, about findin’ Ted. He’s going over to Baden Park tonight. That’ll be him getting out the car. He goes over there some nights to play the organ for ’em.”

  Bony leaned forward, saying:

  “Who else have you asked to find O’Brien?”

  That gave the old man a shock. The thin, warped hands clasped and unclasped. The expression in the watery blue eyes became cunning, and the answer in the negative was forceful.

  “Did O’Brien do any prospecting about here?” Bony persisted. “Yes, sometimes.”

  “I suppose he used to cart in the firewood?”

  “Course. That’s the yardman’s job. What’s firewood got to do with prospectin’?”

  “Did he use the horse and dray for prospecting?”

  “No, nor did he use airyplanes. He had two good legs, didn’t he?”

  “How far would he go out for firewood? Two miles?”

  “Nuthin’ like it. There’s enough good wood within half a mile of the place.” The voice became petulant. “You tryin’ to lead me around?”

  Bony nodded.

  “Yes,�
� he said. “I’m wondering why you are so anxious to find out what happened to Ted O’Brien.”

  “I told you. Me and Ted were friends. Jim hadn’t no right to sack him just because he got into the spirit store.”

  “Where there was a body all cold and stiff, eh?”

  The old man tittered, gasped, and glared at the laughing Bonaparte. Bony stood up and stretched and yawned; then, gazing down upon the wreck, he said softly:

  “Would you like a little drink tonight?”

  “Would a man dying of thirst like snow water? You—you bring me in a little nip tonight, eh?”

  “I might.”

  The sunken mouth writhed and a shaking hand was lifted to still the tremor. Bony studied the watering eyes, observed the struggle going on. Desire, cupidity, mental instability seemed enthroned at the one time. Old Simpson was far from satisfied that the old yardman had actually left the hotel, and he had stated his unbelief in the excuse put forward for the man’s discharge.

  “You keep a secret?” Bony asked.

  “I’m full of secrets,” was the reply.

  “All right. I’ll let you in on a secret later tonight. What time does your son usually return home from Baden Park?”

  “About—any time between three in the morning and daybreak.”

  “I’ll come in and have a chat with you about midnight.”

  “You’ll fetch a nip?”

  Nodding, Bony left the old man to stand for a moment or two before the bird’s cage and then to saunter down the steps and cross to the bridge spanning the little creek. The Buick was parked outside the garage. The sun was setting, and the face of the mountain was like the face of an Eastern woman—partially hidden by the yashmak of purple silk.