Bony and the Mouse Read online

  “Thank you, Sister. We have to remember that Mary at the time was living with the MacBrides. She went to bed about ten o’clock, and was then wearing the nightdress provided by Mrs MacBride. When she was found dead the next morning, she was wearing the old print frock provided by the Mission, and without which no aboriginal woman is permitted to come near Daybreak, or even Dryblowers Flat. Therefore, she must have put on that old print dress before leaving her room, and we can reasonably assume that she did so to go out into Main Street to meet her murderer.

  “How did she compare with the other women of the tribe? Was she gay or serious? Was she personally clean? In short, was she attractive to men ... white men especially?”

  “I’ll describe her for you,” offered Sister Jenks. “Mary was, I’d say, about twenty. On regular food she became nicely rounded. She looked, what shall I say, she looked very nice in the clothes given her. She laughed a lot and spoke very little to anyone excepting Mrs MacBride, of whom I’m sure she was very fond.

  “Now you’ve come to concentrate on Mary, you’ve made me, too, and I remember little things about her. I spoke to her after church on the Sunday morning before she was killed, and she seemed glum; not her usual happy self. I remember asking her if she was unwell. She shook her head. ‘I’m good-o, Miss,’ she said. She called every woman ‘miss’ and every man ‘mister’. Given another year with the MacBrides, I believe she would have spoken as well as most of us.”

  “Forgive me for switching. What men in Daybreak have the name of being strongly interested in women in general, and so possibly in a woman like Mary?”

  “You really think that sex is behind Mary’s murder?”

  “It’s an angle which must not be ignored ... How much or how little is your personal experience with the tribe, individuals, I mean?”

  The cold crust of the hospital sister occupying a position of responsibility plus independent authority melted, to leave this girl warmly human. She burrowed among the debris of her desk and showed him a picture of some fifteen small naked babies lying in the sunshine, and seemingly guarded by two fierce half-bred dingoes.

  “Aren’t they sweet?” she said softly, waiting for his enthusiasm. “Not one a day older than seven months and when the tribe comes back from walkabout I think there’ll be five new ones.”

  “You keep count of them?”

  “Oh yes. And Constable Harmon helps, too. He thinks we’ve stopped that horrid infanticide in this local tribe. They’re a long way from us, though. The young boys and girls are closer than the elders, and I suppose we ought to be grateful to white girls like the Elders and to one or two white lads like Tony Carr.”

  “How d’you get along with Miss Harmon?”

  “Very well. Nice old thing. Always letting the prisoners out, and that annoys her brother tremendously. Of course, they never attempt to go farther than the hotel, but the constable has to round them up and take them back. Then there’s a frightful row. You heard about their tragedy, I suppose?”

  Bony said he’d not heard, and Sister Jenks related that Harmon’s wife and sister were riding in Esther Harmon’s car back to Kalgoorlie one evening, when two youths in a stolen car crashed into them, killing Harmon’s wife, and permanently crippling his sister.

  “It’s why he stays in Daybreak,” she went on. “The boys, they were just under the twenty mark, weren’t hurt, and ran away. Harmon happened to find them working on a station. The station men all had to join in to stop him killing them. There was quite an inquiry, and they sent Harmon out here, and now he won’t agree to a transfer, and the heads aren’t strong on forcing him to take a transfer. I think that’s a lot to do with his treatment of Tony Carr. He seems to be just waiting for Tony to do something he shouldn’t. He bullied Tony badly when Tommy Moss was found killed.”

  “But why, d’you know?”

  “Well, it seems that Tommy Moss never met Tony without calling him names, and one day Tony chased him into the garage and threatened that if he didn’t stop it he’d put him in hospital. Two days later young Moss was found dead on the track beside his bike.”

  “What is your opinion of Tony Carr?” asked Bony, and Sister Jenks came back swiftly:

  “What’s yours?”

  “Same as your own,” he conceded laughingly, and shortly afterwards left to take over the bar service from Kat Loader.

  The following day he rode down to Dryblowers Flat, finding it a town planner’s nightmare, there being no hint of any planning. Ramshackle buildings of old iron, cane-grass and hessian bags sprawled among the rather lovely sandalwoods on the banks of a dry creek in the bed of which a deep soak provided water of the purest quality.

  The house inhabited by Elder and his daughters, though ‘slapped’ together, was at least commodious, clean and cool. Joy came to meet him, pat the horse’s neck, and invite him in for a cup of tea. The injured foot was still bandaged, and today she was wearing a pair of her father’s carpet slippers.

  “It’ll be all right in another week, Nat,” she informed him shyly, her golden eyes frankly admiring.

  “I’m glad of that. I’ll be able to tell a certain young man that he needn’t bother to be worried about you any longer.”

  “Tony Carr?”

  Bony smiled. He was asked not to mention Tony’s name to her father, and he winked brazenly. He was presented to Joy’s sister, Janet, a rounded edition of herself, having the same-coloured hair, but eyes of penetrating grey. Elder was a ‘young’ man of seventy or so, and they found him in the shade of a rear shed, working on leather belts.

  Elder thanked Bony for what he had done for Joy, and the girls went into the house to prepare afternoon tea. He had Janet’s eyes, and they pin-pointed the visitor without a hint of rudeness. Himself of the Interior, he waited politely through several casual remarks to be told the visitor’s business.

  “I’d like to play poker, but haven’t the time,” Bony said, having made the inevitable cigarette. And Elder came back with: “Banker’s my game at the moment. Short shrift, win or lose.”

  “All right, I lay my bet and play it fast. I’m riding Harmon’s horse. I work at the pub. I am on a secret mission of inquiry into the death of Mary, for the Aborigines’ Department. Sister Jenks told me you would respect a confidence, and not ask unwanted questions.”

  “That lass is sound commonsensical, Nat.” The eyes of eternal youth gleamed with humour. “Some debts a man can never pay; he can only try. You ask. I answer.”

  “Thanks. We have reason to think that the aborigines haven’t been a hundred per cent co-operative in helping to clear up that murder, and we’re not satisfied it was a tribal killing. Been any trouble between them and anyone living in Daybreak, or outside?”

  “Used to be a deal of it in the old days,” replied Elder. “Got better after the present chief, called Iriti, took over. Melody Sam and the policeman who was here before Harmon arranged a sort of peace treaty. Since then they’ve acted right, and Melody’s been generous to ’em with meat and tobacco every time they come in from walkabout.”

  “Any trouble with the lubras and the whites?” pressed Bony, and Elder said there had been none since Harmon had got a man three years for having relations with a lubra. Then he mentioned Tony Carr, and Elder said:

  “I got no time for that young feller, but he wouldn’t be off hunting with the bucks for days on end if he was mucking about with black gals. Leastways, he wouldn’t’ve come back from a hunt.”

  It was Elder’s opinion that Mary’s death was a ritual execution. She was becoming too attached to the parson and his wife, and when the excuse came to kill her, that was that, in Main Street or out in the desert. It didn’t matter where, to them.

  “What was the excuse?” Bony promptly wanted to know.

  “Well, daughter Janet tells the story that she and Mary and other gals went camping out, and she and Mary came on an abos’ ceremonial ground in the mulga forest down there. Happened about this time last year. None of us go into the f
orest, there being nothing in it to go for. The gals, you know, black and white, was away up on a rock hole to the north of the forest, and on the way back Janet said that, instead of coming round the outside of the forest, she’d go direct through it, and she kidded Mary to go with her.

  “So through the forest they went, leaving the others to come back the long way round. As Janet tells it, they came to a mound of boulders, and from this mound they see the ceremonial ground all laid out in circles and things with white quartz. Mary got frightened and wouldn’t go with Janet across the ground. She went round it and joined Janet on this side. She oughtn’t to have been there. Taboo to a lubra. Good excuse to kill her for leaving the tribe for the whites, for that is what it looked like, even though she did spend a lot of time with her people. I can’t understand why they didn’t kill Janet, who did cross the ground.”

  “Raise too much dust,” surmised Bony. “And besides, a white girl would mean nothing in their scheme of things.”

  Chapter Eight

  Melody Sam’s Private Eye

  NO MAN was ever more grateful for service than was Melody Sam for being cured, cleaned and polished, and, like his stone counterpart, set up once more on his pedestal. The granddaughter continued to evince interest in quite an important question, viz. was the yardman married or single, and Constable Harmon’s good fellowship, created by the taming of the grey horse, continued without ruffle.

  Nine days had Inspector Bonaparte been at Daybreak, and he had listened and probed as he performed his duties and studied the currents beneath the surface of this normally placid community. He was no more conscious of the passing of time than the town goats, and was as indifferent to what his distant superiors might be thinking about his lack of reports as Bulow’s Range was of the vast and silent mulga forest.

  In mid-morning of the tenth day, he was seated with Melody Sam on the form outside the front of the hotel. There were no customers. Immediately before them was the pepper tree at that end of Main Street, with the stone man looking out to meet the road traveller from Laverton, or nearer station homesteads. Sam, who had not taken a drink for seven days, sat straight and strong, his feet encased in riding-boots, his legs imprisoned within gabardine trousers, his torso decorated by a white shirt, with a buttoned waistcoat of dark material, and a watch-chain of linked gold nuggets strung across his chest. His white hair was short and stiff. His moustache was short and bristling. His countenance, like that of his granddaughter, was polished like a gibber.

  “Them pepper trees,” he remarked, “I planted them back in ’98. There was thirty of ’em, and we only lost one, and that one was chewed up by the ruddy goats. Had to guard ’em pretty close for the first ten years; after that they were too tough even for the goats. Another one we nearly lost, that third one down the row.” Melody Sam chuckled. “He got nearly et by a feller we called ‘Whispering Will’. Someone bet him he wouldn’t chew his way through a pepper tree, so he went out one night and gave it a go. Like the goats he found it a bit tough, so went home for the axe and chopped half-way through before we could snare the axe off him.”

  “Sporting days,” drawled Bony.

  “Before your time, Nat. Them days men got into it, boots and all, with rocks and axes and whatever come handy. Nowadays they sneak around and does folk in with a bludgeon or a knife across the windpipe, and for no reason anyone can make out.”

  “I’ve been hearing about the Daybreak murders.”

  “You would’ve, Nat. Got the police from Kal running round in circles, and poor old Harmon, well, he’s all right in his way. We get along with him.”

  “Must be a lunatic in Daybreak, or at Dryblowers.”

  And again Melody Sam chortled.

  “Plenty of wonkyites down at Dryblowers, but not that bad. Take a ride over that way and look-see for yourself. Characters, all of ’em. No, this feller murderin’ people isn’t that sort of lunatic. He’s livin’ hereabouts nice and peaceful, and one night he’ll get his chance again. And then, Nat, I’m going to put you to work on him.”

  “Oh, why me?”

  “Because there’s something crook about the trackers they got on the job. I’m not liking these murders. Pretty bad for our reputation. Daybreak’s a good town. Exceptin’ for a fight, or a wife-bashing, and a bit of thieving now and then, it could be said that Daybreak’s a pure town. Has to be. She’s my town. Excepting the post office and the police station and courthouse, I own her, lock, stock and barrel. Someone murders one of my folk, and he murders me. We got to catch him, Nat, and when we do I’m going to have Harmon tethered to one of them trees, and I’m goin’ to sit in the courthouse in judgement, and fifteen minutes after I sentence our murderer, we’ll have him hanging pop-eyed under one of them pepper trees.”

  The vapouring of senility? No, the voice was hard, and the mind was clear and cold. Bony stirred uneasily, and, to conceal it, he began with tobacco and papers.

  “Might cause a lot of strife,” he said.

  “Bound to, Nat, bound to.”

  That seemed that, with nothing to add. Bony said:

  “What d’you think is crook about the trackers?”

  “Well, you keep this under your hat. You’re workin’ for Melody Sam, and no one’s ever found him stingy. I like you, Nat, and we get along. ’Sides you never slavered when I was crook of the booze, or made me think I was wonky or something. I’ve watched you. You know more’n you say. Deep, Nat, and I like ’em deep when the deepness is straight. What are we paying you as yardman?”

  “Ten pounds a week, and keep,” replied Bony, and wondered what he would do when given his wages. Worse was to come.

  “A tenner a week,” growled Melody Sam. “Used to be ten shillings a week, and they’d rush the job. A tenner a week, eh! Well, I’m not paying you any more ’cos you wouldn’t be worth it. That is as a yardman. Mind you, you’re not doing too badly in the bar, but you got a lot to learn yet. It’s this other job that’s in me mind, this one about checking up on the trackers and getting right down to base when the next murder happens.”

  “What was the matter with the trackers?” evaded Bony, now wondering how he was going to deal with the taxation fiends if his income were to rise by another ten, twenty or thirty pounds a week.

  Melody Sam moodily watched the council staff sweeping pepper-tree débris into heaps, and slowly nearing the hotel. It seemed that he had to marshal his facts.

  “There’s that abo girl, Nat,” proceeded Melody Sam. “She wasn’t a bad-looker. Not above twenty or twenty-one. You know what some of ’em are like at that age.” An iron-hard elbow dug into Bony’s ribs, and a soft chuckle hinted that Melody Sam knew what they were like at that age. “She was knocked on the head right under the far pepper tree, and opposite the Manse. She was working for the parson at the time, had been, off and on, for a year. They reckoned they’d made a Christian out of her, but ... Now it so happened that Harmon had a tracker called Abie, and this Abie cleared away with the tribe before the parson’s maid was murdered, so that Harmon didn’t have a tracker on hand.

  “It seems that Abie feller was after the lubra, and Harmon got the idea he could have come in from the desert and killed her. Anyway, he had brain enough to have all the ground, about where the girl was found, covered with sheets and things to preserve the tracks, and he telephoned the policeman down at Laverton to bring his tracker along to help prove his point. The Laverton black was brought, four days later, and he said an aborigine had killed the girl, and then he thought it was a white man. He wasn’t sure, and no amount of bullying him could make him sure. In fact, the place there at the far end of Main Street was naturally churned up by people and goats and a cow or two.

  “And the police went no further, or didn’t seem to. Harmon made up his mind it was Abie who did it, and he sat tight and waited for the blacks to come in again, and Abie with ’em. When they did, Abie wasn’t among ’em, and no one’s seen him since.

  “Lot of people thought at the time it was a tri
bal murder. You know, the wench being promised to one buck and another buck stepping in and scooping the pool. Harmon thought that, but the parson wouldn’t have it. He’s all for the blacks and agin’ the whites. Did quite a bit of crowing when the second murder happened. You heard about that?”

  “Yes, a Mrs Lorelli,” replied Bony. “Young Carr was telling me he was suspected of it.”

  “Easier to suspect me,” snorted Melody Sam. “All that young bastard wants is a couple of floggings and a spell of training. I had to exert meself about him. This time again the blacks are away in the back of beyond, and Harmon got two up from Kalgoorlie. They picked up the tracks of a bloke wearing sandshoes; he’d come from the bed of a stony creek, done his killing with his hands.”

  “It was then decided that Tony Carr was a likely suspect?” Bony interjected.

  “Yes.” Melody Sam raised his great voice. “Hey, you, Bert Ellis! It’s only just gone eleven, and you don’t get no drink till your dinner hour starts.” The council staff protested and was told to keep to hell out of it until noon. Melody Sam snorted, controlled his voice, went on: “The working man! Look at him! Twelve quid a week, and I could do more in four hours than he does in eight ... Yes, they tried to hang it on young Carr. He admitted he was at the homestead about sundown, and when the husband got home at nine o’clock his wife had had her life squeezed out. When I say ‘they’, I mean Harmon, egged on by the parson. MacBride’s been here a bit too long. Thinks he owns the place. He don’t even own the church. I do. I pay his screw. I says they don’t arrest young Carr, not with the evidence of them sandshoes.”

  Melody Sam chuckled his dry, soft chuckle, saying: