Winds of Evil b-5 Page 6

  The fence-rider feinted and the cook ducked.

  “Lookin’fer fight, eh?” snarled Hang-dog Jack. “You come outside and I’llwrastle you. In two ups I’ll dump you six times and give you the aeroplane spin.”

  “I don’t believe in ‘wrastling’ with you,” mocked Dreyton. “Give me soup and a pleasant smile.”

  The cook ladled soup into a tin plate and Dreyton took it, with knife, fork and spoon, to a place at the table where he met a barrage of greetings and questions.

  A young fellow, obviously a horseman, who sat on Bony’s right and who was Tilly’s “boy”, Harry West, wanted to know if Dreyton had seen a piebald mare with a colt running at heels. Bill the Cobbler, an old man without a hair to his head, wished to know if Dreyton was feeling fit enough to write a letter for him to a “widderwot’sblackmailing me down in Adelaide”. Young-and-Jackson, so named because the famous hotel of that name in Melbourne was the only building he remembered seeing during his rare visits to that city, wished to know if Dreyton had seen Dogger Smith and “ ’Ow’sthat old pioneer getting along?”

  Beneath their questions was restraint. Dreyton could feel it. He nodded recognition to Bony, who was smiling happily. No one mentioned Mabel Storrie. Harry West asked if Dreyton would take a ticket in the station sweepstake on the Melbourne Cup.

  “I don’t believe in sweepstakes,” snarled Hang-dog Jack.

  “Then why did you buy two tickets?” demanded the organizer.

  “I don’t believe in ’em, all the same.”

  “Whatdo you believe in?” asked Bill the Cobbler.

  “I don’t believe in nothing,” argued the cook as though he enjoyed arguing.

  “Not even beer?” mildly inquired Young-and-Jackson, blinking his green eyes rapidly.

  “Not even in beer-at sixpence a small schooner.”

  The scowl on the cook’s face was terrific. It amazed even Bony. With deliberate unconcern, Hangdog Jack lit an ancient pipe and casually blew smoke into the soup saucepan. Bony was thankful that the first course was past.

  Chapter Seven

  The BookOf The Bush

  MOUNTED-CONSTABLE LEE and Bony sat facing each other across a small table wholly covered with untidy piles of documents which were partially weighted with sand particles. From the ceiling a suspended oil lamp provided a kind of illuminated passage up which spiralled tobacco-smoke. The time was 9.50 p.m., and the room was that designated as the police station office.

  “I don’t envy you your walk to town tonight,” stated the uniformed policeman. When Bony smiled, but did not speak, he added, “And I envy you less your walk back to Wirragatta.”

  “Being a still night, there was, and is, no need for nervousness,” argued Bony, his ready smile revealing his white teeth, his eyes now almost black. “Have you been informed of the departure of any plainclothes men from Broken Hill?”

  “No. I don’t expect any notification. Simone will probably be assigned to this last case, as he is in possession of the details relating to the other two.”

  As he slowly expelled tobacco-smoke, the detective intently regarded the big but lean man who now was frowning.

  He said, “What has aroused your dislike of this Sergeant Simone?”

  Lee hesitated before answering this question, but when he did he spoke deliberately.

  “Simone is a bully. He tries to bully me. He knows that my wife is a Carie woman, and that she would hate to leave here were I transferred. He knows that my wife’s father is a semi-invalid, and that her mother is bedridden. He tells me in his sly, slinking manner that I am too popular and that popular policemen are no good to the Force. Knowing that he has us under his thumb, he makes full use of our parlour, and even drops cigar-ash all over the carpet. That riles my wife and annoys me. If I squeak he’ll pull strings higher up. Then again, as I said the other day, he’s not the shadow of a detective outside a city slum area.”

  “A rather impossible person.”

  “You’ve said it, sir-Bony.”

  “Well, well, if he comes, he will probably amuse us. If he does not amuse, you and I can send him back to Broken Hill, where, doubtless, he is appreciated. Officious policemen always amuse me for a little while. There is something so naive about them. Simone will certainly want a statement from me as a suspicious character camped within a quarter-mile of the scene of the third crime. Pick up pen and write, my dear Lee, to my dictation. Statements are such necessary documents, you know, to officious policemen.”

  Lee stared fixedly at this most unorthodox detective from Brisbane, suspecting sarcasm. Then he smiled grimly when he found a pen, the end of which revealed much savage biting. In his breast-pocket was the document signed by his own State’s Police Commissioner, instructing him to renderevery assistance to Detective-Inspector Bonaparte. Already he sensed that he and his wife had a powerful ally against the hated Sergeant Simone, and this was balm laid to his outraged soul.

  When Bony’s statement had been taken down and signed and initialled by him, the detective said, “Now we can await the gentleman from Broken Hill without mental disturbance. You will not inform him who and what I am, and he will not know. Later we may discuss him again. Meanwhile, please give me your attention and keep secret everything I say now and hereafter.”

  Constable Lee already had forgotten this extraordinary man’s colour. Already he was blinded by the forceful personality of this half-caste who had passed through a university, had risen to high state in his profession-from a police tracker to an inspector-and of whom even he had heard whispers of fine successes.

  “Have you prepared that list ofpersons resident in and near Carie for the last three years?” Bony asked.

  Lee proffered several sheets of paper, saying with gratification, “I completed the list just before you came in.”

  “Ah! The name of every one is here? Yours? Your wife’s?”

  The other’s face took to itself a deeper tint.

  “Well, I didn’t think-” he began.

  “I must add you both,” Bony murmured. “Now… here are the names of some seventy people who have been living here over the period in which two persons were murdered and a third nearly so. If you have not omitted anyone from these lists, other than the two I have just added, then the criminal’s name is beneath my hands.”

  Bony rolled yet another cigarette. There were occasions when he was a chain-smoker.

  “I feel pretty sure, Lee,” he went on when he had struck a match, “that this case will interest me profoundly, and exercise a brain liable to become lethargic with mundane and sordid murder and other crimes. This strangling series is most promising, and I can find even more pleasure in it, as poor Mabel Storrie is now recovering.

  “It may be that the person who attacked her is not the murderer of Alice Tindall and Frank Marsh, but someone who copies his methods. We must not lose sight of this possibility. At this early stage, I think that the same person committed all three crimes. Having perused Simone’s reports when in Sydney, and allowing for his magnification of his difficulties in order to save face, I do not wonder at all that he failed. Here in the bush he would be quite out of his element. But, Lee, here in the bush I am well within mine.

  “Simone, without doubt, has been trained to discovering clues in the form of revolvers and knives, bloodstains and finger-prints. He has experience in keeping his ear to the ground for criminal whispers, and is facile in putting together information received in the hundred and one thieves’ kitchens of any city. I have been trained to use my maternal gifts to see what you white men fail to see on the pages of the Book of the Bush. In that book men and animals, birds and insects subscribe their essays. Added to my inherited maternal gifts are those inherited from my whitefather. I see with the eyes of a black man and reason with the mind of a white man, and in the bush I am supreme.

  “In this bush Simone found no clues. That is not surprising to me. There were no common clues for him to find: most of the uncommon clues remain for me to di
scover. They are written indelibly in the Book of the Bush on certain pages relative to these crimes I have yet to read. Remember, Lee, that although some men sneer at me on account of my mid-race, I am superior to the blacks because I can reason, and superior to many white people because I can both reason well and seebetter than they. I have inall my career never arrested a man, black or white. Such work is distasteful to me. As my chief, Colonel Spendor, often says, I’m no damned policeman’s shadow. No… but I am an investigator of crime, and I will demonstrate how I investigate these crimes. You shall learn. You shall gain credit and put the detestable Simone well in the background.

  “Now… There is, I believe, coming into general use in America, a method which will bring out finger-prints on clothes. I did think of having Mabel Storrie’s clothes sent to America for examination, but time is against me. We shall certainly have one, if not more, sand-storms within the next month or two, and during a sand-storm the strangling brute is active. Let us hope, and hope sincerely, for more sand-storms to come in the near future. Did Simone confide much in you?”

  Lee grinned when he awoke from the trance into which Bony’s little speech had thrown him.

  “Let’s say he boasted to me,” he corrected.

  “Well, then. Did he ever say he thought that the murderer was a tree-climber?”

  “A tree-climber! No, he didn’t.”

  “What is your opinion of Donald Dreyton?” was Bony’s next question; and now, before Lee answered, his puzzled frown vanished.

  “Dreyton is quite a decent man. Never given me the ghost of any trouble. He doesn’t drink to excess, and is liked by everyone.”

  “He appeared to me in that light. And yet… Tell me all you know about him.”

  “I have him pat all right. He arrived here from Broken Hill three days before Alice Tindall was murdered. He put up at the hotel, and his luggage consisted of one large portmanteau. The day after his arrival he got work on Wirragatta as a homestead rouseabout. Then, on the very day Alice Tindall was killed, or rather the day preceding that night, he relieved the book-keeper, who left. Dreyton was book-keeping for eight months before he left the office to take on the rabbit boundary-fence. He’s been on that ever since.”

  “Concise! Excellent!” murmured Bony. “What was he before he came here?”

  Lee laughed shortly.

  “You’ve got me there. I don’t know. And no one else does, either. He has never told us, and, as you know, we bush folk don’t ask unwanted questions about a man’s past history.”

  “Hum! When a man does not discuss his past, the past will not always bear discussion. Why did he leave the office for the fence?”

  “Got tired of the office, I suppose.”

  “When he came here, had he had any bush experience?”

  “I think not,” replied Lee. “No, he was a raw new chum.”

  Bony fell silent, idly watching a moth circling under the lamp. Lee watched him. Then:

  “To use an Americanism, I don’tget Donald Dreyton. I know, of course, that he is an Englishman, originally a member of what is termed the ‘upperclass’. But as there are so many degrees within each class of English society-and I mean that word in its widest sense-I, an ignorant Australian, am at a loss definitely to place him. Is he a soldier, a sailor, a lawyer, a churchman, a diplomat? Or rather was he any one of these? I find it extremely difficult to believe that he left theoffice, and the comforts of life at the Wirragatta homestead, for the opposite conditions of life on a boundary-fence just because he became tired of office work. There is, I think, something more behind that change from one pole to the other than a mere desire for change. I think so still more now that Dreyton has been offered the office work after a long period on the fence, and has declined to take it on permanently.”

  “May be something in what you say, sir…Bony. Still, it doesn’t seem to have any bearing on these strangling cases.”

  Swiftlycame the question:

  “How do you know?” When Lee made no answer, Bony went on, “On the list you have drawn up for me is the name of the man who killed two people and the name of him who nearly killed Mabel Storrie. The actions and the reactions of all those people on our list which are not plain to us must be investigated. Without patience a detective is a block of wood.

  “As I pointed out just now, like Simone, I have to begin an investigation without one leading clue. The murderer didn’t leave behind him his hat, or his false teeth, or his pipe, or a weapon. He left no finger-prints other than those, possibly, on the victim’s clothes. He left no tracks, for the wind wiped them away. He did wear rubber-soled shoes and, for a reason I have not yet established he climbed trees along Nogga Creek the night Mabel Storrie was attacked.”

  “How do you know-about the-?”

  “Please do not interrupt. Listen, note, and don’t question me. We will work together, and you will receive a lot of the credit, and score off the redoubtable Simone. Now, from nothing, or next to nothing, let us at least begin to build up the personality of this criminal. That he knows the locality, especially of Nogga Creek and Wirragatta River, is proved. He operates on dark, starless nights. When the girl Storrie is sufficiently recovered to talk to us of her horrific experience, she will tell us that she did not see her attacker because he attacked her from behind as, in the opinion of Dr. Mulray, he attacked both Marsh and Tindall. For the committal of all these crimes he chose a night following a day of wind and high-blown sand, and a sunset indicating that the next day would be as bad, if not worse. He reveals cunning there-marked cunning-and there is, by the way, no fundamental difference of meaning between ‘cunning’ and ‘clever’.

  “Now!-Where the road begins to dip down the man-made incline to the creek-bed, the bordering trees meet over it. There is evidence that recently someone climbed up the tree on the Catfish Hole side of the road, and then worked his way along boughs until he gained position over the centre of the road. He dropped from the bough as Mabel Storrie passed under him. He dropped from a bough as Alice Tindall passed under him at Junction Waterhole. To do that he must be agile and strong and sure, and because he was so sure of foot and of hand, I believe it was by no means the first time he reached that position over the Broken Hill road.”

  “Hang-dog Jack would fit,” interjected the sorely-tempted Lee.

  “Physically, yes; mentally, perhaps not. Do not forget that the man Marsh was not murdered under a tree, but in the open near the two Common gates. That is a piece of the puzzle which is difficult to place, but I will surely place it. Let us now consider the incidence of time. Each of these three crimes was committed within a period of three hours-from eleven to two o’clock. There may be-I feel sure thereis -significance in this.

  “In this part of Australia we have each year many windstorms of one day’s duration, a lesser number of two days’ duration, and a lesser number still of three days’ duration. Here is a point of importance to us. The close of a day of wind and dust will in ninety-nine times in every hundred indicate whether the following day will be fine and clear or windy and dusty. The close of a fine day will not always foretell a following day of wind and dust.

  “Let me be clear. Any person having a reasonable knowledge of this part of Australia knows at the close of a day of wind and dust what will be the conditions of the next day. Our murderer has this knowledge. He strangles after a day of wind and dust and when the weather signs at sunset foretell another day of wind and dust to follow. You say that Dreyton was a new chum to the bush, and most certainly a stranger to this part of it, when Alice Tindall was murdered. Therefore, his ignorance of the bush and its weather portents go far towards wiping his name off our list. Hang-dog Jack-how long has he been working in this district?”

  “At least five years. He was a sailor at one time, but he is certainly a bushman now.”

  “A sailor, eh! Hum! Promising. All right, let us try a little harder to visualize this murderer. His climbing exploits indicate great strength, agility and familiarit
y with certain trees. His mental ability is proved by the fact that he wears rubber-soled shoes, by the fact that he likes to take his victims unawares by dropping out of a tree as they pass under him, and by the fact that he chooses a night for his crime when it is certain it will blow with force the next day. Lastly, and most importantly, by the fact that he does not leave at the scene of his crimes his wooden leg or his braces, his glass eye, if he wears one, or any of the normal clues which occupy such important positions in a normal murder trial. I am not being humorous. There are a hundred clues our strangler could have left behind him, none of which Simone could be expected to discover, all of which I would discover.”

  “Motive?” breathed Constable Lee.

  “I have been expecting you to raise that point,” continued Bony.“Motive! By the repetition of his crimes our murderer has made his fatal mistake. Taken separately, each crime could offer several motives, or one of several. Together they point to no one particular motive save gratification of the lust to kill.

  “The Strangler’s victims have been two women and one man. Two of them were robbed of their lives; the third almost lost hers. Nothing was taken from the bodies, and the three victims were not connected with each other, and could scarcely have been connected with the Strangler through scheme or plot, jealousy or frustration.

  “Into this brute’s activities chance enters strongly. He may be periodically governed by his lust to kill. It may be-I think it is-that the presentation of the opportunity to kill has to be coincidental with the periodic outbursts of lust. By that I mean that the murderer may have been presented with victims coincidental with a particular weather phase, that he did not choose the dates on which he killed though he must have known that the following day would be stormy. It is possible that every night separating two days of high wind he is out on the hunt for avictim, and that only by chance does he obtain one.”

  Constable Lee’s lips were pressed tightly together and his eyes were gleaming from beneath lowered lids. Bony smiled at him and added: