Venom House Page 9

  “Good afternoon, Miss Answerth!” he gave her when her hand was lifted and he was able to rise. He accompanied her through the outer office and along the short path to the gate in the wicket fence, and there she said, seriously:

  “Be careful you don’t tell anyone what I’ve said. And don’t you go getting notions that Janet or Morris strangled Mother. Janet hasn’t got the guts, and Morris wasn’t out of his room that night. ’Sides, he liked his mother. Gud-dee!”

  “Does your brother know that Mrs Answerth is dead?”

  “Yes. I told him before leaving for the funeral.”

  “What did he say, do?”

  “Nothing. He went on playing with his train. Be seein’ you.”

  Standing just within the gateway, Bony watched Mary Answerth climb into the station wagon, which she drove up the street to park outside the hotel. The attitude of a lounger on the sidewalk betrayed the fact that she asked him a question, and also the fact that she received his respect, for he “dipped his lid”.

  She reappeared, to walk to the back of the vehicle and throw open the two doors. Leaving them open, she strode into the hotel. Bony waited, laying odds with a sparrow in favour of the head stockman. He lost. The stockman appeared. He emerged like a rabbit from its burrow, a rabbit that never paused to look about before leaving its sanctuary. Behind him appeared Mary Answerth. One of her great hands was gripping the Neanderthal’s collar, and the other had gathered the slack of his trousers’ seat. The unfortunate was propelled to the back of the station wagon, lifted and tossed within. The doors were slammed and locked, and Miss Mary Answerth climbed in behind the wheel.

  Slowly the vehicle was turned, to be driven down the incline past the police station. The woman waved her hand. Hatless, Bony bowed acknowledgement.

  Bony sauntered up the street. The sun was red and the shadows were long and dark. It wanted but nine minutes to six, and within the hotel the disgraceful National Swill was in full flow, men pouring as much liquor down their throats as possible before the fatal hour of drought arrived. Across the street, a woman dressed in black and a youth smoking a cigarette were regarding the broken wheel-barrow outside their shop, and near them Mr Harston was conversing with a minister. Women loaded with parcels were entering cars and gigs drawn by horses, and men were impatient to be out of town.

  Before entering his lodging at the very top of the street, he stood to survey the world of hill and dale and dune and sea lorded by this small cut-off township of Edison. To the northward he could see Answerth’s Folly, and the grey roof of Venom House above the tree tops. He could see the stark dead trees standing in water over near the blocked outlet to the sea.

  The sins of the fathers visited upon the children. There was no escape from what is an irrevocable law of nature. But little more than a century ago, those dead trees were alive, that water wasn’t there, and the camps of the inhabitants dotted the river-side, the smokes rising high into this still air. With but little trouble, game and fish were to be had to keep stomachs full and maintain the laughter of women and children. In those far-away days, morality was of iron. Laws, customs, beliefs, in which fear played no small part in gaining compliance, ruled benignly a people who, satisfied with little, wanted for nothing.

  All had vanished before the human offal tossed out by England, and, as Bert Blaze, that keen and knowledgeable cattleman from the Interior, had averred, before all those aborigines had perished they had employed their pointing bones at the Answerths and those with them, and through them down through the years to their children and their children’s children.

  Clearing the land taken by murder had not brought good to the Answerths. Creating pastures, breeding stock, fighting fire and flood, had done them no good. They had lived by brutality and suffered from hate. Power had withered them. Greed had rotted them. The mighty white man, armed with his guns and riding swift horses, never laughed, never knew happiness. And now his abode was called Venom House.

  He whose maternal forebears were of that vanished race, and in whom the best and the worst of the white race constantly warred, lingered in the evening glow and wished his wife were with him. She, also of his duality of races, would, even as he, experience the thrill of satisfaction that before those long-dead aborigines had fallen to the gun, had been outraged and flogged and hanged, they had buried their sting in those who had encompassed their agony.

  “Would you mind coming in to dinner before it’s spoiled, Inspector Bonaparte?”

  He turned about to see Mrs Nash beckoning to him from the garden fence, and he hurried to the gate and joined her.

  “You do right to scold me, Mrs Nash,” he told her and rewarded her with a beaming smile. “Am I so very late?”

  “It’s gone half past six.”

  “I was day-dreaming.”

  “What about?”

  “A problem couched in the question: ‘Is unhappiness due to glandular irregularity or to the blacks pointing the bone at an ancestor?’”

  Mrs Nash laughed, and he liked that, because when she laughed her pale face glowed.

  “You don’t think I can help you, I hope,” she said. “Cooking problems, now....”

  There was a daughter, but she was not at dinner this evening.

  “Did you go to the funeral?” Bony asked, after the soup.

  “I went down the street to see it start. They say it was the biggest funeral ever at Edison. Poor woman.”

  “Her life was not a happy one?”

  “I think she felt unwanted.”

  “And her stepdaughters are not happy?”

  “I can’t say as to that, Inspector. Miss Mary seems to enjoy rioting and shouting at people.”

  “D’you think she is a little ... er ... touched?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Yes. Must be. She actually told me her age. I have never known a reputedly sane woman to do that.”

  Mrs Nash studied her guest, and not till he looked directly at her did she understand his mood.

  “How old did she say she is?” she asked.

  “Now, now! That would never do. A policeman must never gossip. What is your opinion of Janet Answerth?”

  “We’re not gossiping, by the way?”

  “Oh no! No, certainly not. Tell me about Miss Janet.”

  “Miss Janet is everything that Miss Mary is not,” said Mrs Nash, and there was in her eyes that which told him here was a champion. “No one is in trouble for long before Miss Janet comes to help out. When my husband was killed in a car accident, Miss Janet paid for everything until the insurance came in. When young Carlow died, Miss Janet did everything for Mrs Carlow. And that after what she did for her and the boys when they had to leave the farm. There are others, too, who owe her a very great deal. She is kindness itself, and we all have come to rely on her advice.”

  “H’m! Good. Mrs Answerth was born in this district, I’m told. Why was she unhappy?”

  “It’s a long story, Inspector. My husband used to tell of her, he being born here. Mrs Answerth was the youngest of a family of nine. ’Tis said she was a very pretty girl when Jacob Answerth married her. He was such a brute that twice she ran away from him.”

  “Then what happened?” Bony prompted as Mrs Nash appeared disinclined to continue with the subject.

  “Her mother was dead when she ran away the first time. When Jacob came for her, her father told him to begone. Old Jacob knocked him down and stormed into the house. He found his wife hiding in a cupboard, and he dragged her back to Venom House. When she ran away the second time, her father was dead, and her eldest brother owned the property. He refused to take her in, and old Jacob refused to take her back, and went there to say so.

  “He was speaking his mind when Miss Mary arrived. She told her father he was a disgrace, and she told Mrs Answerth’s brother that he was a ... was a ... you know. Then she made Mrs Answerth get up behind her on the horse, and she took her back to Venom House. Miss Mary was only a chit of a girl at that time, but already s
he was bossing her father. And she’s bossed everyone ever since. Excepting Miss Janet.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Division and Multiplication

  THE LIGHT IN the men’s quarters waned and vanished. The light in the small room off the kitchen continued to gleam. The light within an upstairs room of Venom House was like a fire-fly steady on a leaf. The world was invisible, for the stars suffered a high-level haze foretelling wind.

  Reclining on his bunk, Bert Blaze read a weekly newspaper, and, between paragraphs, he was beginning to think of blowing out his lamp when through the open doorway flitted a dark form that silently approached the stretcher and passed unnoticed until it squatted on the floor.

  “You move around,” calmly remarked the cook.

  “Speak softly,” ordered Bony. “The light in the men’s quarters has just gone out, but Foster may not yet be asleep. Anyone with him?”

  “No. He ain’t fit for company, anyway. Got brought home by Miss Mary like something picked up by the dog-catchers. Seems she yanked him outa the pub for the cattle-dipping tomorrow.”

  “It happened like that.” Bony made himself comfortable and rolled a cigarette. Blaze waited, and presently Bony said: “I’ve been thinking that you might like to give me a hand.”

  “Might. Depends, of course, on what.”

  “At locating the murderer of Mrs Answerth.”

  “Then you can rope me in.”

  “I’m glad I wasn’t mistaken in you, Blaze. Let us talk of Mrs Answerth. Somewhere in the background of the past lurked the motive to kill her, and as we don’t know the motive, it is to the past we must travel. I have gathered that no one knows these Answerths more intimately than you.”

  Bony offered opportunity for comment on this point, and as Blaze remained silent, he went on:

  “We don’t know just where Mrs Answerth was strangled. If on the house side of the causeway, then we must concentrate on the living Answerths. If she met her death this side, then we have a much wider range of people with whom to deal. How did Mrs Answerth come to confide in you about her home life?”

  “Well, to explain all that, you’ve got to understand I first came here as head stockman, and that old Jacob was alive and, in addition to his freehold, he leased another fifty thousand acres and employed round about a dozen men.”

  The yellow light of the lamp set on a packing-case at the head of the bed was kind to the lined face and to the dark eyes which could gleam so brightly. The ex-head stockman crammed tobacco into a pipe with a broken stem.

  “In them days things was good and easy,” he said. “Money went a longer way, there was more men about, and they was good at their work. When the first Mrs Jacob snuffed out, and Jacob got society ideas, he sort of left me to be a bit more than just head stockman. The causeway wasn’t under water them days, and I usta go over and spend an evening now and then with Jacob.

  “In them days I was pretty capable, and too independent to call the King me uncle. I knew me job, and old Jacob knew I did, too. When he shouted at me, I shouted back, and he sorta liked it.

  “He’d been married to the second wife about six monse and I was over there at dinner. He was a bit sour, and he took it out of his new wife. Because she wouldn’t answer back, he got up sudden and made to hit her, and I told him I’d knock his teeth down his throat. Instead of sacking me, he doubled me wages, saying I was the only man who’d ever showed the guts to beard an Answerth.

  “He never stopped askin’ me over, either. But he was always careful what he said to his wife when I was there, and she seemed to like me going for that reason. That began a sorta friendship, and I mean friendship and not any funny business. She’d look at me pretty miserable-like, and I’d give her a nod of encouragement, and that’s as far as it went for years.

  “Troubles piled up against her like the driftwood against the coolibahs when the Diamintina’s in flood, and troubles were like a pack of dingoes around old Jacob until he shot himself instead of the dingoes.

  “Then I took sick and was off for months in hospital, and after that wasn’t any good with horses. So I took on this cooking, and one night in this here room I wakes up to find Mrs Answerth standing just where you’re sittin’.

  “‘Bert,’ she says. ‘Come outside, I wanta talk to you. I must talk to someone.’

  “We went out and sat on a log a bit away, and she tells me all she’s had to put up with from the girls, and mostly that both of ’em are gradually getting Morris away from her.”

  “About how old would Morris be then?” Bony asked.

  “Oh, musta been getting along for eighteen,” Blaze replied. “Seems that Miss Janet decides that young Morris wants a firmer hand and less his own way, and Miss Mary disagrees with her. Then the way them two went on upset Mrs Answerth. They wouldn’t speak to each other for weeks, and neither would speak to her, even when she spoke to them. She goes on tellin’ me all this till it is getting dawn, and sometimes she’s crying and I’m patting her shoulder, not knowing what to say.

  “She came over again another night, and after that she’d come about once a week just for a pitch about old times when she was a bride and there was visitors and people about the place. As I told you, there wasn’t ever any funny business. We got to be good cobbers, and I used to get a lot off me chest, too.

  “You see, my parents were speared by the wild blacks and I was brought up on a cattle station and the boss wasn’t married. Exceptin’ the lubras there wasn’t a woman on the place. I was fifteen, or thereabouts, before I ever saw a white woman. I never had anyone to tell me things which worried them, until that night Mrs Answerth came over to talk about her troubles. It was the first time I got the notion I was worth a zac to anyone. And that’s all of that, Inspector.”

  “You would be more than interested to know who killed her,” Bony said, stating a fact.

  “Never had no education exceptin’ what I got off a Scottish lord who had sense enough to keep two hundred miles away from the nearest pub so he could go on living. I can read the papers enough to know they don’t hang murderers in this State. I usta think that was best. If I finds out before you do who murdered Mrs Answerth there won’t be no trial. And that’s jake.”

  “D’you suspect any particular person?”

  Blaze shook his head.

  “Ain’t come to thinkin’ that far. But I will.”

  “Any idea about Carlow coming to be drowned in the Folly?”

  “Ideas! Plenty. He was on the make. I’ve heard a whisper or two. You know, picking up a stolen beast what’s been killed and skinned ready for his shop.”

  “And Carlow evaded paying the lifter what he owed him?”

  “Might be something like that. Them as think themselves smart generally gets taken down. There’s fellers in the forests agin which Ed Carlow was a suckin’ calf.”

  “Men like Robin Foster?”

  “No. Robin Foster’s just a grow’d-up gorilla. His brother Henry’s different. There’s more like Henry who never miss a chance to make a quid or two easy and quiet. Me and old Jacob was troubled by them kind in the old days.”

  “And you think that Henry Foster....”

  “I’m not thinkin’ nothing about Henry Foster ’cos I don’t know anything,” came the swift counter. “I’m putting up Henry Foster as an example of the bloke who’s slick when the chance comes his way.”

  “Was he ever employed by the Answerths?”

  “Only when he does the wool-pressing at shearin’. And then he don’t actually work for the Answerths: he’s employed by the shearers who contract for the job.”

  “Has the recent wool clip here been sent to Brisbane?”

  “Yes. Several weeks back.”

  “How many bales—do you know?”

  “Ninety-two. Branded M & J over A.”

  “What agent was it consigned to?”

  “Parsons & Timms.”

  “Do you know how many sheep were shorn this year?”

  “Of course.
I keep in touch although I’m only a dough slinger.”

  “Then let us work out a little sum and check up.”

  Bony produced notebook and pencil, and Blaze swung his feet over his visitor’s head and sat on the side of the bed that he might watch the sum being worked out.

  “The clip came off three thousand, four hundred and eighty-two sheep. That right?” asked Bony.

  “Correct.”

  “Ewes, hoggets, weaners, lambs. Wethers and rams in together. How many lambs?”

  “One more’n seven hundred and thirty.”

  “Now mix up the rest and give me the average weight of the fleeces.”

  “I’d say ten pounds ... average.”

  “Good. This might be harder. Average weight of the lamb fleeces?”

  “Four pounds,” Blaze promptly answered, watching the working pencil.

  “Now what have we? The total weight of the clip works out at twenty-eight thousand, four hundred and thirty-four pounds. Consider again your estimate ... because it’s important ... the average weight of the fleeces—ten pounds for the adult sheep, four pounds for the lambs.”

  “I stands by it,” asserted the cook. “As a matter of fact, I guessed them weights before the classer worked it out on the scales in the shed.”

  “We’ll take another step, Blaze. How many pounds of wool to a bale?”

  “Three hundred ... mostly just a bit over.”

  “Right! I’ll work all that out.”

  Blaze could not follow the figures leaping to the page, but he was satisfied that this mathematician knew his work. Presently Bony announced the total number of bales to be ninety-four. Still satisfied, Blaze offered no comment.

  “Mistake somewhere along the line,” Bony murmured. “Our total is ninety-four. You said that ninety-two bales comprised the clip. We’re out by two. I’ll check.”

  This time Blaze did not watch the pencil. The hand which held the short-stemmed pipe to his mouth moved downward slowly to rest on a pyjama-clad knee, and thereafter his body was still.