Читать книгу Mr Jelly's Business - Arthur W. Upfield - Страница 12

Within Another World

Before starting off for his post-cutting work, Bony wrote to the Commissioner asking him for details of debts owing on the Loftus farm, and if, when last in Perth, George Loftus had secured a further bank loan or any cash backing from other financial concerns. He also requested the Western Australian Police Chief to instruct the senior officer stationed at Merredin to report to him at Burracoppin as soon as was convenient.

A second letter he addressed to his wife, an educated half-caste like himself, who ruled their bush-girt home at Banyo, near Brisbane. Among other matters he wrote:

This case has many points in common with that which attracted me to the sands of Windee. Whilst remembering that in your goodness of heart and with your broadness of mind you could find nothing wrong with my final actions in that case, where I permitted sentimentality to cloud my sense of duty, resulting in an official confession of failure which has marred my unblemished record, I remember, too, your admonishment that the first and last duty of a crime investigator is to reveal the guilty criminal.

I shall not slip down that incline again. At Windee a lovely face and an understanding mind beat down my judgment and spoilt my greatest triumph. There is in this case, too, a pair of eyes lit by an understanding mind, but I shall watch and guard against my heart weaknesses. She is only fourteen years old and her name is Sunflower. I wish we had a fairy daughter.

Yes; there is in this affair much resemblance to that of Windee. There is no horribly violated body lying on the library floor, or anywhere else so far as I can ascertain. I am sure that murder has been committed; therefore, you will understand that, as in the Windee case, first I must prove the fact of murder and secondly reveal the murderer.

You know about that sixth sense which unerringly tells me that blood has been spilled. That undefined sense prompts me now. I believe that George Loftus was killed when I have no slightest evidence of it. There are in this case elements of peculiar interest. Quite possibly it may turn out to be one of those macabre murders such as those acclaimed by the lecturer in Thomas de Quincey’s immortal essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” The lecturer states:

“People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed—a knife—a purse—and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature.”

How true, dear Marie, how very true! Modern killers often are real artists compared to the savage and crude practitioners of the early days. And as artistic beauty has evolved through the centuries from coarse crudity, so from the condition of low intelligence ruling the old English force known as the Bow Street Runners has become evolved the superlative genius of

Your ever affectionate husband,

BONY

These letters he posted when he had harnessed a horse to a dray and before calling on Mrs Poole for his lunch. He discovered his landlady flushed with anger.

“If you got up earlier,” she snapped to the elder of her small sons, “that Mrs Black wouldn’t have had the chance to milk her. You know what she is. If you don’t get up tomorrow morning, I’ll throw cold water over you.”

“To beat that old cow I’d have to get up before daylight,” was the stout defence of a lad about twelve years of age.

“Well, get up in the dark, then.” To the detective Mrs Poole added:

“That’s twice this week Tom has gone to milk the cow and found her stripped dry.”

“Where is the cow … during the night?”

“In bed. I suppose with that blackguard of a husband of hers.”

Bony was puzzled. He said:

“I was not aware that cows had permanent husbands.”

Obviously Mrs Poole tried hard to regain composure. “I was talking about Mrs Black,” she said stiffly.

“Oh! I thought you were talking about the cow.”

“So I was.”

Bony’s expression continued to indicate perplexity.

Young Tom laughed. “Mrs Black ain’t a real cow,” he explained, and was severely cuffed. It became Mrs Poole’s turn to explain.

“We haven’t any place to keep a cow at night. We keep her tied up with a bit of chaff till we go to bed and then let her loose to pick up grass and stuff about the town roads. Some mornings she’s close by, and sometimes she’s a mile away. Goldie is always going over the railway to Mrs Black’s place. She feeds Goldie with sugar and things. And milks her before huntin’ her away. I know it.”

“Have you seen her actually milking the cow?”

“No. But isn’t it obvious?”

“Where does the lady live?”

“Behind the hall.”

“But there are other women living near the hall. Perhaps it is one of them who steals the milk.”

“Oh! It’s Mrs Black all right. She’d cut off her grandfather’s whiskers to sell as horsehair.”

Laughing silently, Bony went out to his horse and drove at a slow pace along the winding road flanking the railway and the pipe trench. At the rabbit fence gate he unharnessed the horse and put it in the farm stables for the day. Then, carrying a piece of paper and a pencil, he started off to examine every fence post between the railway and the gate across the old York Road.

Observant and curious eyes, had there been any, would have been satisfied that he was examining each post to ascertain if it wanted renewing, and that on the paper he was noting the number of the posts required over the stated distance.

Yet really Bony was less interested by the condition of the fence posts than he was by the surface of the little-used road adjacent to the fence on the western side. Assuming that George Loftus walked home during the early morning of O November, it was possible for evidence of his passing to lie on that track or beside it, despite the fact that it was raining and that the present date, 17th November, marked the passage of fifteen days.

The bush detective was aware of and appreciated one significant fact regarding the mentality of the Australian black tracker. Being an inherent fatalist, the aboriginal too soon gives up. Convince him that there are tracks to be found, and very pride in his wonderful sight will spur him to find and follow them more surely than a bloodhound. But the tracker who was brought from Merredin, twenty-odd miles westward, on 4th November, when it was definitely realized that Loftus was missing, knew that it had rained during the night of 2nd November right through to the dawn of 3rd November. And, observing by the condition of the ground search that even his eyes would not see tracks washed out by the rain. Once the idea that no tracks would be visible became firmly fixed in his mind, extraneous subjects of greater importance and interest would occupy his thoughts and blur his vision. Knowing there were no tracks, he would not think to look for objects which to the white man would become important clues.

Where the full blood would accept defeat without endeavour the white man would accept nothing for fact until it was proved. From his white father Bony had inherited the precious gift of reason, and from his mother the equally precious gift of patience. Reason and patience, developed by undying passion for knowledge, produced in this half-caste a force of good seldom found among the white races and almost never among the black.

While he walked slowly along the track he lived in another world vastly different from that known to the unscientific white man. He descended, or, perhaps, it should be stated, he ascended to the insect world. He saw innumerable ants belonging to a dozen species. The ferocious inch-and-a-half-long bulldog, whose sight was extraordinary, whose pugnaciousness at his approach was superbly courageous, and whose bite was venomous; the hurrying red ant half an inch long, which made beaten roads through the grass from nest to larder as represented by the carcass of some small animal; the tiny black ants but little larger than a grain of sugar, which swarmed along defined highways and up the trunks of many trees and into the branches, there feverishly to gather the honey from the blooms not much larger than themselves; the bigger black ants, long-legged, slow in action, which utilized sun-warmed stones with which to incubate their eggs; and the minute brown fellow of the size of a cheese mite living unconcernedly among this vast population of relative giants.

He saw the grey-and-black honey ants taking down into inconspicuous holes their loads of honey, which they crammed into the mouths of the store ants in their caves deep in the earth, crammed them so that their bodies were distended to the size of peas, the transparent skins making them appear like honey drops, living drops of honey unable to move, too huge to pass along the ant corridors had they been able, living only to regurgitate their stores during the winter.

Everywhere he saw evidence of the stupendous labour of the dweller in a world beyond even the insect world, the termite which lives in eternal darkness, without sight, without hope, the vast majority sexless, without individual purpose, dedicated solely to unending labour, governed by an inexplicable force originating from some inexplicable centre, creatures living the communistic ideal as never a race of super-Marxians could hope to do.

What has a detective to do with ants? What have ants to do with crime? They punish crime only in one way—death. The termite does not even violently kill. The order goes forth from the centre that the criminal must die, and not one unit of the vast population permits the sentenced to eat, and very quickly the doomed itself is eaten when death claims it. More than once had the ants presented valuable ideas to Bony; on more than one occasion they had given him a clue of great value.

Here and there, the rain not having soaked away, had formed overflowing pools, and, the ground slope falling eastward, the water flows had gathered twigs and dead grass into small beaverlike dams against the netting of the Fence. The accumulation of this rubbish was not overlooked by the termite, which works up from beneath the ground, and, working from within, plasters the object it attacks with a cement composed of sand and the juices of its body. Bony, also, did not overlook this rubbish, most of it now looking like thick ropes of rusted wire. He destroyed the careful work of the termites to maintain their loved darkness by kicking all this rubbish asunder, providing the voracious ants with a meal of delectable putty-coloured flesh.