Читать книгу Mr Jelly's Business - Arthur W. Upfield - Страница 7

An Ordinary Wheat Town

In the investigation of crime Napoleon Bonaparte was as great a man as was Lord Northcliffe in the profession of journalism. Like the late Lord Northcliffe, Bony, as he insisted upon being called, interested himself in the careers of several young men of promise. John Muir was one of Bony’s young men, having learned the rudiments of crime detection by valuable association with the little-known but brilliant half-caste. Yet of his several young men the Western Australian detective-sergeant was the slowest to learn Bony’s philosophy of crime detection. Although he knew it by heart he often failed to act on it, and consequently Bony’s advice was often repeated: “Never race Time. Make Time an ally, for Time is the greatest detective that ever was or ever will be.”

Together they gained an interview with the Western Australian Commissioner of Police. By previous agreement Bony was permitted to do most of the talking. He melted Major Reeves’s reserve, which his duality of race had created, with his cultured voice, his winning smile, and his vast store of knowledge that now and then was revealed beyond opened doors. He charmed John Muir’s chief as he charmed everyone after five minutes of conversation.

The interview resulted in Major Reeves believing that John Muir had traced the murderer, Andrew Andrews, with the slight assistance rendered by the Queenslander. He consented to send his own man to Queensland and permit Bony to interest himself in the Burracoppin disappearance. It thus came about that Bony and Muir left Perth together by the Kalgoorlie express, the former alighting at the wheat town at five o’clock in the morning, and John Muir going on to the goldfields’ terminus where he would board the transcontinental train.

Day was breaking when the express pulled out of Burracoppin, leaving Bony on the small platform with a grip in one hand and a rolled swag of blankets and necessaries slung over a shoulder. No longer existed the tastefully dressed man who had accosted Detective-Sergeant Muir in Hay Street. In appearance now Bony was a workman wearing his second-best suit.

At this hour of the morning Burracoppin slept. The roar of the eastward-rushing train came humming back from the yellowing dawn. A dozen roosters were greeting the new day. Two cows meandered along the main road, cunningly putting as great a distance as possible between themselves and their milking places when milking time came. A party of goats gazed after them with satanic good humour.

When Bony emerged from the small station he faced southward. Opposite was the Burracoppin Hotel, a structure of brick against the older building of weatherboard which now was given up to bedrooms. To the left was a line of shops divided by vacant allotments. To the right the three trim whitewashed cottages, with the men’s quarters and trade shops beyond, owned by the State Rabbit Department. Behind Bony, beyond the railway, were other houses, the hall, a motor garage, and the school, for the railway halved this town; and running parallel with the railway, but below the surface of the ground, was the three-hundred-miles-long Mundaring-Kalgoorlie pipeline conveying water to the goldfields, and, through subsidiary pipes, over great areas of the vast wheat belts. Thus is Burracoppin, a replica of five hundred Australian wheat towns, clean and neat, brilliant in its whitewash and paint and its green bordering gum-trees.

Till seven o’clock Bony wandered about the place filling in time by smoking innumerable cigarettes and pondering on the many points of the disappearance of George Loftus contained in the sixteen statements gathered by John Muir. The case interested him at the outset, because there was no apparent reason why Loftus should voluntarily disappear.

A man directed him to a boarding-house run by a Mrs Poole. At that hour the shop in front of the long corrugated-iron building was still closed, but he found the owner in the kitchen at the rear, where she was busy cooking breakfast. Mrs Poole was about forty years old, tall and still handsome; a brunette without a grey hair; a well-preserved woman of character. Into her brown eyes flashed suspicion at sight of the half-caste, at which he was amused, as he always was when the almost universal distrust of his colour was raised in the minds of white women—instinctive distrust which invariably he set himself to dispel.

“Well!” Mrs Poole demanded severely.

“I arrived this morning by the train,” he explained courteously. “A townsman tells me this is the best place in town at which to get breakfast.”

“It’ll cost you two shillings,” the woman stated in a manner denoting doubt of his ability to pay.

“I have a little money, madam.”

Sight of the pound note Bony produced changed Mrs Poole’s expression. The change he hoped was caused by his accent. Mrs Poole produced cup and saucer and seized the teapot.

“Thank you,” he said, gratefully accepting the cup of tea. Offering the treasury note, he added, “It might be as well for you to take that on account. I may be in Burracoppin for some time. As a matter of fact, I have got a job with the Rabbit Department.”

“You have!” Obviously Mrs Poole was pleased. “Then you will be boarding here, I hope?”

“For my meals, yes. I understand, however, that sleeping quarters are provided by the department at the depot.”

“Yes, that’s so.” Quick steps sounded from without. “Oh my! Here’s Eric.”

A man entered as might a small whirlwind from the plains of Central Australia.

“Ah, late again, Mrs Poole! Quarter past seven, and breakfast not ready. When is that husband of yours coming back? Every time he’s away you hug that bed, don’t you? You’ll die in it one of these days. Now, don’t argue. Get on—get on. No burgoo for me. There’s no time to eat. I’ll be getting the sack for being always late.”

The whirlwind was dressed in dungaree overalls. Keen hazel eyes examined Bony humorously.

“Good morning,” Bony said.

“Going to work for the Rabbits,” interposed Mrs Poole.

“Oh! Well, I’d advise you not to board here. Better stop at the pub. Mrs Poole’s husband is a Water Rat, and sometimes he’s away for weeks on end. When he is away Mrs Poole hardly ever leaves her bed, she loves it so. You only get one minute ten seconds to gollop your breakfast, but you do get plenty of indigestion. I’m half dead already.”

“I’m not as bad as all that, Eric,” pleaded Mrs Poole in a way which decided Bony that he was going to like his landlady. To him she added: “Don’t you believe him, Mr—what is your name?”

“Bony.”

“Sometimes I’m late, Mr Bony, but not always. Will you take porridge?”

“Please.”

“You married?” inquired the subsided whirlwind.

“Yes.”

“Then you’ll be Mr Bony henceforth. All married men here are called misters, and single men are called by their Christian monikers. I’m Eric Hurley, unmarried, and, therefore, plain Eric. What’s yours?”

“Xavier,” replied Bony blandly. “But everyone calls me Bony without the mister. I prefer it.”

“Just as well. Xavier! Hell! Bony will do me. Come on, we’ve only got forty seconds. Shoot in that tucker, Mrs Poole. Come on. Get going.”

In the dining-room between kitchen and shop the two men ate rapidly. Hurley, Bony observed, was not much beyond thirty years old. He liked his open face, lined and tanned by the sun and lit with the optimism of youth.

“I’m the boundary rider on this section of the rabbit fence,” Hurley explained between bursts of rapid mastication. “I’ve got two hundred miles of it to attend to—a hundred miles north and south of Burracoppin. When the depression crash came all hands bar ex-soldiers were sacked. Hell-uv-a job. For each Sunday on the job I get a day off here. But I’m workin’ today, as the farm push are short-handed, and there’s a chaff order to be sent away. Hey, Mrs Poole, my lunch ready?”

“I’m cuttin’ it now.”

“Make it big. I haven’t time to eat a decent breakfast.” From the railway yard came the sound of a petrol engine. Through the window they saw the motor-propelled trolley sliding away loaded with permanent-way workers. “Hurry! Hurry! The Snake Charmers have gone. If I’m sacked for being late I’ll murder your husband and take his place. And I won’t get up and light the fire for you. I’ll kick you out of bed.”

A tin rattled. The whirlwind rushed out. There was silence. Then Mrs Poole’s voice was raised urging someone to get up and fetch the cows before Mrs Black got them and “sneaked” the milk. She came to the door.

“Don’t you hurry, Mr Bony. The inspector isn’t so sharp as Eric makes out. You see, my other boarders all work about the town and never come to breakfast till a quarter to eight. This place is easier when Joe’s at home, what with the woodcutting and the cows, an’ that Mrs Black who always tries to milk them first. And I’ve been busy lately. I’ve had two policemen staying here ever since poor Mr Loftus disappeared. They are gone now, back to Perth.”

“Oh!”

“It’s funny, that affair,” she went on. “I’m sure he’s been murdered. Eric was camped half a mile from his house that night. Although it was raining, it was quiet, and he could hear the dogs howling about two in the morning. When my sister had her husband killed on the railway, down near Northam, her dog howled awful for more than an hour. Dogs know when their friends die—don’t you think so?”

Fifteen minutes after Bony left Mrs Poole’s boarding-house he was watching the changing expressions on the face of the Rabbit Fence Inspector while that official read the letter written by the chief of his department and delivered by the detective.

“You are a member of the Queensland police Force?”

Bony inclined his head.

“I am instructed to assist you in every way. What can I do?”

“Permit me to explain. I am a detective-inspector, at present on leave. My friend, Detective-Sergeant Muir, has been obliged to go into another matter, and, as the disappearance of George Loftus interests me, I have decided, with the sanction of the Western Australian Police Commissioner, to look into it. Outside police circles, your chief and yourself are the only people in this State who know I am a police officer. I rely upon you to keep my secret. People talk and act naturally before Bony, but are as close as oysters in the presence of Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte. I want you to give me employment on the rabbit fence, preferably near where Loftus’s wrecked car was discovered. I would like you to take me to see that car this morning.”

“All right. We’ll go now.”

Seated in the department’s truck beside the Fence Inspector, Bony said:

“Please proceed direct along the route taken by Loftus the night he disappeared.”

Bony was driven round the hotel into the main street, then eastward past the shops and the boarding-house and the bank, on past the garage at the extremity of the town.

“Loftus should have taken this right-hand road, but despite Wallace’s objection kept straight on,” explained his companion, whose name was Gray.

“Ah! Has that garage been long vacant?”

“Yes, about a year. The garage on the other side of the railway does all the business now.”

Once past the garage and the wide, good road running up a long, low hill south, they abruptly left the town, the road becoming narrow when it began to wind through whipstick mallee and gimlet trees. Now and then to his left Bony could see the rampart of mullock excavated from the great pipeline trench, with the railway beyond it.

“By the way,” he said, smiling, “I understand that Mrs Poole’s husband is a Water Rat. Precisely in what manner is such an epithet applicable to a woman’s husband?”

Inspector Gray chuckled.

“The men employed along the pipeline are called Water Rats because often they have to work deep in water when a pipe bursts.”

“Thank you. And what are the Snake Charmers?”

“They are the permanent-way men. Now that you are a Rabbit Department employee you are a Rabbitoh.”

It became Bony’s turn to chuckle.

“What are the road repairers called?”

“Well, not being a blasphemous man, I am unable to tell you.”

“Then I must invent names for them myself. Did you know George Loftus well?”

“Moderately well. He was never a friend of mine, although he has been here five years.”

“Tell me all you know about him, please. What he looked like, everything.”

The Fence Inspector hesitated, and Bony saw that he was weighing carefully the words he would use to a police officer when there would have been no hesitation had Bony been an ordinary acquaintance. Why men and women should be so reserved in the presence of members of the police, who were their paid and organized protectors, was a point in human psychology which baffled him. At last Gray said:

“I suppose Loftus would be about twelve stone in weight, and of medium height. He was a rather popular kind of man, a good cricketer for all his forty-one years, would always oblige with a song, and was a keen member of the local lodge. For the first three years he worked hard on his farm, but he slacked a bit this last year. He left most of the farm work to his man.”

“Did he drink much?”

“A little too much.”

“His wife on the farm, still?”

“Yes. She is a good-looking woman, and, I think, a good wife.”

“Any children?”

“No.”

“The farm hand? What kind of a man is he?”

“He’d be about thirty. A good man, too. Loftus was lucky in getting him. Mick Landon his name is. Born in Australia. Fairly well educated. Is the secretary of several local committees and is the M.C. at all our dances.”

“Do you know, or have you heard, what Mrs Loftus intends doing if her husband cannot be found?”

“Well, my wife was talking to her the other day, and Mrs Loftus told her she didn’t believe her husband dead and that she was going to run the farm with Landon’s help until he came back.”

“I suppose his strange disappearance has upset her?”

“Yes, but there is more anger than sorrow, I think. Of course, he might come back at any time. There’s old Jelly, now. He disappears three or four times every year, sometimes oftener, and no one knows where he goes or what he does.”

“Indeed! You interest me. A woman, perhaps?”

“Knowing Bob Jelly, I can think so. Here we are at the fence.”