Читать книгу The Devil's Steps - Arthur W. Upfield - Страница 5

At Wideview Chalet

The alarm clock beside Bisker’s bed called him to his daily life at half-past five. The clock appeared to be armour-clad and completely shock-resisting, for every time the alarm began it was cut short by a callused hand which crashed down upon it with such force that a lesser mechanism would have been smashed flat.

At five-thirty on this first morning in September it was quite dark. Inside Bisker’s room it was coal-black, and, until Bisker began the recitation of the first complaint of the day, utterly silent. Bisker’s voice was loud with emphasis.

“A man oughter be sunk a million miles below the bottom of the deepest well on earth,” he said, in his heart duty wrestling with the desire to strike. “Oh, what a limbless fool I am. Curse the drink! You dirty swine ... it’s you that stops me saving enough money to get me outer this frost-bitten, rain-drowned, lousy hole of a joint, get me back to where there’s a thousand tons of good, dry wood to the acre, and where a man can lie abed all day if he wants to. Oh, blast! If that old cow sezs two words to me this morning, I’ll up and slap ’er down.”

Striking a match, he lit the hurricane lamp standing on the wooden kerosene case beside the bed. Then he took up one of two pipes, in the bowl of which had been compressed the dried “dottles” taken during the previous day from the other pipe. Bisker was a connoisseur in the art of nicotine poisoning and he favoured an extra-strong dose before rising in the mornings, to be followed with mere ordinary doses during the day. To avoid wasting time, the special dose was loaded into the pipe overnight. For five minutes he smoked with only his face outside the blankets, even his face being partially protected from the air by a bristling, stained grey moustache.

“Fancy a man coming down to this!” he exclaimed loudly. “An’ me an up-an’-at-’em cattle drover most of me life. Just tells you what the booze will do to a bloke. Ah, well!”

Slipping out of bed, he revealed naked, bandy legs below the hem of a cotton shirt over a flannel undervest. He stepped into trousers which appeared to be wide open to accept his legs and small and rotund paunch, pulled on a pair of old socks and then stepped into heavy boots he did not trouble to lace. A thick cloth coat and a battered felt hat completed the ensemble, but to this had to be added the working kit comprising one pipe, a plug of jet-black tobacco, a clasp-knife, a tin containing wax matches and a corkscrew.

Taking up the lamp, he passed outside.

It was not so very cold after all, although his breath did issue in the form of steam mixed with tobacco smoke. By the aid of the light he followed a narrow cinder path to its junction with a wide area of bitumen fronting a row of garages. Across this area he lurched along a path also of bitumen which skirted a large wood-stack and eventually arrived at a small door at the rear of Wideview Chalet. The door he opened with a key which he took from beneath a brick, and on passing into the house he found himself in a scullery in which part of his day was spent.

From the scullery he entered the kitchen, switched on the electric light, blew out his lamp and filled a tin kettle with water to place on a small electric stove. He then proceeded with the least noise possible to clean out the four grates of the cooking range, set in the centre of the kitchen, and to light fires in them.

By the time he had completed this work the kettle was at the boil. Bisker made a pot of tea, and whilst the tea was “drawing” he passed out to the scullery and re-fired the boiler which provided hot water to the bathrooms and to every bedroom. He was pouring milk into two cups when the cook appeared in the kitchen.

“Mornin’!” she said with a kind of lisp, as she was minus her false teeth.

“Day!” snarled Bisker. “Cupper tea?”

“Too right! I don’t work till I get it.”

Bisker poured tea into two cups. The cook accepted hers without speaking, set it down on the stove and herself on a chair she drew near to the now-roaring fires. Bisker carried his cup in one hand and his pipe in the other to take a position before one of the fires from which he glared down at the cook.

“A man oughter—” he began, waving his pipe on a level with his moustache.

“Aw—shut up!” pleaded the cook. “Give me a light and be a gentleman.”

Bisker snorted yet again. He put his cup down on the stove, and from a fire withdrew a billet of kindling wood which he presented to the cook. She snatched it from him and lit the cigarette she had produced from her apron pocket.

Mrs. Parkes was only slightly under forty. She was large, very large. Her brown hair was drawn tightly against her head with masses of curling pins. Her large face was deathly white, and against the background of her face her little red nose appeared not unlike a tiddly-winks counter.

Bisker drank his tea without swallowing.

“’Ave another?” he asked.

“Course. Fill it up. Thirty-seven to cook for, as well as the missus, three maids, a drink steward and you. What a life!”

Bisker took the cups over to the wall bench, filled them and brought them back to the now-warming stove.

“How’d you sleep?” he enquired, now a little more cheerful.

“Better than if I’d had you beside me,” replied the cook. “And you be sure to shave early, or the missus will be roaring you up again. You’re a disgrace about the place. Thank ’eaven the winter won’t last much longer. Must’ve been another frost by the feel of it.”

“She froze ’ard but it isn’t so cold outside as I expected,” averred Bisker. “Wind musta shifted to the west just before I got up. Well, I s’pose I’d better get on with the blasted boots.”

“Yes, and you go quiet about it, too,” commanded Mrs. Parkes stubbing out her cigarette. “We don’t want the old cat in her tantrums three days running.”

Bisker stood before the cook, sliding the palms of his hands together and leering.

“One of these days,” he said slowly, “you’re gonna hold her while I cut ’er throat—slowly. The old——”

Mrs. Parkes feigned indignation. She snatched up her cup, glared at Bisker, and said a little shrilly:

“You cut out that murder stuff and get along with your work. You’ll be havin’ me in ‘Truth’ next, and then what’ll me husband say when he comes ’ome!”

“Stick yer teeth in,” Bisker replied, and swiftly retreated to the scullery, retreated backwards as though he were withdrawing from the presence of royalty.

From a box on a shelf he obtained a pencil of chalk and, again entering the kitchen, crossed it and passed through a doorway into a passage which led him to the public lounge. Here he switched on lights, passed through the lounge and so gained the passage which led to the bedrooms. Switching on more lights, he collected the footwear of the guests, marking on the soles the number of the room outside of which they awaited him. There were ten pairs of men’s boots, sixteen pairs of women’s shoes, and three pairs of children’s boots. All these he took back to the scullery, and then went on another journey to collect a pair of shoes from outside the door of the room occupied by Miss Eleanor Jade, the proprietress of Wideview Chalet.

Standing at a bench, Bisker began to work on the collected footwear. Every pair was of good quality, and every pair bespoke their utility for walking. This morning Bisker expected to find them dry, for the weather had been fine for the last four days. He was, therefore, easily provoked to profanity when he began work on a pair of men’s shoes, size eight and bearing on the sole the figure five.

“Musta been out walkin’ late last night, the blinkin’ foreign German,” he complained. “More work—as though a man ’asn’t got enough to do. Musta got ’em as wet as hell.”

These shoes took him three times as long to clean as any previous pair. Having done them, he began to whistle, and continued whistling till he came to the last pair. These were a woman’s shoes, size six, collected from the bedroom door of Miss Eleanor Jade. Like the shoes from Number Five, they were also damp.

“Ha! Ha!” chortled Bisker. “The old bird! The old cat! The old—old——” Ceasing his chortling he began to brush the shoes collected from the bedroom door behind which slept Miss Eleanor Jade. “Now, lemme see. Number Five goes for a walk late last night. In he comes, has a drink or two—I must ask George about that—then toddles off to ’is room, takes off ’is shoes and plants ’em outside his door for me to clean. Yes, that’s how it was. But that same argument can’t be applied to the old cat. She wouldn’t be out walkin’ late last night, and yet ’er shoes are wet same as Number Five’s. The old——Ah—yes, she could ’ave. A little bit of love, eh! Ho! Ho! Sherlock ’Olmes me!”

Having completed this task, Bisker placed the footwear on a large wooden tray and went back to the bedrooms. By the time he had replaced them where he had found them it was almost full daylight.

He left the house to return to his room, a hut built in a far corner of the spacious garden. On the way a magnificent panoramic view of valley and distant mountains was presented to his unappreciative eyes. From the wide, stone-balustraded veranda extending the full length of the house-front, a well-kept lawn tilted gently down to the distant wire fence bordering a main highway. The lawn, as well as the small shrubs in beds spaced upon it, was white with frost, a glittering white upon which lay the reflected light of the sun now rising above the far mountains, thirty-odd miles across the valley.

After shaving and washing in ice-cold water, Bisker returned to the kitchen where the aroma of cooking food and simmering coffee caused him to forget momentarily the agony of the first five minutes of his day following the ringing of the alarm clock. Outside, the air was milder. The bushman in Bisker was quick to note the remarkable rise in the temperature after the sun had risen.

A uniformed maid entered the kitchen with an empty tray on which she had taken early-morning tea to Miss Jade’s guests. George, the drinks steward and table waiter, was already at breakfast at a side table to which Bisker drifted. Another maid set down before him his breakfast of bacon and eggs, toast and coffee for Miss Jade fed her staff well.

“Mornin’, George!”

“Morning, Bisker,” replied George, a sleek man of about thirty, pale of face, dark of eyes and hair. “Nice day.”

“Yes. Gonna be a warm day after the frost. Wind’s gone round to the west. The frost’ll thaw off quick. Might get rain tonight. What time you get to bed?”

“About eleven,” replied George. “The men were tired and cleared off to bed early.”

“You tuck ’em all in nice and comfy?” Bisker enquired with his mouth full.

George smiled in his superior manner.

“All bar the bridegroom,” he admitted. “I left him to the bride.”

Bisker winked and leered. He glanced furtively over a shoulder observed that one of the maids and the cook were standing close, winked again at George and refrained from making an evil remark. The remark was never made, because George, having finished his breakfast, departed for the dining room.

Presently Bisker rose and shuffled out of the kitchen. He left the building by the scullery door and crossed the yard to the wood-stack where, sitting on a splitting-log in the warm sunshine, he fell to slicing chips from his tobacco plug. The slight problem of the wet shoes had vanished from his mind.

Having smoked for ten minutes, he put away his pipe and took up an axe with which he proceeded to split foot-length logs into billets for the cooking range. In addition to the kitchen and the boiler fires, there were the lounge and dining room fires to be fed, great blazing fires so much preferred to the cheerless gas and electric fires in the homes of the guests.

For half an hour, Bisker split wood and then took a broom and began the daily sweeping of the bitumened areas and the paths. And then, when he had worked round to the long front of the house, he heard Miss Jade’s voice.

“Bisker! Have you seen Mr. Grumman this morning?”

Bisker turned and looked upward to see his employer standing at the veranda balustrade, her bejewelled hands sparkling in the golden sunlight.

“No, marm,” he replied.

He stood staring at “the old cat,” the wonder in his mind, as it was always when he looked at her, that anyone could be so fortunate. Under forty, Miss Jade’s hair was as black as night, her eyes were dark and big and even now as she faced the sun her make-up was perfect. Her voice had the faultlessness of tone and accent which must have been acquired only by long practise.

“Very well. Continue your work, Bisker,” she commanded.

Bisker obeyed, but his thoughts were not gentlemanly. He was sweeping the path running parallel with the house-front. It crossed midway the wider path leading from the veranda through the lawn to the wicket gate in the bottom fence above the road. He had almost reached the far end of the path when, to his astonishment, he observed a man in working clothes walking up from the wicket gate. Bisker looked involuntarily for Miss Jade, for no person other than a guest was permitted to enter the grounds of Wideview Chalet by that gate.

Miss Jade was no longer on the veranda. Bisker dropped his broom and ambled down the path to meet the social outcast. He knew him.

“Hey, Fred!” he called, when he was twenty feet away from the intruder. “Don’t you know that none of the slaves can use that there gate to come in?”

The intruder was tall, thin and bony. His blue eyes watered. The tip of his nose suspended a water drop. He said, with the unruffled calm of the man who will not be hurried:

“Come on down. I’ve got something to show you.”

He turned about and went on down to the gate. Bisker paused, glanced back to see if Miss Jade was watching them, and followed. When hard on Fred’s heels, he said, hopefully:

“Got a bottle?”

“Better still,” Fred answered without turning about. “Just a bit of a surprise for you. You and me are gonna be famous.”

“I don’t wanna be famous,” asserted Bisker. “If you’ve brought me all the way down here not to crack a bottle, you ain’t no friend of mine any more. A cold mornin’ like this, too. And that old cat will be starin’ at me with ’er black eyes an’ all and will be wantin’ to know this and that and who the hell you are, and all the ruddy rest.”

On arriving at the wicket gate, it could be seen that a ramp had been cut in the red bank skirting the top side of the highway. Fred and Bisker passed through the gate, down the ramp and so to the macadamised road where they were out of sight of anyone standing on the veranda. Fred stopped, turned and pointed a finger accusingly at Bisker.

“Where were you last night?” he asked.

“In bed. Where d’you think I was?”

“Where was you before you went to bed?”

“Where——I was drinking whisky with you in me ’ut as you well know,” indignantly replied Bisker.

“You’re lucky,” he was informed. “You ever seen a dead man?”

“’Undreds. Why?”

“I’ve found a dead ’un.”

“You have? Where?”

“You’re that close to ’im that you’re all ’ot.”

“You don’t say.”

“I do say. Come on and I’ll show you.”

Fred led Bisker along the road bordering the storm-water gutter dug deep against the foot of the bank. He led on down the road from the little bridge at the foot of the ramp which crossed the gutter. The gutter was almost hidden by the briars and winter weeds. When he stopped, he said:

“I only just caught sight of ’im as I was walking along ’ere on my way to a job. Look!”

He pointed into the gutter. Bisker stood quite still and stared downward into the gutter with eyes unusually large. First he saw, beneath lines of vivid green, a patch of scarlet. Then he saw, also beneath lines of vivid green, part of a man’s face. He bent his body forward, resting his hands upon his bent knees, and stared still harder.

“That’s one of our guests,” he said slowly. “A bloke named Grumman. Looks like ’e’s dead.”

“Too right!” supplemented Fred. “You take a closer bird’s-eye view of ’im.”

Bisker straightened himself and regarded Fred as though it had been suggested that he step off a cliff a hundred feet high. Then he knelt at the edge of the gutter and lowered himself down into it. With his arms, he parted the tangle of brambles and weeds above the figure of the man dressed in a grey dressing gown and with red leather slippers on his feet. Bisker could tell if a man was dead, having seen dead men. He rearranged the covering of vegetation over the body, and then regained the edge of the road.

Fred regarded Bisker with an expression of sternness in his watery eyes. Bisker looked up and was about to speak when, from above them, a voice said:

“What is going on down there?”

Both men stared guiltily and looked upwards to see a slight and well-dressed man standing on the lip of the road bank. Bisker said:

“Morning Mr. Bonaparte. Better come down an’ take a bird’s-eye view of a corpse we’ve found.”

“Did you say a corpse?” asked Mr. Bonaparte.

“That’s right,” affirmed Fred.

“Then I will join you.”

In less than ten seconds this guest at Wideview Chalet stood with Bisker and Fred on the edge of the road just above the body.

“Have either of you men been down there in the gutter?” asked Mr. Bonaparte.

“We both ’ave,” replied Bisker. “Fred ’ere ’e found ’im and brought me down from me work.”

“Ah—pity. You are quite sure he is dead?”

“Too right!”

“Do you know who it is?”

“Mr. Grumman,” answered Bisker.

“Mr. Grumman, eh! Oh! Bring me a stick about five feet in length.”

Fred found a branch on the lower side of the road and snapped off a stick of the required length. With its point, Mr. Bonaparte moved aside the intervening brambles so that he could see clearly the dead man’s face and the clothes he was wearing. Then with the stick he pushed and pulled the vegetation back to hide the body.