Читать книгу The New Shoe - Arthur W. Upfield - Страница 8

The Glass Jewel

Bony found a tall and weathered man seated at his luncheon table. Mrs Washfold bustled in to introduce them.

“This is Mr Fisher from the Navigation Department,” she said, “Going to work at the Lighthouse. Thought you two might like to sit together. Meet Mr Rawlings, Mr Fisher.”

“Working at the Lighthouse, eh!” exclaimed Bony. “I’d like to go over it.”

“Any time you like,” assented the engineer. “I’m startin’ work about two. Walk right in. I’ll leave the door open for you.”

“You take them steps easy, Mr Rawlings,” interposed the licensee’s wife. “There’s about a hundred and twenty of ’em, so they say, and when you’re not used to it the climb will make your legs ache that much you won’t get no sleep for nights. A little vegetable soup, now?”

It was easy and quite natural, and every time Mrs Washfold appeared they were talking about coastal lights and of Fisher’s experiences in many of them.

Towards three o’clock, Bony left the private entrance and at once was joined by the hotel dog. Stug, it was called, and when Bony had asked for the meaning, he was advised to reverse the letters. The name, in reverse, was well chosen in view of the animal’s condition. He wanted to be acknowledged and greatly appreciated Bony’s attention.

With the dog who kept with him all the way, its interest in this new friend never obscured by the alluring scents it came across, Bony arrived at the gate in the Lighthouse fence, paused to examine visually the heavy padlock attached to the chain, and passed inside, closing the gate after him and the dog. Within the enclosure stood a forge and bags of fuel, and to one side against the iron fence was a lean-to shed.

The fence, the yard, himself and the dog were, of course, dwarfed by the mighty structure towering to the cloud-flecked sky. On glancing upwards, the overhanging balcony prevented him from sighting the windows of the Light and the red dome surmounting it. It had been painted recently, and Bony wondered how the painters had done their work.

The yard interested him particularly and for one purpose. When above-surface objects such as the forge and the shed might have interested the city detective, it was the ground which automatically claimed this man’s attention.

Since the last of the police investigators had been here, rain had wiped clean the ground within this yard, and since the rain had fallen there was one set of footprints between the fence gate and the Lighthouse door. Obviously they had been left by Fisher.

The Lighthouse door was open, and on entering the building Bony found himself in a narrow chamber flanked by rows of tall steel gas cylinders. Beyond this small chamber was the bottom of the spiral staircase, and on the bottom step sat Fisher.

“Ah, there you are, Fisher,” Bony said, and drew forward an empty case to sit with him. “Don’t move. I’ll smoke a cigarette and we’ll talk before going up. How’s the leg?”

“The leg, Inspector! All right. How did you know I’d damaged my hip a few years ago?”

“Little bird. Right hip, wasn’t it? Caused a limp.”

“Yes, it did. But I don’t limp now.”

“Just a little. Spent most of your time at sea?”

“That’s so. All us Lighthouse men have been seamen in our time.”

“Well now, let’s get to work. First, you played your part well at lunch. Superintendent Bolt talked to you?”

“Yes, Inspector. Told me not to give you away as a detective.”

“Then forget I am one, and remember that my name is Rawlings ... that I’m a sheepman. Are you the man who found the body?”

“Yes. It was crook because I wasn’t thinkin’ of the naked and the dead. I was thinkin’ of sun-valves at the time.” A humourless chuckle rose from the vicinity of the man’s belt. “Bodies in lighthouses aren’t so thick as daisies in a paddock. I walked in here to do a job to one of the spare cylinder connexions, and I found the sun-valve ...”

“Wait. We’ll come to that. I understand you have been with your department for nine years. You would know the routine. This Lighthouse is inspected four times annually, is it not?”

“Yes, as near as possible in the first week in February, May, August and November each year. It happens that this is inspection time. In fact, Superintendent Bolt only just told me in time about you being here. I was due the day after tomorrow.”

“Did you inspect the Light in February, the usual routine time?”

“Yes.”

“Then your visit here on March the First was not a routine visit?”

“No, it wasn’t. When I was down here early in February, I couldn’t finish a job, so I fixed it up pro tem, and reported to the office that it might last all right until the next inspection. The office said it should be looked at before then, and that’s why I was sent down three weeks later to fix it properly.”

“Anyone outside your office know you were coming?”

“No.”

“Therefore, anyone familiar with the inspection periods would not anticipate anyone coming here again till early in May? Many local people know the inspection periods?”

“All of ’em would know.”

“Apparently the police did not know it,” Bony said, and Fisher caught the note of satisfaction. “They understand you came here on a routine inspection.”

“Well, they asked me why I came down, and I told ’em I came on inspection duty. That’s what I am ... engineer-inspector of automatic coast lights.”

“Ah, I can see where the slight discrepancy occurred. Don’t worry about the matter, now we have it clear. Let me look at the keys.”

Fisher produced a bunch of keys and selected one which fitted the yard gate padlock, and another which fitted the lock in the Lighthouse door. Both keys could quite easily be duplicated. Without comment, Bony returned them.

“I assume you Navigation men have to know several trades,” he said.

“That’s so, Inspector. Rigging and welding and the like. Have to be used to heights, too. The d’s seemed to have an idea that a Navigation Department man could have done the murder. They checked up on us all pretty thoroughly.”

“Matter of work,” murmured Bony. “Now show me over. I want you to proceed exactly as you did when you came here in March, beginning from where you opened the door and ending at that place where you found the body. I am not questioning your statement made to the detectives: it will be to my own advantage to follow you on the course you took that morning.”

Fisher stood with Bony.

“When I opened the door,” he said, “the first thing I did was smell for escaping gas, and then I looked at the pressure gauges on the cylinders and saw that the pressure was OK. You see, although I had that special job to complete, the ordinary inspection had to be done even though I’d done it three weeks before. So I ran my eye over the cocks and connexions down here and then I went on up.”

He proceeded to mount the stairway, Bony following. Their shoes rang metallically on the iron steps centred to the spiralling iron handrail. Thirty-one steps brought them to the first landing, occupying a half-circle. It was almost dark, the handrail gleaming like pewter in the faint light thrown up from the bottom and passed down from the distant upper floor.

A further series of thirty-one steps brought them to another landing, and Bony’s thigh muscles were beginning to complain. On reaching the third landing, he was thankful he hadn’t five hundred steps to mount, and after leaving this landing the light rapidly became stronger till they reached the top floor.

They were now at the summit of the main stone and cement structure upon which rested the cupola housing the Light. To reach the Light was a further flight of fifteen-odd steps, and a steel gangway circled the Light similar to that from which a ship’s engine is served. The engineer went up, and Bony followed.

The daylight entering through the outside plain glass “face” of the Lighthouse illumined the shell of prisms making of them a jewel deserving the softest plush for background. The beauty entranced Bony, so entirely unexpected was it.

In the centre of the prisms and almost at their base nestled a cluster of ordinary acetylene gas jets, and in the heart of the cluster lay another burning a tiny light. The engineer turned a small cock outside the prisms, and the cluster of jets flamed, magnifying the light to ten thousand candle power. The light went out, then flamed again. There was an eclipse, and this was followed by four flashes covering a period of twelve seconds prior to the next eclipse.

Bony found the engineer watching him, and he nodded, whereupon Fisher turned the cock and the flashing lights ended.

“Having tested the Light,” he said. “I went outside to take a look at the sun-valve, not that there could be anything wrong with it because the jets were operating.”

Bony followed him down to the main floor, and Fisher opened a door in the circling iron wall and passed outside. Bony followed, finding himself on the narrow steel balcony, and at once thought of how much the policeman suffers to maintain law and order.

He closed his eyes and held tightly to the railing of the spidery balcony. The narrow overhang of ledge beneath prevented anyone from looking directly down the white wall, and not for several moments did he ascertain that fact for himself. On opening his eyes, he gazed determinedly out over the Inlet to the mountains, and then at the highway and the bridge where the man Owen had waited for him.

He followed Fisher round the balcony, and there was nothing other than the blue and shadowed sea, until he ventured to look down and courageously gazed upon the paw and the wide talons of Split Point. The white-washed rocks and the sandy beach seemed not half a dozen feet below the edge of the headland.

“Long way down,” said the engineer, and Bony turned to look at him. The man’s eyes were dark and seemed full of meaning. The hands resting on the cobweb of balcony rail were like the hands of a giant. For them to pick up a man and toss him over would require no great effort. Bony decided he had never really adored heights.

They passed on round the balcony, and when Fisher again stopped, he reached up and touched a cylinder of glass about twelve inches long and metal-capped at both ends.

“This is the sun-valve,” he explained. “The mechanics are simple when you know. The interior is extremely sensitive to light, but the light must contain heat. Sunlight contains heat, moonlight doesn’t. When the sun rises, no matter what clouds there are, its light acts on the valve and the valve automatically turns off the supply of gas to the jets, and when the sun goes down, the gas is automatically turned on again. The pilot light in the middle of the jets is a permanent light, and the mechanism operating the jets to make them flash is another piece of mechanism.

“Now I came out here to take a look at the sun-valve, as usual, and I found the glass was cracked. Can’t make out what cracked it. Anyway, it was cracked, and I went inside for my bag of tools and took it off, intending to take it back to Melbourne, and knowing there was a spare valve down below.”

“All right. I’ll follow you,” Bony said, slightly impatient to get off that balcony.

He was glad to be inside again, and see Fisher close the iron door and bar it. Once he glanced upward at the jewel set in steel, and then proceeded to follow the engineer down the spiralling steps.

Just before they came to the lowest landing, Fisher stopped and switched on a flashlight, waiting for Bony to stand with him. He then opened a door in the wall to reveal a cavity approximately four feet thick and four by four feet high and wide.

“There used to be a window on the outside of this chamber,” he said. “Before the Light was automatic, the red danger lamp was installed here, and because nothing was done with the space after the lamp was removed, the foreman of a repair gang made the door to fit so that the place could be used as a locker for spare parts.

“The spare sun-valve was kept here. I opened the door, and even put my hand inside for the valve. Then I switched on the torch and saw it. Not the sun-valve. I thought it was a sort of octopus. My torch beam was aimed straight at the face, and the eyes were wide open and the mouth was sagging. I hadn’t sort of expected to see that.”

“Certainly unlikely,” Bony said, dryly. “It must have hit you hard.”

“It did so,” agreed Fisher. “How I went down to the bottom I don’t recollect. Could have been head first. I was down and out of this Lighthouse in two ticks, and even now I don’t like coming back to it, or stopping here by this locker.”

“Then let us go on down.”

It was dark when the engineer switched off his light.

“Thought we left the door open,” he said, turning on the torch. “Didn’t you?”

“We did,” assented Bony. “Actually, I left it open before sitting on the case and making a cigarette. Wind must have blown it shut.”

“Not likely. Too heavy.”

The door hinges were certainly too resistant for the slight wind to move the heavy door. The dog waited in the yard, and he was panting. Bony saw that the yard gate was shut as he had left it, and saw, too, that between the entrance to the Lighthouse and the yard gate there was a third set of footprints made by a man’s shoes. Watched curiously by Fisher, he sauntered to the gate without letting the engineer know he was gazing at those prints, which here and there overlay their own. He opened the gate and looked out, saw no one and closed it again.

Whilst they had been up to the Light, someone had come in and gone from the yard. The person had been wearing a man’s boots that were either a small seven or a large six, and the peculiar item in the story told by the footprints was that the maker of them had come and gone on tiptoe. Peculiar because the ground was soft and even a horse could have walked about the yard without anyone inside the Lighthouse hearing it.