Читать книгу Madman's Bend - Arthur W. Upfield - Страница 6

A Pair of Gossips

The township of White Bend stopped growing in 1920. The hotel, the post-office and the police station, one bank and one general store serve the few inhabitants and the surrounding sheep and cattle stations. Built on high ground on the west bank of the Darling, the remains of its early prosperity may still be seen in the rotting wharf and the wind-wrecked shed.

Constable John Lucas thought highly of White Bend. It was his first station, his wife was a local girl, and he loved the river at first sight. Still in his early thirties, athletic and interested in everything and everyone, he considered the job of conveying Detective Inspector Bonaparte up-river to Bourke a very pleasant chore. There was no obsequiousness in his manner, nor any sign of superiority due to Bonaparte’s mixed ancestry.

Lucas had heard of Bonaparte at rare intervals, but had not known that he was in his territory until a station manager telephoned to ask if he could convey the Inspector to Bourke and the air service. Accordingly, having contacted his superior at Bourke, he left White Bend with Bonaparte shortly after noon on July 19.

The River Darling is unique on several counts. Unlike the Murray, of which it is a tributary, it has character and atmosphere. The land it spans is flat. Though it runs roughly six hundred miles from Walgett to Wentworth at its junction with the Murray, the Darling so twists and turns that its overall course is something like eighteen hundred miles. Save at the major bends the channel is steeply banked as though fashioned by men with gigantic ditching machinery, and the banks are of the same gradient, the same width apart, and the same height from Wentworth to Bourke. Along all its course the river is shaded and sheltered from the summer sun and the winter winds by massive red-gums forming an almost unbroken avenue. Along this river men have found a strange peace of mind, strange in quality and duration, and they have heard siren voices calling them back no matter how long they have been absent or how distant they may be.

The road from Wilcannia to Bourke follows the west bank of the Darling, but, because of the river’s many twists, touches it only at the major bends, these bends being sometimes ten or a dozen miles apart. The land outside almost all the major bends is higher than average, and, since it gives height above flood, level and a permanent water supply from the great hole excavated by the river in flood, it is favoured as a site for homesteads.

“You know, I’ve often thought that when I retire I’ll build a house beside this river,” remarked the man known to many merely as Bony.

“Might come to it myself one day,” declared the policeman, his fair hair whipped by the strong north-east wind, his grey eyes alight. “Plenty of fishing and shooting. No wonder the old pensioners build themselves shacks a mile or less from a township. Who the heck would want to live in a city?”

“Difficult to understand why anyone should,” responded Bony, the wind making his dark-blue eyes small. “Car coming,” he added.

“Mail, probably,” said the policeman. Two minutes later he nodded to the driver of the heavy car and was given a wave by a youth with flaming red hair. “Leaves Bourke at eight, and due at White Bend at one. Faster than the old days with the Cobb & Co. coaches. You remember them? Before my time.”

“No,” replied Bony. “The change to motors occurred about the time I was first looking at Australia.”

When they passed the tip of a major bend he was able to look down at the great water-filled hole and along the bed of the river, down which a tiny stream meandered to the next hole.

“When did the river stop running?”

“Eleven months back,” replied Lucas. “But it’s going to run again soon—and how, from all reports! Going to run a banker. The first of it is well past Bourke, or was at six o’clock last night. Give it a week and this road’ll be out. Funny!”

“What is?”

“Twenty inches of rain in south central Queensland in one month, and not enough to fill a billy-can down here. We missed the autumn rains, and had nothing so far this winter.”

They passed a prosperous homestead built at a bend. This, Lucas said, was called Murrimundi; like Mira, up-river on its far side, it had been deprived of three-quarters of its original area by the Lands Department. It was eight miles to the next bend, the track winding across monotonous dun-coloured flats. And at this next bend they found an abandoned utility.

“Belongs to a feller named Lush,” remarked Lucas, stopping to alight. “Has a place up-river by half a mile.” Leaning into the cabin of the utility, he switched on the ignition. “Run out of petrol, and walked the rest. In town last night till the pub shut. Then too drunk to check.”

“And too much of a hangover to fetch gas this morning,” Bony added.

Lucas agreed, and began to fill a pipe. Bony turned to the river to gaze beyond the high cliff over the usual deep, water-filled hole, and then along the straight, dry course for almost a mile, where the river turned southward. There, above a similar cliff-faced bend, he could see the roofs of Mira Station.

“Fine house there,” Lucas told him. “You can’t see it because it lies to the left, behind the gums. Began as a million-acre property carrying eighty thousand sheep through good years and bad. Now all that’s left to the homestead is a hundred and forty thousand acres and about twenty thousand sheep. It’d do me, though, any time they’d like to make a present of it.”

Set on legs near by stood the Mira mail-box. Lucas casually glanced inside it and observed that someone had already collected the mail. He looked inside a second and smaller box, and from it took a bag bearing a label marked with the word Madden.

“May as well take it on,” he decided. “I’ve no time for Lush, but the women are good—too damn good for him.”

On the far side of the bend the track forked; Lucas took the right, which followed the retreating river to a group of buildings hard against the red-gum avenue. The house was small and dwarfed by the shearing-shed. It needed paint, and the removal of old iron and other rubbish would have improved it still more.

Constable Lucas stopped his car a few yards from the closed door. He was about to knock when a girl, accompanied by two dogs, came out of the shearing-shed. She was wearing jeans and riding-boots, and Bony noted how she placed her feet like a man accustomed to horses. Lucas returned to stand by his car and wait for her.

She said, a little breathlessly, “Good afternoon, Mr Lucas. I didn’t want you to knock because Mother is poorly and lying down.” From the mail-bag he carried she glanced at Bony, still seated in the car, and then ordered the dogs to be gone.

“Oh! Sorry to hear about Mrs Lush, Jill,” Lucas said, proffering the bag. “I brought this along in case your stepfather was busy. We’re running up to Bourke, and I’ll be back tonight. Anything I can get for Mrs Lush?”

“No. No, I don’t think so, thank you. Bill Lush isn’t here. I was going for the mail later. Thanks for bringing it.”

“That’s all right, Jill.” Constable Lucas smiled. “Bill still suffering, I suppose.”

“I wouldn’t know,” the girl said stiffly. “Haven’t seen him since he went to town, and don’t want to.”

“Well, he got home as far as the mail-box. Ran out of petrol.”

Bony could see the frown narrowing the girl’s fine dark eyebrows. The sunlight glinted on her dark brown hair, and on the silver marcasite brooch fastened to her rough drill tunic.

“Probably cleared away into a cubby-hole somewhere with a supply of booze he brought out,” she said bitterly. “Wouldn’t be the first time, Mr Lucas. You know him. Gets so he can’t bear himself, let alone us. Why don’t you lock him up when he’s drunk? He wouldn’t be leaving town sober.”

“Never known him to,” admitted the policeman, adding ruefully, “still, I can’t lock him up if he doesn’t misbehave, and, as everybody knows, the drunker he is the steadier he drives. Well, we must get along. Remember me to your mother, Jill.”

“Thanks, I will.”

Looking back, Bony saw the girl watching the car on its way back to the main track.

“Fine-looking lass,” he said when the Madden homestead had retreated into the river trees.

“Yes. The mother made a mistake.”

“Oh! A bad one?”

“The husband died a bit over two years ago. The widow hired a feller off the track. Seemed all right, just a hand looking for a job. After a year she married him. He sort of took over the place, or seemed to. Personally, I don’t like him. Officially, I’ve nothing against him. Oily type. The booze makes him very polite, but you can see in his eyes he’s not so polite in his mind.”

“The place seems a trifle run down,” Bony said. “Many sheep?”

“About three thousand. Not a big selection when the poor country is taken out. Madden seemed to do well, though. He kept the homestead tidy and the house in good order. Now, as I said, the widow made a mistake.”

Conversation became desultory until they passed the famous Dunlop homestead. The history of that place engaged Constable Lucas for a mile or two; then he again became quiet until Bony asked whether there was anything on his mind.

“Yes, there’s something nagging, Inspector. Did you notice anything wrong with that Madden homestead?”

“Yes,” replied Bony. “House wanted paint. The surroundings needed tidying. The shearing-shed roof is going to blow off for need of re-nailing.”

“I don’t mean all that. Fact is, I don’t know what I mean.”

“Something in the girl’s demeanour?”

“No. She was normal. Never did have any time for the stepfather, and don’t wonder at that. It was something wrong with the house.”

“Ah, the house! Never having seen it before, I’m afraid I cannot help you. Could it be the axe lying on the ground near the front door? The condition of the axe indicated it had been relegated to the woodheap.

“No, it wasn’t the axe. Something else. It’ll come.”

The western fringe of Bourke was in sight when Constable Lucas vented a sharp exclamation.

“I have it! Funny how the mind stops and starts like a traffic signal,” he said. “It was the old door back again. Now why?”

“The door returned home,” Bony prompted. “So!”

“The house fronts the river, and the back is to the west and the road. It gets the westerlies and the dust. Like the rest of the place the back door became cracked for the need of putty and paint. I called there about three months ago to see Mrs Madden about a stock return, and found Lush putting on a new door; the old one was leaning against the wall. That old door was a heavy affair with inset panels. The new one was of plain wall-board clamped to a frame. Now today the old door is back on again. Why put on an old door in place of a new one?”

“Could it not be that the plain door, more suited to the inside, was fitted to an inside door frame, and the old door re-hung until a new back door could be purchased?” asked Bony.

“Yes, that’s the answer. Must be the answer. Let’s see, now. The axe! What would the axe be doing so far from the woodheap?”

Bony chuckled, saying, “You are a suspicious policeman.”

“Me, suspicious?” Lucas laughed without restraint. Then:

“It was you who brought the axe into it.”