Читать книгу Bony Buys a Woman - Arthur W. Upfield - Страница 9

Digging

The four hands were invited into the office, Charlie and another aborigine being told they could take the day off. All four were familiar with the interior of this large room, and so noted that on the wall behind the desk had been tacked a large-scale map of Mount Eden.

Wootton occupied the chair behind the desk. Bony stood beside the desk, almost lazily smoking, while the four men sat and made themselves comfortable, at the invitation of their employer. Finally, obviously wondering what this was all about, they regarded Bony with deep interest.

“As you know, it is now several weeks since Mrs Bell was killed and her daughter abducted,” he began. “Five weeks ago a man and a small child vanished, and both man and child were known to you better by far than I am known to you.

“Since that tragic day, you and many others were engaged in an intensive search for Ole Fren Yorky. You know the details of that search, and the balance of human effort within the extent of the country about Lake Eyre. No doubt you have assessed the chances of locating two human beings on an area of country many people outside would think to be a limitless world, in which fifty, a hundred, men could easily be lost. Thus you will agree with me that, despite all the hunting, all the planning, the chances of Yorky getting away, or holing up somewhere, were good from the beginning. The hunters held four kings, but Yorky held four aces. Correct?”

“Could be, and could not be,” doubted Arnold Bray. “I don’t reckon Yorky planned it. He was too sozzled to plan much. I said, and I still think, that the blacks helped him.”

“Knowing that Yorky was fairly close to the aborigines,” Bony proceeded to argue, “knowing that all the aborigines were camped on the Neales River, the first thing Constable Pierce did was to send riders at top speed to cut off that line of retreat for Yorky. When the trucks for the trackers arrived at the Neales River, they made sure that every aborigine was there. As you say, Arnold Bray, Yorky never planned the murder. It was committed on impulse.”

“And then he was lucky enough to find he held four aces,” interrupted withered William Harte. “In the first place, Yorky knows this country better than any of us, and, better than us, he can think closer to the abos. Put yourself in his place. ... He done a murder before he even thought about it. He knows we’re all away, that no one ain’t likely to come around till middle afternoon. He’s shot Mrs Bell, and he can’t shoot the kid ’cos the reason he shot the woman ain’t strong enough for him to shoot the kid. So he’s got the kid on his hands ’cos the kid seen him doin’ the shootin’. He’s like a bloke having to walk with one boot on and the other off. So he looks over his cards, and decides he holds better cards than anyone else.”

Seated on the floor with his back to the wall, Harte paused to roll a cigarette, and Bony prompted him, the others apparently conceding his superior knowledge and experience.

“When he shot Mrs Bell,” resumed the ageless man, “Yorky knew the country was wide open to him. He knew just where all the abos were fifty miles something up north. He knows them abos pretty well, knows how their minds work, and the reason why he didn’t shoot the kid was stronger than the reason why he ought to have shot her, to give him the best chance of getting clear out of this country. As I said, he knows the blacks better than any of us. He knows that once they’re put to his tracks, even if them tracks is bits of dust in the air, they’ll catch up with him. If they wants to, that is. He knows that if he kills the kid they’ll want to; if he don’t, they won’t. That was his cards.”

“The aborigines thought much of Linda?” pressed Bony.

“They surely did. Like everyone else. One time we was playin’ poker over in the quarters, and I drew a Queen of Hearts and snaffled the jackpot, and I said without thinking: ‘That’s my Linda for you, fellers. The Queen of Hearts.’ And that’s what she was around these parts.”

“The aborigines, however, did try to track Yorky,” Wootton reminded him, and Bony was delighted at the course his conference was taking.

“Too right,” agreed Harte, who then had to go to the doorway for another spit. “What happened? They’re up on the Neales, half-starved, livin’ on goannas and flies. They get brought back, and they’re given lashings of beef and flour and tobacco to start ’em off right. Instead of huntin’ a perenti or another feller’s gin, they’re set to huntin’ Yorky.

“But do they hunt for Yorky? I got me doubts, and I got ’em because they knew he got aces. ‘Good ole Yorky,’ they’d say. ‘We’ll look around, sort of, and feed up on the boss’s beef, an’ smoke the boss’s baccy.’ But they didn’t just look around, as you said, Mr Wootton. They set to work all right, but not because they hate Yorky for killing Mrs Bell. They set to work like bloodhounds to make sure Yorky hadn’t killed Linda and planted her body somewhere, and when they reasoned that Yorky hadn’t been that ruddy stupid, that he’d got clear away with the kid, they sort of got tired and gradually eased up till they quit. That’s why I say Ole Fren Yorky knew when he collared Linda that he held all the aces.”

“And he will continue to hold them while he keeps Linda Bell alive?” encouraged Bony.

“That’s so. While he’s got Linda with him, it’s Yorky’s game.”

“And you still don’t think that the blacks know where he is?” drawled lanky Eric Maundy.

“No, I don’t think they do, Eric. To find that out would mean work, and they’d be satisfied to know that little Linda was safe enough. They’d say Yorky and the kid was around somewhere, that Yorky would come out of smoke when it suited him, and meanwhile Charlie will be chasing Meena, and Canute will scratch his neck ’cos he’s too old to take her even though she was promised to him when she was born. You gotta know them abos, Eric”

“Reckon you know ’em?” jibed the young man named Harry Lawton.

“If you think you know ’em better, put up a better yarn,” advised Arnold with asperity.

“If we accept your idea,” Bony contributed, “where is Yorky obtaining food for himself and the child?”

“At his camps,” replied Harte. “Perhaps you don’t know that when Yorky left here for a bender, he had a job riding the boundary fence.”

“That’s so,” added Wootton. “The boundary fence is some hundred and fifty miles round the station, bar where it cuts into the Lake. Yorky rode it with camels. He had a camp every twenty miles, with water at every second camp.”

“And them camps were stocked with tucker,” inserted Harte. “You know, flour and tea and sugar kept in tins and tinned dog and fish if he was stuck. I asked him once about the abos getting down on his tucker and tobacco, and he laughed and said they wouldn’t steal from him.”

Bony studied the wall map of Mount Eden Station. To Wootton he said:

“Mark the camps, please, and mark additionally those camps where the water is.” To Harte he said: “What’s outside the boundary fence?”

“Nothing. Open country, excepting down south and southeast.”

“Wild aborigines?”

Harte shook his head, saying:

“Not till you get up about the Simpson Desert, and they ain’t as wild as they used to be.”

“The country ... dry all the way up north and west?”

“Same as around here. Haven’t had no rain for months, and that fell at the wrong time. Still, there’s water if you know where to find it. Water holes up on the Neales. Water under the Lake mud, if you can stomach it.”

“H’m! We seem to be going somewhere.” Bony looked at each in turn. “I want you to mark on this map where each of you went that day Mrs Bell was shot, and note also the time when you were farthest from the homestead. That is, as close as possible. A blue pencil, Mr Wootton, please.”

They did as requested. Then Bony said:

“I understand that you four men have been in this part of Australia for many years, much longer than Mr Wootton. You have been most co-operative, and I ask you to continue so. It is good to know that you believe Linda is still alive, and that rescuing her must take priority. I would not have expected such full co-operation, were it not for the possibility of recovering the child.

“You will see clearly that the actual rescue could well be attended by grave danger to her from the man who abducted her. To save himself he might kill her. It is of vital importance to know exactly the kind of man he is, or was, before he shot Mrs Bell. First, let us try to understand why he shot Mrs Bell. Had he ever expressed dislike of her?”

“Not that I ever heard,” replied Arnold. “He was one of them inoffensive poor bastards. Never hardly spoke unless spoken to. You had to get him alone, and sort of talk soft to him, before he’d open up. He’d talk fast enough to Linda, and the black kids.”

“When drunk or recovering from a bout, did he think of women, talk about them?”

“No.”

“Did Mrs Bell ever express dislike of him, ever strongly criticise him?”

“Just the opposite. Mrs Bell sort of liked him, I think. Patched his shirts more than once.”

“After he’d washed ’em,” chuckled young Harry Lawton. “She’d do that for any of us.”

“You’re too flash to have old shirts to be patched,” drawled Eric.

“She never objected to Linda talking to Yorky?”

“Don’t think. Had no reason to. He was harmless enough.”

“Yorky must have gone wonky to have shot her,” insisted Eric.

“All right! Then let us get down to his association with the aborigines,” pressed Bony. “You have said he was close to them. In what way? Did he live secretly with a lubra?”

Harry Lawton broke into laughter, and was silenced by the glare in Arnold’s grey eyes. It was Harte who replied.

“Look, Inspector. Yorky was older than me. Not much, but still he was so. I remember Yorky coming into this country about thirty-five years back. Not much to look at but real rough: always small and a bit wispy, if you know what I mean. And I can’t say he’d had much education, less, sort of, than Meena and Charlie and the other abos who went down to Mission School for a spell.

“Yorky could read the papers, follow the races and all that. But he got to know more about the ants and things than ever I wanted to, and he got to know the ways of camels when he was frightened of horses. I don’t think he was more taken up with women than most of us. Camped for a night or two with one down at Loaders Springs. You know the sort. Some say that there was times when he camped with Sarah, and I have heard that there was times when he had a young lubra with him on the boundary fence. A long time ago, though.”

Harte went again to the door to spit.

“But this is what I am trying to get out. Yorky was more interested in watching ants and birds than he was in talking about cattle and horses like the rest of us. He’d get the black kids to take him out and show him things. All the kids took to him, and they run like hell from me. Gradually he got in with the blacks. And I’m sure it wasn’t to get at the lubras. He was sort of interested in them like he was in the ants. He’d give them things. Fork out tobacco, buy a dress or some such.”

“I once told him he oughta write a book about ’em,” interrupted Harry Lawton. “He knows more about ’em than the perfessors and them sort of blokes.”

“He could have done, too, if he’d had any education,” agreed Harte. “Well, that’s how it is with Ole Fren Yorky. You heard how he got the name?”

“Yes. And what you have said supports what I already know of him,” replied Bony, and bending over the desk he jotted a note on a slip of paper. “It does seem that Yorky must have lost his balance through the booze to have shot Mrs Bell. Could you say he tended to be mentally childish?”

“No,” said Arnold with conviction. “Yet he wasn’t ... I don’t know how to put it. He reminds me of a nephew of mine down in Adelaide. Used to moon about when other kids were playing or larking. Got so when he grew older that he went around dreaming. But he had brains. Ended by being a first class commercial artist with a publishing firm in Sydney. No, Yorky was never wonky. The way he plays poker proves that.”

“He had what I’d call low cunning,” commented Lawton. “You could never tell what cards he held.”

“So that all of you actually find it hard to believe that Ole Fren Yorky did shoot Mrs Bell?” asked Bony.

“That’s about it,” agreed Arnold, and the others nodded agreement. “There’s times when I won’t believe it.”

“You are sure those were his tracks you picked out?”

“Too right! Couldn’t mistake ’em,” replied Harte.

Bony presented his note to Arnold, and said:

“When I locate Yorky, we shall know all about it. The motive will be interesting; the way of his escape will be interesting too.”

Arnold nodded to Harte, and they left the office. The others watched them leave, knowing they did so at the behest of Bony’s note. Wootton cleared his throat preparatory to saying something, and was stopped by a screech from without.

Struggling figures appeared in the doorway, and the men brought in a furious lubra.