Bony - 29 - The Lake Frome Monster

by Arthur W. Upfield

  “No proof,” Bony objected. “He could have swivelled about as he fell. He could have been going to the bore, not coming from it.”

  “The police reckoned he was coming from the lake.”

  “They’re liable to reckon anything,” argued Bony. “Never accept anything at face value is one of my strainer posts. We may contend which way he was walking when shot until there is proof of direction. We may promote supposi­tions into a thesis and waste time. The police think he was returning from the bore lake where he had gone for a billy of water to preserve the water he carried on the bike. The billy was found beside the body, emptied by his fall. That is what they think. I want proof.”

  “Going to be hard,” decided Newton dryly. “You got a job at this distance from the shooting.”

  He moved off and Bony paused to follow his train, as camels always behave better when in single file. The bells tinkled, the eagles flew high in their grand circling, and Bony was happy that all was well with his investigation and the obvious fact that it was going to be hard.

  Eventually coming to the bore, they stopped to watch the ceaseless flow of water pouring from the angled piping. The water dropped in a great gush into a pool of its own making and then ran away along the trench before spread­ing to make the lake it had also created. It had been running like that for years and would run for many years yet, although there was a slight decrease in pressure.

  “Why Number Ten?” Bony asked.

  “Fella that sunk it had a contract to sink ten. This was the last of his contract. It’s not the official name, though.”

  Again in single file they moved along the north side of the drain and then followed the edge of the lake. The sides of the drain and the edge of the lake were lined with mineral salts and a species of algae could be seen below the clear water. After about a quarter of a mile had been trodden round the lake Bony called out, and Newton stopped.

  “I suppose you wouldn’t remember what the weather was like when Maidstone was killed?” he shouted. Newton shook his head and shouted back:

  “Could tell you when back at camp. I keep a diary.”

  They went on following the lake’s edge. The ground at that point was moist and presently it registered the tracks of cattle, and here Newton stopped again and turned his camels to the water. They seemed anxious not to wet their feet, and were not particularly anxious to drink. Standing beside his own two, Bony noted that Rosie was slightly disdainful, but that Old George drank heavily.

  “Lower down the lake that far shore must be full six hundred yards away,” observed Bony. “Is the water deep in the middle?”

  “Only at the original extension of the channel, where it’s up to your neck, accordin’ to Nugget. Some of his kids tried it.”

  “Shallow enough at the edge. The wind could move it into tides. Proof! Those lines of dead algae prove it. Like seaweed.”

  “You don’t miss much,” Newton conceded. “Sometimes there’s a lot of duck here, and swans, too. They don’t get much feed, so they must come down to rest on migration flights.”

  Bony would have liked to explore this artificial lake further and determined to do so when alone. He refrained from asking further questions save for confirmation of a theory. He began by saying that that stop would be good enough to fill his water-drums and that it wasn’t necessary to go farther along the “shore”, and then asked:

  “It would be about here that Maidstone would fill his billy, don’t you think?”

  “About here, yes. No need to go farther along. Water’s the same anywhere on. Only makes tea.”

  After the midday meal, Newton packed and went north along “his” fence. Bony took rake and pitchfork, passed through the gateway, and worked for several hours raking leaves and twigs and hoeing buckbush out from the Fence for four feet up and over three of the monstrous sandhills. Returning to camp an hour before sundown, he hobbled and freed his camels to feed. He then started a cooking fire and later baked damper in the camp oven and boiled salted beef for the morrow.

  It was the end of a perfect day. The flies were not troublesome, the air retained just a hint of freshness, and the stillness was broken only by the bell suspended from Rosie’s neck. Bony felt that if such a day was multiplied indefinitely, if a man had and did live rightly, he would begin to age only when a century old. But a man seldom lives rightly, and such a day is usually over at midnight he reflected sadly.

  However, the next day was just as perfect, and Bony worked on his sandhills. The following day he took the camels to the lake for a drink, because, as Nugget had explained to him, after the fourth day without water Rosie would become cantankerous, and Old George would deter­minedly hobble away towards the nearest bore.

  He had decided that he would circle the entire lake that day and on coming to the bore head he rounded it and proceeded to follow the eastern shore. Carrying a stick, his rifle slung from a shoulder, his eyes continuously searching, he covered half a mile. Now and then he prodded wedges of dead algae which here and there were as much as several yards from the water’s edge. Thus the wind’s power over this shallow sheet was proven.

  Newton had referred to his diary relative to the weather on and after June Ninth. He had mentioned that wind was the great enemy of the SA Border Fence. Wind concerned him most, and wind was the burden Nature laid upon all his men. Wind and rain were ever Bony’s concern when beginning an investigation, for on these climatic elements rested small but vital points in the search for clues in a land and under conditions where fingerprints are practically non-existent.

  It was the information on wind contained within Newton’s diary which made Bony decide to circle the artificial lake. From the diary the following story of the wind emerged:

  June 9. Fitful breeze from the south.

  June 10. Breeze from the north-east.

  June 11. Entirely calm day.

  June 12. Strong west wind rose late.

  June 13. West wind.

  June 14. Calm day.

  Bony referred to his notes after he had watered the camels and filled the two five-gallon water-drums carried by Old George. During the period there had been only one day of strong wind and this blew from the west and was of sufficient strength to raise the water level of the lake along the eastern side of the lake by several inches. The position of the saline suds and the dead algae proved that the eastern drift had extended in places for two yards, and again when walking along the eastern verge, Bony turned over the wedges of algae. However, he found nothing, not even water-bugs, not even the pupae of the blowfly.

  Cattle tracks there were a-plenty. There were horse tracks. The tracks had been imprinted but recently, cer­tainly after the last strong wind. He found not one item indicative of human presence in the vicinity of the lake. Not a bottle, a cork, a cigarette packet or anything to show that human life had visited it, until he reached the far western extremity of the lake, where he found two photo­grapher’s flash bulbs. Bony examined them closely, found they had been used, and wrapped them carefully in a handkerchief.

  The bulbs gave the foundation of a story.

  According to the aborigine trackers with the Quinambie overseer, Maidstone had made camp the day he left Quin­ambie, and the next morning had tramped to the lake to fill his billy with water. Why go with a small billy for water? One of the canvas bags attached to the bike was full, the other empty, and it would have been the empty bag he would have taken, not the billy-can, save as a means by which to fill the bag.

  The man’s camera in its leather case and suspended from a tree branch at the camp was later found by the police to contain no film. Among his equipment were two exposed films. Maidstone had taken, among others, pictures of Quinambie homestead and one of the bore head of Number Nine.

  That he had gone to the Number Ten Bore lake and there had taken two night pictures was proved by the flash bulbs; but the aborigines who tracked him said nothing of this night work. They must have seen where he sat and waited for animal visito
rs to the lake to come within flash­bulb range of his camera. Had he returned to camp with the camera, either there would have been an entire film exposed and put away with the others, or the camera must have contained film.

  Who had extracted the partially-exposed film? What had been the subjects of the pictures taken that night? The empty billy-can! What was he doing with it when shot?

  The possible answers to these questions raised others even more difficult.

  Bony completed the encirclement of the lake without discovering further flash bulbs, but in his mind was the picture of a man who had come to the north side carrying a camera and a billy-can filled with tea or coffee to sustain him during the night. He hoped by remaining quiet to take a picture of a dingo drinking, or a fox, possibly of cattle. He had taken two pictures, had left the lake with the camera and empty billy and had been shot when walking back to his camp. The killer had emptied the camera of film, and hung the camera from the tree branch, and the aborigines had not reported the presence of this second man whose movements must have been recorded on the sandy ground.

  Maidstone had probably taken this man’s picture, and it was so important to the man to destroy pictorial proof of his presence at the lake that he murdered to effect it. Why? It was a free country. There was no question of trespass on private land. Maidstone had a legitimate reason for his visit to the lake at night. What purpose could the second man have had to feel so guilty as to commit murder?

  Bony visited the camp site where Maidstone last stayed, and, without expectancy, thoroughly examined every square foot of the locality. Back at his own camp, he loaded the camels and moved off over the chain of sandhills on the southward strip of his section. There were several odd jobs to do, and it was four o’clock when he reached the place where he and Newton had boiled the billy a short distance from Nugget’s camp site. It was six miles to the gate where he and the overseer had parted company, and it would be the same distance to Bore Ten.

  Having hobbled the camels, he made a fire for tea and sat on the tucker box whilst sipping the tea and smoking a cigarette. The sun at late afternoon had warmth in it, but the night would be cold and clear.

  The results of his visit to the bore lake were two: the one, the finding of the flash bulbs; the other the strong suspicion that the native trackers had from the start “gone dumb”. If this suspicion were correct, then one of their tribe was concerned with the crime, and of their race was the three-quarter caste, Nugget.

  It would be nothing to a man like Nugget to tramp six miles after dark to that lake, stay there for several hours and be back at his camp by daybreak. The overseer, Newton, at the time was many miles down to the south, and in any case if he did not show up at Nugget’s camp by sundown it could be taken for granted that he would not show up that day. Bony rose and walked to the vacated camp.

  Beside the frame of poles to erect the tent when it rained, Nugget’s family had built a rough lean-to wind-break broadside to the fireplace. There was litter of all kinds: paper, tins, broken toys, kangaroo-meat bones, and it was certainly not a camp site any white man would care to occupy. He found also a broken box camera having a length of film trailing from it. The marks of dog teeth seemed to say that the camera had been carelessly left un­guarded and one of Nugget’s dogs had chewed it in play.

  The film would not have fitted Maidstone’s camera.

  Chapter Four

  Needle Kent

  ON THAT southward trip, Bony examined all Nugget’s camp­ing places, but found nothing of interest save a rag doll and several cartridge cases. In common with most aborigines, Nugget and his family had displayed little interest in keeping their camp sites tidy.

  Bony was near the gate at the southern end of the section when Newton overtook him, and together they took their camels to a bore and then camped for the night. The conversation was of trivial matters until they settled at their camp fire after supper and smoked.

  “You find anything at Number Ten?” asked the overseer, combing his whiskers with his pipe stem.

  “No. You saw the camel tracks through the gateway?”

  “That’s so. By the way, I had a word or two about the crime with Needle Kent. He’s the man north of you. Didn’t tell him who you were, of course, but from what he told me I got an idea. For some time now Quinambie think they’ve been losing cattle. They can’t find anything very definite, but on general principles they suspect Yandama’s been pinching ’em. Yandama is north of Quinambie and goes right up to The Corner. Used to be Quinambie would steal Yandama cattle and the Yandama blokes would pinch ’em back with a few more for good luck. Them was the wild days.”

  “Kind of sport?” surmised Bony.

  “No fear, Ed. Dead serious. Well, Needle Kent remem­bers that one night about the time of the murder he was camped some ten miles north of the Number Ten gate, and woke in the middle of the night to hear a big mob of cattle passing south on the other side of the Fence. You could say that cattle don’t travel at night, but sometimes they do without any drivin’. Suddenly gets restless and sick of the country and shifts themselves to another part.

  “Needle’s a bit of a character,” Newton went on, and chuckled in that deep manner of a big man. “If he stays on the job much longer he’ll end like Looney Pete—shove his hat on a fence post and argue the toss. He’s lying under the blankets with the fire out and he’s hearing these cattle go by and reckons they must be making for Bore Ten. They goes by, all of ’em, and then a bit later he hears horses passing, and now and then the clink of metal. He reckons the clinking was being done by hobble chains round a horse’s neck, and that the horse had a rider on him. It was black as hell, but he’s sure there were several horses.”

  “Rustlers?”

  “Could be. Station hands don’t work at night, even them loafing bastards over to Lake Frome. The moving cattle would be on Lake Frome country, as you’d know.”

  “He didn’t mention this incident to the police. And it seems he didn’t mention it to anyone save yourself at your last meeting.”

  “Said he wasn’t going to get mixed up with cattle duffers and have himself shot like Maidstone. The point is, Ed, for your information, Maidstone could’ve been shot by duffers. Don’t know why. He could have seen them good enough to identify them.”

  Bony pinched his nether lip and admitted it was a pos­sible motive.

  “How long is Needle’s section?”

  “Twenty miles. Two men north of him, including Looney Pete. I mentioned this cattle business sort of casual to both of ’em, and neither said they’d seen cattle tracks passing through their gates. This would seem to make them Quinambie cattle all right. If the riders were duffers, likely enough they’d get the beasts to the Number Ten at day­break, water them there and move ’em well away to cut out the weaners and throw a brand on ’em and take them on south.”

  “Interesting,” Bony conceded. “It will bear keeping in mind. Tell me, getting back to Nugget, what does he do with the money he earns?”

  “He’s got more money than me,” Newton replied. “He’s a peculiar bloke. Puts his pay cheques in the bank and writes cheques … thinks himself no end. You officially interested in him?”

  “Only in so far as that of the Fence men he was the nearest to Maidstone when he was shot. That is, six miles. The next nearest was the other man, Needle. Nugget seems to be generous with his women and children?”

  “Never goes down to the Hill, so he can afford to. Every six months a Syrian hawker comes to Quinambie. He carries everything. So Nugget’s women and kids get dresses they wear till they fall off, and the kids are loaded up with toys and things. They are grand nights, them Hawker’s Nights. What with Nugget and family, and all the other homestead blacks spending their dough on the Syrian, they have a wonderful time. I once seen Nugget smokin’ cigars a foot long. Even gave me a cigar once. I was near enough to being sick.”

  The overseer scrambled to his feet and filled the billy for the last pannikin of tea for the da
y. Bony ambled about for “openers” or sticks to start a blaze first thing in the morn­ing, and presently they settled down again.

  “It would seem that Nugget’s generosity is sometimes misplaced,” he said. “At his central camp I saw a box camera badly damaged.”

  “Nugget only cares for two things, Ed: his rifle and his camera. There was trouble at first with the camera. Mighty expensive one and Nugget couldn’t work her until the Quinambie overseer gave him some lessons. Then he got to take good pictures. That box camera he musta given to one of the kids. The wrecks of toys I see often.”

  Bony turned the conversation away from Nugget by ask­ing how often Newton took his holidays, and Newton followed by putting a few discreet questions on Bony’s work and home life. Then he said:

  “You seem to know more about the Number Ten murder than we do.”

  “I should,” agreed Bony. “You see, I’ve studied the police reports, read the very few statements. You will know that the detective-sergeant and his offsider stayed at the bore for a base for over a week before the inquest. The inquest brought a solution no nearer, and accordingly I was asked to come and take a turn. As I believe I told you, I specialize in this kind of investigation in areas where there are no ordinary police facilities.”

  “You think you’ll nail the killer?”

  “Of course! I always do. I’ve never failed yet!”

  “Been at the game long?”

  “Since leaving University. Patience is my greatest asset. Once I finalized a case in a week, and one took me two years. My job is something like your Fence—it never ends. While I think of it—where does Needle draw his ration?”

  “Actually at Quinambie, but doesn’t often go in to ’em. Every other Thursday he camps near the Bore Ten gate to meet the Lake Frome utility what passes through for the mail. The ute collects his list and brings it back later in the day. Let me think. Yes, he’ll be at your north end next Thursday. You aim to meet him?”