The man Jenks appeared with a jug of coffee and a fruit tin of sugar. He filled tin pannikins with coffee, and Mark Brennan said:
“Help yourself, Inspector.” Bony returned to his saddle with a pannikin of coffee.
“You have had breakfast, Inspector?” Doctor Havant enquired solicitously.
“Yes, thank you,” politely replied Bony.
“You find yourself in a strange community, Inspector; in fact, an unique community. I shall eventually write several books about it, I hope. You know, the effect of complete isolation on the human mind. Also I shall write a thesis on the herd instinct in humans.
“Jenks has spoken much of you, Inspector. He bestows upon you the mantle of Javert, although he has never read Hugo’s masterpiece. Entirely in his favour is a lack of animosity towards you, who found him and had him arrested. In that he is unlike our friend there, Joseph Riddell, to whom all policemen are anathema.”
Joseph Riddell! Riddell in 1941 was working on a farm near Brisbane. He was then a taciturn man of thirty years, strong, a good worker, and treated with consideration by his employer. One afternoon there arose dissension between them, concerning a head wound suffered by a cow, and that evening Riddell shot his employer dead with a shot-gun belonging to the victim. He vanished with the farmer’s car which he abandoned, and stole another, to abandon that also when the petrol gave out.
Eventually caught, he received a sentence of twelve years. Another recommendation for mercy. Lonely unfortunate man, living in a hut on a farm when the farmer and his wife lived in luxury in a fine house. If he had bashed the milking cow, the ruddy boss had no right to jaw him about it! Having served nine years he was freed.
Here was Joseph Riddell, still of powerful physique, his hair and beard barely touched with grey.
Observing Bony looking at him, he leaned back on his haunches and grinned. The grin preceded rumbling laughter.
“Hell! It’s damn funny all right,” he asserted, voice deep. “By hell, it’s funny. You’ll be able to write plenty about all this, Doc.”
“What’s funny about it?” snarled the little man with thin sandy hair and weak eyes. “If he is really a police detective, then he can get us all out of here. There’s nothing funny about walking on the earth instead of living like a colony of rats under it.”
Emotion raised the voice but did not disguise the accent, and there lingered still in this man’s voice the tone of authority. He reminded Bony of someone he had seen pictured in the newspapers, and now Havant gave the picture its name.
“My dear Clifford Maddoch, I am strongly in agreement with Joe that the situation existing at this moment is truly funny. I dislike the word, but repeat it because used by you and Joseph. It is funny, because we of the R.M.I, happen to be at a slight disadvantage precisely when Inspector Bonaparte drops in to bid good morning.”
So this was Clifford Maddoch. At the time he had given his wife a measure of strychnine, thallium not then having come into favour for this purpose; he was the manager of an important branch of a wool brokerage firm, the president of the local golf club, and the secretary of the Urban District Committee. For fourteen years he had suffered torture from the battering voice which had probed and pierced the recesses of his mind. It was a strange coincidence that the judge committed him to prison for fourteen years. And having served ten years, he was released.
“You shut up, Clifford,” snarled Riddell. “No good you crawling to the Inspector now, after what you just done.”
The little man leaped to his feet. It seemed that every nerve in his face began to twitch violently.
“I’m not guilty,” he shouted, having to struggle for articulation. “I old you all I didn’t do it. I liked Igor Mitski ... for everything bar his voice.”
Bony recalled the case of Igor Mitski, the displaced, the singer, serving his period of grace in Australia on a northwest station in New South Wales. Cultured, able to speak a little English, banished to live with strange people in a strange land. A Polish Jew who had suffered badly.
The employer and his wife were kindly people. Instead of making Mitski a gardener, they appointed him music teacher to their little girl aged eight. Circumstances climbed high and smashed both Mitski and the child. Mitski still mentally wounded by the treatment received from the invaders of his country; the child spoiled and stubborn, as an only child can be. In a rage, Mitski hit her. Released on parole when having served twenty months of the sentence for manslaughter.
Mitski! Bony had been in a far western town when Mitski was tried. He had arrived there on the last day of the trial and was in court when the prisoner was sentenced. A woman had run from the witnesses’ seat to the dock, and a man had quickly caught her in his arms and tried to pacify her. Bony hadn’t been in court officially, and the incident therefore had not been mentally docketed. He said now:
“Mitski slew a little child.”
“That was so, Inspector,” replied Doctor Havant. “All here know the history of everyone. We often discuss personal experiences, desires, ambitions, satisfactions. We are, actually, a very conservative body.” He chuckled in his dry humourless way, and taking the others into his range, he went on: “I suggest, gentlemen, that we nominate and accept the Inspector into our honoured Association. I have pleasure in putting forward the name of Inspector Bonaparte. I feel that he will do what in him lies to succour and encourage every member, that he will conduct himself worthily, and toil ever on behalf of the defenceless and the unfortunate. What say you?”
“Taking a ruddy risk,” growled Riddell. “He don’t qualify.”
“I propose Inspector Bonaparte,” chirped Clifford Maddoch.
“I take pleasure in seconding the proposal, Mr. President,” drawled Brennan.
Doctor Havant stood. He beamed on the assembly, and his chalky complexion appeared likely to fall off in flakes. The dark eyes regarding Bony recalled to him the eyes of the woman at Mount Singular. Then he remembered where he had seen her before, and the probability of this extraordinary development was like a star born in his mind. He heard the doctor say:
“Welcome, Inspector Bonaparte, into our exclusive Association. I publicly announce your elevation to a Fellowship of the Released Murderers’ Institute.”
Chapter Eleven
A Body for Bony
“I APPRECIATE the honour,” Bony said gravely. “I have many questions which must wait, and doubtless you have many to ask, but first things first. The body. Take me to it.”
“Better arrest this twirp,” offered Joseph Riddell. “He hated Igor Mitski ’cos his voice reminded him of his missus. Didn’t like Igor singing to us, an’ Igor was better than the blasted wireless singers too.” Maddoch again shouted his innocence, and when Riddell once more taunted him the girl broke in with:
“That will be all from you, Riddell. You’re taking a back seat from now on. You’ve no proof that Clifford killed Mitski, so keep your silly big mouth closed.”
Bony swiftly intervened.
“It would seem that all of you are murderers, that all but one have been convicted and released on licence. Other than not having periodically reported, you are of no official interest to me. But you say you have a dead man on your hands, that he was killed, and you infer that one of you killed him. Where is the body of this man?”
“Jenks! The lamp,” said the doctor, adding to Bony: “Jenks is the custodian of the lamps and the oil, which is in short supply.”
The ex-sailor struck a match and applied it to the wick of a hurricane lamp. The doctor took it from him and led the way into the tunnel. They could walk upright, and the floor was level. They passed on the left a branch tunnel from which issued a faint moaning sound. The main tunnel entered a chamber, the limits of which the power of the lamp failed to reach. Bony was conducted past a huge boulder which had fallen from the roof, and over a clear space. Havant stopped, and his lamp revealed a man lying on his chest, and a narrow stream of blood extending into the darkness. He was dressed in
working clothes, rough and durable.
“He hasn’t been moved?” he asked the doctor.
“No. I lifted his head by the hair. The frontal bone has been crushed. Death was obvious, and before I could examine him further, my attention was distracted by the arrival of your dog.”
“Turn him over, someone.”
Jenks did so, and the woman cried out.
Bony estimated that the dead man was close to six feet in height. The body was reasonably well nourished, the face clean-shaven, and the iron-grey hair clipped short.
“With what was he killed?” asked Bony.
“We don’t know,” the girl answered. “Probably with a piece of stone.”
“We haven’t looked for the weapon yet,” volunteered Brennan.
“Bring more lights, if you have them. We’ll look for it now.”
Jenks departed, and Bony watched his departing figure in the tunnel against the daylight at its far end. He asked who found the body, and Mark Brennan said he had found it about half an hour before they discovered the arrival of Bony. When asked under what circumstances, he went on:
“I was with Myra looking for her scarf in the passage leading to the air shaft. We heard Igor shout out something like ‘Do not! Do not!’ Then he shouted once, ‘Help!’ I left Myra and ran with our lamp to see what was wrong. I collided with Doctor Havant just as I reached the main passage, and he said he’d been in what we call the hall, so Igor wasn’t there. We came here, and met Riddell carrying a lamp and Maddoch was with him.”
“Leaves Jenks. What about Jenks?”
“Jenks just turned up to hunt for Mitski with us,” replied Brennan. “We looked around here, and I happened to find the body. It’s a pretty large place as you can see.”
Bony couldn’t see until Jenks arrived with three hurricane lamps. The four lamps standing on the boulder enabled him then to see the extremities of this cavern.
“It is obvious, Inspector, that one of us is a murderer,” tritely observed Dr. Havant.
“Any other passages leading off this place?”
“One that ends in a cul-de-sac. Another goes down to what we call the Jeweller’s Shop, and from there on to what I named Fiddler’s Leap.”
“Other than those present, there are no more of you?”
“No. One of us killed Mitski with a rock.”
“How d’you know it was a rock?”
“Because he was killed with a blunt instrument. We have no blunt instruments other than rocks ranging from small pebbles to the size of this boulder. We have knives, table knives. Mitski wasn’t killed with a table knife.”
“In your opinion, Doctor, would the blunt instrument have blood on it?”
“The answer is difficult, Inspector. Probably not if only the one blow was struck; most likely if more than one blow.”
Bony bade them stand back, and he spent several minutes looking for the weapon. The floor was entirely clean of debris, and on his mentioning it, he was informed that all debris had long since been removed to the short passage which ended in a cul-de-sac.
“We will return to the place where we met,” he said, and the obliging Doctor Havant explained that that had been named the hall.
The return to ‘the hall’ was welcomed by Bony who felt distinctly uneasy in that eerie cavern. They stood watching him, waiting, as he sat on the pack-saddle and fell to making the inevitable cigarette. Their behaviour was unlike normal people, who would have sought information and explanation, and he wondered what this attitude could mean. He recognised the wisdom of delaying satisfaction of his own curiosity.
“Make yourselves easy,” he said. “I’ll talk first, and before I begin one of you answer a question. Are you being kept here against your will?”
All spoke at once, and he waved them to silence. That some of them had been imprisoned here for a long time was evidenced by their faces, and a child could have deduced that they would not have remained had they found a way of escape.
“You know who I am, and what I represent,” he began. “You know that I am a tracker of men, but you don’t know my personal views on crime and criminals.
“I did not frame the laws. Officially, I am not concerned whether a law is sound or futile. Officially, I am not concerned with whatever penalty is imposed for breaking a law. Personally, as a private citizen, I have an abhorrence of murder, the crime which concerns us. To make myself clear, there is another point.
“Each of you men committed a crime and was released when constituted authority chose to think you had been sufficiently punished. Because you did not comply with certain conditions I am able, officially, to prove that you were forcibly prevented from compliance. That isn’t a rash statement, for I believe I have the key to the reason behind this enforced detention, if you do not know it. Do you?”
“We do not, Inspector,” Havant said.
“We’d ruddy well like to,” snorted Riddell.
“We’ll pass it for the moment,” Bony continued. “I was assigned to find a missing woman known as Myra Thomas, who disappeared from a train. The Police held nothing against her, following her acquittal, but the Police were, and are, interested in her because she is a missing person. You are all missing persons, and it is the duty of every policeman to search for such.
“I set out to look for Myra Thomas, and eventually was led to this place by the aid of several clues, including her scarf. Having located her, I would have freed you also, had I not been found wanting in wariness. As I see it now, I am one with you, a prisoner. I have no doubt that you have tried many times to find a way to freedom, and with the introduction of my fresh mind, we may solve this problem.
“Now for the crux of future relations between you and me. If anything happened to me, and eventually you found a way of escape from this hole, you would never find your way back to civilisation, even if you were not hunted down by the persons who brought you here, or by their agents. We are now more than two hundred miles from the nearest homestead, and in the most relentlessly hostile country in Australia.
“So that, as convicted murderers, you may have strong animosity toward me, a police officer, but you must realise that even at this stage you are dependent on me to get you out from this hole and back to civilisation. To employ a nautical cliché, we sink or swim together.”
“I’m not swimmin’,” growled Riddell.
Myra Thomas would have spoken had not Dr. Havant turned to stare at the gorilla. He said, quietly:
“Riddell.”
“I don’t aim...”
“Riddell, I am reading your thoughts.”
Riddell’s eyes avoided Havant. He looked at his naked feet, and his huge body seemed to shrink. Bony had never seen a human being so quickly reduced to abjectness. There was no threat expressed in the doctor’s words or by his face, yet his domination was supreme. Bony, feeling the sudden tension, asserted himself.
“Two tasks confront me,” he told them. “To apprehend those who have unlawfully restricted your freedom; the other, to apprehend the slayer of Igor Mitski.”
“I hope you get him, Inspector,” declared the girl who had been acquitted of murder. “He never harmed anyone here.” Stooping, she gathered the breakfast things, and as she conveyed them to the annexe she added: “And don’t think that because one of you killed Igor that the rest of you now have a chance.”
“You can’t never tell,” Jenks said. “Hey, Doc, some day you’ll be able to write a book called Make Mine Women.”
“You won’t be in it, Ted,” drawled Mark Brennan.
“Says you, Mark. We’ll all be in it. The wench has been looking for strife ever since she came here. She likes strife, she does. S’why she bumped off her husband.”
“All right! All right! Think of something else.”
The girl came from the annexe and gathered the remainder of the breakfast things, pausing to look down contemptuously at the ex-sailor, who was seated on the floor with his back to the rock bench. The resultant action by Jenks w
as so swift that Bony was barely able to follow it. Jenks shot forward and gripped her ankle, pulled. The action of her fall was slow motion by comparison with his.
Bony rose to his feet, as body after body piled on top of Jenks and the girl until there was a heap of fighting lunatics. Dr. Havant crossed to Bony’s side, waved him back to his seat on the saddle. He said:
“It’s nothing, Inspector. Like water over a fire which must eventually come to the boil. I have found it essential in order to maintain a modicum of sanity to permit the steam to escape. While they fight over the woman, they won’t fight us.”
“But the woman, she’ll be hurt,” objected Bony.
“Be not distressed,” urged Havant, icily calm. “She came up the slum way, and it sticks to her and always will, despite the veneer of education.”
Myra Thomas was now trying hard to sink her teeth into Jenks’s arm, as he did his utmost to pull her scalp off, gripping her hair with a hand trained to grip rope. Mark Brennan was hammering Jenks with one fist, and with the other attempted to flatten Riddell’s navel against his backbone. To counter this, the big man was pulling Brennan’s hair upward with one hand, and his vandyke beard downward with the other.
When little Maddoch appeared with a can of boiling water, the doctor called to him, shook his head disapprovingly, and Maddoch’s reaction was to shrug his narrow shoulders and trot back to the annexe with the dampener. It was extraordinary that he heard the doctor’s voice above the shouts, yells, and screams. Returning, Maddoch came carefully round the human heap, and to Bony he said with mouth close:
“It’s the cavern, Inspector. They behave like this now and then, but more often when the woman is around. She’s an unsettling influence.”
“A truthful and original statement,” drily agreed Havant. “You know, Inspector, human hair has remarkable tensile strength to withstand assault. The girl started this fracas. I think she enjoys it, although at the moment one must admit to being faintly alarmed by her present predicament.”
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