Ellery Queen's Crime Cruise Round the World

by Ellery Queen

  Reefer’s Find was a cattle ranch. It was not a large station for Australia—a mere half-million acres within its boundary fence. The outstation was forty-odd miles from the main homestead, and that isn’t far in Australia.

  Only one rider lived at the outstation—Harry Larkin, who was, this hot Sunday afternoon, reading a mystery story. He had been quartered there for more than a year, and every night at seven o’clock, the boss at the homestead telephoned to give orders for the following day and to be sure he was still alive and kicking. Usually, Larkin spoke to a man face to face about twice a month.

  Larkin might have talked to a man more often had he wished. His nearest neighbor lived nine miles away in a small stockman’s hut on the next property, and once they had often met at the boundary by prearrangement. But then Larkin’s neighbor, whose name was William Reynolds, was a difficult man, according to Larkin, and the meetings stopped.

  On all sides of this small homestead the land stretched flat to the horizon. Had it not been for the scanty, narrow-leafed mulga and the sick-looking sandalwood trees, plus the mirage which turned a salt bush into a Jack’s beanstalk and a tree into a telegraph pole stuck on a bald man’s head, the horizon would have been as distant as that of the ocean.

  A man came stalking through the mirage, the blanket roll on his back making him look like a ship standing on its bowsprit. The lethargic dogs were not aware of the visitor until he was about ten yards from the veranda. So engrossed was Larkin that even the barking of his dogs failed to distract his attention, and the stranger actually reached the edge of the veranda floor and spoke before Larkin was aware of him.

  “He, he! Good day, mate! Flamin’ hot today, ain’t it?”

  Larkin swung his legs off the bunk and sat up. What he saw was not usual in this part of Australia—a sundowner, a bush waif who tramps from north to south or from east to west, never working, cadging rations from the far-flung homesteads and having the ability of the camel to do without water, or find it. Sometimes Old Man Sun tricked one of them, and then the vast bushland took him and never gave up the cloth-tattered skeleton.

  “Good day,” Larkin said, to add with ludicrous inanity, “Traveling?”

  “Yes, mate. Makin’ down south.” The derelict slipped the swag off his shoulder and sat on it. “What place is this?”

  Larkin told him.

  “Mind me camping here tonight, mate? Wouldn’t be in the way. Wouldn’t be here in the mornin’, either.”

  “You can camp over in the shed,” Larkin said. “And if you pinch anything, I’ll track you and belt the guts out of you.”

  A vacuous grin spread over the dust-grimed, bewhiskered face.

  “Me, mate? I wouldn’t pinch nothin’. Could do with a pinch of tea, 4 and a bit of flour. He, he! Pinch—I mean a fistful of tea and sugar, mate.”

  Five minutes of this bird would send a man crazy. Larkin entered the kitchen, found an empty tin, and poured into it an equal quantity of tea and sugar. He scooped flour from a sack into a brown paper bag, and wrapped a chunk of salt meat in an old newspaper. On going out to the sundowner, anger surged in him at the sight of the man standing by the bunk and looking through his mystery story.

  “He, he! Detective yarn!” said the sundowner. “I give ’em away years ago. A bloke does a killing and leaves the clues for the detectives to find. They’re all the same. Why in ’ell don’t a bloke write about a bloke who kills another bloke and gets away with it? I could kill a bloke and leave no clues.”

  “You could,” sneered Larkin.

  “’Course. Easy. You only gotta use your brain—like me.”

  Larkin handed over the rations and edged the visitor off his veranda.

  The fellow was batty, all right, but harmless as they all are.

  “How would you kill a man and leave no clues?” he asked.

  “Well, I tell you it’s easy.” The derelict pushed the rations into a dirty gunny sack and again sat down on his swag. “You see, mate, it’s this way. In real life the murderer can’t do away with the body. Even doctors and things like that make a hell of a mess of doing away with a corpse. In fact, they don’t do away with it, mate. They leave parts and bits of it all over the scenery, and then what happens? Why, a detective comes along and he says, ‘Cripes, someone’s been and done a murder! Ah! Watch me track the bloke what done it.’ If you’re gonna commit a murder, you must be able to do away with the body. Having done that, well, who’s gonna prove anythink? Tell me that, mate.”

  “You tell me,” urged Larkin, and tossed his depleted tobacco plug to the visitor. The sundowner gnawed from the plug, almost hit a dog in the eye with a spit, gulped, and settled to the details of the perfect murder.

  “Well, mate, it’s like this. Once you done away with the body, complete, there ain’t nothing left to say that the body ever was alive to be killed. Now, supposin’ I wanted to do you in. I don’t, mate, don’t think that, but I’s plenty of time to work things out. Supposin’ I wanted to do you in. Well, me and you is out ridin’ and I takes me chance and shoots you stone-dead. I chooses to do the killin’ where there’s plenty of dead wood. Then I gathers the dead wood and drags your body onto it and fires the wood. Next day, when the ashes are cold, I goes back with a sieve and dolly pot. That’s all I wants then.

  “I takes out your burned bones and I crushes ’em to dust in the dolly pot. Then I goes through the ashes with the sieve, getting out all the small bones and putting them through the dolly pot. The dust I empties out from the dolly pot for the wind to take. All the metal bits, such as buttons and boot sprigs, I puts in me pocket and carries back to the homestead where I throws ’em down the well or covers ’em with sulphuric acid.

  “Almost sure to be a dolly pot here, by the look of the place. Almost sure to be a sieve. Almost sure to be a jar of sulphuric acid for solderin’ work. Everythin’ on tap, like. And just in case the million-to-one chance comes off that someone might come across the fire site and wonder, sort of, I’d shoot a coupler kangaroos, skin ’em, and burn the carcases on top of the old ashes. You know, to keep the blowies from breeding.”

  Harry Larkin looked at the sundowner, and through him. A prospector’s dolly pot, a sieve, a quantity of sulphuric acid to dissolve the metal parts. Yes, they were all here. Given time a man could commit the perfect murder. Time! Two days would be long enough.

  The sundowner stood up. “Good day, mate. Don’t mind me. He, he! Flamin’ hot, ain’t it? Be cool down south. Well, I’ll be movin’.”

  Larkin watched him depart. The bush waif did not stop at the shed to camp for the night. He went on to the windmill and sprawled over the drinking trough to drink. He filled his rusty billy-can, Larkin watching until the mirage to the southward drowned him.

  The perfect murder, with aids as common as household remedies. The perfect scene, this land without limits where even a man and his nearest neighbor are separated by nine miles. A prospector’s dolly pot, a sieve, and a pint of soldering acid. Simple! It was as simple as being kicked to death in a stockyard jammed with mules.

  “William Reynolds vanished three months ago, and repeated searches have failed to find even his body.”

  Mounted Constable Evans sat stiffly erect in the chair behind the littered desk in the Police Station at Wondong. Opposite him lounged a slight dark-complexioned man having a straight nose, a high forehead, and intensely blue eyes. There was no doubt that Evans was a policeman. None would guess that the dark man with the blue eyes was Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte.

  “The man’s relatives have been bothering Headquarters about William Reynolds, which is why I am here,” explained Bonaparte, faintly apologetic. “I have read your reports, and find them clear and concise. There is no doubt in the Official Mind that, assisted by your black tracker, you have done everything possible to locate Reynolds or his dead body. I may succeed where you and the black tracker failed because I am peculiarly equipped with gifts bequeathed to me by my white father and my aboriginal mother.
In me are combined the white man’s reasoning powers and the black man’s perceptions and bushcraft. Therefore, should I succeed there would be no reflection on your efficiency or the powers of your tracker. Between what a tracker sees and what you have been trained to reason, there is a bridge. There is no such bridge between those divided powers in me. Which is why I never fail.”

  Having put Constable Evans in a more cooperative frame of mind, Bony rolled a cigarette and relaxed.

  “Thank you, sir,” Evans said and rose to accompany Bony to the locality map which hung on the wall. “Here’s the township of Won-dong. Here is the homestead of Morley Downs cattle station. And here, fifteen miles on from the homestead, is the stockman’s hut where William Reynolds lived and worked.

  “There’s no telephonic communication between the hut and the homestead. Once every month the people at the homestead trucked rations to Reynolds. And once every week, every Monday morning, a stockman from the homestead would meet Reynolds midway between homestead and hut to give Reynolds his mail, and orders, and have a yarn with him over a billy of tea.”

  “And then one Monday, Reynolds didn’t turn up,” Bony added, as they resumed their chairs at the desk.

  “That Monday the homestead man waited four hours for Reynolds,” continued Evans. “The following day the station manager ran out in his car to Reynolds’ hut. He found the ashes on the open hearth stone-cold, the two chained dogs nearly dead of thirst, and that Reynolds hadn’t been at the hut since the day it had rained, three days previously.

  “The manager drove back to the homestead and organized all his men in a search party. They found Reynolds’ horse running with several others. The horse was still saddled and bridled. They rode the country for two days, and then I went out with my tracker to join in. We kept up the search for a week, and the tracker’s opinion was that Reynolds might have been riding the back boundary fence when he was parted from the horse. Beyond that the tracker was vague, and I don’t wonder at it for two reasons. One, the rain had wiped out tracks visible to white eyes, and two, there were other horses in the same paddock. Horse tracks swamped with rain are indistinguishable one from another.”

  “How large is that paddock?” asked Bony.

  “Approximately two hundred square miles.”

  Bony rose and again studied the wall map.

  “On the far side of the fence is this place named Reefer’s Find,” he pointed out. “Assuming that Reynolds had been thrown from his horse and injured, might he not have tried to reach the outstation of Reefer’s Find which, I see, is about three miles from the fence whereas Reynolds’ hut is six or seven?”

  “We thought of that possibility, and we scoured the country on the Reefer’s Find side of the boundary fence,” Evans replied. “There’s a stockman named Larkin at the Reefer’s Find outstation. He joined in the search. The tracker, who had memorized Reynolds’ footprints, found on the earth floor of the hut’s veranda, couldn’t spot any of his tracks on Reefer’s Find country, and the boundary fence, of course, did not permit Reynolds’ horse into that country. The blasted rain beat the tracker. It beat all of us.”

  “Hm. Did you know this Reynolds?”

  “Yes. He came to town twice on a bit of a bender. Good type. Good horseman. Good bushman. The horse he rode that day was not a tricky animal. What do Headquarters know of him, sir?”

  “Only that he never failed to write regularly to his mother, and that he had spent four years in the Army from which he was discharged following a head wound.”

  “Head wound! He might have suffered from amnesia. He could have left his horse and walked away—anywhere—walked until he dropped and died from thirst or starvation.”

  “It’s possible. What is the character of the man Larkin?”

  “Average, I think. He told me that he and Reynolds had met when both happened to be riding that boundary fence, the last time being several months before Reynolds vanished.”

  “How many people besides Larkin at the outstation?”

  “No one else excepting when they’re mustering for fats.”

  The conversation waned while Bony rolled another cigarette.

  “Could you run me out to Morley Downs homestead?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course,” assented Evans.

  “Then kindly telephone the manager and let me talk to him.”

  Two hundred square miles is a fairly large tract of country in which to find clues leading to the fate of a lost man, and three months is an appreciable period of time to elapse after a man is reported as lost.

  The rider who replaced Reynolds’ successor was blue-eyed and dark-skinned, and at the end of two weeks of incessant reading he was familiar with every acre, and had read every word on this large page of the Book of the Bush.

  By now Bony was convinced that Reynolds hadn’t died in that paddock. Lost or injured men had crept into a hollow log to die, their remains found many years afterward, but in this country there were no trees large enough for a man to crawl into. Men had perished and their bodies had been covered with wind-blown sand, and after many years the wind had removed the sand to reveal the skeleton. In Reynolds’ case the search for him had been begun within a week of his disappearance, when eleven men plus a policeman selected for his job because of his bushcraft, and a black tracker selected from among the aborigines who are the best sleuths in the world, had gone over and over the 200 square miles.

  Bony knew that, of the searchers, the black tracker would be the most proficient. He knew, too, just how the mind of that aborigine would work when taken to the stockman’s hut and put on the job. Firstly, he would see the lost man’s bootprints left on the dry earth beneath the veranda roof. Thereafter he would ride crouched forward above his horse’s mane and keep his eyes directed to the ground at a point a few feet beyond the animal’s nose. He would look for a horse’s tracks and a man’s tracks, knowing that nothing passes over the ground without leaving evidence, and that even half an inch of rain will not always obliterate the evidence left, perhaps, in the shelter of a tree.

  That was all the black tracker could be expected to do. He would not reason that the lost man might have climbed a tree and there cut his own throat, or that he might have wanted to vanish and so had climbed over one of the fences into the adjacent paddock; or had, when suffering from amnesia, or the madness brought about by solitude, walked away beyond the rim of the earth.

  The first clue found by Bonaparte was a wisp of wool dyed brown. It was caught by a barb of the top wire of the division fence between the two cattle stations. It was about an inch in length and might well have come from a man’s sock when he had climbed over the fence.

  It was most unlikely that any one of the searchers for William Reynolds would have climbed the fence. They were all mounted, and when they scoured the neighboring country, they would have passed through the gate about a mile from this tiny piece of flotsam. Whether or not the wisp of wool had been detached from Reynolds’ sock at the time of his disappearance, its importance in this case was that it led the investigator to the second clue.

  The vital attribute shared by the aboriginal tracker with Napoleon Bonaparte was patience. To both, Time was of no consequence once they set out on the hunt.

  On the twenty-ninth day of his investigation Bony came on the site of a large fire. It was approximately a mile distant from the outstation of Reefer’s Find, and from a point nearby, the buildings could be seen magnified and distorted by the mirage. The fire had burned after the last rainfall—the one recorded immediately following the disappearance of Reynolds—and the trails made by dead tree branches when dragged together still remained sharp on the ground.

  The obvious purpose of the fire had been to consume the carcase of a calf, for amid the mound of white ash protruded the skull and bones of the animal. The wind had played with the ash, scattering it thinly all about the original ash mound.

  Question: “Why had Larkin burned the carcase of the calf?” Cattlemen never do such a t
hing unless a beast dies close to their camp. In parts of the continent, carcases are always burned to keep down the blowfly pest, but out here in the interior, never. There was a possible answer, however, in the mentality of the man who lived nearby, the man who lived alone and could be expected to do anything unusual, even burning all the carcases of animals which perished in his domain. That answer would be proved correct if other fire sites were discovered offering the same evidence.

  At daybreak the next morning Bony was perched high in a sandalwood tree. There he watched Larkin ride out on his day’s work, and when assured that the man was out of the way, he slid to the ground and examined the ashes and the burned bones, using his hands and his fingers as a sieve.

  Other than the bones of the calf, he found nothing but a soft-nosed bullet. Under the ashes, near the edge of the splayed-out mass, he found an indentation on the ground, circular and about six inches in diameter. The bullet and the mark were the second and third clues, the third being the imprint of a prospector’s dolly pot.

  “Do your men shoot calves in the paddocks for any reason?” Bony asked the manager, who had driven out to his hut with rations. The manager was big and tough, grizzled and shrewd.

  “No, of course not, unless a calf has been injured in some way and is helpless. Have you found any of our calves shot?”

  “None of yours. How do your stockmen obtain their meat supply?”

  “We kill at the homestead and distribute fortnightly a little fresh meat and a quantity of salted beef.”

  “D’you think the man over on Reefer’s Find would be similarly supplied by his employer?”

  “Yes, I think so. I could find out from the owner of Reefer’s Find.”

  “Please do. You have been most helpful, and I do appreciate it. In my role of cattleman it wouldn’t do to have another rider stationed with me, and I would be grateful if you consented to drive out here in the evening for the next three days. Should I not be here, then wait until eight o’clock before taking from the tea tin over there on the shelf a sealed envelope addressed to you. Act on the enclosed instructions.”