Chapter Ten
Bony Is Entertained
DURING THE remainder of the week Bony worked hard without securing any result or making a single step towards the solution of the disappearance of George Loftus.
The men riding the harvester machines in the adjacent paddocks kept a sharp lookout for the body of Loftus lying among the wheat straws. Daily the squares of russet and gold grew smaller and the fringing borders of pale yellow straw ever deeper. Daily the iron sloths crept round and round with a low, humming whine and the ever-present cloud of dust forced from them by the thrasher fans.
The summer was now well begun. Each day the brilliant sun heated the ground and drove the ants from theshadeless patches. As early as nine o’clock the sun had sucked the night damp from the wheat-ears, allowing then the machines to start the long day’s toil.
The wheat tide pouring into the rail siding was now in full flood. From eight to twelve hundred three-bushel bags were dumped into the Burracoppin wheat stack every day.
Twice Bony examined the road and the bordering land from the gate at the old York Road to the summit of the long south sand rise, and once from the summit down the farther side to the Loftus farm gate. He found nothing; not a single track or any object which possibly could have been left by Loftus the night he walked to the York Road.
More than once he had watched Mick Landon and the extra man, who cycled daily out from the township, at work in the wheat paddocks; noted how all the farmers bagged the wheat at opposite corners of the wheat squares, forming long dumps in echelon ready for the bag sewer and the carting trucks.
Saturday came. At noon precisely he parked the dray in the Depot yard and freed the horse in the smaller yard beyond. The working week being completed, he left town about half-past one dressed in white sports shirt, belted grey trousers, and polished shoes. Without jacket or hat, he set off for the Jelly farm with plenty of time at his disposal, taking the south road from the Depot.
When he had walked down the road for three-quarters of a mile he reached the old York Road. Here he turned to the left and presently passed the head of that road based at the vacant garage, the road Loftus should have taken. Proceeding a further quarter mile, he came north of a great granite rock rising two hundred feet at its highest point and itself situated on high land. The rock covered hundreds of acres and on its topmost ridge bore the inevitable surveyor’s trig.
From this point Bony commanded a splendid view of the wide, shallow valley through which runs the Perth-Kalgoorlie railway, and from it obtained a wider impression of the vast wheat belt than he had done before. There were several gigantic outcrops of granite masses here and there beyond the valley, the higher of them bearing the rock-built surveyor’s trigs which form the base lines from which the country had been accurately mapped.
Facing due east, he could see where the York Road faded into tall timber, whereinwas the rabbit fence gate about which he had spent so many fruitless hours. Slowly he turned a little south of west, and, although he could not see it, he knew he then faced directly towards the rock mass lying behind the Loftus farm. A swift glance at the sun, a second glance to observe the angle at which his shadow fell to his right rear, and he set off for the hidden rock some two miles distant.
No one desiring a quiet stroll to contemplate the philosophy of Spinoza or the profound problems discussed by Haeckel would have undertaken that pathless journey. Bony undertook it in preference to the easier roads because the nature of the country and the timber was beyond his eastern States experience. The granite masses, sometimes hidden amid a tangle of wattle trees, the bushes in flower, the trees with trunks scored like a gimlet, the sight of a banded anteater and the glimpse of a brush kangaroo, the tracks of a pack of wild dogs, the scratch marks of a fox, were all part of a vastly entertaining scramble over uneven ground, round thickets of dense scrub, and across unsuspected open glades.
The long and gentle ground rise and the dense scrub gave him no warning of being near the Loftus farm rock until he suddenly stepped on it, walked up to a low ridge, and there looked down on the farm a hundred feet below, the rabbit fence beyond, and the vast sweep of flat country chequered by wheat and fallow paddocks, a scene so intensely brilliant as to make him shade his eyes with his hands.
For nearly an hour he sat on the ridge. Government employees might work only their forty-eight hours, but the wheatfarmers work from dawn to dusk-during the three months’ harvest.
Leaving the rock and presently reaching the lower and level ground, he sauntered along the edge of stripped and crushed wheat straw till he came to the rear of the Loftus homestead. Idly he examined the new haystack, wondering how many tons it weighed and how many acres the contents once had covered. He noted the poor-conditioned bush-built stables, the three chained dogs, the open water dam, and the small corrugated-iron house. Beneath a rough bush shed was erected a box-shaped tent, and this he guessed was Landon’s quarters.
When he came in view of the front of the house he saw a woman carrying a basket in the crook of one arm, on her way to the men in the paddock with their afternoon lunch. He observed, too, that the house possessed but one door, and noted this peculiarity in a land where a house almost always had two doors to permit a draught of air to pass right through in summer. Standing at the one door was Mrs Loftus.
“Would you be so kind as to give me a glass of water?” he asked her.
In daylight he saw that her eyes were likediamantoids, blue and green lights flickering in their depths. Dressed in gingham overalls, her hair scrupulously tidy and her face faintly dusted with powder, George Loftus’s wife was even in the light of day fresh and pretty. She took a tin pannikin from a nail and, giving it to him, bade him drink his fill from the rain-water tank.
Bony quenched his thirst whilst she silently watched him. A proud woman, he thought, a hard woman, because the afternoon-lunch tea had just been made and she might have offered him a cup of tea.
After thanking her he walked to the main south road, crossed it, and passed through the strip of low bush to reach the rabbit fence, and there, looking back, saw that she still watched him from the door. When he jumped the fence and turned south towards the Jelly farm he thought of Sunflower and smiled happily.
When Bony approached the Jelly homestead the two dogscame racing round the house, followed by the cat, with tail erect, which in turn was followed by Lucy Jelly. Neither Sunflower nor Mr Jelly appeared. In their stead came an elderly woman whom Bony had not seen before.
“I am glad you have come,” Lucy told him. “If you hadn’t, Sunflower would have been disappointed. This is Mrs Saunders, who is staying with us until Father comes home.”
After the introduction had been acknowledged, Bony said with a trace of concern in his voice:
“Sunflower!”
“She has had an accident and is lying on the sofa on the veranda.”
“An accident!” he cut in quickly.
“It’s nothing very serious, although it was most painful, Mr Bony. She upset a pot of hot water over her foot. Mrs Saunders being here at the time, and being such a good nurse, the foot doesn’t pain now and should be well in a week.”
On the south veranda, where the shade was cool, Bony saw the slender form of the girl lying on the cushioned sofa and the bright face flushed with the excitement of his arrival. With eager haste he reached her side and, drawing a chair close to her, said:
“I am sorry to see you like this. I did not know.”
“It was silly of me to be so careless,” she told him with a radiant smile. “It happened at teatime on Thursday.” She now saw plainly that which her feminine intuition had told her at the beginning of their acquaintance. She saw the gentleness and compassion of his basic nature; saw, too, the bigness of his heart and his lovableness without being conscious of his colour.
“If you had known, what would you have done?” she asked provokingly.
“Come straight here to see you,” was his instant reply.
“I believe you would. Really, I knew you would. But I will be all right soon. There is no pain now.”
Bony related how, when once on walkabout with his family, his youngest son’s foot was scalded and what was done toeffect a cure.
Sunflower was now lying on her side, her head resting on the palm of her hand, her soft eyes holding his gaze with their purity.
“Is little Ed brown like you?” she asked innocently.
“Oh no! His skin is white. It will become faintly dark, but never brown, like mine.”
“You are not sorry you are brown, are you?”
“Sometimes I am. Sometimes I am glad.”
“But why are you sorry sometimes?”
“You really must not ask such personal questions, dear,” Lucy said, looking up from her needlework.
“You are not vexed, are you?” the maid asked of him.
“Decidedly not. You may ask me as many questions as you like.”
Slowly Sunflower put out a hand and timidly touched his arm.
“I won’t ask any more now,” she decided. “Oh, I am glad you came! Tell me some stories of the blackfellows; about their fights and corroborees. Please do.”
So Bony told her much of the folklore and many of the legends of the aborigines, speaking softly in vivid sentences and charming vocal inflexion. The quietly observant elder sister listened with equal interest, sometimes looking up from her work with growing wonder at the picture presented by Bony and the child. Any distrust of him on account of his colour, any doubt there may have been in her heart of the wisdom of confiding certain matters to a police detective, vanished during those never-to-be-forgotten moments. Alike with Sunflower, she became unconscious of his colour.
Mrs Saunders brought out the afternoon tea and set it on a small table at the foot of the sofa. She was a pleasant and placid woman of fifty, and with the solicitude of a lover Bony waited on the invalid.
He described to them his wife and his three sons; how little Ed was going to school at Banyo, near Brisbane, how the restless Bob had answered the call of the bush and was working on a far western cattle station, and of the pride of his life, Charles, the eldest, who attended the Brisbane University and so was closely following in his father’s steps. He went on to describe the working ants, and the wonderful termite, and from the insects passed to the stars when the evening star shone faintly from the darkening eastern sky.
Mrs Saunders and Lucy were as firmly held by the magic of his personality as was Sunflower. To them his well-stored and cultured mind was a revelation. He spoke to them as never a novel or a play could have done; escorted them into worlds unknown.
When the silence of nature fell upon the land during those few minutes between twilight and night, Lucy suggested that he might like to accompany her when she shut up the fowls from the prowling foxes. Together they left the veranda, watched wistfully by the invalid while they drew farther away into the reflected glow of the pink and emerald western sky.
“Do you still wish to help us with Father?” she asked presently, glancing into his face.
“Certainly, if you still would like me to.”
“I-I hope-” she said hesitatingly. “Supposing Father is doing something terrible. You would not act against him, would you?”
“Everyone will think I am a policeman,” he protested.
“But aren’t you? Aren’t you a detective?”
“I am not a policeman. I am an investigator of crime. I am looking into the disappearance of George Loftus. I cannot think that your father has anything to do with that, and, consequently, I can say that whatever lies behind your father’s absences will be dealt with discreetly and with every regard to your feelings. Whatever the mystery behind Mr Jelly, I will lay it bare before you only.”
Realizing how stupidly rash he was in saying all this, knowing he was slipping down the incline which at Windee ruined his greatest triumph, still he persisted. As the dipsomaniac who hugs his bottle although aware of the inevitable result of his indulgence, Bony allowed his heart to govern his mind. The girl at his side and the lovely Sunflower had asked his help, and he could not but give it, even if by so doing he blasted his reputation and humbled his astounding pride.
“Tell me,” he urged, “how long now has your father been going away like this?”
“About seven years.”
“Does he always go away without warning you of his intention?”
“Yes, always.”
“And does he always return without warning?”
“Always.”
“Does anything happen before his goings that is made significant by repetition?”
“Yes. He always receives a telegram.”
“Ah! That is something of value. Have you ever chanced to read one?”
“Two. One early this year; the other several years ago. The last one I read said, ‘Come Sydney’, and the other said, ‘Come Adelaide.’ Neither was signed, and both were dispatched from Merredin.”
Can you be sure that your father received a telegram before he went away this time?”
“I did not see one delivered,” she said in a manner which left no doubt in his mind that she was sure her father had received the usual telegram.
“Now, please, describe how he returns.”
Lucy Jelly did not immediately reply. She shut the fowl-house door and closed another door on some sleepy ducks.
“He always comes home at night,” she said slowly.“Sometimes early, sometimes in the middle of the night. He comes in a car, but I have never seen the car as it always drops him at our farm gate near the rabbit fence. Those times he comes in early we have seen him bring in a parcel of whisky. It is all wrapped up, but I know it is whisky, for I have watched him bury the bottles. Sometimes he says good night before going to his room; sometimes he says nothing to us, not a word. Once in his room he locks the door, shuts himself in for several days, and won’t open to see me and take in anything. When he comes out he looks awful.”
“He has money?”
“Yes. Always he has money. After he becomes normal he pays all our small debts.”
“I suppose he gives you some money too?”
“No. Strangely enough, he will never give Sunflower or me a penny after one of his absences, although at ordinary times he is most generous to us. Somehow I cannot help thinking that he is mean with the money he brings home because it is dirty money. You understand?”
“Yes, fully.”
“You will help us?”
“Surely. I shall find out where Mr Jelly goes and for what purpose, and in what way he obtains the money to bring home.”
“You will tell me when you have found out, won’t you?”
Bony became silent. She repeated her words. Then he said slowly:
“I will tell you if I can tell a lady, Miss Jelly. Men are such strange, illogical creatures. They can do terrible things, things I could not even tell my wife. Yet be not greatly disturbed. Having met Mr Jelly, I cannot believe that he is doing anything dishonourable. He may be a secret drinker or addicted to some terrible vice which holds him with an unrelenting grip. If this proves to be so, and you are told precisely what it is, you will, most likely, be able to help him. Whatever it is, you may rely on both my discretion and my assistance. Do not worry. Every shadow is caused by brightness.”
“Thank you,” she said gently, and having by then come near to the house, they spoke no more of Mr Jelly.
Mrs Saunders had moved Sunflower into the living-room, and the girl was waiting to ask Bony to write something in her autograph album. When he had written a verse of Shelley’s and had added his signature beneath it, he said, looking up at Lucy:
“By the way, this afternoon I saw a woman leaving Mrs Loftus’s house with afternoon lunch for Mick Landon and the other man on the harvester. Who is she?”
“If she was a tall, thin woman, that would be Miss Waldron, Mrs Loftus’s sister. She has been staying with Mrs Loftus ever since her husband disappeared.”
“She wasn’t staying there before Loftus disappeared-when he was in Perth?”
“No. Oh no!”
He remarked the stare she gave him when she answered that question. It was as though the question had created the link completing a chain of incidents. In the presence of Sunflower he refrained from pressing the subject and began to talk of the wild things of the bush, beginning with the great battle he had once seen between two eagles and a fox; how the eagles in turn swooped and knocked the fox over with their wing pinions until they had beaten it to death.
The golden yellow lamplight fell on his animated face. Mrs Saunders was knitting, but Lucy had forgotten her needlework, being as fascinated as her sister. Through open fly-netted doors and windows came drifting and soft distinct night sounds: the constantclickings of the cicadas, the honk-honk of the bullfrogs at the edge of the dam, the whorl-whorl of a fox daintily padding the far sand ridges. And then the dogs barked suddenly.
Bony continued to talk, but he wondered why the dogs barked. Twenty seconds later he heard the low hum of a motor engine. Five seconds after that he saw the flash of fear spring to Sunflower’s eyes and knew that she, too, now heard the car. Still he went on talking, not seeing, but aware that Lucy had quietly gone out of the house.
Happiness and tranquillity went away with her, and in their place came fear. A quick glance at Mrs Saunders showed him the fixity of her eyes whilst her mind was projected beyond the house to the rabbit fence and the roads. Waiting-she was waiting to hear the car stop. Outside, Lucy was waiting to see the car stop. She watched the headlights winking whilst the machine passed beyond the roadside trees, watching and wondering if the car was travelling south on the main road beyond the fence or along the government track their side of the fence, which Mr Jelly would have to take to reach his home. The car did stop-at the farm gate.
Those within the house heard the engine hum die into silence. They could see with mental eyes, as clearly as though they stood against the fence, the tall figure of Mr Jelly getting out of the car. They gave him time to say a word or two to the driver. And they heard the engine hum into song when the driver let out the clutch and began to change gear upward.
Murder down under b-4 Page 9