The Bachelors of Broken Hill

by Arthur Upfield

  “One of the best. Used to boast that his girls left him only to be married.”

  “When she put the tea cup on the counter, how far was it from the customer?”

  “Shirley Andrews says about a yard. The assistant serving the customer, girl named Mary Isaacs, says a yard and a half. They think in yards, you know. The customer was standing at the time, although she had sat on a chair when first she arrived and had to wait to be served. Goldspink was between her and the cup of tea. It couldn’t have been the customer, but we worked like hell to find the woman.”

  “She never came forward? Did you advertise for her?”

  “We did,” replied Crome. “Same old tale—wouldn’t be mixed up in a murder case.”

  “The public was informed it was murder?”

  “Yes. Young Pavier saw to that. The Super’s son. Reporter on the Barrier Miner.”

  “Pity. Were you able to obtain a description of the customer?”

  “Yes, but not a good one. Both girls were a bit hazy about her.”

  “You searched the premises, of course?”

  “Found no trace of cyanide. Only poison found was arsenic in cockroach powder. Check-up with the chemists gave nothing. Didn’t expect it would. Have to sign for a minim of poison in Broken Hill, and can buy it by the pound in any of the surrounding townships. Tons of it used by the stations, you know.”

  “Well, back to the housekeeper.”

  “Mrs Robinov! Been housekeeping for Sam Goldspink for fifteen years. He left her all he had. She seems open and shut. Wasn’t short of money.”

  “When was the will made?”

  “Eight years ago. There are no relatives—no possible schemers.”

  “No mention of a codicil or a new will?”

  “Not a squeak.”

  Bony gently worked to and fro his interlocked fingers, and Crome could not understand the smile of satisfaction.

  “Interesting, Crome. The motive will be an unusual one—when we dig it out.”

  “Motive!” exploded the sergeant. “There isn’t a motive. There can’t be a motive, considering the killing of Pop Parsons in the same way.”

  “There’s a motive all right. There is a motive even for me to light this cigarette. Tell me about Parsons.”

  “I made a hell of a boner about Parsons,” Crome said, his voice abruptly savage. “I was caught right off balance when it happened. Parsons was a retired miner living with his in-laws. I’d known him for years. He had a small pension which ceased at his death. Big man who ate hearty and drank a little. He went into a café one Friday afternoon last December. The place was busy as usual. Sat opposite a man named Rogers, an accountant.

  “Rogers says that Parsons—he didn’t know him—asked for tea and sandwiches, and that he took his time over the meal, reading a Digest. He was still there when Rogers left, and Rogers says he thinks that then Parsons had eaten the sandwiches and had drunk one cup of tea.

  “The tale is taken up by the waitress, a fool of a girl. She says there was quite a rush of customers at the time. She remembered Rogers, and she knew Parsons, who often went there on a Friday afternoon. When Rogers left, a woman took his place and ordered tea and cakes. The woman left when Parsons was still reading his magazine, and a second woman took her place opposite Parsons. This second woman was there when Parsons drank his remaining tea, pulled a face, got up, and muttered something. She didn’t take much interest in him, and the next time she saw him he was lying over the wreckage of a table—dead.”

  “The name of the second woman?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Don’t know!” echoed Bony. “But you inferred you obtained a statement from her.”

  “The statement is unsigned and undated. It was posted at the GPO some time between nine and one the next morning.”

  “Your theory?”

  “That on seeing Parsons sprawled across the table she remained in the café to see what would happen, like many other curious people. She saw the proprietor rush out, and she saw the doctor and me come in. When she knew that Parsons was dead, she slipped away, determined not to be mixed up in the affair. Surprisin’, the number of people who shy away from having to go into a witness box. Anyway, either her conscience persuaded her to write the statement or a husband or someone did. We advertised for her, but she never came forward like Rogers did.”

  “The woman who took Rogers’s place—did she contact you or you her?”

  Crome shook his head.

  Bony made a note and Crome gnawed his lip.

  “No motive suggests itself for this second murder?”

  “Not one—only lunacy, and that’s not a motive,” replied Crome. “There was cyanide in Parsons’s cup. I did have the intelligence to grab the cup. I should have—Oh, what’s the bloody use?”

  “‘It is folly to shiver over last year’s snow,’ as Whately or someone wrote,” Bony stated with conviction. “You searched the café for traces of cyanide?”

  “After me and Abbot finished with it you’d not recognise it for a café,” answered the sergeant. “Not a trace. We looked for cyanide in and under and on the roof of the house where Parsons lived with his niece and her husband. Nothing. There was no discord in that home. Parsons hadn’t any enemies. Never got a lead. Never got a lead in the Goldspink case, either.”

  “Ideas?”

  “One. Lunatic going round dropping a pinch of cyanide into tea-cups. There’s only one common denominator in the two cases. Both men were bachelors. Makes the set-up all the more screwy.”

  “Makes it a little less ‘screwy’,” argued Bony. “There’s another common denominator. Both men were elderly. They weren’t friends, I suppose?”

  “No. And they weren’t related or belonged to the same club. One was a Jew, the other a Gentile. One was poor, the other rich. One had been a miner, the other a shop-keeper. They had nothing in common excepting age and single blessedness. There’s no sense, reason, no anything.”

  “Do we get a cup of tea in this place?”

  “Eh!” The expression of bewilderment on Crome’s face caused Bony to chuckle. “Tea! Yes. The girl brings it round.”

  “If by a quarter to four we are not supplied with refreshment, Crome, we go out to a café. Without morning and afternoon tea, the civil servant cannot be civil. When a civil servant snarls at me, I say, silently, of course: ‘What, no tea?’”

  Crome stuffed tobacco into his pipe as though plugging a hole in a ship, and Bony went on softly:

  “Homicide is a common occurrence in any community, and we grow weary of stepping from the corpse to the murderer and showing him the utterly childish fool he is. But sometimes, and rarely, we are presented with a murder committed by an artist, and then all boredom created by the fool amateur is vanquished. It is so with this murderer of yours who pops a pinch of cyanide into a tea-cup. Why, we don’t know. When we do know, we shall have to return to our amateurs who couldn’t leave more clues if they sat up all night for a week thinking them out. Surely this is an occasion for rejoicing. Have you ever met an artist in murder before? ... No? Now that you most certainly will, you should be happy. I am.”

  Crome put his pipe on his desk. His face grew slowly purple. He muttered the great Australian expletive “Cripes!” and broke into a roar of laughter.

  The Superintendent’s secretary came in with a tray, and Bony rose to accept his cup of tea with a smile.

  “Thank you. Miss Ball, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The girl smiled at him shyly.

  “The tea and biscuits will cost you two shillings a week, sir,” she told Bony. “We can just manage on that.”

  “It’s worth two pounds a week, Miss Ball,” averred Bony, producing his contribution. “And we should all shell out every month for a present for you.”

  “Thank you, sir. I like to prepare the tea, but I’m only allowed to do it because Miss Lodding is away on sick leave.”

  The girl departed, and Bony dunk
ed his biscuit. Crome said:

  “The Lodding woman is the Super’s secretary. Face like a stomach ache.”

  Chapter Four

  Jimmy Nimmo’s Worries

  JIMMY WAS still youthful, still casual about unimportant things, and a sportsman born with zest for the Game of Life, staking liberty against the jackpot and, having learned to respect his opponents, he seldom lost.

  It was known officially that he never carried a weapon and never attempted violence when—rarely—he was cornered. It was also known officially, but never openly admitted, that Jimmy sometimes rendered valuable assistance to the police engaged with a major crime.

  The amount of ‘dough’ he extracted from the Sydney bookmaker’s flat was much greater than he had anticipated, but that had not been a factor in his choice of Broken Hill for a holiday. Like many thousands living in Australia’s coastal cities, Jimmy had imagined Broken Hill to be a mullock dump far beyond a deceitful mirage, and actual contact with this city gave pleasurable surprise.

  He found that lots of people in Broken Hill had lots of dough. He found, too, that the people of Broken Hill were extremely easy-going, generous, and affable. Strangely enough, they didn’t seem to value dough. Wonderful place! Jimmy had plenty of dough, too, but he couldn’t resist gathering a little more—without troubling to earn it in the bowels of the broken hill.

  Now he was regretting it, for of a certainty Inspector Bonaparte would hear about those three jobs he had pulled and not possibly fail to stamp each one with the name of Nimmo. It was just stinking bad luck to run into him like that on Argent Street. He should have known that an ace detective would take up where that blasted Stillman left off, and that after two murders done the same way, Broken Hill was much too ‘hot’—and nothing to do with the temperature.

  To make matters still worse for a self-respecting burglar, this Napoleon Bonaparte was so damned unpredictable. He didn’t tick like the common or garden flatfoot trained in a police school and taped by regulations and what not. There was that time during the war when he was living in Adelaide and had put through two slick jobs, and this Bonaparte bloke had come to his lodgings and said he knew all about those two jobs and suggested making a trilogy of it. The third job had netted a measly bundle of letters, but those letters had put two men and a woman behind barbed wire. Then Bonaparte had actually offered him honest toil. Jimmy shuddered.

  And now Bonaparte was hinting at another spot of police work in these cyaniding cases when he didn’t want anything to do with cyanide, he having acquired an important ambition since coming to Broken Hill. Fading out from this city to another would be just plain stupid, for the entire world was too small in which to escape the attentions of this cursed Bonaparte. Thus this feeling of the nut between steel crackers.

  Arrayed in a light sports suit and a panama to keep his head cool, Jimmy strolled down Argent Street. The afternoon was still and hot. The shadowed pavements were certainly not empty spaces, and the kerbs were lined by parked cars and utilities. The store windows were filled with luxury goods to meet the prosperity of this mining community, and the shoppers were dressed as expensively as he. Even then great wads of dough were coming up out of the earth to the accompaniment of the ceaseless racket of machinery.

  The store once controlled by Samuel Goldspink was about the third best in Argent Street, and Jimmy paused to view the array of gents’ ties and shirts. Ties! He already had dozens in various places, for he had an abiding passion for them, but Bonaparte had ‘suggested’ ties and—hell!

  There were but a few customers within, and Jimmy came to anchor beside a man interested in gloves, and, there being a vacant chair, he perched himself on it with the air of a man having a million years in credit.

  There were opened boxes of gloves on the counter before the man who was trying them on. He was a tall man, heavy, having a distinct paunch. He was very well dressed, even for Broken Hill. His voice was modulated and almost without accent. He could be a retired share-broker, an undertaker, a film producer. He could be—but Jimmy wasn’t interested. Who would be interested in the man when one could gaze upon the assistant serving him?

  She was barely forty, large, severely corseted within an expensive black frock. The pearl necklace floating on the sea of her bosom triumphed in the capture of Jimmy’s attention, for they were real pearls. And those glittering blue diamonds set in the platinum rings on the fat fingers forced Jimmy’s mind to envision the cot wherein these jewels would lie snug o’ nights. There was certain to be a rear yard, with rooms opening to that yard. The burglar alarms, of course, would be just too easy.

  That the wearer of the jewels might not detect in him a too absorbed interest in her trimmings, Jimmy casually watched the man trying on gloves. The hands were long-fingered. They were the hands of a gifted person: the hands of a surgeon, a watchmaker, a burglar. They were steady hands and strong, and Jimmy noted how the long and tapering fingers encased by a fine suede curved inward to the palm to become a powerful fist whilst the owner examined the taut material about the knuckles.

  So determined was Jimmy to ignore the pearls and the diamonds, he permitted too great an interest in the glove customer and suddenly was aware of being regarded by eyes almost black and decidedly speculative. It was just for an instant and created a fast picture in Jimmy’s mind of a face adorned about the eyes with bushy grey eyebrows, and a grey moustache angled stiffly above a small goatee beard.

  An assistant who had been serving a woman with a small boy came to serve Jimmy. Barely matured, she was dark and vivid. Jimmy was at once helpful.

  “Ties, please, miss. Not too expensive. I like those in the window priced at fifteen and six.”

  To avoid looking at the pearls and diamonds, Jimmy glanced at the hand now being thrust into another glove, a brown kid glove. The girl was lifting boxes from the shelves behind the counter. The man was being fastidious. Gloves! No one wore gloves in Broken Hill unless going to a wedding—or a funeral.

  Ah! A figured tie in pale blue silk. A little too dull, perhaps. A strip of light green opal caught the light as it wove about the assistant’s fingers. Colourful, but certainly pleasing. Would go well with his newest lounge suit. Jimmy accepted the tie, angled its sheen to catch the light, placed it aside, and said it would do.

  “This one is perfect for you, sir,” the girl said, producing a ‘creation’ in red. She was being well trained by Pearls and Diamonds, for she exhibited interest in her customer. Jimmy smiled at her and placed the treasure against the cloth of his coat, agreeing that the colour scheme was perfect.

  “I’ve a weakness for ties,” he admitted, and the girl instantly smiled her understanding. “Now show me something less informal.”

  “I’ll have that pair,” said the glove buyer. “What price did you mention, madam?”

  Jimmy blinked—once. The gloves chosen were black, and as the assistant folded them to slip into their cellophane envelope the diamonds sparkled yet more gloriously. The woman—Jimmy was confident that she was Mrs Robinov, the late Sam Goldspink’s housekeeper—appeared to be of a placid disposition, accepting the whims of her customers with fortitude.

  His own assistant was displaying a tie which could be worn at a business conference. The glove purchaser departed, and Jimmy permitted a full minute to pass before remarking to Mrs Robinov, who was replacing gloves into the respective boxes:

  “You wouldn’t sell many gloves in a town like this, would you?”

  Mrs Robinov smiled, and behold, there was a diamond in a front tooth.

  “More often than you might think,” she replied. “Mostly for weddings, of course, and for funerals. Generally a man wanting gloves is going down to Adelaide or over to Sydney. Much too hot up here for gloves—in the summer.

  He was informed of his liability and passed a five-pound note. The girl accepted the money as though a gift to herself, and raced it along the overhead wire to the cashier.

  “Are you staying for the races?” politely inquired Pe
arls and Diamonds.

  “Yes, I think so,” replied Jimmy. “I like Broken Hill, even in summer.”

  “I like it all the year round.” The pearls gleamed as though seen through a fathom of tropical water. “I like the people. We’re very sociable here in the Hill. I hope you have found us so.”

  “I have that,” agreed Jimmy truthfully. Mrs Robinov thanked him for his custom and turned to serve a youth who would doubtless have preferred the girl. Jimmy smiled at her on accepting his change, raised his hat, and sauntered out to the hot street.

  His wrist watch said ten to four, and Jimmy thought of his throat and a pot of tea taken in accordance with the orders of that damned Bonaparte. He paused once to look at a display of new novels and finally entered Favalora’s Café. The place was not crowded, and he chose a table against the wall. A waitress took his order for tea and toasted raisin bread, and Bony sat opposite him.

  “Nice day,” Bony said.

  “Yes. Bit warm, though, for the time of the year. Might bring up rain. Does rain here sometimes, I heard.”

  The waitress brought Jimmy’s tea and toast and Bony ordered the same. When she had gone, Bony asked casually:

  “Are you aware that you are occupying the seat in which a man drank poisoned tea?”

  “Yes. Are you aware that you occupy the chair taken that afternoon by the person who tossed a fistful of cyanide into the tea?”

  “We’re well placed. How was it done, Jimmy?”

  “Simple. The victim was reading a magazine, remember? He wouldn’t see.”

  “Why was it done?”

  “Why? Just to watch the old bloke drink it up and throw a fit. Lots of peculiar types walking around, you know.”

  “If you wanted cyanide, d’you think you would have much difficulty in obtaining it?”

  “Certainly not,” replied Jimmy. “There’s nothing I wanted I couldn’t get—providin’ I had the cash.”

  “Have you spotted the waitress who served Parsons that day?”

  Jimmy sighed and looked at Bony with hurt-dog eyes. He waved his cup towards a girl waiting at one of the central tables.