Madman’s Bend

by Arthur Upfield

  “What’s going to happen to your sheep?” he asked. “They haven’t been shorn yet, have they?”

  “They were to be shorn next month. Vosper, who has a place out west, is taking them to his shed and looking after them. That’s my trouble, Inspector. I can’t live at home and I can’t go on living here, can I?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “That’s what Mrs Cosgrove said. She said it would take time to settle matters. You know, proving the will and all that. And the flood will delay things, and sort of keep me a prisoner here.”

  “Quite a nice prison, anyway, Jill. Then there is Ray.”

  “Ray’s more trouble.” Jill sighed audibly. “He wants to tell his mother about us and marry me, but I know Mrs Cosgrove won’t agree to that, and I feel ... I feel ... I feel I am living here under false pretences, if you know what I mean.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t let that disturb you for a little while, the circumstances being what they are. You are really in love?”

  Jill nodded, and kept her head bent over her work.

  “Then there is the probability that in time Mrs Cosgrove will come to change her mind about it. By the way, do you know how the property was left by your father?”

  “He left it to Mother in trust for me.”

  “Therefore Lush hasn’t an interest?”

  “No. He thought he would take it all over, and didn’t know the truth until after he married Mother. It was one reason he treated her like he did. Mother said she didn’t think to tell him before they were married.”

  “Then that clarifies the situation, Jill. You are the sole mistress of Madden’s Selection. Unless, of course, your mother by will made Lush your guardian.”

  The girl was silent for several minutes, and when she spoke her voice was so low that Bony had to make the effort to hear.

  “That’s what she did, Inspector. Appointed Lush my guardian.” “When did you know this?” he asked.

  “Several months ago. I tried to get Mother to have it altered. She said she would the next time she could get Lush to take her to Bourke and the solicitor. But he wouldn’t agree. You see, poor Mother was frightened of him, and ever so weak.”

  “I’m sure all that could be changed now that Lush is wanted for killing your mother, Jill—that at the moment you are, in fact if not in law until Lush is found to be alive, your own mistress.”

  “It’s what Mrs Cosgrove said, Inspector. And we don’t know if Lush is alive or dead.”

  “That’s for me to find out. It’s why, incidentally, I want to ask more questions. What d’you really think? Is he dead or alive at this moment?”

  “I believe he’s alive,” she replied, still softly, still keeping her head bent over her sewing. He asked her why she believed this, and she continued, “He wasn’t outside the door that morning. He wasn’t in the men’s hut, or in the shed, or anywhere. Ray’s sure he fell into the bend hole. I don’t think he did, knowing Lush.”

  “How so?”

  “He was always too careful of himself. Wouldn’t drive fast when he was drunk. There was that time when two swagmen came asking for meat, and Lush went out and abused them. One of them was a big strong man, and he grabbed Lush by the shirt and shook him and Lush cringed and kept silent. He was like that when I shot through the door. Not a word out of him.”

  “What you say is interesting,” Bony admitted, thinking that his surmise on this particular point was illogical. “How long ago was it that Lush abused the swagmen?”

  “Oh, weeks ago. About Easter, I think.”

  “Did you know them?”

  “No, but Lush did. He threatened to have them arrested. To us women, of course. He said then that one was called Wally Watts, and the other Miner Smith.”

  “Did they come again?”

  Jill shook her head, and Bony looked at the list given by Vickory. The name Watts was there. Again he probed. “Do you know or have you ever heard of a man called Dead March Harry?”

  “Everyone knows Dead March Harry, Inspector. He’s been up and down the river for years. Has a mate they call Mick the Warder.”

  “I met them. When did they call in for tucker the last time?”

  “The day before Lush went to town. No. It was two days before Lush went to town. I was out on the run, and Mother told me they’d been. Lush was away, too. Fishing at a bend up-river. He liked fishing. Poor Mother was always generous to Dead March Harry, and Harry always returned her kindness by chopping wood and bringing it to the living-room door. None of the others did—the regulars, I mean.”

  “None of the regulars appeared about this time?”

  “No. There aren’t so many as years ago, according to Mother.”

  Bony fell to meditating, and presently the girl asked what he was thinking about.

  “About nothing in particular,” he confessed. “Just darting from one subject to another, and so on. You know, Jill, I am coming to think that you could be right that Lush is alive. Your story of the abused swagman shaking him and deflating him like a punctured tyre supports your other story that he said not a word after you fired through the door. He knew he had severely maltreated your mother, and then realized you had taken the stand you did in determination to keep him out for good. I could agree with you were it not for many faults in the picture of that night. Who owned the utility?”

  “It belonged to the Selection.”

  “There’s plenty of petrol in the machinery shed, and he could have filled the tank and taken an additional supply, and cleared out with the vehicle. He didn’t know how desperately injured your mother was, and the risk of being apprehended for stealing the utility would be very small. However, he didn’t take the vehicle, and he didn’t have any of his own property save what he stood up in. The motive we consider could have been his does not stand up.

  “The theory that he returned to the utility and somehow in darkness fell over the cliff is very weak. The place wasn’t strange to him. Even if another theory is examined—that he lost his temper and attacked the utility—it is made very weak by the same argument, that Lush knew the place and would be consciously aware of the cliff. Now the facts as you have told them concerning his attempt to break in do strongly support yet another theory. Obviously you won’t like it.”

  “All right, Inspector. What is it?”

  “That when you fired through the door the bullet killed him. Then, or when day broke, you found him dead outside, and you, with or without assistance, took the body on the barrow and dumped it into the waterhole below the house. It was then essential to destroy the damaged door, which was done by burning.”

  Jill Madden’s reaction to this theory was unexpected. Slowly she removed the material and needle from her lap and placed them on the bench beside her. Slowly she stood, and slowly turned to face Bony, who also stood. There was neither fear nor resentment in her wide eyes when she said, spacing the words, “That is exactly what I would have done had I killed him.” The dark eyes narrowed when she frowned. “How did you guess that, Inspector? As I sat up the rest of the night I believed I had shot him, and I planned what you said I did when day broke. Mother hurt and crying in the bedroom was the last straw. The range fire went out and the room got very cold, but it wasn’t the cold freezing my mind. Yes, that is exactly what I would have done if I had found Lush dead outside the door. You must believe that because it’s true.”

  “Let us sit again, Jill.” Putting a hand on her arm, Bony urged her to sit before saying, “We were going over several theories, were we not? Beliefs or disbeliefs must not be permitted. When investigating a crime one usually begins on the premiss that the crime has been committed. There may be reasons, however, merely to assume that a crime was committed, and in the case of Lush we have reason enough to assume he was killed. In what I’ve just said, belief or otherwise is of no importance. Only facts are important.

  “Your story of having barred Lush from the house is supported by the change of the door and its destruction by fire.
What you found on opening the door, if anything, and what you did subsequently isn’t supported by a single fact. Between that back door and the laundry is a cement path, and if Lush had been shot and only wounded he would have shed blood on that path, and you could have washed off the blood. I took samples of the soil from either side of the path, and analysis may indicate the presence of blood. Then there is the wheelbarrow. If Lush was killed, then even the passage of several hours would not prevent the body exuding blood, and here I am sure that the barrow does not contain such a sign because it has not been washed for a considerable period.

  “I am being patient, Jill, when telling you all this. Facts, not belief, are what is needed. I am permitted to hope. I hope you did not kill Lush. I hope his body may be found, but think, not believe, it may never be. I hope he is still alive, but think he may be dead. I think it possible that you conveyed his body to the river, but I have found not a single fact to prove it. There are our theories, with not a fact to support one of them.”

  “Then what will you do? What shall I do?”

  “I shall go on meanderingly looking for facts. You will stay here at Mira, be patient, be grateful for the kindness extended by Mrs Cosgrove, and the love given you by her son. And now we may admit to beliefs. You may believe that every cloud has a silver lining, and I may believe that the disappearance of William Lush will one day be cleared up. Smile, Jill, just a little.”

  Jill looked at him with misty eyes, and, instead of smiling, burst into sobbing.

  Chapter Fifteen

  A Ship for the Crows

  BONY WAS relieved to hear the men’s cook sounding the afternoon smoko call, and, thinking that sympathy would prolong her sobbing, he chided the girl. When she had removed the traces of weeping from her face they proceeded to the little room for afternoon tea. Here they found Mr MacCurdle and Mrs Cosgrove.

  “We have been meditating in your ‘thinking house’,” Bony said lightly. “A peaceful retreat in which to relax. Have you any startling news of the flood?”

  “Nothing of the flood, Inspector. You are asked to ring back Constable Lucas. We have been planning our defences.”

  “You sound like a chief of staff, Mrs Cosgrove.”

  “I have to be both chief of staff and general officer, Inspector. Mira will soon become besieged by an enemy, and tomorrow we begin to throw up the earth works. If you don’t want to be beleaguered you should withdraw tomorrow.”

  Bony smiled his bland counter.

  “Only if you command my withdrawal, mon général. Otherwise I elect to stay and work on a shovel or a bulldozer. Is the airstrip outside or inside the levee? I omitted to notice.”

  “Inside, Inspector. The only other way out remaining to you is by horse down to the point opposite Murrimundi homestead, and crossing the river by holding to the mail wire. From there you can get to White Bend without much trouble, but from White Bend it would be a long way round to reach Bourke.”

  “I shall stay. I shall never again fly with Doctor Leveska.”

  “Well, the only other airman to get you out is Father Savery, and they do say he is worse than the doctor.”

  “How they go on living is a mystery,” said the manager.

  “There’s no mystery about them,” Mrs Cosgrove said, a shade sharply. “Alcohol saves the one, and prayer saves the other. And what we would do without either of them I don’t know. Now we’ll check on the wool in the shed. Coming, Jill? And you, Inspector?”

  The girl said she would like to go to her room, but Bony accepted, and the manager drove him to the wool-shed in a powerful utility. Here stood a stack of filled bales, and here Mrs Cosgrove decided that the bales would have to be restacked above reach of the water should the levee be broached.

  “We’ll put those loafers to work in the morning, Mac. You can oversee them.”

  “Very well, but don’t you think you could leave them to me?” expostulated the manager.

  “Why? They’re no difficulty to me.”

  “There’s still time enough for them to withdraw from the fortress. We should take them gently.”

  “Gently? Bosh! I know how to deal with working men.”

  MacCurdle shrugged and, with Bony, accompanied Mrs Cosgrove to the group of men—ten in all—gathered about their fire.

  “Good afternoon, Harry. Mick! And you others. Some of you have worked on Mira before,” she began, and Bony thought it a good beginning, “and you should know the latest about the flood. We are going to be cut off, perhaps for a week, perhaps a month. Those of you who don’t want to be cut off had better leave at once. If you stay you will want food. I want men. Those who will work will report to the cook for breakfast, and then to Mr MacCurdle to go on the books. Those who stay and won’t work—well, they tell me there are goannas and snakes in plentiful supply.”

  “Me and Mick will be reporting for work, ma’am,” said Dead March Harry, from whom the despondency of the morning had departed.

  “I think I’ll be packing up,” voted the shrimp of a man called Jacko. “I ain’t cut out for hard labour.”

  “You can boil a billy, surely?” said Mrs Cosgrove.

  “Too right, I c’d do that.”

  “Very well, you can off-side the cook.”

  A large red-headed man flexed his arms and said, “What about starting work right now, Mrs Cosgrove? Me, I’m tired of looking at these blokes, and we’re out of yarns, anyway. Besides, most of us has run out of tobacco.”

  Mrs Cosgrove glanced at the manager, and MacCurdle shrugged. Mrs Cosgrove looked pensively at the gang, knowing that some were hopeless until brought to desperation, and that others genuinely needed employment.

  “Very well. Mr MacCurdle will put you on. Jacko, you tell the cook how many extra he will have, and to set you to work. That’ll be all.”

  Motioning to Bony to accompany her, and leaving the utility with the manager, Mrs Cosgrove crossed to the levee and looked at the river. Bony stood beside her, saying nothing. Eventually she turned towards the sheltered house and proceeded along the levee.

  Here the river came round the Mira bend like the rim of a gigantic wheel, the light-brown surface disturbed only by the expanding discs thrust upward by ponderous power. The wind had died away. There was nothing of turbulence, and yet nothing of gentleness in the flow. It was not unlike tarnished gold on its way to distant moulds, and the odd pieces of flotsam seemed to be partially buried in half-solid matter.

  “It looks bilious, doesn’t it?” Mrs Cosgrove remarked.

  “It would not inspire our great Australian poets, but it will eventually, when the sediment has cleared. You’ve seen it like this many times?”

  “Many times during the years I’ve lived here, Bony. How I hated it, and how I have come to love it!” Mrs Cosgrove laughed softly. “There, you see proof of it. I find no difficulty in calling you Bony, because I have lost my English reserve and you are indubitably part of this land.”

  “If you give Australia the chance it will certainly captivate you,” Bony said. “I’ve encountered many who admit first to hating it and then to loving it. You came here shortly after the war, I think you said?”

  “Yes. My husband was in the Air Force. What he saw in me I don’t know. I was everything he was not. He was gay and casual and impudent, and a tilter at windmills. I detested him. Repeatedly I told him so, but we were married by the archbishop in my cathedral. Then we came out to Mira, and the river I had heard rapturously described was barely running in a ditch, and I loathed it so much I wouldn’t look at it for a year.”

  “Then the river made itself heard.”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “It has a voice, a little voice to whisper to you, a mighty voice to shout at you.”

  Mrs Cosgrove halted and turned to regard Bony with quizzing eyes. She said, “You spoke of poets, remember. You could be one yourself. Yes, I heard the river shouting at me, and I hated it. The wild westerlies would blow when the world was filled with the shouting
of the trees. My husband then had a fast motor-boat, and one evening he induced me to go with him up the river. The day had been hot, and the evening was cool, and when he turned the boat round to come home he stopped the engine, and we just drifted with the current. It was then I first heard the whispering: the bird calls, the fish plopping, the other tiny sounds you’d never hear in broad day. That evening my husband and I were truly joined in spirit.”

  A few yards farther on they stopped again to look at the river. They were opposite the men’s quarters, and could gaze up the mile-long reach to the mail-box bend. The sun was westering, and its rays coloured the surface with pure gold. The overhanging branches of the twin lines of gums were painted with iridescent greens, and their shadows on the water were black.

  The river itself was silent. The late afternoon was drowsily preparing itself for the coming night: roosters crowing, sheep bleating, the voices of men, crows in commotion, an engine softly generating electricity. The sunlight this late winter evening was not unbearable to meet with the eyes, and, since crows always interested Bony with their language, he sought to determine where they were and what they were saying.

  A hundred yards above the entry to the shallow billabong separating the river bank from the house garden crows stood on the bank, and others flew about. Settled upon the sheet of gold a foot or so from the bank were two crows, and, because a crow cannot walk on water, they instantly became of interest.

  “If you will excuse me, I’d like to see what those birds are excited about,” Bony said. “Crows are not likeable birds, but they see everything, say everything, know everything.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Mrs Cosgrove, dropping her hands from shielding her eyes. “Have you heard the story of what father crow advised his son? No? Well, father crow said to his son, ‘If you see a boy, don’t fly too near him; and if you see him picking up a stone, fly away fast.’ The son said, ‘I’ll remember that, father. But what do I do if the boy puts his hand in a pocket?’”