“It was here where poor Alice Tindall was found, wasn’t it?” Bony asked.
Harry West shrugged his shoulders without knowing it. “Yes,” he said, to add quickly: “Come away, Joe. I hate this place even in daylight.”
“Why, it is entrancingly beautiful,” Bony objected. “What a waterhole! It must have been a great camping-place for all the blacks in this district. Water! Cool and precious water now that the summer is come again. Shade! Real shade cast by these trees which suckered before Dampier ever saw Australia. There was loving and fighting, chanting and feasting for years upon years, Harry, all about this waterhole. Then the white man came, and for still a few more years the blacks lived their unfettered lives. But there was no more hunting and, because the white man’s tucker was easy to get—by working for it—there was no more real feasting. Finally came the dreaded bunyip to drive them all away, and this beautiful place now is desolate.”
“Aw, come on!” urged Harry. “We can talk about ’em on our way. Yes, there was always blacks hereabouts before Alice Tindall was strangled. After that, when Simone had finished roaring at ’em, not a one would come within fifty miles of the place. And I don’t blame ’em, bee-lieve me.”
“She was a nice-looking girl, wasn’t she?” Bony said as they strode away from the river, across the bluebush plain.
“Too right she was. As you know, she was a half-caste, but like you she had sharp features. Old Dogger Smith—you ain’t met him yet; he’s the biggest character in Noo South—told me she was born white and didn’t begin to colour until she was past twelve. That sounds funny, but it’s right, maybe. But pretty! Gosh—she was just lovely.”
“How old was she when——?”
“Getting on for eighteen. She was a corker. She had blue eyes, lighter in colour and brighter than yours, Joe. She had long straight hair what hung down her back in plaits. She wasn’t too dark of skin, either. Well, Miss Borradale always took a great interest in Alice. She wanted Alice to be a maid at ‘Government House’, but Alice wouldn’t take it on. Still, that didn’t make no difference with Miss Borradale. She encouraged Alice to visit the maids at ‘Government House’, and she gave her clothes and showed her how to wear ’em. Alice often went with Miss Borradale out riding and sometimes in the car, and it was because of Miss Borradale that Alice grew up as good as she was pretty. Blokes would no more look cross-eyed at Alice than they would at their sisters.
“ ’Course all the blokes were after her. When she was a baby, according to old Dogger Smith, there was a lot of talk about her being taken away from the tribe, and people reckoned she would have been took, only her mother uster cook at ‘Government House’, and she got old Borradale to put a spoke in somebody’s wheel. Anyway, as I said, Miss Borradale had a lot of influence over her, and she wouldn’t have anything to do with any bloke, black or white. I fancy meself a bit, and I tried pretty hard to hang my hat up on her, but it was no win. Even Hang-dog Jack uster shiver and shake when she spoke to him, and the funny part about it was that she wasn’t afraid of him. You’d think she would have been scared stiff by a bloke with a dial like he’s got. There was one man, though, who could have got her if he had thought about it.”
“Oh! Who?” purred the interested detective.
“The boss. I seen her looking at him more’n once when he wasn’t looking at her, and she didn’t know I was looking at her. She uster stand still—quite still—and look at him … like … like. …”
“Like what?” Bony softly asked.
“You ever been in love, Joe?” surprisingly asked Harry West, and he appeared to find the distant town interesting as he put this question.
“Of course. I am still in love.”
“Well, then you’ll understand. Alice uster look at the boss with her blue eyes shining like stars—like—like my Tilly looks at me sometimes. I tries to remember how she looked them times, not as she looked when me and the boss saw her dead.”
The young man fell silent, and, having given him a few seconds, Bony urged him to proceed.
“The evening before, Alice had been up at ‘Government House’ jabbering with the maids. It came on to thunder and lightnin’ and the night was as black as the ace of spades. Anyhow, Alice stayed put till the dry storm had passed over, but even then the air was thick with sand. We blokes had gone to bunk. It was no use any of us asking to take her to the camp, because she would have refused and run off, and even I couldn’t catch her. I tried one afternoon, kiddin’ I’d kiss her if I caught her, but she left me at the post.
“At the time, a recent flood down the creeks had left filled to the brims both Junction and Station waterholes, and there was a wide stream of water connectin’ them. Alice had to walk up this side of the river and cross it above Junction Waterhole to reach the camp, which was on the far side. Not one of the blacks heard her scream out—if she ever did—and the camp from the place where she was strangled was only sixty-odd yards away. Anyway, old Billy Snowdrop, wot’s supposed to be the king of the tribe, came running to the homestead, where me and the boss and Dogger Smith was talking by the stockyards.
“For quite a bit, Billy Snowdrop kep’ up a jabbering we couldn’t understand about a banshee or bunyip what lived in the creek trees near the camp. After Dogger Smith grabbed Snowdrop’s whiskers and shook him up we gets it that early that morning Sarah was on her way to the homestead to do the washing, not having enough gumption to know there wouldn’t be no washing done that day, when she finds Alice dead under a gum-tree. Well, we ran back with Billy Snowdrop to the body. Aw—it was crook all right. It mightn’t have been so crook if Alice had been old and ugly. I don’t like thinking about how she looked that morning. No, not even now.”
“Did no one know who was her father?”
“Not that ever I heard.”
“What was done after you were taken to the body?” Bony asked.
“The boss sent me back to the homestead to drive the car into Carie and bring back Lee and Dr. Mulray. He wouldn’t let me go near ‘Government House’, or tell Donald Dreyton to telephone from the office, for fear of upsetting Miss Borradale, who got upset bad enough when she did hear. As I was leaving, the blacks were rushing across the river above the waterhole, and Billy Snowdrop was yelling for all of ’em bar one or two good trackers to keep back.”
“Did they find any tracks, Harry?”
“By then the wind was raging like hell let loose. There was no tracks for even them to find, and it started them off talking about the bunyip.”
For a spell they walked in silence.
Then Harry said, “ ’Course, we all reckons a bunyip is a kind of blackfeller’s bush ghost. When Simone heard of it he laughed at the blacks, and when they kept it up he roared at ’em and told them to shut up about their fool banshee. Ever since then I have thought there might be something in that bunyip idea. Old Dogger Smith reckons there is, anyway. He fell out of Ma Nelson’s pub one night a bit the worse for wear, and he got slewed and ended up at Nogga Creek, where he thinks it’s as well to camp. He swears he dreamed hearing a banshee or bunyip laughing at him from up in the tree he was camped under. Queer old bird, Dogger Smith.”
“In what way?”
“Well, for a start, he’s about a hundred and fifty not out. Then, when you camps with him, he keeps you up all night talking about murders. He’s great on murders. There ain’t no one in this district he don’t know all about. He knew ’em when they was babies, and he knew everything about their pa’s and ma’s before ’em. He’s a corker all right, but he’s got sense with it.”
The sun’s flaming aftermath was drenching the township with colour, and they had vaulted the boundary-fence in preference to opening and shutting one of the gates, when Bony asked:
“What men were at the homestead when Alice was murdered?”
“Men? Oh, me and Dogger Smith, Bill the Cobbler and Hang-dog Jack.”
“Only four of you? How many were there when Frank Marsh was
killed?”
“Lemme think! Yes, the same four and Young-and-Jackson and Waxy Ted. Cripes! That was a night!”
“Indeed!”
“Too right! The day before Frank Marsh was killed Waxy Ted got a fiver from Tatt’s. What does he do but invite all hands to town that evening Frank was murdered. It happened that Lee was upset about something and wasn’t in a good mood, and Mum Nelson gave orders to James that the bar wasn’t to be opened up to the general public. It was no good Waxy Ted trying to get a drink, ’cos when he’s half-stung he will insist on singing ‘The Face on the Bar-room Floor’. So me and Bill the Cobbler, we took the fiver to the back door and persuades James to hand out thirty bottles of beer, which we takes to the mob parked at the Common gates.
“Hot? It was a hell of a night, and after we had necked more’n half the beer we wasn’t even cheerful about it. So we decides to stagger back to the men’s hut and polish off the rest, and just as we were about to start, along comes Frank Marsh. He was a decent bloke. He was working and camping at the Storries’, making water-tanks. Anyway, when he arrived on his way to town we had to open up another round of bottles, so that by the time we parted from him it must have been around ten o’clock. Gosh! We didn’t think then that poor old Frank would be lying dead at them gates next daybreak. You know, Joe, things are getting worse than crook. Me and Tilly is afraid to walk out after dark.”
“You don’t think Barry Elson committed these crimes?”
“No, I don’t, as I said at dinner. The bloke wot’s doing them must be strongish. Alice and Frank and Mabel were reasonably well set up, and it would take a stronger man than Elson to kill them with his bare hands. Tilly backs me up in that.”
“Ah, Tilly! Did she like the ring?”
“Too right, she did. She’s still talking about it. She reckons it’s miles better than the one Ma Nelson gave Mabel Storrie, and that was a bonzer.”
Chapter Fifteen
Iron Hands
AT DAWN THE following Tuesday the wind began rapidly to freshen from the north, and when the pale-yellow sun rose sluggishly above the rim of the world it cast not black, but dirty grey shadows. By noon the sand waves were rolling over the bluebush plain, and the dead buckbush again lay piled against the fence that Detective-Inspector Bonaparte had slaved to clean. The sun went down in a brown murk, but among the men opinions of the next day’s weather were divided.
Darkness arrived half an hour before due time, and Bony, who had most reluctantly decided to maintain an all-night vigil, slipped away from the homestead at five minutes to eight. He had prepared for a night’s absence from the men’s quarters with the story that Dr. Mulray and he were still fighting a game of chess and that they had determined to sit up till morning, if necessary, to finish it.
The night was not quite so evil as that he had spent at Catfish Hole. The stars could be seen, if faintly, and the darkness was not absolute. The wind had dropped to a strong breeze, and, the temperature of the sand-particles being lowered by the going down of the sun, the wind had now no power to raise them off the ground.
With the cunning and the silence of his maternal ancestors, Bony moved without sound. Never a dead stick broke beneath his feet. He saw obstacles into which a white man would have blundered, over which a white man would have tripped, into which a white man would have plunged, with risk of broken bones.
On leaving the homestead he walked due north out on to the bluebush plain. Here he could not see the river trees, but he could see the weak spark of light which was the oil lamp suspended outside Nelson’s Hotel. The wind moaned and sighed dolefully about the bushes that appear so desirous of preserving their individuality by demanding plenty of space around them. Although Bony was forced to walk erratically to avoid them, he yet succeeded in keeping to a predetermined course.
Without once seeing either the river gums or the creek box-trees, he arrived at that solitary leopardwood-tree in which the crows had been quarrelling that afternoon he had tracked Donald Dreyton up into a box-tree. The Three Sisters and the Southern Cross announced the time to be a few minutes after nine o’clock.
Standing close to that side of the handsome, spotted trunk nearest the township, Bony made a cigarette, and then, with his coat removed and enveloping his head, he struck a match to light it. Thereafter he sat with his back to the tree, facing Carie, and smoked, confident that the west wind would not carry the scent of tobacco to the creek.
It was just such a night for which he had been waiting—a night when the aborigines’ bunyip could be expected to walk, or swing along from tree to tree. Notwithstanding, Bony felt nervous and could not banish his nervousness. Here he sat trying to calm his nerves with cigarette-smoke, wearing a dark cloth coat with the collar turned up and pinned at his throat so that no portion of his white working shirt would be visible. In the right-hand pocket of the coat lay an automatic pistol of small calibre, and in the other was a reliable electric torch.
Who was this strangling beast who behaved like a monkey in trees, who killed with no motive save to gratify a lust to kill? Was his name on the list of persons supplied by Constable Lee? Was he a man, or was he, after all, the bush bunyip? Bony’s aboriginal blood tingled, and Bony’s white man’s mind fought to still the tingling. After a moment’s struggle the mind conquered the blood.
At this point of the investigation he was presented with several pertinent questions for which he could not supply the answers. He was decided that as the three crimes had been committed south of Carie the criminal must live in the township, or at Wirragatta or Storrie’s selection, and of the list of Lee’s names he had struck off all but eleven. These eleven men were “possibles”, but no one of them was a “probable” save, perhaps, Hang-dog Jack. They were:
HANG-DOG JACK, the cook
DONALD DREYTON, the book-keeper fence-rider
BILL THE COBBLER, station-hand
HARRY WEST, station-hand
FRED STORRIE, the selector
TOM STORRIE, the selector’s son
MARTIN BORRADALE, the boss of Wirragatta
CONSTABLE LEE
WEAVER, the storekeeper
JAMES SPINKS, the barman
DOGGER SMITH, the trapper
One of these men was the murderer of Alice Tindall and Frank Marsh, and the attacker of Mabel Storrie. They all had pre-knowledge of the movements of each of the three victims. There were names on the list struck off because, although the owners had pre-knowledge of the movements of one victim, it was proved that they had not this knowledge of the movements of the other. One of the eleven “possibles” was the murderer.
That the man who swung himself from tree to tree along certain sections of Nogga Creek was the person he called the Strangler, Bony was reasonably sure. The obvious reason for this singular method of locomotion appeared to be the desire to leave behind him as few tracks as possible. Yet in this case the obvious might not be the correct basis for argument. The assumption that the crimes were premeditated might be wrong. They might have been begotten by Impulse allied with Chance.
More than a third of the names remaining on his list he could with excuse have rubbed out, but, although the law assumes a man to be innocent until proved guilty, it is the detective’s duty to regard all suspects as guilty until investigation proves which of them are innocent.
Bony had not yet met Dogger Smith. Lee was a “possible”, because he admitted he knew that Alice Tindall was visiting the Wirragatta homestead the night she was killed. And, of course, he knew when Marsh and Mabel Storrie were in the town.
Of only one thing was Bony absolutely sure. The Strangler was no ordinary criminal. He had made only one mistake, which was the repetition of his crimes. This proved that his motive was the primal one, the lust to kill. He belonged to the terrible class of maniacs who can successfully conceal their mania from those about them—by far the most dangerous units of human society.
Perhaps it is no wonder that this half-caste Austr
alian was fearful.
The cigarette having been consumed, he pushed the glowing stub into the soft, deep sand on which he was sitting, rose and stepped from the friendly tree, mentally girding his loins. Two minutes later he reached the creek track to the Broken Hill road, crossed it whilst his skin prickled and came direct to that tree into which Dreyton had climbed to retrieve the piece of grey flannel. It was the end one of fourteen trees forming one of the sections along which the “bunyip” progressed from branch to branch.
At the foot of this tree Bony determined to spend the night. He sat down with his back against its trunk, facing the north and the township, now masked from him by the intervening bluebush. No one could pass along the creek track without being observed. The circumference of the trunk at his shoulders was about five feet, and the knowledge was comforting that even a gorilla could not attack him from its far side and throttle him. Because of his dark clothes and skin, no one could see him from the branches this black, humid and sinister night. Yet, to him, anyone up among the branches would be silhouetted against the sky.
When he had taken up this position, Bony’s nerves became less taut. He felt much less vulnerable to attack than he had done when walking to and from the leopardwood-tree. He was not a powerful man—not even a very robust one—and he knew that he would be no match for a man who could strangle with his hands a young fellow like Frank Marsh.
It says much for Bony that he essayed this vigil. The fears and inhibitions of his mother’s people were in his blood, and like all clever men his imaginative power was much too strong for this kind of work. Reasoning is for daylight, when the primal man in each of us can be, and is, forced back into the mists of time. Like many a white man who knows his bush, Bony believed in the bush spirit named by the blacks as “bunyip”, the spirit that gloats over the unfortunate who, alone, meets with accident, the spirit which lurks close by to a dry waterhole and watches the arrival of men without water. It is everywhere, the bunyip. It watches from the heart of every bush, from behind every tree-trunk, from the summit of every sandhill and from the foot of every mirage.
Bony - 05 - Winds of Evil Page 13