by Tony Medawar
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 neighbour 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 Wondong. 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 organised 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 memorised 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 neighbouring 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 carcass 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 carcass of the calf?’ Cattlemen never do such a thing unless a beast dies close to their camp. In parts of the continent, carcasses 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 carcasses 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.’
‘Very well, I’ll do that.’
‘Thanks. Would you care to undertake a little inquiry for me?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Then talk guardedly to those men you sent to meet Reynolds every Monday and ascertain from them the relationship which existed between Reynolds and Harry Larkin. As is often the case with lonely men stationed near the boundary fence of two properties, according to Larkin he and Reynolds used to meet now and then by arrangement. They may have quarrelled. Have you ever met Larkin?’
‘On several occasions, yes,’ replied the manager.
‘And your impressions of him? As a man?’
‘I thought him intelligent. Inclined to be morose, of course, but then men who live alone often are. You are not thinking that—?’
‘I’m thinking that Reynolds is not in your country. Had he been still on your property, I would have found him dead or alive. When I set out to find a missing man, I find him. I shall find Reynolds, eventually—if there is anything of him to find.’
On the third evening that the manager went out to the little hut, Bony showed him a small and slightly convex disc of silver. It was weathered and in one place cracked. It bore the initials J.M.M.
‘I found that in the vicinity of the site of a large fire,’ Bony said. ‘It might establish that William Reynolds is no longer alive.’
Although Harry Larkin was supremely confident, he was not quite happy. He had not acted without looking at the problem from all angles and without having earnestly sought the answer to the question: ‘If I shoot him dead, burn the body on a good fire, go through the ashes for the bones which I pound to dust in a dolly pot, and for the metal bits and pieces which I dissolve in sulphuric acid, how can I be caught?’ The answer was plain.
He had carried through the sundowner’s method of utterly destroying the body of the murder victim, and to avoid the million-to-one chance of anyone coming across the ashes of the fire and being made suspicious, he had shot a calf as kangaroos were scarce.
Yes, he was confident, and confident that he was justified in being confident. Nothing remained of Bill Reynolds, damn him, save a little greyish dust which was floating around somewhere.
The slight unhappiness was caused by a strange visitation, signs of which he had first discovered when returning home from his work one afternoon. On the ground near the blacksmith’s shop he found a strange set of boot tracks which were not older than two days. He followed these tracks backward to the house, and then forward until he lost them in the scrub.
Nothing in the house was touched, as far as he could see, and nothing had been taken from the blacksmith’s shop, or interfered with. The dolly pot was still in the corner into which he had dropped it after its last employment, and the crowbar was still leaning against the anvil. On the shelf was the acid jar. There was no acid in it. He had used it to dissolve, partially, buttons and the metal band around a pipestem and boot sprigs. The residue of those metal objects he had dropped into a hole in a tree eleven miles away.
It was very strange. A normal visitor, finding the occupier away, would have left a note at the house. Had the visitor been black, he would not have left any tracks, if bent on mischief.
The next day Larkin rode out to the boundary fence and on the way he visited the site of his fire. There he found the plain evidence that someone had moved the bones of the animal and had delved among the ashes still remaining from the action of the wind.
Thus he was not happy, but still supremely confident. They could not tack anything on to him. They couldn’t even prove that Reynolds was dead. How could they when there was nothing of him left?
It was again Sunday, and Larkin was washing his clothes at the outside fire when the sound of horses’ hoofs led him to see two men approaching. His lips vanished into a mere line, and his mind went over all the answers he would give if the police ever did call on him. One of the men he did not know. The other was Mounted Constable Evans.
They dismounted, anchori
ng their horses by merely dropping the reins to the ground. Larkin searched their faces and wondered who was the slim half-caste with, for a half-caste, the singularly blue eyes.
‘Good day,’ Larkin greeted them.
‘Good day, Larkin,’ replied Constable Evans, and appeared to give his trousers a hitch. His voice was affable, and Larkin was astonished when, after an abrupt and somewhat violent movement, he found himself handcuffed.
‘Going to take you in for the murder of William Reynolds,’ Evans announced. ‘This is Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte.’
‘You must be balmy—or I am,’ Larkin said.
Evans countered with: ‘You are. Come on over to the house. A car will be here in about half an hour.’
The three men entered the kitchen where Larkin was told to sit down.
‘I haven’t done anything to Reynolds, or anyone else,’ asserted Larkin, and for the first time the slight man with the brilliant blue eyes spoke.
‘While we are waiting, I’ll tell you all about it, Larkin. I’ll tell it so clearly that you will believe I was watching you all the time. You used to meet Reynolds at the boundary fence gate, and the two of you would indulge in a spot of gambling—generally at poker. Then one day you cheated and there was a fight in which you were thrashed.
‘You knew what day of the week Reynolds would ride that boundary fence and you waited for him on your side. You held him up and made him climb over the fence while you covered him with your .32 high-power Savage rifle. You made him walk to a place within a mile of here, where there was plenty of dry wood, and there you shot him and burned his body.
‘The next day you returned with a dolly pot and a sieve. You put all the bones through the dolly pot, and then you sieved all the ashes for metal objects in Reynolds’ clothes and burned them up with sulphuric acid. Very neat. The perfect crime, you must agree.’
‘If I done all that, which I didn’t, yes,’ Larkin did agree.