Bodies from the Library

by Tony Medawar

  ‘Well, assuming that not you but another did all I have outlined, why did the murderer shoot and burn the carcass of a calf on the same fire site?’

  ‘You tell me,’ said Larkin.

  ‘Good. I’ll even do that. You shot Reynolds and you disposed of his body, as I’ve related. Having killed him, you immediately dragged wood together and burned the body, keeping the fire going for several hours. Now, the next day, or the day after that, it rained, and that rainfall fixed your actions like words printed in a book. You went through the ashes for Reynolds’ bones before it rained, and you shot the calf and lit the second fire after it rained. You dropped the calf at least two hundred yards from the scene of the murder, and you carried the carcass on your back over those two hundred yards. The additional weight impressed your boot prints on the ground much deeper than when you walk about normally, and although the rain washed out many of your boot prints, it did not remove your prints made when carrying the dead calf. You didn’t shoot the calf, eh?’

  ‘No, of course I didn’t,’ came the sneering reply. ‘I burned the carcass of a calf that died. I keep my camp clean. Enough blowflies about as it is.’

  ‘But you burned the calf’s carcass a full mile away from your camp. However, you shot the calf, and you shot it to burn the carcass in order to prevent possible curiosity. You should have gone through the ashes after you burned the carcass of the calf and retrieved the bullet fired from your own rifle.’

  Bony smiled, and Larkin glared.

  Constable Evans said, ‘Keep your hands on the table, Larkin.’

  ‘You know, Larkin, you murderers often make me tired,’ Bony went on. ‘You think up a good idea, and then fall down executing it.

  ‘You thought up a good one by dollying the bones and sieving the ashes for the metal objects on a man’s clothes and in his boots, and then—why go and spoil it by shooting a calf and burning the carcass on the same fire site? It wasn’t necessary. Having pounded Reynolds’ bones to ash and scattered the ash to the four corners, and having retrieved from the ashes remaining evidence that a human body had been destroyed, there was no necessity to burn a carcass. It wouldn’t have mattered how suspicious anyone became. Your biggest mistake was burning that calf. That act connects you with that fire.’

  ‘Yes, well, what of it?’ Larkin almost snarled. ‘I got a bit lonely livin’ here alone for months, and one day I sorta got fed up. I seen the calf, and I up with me rifle and took a pot shot at it.’

  ‘It won’t do,’ Bony said, shaking his head. ‘Having taken a pot shot at the calf, accidentally killing it, why take a dolly pot to the place where you burned the carcass? You did carry a dolly pot, the one in the blacksmith’s shop, to the scene of the fire, for the imprint of the dolly pot on the ground is still plain in two places.’

  ‘Pretty good tale, I must say,’ said Larkin. ‘You still can’t prove that Bill Reynolds is dead.’

  ‘No?’ Bony’s dark face registered a bland smile, but his eyes were like blue opals. ‘When I found a wisp of brown wool attached to the boundary fence, I was confident that Reynolds had climbed it, merely because I was sure his body was not on his side of the fence. You made him walk to the place where you shot him, and then you saw the calf and the other cattle in the distance, and you shot the calf and carried it to the fire.

  ‘I have enough to put you in the dock, Larkin—and one other little thing which is going to make certain you’ll hang. Reynolds was in the Army during the war. He was discharged following a head wound. The surgeon who operated on Reynolds was a specialist in trepanning. The surgeon always scratched his initials on the silver plate he inserted into the skull of a patient. He has it on record that he operated on William Reynolds, and he will swear that the plate came from the head of William Reynolds, and will also swear that the plate could not have been detached from Reynolds’ head without great violence.’

  ‘It wasn’t in the ashes,’ gasped Larkin, and then realised his slip.

  ‘No, it wasn’t in the ashes, Larkin,’ Bony agreed. ‘You see, when you shot him at close quarters, probably through the forehead, the expanding bullet took away a portion of the poor fellow’s head—and the trepanning plate. I found the plate lodged in a sandalwood tree growing about thirty feet from where you burned the body.’

  Larkin glared across the table at Bony, his eyes freezing as he realised that the trap had indeed sprung on him. Bony was again smiling. He said, as though comfortingly, ‘Don’t fret, Larkin. If you had not made all those silly mistakes, you would have made others equally fatal. Strangely enough, the act of homicide always throws a man off balance. If it were not so, I would find life rather boring.’

  ARTHUR UPFIELD

  Born in England in 1890, Arthur William Upfield is probably Australia’s best known writer of detective fiction. He landed in Adelaide, Australia, in 1911 intending to become a surveyor but ending up working on a pineapple plantation. He enlisted in the Australian military in August 1914, fighting in Gallipoli and in France, from time to time selling short stories and articles to the press back home about the experiences of the Australian. In 1915, he married an Australian nurse with whom he had one child, and after the war, he returned to work in England as secretary to the chairman of an ordnance factory.

  But the pull of Australia was too strong and the Upfields returned in 1920. He travelled extensively throughout Australia, working in a variety of jobs—‘droving, rabbiting, kangaroo-hunting, prospecting, opal-gouging and anything else that was going’. In 1925, Upfield started writing in his spare time ‘working in camel carts, station kitchens, in tents, on tucker-boxes under the mulgas— anywhere I could use pencil and paper.’ He wrote more short stories and six novels, one of which was published in book form, a thriller entitled The House of Cain (1928). Its success prompted him to try his hand at a detective story, and in The Barrakee Mystery (1929) he introduced Detective Inspector Napoleon ‘Bony’ Bonaparte of the Queensland police, the son of an aboriginal mother and a white father.

  Around this time, Upfield had started working on the infamous ‘No. 1 Rabbit Fence’ in Western Australia. His third book, The Beach of Atonement (1930), was a thriller but did not feature Bony. However, the detective returned in The Sands of Windee (1931), which led to Upfield’s giving evidence against a man on trial for murdering three transient labourers. While writing the novel, Upfield had discussed the plot with other labourers on the rabbit-proof fence, including the man accused of the murders who had realised how he could exploit the ‘perfect’ murder method that Upfield planned to use in the book. The trial led to the novel’s being serialised in countless newspapers across the country and, never one to miss an opportunity himself, Upfield also wrote a book on the case, The Murchison Murders (1934).

  Later in the 1940s, Upfield joined the Australian Geological Society and led an expedition to northern and western parts of Australia, including the Wolfe Creek Crater, the setting for the Bony novel The Will of the Tribe (1962). Bony remained very popular, appearing in 28 novels, all of which draw on the author’s experiences of outback life and one of which had been left unfinished at the time of his death in 1964. Upfield also wrote an autobiography which, curiously, appeared under the name of his long-time companion, Jessica Hawke, for whom Upfield had left his wife in 1945.

  He wrote ‘The Fool and the Perfect Murder’, the only short story to feature Bony, in 1948 when it was submitted to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for a short story contest. Astonishingly it was mislaid and not published until 1979, when it appeared in the magazine under the title ‘Wisp of Wool and Disk of Silver’, a title not coined by Upfield.

  BREAD UPON THE WATERS

  A. A. Milne

  ‘Kindness doesn’t always pay,’ said Coleby, ‘and I can tell you a very sad story which proves it.’

  ‘Kindness is its own reward,’ I said. I knew that nobody else would say it if I didn’t.

  ‘The reward in this case was the hangman’s rope. Which is what I was say
ing.’

  ‘Is it a murder story?’

  ‘Very much so.’

  ‘Good!’

  ‘What was the name of the kind gentleman?’ asked Sylvia.

  ‘Julian Crayne.’

  ‘And he was hanged?’

  ‘Very unfairly, or so he thought. And if you will listen to the story instead of asking silly questions, you can say whether you agree with him.’

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘About thirty.’

  ‘Good-looking?’

  ‘Not after he was hanged. Do you want to hear this story or don’t you?’

  ‘Yes!’ said everybody.

  So Coleby told us the story.

  Julian Crayne (he said) was an unpleasantly smooth young man who lived with his Uncle Marius in the country. He should have been working, but he disliked work.

  He disliked the country, too; but a suggestion that he should help the export drive in London with a handsome allowance from Marius met with an unenthusiastic response; even when he threw in an offer to come down regularly for week-ends and bring some of his friends with him.

  Marius didn’t particularly like his nephew, but he liked having him about. Rich, elderly bachelors often become bores, and bores prefer to have somebody at hand who cannot escape.

  Marius did not intend to let Julian escape. To have nobody to talk to through the week, and then to have a houseful of rowdy young people at the weekend, none of whom wanted to listen to him, was not his idea of pleasure. He had the power over his nephew which money gives, and he preferred to use it.

  ‘It will all come to you when I die, my boy,’ he said, ‘and until then you won’t grudge a sick old man the pleasure of your company.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Julian. ‘It was only that I was afraid you were getting tired of me.’

  If Marius had really been a sick old man, any loving nephew such as Julian might have been content to wait.

  But Marius was a sound 65, and in that very morning’s newspaper there had been talk of somebody who had just celebrated his 105th birthday at Runcorn.

  Julian didn’t know where Runcorn was, but he could add 40 years to his own age and ask himself what the devil would be the use of this money at 70; whereas now, with £150,000 in the bank and all life to come—well, you can see for yourself how the thing would look to him.

  I don’t know if any of you have ever wondered how to murder an uncle; I mean an uncle whose heir and only relation you are.

  As we all know, the motives for murder are many. Revenge, passion, gain, fear, or simply the fact that you have seen the fellow’s horrible face in the paper so often that you feel it to be almost a duty to eliminate it.

  The only person I have ever wanted to murder is—well, I won’t mention names, because I may do it yet.

  But the point is that the police, in their stolid unimaginative way, always look first for the money motive, and if the money motive is there, you are practically in the bag.

  So you see the very difficult position in which Julian was placed. He lived alone with his uncle’s heir, and his uncle was a very rich man.

  However subtly he planned, the dead weight of that £150,000 was against him. Any other man might push Marius into the river, and confidently wait for a verdict of Accidental Death; but not Julian.

  Any other man might place a tablet of some untraceable poison in the soda-mint bottle, and look for a certificate of ‘Death from Natural Causes’; but not Julian.

  Any other man might tie a string across the top step of the attic stairs—but I need not go on. You see, as Julian saw, how terribly unfair it was. The thing really got on his mind. He used to lie awake night after night thinking how unfair it was; and how delightfully easy it would be if it weren’t for this £150,000.

  I have said that Uncle Marius was a bore. Bores can be divided into two classes: those who have their own particular subject, and those who don’t need a subject.

  Marius was in the former, and less offensive, class. Shortly before his retirement (he was in the tea business) he had brought off a remarkable double. He had filled in his first football pools form ‘just to see how it went’, distributing the numbers and the crosses in an impartial spirit, and had posted it ‘just for fun’; following this up by taking over a lottery ticket from a temporarily embarrassed but rather intimidating gentleman whom he met in the train.

  The result being what it was, Marius was convinced that he had a flair, or, as he put it, ‘a nose for things’.

  So when he found that through the long winter evenings—and, indeed, during most at the day—there was nothing to do in the country but read detective stories. It soon became obvious to him that he had a nose for crime.

  Well, it was this nose which poor Julian had had to face. It was bad enough, whenever a real crime was being exploited in the papers, to listen to his uncle’s assurance that once again Scotland Yard was at fault, since it was obviously the mother-in-law who had put the arsenic in the gooseberry tart; it was much more boring when the murder had taken place in the current detective story, and Marius was following up a confused synopsis of the first half with his own analysis of the clues.

  And it was at just such a moment as this that Julian was suddenly inspired.

  ‘You know, Uncle Marius,’ he smiled, ‘you ought to write a detective story.’

  Marius laughed self-consciously and said that he didn’t know about that.

  ‘Oh, I daresay I should be all right with the deduction and induction and so on—that’s what I’m really interested in—but I’ve never thought of myself as a writer. There’s a bit of a knack to it, you know. More in your line than mine, I should have thought.’

  ‘Uncle, you’ve said it!’ cried Julian. ‘We’ll write it together. Two heads are better than one. We can talk it over every evening and criticise each other’s suggestions. What do you say?’

  Marius was delighted with the idea … So, of course, was Julian. He had found his collaborator.

  Yes (went on Coleby, wiping his mouth), I know what you are expecting.

  Half of you are telling yourselves that, ironically enough, it was Uncle who thought of the fool-proof plan for murder which Nephew put into execution; and the rest of you are thinking what much more fun it would be if Nephew thought of the plan, and, somewhat to his surprise, Uncle put it into execution.

  Actually it didn’t happen quite like that.

  Marius, when it came to the point, had nothing much to contribute. But he knew what he liked.

  For him one murder in a book was no longer enough. There must be two, the first one preferably at a country house-party, with plenty of suspects.

  Then, at a moment when he is temporarily baffled, the Inspector receives a letter inviting him to a secret rendezvous at midnight, where the writer will be waiting to give him important information.

  He arrives to find a dying man, who is just able to gasp out ‘Horace’ (or was it Hoxton?) before expiring in his arms. The murderer has struck again!

  ‘You see the idea, my boy? It removes any doubt in the reader’s mind that the first death was accidental, and provides the detective with a second set of clues. By collating the two sets—’

  ‘You mean,’ said Julian, ‘that it would be taken for granted that the murderer was the same in the two cases?’

  ‘Well, of course, my dear boy, of course,’ said Marius, surprised at the question. ‘What else?’

  ‘The poacher, or whoever it was, had witnessed the first murder, but had foolishly given some hint of his knowledge to others—possibly in the bar of the local public-house. Naturally the murderer has to eliminate him before the information can be passed on to the police.’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Julian thoughtfully. ‘Yes … Exactly … You know,’ and he smiled at his uncle. ‘I think something might be done on those lines.’

  For there, he told himself happily, was the fool-proof plan. First, commit a completely motiveless murder, of which he could not possibly
be suspected.

  Then, which would be easy, encourage Uncle Marius to poke his ‘nose for things’ into the case; convince him that he and he alone had found the solution; and persuade him to make an appointment with the local Inspector.

  And then, just before the Inspector arrives, ‘strike again’.

  It may seem to some of you that in taking on this second murder Julian was adding both to his difficulties and his moral responsibility.

  But you must remember that through all these months of doubt he had been obsessed by one thing only, the intolerable burden of motive; so that suddenly to be rid of it, and to be faced with a completely motiveless killing, gave him an exhilarating sense of freedom in which nothing could go wrong.

  He had long been feeling that such a murder would be easy. He was now persuaded that it would be blameless.

  The victim practically selected himself, and artistically, Julian liked to think, was one of whom Uncle Marius would have approved.

  A mile or two away at Birch Hall lived an elderly gentleman of the name at Corphew. Not only was he surrounded by greedy relations of both sexes, but in his younger days he had lived a somewhat mysterious life in the East.

  It did not outrage credibility to suppose that, as an innocent young man, he might have been mixed up in some secret society, or, as a more experienced one, have robbed some temple of its most precious jewel; and though no dark man had been seen loitering in the neighbourhood lately, at least it was common knowledge that Sir George had a great deal of money to leave, and was continually altering or threatening to alter his will.

  In short, his situation fulfilled all the conditions which Uncle Marius demanded of a good detective story.

  At the moment Julian had no personal acquaintance with Sir George; and though, of course, they would have to be in some sort of touch with each other at the end, his first idea was to remain discreetly outside the family circle.

  Later reflection, however, told him that in this case it would be better to be recognised as just a friendly acquaintance; obviously harmless, obviously with nothing to gain, even something to lose, by Sir George’s death.