An Author Bites the Dust

by Arthur W. Upfield

  “I’ll do the P.M.,” Fleetwood said. “And if I find that death was not due to alcoholic poisoning, that it was caused by another poison, an alkaloid, for instance?”

  “It will strengthen a theory in my mind that this death is connected with the death of Mervyn Blake. It will compel an inquest, and in that both Superintendent Bolt and Inspector Snooks will take exceptional interest—long before I am ready to permit their interest to be roused. Is Professor Ericson in a position to assist you with the post mortem?”

  “Yes, and I feel sure he would be very willing,” replied the doctor. “That’s an idea. Ericson could go very much farther than I could to establish the poison, if there is poison.”

  Bony rose to his feet and loosened his shoulders.

  “Assuming that the professor assented, when would you make the examination?”

  “Tonight, if the professor is agreeable. If not tonight, then first thing tomorrow. I could do the preliminaries this evening.”

  “Could you delay your findings, assuming you found poison?”

  “For two days, perhaps, before reporting to the Coroner. We could find excuses.”

  “Good. I am placed, doctor, in the position of fighting for time.” Bony reached forward and touched Fleetwood upon the label of his coat to emphasize his words. “Cicero said, ‘Certain signs precede certain events’! I am now threatened by certain events preceding me, and that is a situation I find irksome.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Points of Interest

  Having assured Bony of future co-operation, Dr Fleetwood departed, and before his shadow had passed over the old front gate, Bony and Constable Simes were inside Sid Walsh’s bedroom.

  “We must preserve these bottles,” Bony said. “Wrap them in newspaper. Perhaps there’s an old case handy.”

  Without commenting, Simes went to work salving the two whisky bottles.

  “When found, did Walsh have his false teeth in his mouth?” Bony asked.

  “I didn’t notice,” replied Simes.

  “All right. Don’t touch that glass yet. Deal with the bottles by pushing your little finger into the top of them.”

  Bony caught his breath, hating what he had to do. He pulled the blanket down from the face of the dead man, forcing himself to look upon it and mentally shrinking from the awful picture it presented. Simes heard him say, “You didn’t lead a good life, Walsh, did you? Your liking, or weakness, for what you termed guts-shudderer, was your ruin. But you loved flowers, and that must be credited to you. You died with your teeth in your mouth and with your boots on your feet, and you died before you could go to bed. Just too bad. Well, we’ll find out all about it.”

  Covering the face, Bony made a superficial examination of the bedroom, and then looked over the living-room. He went outside and found a lean-to wash-house, and there he poked about for several minutes.

  “Looking for anything in particular?” asked Simes.

  “Yes, a cut-glass tumbler in which Walsh put his false teeth.”

  “Haven’t seen such a tumbler. Only glass in the place is that one on the table in the bedroom. That’s plain and cheap.”

  “Be extra careful of that glass, Simes. No, I don’t think Walsh would tell a lie about the cut-glass tumbler he found buried just inside the Blakes’ gate. There is an old quarry where he used to dump his empties. How far is it from here?”

  “Just outside his eastern fence—about a hundred yards.”

  Bony returned to the bedroom, and examined it more carefully. With the same care he went through the living-room, and on emerging into the glare of the westering sun, confessed that he had learnt nothing from the interior of the hut, save that a cut-glass tumbler was not there, and that a plain glass tumbler was.

  Simes, having packed the whisky bottles and the glass into a wooden case, proceeded to load his pipe whilst he watched Bony walking round and round the hut, shoulders stooped, head bent down. He noted that Bony was moving on his toes, and he received the impression that even the report of a gun would not disturb a mind so completely concentrated on reading tracks. Every time Bony completed a circle, he began another and wider, until eventually he had covered all the ground to the distance of fifty feet about the hut.

  Abruptly the concentration disappeared from the shambling figure, and Bony came walking with his usual smart step to join Simes.

  “That pigeon-toed man who wears a seven in shoes or boots did not immediately knock on Walsh’s door, Bony said. “Before he knocked on the door, he passed on round the house to stand and look in through Walsh’s bedroom window, probably for several minutes. The dog, now—was it found tied up?”

  “Yes, over there. That old barrel was its kennel.”

  “What kind of a dog?”

  “Water spaniel.”

  “Friendly?”

  “Very. Not much of a watch dog, I should think.”

  “Well, we find that the pigeon-toed man came and looked at Walsh through his bedroom window and then went to the back door,” Bony asserted. “I can find no evidence that he entered, because, for one thing, the floor is of boards and was kept reasonably well swept. I wonder why Walsh’s visitor took a cut-glass tumbler and left a plain tumbler in its place? There was the smell of whisky in it, too. Strange that. Walsh told me he never drank from a glass except in a hotel.”

  The patience of the policeman gave out.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” he almost shouted.

  “About drinking glasses, cut and plain, expensive and cheap.”

  “Oh, damn!”

  “No, quarry. Come on.”

  Bony was not satisfied with looking down upon a litter of rusted iron, pots and pans, and broken glass reflecting the sunlight. He walked round the quarry to its entrance and proceeded to poke about among the glass, asking Simes to look for pieces of a cut-glass tumbler.

  At the end of half an hour he gave up, and suggested they sit on a boulder and smoke, and the now desperate constable silently reloaded his pipe and glowered at Bony’s long, brown fingers engaged with making a cigarette.

  Then Bony said, “You’ve been very patient with me, Simes, and in reward I will tell about a ping-pong ball and a cut-glass drinking tumbler.” Ten minutes later, he asked, “Well, what d’you make of it all?”

  “Nothing without the key,” replied Simes. “The toxicologist said he found no poison when, he looked at the insides of Mervyn Blake. That dust might be an unknown poison.”

  “Perhaps not unknown. Perhaps the toxicologist looked for a stomach powder when Blake died of a blood poison. I don’t know that I am expressing my ideas intelligently. I often wish I had studied medicine. What Professor Ericson reported was exceedingly interesting, and he certainly exercises one’s imagination.”

  “I read a book once—now let me think—where—wait a minute.”

  Simes blew a cloud of smoke, which for a moment hung above his head like a crown. “It was a heck of a good book. The feller in it poisoned his wife’s lover with coffin dust. The doctor saying that Professor Ericson thinks that powder is the residuum of a—what kind of animal body was it? Why, what’s the matter?”

  Bony’s blue eyes were blazing and big, and Simes blinked and held suspended a mouthful of smoke.

  “Did you say coffin dust?” Bony asked.

  “Yes, in the book the feller put coffin dust in his wife’s tucker. Bit far-fetched, I thought. I might be wrong, and it might have been the wife’s lover who got it. Anyway, it was a good yarn. My sister got hold of it from somewhere.”

  “Is the book still in your house?”

  “Couldn’t say. You don’t think that that powder could be coffin dust?”

  “What is coffin dust?” Bony demanded. “Did the book tell you that?”

  “Yes,” replied Simes, continuing to be astonished by Bony’s intensity of mind. “In the book, the husband went into an ancient churchyard in the dead of night, opened up a vault, opened a coffin and scooped up the dust that was l
ying underneath the skeleton. The dust was the—what was the word Fleetwood said? Yes, I remember—the residuum. Think we’ve hit on something?”

  “So much so, my dear Simes, that I am very glad you lost your temper just now and so persuaded me to tell you about Mr Pickwick’s ping-pong ball. We must find that book. You go back and bring some plaster of paris. You could return in your car to pick up the case of bottles. I’ll wait for you. We shall want the casts to add to our little collection.”

  When Simes had departed, Bony entered the hut and carried out a further examination of the two rooms. Again he found nothing out of place, but one slight oddity. Where the ends of two floorboards came together, the end of one had recently been re-nailed with two new nails. At first, he thought nothing of it, as the boards were much worn and the age of the hut was, at the shortest, thirty years.

  Subsequently he admitted that had he not had to wait for Constable Simes he would not have investigated further. For a moment he listened for the sound of Simes’s car and, not hearing it, he went to the lean-to wash-house in which, he remembered, there were several tools. Selecting a crowbar he prized up the newly nailed board, and beneath found a glass jar containing a heavy roll of one-pound notes. There were exactly one hundred.

  When Simes returned with the plaster of paris, he was given the money in the jar to lock away in the police station safe, and Bony proceeded to make casts of the significant tracks. The casts having hardened and the date being written upon them, Simes was instructed to take them also to the station, and then try to find the book containing the story about the coffin dust.

  Bony waited for five minutes before leaving the hut and walking slowly along the unmade road to its junction with the highway. There, instead of turning down the hill to Yarrabo, he turned up the highway, keeping to the gravelled footpath and behaving as though he had time to spend admiring the beauties of nature. Not until he had walked a quarter of a mile did he turn about.

  Between the wide strip of macadamed road and the flanking water-gutter there were lesser strips averaging two feet in width, ground comparatively impressionable. Since turning up the road, he had examined the narrow strip between macadam and gutter, as well as examining every inch of the footpath. He had seen tracks of human shoe leather, the tracks left by dogs and by a horse, but among them were not the tracks of either of the men who had abducted Wilcannia-Smythe, or of their car. Crossing the road, he made the same examination of that side as he walked downhill towards the little township. He arrived presently at the side street down which was Mrs Blake’s house. Crossing that, he proceeded until he had gone several yards beyond Miss Pinkney’s gate, and there he paused and stood as though admiring the church on the opposite corner. Then, crossing the macadam again, he sauntered up the road, passing the church, in which he evinced great interest, and so completed the full cycle since parting from Constable Simes. He had found neither the tracks of the car nor of either of the two men who had assaulted Wilcannia-Smythe. And yet the part-prints of the pigeon-toed man on the path from the highway to the gate proved that he had walked from the highway to visit Walsh and had returned to the highway.

  On his way to the Police Station, Bony deliberated on having Wilcannia-Smythe “pulled in” for examination. He could be held on an information, but not for long, and if Mrs Blake did not prosecute, the fellow would have to be freed. As Wilcannia-Smythe could not be made to talk, it would be better to leave him in cold storage a little longer.

  The sun was dipping behind a distant mountain, and the evening train for the city had left Yarrabo, when he reached the police station and called in through the open front door of the house. Simes came along the passage, inviting him to enter and saying that his sister must be at the store, and would certainly soon be back. He conducted Bony into the dining-room, offered him an easy chair beside the open window, and told him that as the kettle was boiling he would have a cup of tea ready “in two ups”. He had not recalled the title of the book, and expressed the hope that his sister would do so.

  Bony could not but like Constable Simes.

  When Simes returned with the tea, Bony asked, “Did you know Captain Pinkney very well?”

  “Oh yes. He was a peppery man and, I’ll bet, a nark at sea,” replied Simes. “After he went to bed I used often to run over there and sit with him. Sometimes his language would be so bad that if he had used it on the street I’d have run him in.”

  “He used to play ping-pong a great deal, according to Miss Pinkney,” Bony stated.

  “Yes, and a heck of a good player, too.”

  “I am going to tell you something else of interest. After her brother became an invalid, Miss Pinkney gave their ping-pong table to the vicar. There was then only one ball of the last batch obtained by the captain from a French firm. Miss Pinkney assures me that the ball found by Mr Pickwick was not that last ball, which could not be found when the table was given to the vicar. Further, she said that her brother always marked the balls he bought with a small ink-spot. There was no ink-spot on the ball Mr Pickwick played with, and so we can assume that that ball was not the last one of the captain’s store. Assume it, I say, because, Simes, the ink mark could have been washed off, or sucked or licked off by the cat, in the course of weeks, if not days.”

  “Ye—es,” Simes agreed, wonderment in his eyes.

  “Miss Pinkney had, at the time Blake died, access to his garden,” Bony went on. “She hated Blake for throwing stones at her Mr Pickwick.”

  “I’m not sure of your drift,” Simes said.

  “Captain Pinkney sailed his ship into all the little-known ports of the world, according to his sister, who often sailed with him. When he retired he had a collection of all kinds of curios and odds and ends, and after he died, she dispatched most of it to a city auctioneer. One of the items he had collected could have been a set of ping-pong balls containing that sinister powder.”

  “But why put the stuff into ping-pong balls, in the first place?”

  “To get it past the customs.”

  “You don’t think that Miss—”

  “I think nothing about it—yet,” Bony said, so seriously that Simes almost believed him. “I have outlined what is a little lesson in deduction. There is the motive. There is access to the scene of the crime. There is the poison—if that powder is a poison—on Miss Pinkney’s premises. And there was the chance to put the powder into Blake’s brandy, and the chance, after he died, to replace the bottle and glass with another bottle and glass.”

  “But could Miss Pinkney replace the glass with a similar one?” asked Simes.

  “That small point reduces probability to possibility,” Bony conceded smilingly. “Having access to the next-door garden, she could previously have burgled Blake’s writing-room for a glass, and Blake might not have noticed the loss, and would not have cared twopence if he had. Remember, we think that the bottle and glass were changed because the person who changed them thought of fingerprints after the poison had been put into the bottle. It would not have mattered so very much if the bottle containing the powder had contained the prints of Mrs Montrose, Mrs Blake, Ethel Lacy, or any one of the guests. But if Miss Pinkney’s prints had been found on a bottle in Blake’s writing-room—what then?”

  “Ah! But it’s impossible! Why, Miss Pinkney would never have done such a thing. No—by heck, Bony, you’d make a man believe anything.”

  “Please don’t mention what I’ve said to Mrs Farn,” Bony pleaded. “I could shoot holes through it as big as the Melbourne Cricket Ground. To be a successful investigator, one must be as cautious as a pawnbroker being offered the Crown Jewels as security. I think this is your sister.”

  “Hullo!” Mrs Farn exclaimed. “Having a little tea party all on your own?”

  “And thoroughly enjoying it,” Bony asserted.

  “Say, sis,” cut in Simes, “d’you remember that yarn we read some time ago in which the hero poisoned his wife’s lover with coffin dust?”

  “Yes. Why?
”

  “Do you remember what book it’s in?”

  “Yes. It’s on the shelf behind you. That blue one next to the gardening book. See it? The Vengeance of Master Atherton, by I.R. Watts.”

  [NOTE—The authority for “Coffin Dust” as a poison is taken from Taylor’s Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence.]

  Chapter Twenty-two

  R Ine I.R. Watts

  The following morning, at half past ten, Bony rang Nancy Chesterfield from a public telephone in Flinders Street. It was a hot and sultry day, and inside the box the heat was unbearable.

  “Good morning, Nan,” he said, in greeting. “Can you come out for morning tea with me?”

  “I could, but I won’t, Bony,” she replied. “It’s far too hot and my office is ever so much cooler.”

  “Then could I call on you? It would not be time wasting.”

  “By all means. I’ll order a second cup of tea and biscuits,” she said. “Honestly though. I couldn’t possibly get away this morning. I’ve got a big news story to deal with. But if you will come up to me, I can spare you half an hour.”

  Five minutes later he was seated beside her desk, and thanking a young lady who had poured tea for them.

  When the girl had gone, he said briskly, “I am not going to detain you very long. This is a busy day for me, too,” and she sensed the earnestness beneath the smile he gave her. “I’m getting warm. Metaphorically, of course. In temperature, I have long since passed the ‘getting’ stage. This tea is delicious. What a train journey, to be sure! Cast your mind back to your visit to the Blakes when Dr Dario Chaparral was staying there. Ready?”

  Nancy Chesterfield laughed delightedly.

  “What a volcano you can be,” she said, mockingly. “D’you know that when we lunched the other day, you didn’t tell me what you thought of Janet Blake and Ella Montrose?”

  “And forgot to thank you for the introduction you posted to me,” he hastily supplemented. “I thank you now—for being a downright good sportswoman. I found both the ladies very charming. How did you know I called on Mrs Blake?”