An Author Bites the Dust

by Arthur W. Upfield

  The Defence

  “As you know I killed my husband, I’ll tell you why I killed him,” Mrs Blake said. “I’ll tell you because, long ago, I resolved not to fight if ever I were found out.”

  The deep bosom lifted a fraction, pushing back the shoulders. The fine feminine head went upward as the wide mouth and the firm chin were recast by strength, leaving nothing of weakness. The wide-spaced dark eyes beneath the deep dark brows became occupied only with Bony. Her voice gained steadiness.

  “When I married Mervyn Blake, I loved him greatly,” she said. “He was brilliant, his mental capacity was remarkable, and we were bound by interests that normally should have enabled us to bridge all gulfs likely to open before married people. These interests were literary, for he was writing his first novel and I had published a number of short stories and a volume of verse.

  “Six months after our marriage, my husband completed his first novel. He was very proud of it, and it was a severe blow when the publishers sent the manuscript back. I made certain suggestions about the story, to which at first he refused to listen. Eventually, with bad grace, he adopted them and the novel was accepted for publication.

  “The book was well received by the critics, who praised its literary qualities and predicted a great future for the author. The praise went to his head and seemed to alter his character to an astonishing degree. In his mind was born a grudge against me for the suggestions I had made to eliminate his faults, but he accepted my assistance with his second and third novels, which were also published and were fairly well received.

  “The knowledge that his work was not entirely his own became a canker in his mind. I came to see it clearly. He craved for adulation; he craved for power. He was ruthless in the employment of the means to realize his ambition. He used to tell me that the successful men are those who have learnt to use others. He would say that for a fellow to blow his own trumpet is fatal, and the wise man persuades others to blow it for him. It was a creed that returned him handsome rewards of a sort, for he was a man of fine address and knew how to be charming.

  “Then he failed. His fourth and fifth novels were rejected by publisher after publisher. He had refused me even the opportunity to read the manuscripts and offer suggestions about them, and he knew that without me he could not stand. I knew he never would unless he devoted all his spare time to the novelist’s craft instead of dissipating his energies in social activities, literary societies, and the like, writing critiques and generally concerning himself with criticism.

  “Then came his sixth novel. With this he permitted my assistance, and it was published and received good notices. This further proof that he could not stand alone embittered him still more, but he resolved to resign the university appointment and devote all his time to literary pursuits and to courting friendship with those in the literary world he thought might be of use to him.

  “Within months our financial position was alarming, and it was then that I showed him the manuscript of my first novel. He condemned it out of hand, taking pleasure in putting me in my place, telling me that my story was loosely written, badly constructed, melodramatic. We quarrelled bitterly about it, but in the end we compromised in my use of a pen name. The book was financially a great success, and I.R. Watts became a well-known name up and down the Americas and over all of Europe.

  “At this time, my husband had teamed up with Wilcannia-Smythe, and each of them was influential in the literary circles of his respective State. My novel and those that followed it were scorned and jibed at as being mere commercial fiction, a term they employed for the work of most Australian authors who would not acknowledge them as leaders of literature.

  “The money came in, the money earned by I.R. Watts, and the money housed and clothed and fed the great Mervyn Blake. The money provided him with the use of a car. The money replenished his bank account every month with fifty pounds. The money enabled him to invite famous and influential people to my house. He became famous—locally—as an author and critic, on the money earned by my commercial fiction, which he condemned publicly, which his friends condemned, and which was read by nearly all nations of the world. My work became something that could not be mentioned in polite literary circles. His novels were acclaimed as fine contributions to the national literature by people whose work he in turn praised with equal fervour.

  “Well, that’s what it came to. I ought to have kicked him out. I ought to have told the world that his novels would never have seen print had it not been for my collaboration. I ought to have told the world all about him. If ever a human dog bit the hand that fed him, it was my husband. For my love he returned hate. For my money he returned abuse. For the gifts of my mind he returned jealousy. Oh no, I didn’t kick him out. I would not return to him such a kindness as that. He wanted me to divorce him and go on paying him the fifty pounds a month. I would have been a simpleton. I had him, and he knew it. Without the money earned by I.R. Watts, he was finished with his social climbing, and with his ambition to gain honours. He knew I had him fast, knew that once his friends knew he was living on the earnings of I.R. Watts he would be more greatly shamed than if they found that he was living on the earnings of a woman of ill fame.

  “Let him go, indeed! I just loved to see him squirm, to let him see the contempt in my eyes, to let him see there, too, the knowledge that I could bring him down with a word. He would get vilely drunk, and then with cold and studied sarcasm would lash me with abuse, with insults, with filthy innuendoes, saying that I thought only of grasping at cheap popularity, and that I was pandering to the low instincts of the common herd. Once he knocked me down with his fist and then kicked me as I lay stunned on the floor. That was a long time ago, and it was then that I decided to remove a horrible excrescence battening on my life.

  “For years I have carried on a large correspondence with notable people abroad, for one does not produce successful novels merely out of one’s head. The mind must be refreshed and fertilized with the inspiration of other minds. Thus it was that, after having met Dr Chaparral, I opened a correspondence with him. We exchanged information concerning our respective countries, and in one letter he told me that a compatriot had been tried for the murder of his wife by giving her coffin dust. As you stated a little while ago, I used that method of killing in my Vengeance of Master Atherton. And, as you said, I persuaded the doctor to bring some of the coffin dust when he came again to Australia.”

  Mrs Blake paused in her narrative. Hitherto her voice had been coldly impersonal. When she spoke again, the note of earnestness had crept into it.

  “I have spoken the truth, Mr Bonaparte,” she said. “I shall continue to do so. You must believe I speak the truth when I say that Dr Chaparral never had the slightest suspicion of why I wanted him to bring me some coffin dust. I told him I should like a sample of it to add to my collection of curios sent me from all parts of the world.

  “The dust was contained in five ping-pong balls so that it would not be questioned by the customs officials. He gave them to me one afternoon when the others were out or resting. It was on this veranda. They were taken from his case in which he kept his bats and table net, and accidentally, I let one drop and it bounced clear of the veranda and simply vanished. I never found it. But that left me four balls half-filled with the dust of a corpse.

  “The four balls I kept in my own safe, and I allowed the weeks and the months to pass by without using their contents. Possession of them gave me a wonderful feeling of power. I would look at my husband’s sneering face, and feel it. I would watch him talking charmingly with a notable guest, and know that when I wished it he would die, that he lived only so long as I wished him to live. I would see the hatred in his eyes and be calm in the knowledge that he was mine to destroy. I would meet his insults with a soft smile, and that would infuriate him the more because he could never be sure why I smiled. I let him live on only because I wanted to continue to enjoy the exquisite sense of power given me by the contents of those four ping-p
ong balls.

  “It was on the afternoon of the day before our house party was to assemble to meet Mr Marshall Ellis that my husband again knocked me down. He was reasonably sober, so there was no possible excuse. I merely smiled because he was strutting about and throwing out his chest and boasting how he, with the help of Wilcannia-Smythe, would hoodwink Marshall Ellis, who was coming to survey Australian literature. My husband then clearly proved himself to be a monomaniac. I shall do this, and that, he said. Through Ellis I shall become famous in London. And so on and on, until I smiled and he knocked me down.

  “And so, as Hitler is said to have bitten the carpet in his rages, so would this great and immortal Mervyn Blake bite the dust—my precious coffin dust.

  “When staying here, Dr Chaparral related to me the highlights of the trial of the man who murdered his wife with coffin dust. It was given in evidence that the husband believed his poison would act slowly in a person of sober habits, and swiftly in one addicted to alcohol. I had not the mind to poison slowly. Having decided to kill my husband, I wanted death to come to him with reasonable swiftness. The constant upsets had affected my work, to the extent that my last novel was only doubtfully accepted by my publishers. That could not possibly go on, and my husband knew it. He knew that the creative mind cannot continue to create if it is continuously clouded by upsets and mental storms. He told me so, told me he was destroying my gift and would never rest until he had done it.

  “Knowing that when the house party assembled, he would begin a bout of drinking in order to quicken his mind, I decided to wait until he was well inflamed with alcohol. When I dragged myself up from the floor that afternoon and wiped the blood from my mouth, I smiled at him in the way he didn’t like. My blood was in my mouth, and coffin dust would be in his—I hoped, grittily between his teeth.

  “And then, when the excrescence was removed from my life, I should write as I.R. Watts had never written before. I should declare myself as I.R. Watts and accept the tributes I.R. Watts had earned. I should come into my own and the second-rate novelists like Wilcannia-Smythe and his fellow crawlers would crawl to I.R. Watts.

  “Yes, Mr Bonaparte, I did all you said I did. I opened the door of the writing-room and stepped over the body of my husband. I carried no light. I exulted, for the evil was stamped flat on the floor. I left the place and hurried to the front gate, where I buried the poison bottle and the glass, and it was then I remembered I hadn’t closed the door, and I went back and did it.

  “A month afterwards, when Walsh was working in the garden, he asked me to lend him two hundred pounds. When I told him I wouldn’t think of doing any such thing, he slyly said it was a pity, since he had always liked working for me, and that he would have to give the police the brandy bottle and the glass he had found buried near the gate. He told me that on the night Mervyn Blake died he had been in the garden to dig up three bottles of brandy my husband told him he had buried as a reserve, and he had seen me go to the writing-room, and looked in after I had left and actually struck a match and saw my husband’s body, and then had seen me go to the gate and bury something, and finally followed me back to the writing-room to see me close the door.

  “I gave him a hundred pounds, and told him that he would never get any more. But he came back for more, and there was only one way to deal with him. Wearing these old gardening shoes, I studied his habits after dark. I used to watch him through the windows of his hut. Every night he’d read and drink spirits from a bottle. He never drank water or anything with it. Then, during the afternoon of the day before he worked here last, I opened a bottle of whisky and poured some of the dust into it, and then, having carefully resealed the cork, I buried it in the garden. When he came the next day I ordered him to do certain work at which he would be sure to find the bottle. I watched him find it, watched him hide it in his shirt and take it to where he left his case and coat.

  “That night I watched him drink from the bottle. He drank almost two-thirds before he lay down and slept. Then I stole into the hut and searched for the bottle and glass he had found near the gate. Both bottle and glass were inside an old portmanteau. I took them, and the whisky bottle I had poisoned for him, leaving on his table an empty bottle and another with a little untainted whisky left in it.”

  “And the drinking glass on his table?” murmured Bony.

  “I knew nothing about the glass. I never saw him drink from it. He did have a visitor the night before. Then the next danger arose in you, Mr Bonaparte. When you visited me that afternoon, you did not convince me you had come from South Africa, not completely, anyway. You see, I have been corresponding with Professor Armberg for several years, and never once did he mention in his letters a tribe called the N’gomo. After you had left us, I referred back to Nancy’s paragraph about you, and I wrote to Mr Lubers asking him to find out what he could about you. He rang up Inspector Snook, and Inspector Snook told him what you are and why you are staying at Yarrabo.”

  “Did he, indeed!” Bony softly exclaimed, and Simes sucked in his breath. “Please go on. What next?”

  “This afternoon I was gardening on the far side of the writing-room,” Mrs Blake continued. “I heard Miss Pinkney talking to her cat, and I could see her through the fence. She was placing a tea-tray on a small table just beyond, and as I had seen you there before having your afternoon tea I felt sure you would come to take it this afternoon. So I fetched the coffin dust, and crept in through the hole in the fence and put some of it into the teapot. If you go to the doctor very soon, he will probably save you. I have nothing against you—not now.”

  “It will not be necessary, Mrs Blake, because I didn’t drink the tea,” Bony said, his face expressionless, and a little soreness in his heart at his failure on the point of the N’gomo natives. “You see, I saw so plainly the imprints of your shoes about the table, and to and from the hole in the fence. And then I saw you seated here, wearing men’s shoes.

  “That was the proof leading to you, but not the culminating proof. I have found in many cases a tendency for important events to take place in rapid sequence once I have begun to put the puzzle together. Within an hour of knowing who left the tracks on the hill-side about Walsh’s hut, and about my tea table, I was informed who I.R. Watts is, and for whom Dr Chaparral brought coffin dust into Australia. Why did you persuade Mrs Montrose to assist you in abducting Wilcannia-Smythe?”

  “The note-book was a treasure chest for any writer,” Mrs Blake replied. “It belonged to my husband, but the contents were contributed by people entertained on my money. When I discovered that Wilcannia-Smythe had stolen it, and when he refused to give it up, I wrote, at the Rialto that afternoon, to Ella Montrose and asked her to visit me. I did think of Martin Lubers to help me, for he has been a real friend for many years, knowing that I am I.R. Watts and giving me constant support. Then I realized that his career would be damned if what I proposed to do became public property, and so I chose Ella. We disguised ourselves in some of my husband’s old clothes.

  “I didn’t prosecute Wilcannia-Smythe for theft because he knows I am I.R. Watts, and because he knows just how my husband treated me and why. If he had made it all public in revenge for my prosecuting him, the finger of suspicion might have been pointed at me.

  “He didn’t prosecute us, because he was a thief, and because I could reveal all the rottenness of his school of literary criticism. So we were equally strong. Ella disliked him on personal grounds.” Mrs Blake looked down upon the hand still resting upon her own, and she said, “Take your hand away, Nancy, you mustn’t touch me.” To Bony, she said, “You have a brain, Mr Bonaparte. When did you first suspect me?”

  “After seeing your husband’s portrait on the wall of your writing-room,” he answered without hesitation. “The other pictures were placed symmetrically, and the frames were exactly the same. That containing your husband’s picture was a trifle smaller, though of the same wood. Behind it the wall colouring had faded less than the general surface, proving that a
larger frame had hung there. When I learnt that your husband’s picture was not included in that gallery as late as the date of his death, it suggested that you did include it to avoid remark upon the absence of it in such a collection of well-known writers and poets.”

  “You are quite right, Inspector Bonaparte,” Mrs Blake conceded, and abruptly stood up. “I did think that the doctor’s suspicions might be aroused, and that the police might send a clever detective to go through the house and question us all. You see, I was right. They sent you, and they say, don’t they, that you never fail. I failed, because you never do. I know, too, that your case against me is much more complete than you have indicated. I shall not attempt any defence. I am too tired, too desperately tired.” She turned to Nancy Chesterfield.

  “I’m glad I killed him, and I want you to believe it, Nancy. I hope that during those last moments, when he frantically struggled to open the door, that he knew I had poisoned him. I hope that as the light of his life flickered and went out, that as he slipped into the pit of death, he remembered how he had been turning down the light of life for me—turning it down slowly for more than twenty years.”