The Widows of Broome

by Arthur W. Upfield

  “Does it favour, if I may use the word here, one sex particularly?” asked Bony.

  “No, I think not. It’s no respecter of persons. Redheaded people are sufferers equally with blonds and brunettes. As I stated, there’s no known cure, and there is no known cause. Because its effects are not serious, medical science hasn’t given much attention to it, both time and money being so urgently needed for the defeat of considerably more serious diseases.”

  “And you know of four cases of it in Broome?”

  Dr. Mitchell nodded and lit a cigarette. Bony pursed his lips, and the doctor, guessing what the next question would be, said:

  “I’ll give you their names in strictest confidence, and in the hope that the information may lead to the identity of this strangling beast. Mind you, there are doubtless others in Broome who, knowing there is no cure, rely on the chemist for ointment to give relief.”

  “There is a chemist in Broome?” promptly asked Bony.

  “Yes. He might know of other sufferers. I’ll enquire if you wish.”

  “That’s kind of you. Well, now, the next step. The persons afflicted with psoriasis: is it all over their bodies?”

  “In the majority of cases not entirely. Most of them have it only on parts of the body, on their legs or their arms or on their back. Those specimens of sloughed skin have, I think, come either from an elbow or a knee where the skin is coarser than elsewhere.”

  “Every sufferer, then, would not show it on the face and hands and forearms?”

  “That’s so,” agreed Dr. Mitchell. “In those cases the disease would not be observable without the patient’s consent.”

  “Have you got it?”

  “I ... oh no. Thank goodness.”

  “Would you consent to prove that?”

  The doctor declared he would be delighted to prove it, and Bony explained his reason for establishing a fact, telling where he had found the portions of dead skin, and pointing out that the doctor had been inside Mrs. Eltham’s house. Turning to Mrs. Walters, he asked:

  “If you will permit the use of a spare room...”

  “Certainly, Bony.”

  “Then I will inspect your carcase,” Bony said, almost gaily. “Now don’t run away, my dear Walters. It’ll be your turn next.”

  “Be damned if it will,” snorted the inspector. “You can take my word for it, backed up by the wife, if you want it.”

  His eyes clashed with the half-caste’s calm gaze, and Bony said:

  “I regret that in this matter I cannot accept the word of any person known to have been inside Mrs. Eltham’s house prior to, by one day at least, her demise, and subsequent to it. When it’s proved that everyone known to have entered the house is free from this psoriasis, then I can logically assume that those particles of skin fell from the body of the man I am seeking for double murder.”

  He was absent with the doctor for five minutes, and on returning from the bedroom to which they had retired, he nodded to Walters and the inspector went in to be examined by the doctor, went without demur. Sawtell followed him, and they brought Clifford from the office to undergo the same inspection. When the inspection of the police force was concluded, Bony asked who removed the body of Mrs. Eltham to the morgue. The local undertaker and an assistant had done that, and the doctor was able to vouch for the undertaker, who was his patient. The assistant was a Malay, and therefore free, for the disease does not occur in that race.

  “Well, that covers everyone with the exception of the homicide men,” Bony decided with satisfaction. “We’ll write an air-mail letter to the Chief of the Perth C.I.B. and have him establish if those three men he sent up here are free from psoriasis. If they are, then our search for a murderer in a population of some eight hundred people can be reduced to, what d’you say, Doctor, a round dozen?”

  “Probably less than a round dozen.”

  “Well, I am truly grateful to all of you for your willing cooperation. By elimination, and by finding tiny bits and pieces and fitting them together, we shall eventually come to see the cause of horribly tragic effects. If you will let me have those names, Doctor, and any others provided by the chemist.”

  “The names of my patients I’ll write now,” said the doctor, producing his prescription pad. Rapidly, he tore off the sheet, scribbled and presented it to Bony. Bony slipped it into a pocket, and accompanied the little doctor to his car.

  “It’s truly good of you to be so helpful,” he said when the medico was behind the steering-wheel.

  “Anything I can do, well, it’s my job in a case like the one you’re handling. I’m a little nervous that the swine might kill again.”

  “Have you studied psychiatry?”

  “Yes. That any help to you? Somehow I think it might be.”

  “I think that, too. I’d like to talk one evening soon.”

  “Do. Any time after seven. Give me a tinkle in case I’m out. Busy place this ... for me. Cheerio!”

  Thoughtfully, Bony returned to the station office.

  “Who’s on that list?” asked Walters, and Sawtell evinced keen interest.

  Bony produced the scrap of paper. He looked round. Constable Clifford was not present.

  “Mrs. Janet Lytie,” he read out, and paused.

  “Old dame who runs a tea-shop,” supplemented Sawtell.

  “Miss Olga Templeton-Hoffer.”

  “Starchy old bird who nurses a martinet of a father. Go on.”

  “Master Leslie Lee.”

  “Schoolboy about fifteen. Next.”

  “Mr. Arthur Flinn.”

  “Oh! Might be worth keeping tag,” Sawtell said.

  Bony placed the paper in his pocket wallet.

  “The doctor has added a fifth name,” he almost lisped, and watched for the effect. “The fifth name on the list is Albert Mark.”

  There was a long pause, and then Sawtell breathed:

  “Black Mark.”

  “I’d like to run out and see him before dinner,” Bony said.

  Chapter Ten

  A Petty Thief

  BLACK MARK heaved himself away from the dinner-table and strode through the empty bar to stand on the front veranda and pick his teeth. When you came to look at him properly, you had to admire the barrel of a chest, the vast shoulders and the powerful arms, and the nether portion encased in gabardine trousers. At first, you did not note these things, because you had to withstand the shock received from the wide, square-cut black beard, the mop of fine black hair, the bold black eyes and the strong black brows. Only a very drunken man or a small child would have the daring to be rude to Black Mark. What had made him so prominent in the north-west of Australia was that, in addition to abnormal physical strength, he was intelligent.

  He was continuing to pick his teeth when the police jeep stopped and three men came up the veranda steps.

  “Evening, Mark,” said Walters, nonchalantly.

  “Evenin’, Inspector. Evenin’, Sergeant.”

  “This is Mr. Knapp,” proceeded Walters. “Personal friend of mine from over east. Criminologist, and all that. Might be able to help us solve these murders.”

  “Glad to meet you, Mr. Knapp,” Black Mark said in a voice thrice the volume of a normal man’s. “You’re welcome to what you can see and find out. I’m an inoffensive man, as the inspector will back me, but I’d be mighty obliged if you could point out the man who murdered Mrs. Cotton. Point him out privately.”

  Bony smiled easily, saying he would keep it in mind. He asked what had been done with Mrs. Cotton’s personal effects.

  “Well, nothing was touched in her bedroom bar the bed linen,” obliged Black Mark. “Probably you know that the body was taken from the yard and laid on the bed, where it remained most of the day. After the body was removed, I took all her things and locked ’em up in her bedroom. Being her executor, I had the solicitor out here and that’s what he advised me to do. Later on, the d.s from Perth looked in, but they didn’t do much.”

  “Were you wit
h the Perth detectives when they entered the bedroom?” asked Bony.

  “Yes. I went in with ’em. They were interested mostly in the window fastenings. Like to look at the room?”

  “I would.”

  Black Mark conducted them to a large well-furnished room containing a stripped double bed now laden with all kinds of women’s possessions. There were several trunks of the kind seldom seen today, and a treadle sewing-machine, and a dozen or so silver trophies won by Mrs. Cotton’s husband.

  Bony examined the window. It was one of the casement type and quite large. The usual fly-netted screen was fitted on the inside. It was not possible to force the window from the outside without breaking the glass. With the window open, the screen provided a degree of protection, for unless the netting was slit the catch-lock could not be turned back.

  “Who brought the body here from the yard?” Bony asked.

  “I did, with a man named Jenks taking the feet.”

  “The door wasn’t locked ... then?”

  “No. There wasn’t even a key in the door.”

  “How often did Mrs. Cotton walk in her sleep?”

  “Very seldom,” replied Black Mark. “Not once in six months, I’d say. Seems to have done it when she was. overtired. She never wandered far, and usually woke up by herself and went back to bed.”

  “On that night Mrs. Cotton was killed, the bar was busy, I understand,” Bony went on, calmly regarding Black Mark. “Was the noise in the bar particularly loud?”

  “Yes. We had a bit of a party. Five prospectors in for a spell.”

  “So that if Mrs. Cotton had cried out for help, either here or in the passage without, or even in the yard, you would not have heard her?”

  Black Mark hesitated, seemingly reluctant to agree.

  “What about the staff?” persisted Bony. “Could they have heard a cry for help?”

  “I don’t know,” Black Mark replied. “I been thinking along that line, and I’ve questioned the maids and the cook and her husband. They reckon that if Mrs. Cotton had sung out they would have thought it was someone in the bar.”

  “So that it was comparatively easy for anyone to walk into the place, knock on Mrs. Cotton’s door, push her back into the bedroom and strangle her?”

  Very slowly Black Mark said, softly for him:

  “I’m afraid it was. But she was found in the yard, remember.”

  “When the Perth detectives were here, did they examine the contents of the dressing-table, and the drawers of that tallboy and the inside of the wardrobe?”

  “They looked into those things but they didn’t take anything out.”

  “Sawtell ... did you, or Pedersen?”

  “Yes, just looked into the drawers. Black Mark was with us. We were trying to find if anything belonging to the dead woman had been stolen. Everything seemed in order.”

  Bony opened the door of the wardrobe and burrowed his head and shoulders beneath the hems of the close-packed rack of dresses, and later on, both Walters and the sergeant admitted they were not surprised when he brought out a bundle wrapped in a piece of linen.

  Sawtell obeyed Bony’s order to remove the books from a small table, and on the table he broke open the bundle.

  “What the hell’s that?” demanded Black Mark, his eyes almost glaring at the strips of torn and ripped silk of several colours. “Looks like women’s silk under-things.”

  “I think, Mr. Mark, that Sergeant Sawtell will take charge of these pieces of underwear,” Bony said, an edge to his voice. “You have not seen them before?”

  “I certainly haven’t,” declared the licensee furiously. “I don’t get it.”

  “Tell me, was Mrs. Cotton a woman of tantrums? Is it possible that she tore these garments in a fit of temper?”

  “No, of course not. Mrs. Cotton was a fine woman, and sweet-tempered, excepting when she had good cause to blow up. She wouldn’t have done all that. Why, she went to market good and hearty only the week before she was killed because someone stole a nightdress of hers off the drying line.”

  “Stole her nightgown!” echoed Bony, his eyes blazing.

  “Too ruddy right. Said it was one of her best silk ones. We have some pretty hard doers drinkin’ here, but we never had no thief before that nightdress was pinched.”

  “What about the aborigines? Are they trustworthy?”

  “No, they’re not. But they wouldn’t have pinched it, or pinch anything else, because they know one of ’em would tell us.”

  “Can you recall the date that the garment was stolen from the line?”

  “Yes. Let me think. Mrs. Cotton was murdered on the night of April 12th. That was a Thursday. The nightdress was stolen on the Sat’day before. We were extra busy that day. We had the football club picnicking out here, and the Buffaloes were having their annual outing. There were a lot of school kids, too. Most of all that lot went back to town at sundown.”

  “Most of them?”

  Black Mark reminded Bony of an outraged porcupine. His hair and beard were distinctly uncurled.

  “Fifty or sixty of the men stayed on till nigh midnight,” he answered.

  “Were many of them strangers to you?”

  “Yes, they were. I don’t know everyone in town. But they wouldn’t pinch a nightdress off a clothes line. No one does that sort of thing up here in the Nor’-West.”

  “H’m! Fetch me a broom, please.”

  Black Mark looked his astonishment and made no comment. While he was absent, Sawtell re-rolled the silk items into a bundle and wrapped that in a pillow slip. On Black Mark’s return with the broom, Bony ordered them all outside while he swept the floor. There might have been sufficient dust to fill an egg-cup. There was nothing but the dust, so far as the human eye could detect, but Bony gathered it into a specimen envelope.

  “Take us out to see the clothes line,” he requested.

  They were conducted to the yard and through the wicket gate to the strip of lawn over which was stretched two long wire lines. When loaded with washing, the lines were kept aloft by forked poles. The inspector said:

  “There would be no reason for anyone just visiting the hotel to come here, would there?”

  “No,” answered Black Mark. “As you saw, there’s a notice on the little gate reading ‘Private’.”

  “But anyone crossing the main yard could easily see the clothes on the line,” Bony pointed out. “Who did the washing that day, d’you know?”

  “Two lubras from up the creek. The blacks have a camp there.”

  The party stood under the two long lines. The young man who had served in the bar that night Bony and old Dickenson had visited this place emerged from the hotel and walked across the yard to enter one of the single bedrooms. He did not openly evince curiosity, but he missed nothing.

  “The maids working here at the time Mrs. Cotton was murdered, are they still employed by you?”

  “One is,” replied Black Mark, continuing to bristle. He added, with a strange diffidence in view of his mood: “Her name’s Irene. She’s a half-caste.”

  “I’d like to talk to her. Bring her here and then leave us.”

  The licensee rolled away to the kitchen. “‘An-out-and-out sinner,’” quoted Bony, and completed it with: “‘Out-and-out sinners don’t strangle women in the dark.’”

  “He’s got psoriasis,” Sawtell said.

  “But, according to police report, he proved a watertight alibi for the night Mrs. Eltham was killed.”

  “Many murderers have put up a watertight alibi,” growled Walters.

  “And Black Mark has got the pub licence,” argued the sergeant.

  The black-bearded man appeared, followed by the girl Bony had seen being teased by a small boy at the water tap. She looked frightened. She was a slim girl about twenty, and had her nose not been so broad she would have been good-looking. Bony stepped forward to meet her, and his smile banished her nervousness.

  “I want to talk to you, Irene,” he said. The others
drifted away through the wicket gate. Bony proceeded to the far end of the grass strip to the bank of the creek, and the girl followed. “You and I, Irene, are people apart. We understand each other, and we can speak of things to each other without being considered foolish. What we talk about, no one will know. O.K. with you?”

  “Yes, O.K. with me,” she assented, her voice soft and her accent pure. Curiosity mastered her. “What part of Australia d’you come from?”

  “From Brisbane, Irene. I happened to be over here on holiday, and when I heard about Mrs. Cotton I thought perhaps I might be able to help Inspector Walters. Did you like Mrs. Cotton?”

  The large, doe-like eyes filled with tears.

  “Mrs. Cotton was...”

  “All right, Irene. I thought she was a good woman, and that’s why I want to find out who killed her. Did the police question you much?”

  The girl wiped her eyes with the small handkerchief she slipped from the pocket of her white apron.

  “Sergeant Sawtell asked a lot of questions,” she replied. “About when Mrs. Cotton went to bed that night, and what we were all doing.”

  “Well then, of what we are going to talk you will say nothing to anyone. Do you remember Mrs. Cotton losing a nightgown off the line?”

  “Oh, yes! It was one of her best ones.”

  “Can you tell me which line it was pegged to, and about where?”

  “In the middle of that one next to the kitchen.”

  “How much other washing was on the line that night?”

  “Not very much. You see, it was a Saturday.”

  “Oh! A Saturday?”

  “You see ... What’s your name?”

  “My wife calls me Bony. You can call me Bony, too.”

  Irene smiled, and then she was good to look at.

  “All right, Bone-ee. You see, the lubras from the camp up the creek come to wash twice a week. They wash on Mondays the sheets from the guests’ rooms and the staff’s, and the other things from the dining-room and the kitchen. Then they come again on Saturdays just to wash for Mrs. Cotton and Mr. Mark.”