The Widows of Broome

by Arthur W. Upfield

  Like the placid ocean, Broome appeared languorous. Down in the road, or street, skirting the protective sand-dune, were but two men and three children. There were several people on the veranda of the Seahorse Hotel, and two cars were parked without. In the yard of the hotel, clothes hung motionless on a line. Bony’s gaze passed over the town, noting clothes drying at four places, and he was reminded of the coming night and the responsibilities it would bring.

  Slithering down the slope of the dune, Bony emptied his shoes of sand and walked briskly that he would not delay the evening meal. When approaching the police station, Keith came to meet him.

  “Can’t find Abie,” the boy said. “I’ve been scouting around for him, too.”

  “He might have gone bush,” surmised Bony. “Black trackers often do, you know. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if he turned up in time to draw his dinner at the kitchen.”

  “That’s likely, Mr. Knapp. The blacks always seem to be hanging around at meal times. I asked Sister King if she had seen Abie, and she said perhaps he’s cleared off to a quiet camp to have a good go at the petrol.”

  “Oh! Who is Sister King?”

  “Sister King’s up at the Mission. The blacks go there, you know, for clothes and things. A lot of the black kids live there. The Sisters make ’em go to their school.”

  “That’s very good of the Sisters, Keith. Without education no one goes very far in this world. Did Sister King say when she last saw Abie?”

  “Yes, she did, Mr. Knapp. She said he was there yesterday just before dark. He wanted a pair of socks. He couldn’t have wanted ’em for himself, because I know he never wears any socks. D’you know what I think?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think,” the boy ran on with assurance in his voice, “I think Abie wanted the socks to trade for some petrol. Anyway, he’ll turn up again, and he’ll be sick enough when he does. He did it a long time ago. Was away for a week, and Constable Pedersen trounced him in the stables.

  “Thoroughly?” Bony asked, and Keith grinned and said that the “trouncing” had “fixed” Abie till that day he had been found behind the gum tree in the compound.

  After dinner, Bony and Inspector Walters retired to the office, where the former opened his mail, comprising several official communications from Perth and one from Brisbane.

  “The only finger-prints raised on those torn garments I sent down to Perth were those of Mrs. Overton,” Bony commented.

  “I didn’t hope for much, did you?”

  Bony regarded Walters pensively.

  “No, I did not. However, two pieces of torn silk bore the imprints of a man’s teeth, both upper and lower teeth.”

  “The fellow must be an animal,” Walters said. “Fits in with what Dickenson said about the man he saw champing his teeth. Where does it get us?”

  “Of itself nowhere. I want only one, or perhaps two, pieces to complete my picture puzzle. I want time, Walters, to find those vitally necessary pieces. Once I complete my picture, then we can move to locate the three stolen nightgowns.”

  “You think he’s kept them?”

  “I’m sure he has. He would keep something to gloat over. I believe he stole them for the purpose of retaining proof that he had conquered a devil which threatened to destroy him.”

  “It all seems pretty deep to me,” Walters stated. “He must kill for the lust of it.”

  “No, he had his reasons for destroying these women,” Bony said. “I know why he killed Mrs. Cotton, and why he killed Mrs. Eltham. I am not sure why he killed Mrs. Overton, but if he makes an attempt to kill Mrs. Sayers, I shall be sure why he killed Mrs. Overton, and why he attempted to kill Mrs. Sayers. And when I know that, my picture will be complete and I shall see him.”

  Walters regarded Bony intently.

  “You really think he will make an attempt to strangle Mrs. Sayers?” he asked.

  “I am hoping he will.”

  “You said that Mrs. Sayers and Briggs have agreed to take every precaution,” stated Walters.

  “Yes. You may be easy in your mind regarding Mrs. Sayers. I will look after her. But we must not relax our efforts in other directions. I see Sawtell, with Clifford and Bolton, coming in. I’ll lecture them on the necessity of being cautious. Does Bolton, the Derby man, know Broome?”

  “He was stationed here for six years.”

  “That’s good.”

  Walters admitted the three men, and Bony gave his lecture on when to be cautious, which was now, and why. Clifford was to watch all through the night the house occupied by Mrs. Abercrombie and her companion, and Bolton was to watch over Mrs. Clayton and her daughter. Under no circumstances save the gravest were they to disclose to anyone police interest in these houses.

  “To sum up,” Bony said in conclusion, “if you see anyone acting suspiciously, or even committing a minor crime, you are not to take action. By all means try to identify the person so acting but not at the risk of yourselves being discovered. Should you see anyone attempting to break into the house you are protecting, let him get well and truly inside before you arrest him.”

  Walters said:

  “I’ve left a couple of torches in the kitchen, and the wife will have a packet of sandwiches for you. You can go off duty at daybreak, and report back tomorrow evening.”

  When they had left, Sawtell asked if anything was known of Abie, and Bony passed on the information given by Keith, adding:

  “I’ll put old Dickenson on to hunting for Abie. You haven’t lost any petrol?”

  “No. I checked up on it.”

  “Ah well! Perhaps the cat found no humour in being blackmailed by the mouse.”

  The evening was advanced when Bony set out to locate Mr. Dickenson. It was almost dark when he discovered him lying full-length on a public bench. The old man appeared to be drunk. Bony leaned over him and spoke. Then he nudged him. Bony sighed, and was charitable. Mr. Earle Dickenson was not a broken reed but rather one badly bent.

  Relieving the “body” of the Webley pistol, Bony walked on.

  Chapter Twenty

  Poor Little Mouse!

  INSPECTOR WALTERS marched into Bony’s “office” and sat down in the visitor’s chair. Bony completed the sentence he was writing into his case-book, set down the pen and reached for tobacco and papers.

  “A road-worker has found Abie,” Walters announced. “The body’s lying half inside a road drain. The black was at his old trick of inhaling petrol fumes, and this time he passed out.”

  “I did think he might end up like that,” murmured Bony.

  “Alight! Petrol’s surer than booze. I caught Abie at it twice, and Pedersen found him that bad that if he’d struck a match the feller would have exploded. Should be made a flogging matter for a native to be found drunk on booze or anything else. The old days and the old ways were good. I’d flog more and imprison less.”

  “The aborigines would prefer that way.”

  Walters snorted. “I’m sure they would. Like the birds they can’t bear loss of freedom, but a taste of jail doesn’t last as long as a flogging. It’s a damn nuisance. The other tracker’s gone on walk-about, and I don’t know yet when to expect Pedersen back with his boy. I’ll have to run out to the body with the doctor. Care to come?”

  Bony nodded and they went out to the open garage in the compound. Walters took his own car, and Bony sat in the rear seat as the doctor would want to hear the details on the way. They had to drive to the hospital, where Dr. Mitchell was making his morning round, and they had to wait twenty minutes. The interval stressed Walters’ intolerance of procrastination, and Bony’s unruffled patience.

  “Another body, eh?” exclaimed the medico, sliding in beside the inspector. “Good-morning, Bony! Altogether too many unauthorised corpses in Broome lately. This black feller was addicted to petrol inhalation, wasn’t he?”

  The inspector said Abie was a confirmed addict and asked the doctor what kind of a kick petrol gave as it might be cheaper tha
n beer to a man sacked from the police force. The doctor replied that his knowledge of the subject was exceedingly slight, and that he didn’t intend to try it on himself to extend that knowledge.

  Walters drove northward to take the right-hand road to the airport. The macadamised road was black, and here and there white-painted posts marked the culverts. A man was standing at one of the culverts a hundred yards beyond the entrance to the airport, and here Walters stopped his car. The road-man pointed down to the drain.

  “He’s down there, Inspector,” he said. “I wouldn’t have seen him only I was working just here.”

  The party stood at the edge of the culvert. The storm-water drain where it passed under the road was four feet deep and a yard wide, and all the upper part of the body could be seen, the legs being inside the culvert. Either side the road grew thick coastal bush and wire-grass, and the bed of the drain was dry and covered with grass too resilient to be broken down. As the road-worker had pointed out, the body would not be noticed by a road traveller, for Abie was dressed in his tracker’s uniform of khaki overcoat which merged into the colour of the drain.

  “Have you been down there?” Bony asked, and the man shook his head.

  The body was lying on its back, the face masked by a blue-spotted brown neck-cloth. Abie’s hat was under the head as a pillow, and near the knees was a beer bottle. The position of the corpse was composed, as though Abie had made himself quite comfortable along the bed of the drain.

  Dr. Mitchell stepped down from the culvert and sniffed at the brightly-coloured cloth.

  “Petrol, all right,” he said. Picking up the bottle he turned it upside down. It was empty. He sniffed at it, and again said: “Petrol, all right.”

  On lifting the cloth, they saw that Abie’s face was composed. Even the jaw had not “dropped”, for the buttoned collar of the military tunic had kept it up after death had taken place.

  Dr. Mitchell clambered out of the drain and dusted his knees.

  “I’m satisfied, if you are,” he said to Walters.

  The inspector glanced at Bony, who imperceptibly nodded.

  “Right-oh! We’ll get back,” Walters briskly decided. “You come along to the station, Tom, and we’ll have you make a formal declaration. Can we have the body buried this afternoon, Doctor?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Bony refrained from asking for an estimate of the time Abie had been dead, and on Walters’ saying he would send the undertaker out immediately, Bony offered to await his arrival. Walters nodded, and slid in behind the wheel, the others also entering the car. It was driven to the end of the bitumen roadway to turn the vehicle, and as it was driven back past Bony, Walters noted that he was making a cigarette. He wondered, but said nothing.

  The car having disappeared, Bony stepped down into the drain and picked up the bottle by inserting his little finger into the mouth. The surface was clean enough, seeming to prove that it had rested in one of the deep pockets of Abie’s overcoat. Bony looked for the cork, and failed to find it. He lifted the cloth from the dead face and thoughtfully studied the position of the eye-lids. He unhooked the collar of the tunic and examined the neck, deciding that Abie had not been strangled. He looked for and found the aborigine’s dilly-bag without which no black-fellow feels decently clothed. It was made of kangaroo hide softened with grease and was suspended from the neck by human hair. It contained four magic healing stones, the beak of a small bird, a letter-stick and a plug of chewing-tobacco.

  The pockets of the tunic contained nothing, but the overcoat produced a pair of socks, clean and darned, and more chewing-tobacco.

  Bony returned the aborigine’s treasures to the dilly-bag, and the socks and tobacco to the overcoat pocket. He spent more than ten minutes in a fruitless search for the bottle cork, before leaving the drain for the road. Eventually he found the cork.

  The picture presented was as follows. Abie, in possession of a bottle containing petrol, corked and carried in a pocket of the overcoat, had chosen the bed of a storm-water drain in which to indulge his singular passion. He chose the drain because of its privacy and the softness of the bed provided by the thick grass. The preparations for the debauch were simple. He made himself comfortable, and then uncorked the bottle. He had, apparently, poured the entire contents of the bottle on to the cloth, and then had no need to recork the bottle.

  The bottle was left by his side, but the cork was neither in the drain nor on one of the banks. It was lying on the far side of the road, where it was impossible for Abie to toss it from his position in the drain. He could have tossed it where Bony found it by standing up, but it was illogical to assume that he had done this, as he would be thinking only of placing the saturated cloth over his face.

  Again apparently, the dead man had chosen the drain primarily for its privacy. Then why had he not crawled into the culvert beneath the road? The culvert was large and airy and dust-dry.

  Again Bony went down into the drain, this time to examine the ground on which the dead man’s military boots rested. Inside the culvert there was no grass. The dry sand loam was scored by the heels of the boots when Abie had pushed his feet into the culvert ... or when they had been pushed in after he died. He could have entered the culvert quite easily, but his dead body could not be pushed in and then carefully arranged with the petrol-soaked cloth over the face ... unless it was in a state of rigor mortis.

  The position of the cork was decidedly significant. The bottle itself gave conclusive evidence. Having carried it to the police station with a finger into its mouth, Bony tested it for finger-prints. There were the finger-prints of Dr. Mitchell’s left hand, and Bony had noted that the doctor had picked up the bottle with his left hand. There were no other fingerprints ... not even those of the dead man.

  The evidence was such that normally a post-mortem would be inevitable. Bony was confident that a post-mortem would disclose that Abie had not died from petroleum poisoning. He was sure that the tracker had been a mouse that had attempted to blackmail a cat. A post-mortem would mean an inquest, and an inquest on Abie would certainly reveal to his murderer that the police in Broome were not as stupid as he was doubtless thinking. The result would be caution, and from Bony’s point of view he had been cautious long enough.

  Inspector Walters was late for lunch. He arrived after the children had returned to school, explaining to Bony that he had been completing arrangements for the disposal of Abie’s body.

  “The doctor gave his certificate?” mildly enquired Bony.

  “Oh, yes. Case quite clear. The coroner agrees that an inquest is not necessary. Abie was bound to do it sooner or later.”

  “Have you known of a similar case of death through petrol inhalation among the aborigines?”

  “No. Plenty of instances of blacks stealing petrol for the purpose of making themselves drunk ... if the effect can be classed as drunkenness. The practice was unknown before the war.”

  “And the burial will take place this afternoon?”

  “Yes. The Reverend Kendrake has agreed to read over him at four. I contacted Black Mark to send word to the blacks’ camp. They’ll all come in somehow or other. There won’t be any corroboree at the cemetery because to them Abie was a proper policeman and must be buried white-feller fashion.”

  Bony stood up, smiling whimsically.

  “I may attend the funeral. I like funerals. Could you borrow from the postmaster the meteorological reports covering the last three years?”

  Walters replied that he would and refrained from pressing for a reason. Bony went to his “office”, and he had barely begun work on his notes when Mrs. Walters came to him with an unposted letter.

  “A small Javanese boy brought it to the kitchen door.”

  Bony thanked her. The envelope was addressed to Mr. Knapp, Police Station, in a style of handwriting often termed copper-plate. It was so skilfully done that Bony cut the envelope with a knife that he might preserve it. Within was a letter written in the same manner.


  “Dear Mr. Knapp,” Bony read. “Circumstances have provided me with information which I am hopeful will erase from your mind my default of yesterday evening. You will find me contrite but unbowed on the public bench outside the post office. Earle Dickenson.”

  Three minutes later, Bony was sitting down beside Mr. Dickenson and interrupting the old man’s apology by saying:

  “In military, and police, parlance, you were off duty, so there was no harm done. I understand how strong an enemy can be. I removed the Webley from your pocket in case someone else did.”

  “Yes, I was off duty. I did intend waiting for you to transmit further orders, but ... Abie lasted longer than I expected.”

  “Ah! You heard about that?”

  “News passes quickly in Broome.” Mr. Dickenson sighed. “I feel sorry for Abie, and for Tojo and Hitler and all those others who drank the wine of power. I understand that he died of petrol fumes. Is that so?”

  Bony sketched the scene at the storm-water drain that morning.

  “Is it your opinion that accidentally he administered to himself too much petrol?”

  “Why do you ask that?” countered Bony.

  “Because I had the thought that it wasn’t petrol that killed him. And also because the blacks are today so wise as to the uses and dangers of petrol that Abie would not have made a mistake which could be credited only to a novice. When speaking of him the other day, you mentioned the possibility that he may have been trailing someone when scouting around the town in the small hours. I think now it’s quite probable, because I’m sure he did not die of petrol fumes.”

  Bony waited, and the old man proceeded:

  “When I woke on the bench last night it was very late and I was contrite. I knew you had visited me, because although the pistol was gone from my pocket my money was intact. I sat there for some time, and then felt the urge to take a long walk. I passed through Chinatown and took the track up the creek and then followed a path across the marsh which would take me to the airport entrance, my intention being to return to the town that way.