Till seven o’clock Bony wandered about the place filling in time by smoking innumerable cigarettes and pondering on the many points of the disappearance of George Loftus contained in the sixteen statements gathered by John Muir. The case interested him at the outset, because there was no apparent reason why Loftus should voluntarily disappear.
A man directed him to a boarding-house run by a Mrs Poole. At that hour the shop in front of the long corrugated-iron building was still closed, but he found the owner in the kitchen at the rear, where she was busy cooking breakfast. Mrs Poole was about forty years old, tall and still handsome; a brunette without a grey hair; a well-preserved woman of character. Into her brown eyes flashed suspicion at sight of the half-caste, at which he was amused, as he always was when the almost universal distrust of his colour was raised in the minds of white women—instinctive distrust which invariably he set himself to dispel.
“Well!” Mrs Poole demanded severely.
“I arrived this morning by the train,” he explained courteously. “A townsman tells me this is the best place in town at which to get breakfast.”
“It’ll cost you two shillings,” the woman stated in a manner denoting doubt of his ability to pay.
“I have a little money, madam.”
Sight of the pound note Bony produced changed Mrs Poole’s expression. The change he hoped was caused by his accent. Mrs Poole produced cup and saucer and seized the teapot.
“Thank you,” he said, gratefully accepting the cup of tea. Offering the treasury note, he added, “It might be as well for you to take that on account. I may be in Burracoppin for some time. As a matter of fact, I have got a job with the Rabbit Department.”
“You have!” Obviously Mrs Poole was pleased. “Then you will be boarding here, I hope?”
“For my meals, yes. I understand, however, that sleeping quarters are provided by the department at the depot.”
“Yes, that’s so.” Quick steps sounded from without. “Oh my! Here’s Eric.”
A man entered as might a small whirlwind from the plains of Central Australia.
“Ah, late again, Mrs Poole! Quarter past seven, and breakfast not ready. When is that husband of yours coming back? Every time he’s away you hug that bed, don’t you? You’ll die in it one of these days. Now, don’t argue. Get on—get on. No burgoo for me. There’s no time to eat. I’ll be getting the sack for being always late.”
The whirlwind was dressed in dungaree overalls. Keen hazel eyes examined Bony humorously.
“Good morning,” Bony said.
“Going to work for the Rabbits,” interposed Mrs Poole.
“Oh! Well, I’d advise you not to board here. Better stop at the pub. Mrs Poole’s husband is a Water Rat, and sometimes he’s away for weeks on end. When he is away Mrs Poole hardly ever leaves her bed, she loves it so. You only get one minute ten seconds to gollop your breakfast, but you do get plenty of indigestion. I’m half dead already.”
“I’m not as bad as all that, Eric,” pleaded Mrs Poole in a way which decided Bony that he was going to like his landlady. To him she added: “Don’t you believe him, Mr—what is your name?”
“Bony.”
“Sometimes I’m late, Mr Bony, but not always. Will you take porridge?”
“Please.”
“You married?” inquired the subsided whirlwind.
“Yes.”
“Then you’ll be Mr Bony henceforth. All married men here are called misters, and single men are called by their Christian monikers. I’m Eric Hurley, unmarried, and, therefore, plain Eric. What’s yours?”
“Xavier,” replied Bony blandly. “But everyone calls me Bony without the mister. I prefer it.”
“Just as well. Xavier! Hell! Bony will do me. Come on, we’ve only got forty seconds. Shoot in that tucker, Mrs Poole. Come on. Get going.”
In the dining-room between kitchen and shop the two men ate rapidly. Hurley, Bony observed, was not much beyond thirty years old. He liked his open face, lined and tanned by the sun and lit with the optimism of youth.
“I’m the boundary rider on this section of the rabbit fence,” Hurley explained between bursts of rapid mastication. “I’ve got two hundred miles of it to attend to—a hundred miles north and south of Burracoppin. When the depression crash came all hands bar ex-soldiers were sacked. Hell-uv-a job. For each Sunday on the job I get a day off here. But I’m workin’ today, as the farm push are short-handed, and there’s a chaff order to be sent away. Hey, Mrs Poole, my lunch ready?”
“I’m cuttin’ it now.”
“Make it big. I haven’t time to eat a decent breakfast.” From the railway yard came the sound of a petrol engine. Through the window they saw the motor-propelled trolley sliding away loaded with permanent-way workers. “Hurry! Hurry! The Snake Charmers have gone. If I’m sacked for being late I’ll murder your husband and take his place. And I won’t get up and light the fire for you. I’ll kick you out of bed.”
A tin rattled. The whirlwind rushed out. There was silence. Then Mrs Poole’s voice was raised urging someone to get up and fetch the cows before Mrs Black got them and “sneaked” the milk. She came to the door.
“Don’t you hurry, Mr Bony. The inspector isn’t so sharp as Eric makes out. You see, my other boarders all work about the town and never come to breakfast till a quarter to eight. This place is easier when Joe’s at home, what with the woodcutting and the cows, an’ that Mrs Black who always tries to milk them first. And I’ve been busy lately. I’ve had two policemen staying here ever since poor Mr Loftus disappeared. They are gone now, back to Perth.”
“Oh!”
“It’s funny, that affair,” she went on. “I’m sure he’s been murdered. Eric was camped half a mile from his house that night. Although it was raining, it was quiet, and he could hear the dogs howling about two in the morning. When my sister had her husband killed on the railway, down near Northam, her dog howled awful for more than an hour. Dogs know when their friends die—don’t you think so?”
Fifteen minutes after Bony left Mrs Poole’s boarding-house he was watching the changing expressions on the face of the Rabbit Fence Inspector while that official read the letter written by the chief of his department and delivered by the detective.
“You are a member of the Queensland police Force?”
Bony inclined his head.
“I am instructed to assist you in every way. What can I do?”
“Permit me to explain. I am a detective-inspector, at present on leave. My friend, Detective-Sergeant Muir, has been obliged to go into another matter, and, as the disappearance of George Loftus interests me, I have decided, with the sanction of the Western Australian Police Commissioner, to look into it. Outside police circles, your chief and yourself are the only people in this State who know I am a police officer. I rely upon you to keep my secret. People talk and act naturally before Bony, but are as close as oysters in the presence of Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte. I want you to give me employment on the rabbit fence, preferably near where Loftus’s wrecked car was discovered. I would like you to take me to see that car this morning.”
“All right. We’ll go now.”
Seated in the department’s truck beside the Fence Inspector, Bony said:
“Please proceed direct along the route taken by Loftus the night he disappeared.”
Bony was driven round the hotel into the main street, then eastward past the shops and the boarding-house and the bank, on past the garage at the extremity of the town.
“Loftus should have taken this right-hand road, but despite Wallace’s objection kept straight on,” explained his companion, whose name was Gray.
“Ah! Has that garage been long vacant?”
“Yes, about a year. The garage on the other side of the railway does all the business now.”
Once past the garage and the wide, good road running up a long, low hill south, they abruptly left the town, the road becoming narrow when it began to wind through whipstick malle
e and gimlet trees. Now and then to his left Bony could see the rampart of mullock excavated from the great pipeline trench, with the railway beyond it.
“By the way,” he said, smiling, “I understand that Mrs Poole’s husband is a Water Rat. Precisely in what manner is such an epithet applicable to a woman’s husband?”
Inspector Gray chuckled.
“The men employed along the pipeline are called Water Rats because often they have to work deep in water when a pipe bursts.”
“Thank you. And what are the Snake Charmers?”
“They are the permanent-way men. Now that you are a Rabbit Department employee you are a Rabbitoh.”
It became Bony’s turn to chuckle.
“What are the road repairers called?”
“Well, not being a blasphemous man, I am unable to tell you.”
“Then I must invent names for them myself. Did you know George Loftus well?”
“Moderately well. He was never a friend of mine, although he has been here five years.”
“Tell me all you know about him, please. What he looked like, everything.”
The Fence Inspector hesitated, and Bony saw that he was weighing carefully the words he would use to a police officer when there would have been no hesitation had Bony been an ordinary acquaintance. Why men and women should be so reserved in the presence of members of the police, who were their paid and organized protectors, was a point in human psychology which baffled him. At last Gray said:
“I suppose Loftus would be about twelve stone in weight, and of medium height. He was a rather popular kind of man, a good cricketer for all his forty-one years, would always oblige with a song, and was a keen member of the local lodge. For the first three years he worked hard on his farm, but he slacked a bit this last year. He left most of the farm work to his man.”
“Did he drink much?”
“A little too much.”
“His wife on the farm, still?”
“Yes. She is a good-looking woman, and, I think, a good wife.”
“Any children?”
“No.”
“The farm hand? What kind of a man is he?”
“He’d be about thirty. A good man, too. Loftus was lucky in getting him. Mick Landon his name is. Born in Australia. Fairly well educated. Is the secretary of several local committees and is the M.C. at all our dances.”
“Do you know, or have you heard, what Mrs Loftus intends doing if her husband cannot be found?”
“Well, my wife was talking to her the other day, and Mrs Loftus told her she didn’t believe her husband dead and that she was going to run the farm with Landon’s help until he came back.”
“I suppose his strange disappearance has upset her?”
“Yes, but there is more anger than sorrow, I think. Of course, he might come back at any time. There’s old Jelly, now. He disappears three or four times every year, sometimes oftener, and no one knows where he goes or what he does.”
“Indeed! You interest me. A woman, perhaps?”
“Knowing Bob Jelly, I can think so. Here we are at the fence.”
Chapter Three
The Wheat Belt
A WIDE tubular and netted gate in a netted fence four feet nine inches high, and topped with barbed wire, halted further progress. Climbing from the truck. Bony made a swift survey of the surrounding country.
The fence ran north and south in a straight line, to the summit of a northern rise and to the belt of big timber to the south. Elaborate precautions had been taken in its construction to keep it rabbit-proof where it crossed the pipeline, whilst the single-track railway line passed over a sunken pit. The fence gate had been repaired, but the wrecked car was still lying partly down on the massive pipeline. The half-caste paced the distance between fence gate and car and found it to be little more than fourteen yards.
About five hundred yards beyond the fence was a house belonging, he was informed, to the Rabbit Department farm, and then occupied by the farm foreman. Also beyond the fence, and on the farther side of the railway, was a farmhouse occupied by a farmer named Judd.
Gray was disappointed when Bony failed to run about like a hunting dog, as all good detectives are supposed to do. For a detective he seemed too casual, and his blue eyes too dreamy. Yet Bony saw all that he wanted to see, which was that the backing of the car from gate to pipeline was done quite naturally, with no tree stumps to make the act a matter of chance.
“I hate the word, but I must use it,” Bony said softly. “I am intrigued. Yes, that is the word I dislike. The railway crossed by the rabbit fence makes a perfect cross. On all four sides the land is cleared of timber and now is supporting ripe wheat. Here is difficult country in which to hide a human body indefinitely; for, supposing the remains of George Loftus were hidden somewhere among all those acres of waving wheat, it would be only a matter of time before a man driving a harvester machine came across them. Assuming that Loftus was killed, what object could his murderer have in hiding his body for only a few weeks, excepting, perhaps, to put as great a distance between himself and it before the body was discovered. And to carry the body weighing twelve stone to the nearest timber, which I judge to be not less than three-quarters of a mile distant, would be no mean feat.”
“It’s mighty strange what’s become of him,” the Fence Inspector gave it as his opinion.
“I shall find him alive, if not dead.”
“You think so?”
“I am sure of it. My illustrious namesake was defeated but once—at Waterloo. I was defeated once ... officially, at Windee Station, New South Wales. I shall not meet my Waterloo twice.”
Inspector Gray hid his face with cupped hands, which sheltered a cigarette-lighting match, to conceal his silent laughter. Bony proceeded, unaware of the effect his vanity was having on his companion. Pointing to the fence, he said:
“I see several posts which want renewing. I suggest that you employ me cutting and carting posts and replacing those old ones. It will give me both opportunity to look about and time to study this affair. Now, please, take me on along the road Loftus would have taken from here to his house.”
Proceeding southward west of the fence, the land to left and right appeared as a golden inland sea caressing the emerald shores of bush and timber. The drone of gigantic bees vibrated the shadowless world—the harvesting machines were at work stripping fifteen bushels of wheat from every acre.
Crossing the old York Road and then continuing straight south, the truck sped up a long, low grade of sandy land which bore thick bush of so different an aspect from that familiar to Bony in the eastern States that he was charmed by its freshness. Here this bush, by its possible concealment of the body of Loftus, presented a thousand difficulties: for in it an army corps could live unseen and unsuspected.
“What is your real opinion of this case?” Gray asked.
“Tell me your opinion first,” Bony countered.
Silence for fully a minute. Then:
“This is the twelfth day since Loftus disappeared. It is my firm belief that he didn’t just wander into the bush and perish. As you see, there is as much cleared land as uncleared bush. Loftus was not a newchum, and even a newchum hopelessly slewed would surely come to the edge of cleared land, where nine times in ten he would be able to see a farmhouse. I think he was killed for the money he might have had with him—anything from a shilling to a fiver—either where his car was found or at some point on his way home, possibly as he crossed the old York Road.”
“Muir informed me that the vicinity of the York Road gate, as well as the edges of the wheat paddocks around the wrecked car, was thoroughly searched.”
“Doubtless that is so,” Gray assented. “Still, the possibility remains that Loftus may have been killed by a man or men possessing a car, who could have taken the body miles away to hide it in uncleared bush north of the one-mile peg beyond the railway.”
“There is solidity in the composition of your theory,” Bony said slowly, his eyes half
closed, yet aware of the quick look brought by his ponderous language. “I am beginning to think that tracing Loftus will resemble the proverbial looking for a needle in a haystack. However, we must not rule out the possibility that Loftus disappeared intentionally. How did he stand financially?”
“He was as sound as the average farmer.”
“And how sound is the average farmer—I mean in this district?”
“Distinctly rocky. Nearly all are in the hands of the Government Bank.”
“Was Loftus an—er—amorous man, do you think?”
Inspector Gray took time to answer this pertinent question.
“Well, no,” he replied deliberately. “I should not consider him amorous. To an extent he was popular with the ladies, but, nevertheless, he was a home bird. And, as I said before, Mrs Loftus is still young, good-looking, and a good wife. There you see the Loftus farm.”
They had reached the summit of the long slope. Before them lay a great semicircle of low, flat country chequered by wheat and fallow paddocks: to the east and south-east reaching to the foot of a sand rise similar to that on which they stood; to the south far beyond the horizon; to the south-west extending to a sand rise which drew closer the farther north it came. The Loftus farm was situated immediately to their right as they slipped down the grade. The house lay not quite half a mile from the road at the foot of a long outcrop of granite with oaktrees growing in the crevices. A tractor driven by one man, which pulled a machine operated by a second man, moved with deceptive slowness round a near paddock.
“That will be Mick Landon driving the tractor,” Gray said when he had taken in all the view. “The man on the harvester is Larry Eldon. He comes out every day from Burracoppin on a bike.”
With narrowed eyes Bony examined the scene spread out before him, for the land dipped a little to the foot of the granite outcrop. Silently he regarded the small iron farmhouse, the stables beyond, and the stack of new hay beyond them. Over all that vast belt of brown fallow and golden wheat here and there moved the humming harvester machines like giant sloths, feeding on the grain voraciously and flinging behind them the dust of their passage. Gray said:
Mr Jelly’s Business Page 2