“If he doesn’t turn up, it will be, eh?” asked Cosgrove.
“Certain deductions will follow such an eventuality, for if he isn’t found alive or dead there can be no proof that he walked or ran from the door alive. That is why I chose to ask you both not to speak of it to anyone.”
“But can’t you believe what Jill says?”
“I fear not, although I permit myself to hope she speaks the truth. I shall continue to add my efforts to those of the Mira men to find Lush. Now, don’t you think you had better leave for Mira and Bourke? Don’t worry about your things, Miss Madden, or about the animals. You may be assured of my sympathy. I’d like to ask you two a question you might think impertinent. May I?”
Jill Madden looked at Cosgrove, and he nodded.
“Are you two in love?”
To this both nodded, and the girl began to sob. Cosgrove took her hand, saying, “We found out about it a couple of months ago, Inspector. We had to keep it dark because my mother detests Lush, and anyway, she’s difficult about what I … Blast it, you know what I mean without saying it!”
“Perhaps I do.”
Bony went with them to the river bank, where he asked Cosgrove to arrange to have the girl’s possessions collected from the laundry because he might be away from the house.
Watching them cross the dry bed and climb the far bank to the horse, Bony found himself wanting in not having asked why the girl had walked from Mira and the man had ridden; and while returning to the house he pondered another tiny mystery. In her statement to Constable Lucas the girl had said Lush had abused her before bashing the door with the axe. After she had fired through the door he had been silent. That was singular indeed. Would not his normal reaction to being fired at be to hurl abuse from a safe distance?
Chapter Seven
The Dead Stand Still
WHEN BONY arrived at the house the sun showed it was one hour to noon. Having removed the cases to the laundry, he locked the doors and strolled to the mail-boxes to put questions to the mail driver scheduled to reach them at twelve. The wind had sprung up again, cold and tangy from the far distant Snowy Mountains, and while waiting he walked on farther to note how the track to White Bend veered, as though fearfully, away from the great wilderness of billabongs and dusty declivities called Madman’s Bend.
He saw a horseman approaching from out of this bend, and shortly afterwards recognized the Mira overseer, the man who had visited him the previous day. On the pommel of the saddle rested the outward mail-bag. He called to Bony before dismounting.
“Got cold, hasn’t it? Hope this easterly won’t last.”
His dark eyes were small, and his long face looked a trifle pinched. He was wearing a leather windcheater, and the tight trousers tucked into short leggings seemed to Bony the sensible clothes for the time and place.
“It can be unpleasant,” he agreed when Vickory had dismounted. “It could be less so in the lee of that gum. The mail is more often late than early, I suppose.”
“Tries not to be,” Vickory said, busy with a cigarette. “After tomorrow he’ll have to take the outside track.”
“The men still searching for Lush?”
“Yes, some again in Madman’s Bend and others through the top bend beyond the Mira homestead. With no sun even a good man could get bushed in Madman’s Bend. About nine square miles.”
“But since Lush disappeared the sun has shone every day.”
“That’s so. With the sun he wouldn’t bush. Musta fell over into the hole. If he doesn’t come up soon he never will.” The overseer drew at his cigarette and thoughtfully regarded Bony. “There’s three no-hopers camped on this side a bit down from our shearing-shed. Just swagmen. Told them about the flood and they seemed surprised it’s so close. Nothing else, ’ceptin’ a couple of stray horses, and they must have been living off the smell of a gum-leaf.”
“The three men you found: how far is their camp from this place?” asked Bony.
“About a mile and a half straight through. Not Lush’s type, though. Lush was too flash to clobber with them. He reckoned himself a squatter.”
“Reckoned?”
“Reckoned, yes. He’s past tense for sure. I think the mail’s coming. On time.”
They could now see the white dust cloud raised by the mail car being swept away westward. Bony continued, “They tell me that Lush when full never drove faster than ten miles an hour. He was full when he left White Bend Hotel. D’you think that after driving some twenty miles at ten miles an hour he would then be drunk enough to walk over this cliff?”
“Not drunk enough—angry enough,” said Vickory. “He was a smarmy bloke. Spoke soft and polite, drunk or sober, to men. But under it he stank. He was sober enough when he took a shovel to a milk cow ’cos she swished her tail in his face. One of our riders happened to see him. He was still bashing the cow when she was dead. Happened, too, with a trotter he raced in town. Backed him all he could and didn’t even get a place. Took him to the races in a float: drove him back that fast and that long the horse was never any good afterward.”
“What has this to do with his disappearing into the hole?”
“What I’m getting at is this. Lush gets here in the middle of the night, runs out of petrol, loses his block, rushes to his mail-box and drags out one of the legs, and belts at the utility. Leg breaks and so he goes for another, and in blind rage misses the box and takes a header over the bank. Easy done. The night was as black as the ace of spades.”
The oncoming mail car was not unlike a laden black beetle.
“An interesting supposition,” Bony said without levity. “Anything to support it?”
“There were four legs to the box. Now there’s three. There’s a dent on top of the near-side mudguard that he could have made with the leg. Pity there’s no leg or part of one to prove it. Still, when it broke he could have flung it yards in his temper.”
Bony felt like complimenting Vickory on having argued so well when the heavy vehicle was braked to a halt. The red-headed youth leaned out from the driving-seat and said, “Lush turned up yet, Vic?”
He had no passengers. He took the Mira bag as the overseer answered, and gave out the inward mail-bag. When Bony approached he asked whether he was Inspector Bonaparte, and casually asked, “Found neither hair nor hide of Lush, eh? Musta done a get after bashing up his wife, and now she’s dead he won’t stop going.”
“When you arrived here and found the utility, was anyone waiting with the Mira mail?” asked Bony.
“Yes. Ray Cosgrove was waiting.”
“You looked into the utility?”
“Too right! Then I looked around for Lush.”
“Was there anything on the utility, anything on the driver’s seat? Purchases?”
“Only an empty beer carton on the passenger’s end of the driver’s seat.”
“A carton which takes a dozen bottles?”
“That’s so. There was a bit of wood on the mudguard, and when I saw a dent near by I wondered if that wood had anything to do with it.”
“Did it look like one of the box legs?” asked Vickory.
“Could have been, Vic,” replied the driver. “Could at that. A leg missing, like?”
“Yes. I’ve been telling the Inspector I reckon Lush lost his block when he ran out of petrol and took to the ute with a leg from his own box. What d’you reckon?”
“Well, someone told me … I can’t remember who it was now. Anyhow, someone told me that when Lush began to climb a wall he’d go up ten or twelve feet. Take a bit of believin’, though.”
“The feller who told you that could have something,” said the overseer, pleased by his own deductions.
“Yair, I suppose he could have. Now, it’s me for the track. See you later! Hell! Not here, look like! Next trip down I’ll have to take the outside track, and leave the mail at Murrimundi. You can get down to Murrimundi, and they can get it over by wire, can’t they?”
“They can g
et it over to our side, but we could be cut off by what I hear of the water coming down.”
“Yair, you might have to raise them levees around the joint, Vic. Have a good time. Hope it don’t rain on my run.”
“Would you deliver this letter to Constable Lucas, or to his wife?” asked Bony, proffering the letter.
The driver grinned, “Too right, Inspector,” he assented. “Always keep sweet with the police’s been my motto for years. I’ll see he gets it.”
The engine roared, the wheels skidded, and redhead drove off with the careless abandon of youth.
“Levees?” questioned Bony, and the overseer said that during the great ’25 flood Mira had had to build a levee to enclose the entire homestead, adding, “She came that high the water nearly got to Madden’s house. This time it could go in and stay in for a week. I’ll get going. Have to meet the gang for lunch. We’ll come for the cows in the morning. Don’t let the chooks out of the yard, ’cos we’ll have to snaffle them as well as the dogs. And what about you?”
“I’ll leave at the same time,” replied Bony.
With this they parted, Bony going back to the house to take his lunch.
By three o’clock he had satisfied himself that the box leg, or any part of it, was not floating on the surface of the great hole to provide support for the theory that Lush had fallen into it and drowned. Twenty minutes later he was standing on the river bank opposite the Mira homestead.
He could now see the commodious house dwarfed by date-palms and surrounded by a high wood fence, with the offices and workshops to the right. Immediately opposite were the men’s quarters, the reservoir tanks on the usual high stands, and the wood-fired boiler on chocked wheels to work the pumps. It was a fine homestead ably supported by the original leasehold, and now too good for the greatly reduced acreage. Down-river were the shearing- and wool-sheds, and at a fire outside the shearing-shed two men sat and smoked. The entire area was higher than the bank Bony was traversing.
Now and then he had to turn away to pass a water gutter which would admit flood water to the billabongs lying amid the box-trees and arboreal rubbish covering this enormous bend. The strong easterly wind moaned through the branches of the majestic red-gums. Major Mitchell and black cockatoos chattered at his passing, but only once did a kookaburra chuckle at him. It was four o’clock and the sun was westering when he came to the camp of the three men reported by the overseer. It was deserted.
As was to be expected of these wandering men who work as seldom as possible and cadge food from station cooks, their camp was littered by wind-blown newspaper, mutton bones, and tins tossed into a hole. The mound of ash spoke of the length of their sojourn, and the temperature of the ash proved they had departed that day, obviously decided by the overseer’s warning.
Bony gave half an hour to poking the paper litter with a stick, but found nothing of interest. He delved into the ashes with the stick, found nothing of interest there either, and then proceeded to cross this Madman’s Bend.
It was impossible to maintain a direct route because of steep-sided gutters and soak-holes and the masses of tree debris piled against obstacles by past floods. He cut the tracks of horses, probably of those ridden by the searchers after Lush. He crossed the tracks of two men where it was impossible to detect whether they were going to or returning from the mail-boxes. He caught sight of a wind-quickened piece of paper and plucked it from a bush.
It was a torn shred of tissue paper, and on smoothing it flat he saw the letters el against the ragged right margin. The paper was unweathered, and he spent a little time searching for the counterpart. He thought it possible that it had been brought from Mira by the vagrant wind, which could carry such a wisp high above the trees and deposit it in this wilderness.
Resting on a log and making a cigarette, he recalled that when leaving the deserted camp he had reacted adversely to this vast area enclosed on three sides by the river. The overseer had said it covered something like nine square miles, five and a half thousand acres.
Now Bony surveyed what he could see of it: the gnarled grey and red box-gums leaning at grotesque angles, their branches ugly and twisted, their leaves dry and grey-green; the stiff, brittle remains of long-dead bushes; and the ground covering of burr all dead and seemingly malignant. It had no positive attributes. It was neither desert nor jungle, neither flat nor hill, neither verdant nor arid, neither light nor dark.
Light! That was it. He recalled how, when he was leaving the camp on the bank beneath the kingly red-gums, the sunlight had appeared to diminish, and he remembered how he had looked up, faintly expecting to see a cloud masking the sun. There were no clouds, and the sun, now midway down the western arc of the sky, was bright and fell slantingly upon him; yet this world of dusty death and decay intermixed with tortured life had begun to disturb this man of two races before he himself realized it. Feeling a distinct revulsion to the place, he stood abruptly and hurried onward.
The ground was of hard clay rubble, exceptionally bad for tracking, even of horses; the tracks of these he cut but seldom, and he was impatient of being even momentarily interested. He felt eyes watching him, and knew that the old enemy ever lurking in the subconscious once again threatened to ride him like an old man of the sea.
The wind moaned high among the scattered trees, but the air about him was still and cold. In summer it could be still and dehydrating, and a man could lose mental balance, panic, and never be found again.
The ghosts of his mother’s people watched him. The same ghosts urged him to run. Resisting the impulse to look back over a shoulder, resisting the command to run, he looked determinedly over the ground before his advancing feet for human tracks, until he came to a tall, slender leopard-wood tree and could see the ground changing imperceptibly from ashen grey to warm off-white.
There was a red-box tree, and there a green wait-a-bit bush, and over there the avenue of river gums. The sun was before him, and the sun took on added brilliance, and once again he was walking in broad daylight, and behind him were left for the nonce the ghosts of his aboriginal forebears.
The easterly wind came along the empty bed of the river to sting his right ear and cheek as he passed the mail-boxes. It played with the light-grey powdered surface of the track, and about the boxes. If it had been as strong as this on the night Lush vanished, it was no wonder the man’s tracks could not be found.
The dogs were vociferous in their welcome and anxiety for freedom. The roosters chortled at him, and as he passed the birds’ dinner-perch to split wood for the stove, the first of the kookaburras landed on it.
Chapter Eight
A Pleasant Conference
BONY AND the dogs were in the warm living-room, and all was well with their limited world. Outside the stars were hard and brilliant, and, although the wind kept teasing the stolid red-gums, the sand of the eastern plains—which the hot summer wind from the west would whip into a sandstorm—lay cold and still.
During a momentary lull both dogs stood and growled, and in the buffeting that followed the approaching vehicle seemed to arrive with a rush. Bony opened the door, the dogs rushed out, and Constable Lucas shouted, “Hope the stove’s red hot.”
He was wearing his uniform greatcoat over civilian clothes, and he stamped his feet on the linoleum. He looked cold, and smiled broadly when he saw Bony at the stove. The dogs, now needing no urging, followed him in before he could close the door.
“You had dinner before you left?” asked Bony.
“As you said, yes. I left after dark. I’ve brought bread and a pound or two of cooked ham.”
“Good! I’m out of bread, and the meat is short. We can eat when we wish to. I felt it was necessary for us to confer, aside from the food supply.” Bony put before the policeman jugs containing coffee and hot milk. “I’ve reached the conviction that Lush is not lying doggo somewhere with a bottle or two, and with the river coming down I shall have to work to another plan.”
Lucas opened
a parcel to disclose a small, attractive cake which he said his wife had sent, and Bony produced a knife with which to cut it.
“You will not forget to thank Mrs Lucas. News from Bourke?”
“Yes. Following the report on the autopsy a warrant was issued for the arrest of William Lush. The coroner’s inquest was held and adjourned. Mrs Lush was buried at five, and the daughter left with the Cosgroves shortly after six. And I telephoned Roger’s Crossing, sixty miles south of Bourke, and they say the head of the flood passed them at two o’clock this afternoon. It’ll be here tomorrow late.”
“What did you get on Lush?”
Lucas produced a slim notebook and thumbed the pages before replying.
“I gained a pretty good picture, Inspector, being armed with the information about the warrant. People liked the Maddens, and weren’t backward in giving information. I tackled the two Roberts men. I told them it would be advisable to speak up, and then asked them if Lush owed them money. They said he owed a betting debt of sixty-odd pounds, and that he still owed the balance of a hundred and eight-five pounds on the trotting horse he bought from them last year. It appears they heard of Lush driving the horse home after the races and permanently crippling it, making it worthless. They had threatened to sue if the two debts weren’t cleared within a week. That was ten days ago, and they started proceedings when Lush said he couldn’t fork out.
“The store account stands at two hundred pounds odd, but this has always been taken care of by the wool cheque and concerns the Selection. The hotel is personal. Lush owes fifteen-pounds-something there, and the publican wasn’t particularly anxious because Lush had owed much more in the past.”
“Thus three hundred pounds would have been more than adequate to square his debts,” Bony observed.
“Then I inquired what Lush had purchased that day, since the mail driver said he saw only an empty beer carton on the utility. The store people say he bought nothing there. The publican says he left at close-up time with three bottles of whisky and six of beer in a beer carton. The baker told me he had got six of bread, and that he had supplied Mrs Lush with bread since her first husband died.”
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