Murder Must Wait

by Arthur Upfield

  Bony found Mrs Yoti in the kitchen and, as he predicted, she was cooking the dinner. The kitchen was hot, and Mrs Yoti was hot, and no woman feels at top when she’s hot in a hot kitchen.

  “Oh, there you are! How was the party?” she asked.

  “Rather boring,” replied Bony, sitting on a chair at the table littered with pastry-making utensils. “I dislike sherry. Alice calls it plonk. Appropriate, I think. Could you give me a couple of aspirins?”

  “Why, of course. Many there?”

  “Crowded. The Bulfords, the Delphs, the Notts, the Reynoldses, the novel-writing woman, and others. Two maids, one a lubra, served the drinks as fast as wanted, and most guests wanted fast. The Professor collared me for a session. Most interested in me as a specimen. His wife was, too. I lost a trouser button and gained a headache.”

  Bony washed down the aspirin with a few sips of water. He stared at the teapot on the mantel over the hot stove, continued to stare that way until certain that Mrs Yoti was aware of the target. He sighed, set down the glass of water, and leaned back.

  “You lost a what?” asked Mrs Yoti.

  “A trouser button,” he answered, standing up. “Well, I mustn’t detain you. Thanks for the aspirin.” Smiling at her, he glanced again at the teapot, and proceeded to the door.

  Mrs Yoti looked at the clock on the mantel, noted the teapot beside the clock.

  “Would you like a cup of tea? I could make a pot before my pastry is due out of the oven.”

  “That is just what I would like,” Bony said, returning to the table and sitting down again. “A strong cup of tea would fix this hangover. It’s very thoughtful of you. How d’you like being married to a policeman?”

  “Wouldn’t like not to be married to a policeman,” replied Mrs Yoti, pouring boiling water into the teapot. “My father was a policeman, my two brothers are policemen, and now my son is one.” The tea was made, the oven was opened and out came the pastry. It looked good, and Mrs Yoti laughingly asked what happened when the button came off his trousers.

  “Mrs Marlo-Jones sneaked round the room to pick it up, and then sneaked over to the mantel and dropped it into a bowl. If you found a button at a party would you do that?”

  “Not while my guests were present. Afterwards, of course. Good buttons are buttons these days. But that Mrs Marlo-Jones has a kink for buttons.”

  “Indeed!” Bony sipped the strong tea with intense satisfaction.

  “Daughter of a friend goes to High School, and once a week Mrs Marlo-Jones takes the botany class, or something like that. One day she was lecturing the class, and she was wearing a jacket suit. She dived her hand into a side pocket for her handkerchief, and with it she pulled out about two dozen buttons. All kinds, too. The girls shrieked as they scrambled after them all over the floor.”

  “And now she has added my button to her collection. I didn’t like to ask her for it.”

  “No. You couldn’t very well do that,” agreed Mrs Yoti. “I’ll sew another on for you.”

  “Thanks. I’m no good at it. Yes, I would like another cup. By the way, is your son a big man, bigger than his father?”

  “Six feet four inches, forty-six or something round the chest, weighs sixteen stone. Why, his father’s a pigmy to our George.”

  “I thought he might be, on coming across a pair of his slippers. Size nine foot?”

  “Size nine. Takes almost a tin of polish every time he cleans his shoes.”

  “Is there an old pair about anywhere? I’d like to borrow them.”

  “Borrow them!” echoed Mrs Yoti. “George’s shoes! Whatever for?”

  “Merely to make a wrong impression.” Mrs Yoti stared at Bony, and proceeded to nod slowly as though comprehension dawdled like a poodle off the lead. Bony was convinced it was still dawdling when he left for his room and the shower, but the number nines were in his hand and he wondered what it felt like to be an outsize man.

  After dinner he found Alice and Essen sitting on his doorstep. Alice said she felt quite all right, and Essen complained that the stewed cloves was wasted effort at home, adding:

  “Anyway, I’ll try a brew on top of the next Lodge night.”

  Bony sat with them on the step.

  “My mind has been reviewing Mr Cyril Martin. What do you think of him, Essen?”

  “Don’t care for him. Nothing definite, of course.”

  “What about his home life?”

  “Good enough, I believe. The wife’s a semi-invalid. She never goes out anywhere. He does enough of that for both.”

  “How does he stand financially, d’you know?”

  “Couldn’t say. Seems to be well heeled. Buys a new car every second year.”

  Bony musingly looked at Alice, and Alice tried to read his mind.

  “How do you feel towards Mr Martin, Alice?”

  “I know Martin’s type. The older they get the sexier they get. And most of it is in their dirty minds.”

  “You think he’s a nasty man?” disarmingly asked Bony, and Essen chuckled and drew to himself disapproval from Alice, who said:

  “I’ll tell you what, and I’m serious. The more I see of those people, which includes this Mr Martin, the more I remember what you said about Satan Worshippers and such like. There’s something going on that I don’t cotton to. Give me the straight-out metho drinkers and city crooks. They’re clean beside this plonk-drinking lot.”

  “Now, now, Alice,” Bony reproved. “Let us stick to Mr Cyril Martin.”

  “All right, we will,” Alice swiftly agreed. “There’s something at the back of my mind between it and him. I can’t dig it out, but I will.”

  “Let me assist you,” Bony pleaded, and went on: “Does he remind you of the man who wears a size eight shoe, and who walks something like a sailor?”

  “Why...” Alice stared. “Why, that’s it.”

  “He comes closer to the man we imagine killed Mrs Rockcliff than anyone we have met in Mitford,” Bony said, dreamily. “But, Alice, I must earnestly warn you not to rush in where even Bony fears to tread. I understand, Essen, that Martin has two children, a boy and a girl.”

  “Correct. Son would be about twenty-six or seven, and the girl is a couple of years younger. The son used to be in partnership with the old man, but three years ago there was a hell of a bust-up and he cleared off to Melbourne. The sister went with him.”

  “The reason behind the bust-up?”

  “Don’t know that one. Could be the father and son are too much alike to get along together.”

  “Too much like physically or mentally?”

  “Both. The son’s the dead spit of the old man. I did hear he set up an estate business in Croydon.”

  “Might dig in behind this Mr Cyril Martin,” Alice said hopefully.

  “I have already done so, Alice. The day before Mrs Rockcliff leased No 5 Elgin Street, Mr Martin cashed a personal cheque for fifty pounds. That was on October 11th. On the same date every month thereafter he cashed a personal cheque for fifty pounds. That is, to January 11th. He didn’t cash a cheque for that amount on February 11th ... four days after Mrs Rockcliff was murdered. You will both recall that Mrs Rockcliff paid her bills on the 12th of every month.”

  “That sort of gives me ideas,” Alice said, eyes very hard, lines between the brows very deep.

  “I took both of you into my confidence, not to provide you with ideas but to ease your minds of the depressing thought that I slumber too much. Could you find me a bike for tonight, Essen?”

  “One on hand in the shed out back,” Essen replied.

  “Too well known. Could you hire one?”

  “Easy. Bike shop just down the street.”

  “Is the tracker still on duty?”

  “Went back to the Settlement an hour ago, according to the Sergeant.”

  “Then hire a reliable bike and leave it here in this room.” Essen stood and waited for the reason behind the bicycle hiring. He received a reason. “I’m going out visiting.”
<
br />   There was dismissal in Bony’s voice, and Essen grinned at Alice and departed.

  “Feeling better?” Bony asked, rolling a cigarette.

  “Much, thank you. Ready for work, too.”

  “The work will come, Alice. I am going to begin tonight. Tomorrow you will begin to work, too. Meanwhile, I’d like you to run along to the Municipal Library and spend an hour or two of relaxation with the magazines in the Reading Room. There is the mystery of the theft of the aboriginal drawing to be cleared up, and then there is the matter of those ceilings being painted duck-egg blue.”

  “What on earth...”

  “This afternoon, when discussing the cicatrice patterns of the Worgia Nation with Professor Marlo-Jones, I overheard a man say that the renovations carried out at the Library last November cost much more than the Council had voted. Another man said he thought the work had been well done and was worth the additional cost. The first man then argued that the work need not have taken so long, causing the Library to be closed to the public for an entire week. I would like to know if the Library was closed to the public on November 29th.”

  “Very well, I’ll find out. November 29th! That was the day the Bulford baby was stolen.”

  “There is the coincidence.” Bony smoothly admitted.

  Alice walked to the door, her shoulders expressive of irritation. She returned to the desk, glared at Bony, who sat smiling up at her.

  “Am I your cobber or am I just a cog in your machine?” she asked. “What’s behind the Library ceilings and the Bulford baby? Oh, damn! I’m sorry, Bony.”

  She had reached the door again when he called her back.

  “As you are not a cog in my machine, Alice, you must come under the other heading. We’re doing splendidly, so let us concentrate on our respective jobs, that our joint efforts may achieve success.”

  She nodded, bit her lip, and burst out with:

  “All right by me, Bony. But what are you going to do with those enormous shoes and the bike Essen is bringing here?”

  “I’m going to stir up an ants’ nest, Alice.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Playing Tricks

  THE NIGHT was silent and dark. The wind had gone off on walkabout. The famed Southern Cross was as ever the Great Celestial Fraud created by persons cursed with uncontrolled imagination.

  It is always sound practice that, if you are unable to command the thoughts of your enemy, you should provide him with material to think anything but the truth; as it is good policy to give your enemy as much worry as possible. Following Bony’s visit to the Aboriginal Settlement, the inhabitants would surely be wondering what prompted it, and, when brought to the verge of desperation, those who had planted red-back spiders in his bed, and had stolen cigarette-ends and a button in order to ‘sing’ these items with their magic, could be expected to make further moves.

  Although ten o’clock, the departed day still faintly illumined the western curve of the world. The road was just visible directly ahead of the front wheel of Bony’s bike, but, when the end of the made road was reached, the track crossing the flats bordering the river was quite invisible even to him. Constantly he rode off the track, had to alight and find his way back to it, and so left on the dusty soil the imprints of the number nine shoes.

  On coming to an old-man red gum growing close to the track, the bike rider was less than a hundred yards from the turn-off to the Settlement. He alighted and leaned the machine against the tree farthest from the track, and sat on a fallen limb to remove the number nines. The shoes he dropped beside the branch and proceeded to employ shaped pieces of wood and cellulose tape, separating his first and second toes from the third, and the third from the fourth and fifth toes. On proceeding, he left clear imprints of something having three long-clawed toes to each foot.

  In the morning sharp eyes would be dilated by tracks surely made by the dreaded Kurdaitcha without his feathered feet. Those prints would be followed back to the tree where the Kurdaitcha put on his great boots and mounted a bike to go back to Mitford. Agile minds would associate the Kurdaitcha with the half-caste police feller, and this police feller had come from far away. To the aborigine, no matter how close he might be to civilisation, the power of magic is assessed in accordance with the distance from which it has come. So if the half-caste police feller is a Kurdaitcha in disguise, then it warrants every aborigine to mind his p’s and q’s.

  Eventually the Kurdaitcha arrived outside Mr Beamer’s house, which, with the church and the store, guarded the Settlement.

  Bony could see Mr Beamer relaxing on the fly-netted veranda. Within the house someone was playing a piano. Beyond it, the red glow of communal fires illumined the fronts of the small huts occupied by the aborigines, about which men would be playing the white feller’s mouthorgans, and the women gossiping. Only the dogs would be suspicious, but not till the owners slept would they become a disturbing influence.

  With a stick Bony scratched in the dust a circle pierced by a shaft of lightning. Outside the store he drew a square, halved it, and in each half placed a triangle. Entering the carpenter’s shop, aided by a masked torch, he used chalk to draw a match-stick man on a board leaning against the wall. In the blacksmith’s shop he chalked a square on the anvil with a match-stick man fleeing from it. He examined the watchmender’s bench and the inside of a portable cabinet. One drawer was locked, but this he opened with forceps, finding within eleven watches, each neatly tagged with a number. On the top of the cabinet he left a sun making eyes at a prostrate black feller. In a box something like a schoolboy’s pencil case he found several pieces of stout celluloid, seven inches long by one and a half inches wide.

  Outside the school he drew on the ground six matchstick children, and passed along to the hospital. There were, he knew, three adult patients in this iron and weatherboard building, and that Marcus Clark occupied the partitioned end of a fly-netted veranda. Despite the hour there was a light in this alleged room, and to Bony’s astonishment, again despite the hour, Marcus Clark had a visitor, a shrunken old man seated at the foot of the bed. His face was clear in the light cast by an oil lamp on the night table, the lamp being accompanied by a large silver-mounted pipe, a tobacco plug and knife, and a paper-backed novel. It was evident that Mr Bertrand Marcus Clark was above average. He was saying:

  “I’m tellin’ you I don’t clam to all that rot. You can do nothin’ to fix this foot of mine, or mend me arm.”

  The old-’un chuckled, dry and humorous.

  “You wait, Clarky, old feller,” he said, softly. “You just wait. The kids got what I wanted, and the young Fred will do what I tell him.”

  Marcus Clark reached for his pipe and proceeded to fill it, and the old man bit a chew from his plug. Although the skin of both was chocolate, they were farther apart than the planets. Chief Wilmot wore the cloak of inscrutable passivity woven by his forebears in procession down the ages, but Clark was naked and neurotic and the sport of a dozen races. He was worried, impatient, victimised by a little knowledge.

  “I’m not sayin’ young Fred ain’t all there,” he argued, speaking with the aloofness of the busy parents to the dull child. “But I’m sayin’ again what I told Ellen, that mumblin’ and moanin’ and crying curses into something a man’s touched won’t give him the gutsache in five minutes. Pickin’ a button off the floor what dropped from a man’s pants, and snitchin’ his cigarette bumpers and the like, and puttin’ your curse into them things when yous points the bone at him, is good enough when you’ve got a month or more to work on him.

  “It’s time yous blacks woke up and took to modern ways what are faster. Like using them red-back spiders. That was a good idea, and I’ll bet it wasn’t yours. As I said at the corroboree last week, yous blacks have got to fight with white men’s brains and white men’s tools. You gotta learn that sitting around on your sterns all day won’t ever get you anywhere. Any’ow, yous old blokes is hopeless. Give me the kids. There’s hope in the kids.”

  �
��That police feller musta found them spiders,” offered old Wilmot.

  “He’s still walkin’ about, ain’t he?”

  Wilmot nodded, strangely cheerful, and Clark snorted when understanding that all he had said in disparagement of pointing the bone had not registered.

  “Young Fred in camp?” asked Clark.

  “Came back early. Went up to Big Bend to have a try for that ole cod he reckons is hanging out there. Must be a big feller, that ole cod.”

  “He ain’t muckin’ around Sarah too much, is he?”

  “No.” The Chief chuckled. “Young Fred ain’t liking it, though. Says it don’t seem fair, them being married only a month, and he can’t hang around. I tells him that’s the orders, and he went off crook.”

  “Well, he’s got to stay away from that camp,” Clark insisted. “It won’t last much longer, when we’ll be in the clear and them two can romp around much as they like. Oh, hell, damn this busted leg. Time I meet up with them fellers what done it, I’ll put ’em in hospital.”

  “Too right!” agreed the old man. “Damn crook all right. You know when you get outta here?”

  “No. Doc Delph he says the more I muck about on the foot the longer I’ll be here. Any’ow I’d be here a ruddy long time if you and the others ‘sung’ it good. And it would get better quicker if you come and see me more. You tell young Fred to come. I can get more outer him.”

  Bony left when a huge lubra wearing a white apron and a white linen hat suddenly appeared and berated the old man for staying so long, and on the ground in front of the veranda door he drew a particularly venomous drawing of Satan in a fit.

  Reaching the tree where he had left the bike, he freed his toes and donned the number nines, and from there pushed the machine all the way to the made road, satisfied that on the following morning his antics would create much ado.

  People were pouring from the two cinemas when he arrived in Mitford. Youths astride motor-bikes were ogling girls on the sidewalks, and other young men, with oiled hair gleaming, were escorting women to the milk bars. No one noted the seedy-looking character turn in at the Station, save Alice McGorr and Mrs Yoti, who were about to enter the police residence by the back door.