Murder Must Wait Page 10

  “I am satisfied.”

  “Yes, I know that, Bony. But what progress?”

  “Decidedly more and decidedly faster than that made on three cases undertaken by your best men, Super.”

  “Yes, but ... Look, Bony, my ‘Commish’ is getting windy over press opinion sent from here. They aren’t so hostile to us over this Rockcliff murder as over the baby series. I know Janes and all his men fell down, but we have public opinion to cope with. The ‘Commish’ said last night if there’s another baby bust up in Mitford we’ll all be kicked out of our jobs.”

  “And what does your Chief Commissioner suggest is to be done about it?”

  “That every man jack of us rush to Mitford and tear the town to shreds.”

  “Do you agree with your Chief Commissioner?”

  “Well, I think we ought....”

  “Relax, Super.” Bony slowly rolled a cigarette, and the large CID Chief smoked a shade too vigorously, thereby betraying perturbation. “I will run over with you these Summaries, and then say that which will enable you to tell your Chief Commissioner to take a running jump at himself. Tell me, first, could you or Janes, or any other senior officer in your Department, look at a six-weeks’-old baby in a pram and tell its sex?”

  Canno pursed his lips and spurted a thin shaft of smoke at the ceiling.

  “Go on, answer me,” urged Bony. “You’re the father of a family of six. Janes has a son and a daughter. Both family men, like me. You answer my question.”

  Superintendent Canno slowly complied.

  “I don’t think I could say with certainty. I’m no chicken sexer.”

  “Of course you couldn’t. Yet what happened? Among your experts there wasn’t one woman. How, then, could you expect teams of men to dig successfully into this series of abductions? I had Alice McGorr in mind when I accepted this assignment. I want prints photographed, I call on Essen here who is an expert photographer and who is wasted in a small town like this. And when I want to know about babies, do I ask a policeman? I ask a policewoman.

  “Now for these fool Official Summaries. There’s no mention that the other babies outside the pub where Mrs Ecks’s baby was stolen were females, proving that the abductors wanted a male child, as were the babies previously stolen. There’s no mention that the child belonging to Mrs Delph was reared, nursed and minded by the cook while Mrs Delph ran around Mitford attending plonk parties. There is no mention in the relative Summary that the telephone in the manager’s office at the Olympic Bank is an old-fashioned contraption nailed to a wall, and not one theory put forward concerning the theft of the child from that bank.

  “So I could go on and on, but to do so would weary you with the crass stupidity of your teams of alleged experts. I’ve been assigned to this case only three days, and you want the murderer and the abductors handed in right away. Essen, step outside and make sure your tracker isn’t listening. Not once but fifty times I’ve been given an assignment when the great white investigators have fallen on their big fat ... yet I’m to be bullied into producing the criminal from a hat within three days. That’s why I cock a snook at you now, at your Commissioner, at my own, at every detective officer in the country. You can take it or leave it. I will produce the murderer of Mrs Rockcliff, and the abductor of her baby, when it suits me, and with or without your leave.”

  “Now, now, Bony old friend,” rumbled Canno. “There’s no argument, only a spot of worry over what the blasted papers are stirring up. All we want to do is to help as much as possible.”

  “Then why the devil didn’t you chase the reports on that stuff we sent to your lab? Why haven’t those reports been flown to me if they were too revealing to be telegraphed or telephoned?”

  “Surely you have received them?”

  “Of course not. I’ll tell you what you can do. Arrange with District Headquarters to let Yoti have another four constables out of uniform, when Yoti will assign two or more to Essen. We have to guard the infants at the hospital, and keep an eye on the babies of fool women who still leave them outside pubs. Was that tracker lounging about outside, Essen?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not agree to my men coming in?” Canno asked.

  “Because, Super, your men had their opportunity here, and seemingly preferred to play ‘two-up’.”

  “Insulting little pal, aren’t you?”

  “I could do better.”

  Alice was there with a large tray, which she placed on the desk. She began to arrange plates and cups in their saucers, and Bony went on:

  “There is a traffic in babies as you know. Doubtless you have covered all the ins and outs of such traffic where you suspected it, and Bolt will have done the same. Now make your men work, Super, on another angle of the same traffic. You will remember Davos in Vienna, and Lumsdon in Argentina. The same horrors could be practised in our own cities, in a hideout anywhere; even in a supposedly respectable house.”

  “What?” Canno almost shouted. A cup clattered, spilled some of its hot tea over the tray. Then Alice was gripping Bony’s shoulders, her hands rigid and her face frozen.

  “Davos! You don’t think ... Devil worship ... black mass ... babies being crucified upside down ... babies ... not here in Australia....”

  “Steady, Alice McGorr,” Bony quietly urged, and Alice stood stiffly while one could count four, and then proceeded to serve them with afternoon tea.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Stolen Masterpiece

  OF COURSE, Bony did the honours, escorting the great man to the airport, and only when he was airborne did Superintendent Canno feel like the mother-in-law who has been diplomatically evacuated.

  Alice McGorr was doing something to a hat with needle and cotton when Bony returned to his office-bedroom and immediately asked if the reports had arrived from Sydney. Instead of betraying exasperation with the delay, he left no doubt in his assistant’s mind that he was immensely pleased with life in general.

  “We haven’t been working hard enough,” he told Alice when rolling one of his absurd cigarettes. “Great Whitefeller Chief not satisfied with what we, of the lower orders, have done in Mitford.”

  Alice tried to smile, gave up the attempt, saying:

  “I’m sorry that I made such a fool of myself.”

  “But you didn’t, Alice. You supplied just the right touch of drama to my idea put forward to rock the Great Whitefeller Chief on his throne. He was on the verge of knocking me for a sixer so that he could tell his Commissioner that he had ‘fixed that Bony feller’ and the alleged experts could return to Mitford.”

  The girl’s hands resting on the desk expressed her mood.

  “Do’you really think that those tiny babies were done to death like you said?”

  “It’s a possibility, Alice. The fact that the five babies were all healthy boys tends to make me uneasy, as does the fact that prior to our coming to Mitford the abductors did not make one mistake. You have been thinking that those babies were stolen for what ... and why?”

  “To sell, the same as stolen cars,” she replied. “Foundling homes have long waiting lists for adoption and many people can’t wait too long. They’d be too old. Properly organised the racket pays well. There was the case of Nurse Quigly who ran a very private hospital in Melbourne. She was in cahoots with a doctor, and an unmarried girl expecting a baby could have it safely at her hospital, never see the infant, walk out and back to her job. The babies were sold to people aching to adopt one. Quigly and her doctor received as much as five hundred pounds for a baby and never less than fifty pounds.”

  “The variation of price dependent on the purse, of course. Would male children fetch more than females?”

  “No. The Matrons of the Homes say that as many people want a girl as want a boy.”

  “And so we return to the fact that all our five babies were boys. If our baby-thieves were running a racket similar to your Nurse Quigly they would steal easy babies, steal a baby girl from a pram rather than take the ris
k of stealing a boy from the Olympic Bank. Did you ever hear of the Satanics?”

  “No,” Alice said as though she didn’t want to hear.

  “I know very little about them. A few years ago in Sydney the remains of three male babies were dug up in a garden at the rear of a large house. The investigation stopped when bogged down by official impatience, but there was reason to believe that the people who occupied the house at the time the children died were Satanics, a particularly virulent organisation of Satan Worshippers. Therefore, we must accept the possibility of such practices.

  “What you need just now, Alice, is sunshine in your mind. Put on your hat and stroll along to the hospital and see the Matron; I’ll phone her you are coming. I want you to look over the Infants’ Ward and find what is the routine at night for their welfare and take note of the general plan of the building.”

  Alice left, obviously glad to be up and doing, and Bony used the house telephone to talk with the Matron. On returning to his room he found Essen waiting.

  “Mail just delivered,” Essen said, expectancy and impatience writ plain on his large face. He had placed on Bony’s blotter several letters and one large official envelope. He was invited to sit and, having glanced at the envelopes, Bony selected the large one for first opening.

  “Under the initials P.R. on the clothes’ tags are J.Q.,” Bony eventually told Essen. “Coincidence, I expect, but Alice mentioned less than an hour ago having known a Nurse Quigly who was in the baby-adoption racket.”

  “I remember the case,” Essen said. “Four years ago. Quigly was said to be fifty-two years old and she got eighteen months. Our Mrs Rockcliff isn’t Nurse Quigly.”

  “The section of wall plaster tells us nothing excepting that the mark left upon it is of a well-known hair dressing which is free from gum and contains ingredients not included in any other formula. You will see a jar of it on my dressing-table behind you.”

  “The sweepings from the bedroom floor gave better results. Two male hairs, dark brown, and having other attributes which need not concern us until we find that murderer. There are several hairs from the head of the dead woman, and no less than five hairs from another woman’s head. You will recall that you found one long hair caught in the spring mattress and obviously pulled from the head of the woman who crawled under the bed. This is one of the five hairs from the woman not Mrs Rockcliff. They are black, like mine. But they haven’t been treated with any hair dressing.

  “The section of the report dealing with fingerprints is disappointing, or would be had you not dusted and photographed. Only the prints left by the dead woman are clear. The prints of the unknown woman’s gloves show they were made of a cotton material and the enlargement of the mended tear will surely interest Alice McGorr. The unknown man’s prints prove he was wearing rubber surgical gloves. You may examine the report at your leisure.”

  “Thank you, and thanks, too, for that remark you made about me to the Superintendent,” Essen said. “That right, we’re to have reinforcements?”

  “From Albury Divisional HQ. Five are being sent. I’m going to suggest to Yoti that he assign you and at least three of the men for prevention of further infant abductions. Alice has gone to the hospital to see what opportunities a baby-thief has there, and it will be up to you to place your men. If you will take care of the babies left in Mitford, that matter will be lifted from me.”

  “I’ll certainly do everything possible.”

  “I know you will. How is friend Marcus Clark?”

  “Dr Nott had him shifted to the hospital at the Settlement this morning. Said he’d be all right out there, as Dr Delph takes in the Settlement and visits there every other day.”

  “I haven’t met Delph. What’s your opinion of him?”

  “One of those men who seems to be too energetic on a hot day. Always on the go. Well liked by men. The women say he’s a dear.”

  Essen departed and Bony passed to his dressing-table and pensively unwound a hair from the bristles of his hairbrush. Taking it to a shaft of sunlight, he studied it for a full moment before putting on his hat and also departing.

  Despite Alice McGorr’s private opinion of his rate of progress, and despite the visit to Mitford by the Chief of the CID, who held the same opinion, Bony was wholly satisfied with his methods. As with many an assignment he had undertaken only when the police team work had bogged, so with this one. He had begun with an unobtrusive study of the people concerned by this series of baby thefts, and was now at the stage when the criminals were beginning to unmask themselves. Presently, and it might well be soon, he would prod the nest and watch the infuriated ants unmask a little faster.

  Team work, Alice had suggested, was always good. It wasn’t, always. It was often very good when applied to a city crime bearing the hallmark of the criminal’s methods, or the criminal’s fingerprints, and assisted by informers. It was when a crime yielded no such leads that team work folded up and he, the half-caste detective, was asked to investigate by officials who secretly hoped he would fail, that in his failure they themselves would be excused.

  When Bony entered the Library he felt almost gay, a mood not generated by the prospect of success but by the many little facts and clues already garnered. He was, too, delighted by the latest item, the fact that Fred Wilmot, the official Police Tracker, had been following him from the Police Station, and was idling behind a remover’s van as he stepped into the Library.

  Mr Oats, the librarian, welcomed him with friendly naïveté.

  “Sit down, Inspector. What is it this time?”

  “Well, chiefly your recent robbery, Mr Oats. Constable Essen who is looking into it has run against several difficulties, and I thought I might be able to help him out. I don’t suppose you know, by repute, of course, any art collector who would be tempted to buy your stolen aboriginal picture?”

  The librarian gently shook his silvered head.

  “An art collector would be less likely to be interested in that rock slab than, say, the curator of a museum, and I know no curator so unscrupulous, even if he had the money, which, recalling my own salary, I’m sure he wouldn’t have to spend!”

  “Can you recall the picture to mind? Do you think you could sketch it, from memory?”

  “I’ll try, but don’t expect to see the work of an artist.” Mr Oats drew a pad forward and took up a pencil. “Let me see, now. There was a general line near the bottom, a horizontal line running like this. Wait a bit, I’m wrong. The line wasn’t exactly horizontal but slightly curved, and on the line was a figure carrying something like a bag, something like ... You remember the boys’ comics? Pictures of Bill Sykes carrying away a huge bag of swag? Peculiar figure, too. It had an emu’s head and tail. Well, that seemed to be what the figure was doing in the picture. At the top of the drawing were lines bending downwards which could be meant as clouds, and between these clouds and the ground there’s what looks like a tree. The tree is in front of the striding man, and at the foot of the tree are little things, I could never make out what.”

  Mr Oats passed the sketch to Bony, who thought he could draw much better.

  “Professor Marlo-Jones,” went on the librarian, “says it is his opinion that the clouds above are heavy with rain, and that the figure represents an old man who, in the far days of the Alchuringa, came up out of the ground and threw rain-stones all about to make the clouds drop the rain.”

  Bony studied the sketch.

  “May I keep it?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “It was drawn in ochre ... white and yellow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not gypsum?”

  “Well, that I could not be sure about. It looked like white ochre, I think.”

  “It needn’t be important, Mr Oats.” Bony lit a cigarette. “I’ll have the sketch copied and circularised, and someone might report having seen the slab of rock. By the way, what was the colour of the rock?”

  “Purple brown, Inspector. Desert sandstone, I
think Professor Marlo-Jones said it was. It comes from a very wide area of Central Australia. I suppose the colour of the rock is why red ochre wasn’t used in the drawing.”

  “Probably. I would like to know why it was stolen. The theft might have been a cover-up for something more valuable. Have you checked over the other museum pieces?”

  “Nothing else was taken,” replied Mr Oats. “We haven’t very much here, as you know, and it didn’t take us long to be sure on that point. Like you, I can’t understand it.”

  Standing, Bony looked down upon the rough sketch. Mr Oats couldn’t be sure, but he felt rather than saw that Bony was smiling.

  ROUGH SKETCH MADE BY LIBRARIAN OATS

  Chapter Thirteen

  A Chat with Mr Bulford

  THE BELL at the private entrance to the Olympic Bank was rung at seven minutes after four, and on opening the door Mr Bulford found Bony standing on the wire mat. Revealing no surprise he smiled his greeting and retreated in invitation to enter.

  “Please go on up, Inspector. I must lock the parlour door.”

  “That is where I would like to chat, Mr Bulford,” Bony countered, and turned to enter the bank chamber and thence to the manager’s office. Mr Bulford might have been a junior clerk, when he sat diffidently in his managerial chair behind the ornate desk.

  “Are you aware that anyone outside your private entrance can hear when you are engaged on the telephone in this room?” Bony asked.

  Mr Bulford was instantly alarmed.

  “No, I didn’t know it,” he replied. “I am apt to speak loudly because the damned instrument has had it and ought to have been axed long ago. That’s just too bad.”

  “It isn’t possible to distinguish words, Mr Bulford. The point concerning this fact is that, knowing when you were engaged on your telephone, the people who stole your infant son were able to carry through a simple plan.”

  The manager paused in the act of lighting a cigarette, his brows raised above hazel eyes now brightly alert.