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  “Yes, I could, Inspector,” Mr Bulford said softly. The window light illuminated the beads of moisture on his forehead. “My first statement is the correct one.”

  Slowly Bony shook his head.

  “I am afraid that won’t do, Mr Bulford.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “You might like to give me the truth.”

  “Perhaps you know the truth, Inspector.”

  “No.” Again silence, that inner silence made the more poignantly complete by the sounds without. “Only the other day I was mentally comparing the American Third Degree methods of interrogation, and those said to be practised by the Hungarian authorities, with our Australian methods of conducting an investigation. While our Australian methods tend to prolong the investigation, I concluded that they provide an irresistible challenge. So that when I am asked to investigate a crime, Mr Bulford, detection becomes an icy slide with truth inevitably at the bottom. Why delay? Would you dally in the act of taking castor oil?”

  Bony stood to smooth down his impeccable tussore silk jacket. He looked down at Mr Bulford, brows raised just a fraction. The manager brought his hands into view and gazed at them as though seeking help. Bony waited. Presently Mr Bulford looked up and slowly shook his head.

  Bony’s shoulders expressed the shrug of resignation, before he turned and walked out.

  Chapter Twenty

  A Trip for Alice

  WITH BONY beside her driving the racy sports car, Alice McGorr silently vowed that if this was one of the methods by which Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte tracked down criminals, then the ways she knew were no more. The car was red, low-slung, long-bonneted, a two-seater. The canvas hood was down and the sun was hot and the wind whipped round the shield like puffs of hot air from an oven and yet astonishingly invigorating. She was reminded of Sweet Seventeen out with the boy friend, and she wanted to let her hair stream in the wind behind her.

  Once away from the green belt, and up and over the lip of the river flats, the world became even brighter and remarkably clean and stereoscopically clear. Alice did actually look upward for the passing cloud, to see the sky unblemished in blue-washed perfection. With unexpected abruptness she was introduced to a strange world.

  The road was merely a track languidly avoiding acacia clumps and box tree groves, running straight over the flats covered with blue bush, and for ever being teased by the dancing horizon.

  Contented sheep lay in the shade cast by old-man saltbush, and rabbits dived into their holes among the foot-high herbage. Far away she saw toy-sized horses beneath box trees, and mottled cattle grazed on a brown grass field. Kangaroos stilled, to gaze curiously at her, and three emus daintily trod a minuet on a bar of red sand.

  The hot sun was forgiven. The flies were left far behind or clung to the rear of the machine like small boys having a ‘whip behind’. And this Alice McGorr, reared in a semi-slum and associated with crime and vice in a close-packed city, felt she was being swiftly carried to some place beyond the mirage of life, a home-place from which she had been absent for centuries.

  Several crows raced the car, low-down and cawing derisively like urchins ya-hooing Sweet Seventeen and her escort. Alice wanted to laugh at them, felt like ya-hooing in return, resisted the thought because she was so utterly content. It was unbelievable that she was Policewoman Alice McGorr, and absolutely impossible that her escort was an inspector of the Criminal Investigation Branch of the Queensland Police Department. Jet-black cockatoos with scarlet under-wings shrieked at this unreal reality, and a flock of rose-breasted grey galahs supported them.

  Into the lullaby of the engine and the singing of rubber on sand drifted the voice of her companion, and during the fraction of time before she glanced at him she was conscious of mental effort to break the spell.

  “Did you ascertain the date of the new moon?” Bony asked.

  She moved her gaze from the slender dark hands about the wheel to rest upon his face in profile, and it seemed that time halted while she looked at the firm chin, the straight nose, the high forehead and the straight black hair which even the wind failed to disturb.

  “It’s due today,” she answered.

  “Today! Someone once said of the moon: ‘The maiden moon in her mantle of blue.’ And I think it was Shakespeare who wrote: ‘The moon, like a silver bow new bent in heaven.’ Do the thoughts build anything for you?”

  “Not clearly,” she replied, hesitantly. “I’m not educated like you.”

  “A mythical problem, Alice. The quotations came to mind to support a theory. Like a silver bow new bent in heaven ... a maiden moon in her mantle of blue ... a maiden and a bow ... Cupid’s bow.”

  After a half minute of silence, Alice said:

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I did think the dates those babies were stolen might have been chosen to coincide with a phase of the moon.”

  “Moon madness or moonshine,” Alice said, teasingly.

  “I sought the possible significance,” Bony said reprovingly. “Just why the new moon is of importance, if at all, to the abductors I have yet to learn. The new moon comes today. We shall see it just after sunset.”

  On a white splodge of mullock hiding the surface of a dam appeared four emus that stupidly must race the car and dart across the track, heads low, tail feathers sweeping up and down, clawed feet at the extremity of long shanks throwing up miniature dust clouds.

  Shortly after the ground colours had painted out these birds which never flew but could run at forty miles an hour, Bony stopped the car to scan the world ahead with binoculars.

  “Something like two miles out are what is commonly called Devil’s Marbles,” he said. “Far to the north-west a dust cloud denotes sheep travelling to a watering place. There are no smokes, nothing to indicate the presence of aborigines, so Padre Beamer was right when he said his blacks went east upriver on their walkabout.”

  Soon the Devil’s Marbles appeared on the image of the landscape like a figure on developing film. Then it seemed that under pressure of vast volcanic forces they jumped over the edge of the world. Alice wondered why Bony drove past these great brown boulders, a Stonehenge here as strange as that on the downs of England.

  Bony braked the car to a halt, again stood and examined the scenery.

  “We must walk,” he said. “Half a mile, that’s all. You may remain in the car, if you wish. I could drive to those Marbles, but the wheel tracks would be noted when the new moon wears her mantle of blue.”

  “I’m being left out far too much,” Alice protested, and almost hastily alighted. Then she wondered why he didn’t walk direct to the heaped boulders, why he angled this way and that to walk on a chain of cement-hard claypans, and once when she looked back at the car it was easy to believe they were space travellers exploring another planet.

  Of brown granite huge smooth rocks supported others upon their shoulders, some with seeming eternal security, others with knife-edge balance which, Alice thought, possibly she could upset. She was asked to stay put, and Bony walked round the little mountain, noting one place where a camp fire had burned.

  The journey back to the car seemed to take longer, and still Alice failed to understand why Bony deviated from the direct line to follow the hard claypans. She was glad to arrive, to welcome the cooling breeze from the moving car as Bony drove on for a further mile before turning back toward Mitford.

  Half an hour later the car was stopped, and Alice couldn’t remember having seen previously the windmill and iron tanks. She strove to recall the gate which Bony alighted to open, drove through and closed. She was sure they hadn’t gone through a gateway before, or passed a windmill, and just where they were she hadn’t the remotest knowledge.

  “I suppose you wouldn’t like to tell me why we’re touring about out here?” she asked, when Bony stopped before another closed gate and she was feeling the apprehension of the lost.

  “Your patience, Alice, hasn’t gone unnoticed,” he told her when t
hey were once more on the move. “Our business here is to prospect a theoretical lode which could show paying results; prospecting which must be done before the effects of stirring up the Settlement are further made manifest. It is all a matter of distances, angles, and compass points and what not.”

  “Now everything is made clear to me,” Alice jibed. “Do you know where we are?”

  “Yes. Ahead of us is a well called Murphy’s Triumph. Far to your left is the Murray and Mitford. If we continued in the present direction for a month we would arrive at Perth, in Western Australia.”

  “What would we do if the car broke down?”

  “Walk fifteen miles to Mitford ... walk south.”

  “I’m glad we brought Mrs Yoti’s flask of tea and something to eat,” Alice said, adding: “I hope the car doesn’t break down.”

  She only just saved herself from giggling, and then was furious at the thought which had captured her mind.

  “We’ll have our tea in the shade of a tree to which I want to present you,” Bony said, and Alice was thankful he hadn’t guessed what was in her mind. “We should be there in twenty minutes. As the tree was something more than a sapling when Dampier first saw the coast of Australia, it is now the Aged King of Trees. Therefore, you must be presented to it.”

  The world continued to roll towards them, parading its endlessly different faces, and then there seemed to be an end of the world and nothing but sky beyond, and the end came swiftly, to mock them by revealing yet another face ... a vast flat depression covered with a russet carpet.

  The car dipped downward to tread the carpet, in the centre of which was one small shrub. The carpet was woven with dried herbage upon a base of broken clay chips, and the shrub was a blot, a flaw. The blot grew under fairy magic, became a tree, and the tree grew and grew like Jack’s beanstalk to tower over the carpet, over the world. When abreast of the tree and some four hundred yards from it, Bony stopped the car, and Alice wanted to say to the tree:

  “How silly to grow there all by yourself. You must be lonely, and you don’t look at all friendly.”

  They drank Mrs Yoti’s tea and ate her salad sandwiches before beginning the walk to the tree. Alice was thinking she should have rested in the car when this image of eternity tore from her mind all lassitude. The girth of the trunk awed her. The grey and brown mottled bark was smooth and yet wrinkled like the skin of a pumpkin, and from high the old bark hung in long streamers to rustle and sing softly in the wind. Four great boughs sprang from the bole to support lesser branches draped with bark shed by the eucalypt instead of its leaves.

  At the base of the trunk was a cavern, black walls of charcoal telling of savage attacks by grass fires, and the cavern was floored with wind-blown sand, rose pink and faintly rippled. Alice was invited to enter the trunk-cavern with Bony, and found ample room for a dozen people to shelter from the rain.

  “A proper monarch,” she said, and Bony nodded agreement and stepped out after her. With him she circled the tree, but she did not follow when he climbed it to disappear among the branches. The wind rustled the bark streamers, and abruptly she felt herself dwindling into the emptiness of space materialised.

  She didn’t see Bony descend on the far side of the trunk, didn’t hear him until he called to her, and she found him smoothing the sand within the cavern, first with his hands and then by flicking his handkerchief. For the second time she verged on giggling, and again she was furious, this time made so by the thought that he was smoothing the sand so that Essen would never know they had been in there.

  When nearing the southern hem of the depression, she looked back, seeing the tree as an aged giant not to be defied, a living monument erected when the world was young, and as they passed up the slope to gain the rose-red plain, she was sorry for it in its immense and terrible solitude.

  The sun was dipping into an opaque haze above the horizon and three minutes later, when she looked again, its gold was tarnished. Sand dunes were crimson on the floor of grey saltbush, shadows beneath old-man saltbush were now purpling, and the shadows of the passing trees were purple splashes, too. The wind dried easily, gladly, and the sky beyond Bony was as bluely grey as oily smoke.

  “Wind tomorrow,” predicted Bony.

  Alice smiled, restful and content. A ’roo raced the car, small and brown with a white apron, a tiny patch of brown on the apron, and when the brown patch moved she saw the head of the baby outside the mother’s pouch. The ’roo swung away, and wherever its bounding feet touched the earth there arose scarlet puff-balls.

  “Like a silver bow new bent in heaven,” quoted Bony, and Alice looked again at the sun, saw a slim crescent above it and said happily:

  “The maiden moon in her mantle of ... of rubies.”

  The sun went down as they dipped into the green belt about Mitford, and abruptly the world darkened and all the glory of the uplands was only a picture in imperfect memory. Alice roused herself, sitting upright, bracing herself to return to the mundane world and keenly regretful that this day was ending.

  “It’s been wonderful,” she told Bony. “I never dreamed the real Australia could be so lovely.” A flock of galahs wheeled above them, softly conversing, and the last rays of the sun were filtered to paint them with rainbow colours.

  The dust of a car in front hung like smoke on a frosty evening, and thus they returned to Mitford. It was darkening fast as Bony swung into Main Street. It was time to switch on the lights when he turned to enter the Police Station yard.

  Essen came from the Station office by the back door, reached Bony’s side as the engine was cut. He said, as though giving evidence:

  “At about four-twenty-five this afternoon, sir, Mr Bulford committed suicide in the manager’s office at the Olympic Bank.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Frantic Ants

  BONY SAT at the Sergeant’s desk, hands resting on blue papers, tapping fingers betraying his mood. With him were Alice McGorr and Essen.

  “Everyone satisfied it was suicide?” he asked, when they were wondering why the silence.

  “The bank was closed for the day, and the teller and the accounts officer were working late. Within three seconds of the shot they were in Bulford’s office. He was sprawled over his desk, the office revolver between his right hand and his head. He had cleared his desk of all papers as though knowing they would be ruined by his blood. The rear door of the bank chamber was ajar; the side door was locked.” Essen paused, to add with emphasis: “Suicide all right.”

  The long dark-skinned fingers continued their slow tapping on the blue documents, and presently Alice said impatiently:

  “Did you expect it, Bony?”

  She was examined by blue eyes unusually blue, steady, cold, inscrutable. Memory of him that afternoon created regret for having spoken and she was glad that the fingers ceased their tapping to become busy with a cigarette.

  “Yes, I did think suicide might be the road Mr Bulford would choose,” he admitted. “There was another road open to him which could have led him to the foot of the rainbow. We discussed that road. You see, Alice, Mr Bulford was unfortunately weak, but he had three shining attributes: honesty, loyalty and veneration. I am risking contradiction by events, yet believe my assessment is correct. Essen, where is Yoti?”

  “Still at the bank when I left twenty minutes ago.”

  “Contact him. Ask him to ascertain from the bank staff if either of the Cyril Martins interviewed Bulford today.”

  “Either! But the young feller...”

  “Is in Mitford.”

  Essen stared, frowned, withdrew to the telephone on the wall of the outer office. Bony lit his cigarette, and Alice forgave his inattention to her. She heard Essen speaking, wanted to ask questions and instead obtained a cigarette from her handbag. When Essen returned, he was still frowning.

  “The Sergeant says that young Cyril Martin interviewed Bulford shortly after two this afternoon.”

  “H’m! I could be wrong in my assessment,
” reflected Bony. “I don’t think so. I want to know when young Cyril Martin came to Mitford, and especially if he was in Mitford about the time Mrs Rockcliff was murdered. He must not be aware of the enquiry, and that is of extreme importance.”

  “I’ll get going right away.”

  “Wait. Have dinner first. Both of you go along now. And do please keep in mind that our baby investigation continues to take priority. Return after dinner. I’ve work for you both.”

  He accompanied them to the outer office, and on looking back from the main doorway Alice saw him at the telephone.

  Bony heard Essen’s car leave the yard before hearing the voice of Mr Beamer.

  “Ah, Mr Beamer! Inspector Bonaparte! Have your people returned from walkabout?”

  “Oh no, not yet, Inspector. They won’t come back for several days at least.”

  “Sudden, wasn’t it? The Sergeant said something about them being afraid of a Kurdaitcha, or something equally silly.”

  “Yes. I don’t believe it, of course. As Sergeant Yoti suggested later, it must have been one of themselves out for a joke. Making all those drawings on the ground and what not.”

  “Seems obvious, Padre. The Chief didn’t go on walkabout?”

  “No. Neither did his son, Fred, and half a dozen others. The hospital lubras wanted to clear out, but Chief Wilmot ordered them to remain as there are several patients as well as Marcus Clark. Now my wife has to keep them pacified, too.”

  “When did they go on walkabout last time?” Bony asked.

  “Oh, let me think. Not long ago. About a month.”

  “And the time before that, d’you remember?”

  Mr Beamer chuckled.

  “I do. We were all set ready to be visited by the Premier, and they all cleared out the day before, that is, all except about a dozen. The Premier had to inspect an almost deserted Settlement.”