Murder Must Wait Page 18

  There reached him the low murmur of gentle soothing; the baby quietened. The dawn shafts were spearing the night when the child cried again, this time demandingly. A woman said sleepily:

  “Was’matter, little feller?”

  The voice was the voice of an aborigine. The baby yelled, old enough to know how to claim attention, and, a moment after, the red eye vanished. The baby continued to cry, and soon there appeared a faint glow which grew swiftly bright to reveal the aboriginal woman tending her fire.

  The blazing fire proved the humpy to be a tent almost made invisible by green tree branches. Bony could not see the mouth of the tent. The woman stood and the firelight showed her to be tall and graceful. She was wearing male attire, a suit of flannelette pyjamas, and her black hair was banded with a blue ribbon. Bony remembered her. She had been with old Wilmot when he visited the Settlement with Alice. She left the fire for the humpy, soothed the infant who wouldn’t be soothed, and came out carrying a feeding-bottle, a tin of powdered milk, and an old billycan. The billy she filled at the creek and placed over the fire.

  The infant, understanding that screaming failed to bring instant doting attention, stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Like all the mothers of her race, this woman loved babies and was versed in the exquisite art of being cruel to be, kind. The baby was hungry and so food must be prepared for it, but to worry about the screaming would be the height of folly because the cry lacked that poignant note of pain. Calmly this woman watched the water heating, and only when it was boiling did she go to the tent and bring out a jug in which to mix the milk.

  She brought cold water from the creek to cool the milk before pouring from the jug to the bottle, her movements unhurried, her face expressive of abiding content. Taking the bottle to the tent, she spoke to the baby and the baby started a yell which was stopped by the bottle teat. Thereafter the soft voice lullabyed.

  Bony could remain no longer, for now the water of the creek was visible and the kookaburras were greeting the New Day with their ironical laughter. The boat was safe enough from chance discovery, and silently he walked up the creek and so to the red gum near the blacksmith’s shop.

  The tree was bent by the years and scarred by innumerable climbing boys. They had made a path upward by the only way, and Bony climbed this path to reach a rough platform at the junction of two branches with the trunk, the work also of the Settlement children.

  Like the woman at the fire, his movements were deliberate as he made himself comfortable on the roughly-woven sticks. He smoked two cigarettes, and now and then he smiled at little mental images and refused to permit ugly thoughts to disturb his mind.

  Having pocketed the two cigarette-ends, he told his mind to sleep till nine o’clock. His mind slept. His mind awoke at nine o’clock when the sun was high and the ants already were up the tree gathering its sweet exudations.

  A bull-ant objected to his presence, and he flicked it into space with a snapping forefinger. The marauding red ants took no notice of him, and he politely ignored them. He climbed, and at the higher elevation commanded a clear range of the Settlement.

  Three magpies were warbling on the office roof, and the smoke from the Superintendent’s chimney was almost the colour of washing blue. Then a lubra in a white dress and white shoes emerged from the hospital to take something to the incinerator, and Dr Beamer appeared from his veranda to cross to the office. After him trotted a grossly fat fox terrier, who quickly gave up the idea of escort duty for the pleasure of rolling his left ear on the ground to remove stick-fast fleas.

  At twenty past nine Bony saw the dust rising behind the car bringing Essen and his constables, and five minutes later the noise of the car propelled Mr Beamer from his office and his wife to the door of the house veranda. A conference was held, and ended by Mrs Beamer and one constable walking to the hospital and Mr Beamer with Essen and the other constable making for the lines of huts.

  All quite normal. The Superintendent would know who of his people had not gone on walkabout, and what huts they occupied. Several figures rose from beside a communal fire, and others appeared from the huts, totalling nine. Finally, all gathered into a small party and walked from the huts to the hospital, Bony recognising old Chief Wilmot, his son Fred, the watch-mender, and he who ran the store. There was an ancient crone and two young women.

  Questions. Did the Beamers know of that woman and baby living in the tent shrouded by green boughs? Did old Chief Wilmot know? Almost certainly, for nothing and no one would escape his notice. Bony gazed over the lesser treetops to the area of dark-green lantana, and failed to see the faintest wisp of smoke from that camp fire.

  The policeman and Mrs Beamer entered the hospital, and Essen and Mr Beamer with the aborigines filed in, leaving one constable on guard at the door. Bony waited five minutes for the woman with the baby to appear, watched for the slightest betraying movement and saw nothing. Then he went to ground, the entire Settlement his for examination ... for one hour.

  The constable at the hospital door saw him cross behind the blacksmith’s shop to the lines of huts, noted the extraordinary footwear, and with great interest watched him as long as possible.

  The ground was dry, flaky, hard beneath the flakes. Only from point to point was the ground powdered by feet; about the Superintendent’s house, where all traffic stopped, about the school and the hospital, was the ground churned to dust. Paths made by naked feet skirted the lines of huts, because off the paths waited the three-cornered jacks having needle-pointed spurs.

  Bony’s first objective was the communal fire, still alive, and the huts closest to it. They were single-roomed shacks, containing a table and hard-bottom chairs, and mattresses of straw lying on the floor.

  Utility blankets lay on one of two mattresses in the first hut he visited. A military greatcoat and a couple of cotton singlets served for a pillow. Hanging from nails driven into the walls was a military felt hat with the brim unclipped to the crown, an expensive stockwhip, a pair of goose-neck spurs in which the rowels had been replaced with sixpences to produce the louder ringing, and a gaudy silk scarf denoting feminine ownership.

  The scarf was the only feminine item in this hut. There was a litter of comics, a pair of tan shoes, a bridle and a .22 rifle in a corner.

  Bony pondered on the two mattresses, so close together; only one in use. Taking great care not to displace the blankets, he looked under each mattress and found nothing. Whereupon he translated what he saw. The things hanging upon the wall, especially the hat and the spurs, said this was Tracker Wilmot’s hut. The unused mattress beside the used one, told of an absent wife. Recollection of Marcus Clark’s reference to a lubra named Sarah, the month-old bride, now added that to this, which totalled a graceful young lubra in the secret camp among the lantana.

  In the next hut he found evidence of occupation by Tracker Fred’s father. Here again were two mattresses, both being used, and placed as far apart as possible. The place was clean enough, due to Mr Beamer’s regular inspections, but the litter was an offence. Under one mattress Bony found a set of pointing bones and a skin bag containing many precious churinga stones and a set of rain stones as large as the hand and as green as polished jade.

  The fact that these sacred articles were hidden under the Chief’s mattress and not in a sacred store-house, such as under a rock or in a tree, indicated that Chief Wilmot was unsure of the degree of his rejuvenated authority over his people, and that he was aware many of them were so ‘ruined’ by white civilisation that they would steal these tribal relics and sell them for a few plugs of tobacco.

  The hut occupied by the watch-mender and the store bookkeeper gave nothing, as did those other huts into which he flitted.

  As he anticipated, he found a path running direct from the huts to the secret camp in the lantanas, and so crossing an open space of two hundred yards. Convinced that the lubra with the baby would lie quiet within the tent, he followed the path and so came to another junctioning with it. This path came from
the direction of the office. On this path he found imprints of the shoes worn by the woman who had crept under Mrs Rockcliff’s bed.

  The wearer had visited the secret camp, and she had returned by the same path. He followed the returning prints, followed them till they passed by the office and continued to the Superintendent’s house. The woman who had been under Mrs Rockcliff’s bed had emerged from and entered Mr Beamer’s house by the back door.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Reports

  WITH AN oar thrust astern, Bony propelled the boat with a minimum of exertion, satisfied with the assistance of the current and aware that for a further fifteen minutes the Settlement aborigines would be boxed inside the hospital. To defeat the glare, his eyes were reduced to mere slits, and now and then the upper lip lifted as it had done when he had cut the prints of that woman who had crept into No 5 Elgin Street.

  The woman had worn the same shoes when in the Aboriginal Settlement the day before this glaring golden day. She had departed via the back door of the Superintendent’s house to visit the secret camp, and had returned to the house and entered it by the back door. For Bony that was proof incontestable.

  There were sound reasons for not following those tracks into the Superintendent’s house to find the shoes, a minor reason being that either Beamer or his wife might become bored with being in the hospital with Essen and the others and return to the house. Essen could keep the aborigines for an hour, but had no power over the Beamers, who naturally would protest at Bony’s trespass without a search warrant.

  The major reason for ordering Satan again to his rear was given by the study of Mrs Beamer’s shoe-prints made when she walked with the constable to the hospital. Her shoe size tallied. She was wearing wedge-type shoes. The prints, however, proved to Bony that she was accustomed to wearing low heels, while the woman who entered the house in Elgin Street was accustomed to wearing high-heeled shoes. While not positive, for human memory cannot be a thousand-per-cent infallible, Bony was satisfied that it wasn’t Mrs Beamer who had visited the secret camp.

  He permitted the boat to drift and smoked another cigarette. The one pair of shoes worn by the one woman linked Mrs Rockcliff’s murder and her abducted child with this Aboriginal Settlement, and this link strengthened the supposition that the baby in the secret camp was a white child.

  There was nothing to support opposing argument. There could be no other intelligent explanation for that small tent masked by tree boughs, a mere hundred yards from twenty-eight weatherproof and comfortable huts. And no lubra could have her baby secretly, and in secret keep it.

  It could be accepted as certain that Chief Wilmot and his men knew all about that lubra and the baby. There were two further certainties. The reason for the baby being kept in that secret camp was a community secret, and a community secret is something which cannot be levered from the aborigines by any method of interrogation accepted by western civilisation.

  He moored the boat at the old jetty, and by a devious route arrived at the rear of the Police Station and entered the yard via the back fence. Unobserved, and with the sheep-skin overshoes under an arm, he entered his office-bedroom to find Essen and Alice McGorr playing poker.

  Essen said, faintly smiling:

  “You look as if you’ve been sleeping with the dog.”

  Alice said:

  “Have you had any breakfast?”

  “Not yet, Alice.” Bony swept his black hair back from his forehead, sat at his desk and began the inevitable cigarette. “Would you try...”

  “I’ll fetch coffee and something to eat from the kitchen,” she told him, her face severe. “Enough to go on with so’s not to spoil your lunch. And don’t go telling Essen anything till I get back.”

  “Not a thing, Alice. I’ll tell him nothing at all.” After she had gone, he said to Essen: “Now you tell me everything.”

  “I followed your instructions, all but,” Essen began. “Arrived on time and left on time. Had no difficulty with the Beamers: in fact, they helped. Beamer came with me and a constable to the huts and we rounded up all the blacks left on the scene. You told me to keep ’em off the grass for an hour and I added ten minutes extra because shortly after I began on ’em I felt something under the surface I couldn’t understand.

  “You know how it is with abos. You can lead ’em but never drive. I put Marcus Clark into a blue sweat, and against the full-bloods he’s a weakling. Couldn’t shift him an inch from his first yarn of having met a cobber down-river and getting drunk with him. I cooked up a couple of yarns hinting we knew he was buying booze and having beanos with other blacks outside the Settlement at night, and that altogether he was a nasty bit of work to have around. No go.

  “Old Wilmot just sat still and kept his face shut. Fred, his son, looked anywhere but at me. The others wiggled their toes and looked frightened. And the Beamers looked at me as if I was murdering the innocents. That’s all, on the surface, but under the surface was something. It was like charging a man with theft when he expects to be charged with homicide. They weren’t concerned with what I was asking them, but by what I might have in mind to ask them later on.”

  “That was your reaction to the attitude of Chief Wilmot and his son and Clark? Not to the attitude of any of the others?”

  “Not to any of the other men, but it was to the lubras, even to the two acting nurses.”

  “Did you probe into the walkabout?” Bony asked.

  “Mentioned it in the beginning. The mob went up-river to Big Cod Bend all right.”

  “How far from the Settlement?”

  “A good nine miles. How did you get along?”

  Bony smiled.

  “Remember the order to tell you nothing until the breakfast is served?”

  “Yes, I remember,” Essen chuckled. “What a girl! Ten thousand women in one, and to date I’ve only seen about six of them: mother, man-handler, sleuth, home-manager, infant-welfare expert, and dictator.”

  “The order doesn’t prevent you informing me on the movements of Mr Cyril Martin, Junior.”

  “That’s so. Young Martin’s been in town two days, arriving late the day before yesterday. The last time he was here he stayed with a pal who owns a vineyard about two miles downriver. That was from January 26th or 27th to February 10th. He was in Mitford on February 1st and 10th, because on those days he booked petrol at the Service Station.”

  “Where is he staying now?”

  “With his parents,” Essen replied. “Must have patched it up with the old man.”

  “The patching could have fallen apart, Essen. I heard them in heated argument at the father’s office.” Bony paused, to add:

  “Even that must wait.”

  They were discussing Tracker Wilmot’s spurs when Alice returned with a tray, which she set before Bony and at once poured his coffee. She returned Bony’s smile before sitting beside Essen on the far side of the desk and examining her chief with critical eyes.

  “What have you to report, Alice?” he asked, sipping coffee and holding a sandwich in the other hand.

  “I went to the Delph house and called on my bosom friend the cook. They seem to treat her pretty well, and as she had cleaned up for the day she’d gone to her room. Her room is at the back of the house, where there’s a small cottage for the domestic staff, but she’s the only domestic. There’s a house telephone in her room.

  “Anyway, we settled for a half bottle of gin and a few bottles of dry, and I got the news of the day. Everything went as usual until half past three in the afternoon, when the doctor came in and Mrs Delph rang for afternoon tea. The cook took it to the lounge, where there was a hot argument going on between the doctor and his wife over the usual; the usual, according to the cook, being the monthly plonk bill.

  “The cook had cleared away the tea things and was preparing the vegetables for dinner when the telephone in the hall rang and Mrs Delph answered it. Mrs Delph called loudly to her husband, who came from somewhere. She said something the cook
couldn’t hear, and then let out a screech like a reefered2 galah. The doctor shouted, and then spoke a bit softer into the phone. A moment after that he shouted for the cook.

  “When the cook reached the hall, the doctor was bending over Mrs Delph, who was lying on her back on the floor and yelling over and over the one word ‘No’. The doctor told the cook to try to pacify her, and he rushed away to his surgery and came back with a hypodermic and gave his wife a shot. It put her out in under the minute, and they carried her to her bedroom and the cook undressed her and put her to bed. Afterwards, Dr Delph told the cook they had received a bad shock, that someone at the bank had rung to say Mr Bulford had killed himself.

  “Later, when the cook was setting the table for dinner, she heard the doctor phoning a telegram to the Post Office. It was to Dr Nonning, Mrs Delph’s brother down in Melbourne, telling him she had had a nervous breakdown and asking him to come up at once and help. After that nothing happened. When she had cleaned up, she asked Dr Delph if she could do anything for Mrs Delph, and he said he would nurse her and she could go off for the night.

  “I left most of the gin with Cookie and found a phonebooth and reported to Sergeant Yoti as you ordered. From there I went to the Olympic Bank. There were three cars outside. There were lights in the rooms over the bank, and the light outside the private door was on. So I got into the vacant place next-door and took a stand against the fence opposite the private door and waited to see who came out.

  “I had been there less than twenty minutes when Dr Delph drove up and came along the lane to ring the door-bell. It was Professor Marlo-Jones who let him in, not Mrs Bulford, and as neither said a word, I thought they’d done a spot of telephoning and Dr Delph had come to give Mrs Bulford a shot, too.

  “Anyway, I spent two hours fighting the mosquitoes, when the door opened and the visitors came out. With them was Mrs Bulford, so she couldn’t have had a shot, and by the look of her she didn’t need one.

  “There was Professor Marlo-Jones and his wife, Dr Delph, that Mrs Coutts and her husband, the Town Engineer, and another man and woman I didn’t know by name. They were at the plonk party. After they’d gone I waited around, and when all the upstairs lights were out I reckoned Mrs Bulford had gone to bed, and I went off to get a couple of cups of coffee and a meat pie before going back to the Delph’s place.