Arthur Upfield - Man of Two Tribes

Others watched him with covert curiosity, for inside the church his one-time sweetheart was being married-to his rival of long standing. He stood there, hands in pockets, the loose stance of the recruit already seeing himself a veteran.

Out upon the low porch stepped the bride and groom, well matched, beautiful in youth, blessed by the vows they had exchanged. They came down the porch steps and people began tossing confetti at them.

Mark Brennan did not throw confetti. From his military coat he drew a pistol and shot the bride between the eyes. The groom was almost dragged to the ground by her lifeless body. Then, with one arm about her, he straightened and confronted the murderer-who shot him in the stomach.

The case caused wide public interest. Tragic young man! Torn apart by duty to his country, and grieved by the loss of his sweetheart. The jury recommended mercy. The judge passed the death sentence. The Executive Council automatically commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, and marked his papers: Never To Be Released.

Never to be released! And here he was assisting Bony to move his gear to the side of the cavern under the Nullarbor Plain. The beard made him look arty, and handsome. The eyes were cold, as they must have been when he pressed the trigger of the pistol, twice.

The chore accomplished, Bony sat on Curley’s saddle and rolled a cigarette. Watchful, he waited for these riddles to be solved. A cloth of clean canvas had been spread on the rock floor, and on this the woman was placing sliced baking powder bread, opened tins of sardines, a bottle of sauce, a tin of jam.

The man Jenks appeared with a jug of coffee and a fruit tin of sugar. He filled tin pannikins with coffee, and Mark Brennan said:

“Help yourself, Inspector.”

Bony returned to his saddle with a pannikin of coffee.

“You have had breakfast, Inspector?” Doctor Havant enquired solicitously.

“Yes, thank you,” politely replied Bony.

“You find yourself in a strange community, Inspector; in fact, an unique community. I shall eventually write several books about it, I hope. Youknow, the effect of complete isolation on the human mind. Also I shall write a thesis on the herd instinct in humans.

“Jenks has spoken much of you, Inspector. He bestows upon you the mantle of Javert, although he has never read Hugo’s masterpiece. Entirely in his favour is a lack of animosity towards you, who found him and had him arrested. In that he is unlike our friend there, Joseph Riddell, to whom all policemen are anathema.”

Joseph Riddell! Riddell in 1941 was working on a farm near Brisbane. He was then a taciturn man of thirty years, strong, a good worker, and treated with consideration by his employer. One afternoon therearose dissension between them, concerning a head wound suffered by a cow, and that evening Riddell shot his employer dead with a shot-gun belonging to the victim. He vanished with the farmer’s car which he abandoned, and stole another, to abandon that also when the petrol gave out.

Eventually caught, he received a sentence of twelve years. Another recommendation for mercy. Lonely unfortunate man, living in a hut on a farm when the farmer and his wife lived in luxury in a fine house. If he had bashed the milking cow, the ruddy boss had no right to jaw him about it! Having served nine years he was freed.

Here was Joseph Riddell, still of powerful physique, his hair and beard barely touched with grey.

Observing Bony looking at him, he leaned back on his haunches and grinned. The grin preceded rumbling laughter.

“Hell! It’s damn funny all right,” he asserted, voice deep. “By hell, it’s funny. You’ll be able to write plenty about all this, Doc.”

“What’s funny about it?” snarled the little man with thin sandy hair and weak eyes. “If he is really a police detective, then he can get us all out of here. There’s nothing funny about walking on the earth instead of living like a colony of rats under it.”

Emotion raised the voice but did not disguise the accent, and there lingered still in this man’s voice the tone of authority. He reminded Bony of someone he had seen pictured in the newspapers, and now Havant gave the picture its name.

“My dear Clifford Maddoch, I am strongly in agreement with Joe that the situation existing at this moment is truly funny. I dislike the word, but repeat it because used by you and Joseph. It is funny, because we of theR.M. I, happen to be at a slight disadvantage precisely when Inspector Bonaparte drops in to bid good morning.”

So this was Clifford Maddoch. At the time he had given his wife a measure of strychnine, thallium not then having come into favour for this purpose; he was the manager of an important branch of a wool brokerage firm, the president of the local golf club, and the secretary of the Urban District Committee. For fourteen years he had suffered torture from the battering voice which had probed and pierced the recesses of his mind. It was a strange coincidence that the judge committed him to prison for fourteen years. And having served ten years, he was released.

“You shut up, Clifford,” snarled Riddell.“No good you crawling to the Inspector now, after what you just done.”

The little man leaped to his feet. It seemed that every nerve in his face began to twitch violently.

“I’m not guilty,” he shouted, having to struggle for articulation. “I old you all I didn’t do it. I liked Igor Mitski… for everything bar his voice.”

Bony recalled the case of Igor Mitski, the displaced, the singer, serving his period of grace in Australia on a northwest station in New South Wales. Cultured, able to speak a little English, banished to live with strange people in a strange land. A Polish Jew who had suffered badly.

The employer and his wife were kindly people. Instead of making Mitski a gardener, they appointed him music teacher to their little girl aged eight. Circumstances climbed high and smashed both Mitski and the child. Mitski still mentally wounded by the treatment received from the invaders of his country; the child spoiled and stubborn, as an only child can be. In a rage, Mitski hit her. Released on parole when having served twenty months of the sentence for manslaughter.

Mitski! Bony had been in a far western town when Mitski was tried. He had arrived there on the last day of the trial and was in court when the prisoner was sentenced. A woman had run from the witnesses’ seat to the dock, and a man had quickly caught her in his arms and tried to pacify her. Bony hadn’t been in court officially, and the incident therefore had not been mentally docketed. He said now:

“Mitski slew a little child.”

“That was so, Inspector,” replied Doctor Havant. “All here know the history of everyone. We often discuss personal experiences, desires, ambitions, satisfactions. We are, actually, a very conservative body.” He chuckled in his dry humourless way, and taking the others into his range, he went on: “I suggest, gentlemen, that we nominate and accept the Inspector into our honoured Association. I have pleasure in putting forward the name of Inspector Bonaparte. I feel that he will do what in him lies to succour and encourage everymember, that he will conduct himself worthily, and toil ever on behalf of the defenceless and the unfortunate. What say you?”

“Taking a ruddy risk,” growled Riddell. “Hedon’t qualify.”

“I propose Inspector Bonaparte,” chirped Clifford Maddoch.

“I take pleasure in seconding the proposal, Mr. President,” drawled Brennan.

Doctor Havant stood. He beamed on the assembly, and his chalky complexion appeared likely to fall off in flakes. The dark eyes regarding Bony recalled to him the eyes of the woman at Mount Singular. Then he remembered where he had seen her before, and the probability of this extraordinary development was like a star born in his mind. He heard the doctor say: