Arthur Upfield - Man of Two Tribes

“So that, as convicted murderers, you may have strong animosity toward me, a police officer, but you must realise that even at this stage you are dependent on me to get you out from this hole and back to civilisation. To employ a nautical cliche, we sink or swim together.”

“I’m notswimmin ’,” growled Riddell.

Myra Thomas would have spoken had not Dr. Havant turned to stare at the gorilla. He said, quietly:

“Riddell.”

“I don’t aim…”

“Riddell, I am reading your thoughts.”

Riddell’s eyes avoided Havant. He looked at his naked feet, and his huge body seemed to shrink. Bony had never seen a human being so quickly reduced to abjectness. There was no threat expressed in the doctor’s words or by his face, yet his domination was supreme. Bony, feeling the sudden tension, assertedhimself.

“Two tasks confront me,” he told them.“To apprehend those who have unlawfully restricted your freedom; the other, to apprehend the slayer of Igor Mitski.”

“I hope you get him, Inspector,” declared the girl who had been acquitted of murder. “He never harmed anyone here.” Stooping, she gathered the breakfast things, and as she conveyed them to the annexe she added: “And don’t think that because one of you killed Igor that the rest of you now have a chance.”

“Youcan’t never tell,” Jenks said. “Hey, Doc, some day you’ll be able to write a book calledMake Mine Women.”

“You won’t be in it, Ted,” drawled Mark Brennan.

“Says you, Mark. We’ll all be in it. The wench has been looking for strife ever since she came here. She likes strife, she does. S’why she bumped off her husband.”

“All right! All right! Think of something else.”

The girl came from the annexe and gathered the remainder of the breakfast things, pausing to look down contemptuously at the ex-sailor, who was seated on the floor with his back to the rock bench. The resultant action by Jenks was so swift that Bony was barely able to follow it. Jenks shot forward and gripped her ankle, pulled. The action of her fall was slow motion by comparison with his.

Bony rose to his feet, as body after body piled on top of Jenks and the girl until there was a heap of fighting lunatics. Dr. Havant crossed to Bony’s side, waved him back to his seat on the saddle. He said:

“It’s nothing, Inspector. Like water over a fire which must eventually come to the boil. I have found it essential in order to maintain a modicum of sanity to permit the steam to escape. While they fight over the woman, they won’t fight us.”

“But the woman, she’ll be hurt,” objected Bony.

“Be not distressed,” urged Havant, icily calm. “She came up the slum way, and it sticks to her and always will, despite the veneer of education.”

Myra Thomas was now trying hard to sink her teeth into Jenks’s arm, as he did his utmost to pull her scalp off, gripping her hair with a hand trained to grip rope. Mark Brennan was hammering Jenks with one fist, and with the other attempted to flatten Riddell’s navel against his backbone. To counter this, the big man was pulling Brennan’s hair upward with onehand, and his vandyke beard downward with the other.

When little Maddoch appeared with a can of boiling water, the doctor called to him, shook his head disapprovingly, and Maddoch’s reaction was to shrug his narrow shoulders and trot back to the annexe with the dampener. It was extraordinary that he heard the doctor’s voice above the shouts, yells, and screams. Returning, Maddoch came carefully round the human heap, and to Bony he said with mouth close:

“It’s the cavern, Inspector. They behave like this now and then, but more often when the woman is around. She’s an unsettling influence.”

“A truthful and original statement,” drily agreed Havant. “You know, Inspector, human hair has remarkable tensile strength to withstand assault. The girl started this fracas. I think she enjoys it, although at the moment one must admit to being faintly alarmed by her present predicament.”

There was, however, no cause for perturbation. The girl suddenly extricated herself from the tangled mass, her violet eyes glittering with triumph. She smiled defiantly at both Havant and Bony, handed Jenks a right smart face slap, lifted a blanket revealing a second annexe, and disappeared.

Brennan sat up and tenderly combed his beard with his fingers, as though needing assurance that he still had one. The others rose unsteadily, and sheepishly inspected the damage.

With the cessation of violence there was silence.

Unnoticed, the dog had departed.

Arthur Fiddler’s Way Out

OFthese men, Bony judged Clifford Maddoch to be the least dangerous, themost sane. With the exception of Maddoch and Doctor Havant, they were now licking their wounds, and Havant he told firmly to remain with them.

Again he stood beside the remains of Igor Mitski, manipulating the lamp, and on the far side of the body Maddoch watched and waited.

“A severe blow,” Bony said. “And if a rock was the weapon, it must have been fairly large and heavy.”

“I didn’t do this, Inspector,” the little man cried, desperately. “I couldn’t kill anyone… not like that. Mitski was a fine man. I could talk to him even though his main interest was music and I know little about it. He could sing too, and even make music from a row of tin pannikins. I had no cause to kill him.”

“You disliked his voice,” murmured Bony.

“Only when he became excited,” admitted Maddoch, “then his voice resembled that of my wife… her riveting voice… I can hear it even now. But I’m not a real murderer. I couldn’t hurt anyone. I don’t believe you could understand, but Igor did. You see, after the Russians invaded his country they locked a metal thing over his head and beat it with a bar, and the noise almost drove him mad. So he knew what I had to suffer for years and years before I simply had to do something about it. I didn’t really murder my wife, not in my mind I didn’t, but I had to stop that voice from crawling into my head like a talking maggot.”

No, he couldn’t hurt his wife by knocking her down. He didn’t hurt her when he slipped poison into her glass of sherry, although the poison did. Every policeman knows that some persons are natural murderers, but the Law will not accept that in extenuation. So Bony must persist.

“When excited, Mitski’s voice did irritate you,” he pressed.

“Yes, it did. I used to beg of him to be calm. His voice didn’t go on and on for hours like my wife’s did, when I could have screamed for sleep, yet didn’t dare occupy another room.”

“Where were you when Mitski shouted ‘Donot! Do not! Help!’?”

“I was coming from the Jeweller’s Shop where I’d been to empty kitchen waste down a shaft,” replied Maddoch. “I know the way so well that I didn’t need a light, and oil is precious. I heard Igor call out just before I left the passage to this cavern, and when I entered it, I saw movement just here. Whatever it was-I didn’t know then what it was-it stopped as I went towards it and I could see nothing. As I was groping past that big boulder, I heard someone behind me and Riddell grabbed me, and the others were all here.”

“You say you were without a light. Where was the light in this cavern when you saw movement?”

“I didn’t need a light.”

“Then how could you see movement in the dark?”

“I’ll show you how it is, Inspector. I’ll stay here. You go over there and blow out the lamp.”

Bony accepted the suggestion. Having puffed out the lamp, he waited for his eyes to become accustomed to the darkness when he found that the light from the distant ‘hall’ gave just sufficient illumination to see the formless figure standing beside the body, and the boulder which was several feet to the left.