Arthur Upfield: Man of Two Tribes

At last blessed peace and order, when the house was once againher own, as well as her husband. They could listen again to the sweet song of silence sung over the Plain at night, and now and then accompanied by the organ music of an approaching train. Books to read. Sewing to do. Recipes to try. The tucker-box to be packed when her husband had to leave on patrol. And now this! Another policeman coming even then from the standing train.

The diesel hooted and she heard the train pulling out on its longlong way to Kalgoorlie in the west. And its music would dwindle and dwindle into the whispered lullaby of the Plain.

The aroma of coffee filled the kitchen, and the old American clock tick-tockingon the mantel over the stove had counted the moments for three generations. She placed the chops on a dish within the oven, and was surveying the breakfast table when she heard their footsteps on the veranda, along the passage. The train was sounding its nostalgic fare-you-wells, and the clock was striking the half-hour when they came into the kitchen.

The stranger was at first disappointing to Elaine Easter. She was accustomed to seeing very large men enter her kitchen, men with large square faces and small gimlet eyes which she always said they made small on purpose. This man was slight, wiry, dark-skinned, and the most amazing blue eyes she had ever seen regarded her as though appealing for forgiveness of the intrusion. She experienced a distinct shock when at the back of her mind she realised that he wasn’t a full white man, but the shock was suppressed instantly by the charm of his smile as he waited to be presented.

Her husband put down the large suitcase, and she tried to avoid staring at him, because he was actually looking very happy. He said:

“Guess who, Elaine! Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte! He says we must call him ‘Bony’. Says if we don’t he’ll recommend my demotion. Meet the wife…er, Bony.”

Inspector Bonaparte! Her husband’s tin god. The greatest crime investigator in all Australian history -according to her husband. The man who never yet had failed-again according to her husband.

Now she was being bowed to, and one part of her mind wondered why the other part told her that she was a woman, not just Elaine Easter. She was caught by the blue eyes and found herself listening with pleasure to his voice.

“All my friends call me ‘Bony’, Mrs. Easter. Even my Chief Commissioner, my wife and my sons, call me ‘Bony’. I’ve been sure I would meet none but friends at Chifley.”

Bonaparte’s Assignment

ATbreakfast the Easters were captivated by their official guest, but it was not until much later that day that they were able to analyse their reactions. Both were of what is loosely termed ‘the bush’, and they had expected their guest to be the opposite of what he proved to be-one of them.

That he was of mixed races they had to accept, reluctantly. His features and bearing were far removed from the castes with whom they were familiar along these southern districts of Australia, for Bonaparte had entered the world in the mid-north of Queensland, and his maternal ancestry had been powerfully influenced by the impact of the Polynesian peoples. When meeting the calm blue eyes and listening to the softaccentless voice, it was so easy to forget the duality of races.

Bony had crossed the Nullarbor many times, by train and plane; once only by car following the old telegraph route which skirts the southern edge of the Plain where it drops to the narrow coastal belt. Never previously had he been professionally interested in this part of Australia, and he anticipated no hardships additional to those he had experienced closer to the centre, such as the mulga forests, the gibber deserts, the desolation of the salt-pan basins. Although these several geophysical areas are strikingly different, common to all is the force of opposition to man, varied only by the circumstances confronting the individual.

“You have an office with the usual map of Australia pinned to the wall?” he asked, well knowing that the Police Station is the cross carried by every policeman in the true outback.

Easter conducted him to his own particular cross, where he lit the oil-lamp suspended from the ceiling, permitting Bony to survey the usual littered desk, the usual wire files hanging from nails driven into the walls, and usual large-scale map. Mechanically constructing what could be assumed to be a cigarette, he stood with Easter before the map on which someone had etched with blue pencil the area marked Nullarbor, meaning no trees. The cartographer had drawn a rule-straight line from east to west, and named this the Transcontinental Railway, the line bisecting the area.

“Authorities differ over the extent of this Plain,” Bony said, without intention to teach but rather as a preface to what he had in mind to say. “It’s probably much more than the estimate of thirty thousand square miles. What do you know of it?”

Easter’s forefinger traversed the railway.

“Three hundred miles of dead straight line built on dead level ground, or what appears to the naked eye as dead level.” The finger flashed downward on the map to within an inch of the coastline, moved slowly upward to cross the railway, continued upward until seemingly stopped by a blue dot named Lake Wyola. “From here down to the coast is something like three hundred miles. No trees, no surface water except in rock-holes filled by rain. Just a vacuum spanned by a railway, the railway stops by nothing but a few houses and servicing depots. No out-lying homesteads excepting to the south and one to the north-west. No roads but that coastal one. No fences, only land and the sky. That woman didn’t fall from the train.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I’ve a theory. No facts.”

“Give me the theory.”

“Well, I’ve always been interested in abnormal psychology,” Easter said. “Didn’t take much notice of the Thomas case because it was just another husband-wife brawl, but after the trial we dug up the papers and read the reports and got different ideas about the woman. When she disappeared, other things added up.

“I’d say Myra Thomas was vanity plus. She had tasted fame, strictly local though it was, but what a banquet during her trial! She finds herself hitting the headlines all over Australia. I’ll bet no one received a bigger shock than she did when she was acquitted. What happened? She becomes the centre of nation-wide controversy, then within a week all the glory has faded, and the morons who screamed their admiration as she left court, deserted her to rush to the airfield to yell and scream their welcome to a foreignswooner. So, having dined with the gods, she must scramble under the table after the crumbs.”

Bony was frankly astonished by this lucid exposition.

“What happens next?” proceeded Easter. “She planned the disappearance, planned it to take place in the middle of the fabulous Nullarbor Plain, the only place of its kind in the world and famous for just that. So she vanishes from a famous train when in the middle of a famous Plain. Sounds like poetry, doesn’t it? Dressed in her night things and wearing slippers, she left the train at Cook and entered a car or truck driven by a pal who took her by the only track to the coast road, from which point they could go east or west into smoke.

“She certainly got what she wanted-more and more publicity which made the publicity at the triallook like a social paragraph. Now she will lie low for some time, and then reappear with the yarn that she had a sudden attack of amnesia brought on by the dreadful horror of the murder. Imagine the headlines! The money in the story of her life! That’s my theory.”

Easter found himself being studied.