Arthur Upfield - Murder Must Wait

She took the print to the window, wasn’t satisfied and switched on the light, standing directly beneath the globe.

“Finely darned and evenly spaced,” she said. “Yes, the person who did the mending is an expert.”

“Would you be able to recognise her work on another garment… from memory of that print?”

“I might, but I wouldn’t guarantee it. Alice continued to study the print. “I’d say that the person who mended the glove was used to doing a lot of sewing, and also that she was used to making her things last as long as possible, not being one of the idle rich.”

Essen came back to report, that Sergeant Yoti had certainly not put Fred to shadow Inspector Bonaparte, and further that the arrangement made with Fred to act as police tracker had been elastic. Fred often failed to come to work for days and even weeks unless sent for. He had not been sent for when he came to work on the previous Tuesday. Hisjob was to keep the yard tidy, scrub out the cells, cut the wood for Mrs Yoti, and accompany an officer when required.

“You sure he was tailing you?” asked Essen, and Bony replied at zero.

“Of course. Marcus Clark tailed Alice. Now Frederick Wilmot tails me. There is the robbery from the Library, a large slab of rock on which an aborigine has made a crude drawing. It would not surprise me if the rock drawing was stolen to prevent me seeing it.”

“No one seems to know what the drawing means, according to Oats, the librarian,” Essen said. “Not even oldMarlo-Jones, and being a professor of anthropology he’d know most things about theabos.”

“Mr Oats told me that the Professor believes the drawing has something to do with rain-making,” Bony continued. “Oats knows nothing about the drawing, where it came from, or who gave it to the Library Museum. I must pay a visit to the Mission Station tomorrow.” Bony lit a cigarette he had been toying with for several minutes. “There is in these baby thefts something of the aborigine, and, so far, nothing of the whites. And by the way, Alice, you and I have been invited to a sherry party tomorrow afternoon. What is a good antidote for Australian sherry, d’youknow?”

“A drop of battery acid, my old man used to say,” replied Alice.

“H’m! I remember hearing that one before,” Bony said, faintly disapproving. “I have a less drastic formula. Well, here is the invitation. Reads: ‘Sherry at five. Marlo-Jones. Do come. Inspector Bonaparte and Cousin.’The last written in green ink in a style rarely seen these days. Cousin! Knowledge from gossip, Alice. You cannot escape.”

“I’m not going,” Alice declared. “I won’t drink plonk.”

“You will accompany me, Alice,” Bony ordered, the smile leavening the flat evenness of authority. “You will drink plonk with me. I will have at hand an efficient antidote so that neither will suffer… much

… in performance of duty.”

“There’s nothing in the Oath of Allegiance about having to drink plonk,” argued Alice, tossing her head and having to re-tighten the roll of hair.

“You won’t drink plonk for a reason other than to please me,” soothed Bony. “I must accept the invitation. I must be supported by someone, decidedly you for preference, and if eventually we swing down Main Street arm in arm and minus decorum, well…”

“I don’t like it,” Alice continued to protest. “Could I take a bottle of gin or something?”

“I fear not,” Bony gravely told her. “Our hosts would feel insulted. So, sherry it must be.”

“I hate the filthy stuff.”

“They say you get to acquire a taste for it,” Essen observed. “Don’t mind it myself.”

“You’re not going; I am,” announced Alice… all objection banished by the thought that Bony might substitute Essen for her.

A few minutes later Bony dismissed them for the day and, having gathered his papers and locked them in his case, he strolled into the warm and balmy night to call on the Reverend Mr Baxter, who received him with smiling friendliness and kept him talking for an hour.

Nothing came of that interview additional to the sparse information already obtained from the Methodist Minister, and for a further hour and a half Bony walked the streets of Mitford, feeling within his mind a growing restlessness, which sprang from intuitive promptings that forces were gathering against him rather than from impatience with the progress and speed of his investigations.

He could think of nothing left undone, no avenue left unexplored. There was no Pearl Rockcliff on any Electoral Roll in the States of New South Wales and Victoria, and the Income Tax authorities knew of no tax payer of that name. Teams of patient men were delving into the background of all persons whose name began with Q on the chance of finding a woman absent from her usual abode… a gigantic task seemingly without end and without prospect of success.

People were leaving the cinema when he passed down Main Street to reach the Police Station. The police residence was in darkness, but there was a light in the office across the way, and there Bony found a constable on duty. He had nothing to report.

With thought of a shower before bed, Bony entered his room physically and mentally tired. Switching on the light, he sat on the bedside chair to remove his shoes for slippers, when bodily movement abruptly ceased.

Something was wrong with the room.

Standing, his eyes registered this pleasant interior, accepting every item with suspicion and finding no fault. The suitcase against the wall was as he had left it when brushing his hair before dinner. The chest of drawers was normal, and things upon it unmoved. The desk was neat and almost bare, the ashtray littered with cigarette-ends. But numerically less than when he had gone out. The ends were of cigarettes smoked by Alice McGorr. All the ends ofhis own self-made cigarettes had vanished.

Oh yes, something was wrong. He sniffed, without sound and without cease, like a hound silently hunting a scent. He lowered the blinds and prowled like a cat suspicious of danger, often bringing his nose close to the furniture, and sometimes to the linoleum covering the floor. The linoleum was old and the light was of little use to show tracks.

The bed was as when expertly made by Mrs Yoti, the upper sheet folded down over the blankets, his pyjamas neatly folded and lying upon the pillow. He sniffed at the pyjamas, the pillows. He studied the bed again, and again sniffed at the pillows, and the pyjamas. The coarse cream linen bedspread was without a rumple anywhere.

He looked under the bed. Nothing. He opened the wardrobe and burrowed among the clothes there. He opened the suitcase and carefully examined every item. Still nothing. But the prickling at the nape of his neck, the reaction to danger which had never yet fooled him, continued to warn, warn insistently.

Back again at the bed, he sniffed it all over and now with loud vigour. He fancied he detected a strange odour, could not be positive, and the doubt put springs to his shoeless feet and magnified sensitivity at his fingertips. Gingerly he took up the pyjamas and dropped them on the chair. The top pillow he lifted as carefully, and then the second pillow. Deliberately cautious, he rolled down the bedclothes, over and over to the foot of the bed.

And then he leapt to the dressing-table for his hairbrush to smash five red-back spiders which had been lying in wait to inject their poison into his feet.

Lurking under cover, often in colonies, this insect’s attack is to be countered by swift medical attention, or surely culminates in long illness if not death.

The Doomed Race

ITWASnot a pleasing day, and Alice decided that if people liked living in the bush in preference to the salubrious cities, they could stay in their damned bush. Once away from the vineyards and the orchards nurtured by the network of water channels webbed about Mitford, the Murray Valley in summer presents a picture of flat barrenness, a suntrap masked by dark grey dust raised by the wind.