Arthur Upfield - Murder Must Wait

“Very well, I’ll find out. November 29th! That was the day the Bulford baby was stolen.”

“There is the coincidence.” Bony smoothly admitted.

Alice walked to the door, her shoulders expressive of irritation. She returned to the desk, glared at Bony, who sat smiling up at her.

“Am I your cobber or am I just a cog in your machine?” she asked. “What’s behind the Library ceilings and the Bulford baby? Oh, damn! I’m sorry, Bony.”

She had reached the door again when he called her back.

“As you are not a cog in my machine, Alice, you must come under the other heading. We’re doing splendidly, so let us concentrate on our respective jobs, that our joint efforts may achieve success.”

She nodded, bit her lip, and burst out with:

“All right by me, Bony. But what are you going to do with those enormous shoes and the bike Essen is bringing here?”

“I’m going to stir up an ants’ nest, Alice.”

Playing Tricks

THENIGHTwas silent and dark. The wind had gone off on walkabout. The famed Southern Cross was as ever the Great Celestial Fraud created by persons cursed with uncontrolled imagination.

It is always sound practice that, if you are unable to command the thoughts of your enemy, you should provide him with material to think anything but the truth; as it is good policy to give your enemy as much worry as possible. Following Bony’s visit to the Aboriginal Settlement, the inhabitants would surely be wondering what prompted it, and, when brought to the verge of desperation, those who had planted red-back spiders in his bed, and had stolen cigarette-ends and a button in order to ‘sing’ these items with their magic, could be expected to make further moves.

Although ten o’clock, the departed day still faintly illumined the western curve of the world. The road was just visible directly ahead of the front wheel of Bony’s bike, but, when the end of the made road was reached, the track crossing the flats bordering the river was quite invisible even to him. Constantly he rode off the track, had to alight and find his way back to it, and so left on the dusty soil the imprints of the number nine shoes.

On coming to an old-man red gum growing close to the track, the bike rider was less than a hundred yards from the turn-off to the Settlement. He alighted and leaned the machine against the tree farthest from the track, and sat on a fallen limb to remove the number nines. The shoes he dropped beside the branch and proceeded to employ shaped pieces of wood and cellulose tape, separating his first and second toes from the third, and the third from the fourth and fifth toes. On proceeding, he left clear imprints of something having three long-clawed toes to each foot.

In the morning sharp eyes would be dilated by tracks surely made by the dreaded Kurdaitcha without his feathered feet. Those prints would be followed back to the tree where the Kurdaitcha put on his great boots and mounted a bike to go back to Mitford. Agile minds would associate the Kurdaitcha with the half-caste police feller, and this police feller had come from far away. To the aborigine, no matter how close he might be to civilisation, the power of magic is assessed in accordance with the distance from which it has come. So if the half-caste police feller is a Kurdaitcha in disguise, then it warrants every aborigine to mind hisp’s andq’s.

Eventually the Kurdaitcha arrived outside Mr Beamer’s house, which, with the church and the store, guarded the Settlement.

Bony could see Mr Beamer relaxing on the fly-netted veranda. Within the house someone was playing a piano. Beyond it, the red glow of communal fires illumined the fronts of the small huts occupied by the aborigines, about which men would be playing the white feller’smouthorgans, and the women gossiping. Only the dogs would be suspicious, but not till the owners slept would they become a disturbing influence.

With a stick Bony scratched in the dust a circle pierced by a shaft of lightning. Outside the store he drew a square, halved it, and in each half placed a triangle. Entering the carpenter’s shop, aided by a masked torch, he used chalk to draw a match-stick man on a board leaning against the wall. In the blacksmith’s shop he chalked a square on the anvil with a match-stick man fleeing from it. He examined the watch-mender’s bench and the inside of a portable cabinet. One drawer was locked, but this he opened with forceps, finding within eleven watches, each neatly tagged with a number. On the top of the cabinet he left a sun making eyes at a prostrate black feller. In a box something like a schoolboy’s pencil case he found several pieces of stout celluloid, seven inches long by one and a half inches wide.

Outside the school he drew on the ground six matchstick children, and passed along to the hospital. There were, he knew, three adult patients in this iron and weatherboard building, and that Marcus Clark occupied the partitioned end of a fly-netted veranda. Despite the hour there was a light in this alleged room, and to Bony’s astonishment, again despite the hour, Marcus Clark had a visitor, a shrunken old man seated at the foot of the bed. His face was clear in the light cast by an oil lamp on the night table, the lamp being accompanied by a large silver-mounted pipe, a tobacco plug and knife, and a paper-backed novel. It was evident that Mr Bertrand Marcus Clark was above average. He was saying:

“I’mtellin ’ you I don’t clam to all that rot. You can donothin ’ to fix this foot of mine, or mend me arm.”

The old-’un chuckled, dry and humorous.

“You wait, Clarky, old feller,” he said, softly. “You just wait. The kids got what I wanted, and the young Fred will do what I tell him.”

Marcus Clark reached for his pipe and proceeded to fill it, and the old man bit a chew from his plug. Although the skin of both was chocolate, they were farther apart than the planets. Chief Wilmot wore the cloak of inscrutable passivity woven by his forebears in procession down the ages, but Clark was naked and neurotic and the sport of a dozen races. He was worried, impatient, victimised by a little knowledge.

“I’m notsayin ’ young Fred ain’t all there,” he argued, speaking with the aloofness of the busy parents to the dull child. “But I’msayin ’ again what I told Ellen, thatmumblin ’ andmoanin ’ and crying curses into something a man’s touched won’t give him thegutsache in five minutes. Pickin ’ a button off the floor what dropped from a man’s pants, andsnitchin ’ his cigarette bumpers and the like, andputtin ’ your curse into them things whenyous points the bone at him, is good enough when you’ve got a month or more to work on him.

“It’s timeyous blacks woke up and took to modern ways what are faster. Like using them red-back spiders. That was a good idea, and I’ll bet it wasn’t yours. As I said at the corroboree last week, yous blacks have got to fight with white men’s brains and white men’s tools. Yougotta learn that sitting around on your sterns all day won’t ever get you anywhere. Any’ow, yous old blokes is hopeless. Give me the kids. There’s hope in the kids.”

“That police fellermusta found them spiders,” offered old Wilmot.

“He’s stillwalkin ’ about, ain’t he?”

Wilmot nodded, strangely cheerful, and Clark snorted when understanding that all he had said in disparagement of pointing the bone had not registered.

“Young Fred in camp?” asked Clark.

“Came back early. Went up to Big Bend to have a try for that ole cod he reckons is hanging out there. Must be a big feller, that ole cod.”

“He ain’tmuckin ’ around Sarah too much, is he?”

“No.” The Chief chuckled. “Young Fredain’t liking it, though. Says itdon’t seem fair, them being married only a month, and he can’t hang around. Itells him that’s the orders, and he went off crook.”