Arthur Upfield - Murder Must Wait

There were two prints, one perfect, the other almost evaporated. There were other prints, many of them, and passers-by were adding to the number. There were the tracks of a dog. It was the one perfect human print and the one imperfect print which halted Bony.

So the murderer of Mrs Rockcliff was still in Mitford, had been walking ahead of him by perhaps less than a hundred yards.

Bony hurried, almost ran, seeking the next wet patch. The patch at the next hydrant extended merely a foot in from the kerbing, and gave nothing of the murderer’s footprints. He passed Martin amp; Martin’s Estate Offices, Madame Clare’s Frock Shop, the Olympic Bank, but the next two hydrants had done nothing to assist him, and when he returned down Main Street, the sun had dried the cement.

Standing in black shadow, he looked at a display of books and saw only the jumbled colours of the jackets. He mopped his face with his handkerchief, seeing only the mental picture of that wet shoe-mark which tallied in every detail with those left on the linoleum at No 5 Elgin Street. A man taller than himself, who took a longer stride, who walked on his toes as though inebriated or just off a ship. Now it would be too early to be drunk, and the seafarer long since would have gained his land legs. A man who walked forward on the balls of his feet like one ever anxious to arrive.

He entered the Estate Offices of Martin amp; Martin. The clerk at the counter of the outer office was listening to a woman complaining of the front fence of her home. It was about to collapse on to the sidewalk, and it appeared that the landlord had promised to have it seen to months previously. She was a woman determined to have her say and the supercilious clerk wilted.

The door to the inner office was closed. From beyond it drifted the murmur of voices, proving that Mr Cyril Martin was there. He was taller than Bony, and he walked like a man ever anxious to arrive. He could have come in, five minutes back; he could have trodden on that wet patch of pavement.

Then the door opened, and a man said:

“Well, that’s how it is and how it’s going to be.”

He came out, brown eyes angry, wearing his hat. He closed the door with unnecessary vigour and kicked the floor mat as he crossed to the outer doorway. He was taller than Bony. Bony followed him to the street, watched him walk down the street. Mr Cyril Martin could not deny this man was his son. Save for the lines of age on the father’s face, they could have been twins.

His reason for calling must wait upon events. Bony sauntered to the Olympic Bank, and without delay met Mr Bulford, who stood behind his desk to greet him nervously and invite him to be seated.

“Phew! Hot morning,” Bony said, and again wiped his face with silk.

“Must expect it at this time of year, Inspector.”

The manager was alert, a trifle too alert. His voice betrayed tension, and his hands allied the voice. Bony replaced the handkerchief in his breast pocket, and from a side pocket brought out tobacco pouch and papers. With these in his hands, he looked at Mr Bulford, and then looked down at his fingers working at the cigarette. Mr Bulford was silent. He took a cigarette from the silver box and lit it.

“Your child was abducted on November 29th, Mr Bulford, was it not?”

“Yes, that was the date, Inspector.”

“From November 26th to 30th the Municipal Library was closed to the public as renovations were being carried out.”

In the parlour, silence. From without the faint clinking of money and the muted sound of voices. Bony drew at his cigarette, slowly exhaled, looked through the smoke at the man seated behind the desk. Mr Bulford stubbed his half-consumed cigarette, and dropped his hands below the edge of the desk.

“I forgot that the Library was closed that day.”

Bony waited. Mr Bulford waited. Neither spoke until Bony leaned forward and pressed the end of his cigarette into the ashtray.

“One, Mr Bulford. You were working here when the child was stolen. Two, Mr Bulford. You left shortly after your wife and met Mrs Rockcliff in the Library. Three… Could you let me have number three statement of what you did between four-thirty and five-thirty on the afternoon of November 29th?”

“Yes, I could, Inspector,” Mr Bulford said softly. The window light illuminated the beads of moisture on his forehead. “My first statement is the correct one.”

Slowly Bony shook his head.

“I am afraid that won’t do, Mr Bulford.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“You might like to give me the truth.”

“Perhaps you know the truth, Inspector.”

“No.” Again silence, that inner silence made the more poignantly complete by the sounds without. “Only the other day I was mentally comparing the American Third Degree methods of interrogation, and those said to be practised by the Hungarian authorities, with our Australian methods of conducting an investigation. While our Australian methods tend to prolong the investigation, I concluded that they provide an irresistible challenge. So that when I am asked to investigate a crime, Mr Bulford, detection becomes an icy slide with truth inevitably at the bottom. Why delay? Would you dally in the act of taking castor oil?”

Bony stood to smooth down his impeccable tussore silk jacket. He looked down at Mr Bulford, brows raised just a fraction. The manager brought his hands into view and gazed at them as though seeking help. Bony waited. Presently Mr Bulford looked up and slowly shook his head.

Bony’s shoulders expressed the shrug of resignation, before he turned and walked out.

A Trip for Alice

WITHBONYbeside her driving the racy sports car, Alice McGorr silently vowed that if this was one of the methods by which Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte tracked down criminals, then the ways she knew were no more. The car was red, low-slung, long-bonneted, a two-seater. The canvas hood was down and the sun was hot and the wind whipped round the shield like puffs of hot air from an oven and yet astonishingly invigorating. She was reminded of Sweet Seventeen out with the boy friend, and she wanted to let her hair stream in the wind behind her.

Once away from the green belt, and up and over the lip of the river flats, theworld became even brighter and remarkably clean and stereoscopically clear. Alice did actually look upward for the passing cloud, to see the sky unblemished in blue-washed perfection. With unexpected abruptness she was introduced to a strange world.

The road was merely a track languidly avoiding acacia clumps and box tree groves, running straight over the flats covered with blue bush, and for ever being teased by the dancing horizon.

Contented sheep lay in the shade cast by old-man saltbush, and rabbits dived into their holes among the foot-high herbage. Far away she saw toy-sized horses beneath box trees, and mottled cattle grazed on a brown grass field. Kangaroos stilled, to gaze curiously at her, and three emus daintily trod a minuet on a bar of red sand.

The hot sun was forgiven. The flies were left far behind or clung to the rear of the machine like small boys having a ‘whip behind’. And this Alice McGorr, reared in a semi-slum and associated with crime and vice in a close-packed city, felt she was being swiftly carried to some place beyond the mirage of life, a home-place from which she had been absent for centuries.

Several crows raced the car, low-down and cawing derisively likeurchinsya-hooing Sweet Seventeen and her escort. Alice wanted to laugh at them, felt likeya-hooing in return, resisted the thought because she was so utterly content. It was unbelievable that she was Policewoman Alice McGorr, and absolutely impossible that her escort was an inspector of the Criminal Investigation Branch of the Queensland Police Department. Jet-black cockatoos with scarlet under-wings shrieked at this unreal reality, and a flock of rose-breasted grey galahs supported them.