Arthur Upfield - Murder Must Wait

The scarf was the only feminine item in this hut. There was a litter of comics, a pair of tan shoes, a bridle and a. 22 rifle in a corner.

Bony pondered on the two mattresses, so close together; only one in use. Taking great care not to displace the blankets, he looked under each mattress and found nothing. Whereupon he translated what he saw. The things hanging upon the wall, especially the hat and the spurs, said this was Tracker Wilmot’s hut. The unused mattress beside the used one, told of an absent wife. Recollection of Marcus Clark’s reference to a lubra named Sarah, the month-old bride, now added that to this, which totalled a graceful young lubra in the secret camp among the lantana.

In the next hut he found evidence of occupation by Tracker Fred’s father. Here again were two mattresses, both beingused, and placed as far apart as possible. The place was clean enough, due to Mr Beamer’s regular inspections, but the litter was an offence. Under one mattress Bony found a set of pointing bones and a skin bag containing many precious churinga stones and a set of rain stones as large as the hand and as green as polished jade.

The fact that these sacred articles were hidden under the Chief’s mattress and not in a sacred store-house, such as under a rock or in a tree, indicated that Chief Wilmot was unsure of the degree of his rejuvenated authority over his people, and that he was aware many of them were so ‘ruined’ by white civilisation that they would steal these tribal relics and sell them for a few plugs of tobacco.

The hut occupied by the watch-mender and the store bookkeeper gave nothing, as did those other huts into which he flitted.

As he anticipated, he found a path running direct from the huts to the secret camp in the lantanas, and so crossing an open space of two hundred yards. Convinced that the lubra with the baby would lie quiet within the tent, he followed the path and so came to anotherjunctioning with it. This path came from the direction of the office. On this path he found imprints of the shoes worn by the woman who had crept under Mrs Rockcliff’s bed.

The wearer had visited the secret camp, and she had returned by the same path. He followed the returning prints, followed them till they passed by the office and continued to the Superintendent’s house. The woman who had been under Mrs Rockcliff’s bed had emerged from and entered Mr Beamer’s house by the back door.

Reports

WITHANoar thrust astern, Bony propelled the boat with a minimum of exertion, satisfied with the assistance of the current and aware that for a further fifteen minutes the Settlement aborigines would be boxed inside the hospital. To defeat the glare, his eyes were reduced to mere slits, and now and then the upper lip lifted as it had done when he had cut the prints of that woman who had crept into No 5 Elgin Street.

The woman had worn the same shoes when in the Aboriginal Settlement the day before this glaring golden day. She had departed via the back door of the Superintendent’s house to visit the secret camp, and had returned to the house and entered it by the back door. For Bony that was proof incontestable.

There were sound reasons for not following those tracks into the Superintendent’s house to find the shoes, a minor reason being that either Beamer or his wife might become bored with being in the hospital with Essen and the others and return to the house. Essen could keep the aborigines for an hour, but had no power over the Beamers, who naturally would protest at Bony’s trespass without a search warrant.

The major reason for ordering Satan again to his rear was given by the study of Mrs Beamer’s shoe-prints made when she walked with the constable to the hospital. Her shoe size tallied. She was wearing wedge-type shoes. The prints, however, proved to Bony that she was accustomed to wearing low heels, while the woman who entered the house in Elgin Street was accustomed to wearing high-heeled shoes. While not positive, for human memory cannot be a thousand-per-cent infallible, Bony was satisfied that it wasn’t Mrs Beamer who had visited the secret camp.

He permitted the boat to drift and smoked another cigarette. The one pair of shoes worn by the one woman linked Mrs Rockcliff’s murder and her abducted child with this Aboriginal Settlement, and this link strengthened the supposition that the baby in the secret camp was a white child.

There was nothing to support opposing argument. There could be no other intelligent explanation for that small tent masked by tree boughs, a mere hundred yards from twenty-eight weatherproof and comfortable huts. And no lubra could have her baby secretly, and in secret keep it.

It could be accepted as certain that Chief Wilmot and his men knew all about that lubra and the baby. There were two further certainties. The reason for the baby being kept in that secret camp was a communitysecret, and a community secret is something which cannot be levered from the aborigines by any method of interrogation accepted by western civilisation.

He moored the boat at the old jetty, and by a devious route arrived at the rear of the Police Station and entered the yard via the back fence. Unobserved, and with the sheep-skin overshoes under an arm, he entered his office-bedroom to find Essen and Alice McGorr playing poker.

Essen said, faintly smiling:

“You look as if you’ve been sleeping with the dog.”

Alice said:

“Have you had any breakfast?”

“Not yet, Alice.”Bony swept his black hair back from his forehead, sat at his desk and began the inevitable cigarette. “Would you try…”

“I’ll fetch coffee and something to eat from the kitchen,” she told him, her face severe.“Enough to go on withso’s not to spoil your lunch. And don’t go telling Essen anything till I get back.”

“Not a thing, Alice. I’ll tell him nothing at all.” After she had gone, he said to Essen: “Now you tell me everything.”

“I followed your instructions, all but,” Essen began. “Arrived on time and left on time. Had no difficulty with the Beamers: in fact, they helped. Beamer came with me and a constable to the huts and we rounded up all the blacks left on the scene. You told me to keep ’emoff the grass for an hour and I added ten minutes extra because shortly after I began on ’emI felt something under the surface I couldn’t understand.

“You know how it is withabos. You can lead ’embut never drive. I put Marcus Clark into a blue sweat, and against the full-bloods he’s a weakling. Couldn’t shift him an inch from his first yarn of having met a cobber down-river and getting drunk with him. I cooked up a couple of yarns hinting we knew he was buying booze and havingbeanos with other blacks outside the Settlement at night, and that altogether he was a nasty bit of work to have around. No go.

“Old Wilmot just sat still and kept his face shut. Fred, his son, looked anywhere but at me. The others wiggled their toes and looked frightened. And the Beamers looked at me as if I was murdering the innocents. That’s all, on the surface, but under the surface was something. It was like charging a man with theft when he expects to be charged with homicide. They weren’t concerned with what I was asking them, but by what I might have in mind to ask them later on.”

“That was your reaction to the attitude of Chief Wilmot and his son and Clark? Not to the attitude of any of the others?”

“Not to any of the other men, but it was to the lubras, even to the two acting nurses.”

“Did you probe into the walkabout?” Bony asked.

“Mentioned it in the beginning. The mob went up-river to Big Cod Bend all right.”

“How far from the Settlement?”

“A good nine miles. How did you get along?”