Arthur Upfield: Murder Must Wait

The Murder of Mrs Rockcliff

ITHAPPENEDat Mitford some time during Monday night. Sprawled on the northern bank of the River Murray, and in the State of New South Wales, Mitford is wide open to the cold southerlies of winter and the hot northerlies of summer. A broad tree-shaded boulevard skirts the river, and Main Street is flanked by squat emporiums crammed with goodslikely, and unlikely, to be needed by people who own the surrounding vineyards and who operate the canning works for ten weeks every year.

It wasn’t Sergeant Yoti’s first homicide case, but it was destined to give him a new and not altogether unpleasant experience. He wasn’t much to look at… in civilian clothes. He was square andgrey, and the foolish ones thought him soft. You think of a kind, understanding uncle when at the point of inebriation you own the town, and you may wake up and faintly recall that what Sergeant Yoti failed to do with his fists, he accomplished with his boots.

This Wednesday opened as every other day in February: hot and windy and dusty outside the Police Station, still and hot and boring within. The morning was governed by dull routine, and the afternoon was given by the Sergeant to polishing his cases for presenting to the magistrates the following day. Shortly after three o’clock the mail was delivered, and Yoti read a letter penned by the Chief of the State CID, in Sydney.

Dear Yoti [wrote Superintendent Canno], I’ve seized the opportunity of snaffling Napoleon Bonaparte to look into those baby cases out your way. Don’t know if you have ever met this bloke, but you must have heard of him. Anyway, give him all the rope and he’ll pay dividends. You’ll find him the most aggravating feller you could think of, but there’s nothing lousy in his makeup. How’s things up your street? Drop me a line sometime. Remember me to Joan. Your George is shaping well in the Traffic Branch, I’m told…

Yoti permitted himself to smile. Canno had gone high; he himself had remained almost stationary, and the day was long back on life’s road when they had joined the Department together.

Napoleon Bonaparte! What a name! And, by all accounts, what a man! Sergeant Yoti pondered, his friend’s letter gripped by a sizeable fist. The tales he had heard about this Napoleon Bonaparte, this detective-inspector of the Queensland CID, this cross between Sir Galahad and Ned Kelly.

Well, the stolen babies would deflate this Bonaparte. They’d stir his grey matter and dry up his sinuses. He boasted that he’d never failed to finish an investigation. Well, well! Old Canno must be putting the yoke on this Mister Bonaparte, doing a snigger up his sleeve while urging him on to tackle the disappearances of four babies, babies who had just vanished, vanished from a pram or a cot, out of a house, off a veranda, even off Main Street one busy afternoon.

Yoti wasn’t amused when thinking about it, even though the only gleam of comfort in a dark night was the failure of Canno’s city experts to do better than he had done… which was just nothing in clear results. The first baby had been a routine job; the second baby, an upheaval. The third child had brought Canno’s boys; photographers andfingerprinters and dust collectors. And the last baby had loosened all hell in Mitford so that even his wife had looked at him with eyes of disillusionment.

Napoleon Bonaparte! Coming to try his luck weeks after Baby Number Four had vanished like a penny in the river. No wonder the cat laughed.

Sergeant Yoti loved cats, and was stroking the enormous black specimen on his desk when the telephone in the outer office blasted the peace. Yoti smiled at the cat, almost unconscious of the voice acknowledging the telephone call. He heard the receiver being replaced, then the quick, heavy footfalls of the uniformed constable who entered his office and stood stiffly beyond the desk.

“Essen rang through, Sergeant,” reported the constable, not yet old enough to keep his face masked or his voice controlled. “His brother-in-law rang him to say he was worried about a Mrs Rockcliff who lives next door. Essen went round. The woman hadn’t been seen for a couple of days and the milk and mail not taken in. He tried the front door and found it unlocked, and went in. The woman’s lying dead in a bedroom. Essen says he thinksit’s homicide.”

No eruption rocked the Police Station at Mitford. No sirens screamed through Main Street. The police car driven by a constable negotiated the cross-street with normal care, and Yoti smoked his pipe and returned the greeting of a man who waved to him.

Elgin Street consisted of detached villas, guarded by small front gardens. At the gate of No 5 two men waited: one obviously a policeman in mufti, the other elderly and obviously nervous. First Constable Essen came forward.

“Woman appears to have been murdered,” he said. “Body’s in the front bedroom. This is my brother-in-law, who last saw the woman alive on Monday. Rang me about it because there mightn’t have been anything to it.”

Yoti nodded.

“I live next door, Sergeant,” admitted the elderly man. “The name’s Thring. We haven’t seen Mrs Rockcliff since Monday, andthere’s two lots of milk and letters at the gate. I thought…”

“You did right, Mr Thring. Stay here with the constable. We’ll go in, Essen.”

Essen opened the door by the handle of the ordinary catch, and Yoti noted the Yale-type lock was snibbed. The hall was small and had the imprint of the house-proud slave. A hat and umbrella stand stood against one wall, a small table flanked by a chair fronted another. On the table was a bowl of dying roses; above it hung an oval mirror reflecting the open front door. Dark green linoleum covered the floor of the hall and passage leading to the rear.

“Room to the right, Sergeant,” Essen said tightly. “The door was shut, but I managed to open it without mucking up possible prints. She’s lying on the floor at the foot of the bed. And the baby’s cot is empty.”

Yoti closed the door, and the light from the open fanlight emphasised the lines which suddenly appeared about his wide mouth. Abruptly he strode to the bedroom, paused just within the door frame. The scene was registered as a succession of pictures: beginning with the meticulously made bed, then the blind-protected windows, the body of the woman on the floor, and finally the empty cot beyond the foot of the bed.

“Thring says he and his wife are sure that Mrs Rockcliff left the child alone in the house,” Essen said. “None of the neighbours have seen it since last Monday. Looks like the woman returned to find the baby-thief on the job, and was done in because she recognised him.”

It was a pleasant room, the drawn linen blinds creatinga pseudo -coolness, and the sunlight penetrating at one side to fashion a finger of gold to caress a dead hand upon a blue rug. There was light enough to see the lacy draperies of the baby’s cot, the feeding bottle on the small table, the miniatures on the walls.

Only now was he conscious of the flies blundering about, of the staleness of the air, of the silence about him and of the noises without. On tiptoe he left the doorway to step over the body and reach the cot. He could see the valley on the tiny pillow where the baby’s head had rested, and his mind was so crowded with the consequences of that empty cot that the murder of the mother was then of small moment.

He went back the road he had come… over the body… again paused in the doorway, to look at the cot before permitting his eyes to concentrate on the dead woman, lying partially on her back, one arm above the head, the other outflung.

“You been through the house, of course?” he said to Essen.

“Yes. Back door locked. All the windows fastened. Nothing out of place.”