Arthur Upfield - The New Shoe

It wasn’t much of a road… just a narrow track surfaced with gravel reflecting the starlight sufficiently for one to keep to it. For a mile it skirted the edge of the Inlet bowl, on which were grazing sheep. At a gate to a paddock, he halted to lean against it, and now that the sound of his footsteps had ceased, he could hear many undertones of life and the muttering of the distant surf.

He was reasonably sure at the end of this first week that the murderer he sought was a member of this local community. The killer was familiar with the interior of the Lighthouse and kept himself up to date with its inspections and renovations. With all these local people the Lighthouse was a dominant influence. Every boy and girl on entering the age of adventure would want, and would succeed, in climbing those steps to see the Light, to marvel at the sun-valve, to watch the play of the jets within the encircling prisms. They would come to know as much about the Light as the engineers.

Leaving the gate heproceeded along the country road, which soon afterwards divided at a junction, the road to the left leading to the farm occupied by the Owens, and that straight ahead leading to the farm at which lived Eli Wessex and his wife and daughter. Bony kept straight on, walking smartly and enjoying the warmth of the exercise.

Crime is like the impact of a stone on placid waters. The stone had been dropped in this locality ten weeks before this night, and Bony was confident that the waves it produced were still expanding and contracting as influences in human minds. Mental influences produce physical action, and Bony was waiting to note an action that he might follow the influence causing it to its source… the dropped stone.

On seeing a light among the trees ahead, he experienced astonishment that he had walked four miles from the hotel, for the light was within the house occupied by the Wessex family. From day time exploration, he knew he was within a few yards of the road gate beyond which stood the house within its fenced garden.

A dog was barking, and he was sure the animal was not alarmed by his approach but wanted freedom from the chain.

On arriving at the gate, he decided to go no farther. It was then that he heard the approach of a vehicle far back along the road, and the noise emerged slowly from the nearer throbbing of a small-powered petrol engine running the electric lighting plant. It was several minutes before he decided that the motor vehicle was coming his way, and another passed before he saw its headlights weaving among the trees.

To avoid being recognized and thereby raising suspicion, he moved to stand against the trunk of an ironbark.

The engine was left running when the driver got downto open the gate. He had to pass into the beam of the lights, and then Bony saw Tom Owen. The man drove the vehicle to the garden gate, leaving the road gate open, and Bony recognized the utility which had been standing outside old Penwarden’s house.

A second chained dog added its barking to the first. A veranda light was switched on, and the truck’s lights were turned off. Bony could plainly see Owen walk through the garden gateway to the house veranda steps, where he was welcomed by a woman. She was tall, and her hair was light-grey and drawn to a “bun” at the nape of her neck.

What they said, the barking of the dogs prevented from being heard. The woman went inside and was followed by Owen. The veranda light was turned off, but the front door was not closed. Bony waited… for no tangible reason. The stars said it was a few minutes after eight.

The barking of the dogs dwindled to desultory complaint. In the tree branches above Bony a kookaburra throatily guffawed like a satisfied devil pleasantly dreaming. Then the silence pressed down upon the invisible earth until a sepulchral voice moaned:

“Ma…poke! Ma…poke! Ma…poke!”

It was restful standing there against the excessively rough bark of the tree, only the watchful mopoke aware of him. This was Bony’s world where Time meant nothing and the lives of even the grandest men of no more moment than the nuptial flight of the termites. Bony felt no curiosity in Owen’s visit to the Wessexes. These people were good neighbours.

Four miles! Four miles back to the hotel, and a leaping log fire and a drink before bed. Bony had actually left the tree when the veranda light sprang up and he returned to the ironbark to wait till the truck’s lights would not reveal him.

Tom Owen appeared. He was followed by the woman Bony was sure was Mrs Wessex, and after her came a younger man whom Bony thought to be the hired hand, Dick Lake’s brother. The three left the veranda and approached the utility. The dogs again broke into excited barking.

The lights of the truck being extinguished, the three persons were indistinguishable when they stopped at the rear of the vehicle. The tailboard fell with clang to the extremity of its supporting chains, and then Bony could just make out that something was being taken from the truck, a heavy object requiring both men and the woman to lift. Burdened thus, they moved towards the garden gate, where they were careful to negotiate the narrow entrance.

Now the veranda light held them, to reveal Tom Owen proceeding first and taking the weight of the forepart of the object, with the youth taking the other end and determinedly assisted by Mrs Wessex.

Along the short path they staggered and lurched to the veranda steps, where Owen managed to turn without losing his grip and proceed backwards up the steps.

What Bony thought they carried drew him from the tree, in through the gateway, to the very fence encircling the house. The carriers lifted their load to the veranda and immediately beneath the light. The object gleamedredly as slowly, slowly, it was taken into the house.

It was acoffin, the casket in which Bony had been invited to lie that Penwarden might be assured it would take comfortably the body of Mrs Tom Owen.

A Man and a Dog

AT ELEVEN BONY retired to his room, his programme for the next day altered by the message left by Dick Lake that the trip over Sweet Fairy Ann was “off”. At eleven-fifteen he turned out the light and sat on the side of the bed, wearing his overcoat and hat and his pocket weighted. At eleven-thirty he opened and closed the bedroom door without noise, and as silently closed the front door after him as he stepped out to the veranda.

Stug shifted himself off the doormat just in time to escape being stepped on. It was so dark that Bony couldn’t see him, and thereafter he knew the dog accompanied him only by the occasional touch of a cold nose to a hand.

Man and dog crossed the lawn, climbed through a fence, walked down the slope of an open paddock, and so gained the highway without nearing the road lights.

Ten minutes later they reached the gate in the tall iron fence surrounding the Lighthouse, and here Bony squatted on his heels and fondled the dog. Even thus he couldn’t distinguish the animal, but knew by its behaviour that they had not been followed.

Under the snarl of the everlasting surf the night here was as quiet as it had been at the gateway to the Wessex homestead. Above man and dog the Light pierced the sky with faint lightning flashes… four within the period of twelve seconds, followed by the eclipse.

“As we cannot hear anything suspicious, Stug, we must begin work,” he murmured, and the old dog softly whined his pleasure in his voice. “I am going to leave you outside the gate and hope, I expect vainly, that should the gentleman who tiptoes about lighthouse yards come this way, you will warn me. You know him, of course. You recognized him when he entered the yard yesterday, and I bet he made a fuss of you, and you pranced about him. I know because you were panting when I came out of the Lighthouse. He was a small man, and he came and went away on his toes when there was no real necessity. You think matters over and then tell me who he is, what he’s like to look at. If you don’t, I’ll tell you, perhaps.”