Arthur Upfield - The New Shoe

Again that withdrawal of sound into the twilight. Again the dreadful silence. This time the silence was ended by a plaintive cry. The lid was lifted. Daylight rushed upon Bony, and the sweet aroma of wood shavings swept like brooms through the corridors of his haunted mind. Arms slid under him, lifted him, assisted him up and out of the coffin. His legs were almost paralysed, and his breathing wasstertorous. Old arms, strong yet, and made stronger still by emotion, helped him to the wall, there to let him down with his back resting.

Old Penwarden fell to his knees before Bony, his hands upon the floor. Horror lived in his blue eyes matching the horror still living in the blue eyes of Napoleon Bonaparte. His voice was like the wind in bulrushes.

“Mr Rawlings, sir! Mr… Inspector Bonaparte, sir… Mr Rawlings! I didn’t know. I made a mistake, ’deed I did. Take your time, Mr Rawlings, sir. Just you take your time.”

The Master Mind

IT WAS BONY who first recovered. He assisted Penwarden to his feet, felt the trembling of the old body, was perturbed, by the prospect of heart failure cutting off a vital source of information.

“We’ll go out to the workshop and talk about it,” he said, finding it necessary to steer the old man to the packing case at the bench. Having sat him down, Bony took from the wall shelf the pipe and the tin of tobacco, and liftedhimself to sit on the bench. With effort to control his fingers, he rolled a cigarette.

“Be easy, Mr Penwarden,” he urged the old man, who sat with face turned down to the hands resting on his knees. “I am, indeed, a detective inspector investigating the death of the man in the Lighthouse, and it seems that you have had the idea that I was a bird of entirely different plumage.”

“That’s how ’twas, Mr Rawlings, sir.” Penwarden reached for pipe and tobacco, and the hand trembled violently. “I am truly sorry I was somistaken, and very glad that the mistake didn’t end in a bad way… for both of us. What will yoube doing about it?”

“Having admitted the mistake, and the mistake not having ended in a bad way, nothing. We will forget about that little episode, and concentrate on matters of greater importance. Now light your pipe and be easy. As you urged me to do, take your time.”

“Thatbe very kind of you, Mr Rawlings, sir. What I done was inthinkin ’ for others. Now I can see what an old fool I was. Ah me! ’Tis a sad thing that the Lord thrashes those He loves, and if you would spare ’emall you can, I’m sure your reward in the hereafter would be certain.”

“If you refer to the innocent, Mr Penwarden, I have known many instances when the police have striven to lessen the suffering of innocent persons occasioned by the guilty,” Bony said, quietly. “After all, we policemen are ordinary men. We are fathers and sons or brothers. We uphold the law, and try to do so impersonally, and the older we become, so are we the more inclined to be sympathetic, even to the criminal, who is, of course, suffering an illness of the mind.”

Penwarden puffed vigorously at his pipe without speaking, till he put the pipe down on the bench and heaved a sigh. The unwrinkled face was gaining a little of its normal pinkness, and the hands were less agitated. Bony waited patiently, his mind sponged clean of rancour, and presently the old man spoke.

“Itwere Fred Ayling who told me about you finding their old cave, and then telling me you must be a friend of the man they found dead in the Lighthouse. That man had Eldred Wessex in his clutches. Fred warned me against you, and I sharpened my wits and put two and two together. I happened to see you going into Moss Way’s campt’othernight, and I sneaked close and heard him and you talking. You played him well, and I come to be sure about you. Now I’m sad at heart, Mr Rawlings, sir, that I gave you such a fright.

“I’ll have to go back a long way to the time I came here as a lad with nothing but the strength in me arms and back. In them days, Eli Wessex was a mere boy, and Tom Owen wasn’t born. No one hereabout had much money, and to journey to Melbourne was a big thing to do.

“In course of time, we all took wives and sired children, and we never hadno quarrels like most neighbours have. When the present Lake’s father and mother came to take up land, we helped ’emto their feet. When the fires came and burned the Owens out, we set ’emup again. When the present Lake broke his leg, Tom Owen bossed the lads and seen to it they did their work. All of us did our best to be upright and God-fearing.

“Itwere Eli Wessex’s father who set me up as wheelwright and undertaker. He advanced me a hundred pounds, and when I was able to repay the debt he was dead, and Eli wouldn’t take the money… wiped out the debt, saying I’d already paid it in service.

“My sons grew up before Eldred and Dick Lake and Fred Ayling, and it was Eli who had ’emover to his place and read and talked to ’emand set their feet firmly on the road. To this day, my sons haven’tforgot Eli, and what Eli did for ’em.

“Then came up Eldred, with Dick and Fred, and Eli did for them what he did for my boys. Boys are boys, and the generations don’t change ’em. There’s no difference between boys and young horses. They like to show off. They wants to be men before their whiskers sprout, and when their whiskers do grow long enough to shave off, most of ’emquiet down and get a bit of sense. My sons did. So did Dick Lake, in his own way, and Fred Ayling in his.

“But Eldred, he never got sense, never got past the showing off stage, never took in anything from his father. Several times before the war, a policeman came to find where Eldred was, and to tell Eli and his wife that, if they didn’t put a brake on him, he’d find himself in gaol. All of us thought that the Army would tame him.

“He never went to America after the war. He never came home neither. Said he was trying to make good before he came home. I know he didn’t make good, ’coshe wrote asking me for money, and saying I was not to tell his parents about it.

“I sent him the money to Sydney. It was a fairish bit, too. A couple of months after that he wrote for more, and more I sent him, thinking about that hundred pounds I never repaid his grandfather. When he wrote for the third time asking for money, I refused him. It was only the other day that I learned that his mother used to send him money, and even Dick Lake did.

“And then one morning Dick Lake popped in here to tell me that Eldred was coming home. He’d had a telegram from Eldred saying he’d be arriving at Geelong that veryday, and Dick planned to meet him and take him home to give Eli and his wife the surprise of their lives. Dick borrowed Eli’s car and went up to Geelong, but he didn’t come back that day, or the next day till ten that night.

“He knocked on my front door, and I answered as the old woman had gone to bed. Dick tells me he wants to talk private like, and would I go with him to the workshop. We came here, me carrying a hurricane lamp. I set the lamp down here on this here bench, and Dick’s beside me. Then Ihears a noise behind me, and I turns round to see Eldred.

“He’s the same Eldred, yet different. Older of course. There’s no colour to his face. His mouth is sort of sagging and both cheeks are twitching like he’s got the palsy. Ilooks at him, and he looks at me, and we don’t say a word. Dick says:

“ ‘Meand Eldred is up against it, Ed. Want to talk it over, sort of, like when we were kids. Pretty serious this time, though. Eldred’s all played out, and I can’t think straight. It’s terrible crook, Ed!’

“Dick wasn’t cocky, like usual. He looked like he did when he was a little feller and come to me to get him out of scrapes. He made me fear, and Eldred stood thereslobberin ’ and saying something over and over what I couldn’t understand. Him I didn’t care tuppence for. I went over to the door and locked it. Then I came back to the bench and put the light out, so’s no one would know we were here, and I told Dick to ‘fess up’.”