Arthur Upfield - The New Shoe

“Did Mary Wessex know about the killing?”

“No. But she knew about the clothes and the case being in the cave. Unbeknownst to Dick, she went there sometimes. He happened to see her about to go down. You were on the beach that day, and he knew if she went down you would see her and guess there must be a cave. So he stopped her. Owen had comelookin ’ for Mary, and he was a bit too late to lend a hand.”

Bony gazed hard into the now not so bright blue eyes, and slowly he asked:

“You are convinced that Eldred did not visit his parents… as you ordained?”

“Yes. Dick spoke true, and Eldred never came back after being taken to Ballarat.”

“How do you account for the fact that the dead man’s fingerprints were found on the hand rail inside the Lighthouse?”

“Dick said… Dick said when he was telling me just what they done with the body that, as he was carrying the body on his back up the steps, Eldred took the dead man’s hand and made his prints on the rail to sort of confuse things for when the body was found.”

“To that extent Eldred still had his wits.”

“Seems like it were so,” Penwarden agreed.

“It’s certain that you had your wits about you that night. Tell me, what did you intend doing with my dead body inside the coffin?”

Penwarden slowlystood, the picture of bewilderment.

“Well, now… I don’t rightly know, Mr Rawlings, sir. I never got that far. You see, I didn’t think what to do about you until youwas being fitted.”

Trail’s End

WAITED UPON BY the cheerful and tireless Mrs Washfold, Bony lunched in solitary state. As Mrs Washfold was inclined to linger beside his table, he asked her if Fred Ayling had returned to his camp, and was informed that the wood cutter was staying with the Wessexes.

“I never cottoned to him, Mr Rawlings,” she added.“Too moody for my liking. Up in the air one day and down in the dumps the next. Same with his ideas about you. One time praising you to the sky, and then crying you down. Don’t mean anything, of course. Way he’s made.”

“I have sensed that peculiarity in him,” Bony admitted. “What did he cry me down about?”

“Oh, you know how these country people can be, suspicious and all that. If they don’t know just what you do and how much money you have in the bank, they imagine things. Never give credit to people for being natural. Fred can’t understand why you have such an old car when you’re a pastoralist and wool’s over a hundred pounds a bale. Can’t understand a man wanting to have a holiday in winter time. Can’t understand this and that, so has to imagine you’re a detective, or a Russian spy, even a city gangster in smoke. Take no notice, Mr Rawlings.”

“Of course not, Mrs Washfold. I must tell my wife about that. She’ll say she wished I were a spy or a policeman and then I’d talk romantically instead of about wool and taxes.”

After lunch he sat on the veranda and pondered on his next move. Penwarden had given him much thatmorning, and no man could be less unsophisticated and less prone to dissimulation. That Penwarden had spoken the truth, as he knew it. Bony believed, but doubted that the truth as known to Penwarden was all the truth.

The doubt was that Dick Lake had driven Eldred Wessex to Ballarat. Had he done so, had Eldred Wessex travelled as far distant as possible, why had Lake taken such risk to retrieve the clothes and suitcase, and why had Ayling told Penwarden that cock and bull yarn that he, Bony, was an accomplice of the dead man? Were Eldred Wessex a thousand or ten thousand miles away, would it actually have mattered greatly that a detective had discovered the dead man’s effects? The clothes and the contents of the suitcase had given little by comparison with that given by the death of Dick Lake.

Ayling had warned Penwarden not to gossip to the stranger Mr Rawlings, and Ayling, who had served in the war-time Navy, would not be so simple as to think Bony was a criminal’s accomplice. He had tried to influence the Washfolds against him, and had tried with less success to warn Moss Way. This action was more in keeping with the probability that Eldred Wessex was living somewhere on his father’sfarm, or beyond Sweet Fairy Ann with or near Fred Ayling.

Assuming this, it was unlikely that the fact would be conveyed to a friend and neighbour like Edward Penwarden, who already had done so much incupboarding the skeleton of family dishonour.

Ayling was the next move.

As Ayling could be difficult, Bony sought BertWashfold and told him he intended visiting Eli Wessex and would most certainly be back for dinner that night. He adopted a further unusual precaution of transferring from his suitcase to his pocket a small automatic.

Choosing to walk, Stug accompanied him.

Passing Penwarden’s workshop he observed that the door was shut, an interesting item as it was then ten minutes after two. One hour after passing the workshop, he rounded a bend in the track and came in sight of the road gate to the Wessex farm.

Outside the gate stood Ayling’s old car. It was facing towards the hills and Sweet Fairy Ann. At the gate appeared Mary Wessex and Fred Ayling. Ayling carried a suitcase and, like a raincoat on his shoulder, several grey blankets.

Concealed by a tree, Bony watched Ayling pass the blankets and suitcase into the back of the car, go to the front and crank the engine. It was then obvious that the girl was disinclined to enter the car, resulting in a protracted discussion which terminated when Ayling nodded assent. Whereupon the girl walked off the road and entered the forest opposite the farm, Ayling sitting on the running board and lighting a cigarette, clearly prepared to wait.

Bony waited too, keeping Stug with him. The suitcase was normal luggage for a man to bring from camp, but in view of the fact that Ayling habitually stayed with the Wessexes, he would not bring his own blankets.

After five or six minutes, Mrs Wessex appeared at the gate, and Ayling joined her. They talked for several minutes, when Mrs Wessex returned to the house and Ayling to thecar, and from the pantomime of their actions Bony was sure that Ayling had succeeded in quietening the woman’s perturbation.

When the girl reappeared, and stepped down the low bank to the road, she tiptoed to the car. Ayling caught her by the arm and without fuss put her into the front seat, and getting in behind the wheel he drove off.

Bony smoked two cigarettes before he moved on.

Some time previously he had noted that where the girl had gone into the forest a truck had been driven in and out again, and he had thought the truck had been used for collecting firewood. On reaching this point, which was opposite the gate and in full view of the homestead, he, too, entered the forest.

The abnormal rain which fell on the night Dick Lake crashed to death had obliterated the track of the vehicle, but there were tracks made since that night by a woman’s and a man’s boots size six… the boots Mary Wessex had worn when she listened outside the door of the Lighthouse, and again when she tiptoed to the veranda that afternoon Bony talked with her father. Prior to this afternoon the girl had entered the forest four times since the great rain. She had been alone.

Her tracks ended in a little dell shadowed by white-gums and littered with flakes of limestone and windfalls from the trees. It was a pretty place even on this cold and windy day. Magpies were made angry by the intrusion, and small scarlet-capped brown finches twittered their alarm.

The girl had come here and stood about a long splinter of stone. There was nothing remarkable about the stone: for, as Bony had noted, the floor of the dell was littered with these fragments of limestone. On her previous visits the girl had come to this particular fragment.