Arthur Upfield - The New Shoe

Walking back to the lip of the natural basin, he listened to the birds, watching them, tarried till assured no human was in the vicinity. On returning to the stone splinter, he turned it over.

Beneath, buried flush with the ground, was a small cedar-wood box. He lifted the lid. The box contained a photograph of Eldred Wessex in a cheap metal frame and, within a dainty blue silk handkerchief, the fourth ring.

Returning the ring and the photograph, he put back the box and replaced the stone. To the dog who watched, he said:

“You will not come here again and dig up that box, Stug. Your load of fleas and my heaviness of heart are as nothing to the tragedy of that poor mind groping in the world of reality for a world she has lost, and finding no resting place in either. How blessed are we!”

Stug wagged his tail and followed Bony from the dell. Soberly the man returned to the road, and docilely the contented dog followed. They came to the Wessex farm gate, and there Bony leaned upon it and pensively regarded the neat homestead, and the cleared paddocks beyond. No one was in view. Smoke slanted sharply from one of the three chimneys. Powerfully disinclined to open the gate, Bony did so and walked slowly to the house.

Mrs Wessex answered his knock. There was no welcoming smile. The weather-ruined face held no expression, the voice no inflection.

“Please come in.”

Eli Wessex sat between the window and the brightly burning fire. He was wearing a dressing gown, and his pathetic hands were resting uselessly in his lap. At Bony’s entrance he neither looked up nor spoke, and it was his wife who invited the visitor to be seated at the other side of the fire. She drew forward a chair to sit between them.

“Mr Penwarden telephoned that I was on my way?” asked Bony.

“He spoke to Fred Ayling,” replied Mrs Wessex, dully, staring at the fire. “Fred told us. He’s taken Mary away to the Lakes. They will look after her, and so will Fred. Fred has always loved her. You mustn’t blame Fred for anything.”

“Did Mr Penwarden know that Eldred came home?”

The woman shook her head.

“I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “Ayling knew that Eldred came home, stopped here?”

“Yes, Inspector. He got it all out of Dick.” Abruptly, she turned to him, a human being divested of its personality. “I am to blame for everything. Upon me is the mark. I am to blame for Eldred. And for Dick. I am to blame for dear old Mr Penwarden, and for my husband.”

Turning, she confronted the fire. Eli said nothing, nor did he move.

“I know already what was done about the killing of the man from Sydney,” Bony said. “I know of Mr Penwarden’s contribution. Tell me how Eldred came to die.”

“You found his grave?”

“Yes.”

A long silence which Bony did not interrupt. When Mrs Wessex spoke, Bony had to lean forward to hear what she said.

“We’d like you to know, Inspector Bonaparte, that we feel no animosity towards you. You are the agent of Nemesis which we were silly enough to think we could escape. Had it not been you it would have been another. Shall I tell him, Father, or will you?”

“You tell it, wife.”

“We had only the one son, and we loved him above all else. I won’t waste time by telling you about his boyhood, excepting to say he was lovable and impetuous, quick of temper and imaginative. You know all that. What I am going to tell you about Eldred we didn’t know until the other day.”

“Early in March,” amended Eli.

“Early in March. Very early in the morning, Eldred came home, and Dick Lake was with him. Eldred wanted to give us a surprise, and he did. He was much altered, for we hadn’t seen him for eleven years, but there was something new about him we couldn’t make out, and didn’t try to at first.

“He told us he wanted to keep his visit a secret, even from the Owens, our near neighbours all ourlives, and we didn’t ask him why because we were so happy to have him home again. Dick went off to his camp about ten o’clock and Eldred went to bed and stayed there all that day. That evening he told us how well he was doing in Sydney, and it was then that I thought the business was ruining his health and that I’d have to insist on his staying home so I could look after him.

“The next morning I heard about the murder. I happened to telephone to the grocer about an order, and he mentioned it. Naturally, I wanted to hear more, and learned that if Mr Fisher hadn’t had to come down specially the body mightn’t have been discovered for months.

“Late that same day, Dick came to see Eldred, who hadn’t got up, and they were together for a long time. After Dick had gone, I went in to see Eldred. He looked awful. He was shaking all over, and he frightened me. When I said I would call the doctor, he shouted at me not to be a fool, as he was suffering only from a bout of malaria he’d got in the jungle.

“He told me to get him a glass of brandy. After I’d done that I took him a bowl of soup and some toast as he said he wasn’t hungry. Then he seemed better, but kept asking me if I’d told anyone he was at home. He’d already seen Mary, of course, but he was desperately anxious that she shouldn’t say anything.

“A cold dread began to creep through me, he acted so strangely. I remembered that when Dick came with him in the early morning, and again that late afternoon, he never once smiled as he always did. The dread in my mind I wouldn’t face, not till Dick came again the next night.

“Dick brought brandy, three bottles of it, and he was with Eldred for more than an hour, Eldred still lying abed. It was about eleven when Dick went, and I walked with him to the road gate. At first he wouldn’t tell me anything. I pleaded with him for some time, I mentioned Father, saying how worried he was about Eldred, and that it couldn’t go on. I’ve known Dick since he was a tiny tot, and I knew he would tell me eventually.

“When he’d told me everything, it was he who pacified me, and I came back to the house having agreed to do nothing and to say nothing.

“But I broke the agreement when I went in to Eldred after I’d put Father to bed. I told Eldred he would have to give himself up in the morning. He shouted that he would never do that. Then he laughed and told me I would see him sentenced to death, how I would live through the second when he would be put on the trap and hanged. He got out of bed and fell upon his knees, and implored me not to betray him.

“Then he boasted about his life in Sydney, the money he had made and how he had made it, how he had at first peddled cocaine and finally had taken it himself. He whimpered like a dog. He said he’d run out of the drug, and that I’d have to get some somehow at Geelong. He got up and drank brandy from the bottle, and I didn’t recognize him as Eldred. He… he wasn’t a man any more.

“He said the man deserved what he got. He blamed him for everything, for smuggling drugs off the ship, for supplying him with other things he sold. He swore about Ed Penwarden suggesting what to do with the body, when they had the chance to take it over to Fred’s camp.

“So it went on for hours, now and then Eldred drinking from the bottle although there were already three glasses on the table by the bed. I thought of Father’s sleeping tablets, and blamed myself for not thinking of them earlier. I fetched two and gave them to Eldred, and presently he fell asleep.

“That must have been near dawn. I sat on the foot of the bed looking at him. He lay comfortably on his back, one arm out-flung, the other under the clothes. All the ugliness had gone from his face. He looked like he did when he went off to the war. He was my boy again. He was safe and asleep in his own room with the two pictures of ships under full canvas on the walls, and the text in the frame above the bed. After all the years, my empty heart was full again.