Arthur Upfield - Batchelors of Broken Hill

The inquest was adjournedsine die.

The affair made Detective Sergeant Bill Crome most unhappy, owing to the fact that for the first time since being promoted to senior constable he had failed to produce results.

Old Goldspink had been cyanided on 28th October. On the afternoon of 10th November the wife of a mine manager reported the theft from her home of jewellery which she valued at sixty-five pounds. Senior Detective Abbot took charge of this case.

It appeared that the woman left her house on a shopping expedition down Argent Street, locking the front door and placing the key under the porch mat. On her return she retrieved the key, entered the house, and found ‘slight’ confusion. Thereupon she discovered the loss of the trinkets she was positive she had left in an unlocked drawer of her dressing-table. A trifling case compared with murder, and yet perplexing because it was not stamped with the usual methods of any known local criminal. Abbot decided that the confusion was the result of a sudden decision to leave housework and go shopping, and that eventually the jewellery would be found by the owner, who had temporarily forgotten where she had put it. No one knows better than the experienced detective how frail is the human mind.

Frail! Crome’s word for it was ‘barmy’.

Early in December four hundred and seventeen pounds disappeared from the safe in the office of the Diggers’ Rest. There were no signs of the safe’s having been tampered with. There were no unauthorised fingerprints on the safe. The key had never left the trousers pocket of the licensee, save when he went to bed, and it was then transferred to the pocket of his pyjamas. Drink! The licensee had been up to the hospital on the hill several times with delirium tremens.

Yes, Sergeant Crome was in no light mood as he strolled down Argent Street on the afternoon of 23rd December. The pavements were thronged with Christmas shoppers, and the street was alive with traffic flowing between the borders of parked cars, utilities, and horse buggies. Miners sagged against the veranda posts, weighted with parcels bestowed on them by their wives. Women gossiped in small parties, and their children tugged at their skirts in frantic demands for ices and toys.

Crome met and nodded to Luke Pavier, the Superintendent’s son and reporter on the staff of theBarrier Miner. He met, and did not salute because he did not know him, Jimmy the Screwsman arrayed in tussore silk and a white panama hat.

From a jeweller’s shop issued Dr John Hoadly, who was large and young and damnably energetic.

“Day, Bill! Nothing to do?”

Sergeant Crome widened his mouth, pushed his felt hat to the back of his head, and then drew it forward to ride on an even keel.

“You’d be astonished at the work I get through while you squander your ill-gotten fees. How’s the wife and the baby?”

“Fine, Bill, fine. Just bought her an opal pendant and the kid a gold christening cup. Be up the pole this Christmas, with the wife in hospital, but it’ll be worth it. The boy’s a beaut.”

“Naming him?”

“John. Wife insists.”

The doctor’s happiness lightened Crome’s mood, and the sergeant smiled. “Nice work, Jack, but don’t be a mug,” he added seriously. “Make sure little John has a mate. An only child is a lost soul-I know…”

A slight man wearing a white drill tunic and black trousers appeared, grasped the doctor by the arm, and regarded Sergeant Crome with black eyes tinted with indignation. He shouted:

“Acustomair! In mycafee! He stand, he bend backovair one of my tables. He fall andbreakitda table-smashoh. I go to him. I ask him ‘What the hell?’ He say nothing, nothing at all. He is dead.”

“Your job, Doctor,” Crome said.

Dr Hoadly nodded. With the little Italian’s hand still clutching his arm as though to be sure he would not run away, they entered the cafe, which was next to the jeweller’s establishment.

The cafe was narrow and deep. People were standing with the startled irresoluteness of kangaroos warned of danger by one of their sentinels. Between the groups, like a ship steering between the islands of the Barrier Reef, the cafe proprietor led the doctor, Crome coming up astern.

An elderly man lay upon the wreckage of a table. The face was stained faintly blue. The dilated eyes tended to turn inward, and the bared teeth were irregular and tobacco-stained. Crome knew him-a retired miner living with his niece and her husband in South Broken Hill.

The customers were leaving the cafe, the sensation over and the prospect of being tabbed as witnesses enlarging. Crome was not particularly interested in them. Heat apoplexy. Many of these old chaps could not stand what in their youth they ignored. Old Alf Parsons was for it. Good way to go out-like a light.

The doctor made a superficial examination, and then crouched low and sniffed at the dead man’s mouth. On rising to his feet, he dusted his trousers and wiped his hands with a handkerchief. He told the distracted Italian he would send for the ambulance, and Crome he drew aside and whispered:

“I’m not stating he died of cyanide, Bill, but I’m thinking he did.”

Crome grabbed Favalora, the cafe proprietor.

“Where was he sitting?” he snarled.

There was cyanide in the dead man’s tea cup, which Crome presented to the analyst.

Crome kept on his feet for sixty hours. Asking questions, questions, questions. Statements, reports, theories, argument. Crome was semi-conscious when Inspector Stillman arrived from CIB, Sydney. Soft-spoken, sarcastic, bitingly insulting, Stillman caused Favalora to scream with rage, Mary Isaacs to weep, Mrs Robinov to order him from the shop. Stillman caused Bill Crome to come within an ace of smashing a fist into his sadistic mouth, and Abbot actually formed his lips to give forth the raspberry.

A damn-fool woman complained that during her absence from home at North Broken Hill someone had stolen one hundred and eighty pounds she had kept in the American clock on the sitting-room mantel. Barmy! Served her right. What the hell were banks for? Stillman, the swine! Ha! Ha! The wonderful Stillman was bogged down too. The mighty brain from Sydney wasn’t able to produce any results.

Leads… blanks. Theories built… and pulled down. Questions, and ever more and more questions, leading nowhere, giving nothing. Stillmancrawfishing out from under, pulling strings in Sydney to let him out and so leave the bag with Crome. Statements… reports… theories… conferences… disappointment… hope… disappointment… patience… patience.

The inquest on Alfred Parsons adjournedsine die.

Conference

IT WAS a large room overlooking Argent Street, and only when the heavy door was open did the clacking of typewriters penetrate. Through the wide-open windows drifted the distant noise of mining machinery and the nearer sound of trams and cars. A room befitting the senior officer of the South-Western Police Division of New South Wales.

Superintendent Luis Pavier had never been known to betray irritability. He seldom smiled, and when he did the placid features blurred like a pond disturbed by a stone. There was a stillness about Pavier which had nothing to do with physical control.

One after another he was lifting reports from his ‘in’ basket, reading and initialling, and dropping them into the ‘out’ basket. It was routine work, the pulse of a virile community with his finger ever on the pulse, the patient mostly normal, and occasionally revealing bouts of fever. There remained three documents on his blotter when he pressed his desk bell.

The door opened to admit his secretary, who came to stand at his elbow and remove the contents of the ‘out’ basket. Pavier took up the documents from the blotter and turned slightly that he might look at the girl. She was young and good to look at.