Arthur Upfield - Batchelors of Broken Hill

“After me and Abbot finished with it you’d not recognise it for a cafe,” answered the sergeant. “Not a trace. We looked for cyanide in and under and on the roof of the house where Parsons lived with his niece and her husband. Nothing. There was no discord in that home. Parsons hadn’t any enemies. Never got a lead. Never got a lead in the Goldspink case, either.”

“Ideas?”

“One. Lunatic going round dropping a pinch of cyanide into tea-cups. There’s only one common denominator in the two cases. Both men were bachelors. Makes the set-up all the more screwy.”

“Makes it a little less ‘screwy’,” argued Bony. “There’s another common denominator. Both men were elderly. They weren’t friends, I suppose?”

“No. And they weren’t related or belonged to the same club. One was a Jew, the other a Gentile. One was poor, the other rich. One had been a miner, the other a shop-keeper. They had nothing in common excepting age and single blessedness. There’s no sense, reason, no anything.”

“Do we get a cup of tea in this place?”

“Eh!” The expression of bewilderment on Crome’s face caused Bony to chuckle. “Tea! Yes. The girl brings it round.”

“If by a quarter to four we are not supplied with refreshment, Crome, we go out to a cafe. Without morning and afternoon tea, the civil servant cannot be civil. When a civil servant snarls at me, I say, silently, of course: ‘What, no tea?’ ”

Crome stuffed tobacco into his pipe as though plugging a hole in a ship, and Bony went on softly:

“Homicide is a common occurrence in any community, and we grow weary of stepping from the corpse to the murderer and showing him the utterly childish fool he is. But sometimes, and rarely, we are presented with a murder committed by an artist, and then all boredom created by the fool amateur is vanquished. It is so with this murderer of yours who pops a pinch of cyanide into a tea-cup. Why, we don’t know. When we do know, we shall have to return to our amateurs who couldn’t leave more clues if they sat up all night for a week thinking them out. Surely this is an occasion for rejoicing. Have you ever met an artist in murder before?… No? Now that you most certainly will, you should be happy. I am.”

Crome put his pipe on his desk. His face grew slowly purple. He muttered the great Australian expletive “Cripes!” and broke into a roar of laughter.

The Superintendent’s secretary came in with a tray, and Bony rose to accept his cup of tea with a smile.

“Thank you. Miss Ball, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.”

The girl smiled at him shyly.

“The tea and biscuits will cost you two shillings a week, sir,” she told Bony. “We can just manage on that.”

“It’s worth two pounds a week, Miss Ball,” averred Bony, producing his contribution. “And we should all shell out every month for a present for you.”

“Thank you, sir. I like to prepare the tea, but I’m only allowed to do it because Miss Lodding is away on sick leave.”

The girl departed, and Bony dunked his biscuit. Crome said:

“The Lodding woman is the Super’s secretary. Face like a stomach ache.”

Jimmy Nimmo’s Worries

JIMMY WAS still youthful, still casual about unimportant things, and a sportsman born with zest for the Game of Life, staking liberty against the jackpot and, having learned to respect his opponents, he seldom lost.

It was known officially that he never carried a weapon and never attempted violence when-rarely-he was cornered. It was also known officially, but never openly admitted, that Jimmy sometimes rendered valuable assistance to the police engaged with a major crime.

The amount of ‘dough’ he extracted from the Sydney bookmaker’s flat was much greater than he had anticipated, but that had not been a factor in his choice of Broken Hill for a holiday. Like many thousands living in Australia’s coastal cities, Jimmy had imagined Broken Hill to be a mullock dump far beyond a deceitful mirage, and actual contact with this city gave pleasurable surprise.

He found that lots of people in Broken Hill had lots of dough. He found, too, that the people of Broken Hill were extremely easy-going, generous, and affable. Strangely enough, they didn’t seem to value dough. Wonderful place! Jimmy had plenty of dough, too, but he couldn’t resist gathering a little more-without troubling to earn it in the bowels of the broken hill.

Now he was regretting it, for of a certainty Inspector Bonaparte would hear about those three jobs he had pulled and not possibly fail to stamp each one with the name of Nimmo. It was just stinking bad luck to run into him like that on Argent Street. He should have known that an ace detective would take up where that blasted Stillman left off, and that after two murders done the same way, Broken Hill was much too ‘hot’-and nothing to do with the temperature.

To make matters still worse for a self-respecting burglar, this Napoleon Bonaparte was so damned unpredictable. He didn’t tick like the common or garden flatfoot trained in a police school and taped by regulations and what not. There was that time during the war when he was living in Adelaide and had put through two slick jobs, and this Bonaparte bloke had come to his lodgings and said he knew all about those two jobs and suggested making a trilogy of it. The third job had netted a measly bundle of letters, but those letters had put two men and a woman behind barbed wire. Then Bonaparte had actually offered him honest toil. Jimmy shuddered.

And now Bonaparte was hinting at another spot of police work in these cyaniding cases when he didn’t want anything to do with cyanide, he having acquired an important ambition since coming to Broken Hill. Fading out from this city to another would be just plain stupid, for the entire world was too small in which to escape the attentions of this cursed Bonaparte. Thus this feeling of the nut between steel crackers.

Arrayed in a light sports suit and a panama to keep his head cool, Jimmy strolled down Argent Street. The afternoon was still and hot. The shadowed pavements were certainly not empty spaces, and the kerbs were lined by parked cars and utilities. The store windows were filled with luxury goods to meet the prosperity of this mining community, and the shoppers were dressed as expensively as he. Even then great wads of dough were coming up out of the earth to the accompaniment of the ceaseless racket of machinery.

The store once controlled by Samuel Goldspink was about the third best in Argent Street, and Jimmy paused to view the array of gents’ ties and shirts. Ties! He already had dozens in various places, for he had an abiding passion for them, but Bonaparte had ‘suggested’ ties and-hell!

There were but a few customers within, and Jimmy came to anchor beside a man interested in gloves, and, there being a vacant chair, he perched himself on it with the air of a man having a million years in credit.

There were opened boxes of gloves on the counter before the man who was trying them on. He was a tall man, heavy, having a distinct paunch. He was very well dressed, even for Broken Hill. His voice was modulated and almost without accent. He could be a retired share-broker, an undertaker, a film producer. He could be-but Jimmy wasn’t interested. Who would be interested in the man when one could gaze upon the assistant serving him?

She was barely forty, large, severely corseted within an expensive black frock. The pearl necklace floating on the sea of her bosom triumphed in the capture of Jimmy’s attention, for they were real pearls. And those glittering blue diamonds set in the platinum rings on the fat fingers forced Jimmy’s mind to envision the cot wherein these jewels would lie snug o’ nights. There was certain to be a rear yard, with rooms opening to that yard. The burglar alarms, of course, would be just too easy.