Arthur Upfield - The Widows of broome

This dual fear had become directed to certain women whose activities threatened his power and whose sex tormented him.

He had watched and waited for the opportunity to steal a woman’s nightgown to ease a craving and still a fear, only to discover that possession of it gave strength to the fear.

The fear must be destroyed. The torment silenced.

He had planned to enter the woman’s bedroom, but before he could do so, she had come walking in her sleep to meet him.

“Mrs. Cotton, I want you!” he had breathed, and the perfumed femininity had flowed into his hands and up his arms and to his brain like a river of sweet coolness to create a feeling of triumphant chastity.

Only the lesser evil remained to be destroyed, that it mock him not, and, uplifted by the triumph, he had entered the woman’s room and had cut and ripped and torn her underwear to shreds.

The triumph over the demon had been momentary. It had returned to drive him on to whisper:

“Mrs. Eltham, I want you!”

Something… perhaps a knock on the door… had blacked out a thing still to do. Again to the house to destroy the garments so intimately associated with the woman.

There was no release.

“Mrs. Overton, I want you!”

It was driving him now, driving him onward to the moment when he would whisper:

“Mrs. Sayers, I want you!”

The Angler Wins

TO sit comfortably for thirty minutes and meditate on pleasing subjects is, in these hectic years, an experience. To sit on a hard chair for three hours, with hearing strained to locate the approach of a multiple murderer is perhaps one degree easier to bear than lying on a bed and imaginatively dying a hundred deaths by strangulation. Had Mrs. Sayers screamed: “I can’t bearit! ” Bony would have been neither surprised nor angered.

The cessation of a sound so prolonged as to become unnoticed was at first not registered by Bony, and it was several seconds before he realised that the wind in the taut telephone wires had stopped. There could be only the one explanation-the murderer had cut the wires.

Holding the edge of the window curtain one inch from the frame, Bony kept watch on the veranda. He hoped that Mrs. Sayers had noted the cessation of wind playing on telephone wires, for then she would at least know that her ordeal was drawing to a climax.

A measureless period of emptiness was endured when imperceptibly the darkness of the veranda waned before the waxing of light. The light grew but not sufficiently to illumine the furniture, and suddenly Bony saw its source, the round opaque disc of a flashlight masked by a cotton handkerchief.

The murderer was now facing the master light switch. He appeared to be standing there a long time, but actually was with infinite care raising the switch bar to prevent any metallic sound. A master in the art of noiseless movement, Bony felt admiration for the practitioner who equalled himself. The disc of light disappeared, and again imperceptibly the light waned. He was coming back into the passage.

Bony sat with one hand on the rod and the other about the brake controlling the reel-drum… one hand holding the camera release shutter and a finger of the other touching the smooth surface of the press-button. When fishing, he sat with the base of the rod swivelled to the seat between his knees: now his knees gripped a sizeable flashlight.

The murderer must now be outside the bedroom door. Bony could not hear him. Not a sound of him. Why the delay? There was no further precaution he need take. The telephone wires had been cut. The overhead wire to Briggs’ alarm bell would have been cut, and the light power had been switched off. The victim was beyond communication with the outside world, as Mrs. Eltham had been and Mrs. Overton.

The door was being opened so silently and so slowly that there was no detectable difference in air pressure. Then as silently and slowly the door was closed.

Mrs. Sayers moved. She sighed. She breathed with soft rhythm.

Bony was wondering what was keeping the shark from taking the bait-fish when he saw the brute’s head rising above the surface. He was hearing the tapping of teeth, the sound he had heard once before.

The small disc of light appeared. It was directed to the floor. The diffusedilluminant revealed the man standing with his back to the closed door. It revealed the foot-board of the bed and the small table at the head of the bed whereon stood the useless telephone. The man who appeared to have the body of a giant advanced to the bed. Silence! And then the whispered command:

“Mrs. Sayers, I want you! Mrs. Sayers, I want you!”

Then Bony saw Mrs. Sayers sitting on the edge of the bed, and slowly she stood up.

“Oh, Mr. Rose, this is so sudden,” she murmured.

The shark’s jaw opened wide. The torch he carried he dropped as his hands darted towards his victim’s throat.

Bony pressed his finger on the bell button and kept it there. He pulled on the camera shutter release. There was a flash of white light which lingered behind the eyes. A cry of astonishment. A woman’s laughter which Bony remembered for many a year. A shout of fury.

Bony’s torch beam revealed Mr. Rose. He was facing towards Bony, his back arched, his knees sagging, his mouth gaping, and his eyes white with agony. Mrs. Sayers was behind him. She was doing something to his left arm and something to his neck, as she shrieked:

“You dirty beast! You scum! I’ll snap your neck like a carrot, you dirty, filthy, murderous swine.”

A terrific blow was given to the back door. Bony laid his flashlight on the tall-boy, directing its beam on the struggling Mr. Rose. He rushed forward, shouting:

“Don’t injure him, Mrs. Sayers! Don’t injure him!”

He swung a sock nicely filled with sand down hard on the head of Mr. Rose, and the abrupt weight sent Mrs. Sayers to the floor. There was a pounding of feet in the passage. The door was flung inward, and Briggs dived for the unconscious Mr. Rose, whom he thought was lying on Mrs. Sayers and strangling her.

“Let him be!” Bony shouted. “Let him be!”

“Let up, Briggs, you ruddyfool,” screamed Mrs. Sayers. “Can’t you see the scum’s out to it. Pull him off me, d’you hear?”

Bony rushed out to the master switch. On re-entering the passage, he collided with Mr. Dickenson, made no apology and darted into the bedroom, where he tugged the light cord.

Mr. Rose was now lying on his back on the floor. Briggs was bending forward, his hands working and extended towards the inert body. Mrs. Sayers was getting to her feet, and in a fit of wild hysteria. Bony dragged Briggs back and ordered him to attend to Mrs. Sayers. Briggs attended to her… slapping her face and shouting:

“Cut it out, Mavis. What’s biting you?”

There came the roar of the police jeep. Mr. Dickenson, who had switched on the veranda lights, was in time to unlock the front door. And then Mrs. Sayers’ bedroom was full of men.

Inspector Walters claimed that he was damned!

“What’s the matter with him? Someone kill him?”

“I was persuaded to sandbag him,” admitted Bony. “I had to be cruel to be kind.”

“Why, it’s a beaut!” shouted Sawtell. He rocked the developing dish, and Bony wanted to stop him that he could appraise the value of the negative.

“It’s got everything,” chortled the sergeant as he transferred the plate from the developer to the fixing bath. “We’ll have a proper look in a minute or two. How in hell did you pick on him?”

Bony did not answer the question. He was too absorbed by the promise of the picture he had taken to bother with explanations at this moment, and he waited with a mental breathlessness as he had so often done when the club secretary was weighing his marlin at the end of the jetty. Then Sawtell lifted the plate and held it before a white light.