Arthur Upfield - The Mountains have a Secret

“Yes.”

“Having given the note to Constable Groves, you will return to this place, park your machine in the scrub, and mount the horse I will leave tethered close by. You will then ride to those locked gates inside which Simpson burned the body. Take with you a spanner to remove the bolted hinges, the size of the nuts being one inch and a half. By removing the hinges of one gate you will be able to draw both gates clear of the road and thus leave it open for Mulligan. Then you will wait for Mulligan at the electrically controlled main gate, and on his arrival, if I am not with you, you will inform him that I am at the homestead and that he is to take the place by storm and arrest everyone on sight. Is that clear too?”

“Clear as battery water, Bony, old pal, but-”

“Well?”

“When ought the cops to arrive at the main gate?”

“Before daybreak. I shall be counting on that hour. You will do nothing whatever to upset the peace of the summer night-and should you find it necessary to take action to preserve the peace of the summer night you will do so discreetly. Remember that you have already shot one man and knifed another. Remember, too, the most important factor is that swift and silent approach by the police might well be vital to the safety of your sweetheart and her friend-if they still live. Now get along and don’t spare the horses.”

When the noise of Shannon’s machine faded into the silence beyond the sound of the slight wind in the trees, Bony was smoking a cigarette and reading the papers he had taken from the bodies of the stockmen, reading with the aid of a small fire carefully hidden in dense scrub. He learned that the name of one was Paul Lartz, a Czechoslovakian subject naturalised in 1938, and the other was named William Spicer, according to a letter addressed by Bertram amp; Company, Melbourne, who stated that letters received for Spicer would be forwarded to Baden Park. There was a second letter forwarded by Bertram amp; Company from a man signing himself Hans Stromberg. It was dated June 11, 1946, from aP.O. W. camp north of Victoria, the writer expressing fervent hopes of being soon returned to Germany.

The camp, Bony recalled, confined German soldiers found to be dangerous members of the Nazi party.

Germans and Germany! How often had some association with Germany cropped up in this investigation! Doubtless Spicer was an alias for a German. Bertram was a German name. In fact, Bertram was a German. The Czech could be a Sudeten German. Then there were the Bensons, whose father’s name was Schoor, said by old Simpson to have been Austrian or Swiss. Organs from Germany. Ah! And stockmen who rode like soldiers and who gave careless salutes which could be the Nazi salutes carefully disguised.

The Bensons had been in Germany in 1939. Through the war years they had worked and lived quietly and had made money. In ’45 they had made the new road over the mountain and past the hotel to the Dunkeld road. After the war, after ’45, they had entertained parties of people said by old Simpson to be unlike the type of visitors who toured the Grampians and stayed at the hotel over Christmas and Easter, parties who “throw out their chests like they own the Grampians.” Germans!

It was a thoughtful man who rode in the dark over bad country to the hidden camp amid the boulders at that place he had burrowed under the great fence. There he ate the remainder of his cooked food and smoked two cigarettes from the last of his preserved ends.

Ten minutes later he was standing inside the fence. He looked at the stars. It wanted two minutes till ten-thirty.

Rebels in White

MINUS the heavy swag and gunny-sack, Bony travelled light and fast, keeping parallel with the fence to reach the gate and follow the road. The night was dark though the stars were clear, and he did not see the wire over which he almost tripped. It had been dragged away from the fence after a repair job, but it was still tough and flexible.

He had left it behind when an idea halted him, sent him back to break off about four feet of it by constantly bending and opening the bend. One end of the broken-off piece he bent into a long hook, slipped the hook down through his belt, from which it was suspended something like a sword. A length of heavy wire is a handy weapon against men and dogs.

The gate was shut, but it opened when he stood on the metal bar inset into the roadway. It closed again shortly after he removed his weight. He thought of placing a boulder on the bar to keep the gate open for Mulligan and discarded the idea because someone arriving or departing before he was ready would give the alarm.

Keeping well off the road, Bony arrived eventually at an open gateway in a massive hedge guarded by a plain wire fence, and because the wind was coming from the north and there being the likelihood of dogs, he skirted the hedge to the south and so came to the anchored aeroplane and the wicket gate through which the passengers had been conducted.

Beyond the wicket gate and through the short tunnel in the hedge was the house, several of its rooms being brilliantly illuminated. To the left of the house was the observatory. The men’s quarters and the outbuildings must be situated on the far side.

Having unlaced his boots and hidden them in the hedge, he made his way through the garden and on to the lawn laid before the front of the house, moving like a wisp of fog in a lightless dungeon.

The house was the usual bungalow type and built three feet above ground, this side being skirted by a wide veranda having four steps to it along its entire length. From the lawn it was not possible to see the lower portion of the rooms beyond the openfrench windows.

Bony spent five minutes assuring himself that none other was in the garden, and then he slipped along the black bar between two of the broad ribbons of light falling half-way across the lawn, to float up the veranda steps and gain the shadow against the wall between two pairs of windows. The murmur of voices rose to clarity as he edged one eye round a window frame.

The size of the room, theelectroliers, the tapestries on the walls, the long table of gleaming walnut, the floor covering, the high-backed chairs; the two women and the twelve men seated at the table, the sergeant-major of a butler, and the huge portrait against the end wall, all comprised but a hazy background to the presentation of two young women arrayed entirely in white.

Seated at the head of the table was the man who had watched the burning of O’Brien’s body. At the far end of the table sat the man who had conveyed the body on the dray. Upon Benson’s right hand and on his left sat a woman, middle-aged but preserved by all the’ arts, big-framed, and stiff. Like Benson and James Simpson, the other men were in formal evening clothes. Directed by the butler, the two women in white served the host and his guests.

The conversation was conducted in a language with which Bony was unfamiliar. It was a harsh, masculine tongue, and the men and women who spoke it were masculine and harsh and handsomely arrogant. They sat stiffly, moved jerkily, like subalterns at mess when the general is present. No one smiled. They were of one race, blond and square. The men looked corseted, save Simpson, who was not of them.

The serving maids! One was a brunette, slim and pretty. The other’s hair gleamed like the aftermath of a sunset. She was taller than her companion and more robust. She was worth any young man’s voyage across the world.

It had been logical to assume that these two young women had wandered off the road and had perished in the bush. It had been logical to assume that they had been murdered because they had stumbled upon a dreadful crime or a tremendous secret. It had been logical even to assume that they had been kidnapped to appease the hunger of lascivious brutes, but to have been kidnapped into domestic service Bony had not permitted himself to assume.