Arthur Upfield - An Author Bites the Dust

“Yes, he has,” replied Mrs Farn. “He tells me that you wish to ask me a few questions. I shall be glad to help you, if I can. Would you like a cup of tea? I’ve just made it.”

Bony looked at Constable Simes and laughed. Mrs Farn also laughed, and said that her brother had no secrets from her. She went away and Bony turned to the picture, asking. “Where is that scene?”

“In the Cumberland Valley out beyond Marysville,” Simes replied. “When I was there two years ago I took a series of photographs from which I painted the picture.”

“Don’t let anyone tell youyou can’t paint,” Bony murmured, engrossed by the scene of stark death. “Are there many trees like that?”

“There must be a hundred thousand in the Cumberland Valley alone,” asserted Simes. “Nineteen thirty-eight was a tragic year. A number of people, and at least a million trees, died in the fires. Please don’t forget that my sister’s husband died then.”

“I haven’t forgotten. Tell me about that door. Why was it made to open outward?”

“Well, the place was built with unseasoned timber,” Simes said. “The demand for timber for houses was, and still is, so great that seasoned timber is unprocurable. A door could not be built, and so one of the inside doors was taken and fitted to a frame made by the carpenter. After a week or two the building warped and the door could not be made to open over the thick felt laid on the floor. Because the door is of excellent quality and is intended to be returned to its original frame when a door can be bought for the writing-room, it was decided to reverse it to swing outward. That’s the explanation I received from Mrs Blake.”

“Did Blake always sleep with the window shut?”

“No, very seldom. It is thought that after Blake retired from the house, he sat in his room drinking brandy and dry ginger for some time before going to bed, and that when the first shower came he closed the window.”

“Yes, a reasonable explanation. Ah, here is Mrs Farn with the tea. Mrs Farn, you are very kind. I confess that had your brother not suggested tea I would have done so.”

Mrs Farn said, “My brother is always suggesting tea, and he couldn’t resist the temptation of suggesting it first this morning. Do you take milk and sugar?”

“Milk, thank you. Sugar, no. Not with three growing boys to support, and the eldest at the University having most expensive tastes. I gave up my sugar, but conditions are going to be excessively tough before I give up my cigarettes.’

Simes begged to be excused and took his cup and biscuits to his office, and Bony almost at once got down to his questioning.

“I assume that you know almost as much as your brother about the Blake case,” he said over his cup. “The lack of evidence and the absence of any motive for either suicide or murdercreates extraordinary difficulties. To make it even harder for me, there’s the lapse of nearly two months since Mervyn Blake was found dead. However, I must make a beginning, and it seems the only way to do that is to get beneath the surface and dig up bits and pieces of the puzzle in order to prove whether Blake was murdered or not, and, if he was, who murdered him.

“I must begin at the beginning, and the beginning is not when Blake died but some time before he died-days, weeks, months before that night he died. Well now, your brother and I were talking about Mervyn Blake’s health. He said that he understood from you that Blake benefited by the change to Yarrabo.”

“I know nothing definite,” Mrs Farn confessed. “I recollect that he was ill for about a week. Now let me think. It was when the first strawberries came in. I was in the fruiterer’s shop buying two punnets of strawberries when Mrs Blake entered. We were at the nodding stage, you know, and I asked her how she was keeping, and she said she was very well, but that Mr Blake was in bed with a bout of his old trouble. She said, too, that he used to suffer terribly from stomach ulcers, but that since coming to Yarrabo he had been ever so much better. You don’t think-”

“Don’t you,” warned Bony. “You must not let the trend of my questions make you think I have any thoughts about the case. I am like a city policeman on his beat at night-testing doors.” Abruptly he laughed, adding, “You see, it’s the only thing I can do. I find Miss Pinkney a very charming woman. You have known her for some time, your brother informs me.”

“I knew her before she came to live here with her brother.”

“There was a tragedy, I understand?”

“Yes. She was engaged to marry a man who was killed by a tree.” Mrs Farn regarded Bony with steady eyes. “He was a fine man, a Norwegian. He had straight dark hair and eyes like yours, and they said he could fell a tree within an inch of the line he chose. The giants of the forest fell to his axe and saw, and one day a giant killed him.”

Bony nodded in sympathy, and she went on, “He was caught by the backlash on his last trip into the mountains. They were to be married and he was to take charge of a mill quite close by. Priscilla was always a happy woman, always delighted by simple things. She wasn’t particularly strong in character, but everyone overlooked that because of her joyousness in living. She was never the same again, after he was killed.”

“Yet she gets along very well by herself.”

“Oh yes. After her brother died she wanted to withdraw herself from the local world, but I stepped in then and prevented it. You see, we have much in common. My husband perished in a forest fire.”

“Indeed!” murmured Bony.

“The forests and the trees take their yearly toll,” Mrs Farn said steadily. “The pity of it is that the men who die in the forests are real men, the salt of the earth. My man was strong and a good tree faller, but Priscilla’s man was the king of the fallers.”

“Now all she has is her cat,” Bony said matter-of-factly.

“Yes, Mr Pickwick is father and mother and husband and brother to her. She became eccentric after her sweetheart was killed, but her eccentricities are without harm.”

“I find them charming,” Bony asserted. “Did you ever visit theBlakes?”

“Oh, no. I think I might have got closer to Mrs Blake,” Mrs Farn paused and pinched her lip. “I received the impression that she was a woman who wanted to be friendly with everyone and yet could not forget her husband’s importance.”

“Was he important-so very important?”

“Well, he wrote books, you know. His name was often in the papers.”

“H’m, yes, I understand that was so, though, living in Queensland, I read nothing about him to fix him in my mind as an important person. I am afraid that I am notau fait with literary people, and it does seem that now I must become familiar with them. I understand that Mervyn Blake was a critic as well as an author, and of late years had been much more a critic than author. Do you read novels?”

“Plenty. And I am very fond of poetry.”

“Ah!” Bony sighed, and yet his eyes twinkled. “I detest poetry produced after Tennyson died,” he confessed. “One of Blake’s guests was a Mr Twyford Arundal. He has been described to me as a puny little twerp. From the reports on the case compiled by the C.I.B. I gain the impression that he managed to keep himself much in the background. I wonder if you happen to know anything of him, saw him when he stayed with theBlakes, heard anything concerninghim? ”

“He was in love with Mrs Blake,” Mrs Farn said.

“Is that so?”

“Yes, indeed. Priscilla Pinkney used to see them walking in the garden late in the evenings,” Bony’s hostess smiled swiftly. “One ofPris’s little failings is a tremendous curiosity in her neighbours, especially theBlakes and the people staying with them. She’s not a gossip, you know. Never one to make mischief, and I do believe she never told anyone but me what she saw and heard beyond her fence.”