Arthur Upfield: An Author Bites the Dust

“Mr Pickwick is a character reader,” averred Miss Pinkney. “He likes you. You are doubly welcome, for the liking is dual. Please don’t think Mr Pickwick takes to everyone. Oh dear, no.” She spoke directly to the cat, saying, “Now Mr Pickwick, show Mr Bonaparte how to play ping-pong.”

She moved her arm like a baseball thrower and the cat walked sedately from the room. Bony observed that he was expected to be silent. Miss Pinkney sipped her tea and smiled. In came Mr Pickwick, walking with the appearance of having no weight. He stared up at Miss Pinkney, and she deliberately looked out through the window.

Whereupon the cat, finding no encouragement in that quarter, approached Bony and placed on the carpet at his feet the ping-pong ball it had been carrying in its mouth. What he was expected to do was plain to Bony, and he did it Mr Pickwick flew after the ball Bony rolled towards the door. He punched the ball into the passage beyond and there skidded and bucked and punched the ball about the bare and polished floor, watched by the admiring Bony and the proud Miss Pinkney. That the ball was a little “dead” Bony attributed to the repeated assaults upon it by claws and mouth.

“I taught Mr Pickwick to fetch and carry when he was quite young,” remarked Miss Pinkney.“Another cup of tea? He just loves to play with a ball or a little wad of paper. You’ve made him accept you as his friend. Ah, here he comes!”

Again Mr Pickwick did his act and Bony picked up the ball. His finger-tips told him that the ball was firm and hard, but his mind was occupied with the expression of simple delight registered on his hostess’s unadorned face. The cat disappeared after the ball, and Miss Pinkney rose and left the room without explanation.

Ah! Bony leaned back in his chair and sipped his tea, sipped it from fragile china far removed from a tin pannikin. Comfort! Comfort surrounded him, solid and real, and no man was better able to appreciate comfort than he who but recently had come back from the interior, where he had been investigating a disappearance. Mr Pickwick again entered the room and this time laidhimself down beside the ball, flanks working like bellows, mouth wide open. Miss Pinkney returned, in her hands a silver cigarette-case anda silver lighter.

“I like a cigarette sometimes,” she said, and then giggled. “The sometimes is as often as the ration will allow. Please offer me one.”

On his feet, Bony opened her case. She took one and insisted that he should do likewise. Then he needs must take her lighter and find that it would not work, and whilst he held a lighted match in service, she said it was a shame that in these days the garage people didn’t know their business.

“I have been visualizing a stern lady who would denounce tobacco and forbid me smoking in the house,” he told her, smiling.

“My dear Mr Bonaparte, you may smoke when and where you like,” she said. “I’d hate to think of you lying with your head in a cold fire-place and smoking up the chimney. I am glad you smoke. My brother used to say, ‘Never trust a man who doesn’t smoke or drink or swear when he hits his thumb with a hammer’. Mr Pickwick distrusts them, too. He hated Mr Wilcannia-Smythe when he was staying next door at the time Mr Blake died. I’ve seen him lying on top of the division fence and hissing at Mr Wilcannia-Smythe. Afterwards, someone told me that Mr Wilcannia-Smythe neither smoked nor drank. And, I assume, never used an inaccurate adjective.”

“What was Mr Pickwick’s attitude towards Mr and Mrs Blake?” Bony asked.

“Mr Pickwick hated Mr Blake,” replied Miss Pinkney. “Mr Blake would sometimes throw a stone at Mr Pickwick if Mr Pickwick happened to be in his garden. Once I saw him do it, and I remonstrated with him. He was very rude to me.” Miss Pinkney smiled. “I’m afraid I spoke to him somewhat after the fashion of my brother!”

“H’m! Did you sec much of Mrs Blake?”

“Very little. I used to see her on occasions playing ping-pong. They have a table on the back veranda. We can see it from the fence. They must have lost a ball when playing, because Mr Pickwick brought one in from their garden. He will wander at night, although why I don’t know, because I had him doctored and he’s quite, quite happy about it.”

“I read of the affair in the Melbourne papers,” Bony murmured.“About the sudden death of Mr Mervyn Blake. There was a house full of guests, I understand.”

“Oh yes, there was a house party for a week before Mr Blake died,” Miss Pinkney said. “Several well known people, you know. TheBlakes often had writers and personalities staying with them. But they wouldn’t associate with anyone in the district. Er -well, you know what I mean.”

Bony was not sure that he did know. He said, “It was most peculiar Mr Blake dying so suddenly. I wonder if he was tired oflife? ”

“Not a bit of it,” Miss Pinkney cheerfully stated. “No man who drinks like he did would think of ending his life. He was so well known. Someone told me that if he condemned a book the book was a certain failure, and it would be a success if he praised it. Oh no, there was no reason for him to commit suicide. Someone hated him enough to murder him. This evening, when it’s cool, I’ll take you into the garden and show you the little building where he died.”

The People Next Door

HAVING eaten an excellent dinner, Bony was in the proper frame of mind to appreciate the view from the front veranda of Rose Cottage, Yarrabo, in the State of Victoria.

Before the flower-embowered house passed a main highway to the city from the vast timber country of Gippsland. Beyond the road, beyond the narrow valley, the trees marched up the steep slopes of Donna Buang. There were no clouds beheading the mountain this summer’s evening, and the setting sun was painting the escarpments with deep pink which, even as he watched, was turning into cloudy purple.

Seated in luxurious ease, completely satisfied with the accommodation found for him by Constable Simes, and confronted by a puzzle promising to tax his intelligence, Bony felt calmly happy.

TheBlakes had certainly chosen wisely when they purchased the property next door and called it “Eureka”. Old Captain Pinkney had also been wise, though his main objective in retiring to Yarrabo was to put the sea away from him that his heart might not pine overmuch for it.

It is a far cry from the inland plains and mulga forests and gibber flats, swooning in the grip of the relentless sun, to the Valley of the Yarra, bright green and luscious and temperate even in January. The sun was setting to end this third day of the month, and deep in his most comfortable chair, Napoleon Bonaparte relaxed both his mind and his body.

For him it was anotherbusman’s holiday, and the cause of it Superintendent Bolt of the Victorian C.I.B. Bolt had written suggesting that the death of Mervyn Blake fell under circumstances sure to interest Inspector Bonaparte. The letter was waiting for Bony at his home on his return from the far west of Queensland, and the writer of it became extremely unpopular. Bony’s chief wanted him to sally forth on another Inland case, and his wife wanted him to take his month’s accumulated leave andherself to a South Coast ocean resort. Bolt had won-with the official summary of the investigation.

Subsequently he said to Bony, who was seated before his huge desk, “This Blake bird was fifty-six, but he was tough. He drank heavily between bouts of complete sobriety, and he suffered slightly from gastric ulcers, but the post mortem revealed no reason why he died. Take the case history with you, and thank you for coming down.”

“Give me your private opinion,” Bony requested, and Bolt said, “I won’t bet any way-natural causes, suicide, murder-I’ve just got a funny little feeling that Blake was laid out. We can’t discover any likely motive for suicide, or any motive for murder. I don’t believe he died from natural causes just because the pathologists and the toxicologists can’t find any unnatural causes sufficiently severe to have killed him. My crowd are all flat out on a series of gang murders, and I thought of you and decided that this Blake business might be right up your alley. As I just said, I’m pleased you consented to come and take hold of it because I don’t want it to grow cold.”