Arthur Upfield: The Devil_s Steps

At Wideview Chalet

THE ALARM clock beside Bisker’s bed called him to his daily life at half-past five. The clock appeared to be armour-clad and completely shock-resisting, for every time the alarm began it was cut short by a callused hand which crashed down upon it with such force that a lesser mechanism would have been smashed flat.

At five-thirty on this first morning in September it was quite dark. Inside Bisker’s room it was coal-black, and, until Bisker began the recitation of the first complaint of the day, utterly silent. Bisker’s voice was loud with emphasis.

“A manoughter be sunk a million miles below the bottom of the deepest well on earth,” he said, in his heart duty wrestling with the desire to strike. “Oh, what a limbless fool I am. Curse the drink! You dirty swine… it’s you that stops me saving enough money to get me outer this frost-bitten, rain-drowned, lousy hole of a joint, get me back to where there’s a thousand tons of good, dry wood to the acre, and where a man can lie abed all day if he wants to. Oh, blast! If that old cowsezs two words to me this morning, I’ll up and slap ’erdown.”

Striking a match, he lit the hurricane lamp standing on the wooden kerosene case beside the bed. Then he took up one of two pipes, in the bowl of which had been compressed the dried “dottles” taken during the previous day from the other pipe. Bisker was a connoisseur in the art of nicotine poisoning and he favoured an extra-strong dose before rising in the mornings, to be followed with mere ordinary doses during the day. To avoid wasting time, the special dose was loaded into the pipe overnight. For five minutes he smoked with only his face outside the blankets, even his face being partially protected from the air by a bristling, stained grey moustache.

“Fancy a man coming down to this!” he exclaimed loudly. “An’ me an up-an’-at-’emcattle drover most of me life. Just tells you what the booze will do to a bloke. Ah, well!”

Slipping out of bed, he revealed naked, bandy legs below the hem of a cotton shirt over a flannel undervest. He stepped into trousers which appeared to be wide open to accept his legs and small and rotund paunch, pulled on a pair of old socks and then stepped into heavy boots he did not trouble to lace. A thick cloth coat and a battered felt hat completed the ensemble, but to this had to be added the working kit comprising one pipe, a plug of jet-black tobacco, a clasp-knife, a tin containing wax matches and a corkscrew.

Taking up the lamp, he passed outside.

It was not so very cold after all, although his breath did issue in the form of steam mixed with tobacco smoke. By the aid of the light he followed a narrow cinder path to its junction with a wide area of bitumen fronting a row of garages. Across this area he lurched along a path also of bitumen which skirted a large wood-stack and eventually arrived at a small door at the rear of Wideview Chalet. The door he opened with a key which he took from beneath a brick, and on passing into the house he found himself in a scullery in which part of his day was spent.

From the scullery he entered the kitchen, switched on the electric light, blew out his lamp and filled a tin kettle with water to place on a small electric stove. He then proceeded with the least noise possible to clean out the four grates of the cooking range, set in the centre of the kitchen, and to light fires in them.

By the time he had completed this work the kettle was at the boil. Bisker made a pot of tea, and whilst the tea was “drawing” he passed out to the scullery and re-fired the boiler which provided hot water to the bathrooms and to every bedroom. He was pouring milk into two cups when the cook appeared in the kitchen.

“Mornin’!” she said with a kind of lisp, as she was minus her false teeth.

“Day!” snarled Bisker.“Cupper tea?”

“Too right! I don’t work till I get it.”

Bisker poured tea into two cups. The cook accepted hers without speaking, set it down on the stove and herself on a chair she drew near to the now-roaring fires. Bisker carried his cup in one hand and his pipe in the other to take a position before one of the fires from which he glared down at the cook.

“A manoughter -” he began, waving his pipe on a level with his moustache.

“Aw-shut up!” pleaded the cook. “Give me a light and be a gentleman.”

Bisker snorted yet again. He put his cup down on the stove, and from a fire withdrew a billet of kindling wood which he presented to the cook. She snatched it from him and lit the cigarette she had produced from her apron pocket.

Mrs. Parkes was only slightly under forty. She was large, very large. Her brown hair was drawn tightly against her head with masses of curling pins. Her large face was deathly white, and against the background of her face her little red nose appeared not unlike a tiddly-winks counter.

Bisker drank his tea without swallowing.

“ ’Aveanother?” he asked.

“Course. Fill it up. Thirty-seven to cook for, as well as the missus, three maids, a drink steward and you. What a life!”

Bisker took the cups over to the wall bench, filled them and brought them back to the now-warming stove.

“How’d you sleep?” he enquired, now a little more cheerful.

“Better than if I’d had you beside me,” replied the cook. “And yoube sure to shave early, or the missus will be roaring you up again. You’re a disgrace about the place. Thank ’eaventhe winter won’t last much longer. Must’ve been another frost by the feel of it.”

“She froze ’ardbut it isn’tso cold outside as I expected,” averred Bisker. “Windmusta shifted to the west just before I got up. Well, Is’pose I’d better get on with the blasted boots.”

“Yes, and you go quiet about it, too,” commanded Mrs. Parkes stubbing out her cigarette. “We don’t want the old cat in her tantrums three days running.”

Bisker stood before the cook, sliding the palms of his hands together and leering.

“One of these days,” he said slowly, “you’regonna hold her while I cut ’erthroat-slowly. The old-”

Mrs. Parkes feigned indignation. She snatched up her cup, glared at Bisker, and said a little shrilly:

“You cut out that murder stuff and get along with your work. You’ll behavin ’ me in ‘Truth’ next, and then what’ll me husband say when he comes ’ome!”

“Stickyer teeth in,” Bisker replied, and swiftly retreated to the scullery, retreated backwards as though he were withdrawing from the presence of royalty.

From a box on a shelf he obtained a pencil of chalk and, again entering the kitchen, crossed it and passed through a doorway into a passage which led him to the public lounge. Here he switched on lights, passed through the lounge and so gained the passage which led to the bedrooms. Switching on more lights, he collected the footwear of the guests, marking on the soles the number of the room outside of which they awaited him. There were ten pairs of men’s boots, sixteen pairs of women’s shoes, and three pairs of children’s boots. All these he took back to the scullery, and then went on another journey to collect a pair of shoes from outside the door of the room occupied by Miss Eleanor Jade, the proprietress of Wideview Chalet.

Standing at a bench, Bisker began to work on the collected footwear. Every pair was of good quality, and every pair bespoke their utility for walking. This morning Bisker expected to find them dry, for the weather had been fine for the last four days. He was, therefore, easily provoked to profanity when he began work on a pair of men’s shoes, size eight and bearing on the sole the figure five.

“Mustabeen outwalkin ’ late last night, theblinkin ’ foreign German,” he complained. “More work-as though a man ’asn’tgot enough to do. Musta got ’emas wet as hell.”