Arthur Upfield - No footprints in the bush

“Just helpyourself,” he said. “I feel like a good stiffener.”

“So doI, although I seldom drink,” Bony confessed. “I find alcohol blurs my mind, not exhilarates it. Ah-well! I think we both have an excellent excuse tonight. That pilot did his foul work efficiently. I can hardly think he is that Dr Whyte who visited here two months ago. Is there a romance, do you know?”

“Er-Yes, I believe so. Whyte seems a decent man, but not good enough for Flora. No man would be.”

Bony drank and then lit his first cigarette. There was no hint of levity when he said:

“On several occasions I have been sentimental to the extent of defying red tape and regulations and that kind of thing. I have a failing for match-making-or I ought to say clinching a match. I have asked Price to get in touch with Dr Whyte. I want the doctor to pay a visit here in the near future.”

“Oh!” McPherson slowly exclaimed.

“Yes. You see, I hope to persuade him to take me up in his machine. I’d like much to have a look over all that open country to the west. Somewhere in that open country that renegade pilot must have his headquarters-a shed for his plane, petrol supply, which is doubtless replenished by a truck transporting the oil. And a truck leaves tracks to be seen easily from the air. Price spoke highly of Sergeant Errey. I have a duty towards the sergeant’s widow and son.”

“And that is?”

“To set that pilot on the roadwhich ends at an open trapdoor. You know, there are killers and killers. I could discourse on them for an hour. All fall, roughly, into three classes, the worst by far being that claiming the cold, clever, deliberate murderer. Cold, clever and deliberate is that pilot. He killed Errey because Errey had found out too much. Or he killed Mit-ji because he feared Mit-ji would betray him. He couldn’t kill either without the other; and it made no difference to him how many he killed. How old was Mit-ji?”

“Six years older than Burning Water.”

“Did Errey bring him in from the camp of the murdered stockmen?”

“Yes. There were the three of them. He managed to escape when the Illprinka blacks raided the camp and speared the others.”

“The two killed-were they old men, too?”

“Oh no; both were young. The lubra of one told Errey, so Burning Water tells me, that Mit-ji was an accomplice of the raiders, that she often had seen him sitting alone by a little fire sending messages, and that the night the attack was made he was not in the camp. Can’t blame the lubra for talking to Errey. A black girl can love as passionately as a white woman.”

“Yes, that is so,” Bony agreed slowly, staring hard at the squatter. “What you say of Mit-ji indicates that he was disloyal to his own tribe. There may be other traitors. You really have no idea who that airman might be?”

McPherson answered in the negative by shaking his head. He did not look at the questioner.

“Forgive me for being a bore so late at night, but I have so much to accomplish before next week,” Bony continued. There were now four cigarettes remaining on the table. “Forgive me, too, for being unpardonably inquisitive. The vice is born early in all journalists-and detectives. Now we know one facet of the character of the man who killed Errey and Mit-ji. He is an expert pilot and, too, an expert bomber. I understand that this Doctor Whyte was in the Royal Air Force during the latter portion of the Great War. That’s by the way, however.

“A man doesn’t take grave risks without just cause. This unknown pilot took risks when he attacked the car, and he took risks when he flew over this house earlier this evening. Although he did everything he could to make himself sure there would be no witnesses of his destruction of Errey and the black, he certainly accepted the risk of being observed. Therefore, his motive for killing those two in the car was powerful. If it were not then the fellow must be a lunatic.

“What was his motive for the double murder? I believe this to be a question easily answered. His motive was to destroy evidence against himself for complicity in another crime-that resulting in the killing of your two stockmen. He knew that Errey had obtained evidence, or he feared that Errey would obtain evidence through the mind of Mit-ji.

“I find support for this theory in the fact that Australian aborigines do not run off with cattle in the mass. I know of only one instance in history when an aborigine stole stock wholesale, and, like Burning Water, he was outstanding. I refer, of course, to the Black Squatter, a Victorian native who, in the early days of settlement, compelled his tribe to drove off mobs of sheep to stock a portion of tribal land still left from the robbing white men.

“That the pilot of the aeroplane is directly connected with the murder of your stockmen, the theft of your cattle, totalling some three thousand, the unrest of the Wantella tribe and boldness of the wilder blacks, the Illprinka, is a theory one can be pardoned for believing to be a fact.”

There now were but three cigarettes lying on the table. Bony, unusually indulgent, helped himself to whisky and water.

“I am, Mr McPherson, conscious of your difficulty in accepting me for an inspector attached to the Criminal Investigation Branch of the Queensland Police Department. Price is experiencing the same difficulty. However, I can assure you that I was not raised to my present rank through political or social influence. My birth was a serious bar, and, to achieve eminence in my profession, I had to prove myself not only worthy of it, but doubly so. This is a democratic country-I don’t think!

“As a policeman I am a fearful failure; but as an investigator I am a success. I fail as a policeman because my mind refuses to be confined within prison bars of red tape. But I am what I am because-well, because I am Napoleon Bonaparte.

“Now, at the beginning of my investigation here, I find that the murder of Sergeant Errey and Mit-ji is the culmination of a series of outrages committed against you. Imean, the culmination of the series to date; for that air pilot will strike again and again until I finalize his career of crime.

“From what you have told me of your history, and from what I have learned through preliminary inquiries, together with the result of study of your circumstances, I can well understand your attitude of hostility to what you regard as outside interference. Such hostility, however, cannot prevent me from finalizing my investigation. Please tell me, who is that airman?”

There followed a profound silence. McPherson’s gaze was directed to the remaining cigarettes on the table. There were but two. His face angled upward and his cold grey eyes stared at the slighter man lounging easily in his chair. The full grey moustache actually bristled, whilst rising blood reddened still deeper the sun-reddened complexion of his face. Then with swift violence his hand rose, and the clenched fist crashed upon the table. His head was thrust towards Bonaparte like that of a mongoose attacking a snake. His voice, when he spoke, was low, but vibrating with passion.

“I tell you I don’t know,” he said. “If you call me a liar, I’ll fetch my people to tie you, and I’ll flog you as I flogged that Illprinka man. When I say a thing I’m finished with saying it.”

“Well, then, let us pass to another subject,” Bony compromised, but with an icy gleam in his eyes. “Tell me about Miss Flora McPherson and this Doctor Whyte.”

“I know next to nothing about Whyte. Flora is my sister’s only child and she came here after my mother died. Do you want to know how much money I’ve got in the bank?”

“I wouldn’t ask you that,” Bony said, quietly. “If it were necessary for me to know, I would find out-through other channels. No, I don’t wish to know how much money you have in the bank. I would, however, like to know why you find yourself unable to be frank with me.”