Arthur Upfield - The Bone is Pointed

“I am glad to find you here, Mr Lacy,” the detective said on entering the office. “I hope, however, I am not interrupting important work.”

Like many poorly educated men, Old Lacy found pleasure in a well-spoken man provided that person attempted to take no advantage-should he attempt it Old Lacy quickly proved that education was nothing.

“Not at all, Bony,” he said with hearty assurance. “I’m finishing up, and what I leave the lad can fix. Can’t get along without him, y’unnerstand. Takes after his mother. Neat and particular.” A rumbling chuckle issued from the lips framed with white hair. “He takes down my letters in shorthand and then types ’emout in his own language. I say: ‘Sir-Why the devil haven’t you sent me that windmill part as ordered a month ago?’ The lad writes: ‘Dear Sir-We regret to have to inform you that at date the windmill part ordered on the 20th is not yet to hand.’

“Only this morning I’m sitting here and the telephone bell goes off. The lad answers it. The call’s from Phil Whiting, the storekeeper and postmaster at Opal Town, and from what I can make out the fool is explaining to the lad why our mail-bag was put on the Birdsville mail car by mistake. The lad hums and haws and says the mistake is to be regretted, and that it has caused us great inconvenience. So I grabs the telephone and I says: ‘That you, Whiting? Good! What the so-so do you mean making that mistake with our mail-bag? Sorry? What the so-so’sthe use of being sorry? If you do it again you’ll lose the Karwir custom for a year, and that’s flat.’ Now, which is the best way to deal with ’em?”

“Your way, of course,” instantly replied Bony smiling. “You know, if all the polite phrasing were to be cut out of business and official letters some two or three million light years would be saved. Colonel Spendor says often: ‘Give me the guts not the trimmings.’ The idea may be vulgarly expressed but it is sound.”

“Ah, I’ll remember that,” chortled the old man, and from a drawer he produced a bundle of letters. “These came for you yesterday. Should have been here days ago. Hullo! That’s the afternoon tucker gong. Come on! Diana’s a stickler for being prompt on the job. How’s the investigation going?”

Bony followed Old Lacy outside the building before answering.

“Not fast, but it has progressed.”

Now as they crossed to the garden gate the old man kept half a pace ahead of the detective, walking firmly, his body carried straight, his white-crowned head held high, his hands white in places that once had been scarred with hard work.

“You married?” he asked.

“Yes. I have been married a little more than twenty years,” Bony replied. “I have a son attending the university and the youngest is going to the State School at Banyo where I live with my wife and children-sometimes.”

“Humph!” grunted Old Lacy, slightly increasing the pace. “This flash education has its points, I admit, but I don’t know that it makes people any more content with life. Young people of to-day stand four-square, but I much doubt that they are any better than the young people of my day. That they are not worse is a blessing.”

They discovered Diana standing beside the tea table set on the cool south veranda. She smiled at her advancing father, and to Bony she gave the slightest of cool nods. That she was thoroughly interested in him he suspected, and that she now experienced slight astonishment at his taste in dress she admitted afterwards to her father. But she kept herself at a distance from Bony, and he knew it. Yet, undaunted, he said to her:

“Coming to a homestead cannot be unlike coming to an oasis in the Arabian desert. Outside the house the birds are ever numerous, and inside almost invariably are to be found wickedly luxurious lounge chairs.”

Diana inclined her head towards a wonderful wicker-work affair.

“Let me recommend you to that super-wicked luxury chair,” she said, still unsmiling.

“Thank you.” Bony sighed after he had taken the chair, which was not until the girl had sat down to pour out the tea. He wasn’t to be tricked too easily into making a social mistake. “Why cannot some inventive genius evolve a saddle to give the standard comfort set by even an ordinary chair?”

“Look funny, wouldn’t it, to see a chair like the one you’re sitting in lashed to the back of a horse?” remarked Young Lacy as he approached them.

“They fix luxurious seats in motor-cars these days,” persisted Bony.

“And comfortable seats in aeroplanes,” Diana added. “The passenger’s seat in your ship, Eric, is the acme of comfort.”

“My contention,” asserted Bony. “Twenty years of air and motor travel have evolved comfortable seats. Saddles to-day are not more comfortable, or rather, not less uncomfortable, than they were hundreds of years ago.”

“Comfort! Luxury! Softness!” exploded Old Lacy, settling himself into a leather affair with foot-wide arm rests and a velvety soft bulge to take the neck. “In my young days there was no softness, no luxury chairs.”

“Which was your great misfortune, father,” countered Diana. “Now take this cup made in England by Grafton, and please don’t say you would prefer to drink tea out of a tin pannikin.”

“Hur! Thanks, my gal. In your hearts you young people think you’re a sight smarter than the old people, but the old people don’t think, they know they’re smarter than the young folk. And now, as we seem to have settled the family argument, perhaps we can persuade Inspector Bonaparte to tell us something of what he’s been doing.”

“A real policeman never tells anything to anyone,” Bony said sadly, and theLacys regarded him sharply for the sudden change of mood. “Of course, I’m not a real policeman, as I have told you, but you make me feel like one when you call me Inspector.”

“Good for you, Bony! I forgot,” almost shouted Old Lacy.

“Ah-that’s better. Now I feel more like myself,” Bony said with a quick smile. “Progress has been slow, but I am not disappointed because I expected it to be slow. However, the case is proving to be of great interest, and if you, Miss Lacy, will permit me to talk shop-?”

Diana inclined her head. She refused to be drawn, but Bony’s penetrating eyes detected her eagerness to hear what he had accomplished.

“Well, then. I have discovered clues which satisfy me that Jeffery Anderson parted from his horse somewhere in the northern half of Green Swamp Paddock. I know that he camped for lunch, that day he left here, at the foot of the sand-dunes where the paddock’s east fence rises from the plain country. You see, Mr Lacy, we were right in our reasoning. He camped for the lunch hour at the foot of the sand-dunes, and before he left it began to rain, and he decided it was not necessary to ride over to the swamp and the hut.

“From this point I cannot definitely establish Anderson’s movements, but I incline to the supposition that he continued to ride northward along the east fence as far as its junction with the netted boundary fence. There, he turned westward along the boundary fence, which forms the north fence of Green Swamp, and so eventually rode down from the sand-dunes on to flat country bordering the Channels.

“I say that I incline to that supposition. Anderson, when the rain began, might well have decided to take a short cut home by striking due westward from his lunch camp and so come to that corner post on the southernmost depression and continue along the fence to the road gate.

“Let us draw an imaginary line from his lunch camp to that corner post on the depression. We see then that north of the line lies Green Swamp, the sand-dunes east and north of it, and the Channels. At the lunch camp, remember, I discovered proof that Anderson had boiled his quart-pot there. And, south of the line and south of the corner post on the depression, I found tracks made by The Black Emperor not before it rained or after it had stopped raining, but while it was raining, when it had rained about half an inch.