Arthur Upfield - The Bone is Pointed

“Whom did I-I beg your pardon?”

Bony’s voice remained mildly conversational when he repeated the question. He had timed his bomb to explode at the close of luncheon, and now he leaned forward over the table and offered her a cigarette from his open case. Her gaze centred on his guileless eyes, her hand gropingly extracted a cigarette and then a match flared and was held in service. She accepted the service before rising indignation took her to her feet to stare at him, as he, too, stood up.

“I consider you to be impertinent,” she cried. “You ask a question smacking of innuendo.”

“Indeed no, Miss Lacy. I asked a quite straightforward question. I’m sorry, but I must press for the answer.”

“I refuse to give it, Mr Bonaparte.”

“After that meeting between you and someone who came from Meena, the blacks most thoroughly wiped away all traces of it,” Bony said, well satisfied with the effects of his bomb. There was less anger than mortification in her eyes. “The action of the blacks indicates, or appears to indicate, that either you or the person you met desired that I should not know of the meeting. Apparently the object of the meeting was a secret to be kept at all costs. Were I sure that the meeting was a quite harmless one between, let us say, two lovers, I should certainly not even have mentioned it. Since I am not sure, I must continue to press you for the answer to my question.”

Now anger held full sway in the blue eyes, and furiously the girl cried:

“I still refuse to answer your question. It does not concern you.”

After this declaration they stood on either side of the table, Diana with her head thrown back, her breast quickly rising and falling, her eyes blazing; Bony passive, his eyes lakes of blue ice. He wished ardently to break her, to smash down the barrier she had erected between them, to know her true self.

“Might it be that your answer would implicate the person you met in the disappearance of Jeffery Anderson?” he said in an effort to obtain an admission of the name of the person she had met. “Recent events point to the fact that the people who wiped away traces of the meeting have come to fear me for what I will discover concerning Anderson’s fate.”

“You are quite wrong. I will not answer a question that concerns my private life only. Whom I meet is my affair, not yours.”

Bony sighed in mock defeat and, bowing stiffly, turned and walked away to the far veranda door. Having placed his hand on the brass knob, he left the door and returned to the girl’s side. She stared up at him, her breath held, her lips parted. She heard him say, his voice still provokingly calm:

“The next time you use the telephone at Pine Hut, remember to refrain from making in the dust on the note shelf many little crosses.”

“Crosses! Little crosses!”

“Little crosses, Miss Lacy. When I was very young I used to place little crosses at the bottom of letters I wrote to a young woman.”

And then swiftly, without another word, he turned, crossed the veranda to the door, leaving her speechless.

Half an hour later she saw him, dressed in his old bush clothes, leave the house and pass out through the garden gate. She was then in the garden, and through a gap in the cane-grass hedge she saw him go into the office, come out with the key of Anderson’s room, unlock its door and enter. He was there only a minute, and then he returned to the office where, presumably, he left the key. Ten minutes after that she saw him leading his horse to the Green Swamp Paddock gate, saw him mount on its far side and ride away along the road to Opal Town and the boundary.

Even then she was still biting her lips in anger.

The Time Factor

BONY rode away from Karwir with a shadow in his eyes and a faintly grim smile about his mouth. He had paid the call at the homestead only for the purpose of learning a little more about the meeting of the riders of the white and brown horses, knowing that Old Lacy and his son would be absent at Opal Town.

Like almost every man living in solitude, Bony found pleasure in talking aloud to his horse. And now he said to her:

“Making crosses at the end of a letter, indeed! As though I, Napoleon Bonaparte, would ever have done such a thing, when I could and did pen poetry about my love. Ah, youth is Life, but age is Triumph, triumph over Life, mocking youth and tormenting it. If you possessed a human brain, my dear Kate, you would agree with me.”

The mare softly snorted, tossed her head and increased her pace. It was as though she did understand and appreciate her rider’s confidences. Bony continued:

“I suppose, Kate, that hunting evil-doers and associating with detectives and policemen have gone far to making me a fearful liar. Who was it who said: ‘Liars are verbal forgers’? Hum! That hints at crime. I must tread more circumspectly else I become a moral criminal. Still, I suppose there are occasions when the end does justify the means. Those imaginary crosses drawn in the dust thick on the telephone instrument at Pine Hut did produce a result, a negative one possibly, but one which my imagination can make positive. That very nice and wholesome young woman, who actually thinks she is smarter than poor old Bony, answered my question so clearly by refusing to answer it at all-with words. She admitted that she had met John Gordon at the boundary fence, that she loves him and he her; and she now thinks that she unconsciously drew little crosses while talking to him on the telephone to Meena.

“The odds greatly favour that meeting being arranged between lovers for the purpose of a little innocent love-making. We know, Kate, that Old Lacy thinks he’s a wise father, thinks that his daughter hasn’t a lover and never had a lover. We know that he desires his daughter to marry well, that is to say, to marry a man of position in the social and financial worlds. Doubtless the girl knows that too. Yet she falls in love with a man who is nobody in the social and financial worlds. Not her fault, of course. John Gordon has much to commend him to any woman, and a very great deal to commend him to me and to people like me. He is respected, and admirable in all things except wealth.

“Like me, the girl is a real lion tamer. I am sadly mistaken if she couldn’t tame Old Lacy sufficiently to make him consent to her alliance with John Gordon. But, Kate, she is not yet of age; and there is the possibility that she so loves the old lion that she could not bring herself to desert him by marrying Gordon. She may argue that, being only twenty, she can wait several years; for her father is over seventy and his life may end before she is thirty.

“I wonder, now. I wonder if I have entered a maze, if I have imagined that the traces of the meeting were wiped away to preventmy seeing them, when the object might really have been to preventanyone seeing them, anyone who could have read their meaning and talked about the meeting. If that is so, then the meeting can have no connection with the disappearance of Jeffery Anderson. If that is so, then the disappearance is all black, and to the blacks only can I look for a solution of the mystery.”

Oblivious of the hot sunlight striking upon his left cheek, neck and hand, Bony was carried at a quick walk over the slightly undulating plain country towards the far distant mulga forest through which passed the netted boundary fence. The depressions were filled to the brim with mirage water, as though this world of colourful space were composed of treeless islands dotted upon a vast lake. The gum-trees marking the creek and the Karwir homestead had already risen above the “water” to become waving coconut and date palms, and now were swiftly being dwarfed by distance. Now there emerged from the “water” ahead to cross an “island” a shape like that of a beetle on stilts. The beetle sank again into the “water” with a deep humming, finally emerging to crawl up upon the “island” on which Bony himself was the castaway mariner. He urged the horse off the track, when the car halted and from it issued Old Lacy’s booming voice.