Arthur Upfield - Winds of Evil

As he slowly expelled tobacco-smoke, the detective intently regarded the big but lean man who now was frowning.

He said, “What has aroused your dislike of this Sergeant Simone?”

Lee hesitated before answering this question, but when he did he spoke deliberately.

“Simone is a bully. He tries to bully me. He knows that my wife is a Carie woman, and that she would hate to leave here were I transferred. He knows that my wife’s father is a semi-invalid, and that her mother is bedridden. He tells me in his sly, slinking manner that I am too popular and that popular policemen are no good to the Force. Knowing that he has us under his thumb, he makes full use of our parlour, and even drops cigar-ash all over the carpet. That riles my wife and annoys me. If I squeak he’ll pull strings higher up. Then again, as I said the other day, he’s not the shadow of a detective outside a city slum area.”

“A rather impossible person.”

“You’ve said it, sir-Bony.”

“Well, well, if he comes, he will probably amuse us. If he does not amuse, you and I can send him back to Broken Hill, where, doubtless, he is appreciated. Officious policemen always amuse me for a little while. There is something so naive about them. Simone will certainly want a statement from me as a suspicious character camped within a quarter-mile of the scene of the third crime. Pick up pen and write, my dear Lee, to my dictation. Statements are such necessary documents, you know, to officious policemen.”

Lee stared fixedly at this most unorthodox detective from Brisbane, suspecting sarcasm. Then he smiled grimly when he found a pen, the end of which revealed much savage biting. In his breast-pocket was the document signed by his own State’s Police Commissioner, instructing him to renderevery assistance to Detective-Inspector Bonaparte. Already he sensed that he and his wife had a powerful ally against the hated Sergeant Simone, and this was balm laid to his outraged soul.

When Bony’s statement had been taken down and signed and initialled by him, the detective said, “Now we can await the gentleman from Broken Hill without mental disturbance. You will not inform him who and what I am, and he will not know. Later we may discuss him again. Meanwhile, please give me your attention and keep secret everything I say now and hereafter.”

Constable Lee already had forgotten this extraordinary man’s colour. Already he was blinded by the forceful personality of this half-caste who had passed through a university, had risen to high state in his profession-from a police tracker to an inspector-and of whom even he had heard whispers of fine successes.

“Have you prepared that list ofpersons resident in and near Carie for the last three years?” Bony asked.

Lee proffered several sheets of paper, saying with gratification, “I completed the list just before you came in.”

“Ah! The name of every one is here? Yours? Your wife’s?”

The other’s face took to itself a deeper tint.

“Well, I didn’t think-” he began.

“I must add you both,” Bony murmured. “Now… here are the names of some seventy people who have been living here over the period in which two persons were murdered and a third nearly so. If you have not omitted anyone from these lists, other than the two I have just added, then the criminal’s name is beneath my hands.”

Bony rolled yet another cigarette. There were occasions when he was a chain-smoker.

“I feel pretty sure, Lee,” he went on when he had struck a match, “that this case will interest me profoundly, and exercise a brain liable to become lethargic with mundane and sordid murder and other crimes. This strangling series is most promising, and I can find even more pleasure in it, as poor Mabel Storrie is now recovering.

“It may be that the person who attacked her is not the murderer of Alice Tindall and Frank Marsh, but someone who copies his methods. We must not lose sight of this possibility. At this early stage, I think that the same person committed all three crimes. Having perused Simone’s reports when in Sydney, and allowing for his magnification of his difficulties in order to save face, I do not wonder at all that he failed. Here in the bush he would be quite out of his element. But, Lee, here in the bush I am well within mine.

“Simone, without doubt, has been trained to discovering clues in the form of revolvers and knives, bloodstains and finger-prints. He has experience in keeping his ear to the ground for criminal whispers, and is facile in putting together information received in the hundred and one thieves’ kitchens of any city. I have been trained to use my maternal gifts to see what you white men fail to see on the pages of the Book of the Bush. In that book men and animals, birds and insects subscribe their essays. Added to my inherited maternal gifts are those inherited from my whitefather. I see with the eyes of a black man and reason with the mind of a white man, and in the bush I am supreme.

“In this bush Simone found no clues. That is not surprising to me. There were no common clues for him to find: most of the uncommon clues remain for me to discover. They are written indelibly in the Book of the Bush on certain pages relative to these crimes I have yet to read. Remember, Lee, that although some men sneer at me on account of my mid-race, I am superior to the blacks because I can reason, and superior to many white people because I can both reason well and seebetter than they. I have inall my career never arrested a man, black or white. Such work is distasteful to me. As my chief, Colonel Spendor, often says, I’m no damned policeman’s shadow. No… but I am an investigator of crime, and I will demonstrate how I investigate these crimes. You shall learn. You shall gain credit and put the detestable Simone well in the background.

“Now… There is, I believe, coming into general use in America, a method which will bring out finger-prints on clothes. I did think of having Mabel Storrie’s clothes sent to America for examination, but time is against me. We shall certainly have one, if not more, sand-storms within the next month or two, and during a sand-storm the strangling brute is active. Let us hope, and hope sincerely, for more sand-storms to come in the near future. Did Simone confide much in you?”

Lee grinned when he awoke from the trance into which Bony’s little speech had thrown him.

“Let’s say he boasted to me,” he corrected.

“Well, then. Did he ever say he thought that the murderer was a tree-climber?”

“A tree-climber! No, he didn’t.”

“What is your opinion of Donald Dreyton?” was Bony’s next question; and now, before Lee answered, his puzzled frown vanished.

“Dreyton is quite a decent man. Never given me the ghost of any trouble. He doesn’t drink to excess, and is liked by everyone.”

“He appeared to me in that light. And yet… Tell me all you know about him.”

“I have him pat all right. He arrived here from Broken Hill three days before Alice Tindall was murdered. He put up at the hotel, and his luggage consisted of one large portmanteau. The day after his arrival he got work on Wirragatta as a homestead rouseabout. Then, on the very day Alice Tindall was killed, or rather the day preceding that night, he relieved the book-keeper, who left. Dreyton was book-keeping for eight months before he left the office to take on the rabbit boundary-fence. He’s been on that ever since.”

“Concise! Excellent!” murmured Bony. “What was he before he came here?”

Lee laughed shortly.

“You’ve got me there. I don’t know. And no one else does, either. He has never told us, and, as you know, we bush folk don’t ask unwanted questions about a man’s past history.”

“Hum! When a man does not discuss his past, the past will not always bear discussion. Why did he leave the office for the fence?”