Arthur Upfield - Murder down under

Whilst Mr Jelly saturated the squares of sheeting to wash the wound and to form cold compresses, the detective rolled the long strips into bandages. Bony was hunting for pins when the rapidly approaching car roared to a stop outside the house. There entered the Spirit of Australia in the van of two other men. “What’s up, Bob?” he demanded in tones of unaccustomed softness.

“Landon shot her,” Mr Jelly replied sharply.

“So Hurley told us. But why?”

“I’ll answer no damn questions now,” Mr Jelly said with equal sharpness. “We’ve got to get her home quickly. Mrs Saunders can look after her properly until we get a doctor. Come on! Give us a hand to get her into the car.”

Bony found Eric beside him when they had passed the limp form into the waiting arms of her father, seated in the rear seat of the car. With but ill-restrained impatience he said:

“Eric, straddle that machine of yours. Go to Merredin as quickly as possible. Find Sergeant Westbury. Tell him to come out at once. Tell him to bring a doctor. Tell him to bring Sergeant Muir. Tell him we want Landon for the murder of George Loftus, and to organize search parties to stop him getting on the trains or escaping by somebody’s car. You’ll ride fast, won’t you?”

“No one has seen me ride real fast yet.”

Mrs Loftus Passes On

THE CAR moved off with its burden and its passengers. The motor-cycle made off at racing speed along the east side of the rabbit fence. Bony ran out to the road. He stopped the first car which came along, explained the situation to the driver, who then consented to act on Bony’s instructions. They speeded away on a tour of the country south, east, and north, rousing the farmers, getting guards on all main and subsidiary roads.

When at twenty minutes to eleven Mrs Loftus and her sister drove in through the farm gate the haystack was in flames.

Mrs Loftus drove the car to the back of the house, put the brakes hard on, and gazed with the fixed stare of the hypnotized at the stack of hay blazing at both ends.

A fire brigade then could have extinguished the flames within a few minutes, provided, of course, that the pumps were fed with water from hydrants. The fact that the stack was newly built must be taken into consideration to account for the rapidity with which the fire gained a mastering hold, for with an old stack the hay would have become compressed with the passage of time.

The ruddy glare lit up the house, the stables, the cart shed, and the dogs’ kennels. The three dogs lay in recumbent attitudes, as though asleep. The gentle south wind had but little effect on the flame-lit smoke until it had risen two hundred feet in leaping, spark-streaked spirals which formed the huge column.

“How could it have got alight? Someone must have done it, sis!” Miss Waldron exclaimed indignantly.

“It looks like it,” Mrs Loftus agreed absently. She was thinking how strange it was that she simply could not put from her mind a picture once she had seen of a Viking funeral pyre, even while she wondered why it was that Mick Landon did not come out of the house; for he was nowhere near the stack, and the lighted lamp indicated that he must be at home.

In agreement with her, Landon had excused himself from his duties as secretary to the meeting early in the proceedings on the plea of indisposition. He had hired, Fred, the garage-man, to drive him back, and at the old York Road fence gate he had got out of the car, telling Fred that he preferred to walk the rest of the way, hoping that the exercise would do him good. Landon then had kept to the main road until he reached the north-east corner of the farm. Cutting in as he did from the corner to the cart shed, Hurley, of course, could not possibly haveseem him. At his arrival at the homestead the silence of the dogs had warned him.

Soul-shrivelling foreboding seized upon Mrs Loftus while she sat in the car. An imp perched on her shoulder and shrieked into her ear, “You fool! You fool! You fool!” She could see it all now, the stupidity of all that self-deception, the wilful creation of that illusion of happiness and security. “You fool! You fool! You fool!” She should have known that Time would wear away the covering she had so carefully woven about her skin.

The car engine had stopped, and without troubling to start it again-it meant cranking, since the self-starter was out of order-she got out and walked round the house to the door, closely followed by Miss Waldron.

“Hullo, Mick! Where are you?” she called when, at the doorway, she failed to see the hired man.

On the step of the door she stood. The shattered fragments of the china vase beneath her feet made her look down to observe them whitely gleaming against a background of water-veneered boarding. The lamp was set at the farthest end of the table. The big enamelled basin was still on the floor between the table and the bedroom door. At the same time both she and her sister saw the bloodstained swabs and the stained water in the basin.

Mrs Loftus was experiencing a slow invasion of cold which had no centre in any part of her body and yet seemed not to come from without. She heard her sister’s cries of alarm but felt no affect from them. They sounded such futile, childish cries, now that the wonderful barriers she had built between herself and disaster had been apparently torn down.

Mick! Was that Mick’s blood in the basin? Whom had he discovered here, and what had happened to him? Oh! These hammering questions! Never during all her lifehad she felt so icily calm.

Unable to have known, yet she did know that the secrets that the house contained were no longer there. For fully a minute she stood gazing down at the open hearth, stripped of its covering of crimson tissue paper, incuriously noting that one of the three lifted bricks rested on the other two, knowing that the japanned box had been taken without troubling to bring the lamp near to assure herself.

Heedless of her sister’s questionings, she turned away from the fireplace, picked up the lamp, and carried it into the bedroom. The counterpane and the blankets cast on the floor, the remains of the torn sheet, were clues which, added to the bloody swabs and water, proclaimed plainly that someone had been badly injured. For the first time she felt fear, fear for the man she loved so passionately. Where was Mick Landon? Where was the man who had swept her into a world of delirious delight?

The mattress did not appear to have been disarranged. However, still holding the lamp, she raised the foot of the flock mattress and calmly scrutinized the opening she had cut and sewed together. She could not detect Lucy Jelly’s work, but she must make sure, she must know the worst. And then? And then? Well, all along, in her inmost heart, she had known that she would have to take the last long journey. And now that this departure seemed imminent, she knew that the journey would have no terrors for her if her lover accompanied her. Suicide pact; yes. That is what people would call it.

As though she opened a door and stepped into a room, she came to hear the questions being fired at her by Miss Waldron. She realized now that her sister could no longer remain with her. She would have to leave at once, before they came to find, to find-

“You see, we have had burglars,” she said in a clear and steady voice. “They have gone now, after taking what they wanted and firing the haystack. The police will come and ask questions, and you must not be here then. I shall be all right, but I want to be alone. You cannot sleep in your veranda room tonight. You must go to theKingstons.”

“But-but-, sis-I can’t leave you know,” objected Miss Waldron loyally. Mrs Loftus melted for a second. Her sister saw a fleeting expression of wistful tenderness sweep into the marble-pale beautiful face. Mrs Loftus said: