Arthur Upfield - Murder down under

And when he saw Bony step out of the scrub on to the rock at the exact place he had stepped on the rock, when he saw the crowd behind the two detectives, he sprang to his feet, waved his arms over his head, and shrieked.

He saw the crowd with Bony open out fanwise. Their sport sticks, cut to assist them through the bush, appeared to him like gun barrels.

“I give up-I give up!” was his wailing cry when he ran down the rock slope to the surprised tracker and his escort. They knew he was without a weapon because they had found the cartridges on the great rock and the revolver behind the bush where he had hidden from the “sportsmen” in the car.

“Save me! Help me! I give in-I give in!” Mick Landon sobbed when he fell at Bony’s feet and wrapped his arms about the tracker’s legs.

FinalizingA Case

“SO YOU see, John, your Burracoppin case was after all very simple and very sordid, requiring only one qualification in the personality of the investigator to achieve success.”

Bony was smiling into the alert military type of face of John Muir while he and the detective-sergeant lounged in the shade of a big salmon gum on the side of theGoomarin Road a mile out of Merredin. A week had passed, and the magistrate at Perth had remanded Mick Landon for trial on the capital charge.

“What is that necessary qualification? How did you know that George Loftus’s body was in the haystack? How did Jelly happen to become mixed up in the affair?”

With a face indicative of extreme pain Bony sighed. With slow significance he said:

“The qualification necessary in such a case is one which I possess to an acute degree and which in you, so far, I find lacking. You and our two chiefs are all lacking in patience. It is probable that you will eventually rise to the Western Australian Commissionership because you have organizing ability and an excellent address, but you will never make an outstanding detective. Colonel Spender is an excellent head of a police department, but he would be unequal to solving the mystery of a lost collar stud. In many respects Colonel Spender and you are akin.”

“Don’t rub it in too hard,” Muir urged with heightened colour. “You have answered my first question in a most offensive way; now please answer the remaining two.”

“Very well. How did I know that Loftus was buried in the haystack? Remember this significant point. It is undoubted that my investigations would have been greatly delayed if at Burracoppin I had announced myself as Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte. To have done so would have caused everyone to shrink into their little shells, as the customers at the hotel did when you appeared that evening. As a detective you are too distinguished. And your picture has appeared too often in the press.

“If Landon had known what I was he never would have invited me to examine the Loftus homestead the Sunday following the dance at the Jilbadgie Hall. He took me for precisely what I was supposed to be, and during my investigation of the homestead he became nervous only when we halted at the south end of the haystack. He thought then that the prowler of the night before suspected his secret and had been probing into it, and he simply had to know the truth about it. I pointed out tracks of the prowler which were not there, but I was interested less in deceiving him than in the abnormal number of blowflies buzzing and crawling deep in the hay.

“At this time I strongly suspected that Loftus had been murdered, for you will remember that I had evidence, which afterwards became definite proof, that Landon had recently slept in Mrs Loftus’s bed and that Mrs Loftus had settled a garage account with new treasury notes of the same serial as that to which belonged the notes paid by the bank to her husband.

“The blowflies in the hay recalled the incident of Hurley’s dog which, when with me one day, caught several rabbits. One of these dead rabbits I kicked into a posthole, and, filling in the hole, I rammed down the earth. Yet days afterwards the blowflies smelled the dead rabbit fifteen inches below the surface of the ground. It is the keen-scented blowfly that will hang Mick Landon.

“At the time George Loftus reached home from Perth, Landon, acting on his instructions, had started to cart hay to build the stack.

“He had laid the foundations of the stack, which that night was some three feet high. He was an alert young man, clever, as his social activities in Burracoppin proved, and his idea of burying the corpse near one end of the haystack, and proceeding to build overit, was original, you must admit.

“However, it does seem impossible for a murderer not to make at least one foolish mistake. The very act of homicide provides a shock sufficient to upset the balance, temporarily, of the human mind. Immediately the crime is committed the one thought excluding all others is how to hide the evidence of the crime. Having killed Loftus, the body had to be concealed somehow, anyhow. Like the man who realizes he is bushed, the murderer cannot sit down and calmly reason. Even though Landon had the cold Mrs Loftus at his back, he could not perceive that if the body was not buried deep below the ground surface the blowflies would be attracted. He reasoned that if the body was buried beneath tons of hay it would be out of sight, and, secondly, the hay in the stack, settling downwards, would become pressed into a solid mass around and above the corpse. He was fearful that if he buried the body the fresh-turned earth would attract attention, as it has done in many cases.

“The idea of burying a body deep in a haystack is good, but to conceal a body effectually he should have burrowed down through the foundations of the stack and dug a grave in the earth. With the stack above the grave the blowflies would not have been attracted, and the stack eventually could have been sold or cut into chaff. All that was lacking, John, was calmness at a critical moment, and, fortunately for humanity, the necessary calmness of mind is, usually, impossible in a murderer.

“Landon having broken down and confessed everything, we know that he and his paramour were in George Loftus’s bed when the returning farmer knocked at the door. According to Landon, he only desired the woman for her sex attraction, but she was madly infatuated with him. A few minutes before Loftus knocked, the restless dogs had awakened them, and during those minutes when they sleepily debated why the dogs barked they did not hear a car pass along the main road. Therefore, when Loftus did demand admittance, they could have inferred that he walked home, that he had not driven his own car or had been brought home in any other.

“It does appear, and, having studied Mrs Loftus, it is more than credible, that what followed was a re-enactment of Macbeth. The woman urged; the man resisted the suggestion. But the woman’s personality was the stronger, and the man obeyed her will. When she had lit the lamp in the kitchen Landon took a position where he would be behind the door when Mrs Loftus opened it. George Loftus stepped inside and Landon shot him through the head.

“They stripped the body. Landon dealt with it, and Mrs Loftus dealt with the clothes and articles they contained, cutting off the buttons, and, with the cigar case, silver match-box, watch and chain, buried them under the hearth in the japanned box. The collar pin, found among the notes in the woman’s mattress, and which Wallace swears Loftus was wearing when they returned from Perth, is, perhaps, the most damning evidence against them after the proof that the bullet found in the dead man’s skull was fired by the revolver I picked up near the road crossing the old York Road, and which Landon admits is his.

“And now, John, for your last question. Mr Jelly’s part in the mystery concerning the disappearance of George Loftus is easily explained. He thought, as many people did, that the police had given up or deferred their inquiries. Believing that Loftus had not voluntarily disappeared, being suspicious that Mrs Loftus and Landon were lovers, he determined to do a little investigating himself. The first time he visited the homestead he was shot, and had, himself, to disappear till the slight wound he had received had healed sufficiently to enable him to conceal it. The second time he went to the farm he arrived after his daughter and myself, taking advantage of the farmers’ meeting as I did; and, not being satisfied with feeding the dogs and thrashing one, he regrettably poisoned them. I do not agree with that act. The poor dogs were only loyal to their master. That is all, John. Even had Landon not confessed, you would have had more than enough evidence with which to hang him.”