Arthur Upfield: Murder down under

Napoleon Bonaparte’s Holiday

IF IT had not rained! If only the night of 2nd November had been fine! Raining thirty points that most important night was sheer cursed bad luck.

John Muir sauntered along the south side of Hay Street, Perth, heedless of the roaring traffic and of the crowd. To him the life and movement of the capital city of Western Australia was then of blank unconcern; of greater moment was the heavy shadow of failure resting on his career. To the average ambitious man temporary failure may mean little, and that little but the spur to the posts of achievement; failure now and then interposed among marked successes to one of Muir’s profession merely delays advancement; but failure repeated twice, one treading on the heels of the other, raised the bogey of supersession.

Detective-Sergeant Muir was not a big man as policemen go. There was no hint of the bulldog about his chin, or of the bull about his neck. Although he walked as walks every officer in the Police Force, having attended that school of the beat in which every constable is enrolled, John Muir in appearance looked far less a policeman than a smart cavalryman. Not much over forty years old, red of hair and complexion, he did not seem cut out to be a victim of worry: worry crowned him with peculiar incongruity. So deep were his cogitations about the weather that it was not the hand placed firmly on his left shoulder, nor the words spoken, but the soft drawling voice which said:

“Come! Take a little walk with me.”

It was a phrase he himself had often used, and the fact that other lips close to his ear now uttered it produced less surprise than did the well-remembered voice. The drabness of his mood gave instant place to the lights of the world about him. He swung towards the kerb, caught the arm of the man whose hand was upon his shoulder, and gazed with wonder and delight into a pair of beaming blue eyes set in a ruddy brown face.

“Bony! By the Great Wind, it’s Bony!”

“I at first thought you were the ghost of the Earl of Strafford on his way to the block,” Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte said gravely. “Then I was reminded of poor Sinbad the Sailor, wearied by the old fellow who so loved him. Why the mantle of gloom this bright Australian morning?”

“Where were you the night of the second of November?” demanded John Muir, his grey eyes twinkling with leaping happiness.

“November the second! Let me think. Ah! I was at home at Banyo, near Brisbane, with Marie, my wife, and Charles, and little Ed. I was reading to them Maeterlinck’s-”

“Did it rain that night?” Muir cut in as though he were the prosecuting counsel at a major trial.

His mind being taken back to the night of importance by Muir’s first question, Bony was able to answer the second without hesitation.

“No. It was fine and cool.”

“Then why the dickens couldn’t it have been fine and cool at Burracoppin, Western Australia?”

“The answer is quite beyond me.”

Detective-Sergeant Muir, of the Western Australian Police, slipped an arm through that of Detective-Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, of the Queensland Police, and urged his superior across the street. The delight this chance meeting gave him, resulting in this impulsive act, suggested to the constable just behind them that the quietly dressed half-caste aboriginal was indeed taking officially a little walk with the detective-sergeant. He became puzzled when the two entered a teashop on the opposite side of the street.

They were fortunate to secure a table in a corner.

“The fact that it rained a certain night at a particular place seems to perturb you,” Bony remarked, with his inimitable blandness, after tea and cakes had been set before them.

“What are you doing here?” Muir asked with a trace of anxiety.

“Waiting for you to pour out my tea.”Bony’s deep blue eyes shonequizzingly. Perfect teeth gleamed between his lips when he spoke. His fine black hair, well brushed, had the lustre of polished ebony.

“Well, what are you doing here in the West?”

“Impulsive as ever, John. Your head is full of questions as uncontrollable as the tides. After all my interest taken in your career, despite my careful coaching extending over a period of eight years, in spite of your appearance, which is less like that of a policeman than any policeman I know, you flagrantly give away to even the most unsuspecting person your precise profession through your excessive questionings.”

John Muir laughed.

“By the Great Wind, Bony, old chump, I’m glad you are with me in this teashop,” he exclaimed with dancing eyes. “I’vebeen wanting one man in all the world to get me out of athunderin ’ deep hole, and lo! that man whispers into myear’ole: ‘Come, take a little walk with me.’ But tell us the story. How is it you’re in Perth just when I needed you?”

Muir was like a youth in the presence of a generously tipping uncle.

Softly Bony murmured, “I am here because you wanted me.”

“You knew it? How did you know?”

“You made a tangle of the Gascoyne affair, didn’t you?” Bony countered accusingly.

“Ye-es, I am afraid I did.”

When next he spoke Bony’s gaze wascentered upon his plate.

“After all my tuition you took a creek without first ascertaining the depth of the water. You accepted a conclusion not based on logical deduction. You ignored science, our greatest ally after Father Time. It was unfortunate that you arrested Greggs, wasn’t it?”

John Muir mentally groaned. Bony, looking up swiftly into his greyeyes, saw once again the shadow.

“You see, John, I have been following your career closely,” he went on in his calm, pleasant manner. “Because a man’s trousers are bloodstained, it does not follow that the blood on them is human blood. Granted that at the time you did not know Greggs was a sheep-stealer supplying the local butcher with cheap meat, you should, however, have walked slowly, making sure that the stains of blood were human or animal, and making equally sure Greggs did not get away whilst you were walking. Jumping thus to a most unscientific conclusion, which that great mathematician, Euclid, would have bitingly termed absurd, you permitted Andrews to get clear away.”

“I know, I know! What a fool I was!”

“Hardly a fool, John, but too impetuous. And now, why your worry regarding the weather during the night of November the second?”

Again sunlight chased away the shadows. From an inside pocket John Muir produced a wallet, and from the wallet a roughly drawn plan, which he laid before Bony.

“Here’s a drawing of a wheat town and locality named Burracoppin, one hundred and eighty miles east of Perth on the goldfields’ line,” the sergeant explained. “For eight days prior to the second of November a farmer named George Loftus was down here in Perth on business and pleasure. The licensee of the Burracoppin Hotel, Leonard Wallace, met Loftus in Perth during the afternoon of November the first, and Loftus, having unexpectedly completed his business, offered Wallace a lift to Burracoppin the next day.

“They left Perth at ten o’clock, and, as Loftus’s car is a light one, it was ten o’clock that night when they arrived at Wallace’s pub. After supper they went to the bar and stayed there drinking until one o’clock. By that time, according to Wallace, they were both well down by the stern. He says that when they went out to the car it was raining, and he urged Loftus to stay the night. But Loftus appears to be a pigheaded man in drink, and, drunk as he was, determined to drive home. Wallace, deciding to go with him, induced Loftus to wait while he informed Mrs Wallace. She heard them set off at ten minutes past one.”