Arthur Upfield - Wings above the Diamantina

“Unlike nearly all blackmailers, Markham was satisfied with his thousand a year. He died in 1927, and the pension was paid thereafter to his wife-who held the transferred power. She was not by any means a bad woman. Between her adopted daughter and herself a strong affection had arisen, and on her deathbed, knowing that the pension would cease with her life, she confessed all to Muriel Kane and produced the wills, the last of which left all old man Kane’s property to her as heiress of the dead Charles, her father.

“Muriel then wrote to John Kane, her uncle. The letter was typewritten, for the girl had fallen into the modern habit of typing her correspondence. The more easily, as she was a free-lance journalist, and habitually used a machine. Generously, she offered to take but half of the estate, permitting him to retain the other half. He replied, expressing his gratitude and his contrition, and he suggested that as he was in poor health she should visit him at Tintanoo. He would send a neighbour in his car to meet her at Broken Hill. She received that communication the day before Mrs Markham died, and almost at once Owen Oliver left to meet her and to bring her north. It is quite a long story, you see.

“The arrival of Muriel Kane at Tintanoo was arranged. In Golden Dawnwas Captain Loveacre and his air circus, and early that day Mrs MacNally, the jackeroo, and all the men at the homestead were sent off to Golden Dawn. They knew nothing of her arrival. At breakfast she was given the poison used by a tribe of aborigines of Northern Australia to poison fish in waterholes and make them rise to the surface. As a student of aboriginal life, Kane knew it well. She was then taken to an uninhabited hut on the boundary of Windy Creek Station.

“Owen Oliver has always been a wild spendthrift, and to curb his vicious habits his father curtailed a once too-generous allowance. Young Oliver began to borrow, and when his creditors threatened to go to his father he applied to John Kane for temporary assistance. It was a debt that made Owen Oliver a tool. Kane promised to wipe out the debt and to give him five thousand pounds for his assistance.

“The night following her arrival at Tintanoo, Muriel Kane found herself paralysed, lying on the floor of the empty hut on Windy Creek. That night John Kane stole the red monoplane and flew there, to land on a narrow ribbon of level ground in the near vicinity and aided only by Oliver’s torch. He must have had extraordinary nerve.

“Into the aeroplane they packed a large canister of nitro-glycerine and strapped the helpless girl to the passenger’s seat. Kane took enormous risks that night, the chief of which was taking off fromunlighted, and almost unknown ground, with that terrible explosive in the plane. He flew straight for the junction of the Coolibah track with the St Albans road. Flying westward, he flew between the homesteads of Coolibah and Tintanoo, picked out his position by a long strip of water lying in one of the river channels, then flew north of west, and so passed north of Gurner’s Hotel. He circled southward until he saw below him the bore stream and lake, known as Bore Fourteen, which is but a mile or so north of Emu Lake paddock. There he fixed the controls of the machine, and then he made his only mistake. Before jumping he switched off the engineWith sheepskin boots on his feet he landed by parachute, gathered up the parachute and walked with it to the main road, where Owen Oliver soon arrived to pick him up.

“With extraordinary good fortune the machine landed perfectly on an area of ground, which, compared with the surrounding scrub and broken country, was no larger than a grain of sand. This was something neither Kane nor any one else could have foreseen-something that scarcely any one in the world would have believed possible. But it has happened before.

“Together, Kane and Oliver drove at breakneck to Golden Dawn, where, one mile out, the car was stopped. Kane then walked to the town and to his bed at the hotel, reaching it a little before day broke. Oliver turned the car and drove back to Tintanoo.

“Kane’s statement that he was at Golden Dawn immediately after the aeroplane was stolen was false. He certainly was in his bed at the hotel in the morning, but when he claimed to have collided with Dr Knowles in the rush to see the stolen plane fly off, he relied on the doctor being, as was then too often the case, in no condition to deny it.

“Now into this affair entered the telephone exchange operator. She hoped to marry John Kane. He, indeed, had promised to marry her. At his request, she reported to him everything which passed along the telephone wires through her exchange and everything which passed along the telegraph wires through the post office, she being an experttelegraphist and able to hear and read the clacking of the instruments. That is, she told him everything which could, even remotely, bear on the theft of the aeroplane.

“When John Kane learned of the discovery of the monoplane and the young woman in it he communicated with Owen Oliver, and Oliver, wearing his master’s sheepskin boots, went out to Emu Lake and fired the machine in order to destroy all fingerprints. The nitro-glycerine, of course, exploded. Knowing that medical men might achieve a cure-knowing that most probably the young woman would be taken away to a town or city hospital-John Kane himself came to the house that same night and attempted to poison Miss Kane by putting strychnine in the brandy. It was his last chance, because that telephone girl informed him of the watch being kept. She informed him of my sending for Illawalli, and without doubt, had Captain Loveacre landed my friend at Golden Dawn, we should have met opposition when bringing him here. I have told you how Kane did deal with Illawalli.

“He knew that I had ordered the suspension of the telephone operator and the arrest of Oliver. He knew, too, I was on my way in from Gurner’s Hotel, and he removed and concealed the batteries working the two telephone instruments in his office. Fortunately I had with me the telephone instrument I had removed from Gurner’s Hotel. I believe he then planned two objectives. He knew that the flood was nearing Tintanoo, and he decided to lure us in our much slower car across the front of it and then, when he was half-way over, to take a seldom-used branch track leading direct to Coolibah. Had he achieved the first objective he would have been safe, knowing that Oliver would stubbornly refuse to talk. And now Oliver has talked, and John Kane is destined for a long term of imprisonment.

“Kane is somewhat an abnormal type. He has revealed courage of a high order-proved when he took to the air that night with enough nitro-glycerine to blow up a town hall. His plan to remove Miss Kane without trace-that is, without leaving any clue to her identity-was original and well executed. But, like all clever men, he made mistakes-mistakes which a less clever man would not have made! He was clever enough to deny the fact that he held a quantity of nitro-glycerine down in the cellar. Not knowing just what I knew, he played well the card of perfect frankness. That was a good card, and it might have been the winning card if only he had remembered to wipe away Owen Oliver’s fingerprints on the empty carboy.

“That, I think, is about all. With Muriel Kane alive he was practically a pauper. She offered him half of her grandfather’s estate, but he was not satisfied with that. Having lured her to Tintanoo, having assured himself that the vital wills were lying in a safe-deposit vault in Adelaide, he conceived the idea of stealing the aeroplane, and making certain that his niece’s remains would be found among the debris and taken for those of the thief. After all the astonishing risks he took, he should have succeeded, but the more perfectly the crime is conceived and executed so, strangely enough, the more likely is fate or chance or a higher Power to step in.”