"No footprints in the bush" - читать интересную книгу автора (Upfield Arthur W.)

Chapter Six

Bony is Persistent

IT was after midnight when the squatter and Bony said goodnight to Price on the road above the gully, in which lay the remains of a modern car and two men. Price drove on to Shaw’s Lagoon: Bony and his host returned to the homestead, which they reached shortly before one o’clock.

“Well, I suggest a peg, and then bed,” McPherson said.

“I find that suggestion good,” Bony agreed quietly. “I too will make one: that we have the peg in the office. There are a number of questions I would like settled before I go to bed. Otherwise I will probably not sleep for worrying about them.”

“Hope they won’t be many,” the squatter objected, almost rudely. “I’m tired-and sick.”

“So am I-whichis another reason why I don’t wish to go to bed yet. Memory is the devil at times.”

“Humph!…All right. You go into the office and light the lamp. I’ll get the drinks.”

McPherson found Bony making cigarettes, the number of which did not appear to indicate an early retirement. There were four cigarettes already made, each with the “hump” in the middle, all lying in a row. Bony did not look up until he had rolled the fifth cigarette and placed it beside the fourth. Near to the cigarettes McPherson set down the tray.

“Just helpyourself,” he said. “I feel like a good stiffener.”

“So doI, although I seldom drink,” Bony confessed. “I find alcohol blurs my mind, not exhilarates it. Ah-well! I think we both have an excellent excuse tonight. That pilot did his foul work efficiently. I can hardly think he is that Dr Whyte who visited here two months ago. Is there a romance, do you know?”

“Er-Yes, I believe so. Whyte seems a decent man, but not good enough for Flora. No man would be.”

Bony drank and then lit his first cigarette. There was no hint of levity when he said:

“On several occasions I have been sentimental to the extent of defying red tape and regulations and that kind of thing. I have a failing for match-making-or I ought to say clinching a match. I have asked Price to get in touch with Dr Whyte. I want the doctor to pay a visit here in the near future.”

“Oh!” McPherson slowly exclaimed.

“Yes. You see, I hope to persuade him to take me up in his machine. I’d like much to have a look over all that open country to the west. Somewhere in that open country that renegade pilot must have his headquarters-a shed for his plane, petrol supply, which is doubtless replenished by a truck transporting the oil. And a truck leaves tracks to be seen easily from the air. Price spoke highly of Sergeant Errey. I have a duty towards the sergeant’s widow and son.”

“And that is?”

“To set that pilot on the roadwhich ends at an open trapdoor. You know, there are killers and killers. I could discourse on them for an hour. All fall, roughly, into three classes, the worst by far being that claiming the cold, clever, deliberate murderer. Cold, clever and deliberate is that pilot. He killed Errey because Errey had found out too much. Or he killed Mit-ji because he feared Mit-ji would betray him. He couldn’t kill either without the other; and it made no difference to him how many he killed. How old was Mit-ji?”

“Six years older than Burning Water.”

“Did Errey bring him in from the camp of the murdered stockmen?”

“Yes. There were the three of them. He managed to escape when the Illprinka blacks raided the camp and speared the others.”

“The two killed-were they old men, too?”

“Oh no; both were young. The lubra of one told Errey, so Burning Water tells me, that Mit-ji was an accomplice of the raiders, that she often had seen him sitting alone by a little fire sending messages, and that the night the attack was made he was not in the camp. Can’t blame the lubra for talking to Errey. A black girl can love as passionately as a white woman.”

“Yes, that is so,” Bony agreed slowly, staring hard at the squatter. “What you say of Mit-ji indicates that he was disloyal to his own tribe. There may be other traitors. You really have no idea who that airman might be?”

McPherson answered in the negative by shaking his head. He did not look at the questioner.

“Forgive me for being a bore so late at night, but I have so much to accomplish before next week,” Bony continued. There were now four cigarettes remaining on the table. “Forgive me, too, for being unpardonably inquisitive. The vice is born early in all journalists-and detectives. Now we know one facet of the character of the man who killed Errey and Mit-ji. He is an expert pilot and, too, an expert bomber. I understand that this Doctor Whyte was in the Royal Air Force during the latter portion of the Great War. That’s by the way, however.

“A man doesn’t take grave risks without just cause. This unknown pilot took risks when he attacked the car, and he took risks when he flew over this house earlier this evening. Although he did everything he could to make himself sure there would be no witnesses of his destruction of Errey and the black, he certainly accepted the risk of being observed. Therefore, his motive for killing those two in the car was powerful. If it were not then the fellow must be a lunatic.

“What was his motive for the double murder? I believe this to be a question easily answered. His motive was to destroy evidence against himself for complicity in another crime-that resulting in the killing of your two stockmen. He knew that Errey had obtained evidence, or he feared that Errey would obtain evidence through the mind of Mit-ji.

“I find support for this theory in the fact that Australian aborigines do not run off with cattle in the mass. I know of only one instance in history when an aborigine stole stock wholesale, and, like Burning Water, he was outstanding. I refer, of course, to the Black Squatter, a Victorian native who, in the early days of settlement, compelled his tribe to drove off mobs of sheep to stock a portion of tribal land still left from the robbing white men.

“That the pilot of the aeroplane is directly connected with the murder of your stockmen, the theft of your cattle, totalling some three thousand, the unrest of the Wantella tribe and boldness of the wilder blacks, the Illprinka, is a theory one can be pardoned for believing to be a fact.”

There now were but three cigarettes lying on the table. Bony, unusually indulgent, helped himself to whisky and water.

“I am, Mr McPherson, conscious of your difficulty in accepting me for an inspector attached to the Criminal Investigation Branch of the Queensland Police Department. Price is experiencing the same difficulty. However, I can assure you that I was not raised to my present rank through political or social influence. My birth was a serious bar, and, to achieve eminence in my profession, I had to prove myself not only worthy of it, but doubly so. This is a democratic country-I don’t think!

“As a policeman I am a fearful failure; but as an investigator I am a success. I fail as a policeman because my mind refuses to be confined within prison bars of red tape. But I am what I am because-well, because I am Napoleon Bonaparte.

“Now, at the beginning of my investigation here, I find that the murder of Sergeant Errey and Mit-ji is the culmination of a series of outrages committed against you. Imean, the culmination of the series to date; for that air pilot will strike again and again until I finalize his career of crime.

“From what you have told me of your history, and from what I have learned through preliminary inquiries, together with the result of study of your circumstances, I can well understand your attitude of hostility to what you regard as outside interference. Such hostility, however, cannot prevent me from finalizing my investigation. Please tell me, who is that airman?”

There followed a profound silence. McPherson’s gaze was directed to the remaining cigarettes on the table. There were but two. His face angled upward and his cold grey eyes stared at the slighter man lounging easily in his chair. The full grey moustache actually bristled, whilst rising blood reddened still deeper the sun-reddened complexion of his face. Then with swift violence his hand rose, and the clenched fist crashed upon the table. His head was thrust towards Bonaparte like that of a mongoose attacking a snake. His voice, when he spoke, was low, but vibrating with passion.

“I tell you I don’t know,” he said. “If you call me a liar, I’ll fetch my people to tie you, and I’ll flog you as I flogged that Illprinka man. When I say a thing I’m finished with saying it.”

“Well, then, let us pass to another subject,” Bony compromised, but with an icy gleam in his eyes. “Tell me about Miss Flora McPherson and this Doctor Whyte.”

“I know next to nothing about Whyte. Flora is my sister’s only child and she came here after my mother died. Do you want to know how much money I’ve got in the bank?”

“I wouldn’t ask you that,” Bony said, quietly. “If it were necessary for me to know, I would find out-through other channels. No, I don’t wish to know how much money you have in the bank. I would, however, like to know why you find yourself unable to be frank with me.”

“Blast you! I’m being as frank as I intend to be with a damned, interfering, half -caste detective. And now I’m going to bed.”

“Very well, then,” Bony said quickly, and McPherson made no move to retire to bed. “Tell me why you refused to launch a prosecution six years ago, against the person who forged your signature to cheques amounting to close upon three thousand pounds.”

“I refuse to say. It’s my business. It was my money. I’m going to bed.”

The squatter now stood up. Bony remained seated. His right hand went out to take the fourth cigarette of the five he had made. He found this one to have a hole in the paper and so discarded it for the last.

“I must point out that the murder of Sergeant Errey falls into a different category to those misdemeanours you name annoyances,” Bony proceeded, whilst steadily regarding the standing squatter. “By the way, Sergeant Errey’s small attache case was stolen from my swag.”

“When?” barked McPherson.

“After my arrival here, I think.”

“Rot! Who would take anything from your swag?” McPherson demanded-and sat down.

“I placed the attache case inside the swag, before Burning Water and I left the cabbage-tree camp. I made it quite secure. When I unrolled the swag in my room this evening it was not there, but all my other possessions, such small objects as shaving brush, hairbrush and comb, were exactly as I had placed them. Burning Water carried the swag down from the hills and across the plain, as I required freedom to use my pistol arm. After his people met us one of them carried it and left it propped against the rear wall of this building. Who brought it to my room, d’you know?”

“I don’t. The groom, a black, took it to the kitchen. One of the two maids would certainly take it to your room. I didn’t steal the damn thing-if it were stolen and didn’t fall from the swag.”

“I am not accusing you, my host. Its theft is not so very important, for after all I like to gather my own evidence in my own way. You mentioned that Mit-ji was an old man suspected of communicating with the Illprinka blacks. Are there any other Wantella men so suspected?”

“I’ve had my eye on a fellow named Itcheroo.”

“Ah! Perhaps it can be accounted to Itcheroo that the pilot knew of Mit-ji’s arrest, and now would know I witnessed his bombing of the car, that I retrieved a flat object belonging to Errey, and that I was here when he flew over the house this evening. I must interview this dangerous Itcheroo, and then we’ll go off to bed.”

Bonaparte had done all he could to obtain the confidence and the assistance of the man still angrily glaring at him; and now had arrived his predetermined time to break McPherson’s opposition.

“I understand that you never married,” he said. “I understand, too, that Miss McPherson is the only living relative. Your opinion of her sterling qualities is warmly supported by me. Who was the visitor here who left that extraordinarily vivid dressing-grown and the blue doeskin slippers?”

McPherson’s face became as grey as his moustache. Bony saw panic leap into his eyes, noted how the hand holding the pipe was faintly trembling. But the squatter’s voice was wonderfully controlled.

“He was a man who came up from Melbourne to write a book,” the harsh voice barked. “I tell you I’m sick of this conversation, this cross-examination. I’m going to bed.”

“In normal circumstances I would not be so persistent,” Bony said, and there was no buoyancy in his voice. “I am a man hating always to be hurried. I like to proceed with an investigation in my own plodding manner, declining assistance from anyone, resenting assistance if offered. I know this much, already. The man you say came here from Melbourne to write a book was a half-caste like me.

“In normal circumstances, I would regard the theft of Errey’s attache case from my swag as in no way annoying. But, Mr McPherson, the present circumstances are not normal. No, not when a man drops bombs from an aeroplane and flies over a house at night to dropa treacle tin containing a threatening message. Here it is.”

With his right hand Bony pressed the end of the fifth cigarette into the emu-egg ash tray, and with the left proffered the squatter the piece of paper he had found among the sand inside the treacle tin.

McPherson’s face became grey. He stared into Bony’s eyes, and automatically his right hand accepted the paper. He read aloud the message, written in a small and neat hand.

“You had better give in and retire. I am becoming impatient. If you don’t surrender I shall strike again and again, and I shall strike harder.”

The paper planed down to the surface of the table desk, and Bony picked it up and placed it inside a slim pocket-book. For twenty seconds McPherson stared at him before saying:

“You win. The aeroplane pilot is my natural son.”