The Devil's Steps. Arthur W. Upfield
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are just——Ah!”
Into the reception hall stepped Constable Rice. He was not a large man, but he looked efficient. He was wearing ordinary clothes. The visitor for Mr. Grumman, observed Miss Jade looking beyond him, turned about to face the constable, and Rice looked his astonishment.
“Why!” he said. “I do believe it’s our old friend, Marcus! Marcus without his little black moustache, too! No, you don’t, Marcus!”
Rice flashed into a crouch and then leapt forward. He was actually off the floor when they heard a distinct “florp” sound. Miss Jade could see the weapon in the visitor’s right hand, a weapon having a long and ugly nozzle—a silencer. The velocity of the policeman’s body carried it to the place where the visitor had been standing, but he leapt aside, and Rice fell to the floor, an inert and sprawling figure.
He lay quite still. The visitor turned round to face Bisker and Miss Jade. His eyes were twin coals of flame, a dull scarlet behind black. Miss Jade opened her mouth to scream but the sound that issued from it was merely a long-caught sob.
Bisker stood with his hands doubled into his hips, his eyes little points of livid grey. The visitor backed slowly to the main entrance, stood there for what seemed a long time, then vanished beyond the door he slammed shut. Neither Bisker nor Miss Jade made the smallest movement. They heard the sound of a car being driven swiftly down the drive to the highway. Then Miss Jade slumped to the carpeted floor.
To Bisker it seemed that his own voice came to him from at least a hundred feet distant. He was on his knees when he heard it saying:
“Now, now, Mr. Rice! You hurt bad?”
He turned over the body of the constable, and then ceased further movement whilst he gazed down at the small round hole in the centre of the policeman’s forehead, and at the thin trickle of blood oozing from it.
“The dirty rat!” he said slowly.
Then he was on his feet and running to the closed front door. He swung it open and dashed outside, ran for a short distance over the bitumened space, then pulled up and said again:
“The dirty rat!”
On returning to the reception hall, he discovered Miss Jade on her hands and knees, and because her hair was all awry he had the impulse to laugh at her. Instead, he bent over and hauled her to her feet, and half dragged her into the office, where he put her in her own most comfortable chair.
“Leave it all to me,” he ordered, and was astounded by the timbre of his own voice.
He walked to the office door with the intention of closing and locking the door between the reception hall and the short passage leading to the lounge. Then he had his second brilliant “brain-wave” of that morning. He went back to Miss Jade’s desk and pressed the electric button summoning George.
Bisker was standing at the door between hall and passage when George appeared.
“Bring a bottle of whisky and glasses for two and a siphon of soda-water,” he ordered.
George was on the point of questioning this order when Bisker partly stood aside to give George a view of the dead policeman.
“Get that whisky quick,” Bisker snarled, and George almost ran to obey. When he returned, Bisker let him into the hall and locked the door. He took the tray from George.
“Bolt the front door—go on—quick.”
In the office he found Miss Jade still slumped into her chair. She looked up at him, her black eyes wide and unwinking. She opened her mouth to scream, and Bisker said:
“Keep your trap shut, marm.”
He poured whisky into a glass, added a splash of soda-water and offered it to Miss Jade, who continued to regard him with a fixed stare.
“Take a holt of yerself, marm. Come on—drink ’er up.”
“Bisker!” she cried. “Is Mr. Rice dead?”
“As mutton, marm,” replied Bisker.
Miss Jade noted the remarkable metamorphosis in Bisker, Bisker the retiring, apologetic, shuffling Bisker, and she thought it even more strange that she liked him and experienced a feeling of comfort—of all feelings she might be expected not to be expecting. Her arms slid outward over the desk and her head fell forward to rest upon them as she burst into a fit of weeping.
Even as she wept she heard the gurgle of liquid pouring into a glass. She did not observe Bisker fill a glass to the brim and drink it without more than one swallow. She heard the siphon sizzle when Bisker half filled his glass with soda-water for a “chaser.” Then she heard him at the telephone calling for Police Headquarters, Melbourne.
Her weeping ceased as abruptly as it had begun. She moved her body upwards. Bisker was sprawling over the desk speaking into the receiver, describing what had happened. She felt inexpressibly tired. Almost mechanically, she picked up the drink Bisker had poured for her and began to take quick sips from the glass. Behind Bisker stood George and she thought how extraordinary it was that George appeared calm and self-possessed.
Presently Bisker replaced the telephone.
“A patrol car in an outer suburb nearest to us will be here in twenty minutes,” he told her. “I’m to keep everyone out until they arrive. You had better go and see that the guests don’t wake up to what’s happened.”
“I—I——” began Miss Jade, when Bisker cut her short. It was necessary, in order to execute a little plan he had thought of, to get rid of Miss Jade and George.
“George!” he snapped. “Help me to take Miss Jade outer here.”
They had almost to carry Miss Jade from the office and across the reception hall, past the sprawling figure on the floor. At the passage door Bisker glared into George’s eyes and snarled:
“Take Miss Jade away to her room, anywhere. And keep your own trap shut, too. Get me?”
George nodded. Bisker unlocked the door, and George assisted his employer out into the short passage. After that Bisker shut and re-locked that door. He ambled back into the office, where he put the siphon behind a lounge chair, the glasses into a desk drawer and the three-parts-full bottle of whisky into his hip pocket. Then he passed out of the office, crossed to the main door, unbolted that, passed outside and re-closed the door, and stood hesitant on the iron foot-grid before the front step of the porch.
Would he have time to take the bottle of whisky to his hut and there conceal it under his mattress? Hardly. There was, too, the chance that someone might see him, and the police might hear of it and want to know why.
Either side of the front door there grew an ornamental shrub in a large tub. Bisker selected the tub on the left side of the door. The earth was friable. He scooped a small and deep hole straight down so that the bottle would not lie longwise with the danger of its precious contents seeping out from the glass-stoppered cork. Down went the bottle into the hole. Bisker covered it in, having to place only three inches of earth above the stopper. That done, he sat on the edge of the tub and produced his tobacco plug, knife, pipe and matches and began to slice wafers from the plug.
The second wafer was cut when round the corner of the building appeared Mr. Napoleon Bonaparte.
“Ah! Bisker! Did you call the local policeman?” Bony enquired.
“I did, Mr. Bonaparte. He’s here—inside.”
“Indeed! What is keeping him?”
Bonaparte’s blue eyes regarded Bisker with a penetrating stare.
“You just didn’t happen to see the car what come up the drive and then went down the drive a few minutes ago, did you?” Bisker asked.
“I did. What of it?”
“Didn’t note the number, I suppose, Mr. Bonaparte?”
“No, I wasn’t near the drive. Why?”