The Bachelors of Broken Hill. Arthur W. Upfield
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says that Parsons—he didn’t know him—asked for tea and sandwiches, and that he took his time over the meal, reading a Digest. He was still there when Rogers left, and Rogers says he thinks that then Parsons had eaten the sandwiches and had drunk one cup of tea.
“The tale is taken up by the waitress, a fool of a girl. She says there was quite a rush of customers at the time. She remembered Rogers, and she knew Parsons, who often went there on a Friday afternoon. When Rogers left, a woman took his place and ordered tea and cakes. The woman left when Parsons was still reading his magazine, and a second woman took her place opposite Parsons. This second woman was there when Parsons drank his remaining tea, pulled a face, got up, and muttered something. She didn’t take much interest in him, and the next time she saw him he was lying over the wreckage of a table—dead.”
“The name of the second woman?”
“We don’t know.”
“Don’t know!” echoed Bony. “But you inferred you obtained a statement from her.”
“The statement is unsigned and undated. It was posted at the GPO some time between nine and one the next morning.”
“Your theory?”
“That on seeing Parsons sprawled across the table she remained in the café to see what would happen, like many other curious people. She saw the proprietor rush out, and she saw the doctor and me come in. When she knew that Parsons was dead, she slipped away, determined not to be mixed up in the affair. Surprisin’, the number of people who shy away from having to go into a witness box. Anyway, either her conscience persuaded her to write the statement or a husband or someone did. We advertised for her, but she never came forward like Rogers did.”
“The woman who took Rogers’s place—did she contact you or you her?”
Crome shook his head.
Bony made a note and Crome gnawed his lip.
“No motive suggests itself for this second murder?”
“Not one—only lunacy, and that’s not a motive,” replied Crome. “There was cyanide in Parsons’s cup. I did have the intelligence to grab the cup. I should have—Oh, what’s the bloody use?”
“‘It is folly to shiver over last year’s snow,’ as Whately or someone wrote,” Bony stated with conviction. “You searched the café for traces of cyanide?”
“After me and Abbot finished with it you’d not recognise it for a café,” answered the sergeant. “Not a trace. We looked for cyanide in and under and on the roof of the house where Parsons lived with his niece and her husband. Nothing. There was no discord in that home. Parsons hadn’t any enemies. Never got a lead. Never got a lead in the Goldspink case, either.”
“Ideas?”
“One. Lunatic going round dropping a pinch of cyanide into tea-cups. There’s only one common denominator in the two cases. Both men were bachelors. Makes the set-up all the more screwy.”
“Makes it a little less ‘screwy’,” argued Bony. “There’s another common denominator. Both men were elderly. They weren’t friends, I suppose?”
“No. And they weren’t related or belonged to the same club. One was a Jew, the other a Gentile. One was poor, the other rich. One had been a miner, the other a shop-keeper. They had nothing in common excepting age and single blessedness. There’s no sense, reason, no anything.”
“Do we get a cup of tea in this place?”
“Eh!” The expression of bewilderment on Crome’s face caused Bony to chuckle. “Tea! Yes. The girl brings it round.”
“If by a quarter to four we are not supplied with refreshment, Crome, we go out to a café. Without morning and afternoon tea, the civil servant cannot be civil. When a civil servant snarls at me, I say, silently, of course: ‘What, no tea?’”
Crome stuffed tobacco into his pipe as though plugging a hole in a ship, and Bony went on softly:
“Homicide is a common occurrence in any community, and we grow weary of stepping from the corpse to the murderer and showing him the utterly childish fool he is. But sometimes, and rarely, we are presented with a murder committed by an artist, and then all boredom created by the fool amateur is vanquished. It is so with this murderer of yours who pops a pinch of cyanide into a tea-cup. Why, we don’t know. When we do know, we shall have to return to our amateurs who couldn’t leave more clues if they sat up all night for a week thinking them out. Surely this is an occasion for rejoicing. Have you ever met an artist in murder before? ... No? Now that you most certainly will, you should be happy. I am.”
Crome put his pipe on his desk. His face grew slowly purple. He muttered the great Australian expletive “Cripes!” and broke into a roar of laughter.
The Superintendent’s secretary came in with a tray, and Bony rose to accept his cup of tea with a smile.
“Thank you. Miss Ball, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
The girl smiled at him shyly.
“The tea and biscuits will cost you two shillings a week, sir,” she told Bony. “We can just manage on that.”
“It’s worth two pounds a week, Miss Ball,” averred Bony, producing his contribution. “And we should all shell out every month for a present for you.”
“Thank you, sir. I like to prepare the tea, but I’m only allowed to do it because Miss Lodding is away on sick leave.”
The girl departed, and Bony dunked his biscuit. Crome said:
“The Lodding woman is the Super’s secretary. Face like a stomach ache.”
Chapter Four
Jimmy Nimmo’s Worries
Jimmy was still youthful, still casual about unimportant things, and a sportsman born with zest for the Game of Life, staking liberty against the jackpot and, having learned to respect his opponents, he seldom lost.
It was known officially that he never carried a weapon and never attempted violence when—rarely—he was cornered. It was also known officially, but never openly admitted, that Jimmy sometimes rendered valuable assistance to the police engaged with a major crime.
The amount of ‘dough’ he extracted from the Sydney bookmaker’s flat was much greater than he had anticipated, but that had not been a factor in his choice of Broken Hill for a holiday. Like many thousands living in Australia’s coastal cities, Jimmy had imagined Broken Hill to be a mullock dump far beyond a deceitful mirage, and actual contact with this city gave pleasurable surprise.
He found that lots of people in Broken Hill had lots of dough. He found, too, that the people of Broken Hill were extremely easy-going, generous, and affable. Strangely enough, they didn’t seem to value dough. Wonderful place! Jimmy had plenty of dough, too, but he couldn’t resist gathering a little more—without troubling to earn it in the bowels of the broken hill.
Now he was regretting it, for of a certainty Inspector Bonaparte would hear about those three jobs he had pulled and not possibly fail to stamp each one with the name of Nimmo. It was just stinking bad luck to run into him like that on Argent Street. He should have known that an ace detective would take up where that blasted Stillman left off, and that after two murders done the same way, Broken Hill was much too ‘hot’—and nothing to do with the temperature.
To make matters still worse for a self-respecting burglar, this Napoleon Bonaparte was so damned unpredictable. He didn’t tick like the common or garden flatfoot trained in a police school and taped by regulations and what not. There was that time during the war when he was living in Adelaide and had put through two slick jobs, and this Bonaparte bloke had come to his lodgings and said he knew all about those two jobs and suggested making a trilogy of it. The third job had netted a measly bundle of letters, but those letters had put two men and a woman