An Author Bites the Dust. Arthur W. Upfield
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mulga forests and gibber flats, swooning in the grip of the relentless sun, to the Valley of the Yarra, bright green and luscious and temperate even in January. The sun was setting to end this third day of the month, and deep in his most comfortable chair, Napoleon Bonaparte relaxed both his mind and his body.
For him it was another busman’s holiday, and the cause of it Superintendent Bolt of the Victorian C.I.B. Bolt had written suggesting that the death of Mervyn Blake fell under circumstances sure to interest Inspector Bonaparte. The letter was waiting for Bony at his home on his return from the far west of Queensland, and the writer of it became extremely unpopular. Bony’s chief wanted him to sally forth on another Inland case, and his wife wanted him to take his month’s accumulated leave and herself to a South Coast ocean resort. Bolt had won—with the official summary of the investigation.
Subsequently he said to Bony, who was seated before his huge desk, “This Blake bird was fifty-six, but he was tough. He drank heavily between bouts of complete sobriety, and he suffered slightly from gastric ulcers, but the post mortem revealed no reason why he died. Take the case history with you, and thank you for coming down.”
“Give me your private opinion,” Bony requested, and Bolt said, “I won’t bet any way—natural causes, suicide, murder—I’ve just got a funny little feeling that Blake was laid out. We can’t discover any likely motive for suicide, or any motive for murder. I don’t believe he died from natural causes just because the pathologists and the toxicologists can’t find any unnatural causes sufficiently severe to have killed him. My crowd are all flat out on a series of gang murders, and I thought of you and decided that this Blake business might be right up your alley. As I just said, I’m pleased you consented to come and take hold of it because I don’t want it to grow cold.”
It was cold enough in all conscience. Blake had died on 10th November and now it was 3rd January. The Coroner’s verdict was an open one, and the dramatis personae had scattered: one to England, another to Adelaide, the third to Sydney, the others being domiciled in Victoria. Cold and dead as the author-critic, the case was all Bony’s.
His decision to “look into it” had been taken entirely on Bolt’s recommendation. From the summary of the investigation he had formed no opinion, and study of the huge official file he intended leaving until after he retired to that most attractive bedroom.
So here he was a thousand miles or so from his own stamping grounds, seated at ease a few yards from a main highway instead of a winding camel pad, living in a country of flowing water and green verdure instead of flowing sand and brick-red, sun-baked earth. Oh yes, a detective’s life did have an occasional bright patch in it. And in this case the particular bright patch was Miss Priscilla Pinkney. She came and sat with him.
“I do hope, Mr Bonaparte, that you won’t be disturbed by the timber trucks,” she said. “My brother used at first to complain bitterly about the—the damn noise beginning too early in the morning. Just listen to that one coming up the hill.”
His mind a little shocked by the adjective, which was so foreign to his acceptance of Miss Pinkney’s personality, Bony did as requested. The road to the city began to rise just before it entered the scattered township of Yarrabo, and the driver of the approaching wagon loaded with one huge log had been quickly compelled to change to a lower gear. The engine was labouring with a steady roar, and presently they watched the vehicle pass the gateway in Miss Pinkney’s cypress hedge. A similar vehicle was coming the other way, fast and loadless. As it came speeding down the long hill its exhaust issued a succession of loud reports similar to those made by a battery of light guns.
“I expect I shall become used to it,” Bony told his hostess. “I sleep soundly.”
“We all get used to it in time, Mr Bonaparte, but a visitor at first finds it annoying.” Miss Pinkney gave a silk-clad leg a smart slap. “The traffic begins about five in the morning and it continues all through the day until about nine. It is astonishing the number of logs that pass every day.”
“Do they bring them from very far?”
“From up in those mountains, in frightful places,” she replied. “You should go up one day in an empty truck and return with it on its way to a mill. How on earth they ever get the logs to the loading stages I don’t know. Oh my! The mosquitoes are beginning. They do bite me so. Do they attack you?”
“They do,” admitted Bony, rubbing an ankle. “Will you not show me your garden?”
“Of course. I’ll call Mr Pickwick. He dearly loves to walk in the garden in the cool of the evening.”
She left him to go into the house, and he stepped down from the veranda and strolled to the front gate, there to gaze up and down the broad highway at the few shops and scattered houses. Then he heard her voice again in front of the house.
“Now come along, Mr Pickwick,” she was saying, as though talking to a small boy. “I won’t have you pretending you are too tired to take a walk. It’ll do you good. If I carry you everywhere you won’t have any legs to walk with.”
Mr Pickwick had gone on strike. He was lying on the veranda as though trying to reach the veranda roof with his paws. His slave gave him up and joined her guest.
Together they admired the roses and the many choice gladioli, pausing here and there whilst Miss Pinkney discoursed upon them and her flowering shrubs. Eventually they came to the vegetable garden at the rear of the house, and it was here that Mr Pickwick joined them, arriving at top speed and ending up in a plum-tree.
“You don’t tend all this garden yourself, do you?” Bony inquired, his brows fractionally raised.
“I do all the planting and most of the hoeing,” he was informed. “I have a man who comes in now and then to dig and trim and cut wood for me. He typifies the new generation.”
“Indeed! In what way?”
“In giving as little as he can for as much as he can get. My brother, however, used to manage him very well by setting him a good example. My brother used to work very hard. Perhaps if he hadn’t worked so hard he would be alive today. Thrombosis claimed him, poor man. You would have liked him. So downright in his opinions. So—so forceful in his language. Let’s go on and I’ll show you the place next door. Mrs Blake has been away for ten days and her cook, I think, has gone to the pictures at Warburton.”
Miss Pinkney led the way along the narrow cinder path separating the beds of peas and carrots and parsnips and greens of all kinds. They skirted the rows of currant and gooseberry bushes and entered the early shadows cast by the line of lilac-trees masking the rear fence. This fence was built of narrow boards and was six feet high. Here and there a board was loose, and a coat of paint was indicated.
It was comparatively dark beneath the lilac-trees, for the sun had set and the mountain rose jet-black against the indigo blue of the evening sky. Miss Pinkney tittered. She tiptoed to the fence, against which lay a banana case. Mr Pickwick caught up with them and sprang to the top of the fence. In a thrilling whisper, Miss Pinkney invited Bony to stand on the case and look over the fence.
The branches of the lilac-trees reached out into the Blake’s garden, and the fence was therefore almost invisible to anyone near either Miss Pinkney’s house or that next door. As Miss Pinkney had said that Mrs Blake was away and her cook had gone to the pictures, he wondered at her cautious approach to the fence and her plea to him to be cautious.
Beyond the fence, distant about twenty-five feet and slightly to his right, stood a cream-painted, weatherboard building of about twenty feet by fifteen. The door he could not see, and on that side towards the house there was a large window having a single pane of glass.
The house he could plainly see. It fronted the side road off the highway and its back faced to the east and the mountain. Of the usual bungalow type, it contained, he estimated, ten or twelve rooms. The rear side was protected by a spacious veranda, and on the veranda he could see several lounge chairs and the white net spanning a ping-pong table. A man was sitting low in one of the chairs.
Bony stepped down from the case.
“Quite