The Bachelors of Broken Hill. Arthur W. Upfield
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to net the poisoner.
On facts being winnowed from confusion they formed the vertebra of a common enough background.
The time of the tragedy was three-twenty, or thereabouts, on a Friday afternoon, the busiest time of the week. The shop was crowded, and the eleven assistants were all hard at it, the most experienced serving two customers at the one time. Goldspink seldom served behind the counters. He was his own shopwalker, receiving his customers as his friends, talking volubly, escorting them to the departments they needed, and seeing to their comfort if they had to wait to be served.
From three o’clock every afternoon all the assistants in turn were given the opportunity to slip away to a rear fitting-room for a cup of tea and a sandwich served by Mr Goldspink’s housekeeper. Like the farmer who believes that a well-fed horse will work harder, Mr Goldspink believed in looking after his assistants, but in addition he had long proved himself a kindly man.
On her return to the shop, one or other of the assistants would carry a cup of tea and a biscuit to Mr Goldspink, and sometimes he would invite a valued customer to join him.
Mr Goldspink this Friday afternoon was chatting with a woman choosing handkerchiefs, and he told the girl to put the tea cup on the counter as he was himself displaying handkerchiefs to the hesitant buyer, adding his persuasive powers to that of the girl actually serving.
The assistant said that the customer was seated at the counter and that her employer was standing beside the customer. She could not describe the customer save that she was elderly and a stranger. She remembered this because Mr Goldspink put several artful questions to the customer in an effort to elicit her address. Eventually the customer chose her handkerchiefs, paid cash for the purchase, and departed without the receipted docket. Mr Goldspink then had taken up the cup of lukewarm tea and drunk it. Whereupon he had turned half round to the main floor of his shop, staggered, arched his back, slumped, and collapsed.
Mrs Robinov, the housekeeper, then had taken charge. She cleared the shop, locked the street doors, and called for the doctor who had been attending Mr Goldspink for some time. The body was taken into the fitting-room and placed on the dress-makers’ table. The doctor, being aware of the condition of Mr Goldspink’s heart, had not arrived until a full hour had passed.
The cup and saucer had been washed with the other utensils.
No cyanide was found in the shop or anywhere on the premises. As Mrs Robinov was her late employer’s sole beneficiary, she reopened business the day following the funeral.
The inquest was adjourned sine die.
The affair made Detective Sergeant Bill Crome most unhappy, owing to the fact that for the first time since being promoted to senior constable he had failed to produce results.
Old Goldspink had been cyanided on 28th October. On the afternoon of 10th November the wife of a mine manager reported the theft from her home of jewellery which she valued at sixty-five pounds. Senior Detective Abbot took charge of this case.
It appeared that the woman left her house on a shopping expedition down Argent Street, locking the front door and placing the key under the porch mat. On her return she retrieved the key, entered the house, and found ‘slight’ confusion. Thereupon she discovered the loss of the trinkets she was positive she had left in an unlocked drawer of her dressing-table. A trifling case compared with murder, and yet perplexing because it was not stamped with the usual methods of any known local criminal. Abbot decided that the confusion was the result of a sudden decision to leave housework and go shopping, and that eventually the jewellery would be found by the owner, who had temporarily forgotten where she had put it. No one knows better than the experienced detective how frail is the human mind.
Frail! Crome’s word for it was ‘barmy’.
Early in December four hundred and seventeen pounds disappeared from the safe in the office of the Diggers’ Rest. There were no signs of the safe’s having been tampered with.
There were no unauthorised fingerprints on the safe. The key had never left the trousers pocket of the licensee, save when he went to bed, and it was then transferred to the pocket of his pyjamas. Drink! The licensee had been up to the hospital on the hill several times with delirium tremens.
Yes, Sergeant Crome was in no light mood as he strolled down Argent Street on the afternoon of 23rd December. The pavements were thronged with Christmas shoppers, and the street was alive with traffic flowing between the borders of parked cars, utilities, and horse buggies. Miners sagged against the veranda posts, weighted with parcels bestowed on them by their wives. Women gossiped in small parties, and their children tugged at their skirts in frantic demands for ices and toys.
Crome met and nodded to Luke Pavier, the Superintendent’s son and reporter on the staff of the Barrier Miner. He met, and did not salute because he did not know him, Jimmy the Screwsman arrayed in tussore silk and a white panama hat.
From a jeweller’s shop issued Dr John Hoadly, who was large and young and damnably energetic.
“Day, Bill! Nothing to do?”
Sergeant Crome widened his mouth, pushed his felt hat to the back of his head, and then drew it forward to ride on an even keel.
“You’d be astonished at the work I get through while you squander your ill-gotten fees. How’s the wife and the baby?”
“Fine, Bill, fine. Just bought her an opal pendant and the kid a gold christening cup. Be up the pole this Christmas, with the wife in hospital, but it’ll be worth it. The boy’s a beaut.”
“Naming him?”
“John. Wife insists.”
The doctor’s happiness lightened Crome’s mood, and the sergeant smiled. “Nice work, Jack, but don’t be a mug,” he added seriously. “Make sure little John has a mate. An only child is a lost soul—I know ”
A slight man wearing a white drill tunic and black trousers appeared, grasped the doctor by the arm, and regarded Sergeant Crome with black eyes tinted with indignation. He shouted:
“A customair! In my cafee! He stand, he bend back ovair one of my tables. He fall and breakit da table—smashoh. I go to him. I ask him ‘What the hell?’ He say nothing, nothing at all. He is dead.”
“Your job, Doctor,” Crome said.
Dr Hoadly nodded. With the little Italian’s hand still clutching his arm as though to be sure he would not run away, they entered the café, which was next to the jeweller’s establishment.
The café was narrow and deep. People were standing with the startled irresoluteness of kangaroos warned of danger by one of their sentinels. Between the groups, like a ship steering between the islands of the Barrier Reef, the café proprietor led the doctor, Crome coming up astern.
An elderly man lay upon the wreckage of a table. The face was stained faintly blue. The dilated eyes tended to turn inward, and the bared teeth were irregular and tobacco-stained. Crome knew him—a retired miner living with his niece and her husband in South Broken Hill.
The customers were leaving the café, the sensation over and the prospect of being tabbed as witnesses enlarging. Crome was not particularly interested in them. Heat apoplexy. Many of these old chaps could not stand what in their youth they ignored. Old Alf Parsons was for it. Good way to go out—like a light.
The doctor made a superficial examination, and then crouched low and sniffed at the dead man’s mouth. On rising to his feet, he dusted his trousers and wiped his hands with a handkerchief. He told the distracted Italian he would send for the ambulance, and Crome he drew aside and whispered:
“I’m not stating he died of cyanide, Bill, but I’m thinking he did.”
Crome grabbed Favalora, the café proprietor. “Where was he sitting?” he snarled.
There was cyanide in the dead man’s tea cup, which Crome presented to the analyst.
Crome kept on his feet for sixty hours. Asking questions,