The New Shoe. Arthur W. Upfield
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he was making out, and away up in Brisbane the Queensland Chief Commissioner, Colonel Spender, was demanding to know— one, what the hell did that damned Bonaparte think he was doing by mooning around Victoria and, two, why the hell did he ever agree to the seconding of his pet officer to another State.
Bony was unconscious of Time and the necessity of Results. He sat on a bench and watched old Penwarden working with cheap wood on coffins to be sent to undertakers in Melbourne. It seemed certain that the old man would live and be active for another thirty years and that Bony himself was destined to reach the century. These two ignored Time. Ever had they refused to be bustled, to be annoyed by Authority, to be daunted by Life. Bony found affinity with Penwarden, who had lived from one age into another, and refused to permit the last to erase the influences of the first.
At his third visit to the old wheelwright-cum-coffinmaker, Bony asked permission to look again upon the casket built for Mrs Tom Owen, and, permission being granted, he retired to the small annexe and lifted the cloth and stood enraptured by the loveliness of man’s handicraft. When the old man joined him, he had raised the cover and was standing a little back from it to observe how the light appeared to penetrate deep below the surface, and quietly the old man said:
“Life is a Forge. Sorrow is the Fire and Pain the Hammer. Comes Death to cool the Vessel. Like to try her out?”
Old Penwarden stood with his finger tips resting on the edge of one side panel, and, looking at him, Bony realized that he was being most specially favoured. Said the old man:
“You’d fit nicely. Take off your shoes ... might scratch.”
He saw the light gleam in Bony’s eyes, witnessed the momentary hesitation before succumbing to the invitation. Bony removed his shoes and climbed into the casket and laid himself within. He felt the curving wood caressing his spine and shoulders. He felt the rest against his neck. There was no discomfort, lying there, and he looked up into the bright blue eyes expectantly regarding him.
“I couldn’t be more comfortable in bed,” he said, and with effort made haste slowly to sit up and climb out.
“You wouldn’t like to try her with the lid down?” was the hopeful suggestion.
“Well, er ...”
The old man chuckled, and combed back his white hair with calloused fingers.
“With the lid down you wouldn’t see a blink o’ light ... not like some of the boxes I’ve seen made of pine and such like. Same with the houses they build these days.”
“Mrs Owen not had her second fitting yet?”
Old Penwarden chortled and his blue eyes were full of laughter.
“She be a frightened one that,” he said. “About your size and shape exceptin’ across the hips.” He patted the casket with his left hand, and with the cloth in his right polished out the hand-marks they had left on the cover. “Getting you to try her will have to do. You found her comfortable enough, you said. Said she fitted into the small of the back and across the shoulders. Reckon I’ll tell Owen she’ll do without the second fitting.”
“Owen has his casket, I think you mentioned,” Bony remarked and refrained from laughing.
“Too right, he has. I made his’n back in ’29. Made one for Eli Wessex and another for Eli’s old woman afore the 1914 war. Them’s of teak and they ain’t so colourful as this redgum.”
“There’s a daughter, isn’t there? Made one for her?”
“Mary Wessex! Naw. Too young she be, for one thing, and for another ... Well, you see, Mr Rawlings, sir, people have to be grow’d steady and settled, a sort of part of their surroundings. A young gal wants a glory box, not a coffin. I made Mary a glory box outa silky oak from Queensland. She was goin’ to marry a lad up Geelong way, but he went away to the war and was killed.”
“That was sad for her,” Bony interposed.
“’Twas so. Took it to heart too much and for too long. Her brother went to the war, too. Eldred Wessex didn’t come home, either. Wasn’t killed, or anything like that, mind you. Just didn’t come home after the war, but went off to Amerikee.”
The woodworker took a sight along the edge of a board. In the white-gum outside a kookaburra cackled and raised a laugh from its mate farther away. A motor on the highway laboured up the rise towards the post office. Carrying the board under an arm, the old man led the way back to the planing bench.
“You’ve heard about our murder, I suppose,” he asked, and the abrupt switch of subject caused Bony mentally to blink.
“Yes, of course.”
“Very mysterious, that was. No one about here never before set eyes on the man in the Lighthouse. Seems to have put the police well ashore, don’t it?”
“That’s so. Did you see the dead man?”
“I did. The Superintendent came along and asked me to look at him, saying as how I’ve been here so long I might know him. But I didn’t. Never seen him. No one here had ever seen him, either. Musta been brought from a distance, or might have been just a summer visitor. Pity that happened. Gives the place a bad name. Couldn’t have happened if the keepers had been there.”
“The Light was changed to automatic some thirty-odd years ago, I understand. You’ve been up to the Light, I suppose?”
“Been up it? Several times when I was younger than I am now. Mighty peculiar no one come forward to say who the dead man was. Picture in the papers an’ all. Someone must know him.”
“I suppose it’s possible he could have been killed in one of the many summer cottages in this district,” surmised Bony.
“That’s likely what happened,” agreed the old man. “But then a lot of things could have happened which for us don’t make sense.”
“What seems so extraordinary is how the victim or the murderer was able to get into the Lighthouse,” Bony murmured. “The keys are always kept in Melbourne, so the engineer said.”
Penwarden settled the board on the bench to his satisfaction and took up a plane.
“Them Lighthouse locks could be turned with skeleton keys. The padlock key to this shop door is a skeleton. I made her three years back when I lost the proper one. The Lighthouse locks ain’t nothing from the ordinary.” The plane went to work and the shavings rolled and twisted away from it to fall to the littered floor. Bony went back to the subject of rented houses.
Yes, it was quite likely that the owner of such a house could let it to a person he would never see, the arrangement being conducted through the post. This line of inquiry added to rather than subtracted from the difficulties confronting him, and in any case it had been thoroughly explored by Bolt’s team as well as the local men.
“The Lighthouse has never provided much work for people in this district, I suppose,” he said, idly regarding the grain in the wood shavings falling from the plane.
“Not since she was built,” replied the old man. They put on casual labour sometimes when the Repair Gang comes down from Melbourne. Young Dick Lake got a job there last year. Lasted a few weeks.”
“That was when the Gang made a locker from the old red lamp bay, wasn’t it?”
“That’s so.”
“So you know about that?”
“About making that locker? Yes. ’Tain’t much we don’t get to hear about. The feller that put the body in there musta known about that new locker, too.”
“It would seem certain. And was also in possession of skeleton keys.”
The worker stopped to stare at his visitor.
“That’s so,” he agreed. “Or they musta took impressions of the Lighthouse keys to have got in.”
“They! D’you think there