Bony - 11 - An Author Bites the Dust

by Arthur W. Upfield

  Miss Pinkney was finding life most interesting. Indeed, she had found it so the moment she learnt that Mr Mervyn Blake had rented the property beyond her own. Thereafter her sedate and somewhat bucolic life was enlivened by inter­est piled upon interest in the visits to the Blakes of famous authors, artists, and radio personalities.

  Then came the discovery of Mervyn Blake dead in his writing-room at the bottom of his garden, the building just beyond Miss Pinkney’s back fence. For days the police were all over the place. They even raised their heads above the division fence and stared at Miss Pinkney when the hem of her skirt was pinned to her waist and she was wearing old shoes and gardening gloves, being then engaged with her vegetables.

  She had wanted to pay a call on the poor little widow, but she felt that it would not be appreciated by a woman who had never given the faintest sign of neighbourliness. And the peculiar thing about the matter was that it seemed the coroner could not make up his mind what Mr Blake had died of.

  That was weeks ago, and then, just when life threatened to become once more bucolic, that nice Constable Simes had stopped her in the street and told her he would be much easier in his mind if she got someone to live with her, since there was a positive crime wave in Melbourne. She had told Constable Simes that she hadn’t a relation or a friend who could possibly come and live with her, and at that the dear constable promised he would find a boarder for her, someone quiet and genteel.

  The very next day he had called to tell her he had found just the ideal gentleman he had had in mind, and she had consented to accept this paying guest. Now he was due to arrive and she and her house were dressed in their best. But wait!

  Where was Mr Pickwick? She had actually forgotten to change Mr Pickwick’s collar. What a mercy she had remem­bered it in time. She flew to the kitchen, then out to the back garden crying, “Mr Pickwick! Dear Mr Pickwick! Where are you?”

  An enormous all-black cat emerged from the shadow cast by a camellia bush and followed Miss Pinkney to the house. There she removed a stained blue silk collar looking much like an early Victorian garter, and placed about Mr Pick­wick’s neck a similar item of orange. It was then that someone knocked upon the front door.

  Uttering a little cry Miss Pinkney rushed to the mirror hanging behind the kitchen door, patted her hair and the collar of her old-fashioned bodice, and fluttered along the passage to the hall and the front door.

  “Miss Pinkney?” inquired the caller.

  “Yes! Oh yes! You are—”

  “Napoleon Bonaparte. Constable Simes has told me about you and that you are willing to give me a haven of rest and peace for a week or two.”

  “Yes, that’s right, Mr Bonaparte,” she hastened to assure him. “Oh, I see you’ve brought your luggage. Will you bring it in? I’m so sorry I haven’t a domestic—please do come in.”

  Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte had removed his hat and now smiled upward at Miss Pinkney who was stand­ing on the topmost of the three steps to the veranda. He saw a slim woman dressed in grey, her hair greying, her small face coloured by excitement, her prominent grey eyes bright and warm.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll get my case. What a charming house you have. What a beautiful garden. Oh!”

  The enormous cat appeared beside Miss Pinkney’s brown house shoes.

  “This, Mr Bonaparte, is my Mr Pickwick,” announced Miss Pinkney.

  The cat marched down the steps, tail erect, great golden eyes examining the stranger. Bony stooped and stroked the animal and Mr Pickwick purred.

  “You adore cats, I can see,” Miss Pinkney cried happily.

  The paying guest admitted that he adored cats, and when he turned and walked to the gate for his case Mr Pickwick waddled after him. He waddled behind Bony on the return journey to the front veranda.

  “Please come in,” Miss Pinkney cried. “I’ll show you to your room. Yes, do come in. It’s so warm out in the sun today.”

  She preceded her guest into the hall, on the panelled walls of which hung three large pictures in oils of sailing ships. Bony’s gaze passed from them to the ship’s oil lamp sus­pended from a bracket fixed to the wall near the opposite door. Miss Pinkney halted beside a door on the right, and she smiled at him and gave a little bow of invitation for him to enter.

  Murmuring his thanks, he went in. The walls were of wood stained mahogany. The bed was a ship’s bunk, broad and long and inviting. Above the bunk was a ship’s brass port, the inside painted bright blue to resemble the sky. The floor was polished and unspoilt by coverings. A large table and two easy chairs, an open-fronted case filled with books, a standard lamp and a brass spittoon completed the furni­ture. Bright cretonne curtains ornamented the casement windows.

  Bony put down his case and dropped his hat upon the table. He turned then to see Miss Pinkney still standing just outside the door. She was looking at him anxiously, her hands clasped and stilled against her flat breast.

  He said, “I like this room—very, very much.”

  The anxiety vanished, and the words came tumbling.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you like your room, Mr Bonaparte,” she cried. “It used to be my brother’s room, you see. He loved it. He was a sailor, you know. He commanded ships. We were very happy here at Yarrabo, though he missed the sea after he retired. Poor man, he died four years ago. If you wish, I will show you the bathroom and the dining-room and the lounge. Then I’ll serve you with afternoon tea. Do you like afternoon tea?”

  His deep blue eyes beamed at her and he gave her a hint of a bow, saying, “Madam. I like tea at any hour of the day and of the night.”

  The dining-room contained additional evidence of the departed sea captain, but the lounge belonged entirely to Miss Pinkney. The floor was covered by a white and gold Chinese carpet. Books rested everywhere. Framed photo­graphs on the mantelpiece flanked the enlarged portrait of a vitriolic-looking man in the summer uniform of a captain in the mercantile marine. It was a woman’s room with its cut flowers, its soft divan, and inviting pouffes.

  Mr Pickwick came in and parked on the hearth rug. Miss Pinkney entered trundling a tea wagon, and Bony rose to assist her. Fifty and lonely, celibacy had not soured her. He had expected to meet an eccentric woman who lived alone with her cat, and he was feeling the warmth of a mind that life had never defeated. She was as excited as a child of twelve, and she made no attempt to conceal the pleasure his advent gave.

  The cat advanced to his feet, and he put down the fragile blue and white cup and saucer on the trolley that he might stroke Mr Pickwick. Mr Pickwick loudly purred and rubbed himself against Bony’s elegantly trousered leg, and Bony said, “Mr Pickwick, you have that which few cats possess—personality.”

  “Mr Pickwick is a character reader,” averred Miss Pinkney. “He likes you. You are doubly welcome, for the liking is dual. Please don’t think Mr Pickwick takes to everyone. Oh dear, no.” She spoke directly to the cat, saying, “Now Mr Pickwick, show Mr Bonaparte how to play ping-pong.”

  She moved her arm like a baseball thrower and the cat walked sedately from the room. Bony observed that he was expected to be silent. Miss Pinkney sipped her tea and smiled. In came Mr Pickwick, walking with the appearance of having no weight. He stared up at Miss Pinkney, and she deliberately looked out through the window.

  Whereupon the cat, finding no encouragement in that quarter, approached Bony and placed on the carpet at his feet the ping-pong ball it had been carrying in its mouth. What he was expected to do was plain to Bony, and he did it Mr Pickwick flew after the ball Bony rolled towards the door. He punched the ball into the passage beyond and there skidded and bucked and punched the ball about the bare and polished floor, watched by the admiring Bony and the proud Miss Pinkney. That the ball was a little “dead” Bony attributed to the repeated assaults upon it by claws and mouth.

  “I taught Mr Pickwick to fetch and carry when he was quite young,” remarked Miss Pinkney. “Another cup of tea? He just loves to play with a ball or a litt
le wad of paper. You’ve made him accept you as his friend. Ah, here he comes!”

  Again Mr Pickwick did his act and Bony picked up the ball. His finger-tips told him that the ball was firm and hard, but his mind was occupied with the expression of simple delight registered on his hostess’s unadorned face. The cat disappeared after the ball, and Miss Pinkney rose and left the room without explanation.

  Ah! Bony leaned back in his chair and sipped his tea, sipped it from fragile china far removed from a tin panni­kin. Comfort! Comfort surrounded him, solid and real, and no man was better able to appreciate comfort than he who but recently had come back from the interior, where he had been investigating a disappearance. Mr Pickwick again entered the room and this time laid himself down beside the ball, flanks working like bellows, mouth wide open. Miss Pinkney returned, in her hands a silver cigarette-case and a silver lighter.

  “I like a cigarette sometimes,” she said, and then giggled. “The sometimes is as often as the ration will allow. Please offer me one.”

  On his feet, Bony opened her case. She took one and insisted that he should do likewise. Then he needs must take her lighter and find that it would not work, and whilst he held a lighted match in service, she said it was a shame that in these days the garage people didn’t know their business.

  “I have been visualizing a stern lady who would denounce tobacco and forbid me smoking in the house,” he told her, smiling.

  “My dear Mr Bonaparte, you may smoke when and where you like,” she said. “I’d hate to think of you lying with your head in a cold fire-place and smoking up the chimney. I am glad you smoke. My brother used to say, ‘Never trust a man who doesn’t smoke or drink or swear when he hits his thumb with a hammer’. Mr Pickwick distrusts them, too. He hated Mr Wilcannia-Smythe when he was staying next door at the time Mr Blake died. I’ve seen him lying on top of the division fence and hissing at Mr Wilcannia-Smythe. Afterwards, someone told me that Mr Wilcannia-Smythe neither smoked nor drank. And, I assume, never used an inaccurate adjective.”

  “What was Mr Pickwick’s attitude towards Mr and Mrs Blake?” Bony asked.

  “Mr Pickwick hated Mr Blake,” replied Miss Pinkney. “Mr Blake would sometimes throw a stone at Mr Pickwick if Mr Pickwick happened to be in his garden. Once I saw him do it, and I remonstrated with him. He was very rude to me.” Miss Pinkney smiled. “I’m afraid I spoke to him somewhat after the fashion of my brother!”

  “H’m! Did you sec much of Mrs Blake?”

  “Very little. I used to see her on occasions playing ping-pong. They have a table on the back veranda. We can see it from the fence. They must have lost a ball when playing, because Mr Pickwick brought one in from their garden. He will wander at night, although why I don’t know, because I had him doctored and he’s quite, quite happy about it.”

  “I read of the affair in the Melbourne papers,” Bony murmured. “About the sudden death of Mr Mervyn Blake. There was a house full of guests, I understand.”

  “Oh yes, there was a house party for a week before Mr Blake died,” Miss Pinkney said. “Several well known people, you know. The Blakes often had writers and personalities staying with them. But they wouldn’t associate with anyone in the district. Er—well, you know what I mean.”

  Bony was not sure that he did know. He said, “It was most peculiar Mr Blake dying so suddenly. I wonder if he was tired of life?”

  “Not a bit of it,” Miss Pinkney cheerfully stated. “No man who drinks like he did would think of ending his life. He was so well known. Someone told me that if he con­demned a book the book was a certain failure, and it would be a success if he praised it. Oh no, there was no reason for him to commit suicide. Someone hated him enough to murder him. This evening, when it’s cool, I’ll take you into the garden and show you the little building where he died.”

  Chapter Three

  The People Next Door

  HAVING eaten an excellent dinner, Bony was in the proper frame of mind to appreciate the view from the front veranda of Rose Cottage, Yarrabo, in the State of Victoria.

  Before the flower-embowered house passed a main high­way to the city from the vast timber country of Gippsland. Beyond the road, beyond the narrow valley, the trees marched up the steep slopes of Donna Buang. There were no clouds beheading the mountain this summer’s evening, and the setting sun was painting the escarpments with deep pink which, even as he watched, was turning into cloudy purple.

  Seated in luxurious ease, completely satisfied with the accommodation found for him by Constable Simes, and con­fronted by a puzzle promising to tax his intelligence, Bony felt calmly happy.

  The Blakes had certainly chosen wisely when they pur­chased the property next door and called it “Eureka”. Old Captain Pinkney had also been wise, though his main objec­tive in retiring to Yarrabo was to put the sea away from him that his heart might not pine overmuch for it.

  It is a far cry from the inland plains and 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.