“Bessie is very wide awake, Nat.” Rosalie started to play ‘My Wild Irish Rose’ saying: “Now we will work hard, if you please.”
For once in his career, Bony had to curb his questioning. This charming Irish girl was no love-lorn maiden ready to confess her thoughts and longings to any sympathetic listener, and apart from the sense of family loyalties, she was unusually self-dependent. As far as she was concerned, having gained his cooperation in delivering the letter to Bessie O’Grady was sufficient.
This was how she thought at that first music lesson. It required many such interludes from teaching children and digging spuds, before he could extract from her the story of Eric Torby alias Hillier. Eventually she came more than half way to meet him and he was able to retain his pose of the sympathetic listener.
Torby had appeared one afternoon in mid-December. Together with a man named O’Halloran and Mike Conway, he had passed the school while she was giving the children physical exercise. He had stopped in the roadway, raised his hat to her and called a cheery greeting to the children.
At dinner that night and subsequently, he had occupied the place now taken by Bony. He had been interested in the school, and his knowledge of the curriculum and the classifications supported his claim to be a teacher. He was spending the summer vacation, as on previous holidays, on a walking tour, the main objective being to further his geological studies.
The man O’Halloran had found him eastward of the waterfall, and he said he had entered the valley from that direction the previous day. Answering their questions as to how he had descended from the rim, he had said he was an experienced mountaineer, but he didn’t need to call on his experience to assist him although the descent needed careful negotiation.
Mike Conway invited him to stay on a few days, and he had been given the ‘spare room’—Bony’s underground room. It appeared that Torby’s liberty was in no way curtailed, for he had wandered about the settlement, had prospected the river as far as Kelly’s house, and had visited the schoolhouse where Rosalie had been giving music lessons to a most promising pupil. On one of these visits he had seen among the books on the library shelf a volume of reminiscences written by some very early pioneers at the invitation of the governor of the time, and this volume he had borrowed to read in his room. In this book Rosalie had found his message.
Having been at the settlement six days, Torby departed without telling her he was returning to the city. He had been offered a lift as far as Wollongong. Mike told her at dinner that day, and the following day one of the children had returned the borrowed book to the school.
Rosalie admitted that she was piqued because Hillier hadn’t said goodbye before he left. Two days before Christmas, at dinner, Mike Conway had produced and read a letter which he said was written by Hillier, thanking them all for their hospitality, and that the writer had given his address at some street in Rydalmere, Sydney. A few days after Christmas, Rosalie had written to him, hoping to begin a correspondence, and had received no reply.
Finding Hillier’s note in the borrowed book gave Rosalie grounds for several surprises. Here he gave his address as No. 10 Evian Street, Rose Bay. Here he admitted warm regard for her, and his intention of coming back to Cork Valley. Now suspicion arose that Mate Conway had stopped her letter to Eric Hillier.
All this she admitted to Bony, admissions before he could begin his very careful cross-examination, and the following transpired over the course of several music lessons.
“Do you remember the date that Hillier returned to Wollongong?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” Rosalie replied, as though to forget such a date was impossible. “It was December 20.”
On December 21 the body of Eric Torby had been found on the road to Bowral.
“Would you allow me to read the message he wrote in the book?”
“I don’t know, Nat,” she answered hesitantly. “Yes, if you want to.”
“You could let me borrow the book.”
“I tore out the leaf. I keep it in my keep-sake box in my room.”
Soundlessly, Bony sighed. He said: “It doesn’t matter. When did you read it last? Every night, I suppose.”
“No, it was several nights ago. I know every word by heart.”
“You say that Mike told you all at dinner that Hillier took the opportunity of a lift to Wollongong. By who?”
“I couldn’t say. I don’t know.”
“But it wasn’t Mike Conway?” pressed Bony.
“I could not be sure about anything that day, Nat. You see, the day wasn’t important until … until dinner that night. Why bother? Someone must have taken him to Wollongong. He wasn’t here at lunch.”
“No one appeared to be worried about him after he left?”
“It’s funny you ask that,” Rosalie said. “I had the feeling that Mate was until Mike read Eric’s letter at dinner, the letter thanking us all for being nice to him.”
“And no one could have stopped your letter going out to Hillier in the post excepting Mate?”
“She always collects the mail from the box and puts it into the bag, and seals the bag. Anyone going to Bowral or Wollongong takes the bag there.”
Later, choosing the moment carefully, Bony asked the girl:
“Why would Mate stop your letter?”
“Because she wouldn’t want me to fall in love with an outsider. Eric is, you know. He isn’t even Irish. Besides …”
Her sentence was not completed until two evenings later, when Bony learned that the Conways hoped Rosalie would marry a Kelly. Returning to the subject, he reminded her that Brian appeared not to be favoured, and she said:
“When he came back from school, Grandma told me. I told them I’d never love Brian well enough to marry him, and they said, I mean Grandma said, love had nothing to do with marrying. Anyway, Brian’s all right, but I had to smack his face one evening. I’ll marry who I want to.”
He learned that the man O’Halloran was of the Kelly side of the valley, and that the place where O’Halloran discovered Torby, or Hillier, was a quarter of a mile or less on the east side of the waterfall. He asked Rosalie if she had ever been to that particular place, and was told no one was permitted to go near the fall as the rock faces sometimes fell without warning.
The waterfall! He remembered vividly the coming of the car which had collected men and proceeded, without lights, in the direction of the waterfall.
Chapter Nineteen
The Distillery
ALTHOUGH Bony’s exploits on the trip across the mountains had gained him the freedom of Cork Valley, he had not yet uncovered any of the valley’s secrets. After a long probation period, instinct told him that his movements were no longer questioned, but although he had been permitted to know that sugar is necessary in the production of ‘dandelion wine’, he had been given no hint of the locality of the production plant.
Having reached the decision to stick to the very last letter of his assignment, which meant finding the murderer of Eric Torby, and not concerning himself with Mountain Dew, or the payment of TV licences, he was brought back to the production of Mountain Dew because it probably triggered off Eric Torby’s murder.
Bony was in no way concerned by the time it had taken him to find out that Torby had, indeed, been in Cork Valley immediately prior to the finding of his body. At least he had succeeded where a ponderous police investigation had failed, and it was pretty certain that if he had rushed hither and thither looking for illicit stills, he would not have progressed this far.
The two bushwalkers who had crossed the paddocks had been quickly apprehended and removed from the premises. Before them a disguised policeman had been taken out to the hospital. It now transpired that Torby had entered like a burglar and had been found the following day and brought to the settlement where, without doubt, he was meticulously watched.
Had Torby been sentenced to death and executed because he had learned the great secret of Cork Valley? If this were so the secret of Co
rk Valley was near the waterfall where Torby’s trail began, ending on a road many miles away.
Bony had not previously been given an assignment where the investigators had no prerogative to put direct questions. The girl had no actual knowledge of the manner of transport and the persons with whom Torby had departed from the settlement, and there was no other person he could question, nobody he could tackle with subterfuge without betraying an interest entirely divorced from his character of Nat Bonnay. Time was of no importance, however, and the unmasking of Torby’s murderer was his only objective.
He could not be too openly persistent with his questioning of Rosalie. He could not strain her sense of loyalty to the point of being permanently rebuffed, and there were fifty questions left unasked which might well have clarified Torby’s sojourn with the Conways.
Bony waited till midnight before leaving his underground room, wearing a dark blue working shirt in preference to the white one he usually wore in the evenings, and three pairs of socks instead of boots. There was a late moon shrouded by light fog; the night was not in total darkness.
He avoided the street, passing to the rear of the shed building, the houses and the school on that side, and he kept off the track taken by the car without lights. He had not left the settlement limits when a cold nose was pushed against his hand. It was one of the beagle dogs that had accompanied Brian Kelly.
“What do you want?” he asked softly, the thought occurring to him that the dog was scouting for Brian Kelly and would run off to inform on him. The dog stood still, his tail wagging, his stern unaffected. With his head slightly askew he regarded Bony with expressive and friendly eyes. “I think I know what you want. To go for a walk. Just bored doing nothing, eh?”
The beagle proved him right. The dog trotted sedately ahead.
Bony veered right to reach the track beyond the factory building, coming eventually to the piggery, betrayed by the smell and an occasional animal grunt, and for a moment or two he was unable to find a track proceeding from this place. In daylight it would have been easy; as it was the dog saved him time.
The dog, once he had understood that the man’s interest was not in pigs, made for a wall of low scrub and entered it. Bony found the scrub to be a narrow belt, and on the far side came to the twin impressions made by motor vehicles. A visitor to the piggery would not see this track proceeding from it.
Now, confident of the man’s destination, the beagle trotted over the little-used track, its nose to ground, its rudder barely moving. On Bony’s right was the river, and presently they came to a bridge which was little more than a wooden causeway. The bridge was ignored at the cost of wet feet. The little-used track missed the trees and seemed intent on keeping to grassy ground, and without doubt the man who drove the car without lights must have had super eyesight. Now and then the dog and the man were halted by a sound nearby of a rabbit, of a departing wombat or some other wild animal, but gradually the noise of the waterfall pervaded the night.
By day Bony had estimated the distance of the waterfall from the settlement as a mile. Now it seemed much farther. They came to the river again and another bridge, and this bridge, too, was ignored. The sound of the waterfall was all about them, and there emerged from the light fog the vertical curtain of lighter grey extending upward into the void. At the foot was a rugged natural catchment basin, into which the water fell with a ceaseless low roar, and at the outlets, which became the river, were several ram-pumps, doubtless servicing the settlement.
Beyond this basin the faint track did not proceed, and thus it might be presumed that the business of the motor driver was to inspect the pumps. According to Rosalie, it was to the eastward of this place that the man O’Halloran had found Eric Torby.
The dog was waiting patiently for Bony on the eastern side of the basin, and when Bony walked on, the beagle moved on at once, leading him through light scrub, and across broken, gouged, but dry watercourses. Abruptly the dog veered to the right, and as suddenly as he had come to the fall he now came to a wall of rock and realised he was hard against the mountain flank.
The beagle began to climb the rock face which was not truly perpendicular, then halted to look down when Bony hesitated to emulate this mountaineering feat. Being a dog and not a goat or a chamois, and unlikely to rock-climb for the idle fun of it, it was fairly obvious that the dog knew his job and was familiar with the way. He led Bony up into the void, like a fly on a wall with the light out.
It seemed to Bony that he and the dog ascended a thousand feet from the basin, both hemmed in by the noise of the fall and by the fog, when first one and then the other crawled over the lip of a ledge wide enough to take a car. No car, however, had ever been on this ledge.
Now Bony could smell smoke, the scent of burning gum-wood. He followed the dog, and presently came to what at first he thought was a tree trunk but which proved to be part of a hoist which, when thrust out from the ledge, would raise or lower heavy loads.
The ledge turned inward as Bony advanced, and the dark grey mistiness changed to bars of deeper grey. The rock became wet and threatened disaster to the unwary, and then Bony found himself in a corridor—rock wall on the left and sheeted water on the right. He was behind or inside the fall, and here was the opening to a cave.
Beside him stood the dog, for the first time disinclined to go on without him. On the floor of the cave was a hurricane lamp, and its light revealed a stack of wood and a dozen objects, including an array of pipes and a great cylindrical object which was plainly a water boiler. Steam was being emitted from valves, and at the foot the red glow of the fire escaped through the badly-fitted door of the firebox. Smoke and steam rose to the cave roof and created a dark cloud which came to the entrance and was wafted into the ceaseless curtain of falling water.
It was the perfect hideaway for an illicit still. And a still which had supplied the connoisseurs with Mountain Dew for more than a hundred years! No one standing at the foot of the fall, or perched on the distant rim of the amphitheatre armed with a telescope would ever detect smoke and steam even on the brightest of days or a clear and frosty evening.
Keeping close to the rock wall, Bony moved into the cave. The dog declined to accompany him. Now Bony could see demijohns and glass jars on benches, steam boilers, a stack of potatoes and sugar sacks. In the irregular wall he found a niche, and here he remained and waited, for the lamp on the floor indicated the presence of at least one man.
It was well that Bony was cautious. Beside the big steam boiler appeared a man. He opened the front of the firebox and the glare revealed him to be Joe Flanagan. The ruddy light was reflected on his bald cranium as he tossed billets of wood into the furnace. Another man appeared, entering the cave from farther back, and the movement of his coat proved that inside the inner cave was an air fan. He was none other than Red Kelly.
“I’ll be turning in, Joe,” he shouted, quite unnecessarily, for in the main cave it was comparatively quiet. “Call me when you leave in the morning.”
Flanagan slammed shut the furnace door, and said:
“I will that, Red. Want me tomorrow night?”
“No, we’ll close down till after the festival. Tell Spade to come about noon to lend me a hand to store away.”
Red Kelly disappeared into another cave, and within a few minutes reappeared wearing pyjamas. In the poor light he looked like King Kong prepared for the operating table.
“Remind Spade we’ll want some grub,” he shouted.
Joe said he wouldn’t forget, and Red returned to the inner cave where presumably was his bed. Joe brought a sack which he folded on a case. He hung the lamp by a hook on a pipe, drew the case nearer the furnace, took from his voluminous coat a bottle, drank a shot of Dew, and then, having replaced the bottle, produced from the coat a hard-cover book. Then he sat on the case and prepared to relax.
From without came the muted noise of the fall competing with the inside sound of escaping steam, and for a few minutes Bony pondered on his n
ext move. He arrived at the conviction that further examination of this place might not be worth the risk of being discovered. Then the bell sounded.
It was so unexpected that it momentarily stunned Bony as it did Joe Flanagan. Joe dropped the book and stared at a point to his right. The bell stopped and the silence prodded Joe into movement. He snatched down the lamp and carried it to the right wall of the cave, where the light revealed a domestic indicator similar to the one in the Conway living-room.
“Hey, Red,” he shouted, and Bony slipped away to the entrance of the cave and waited, peering round the bulge of rock. Kelly appeared. He must have heard the alarm for he asked no questions as he lumbered across the rock floor in his bare feet to stand with Joe.
“The first bridge,” Joe observed, and there was now no amiability in his voice.
“Wait for the second,” Red said, adding: “Could be a wombat like that time a year or more back. The second bridge will tell for sure.”
Bony didn’t wait for the second alarm, being unsure which of the two bridges were designated first or second and having to retreat swiftly to the cover of the bush on the floor of the valley. As he sped along the wide ledge he hoped he would find the place where the ascent from the valley had ended, for there was probably no other way down.
Then he saw the beagle. The dog was lying on the edge of the ledge, and he stood on seeing Bony, wagged his rudder, and disappeared, instantly ready to go ahead on the return ‘walk’.
Bony slipped twice going down. Once he dislodged a piece of rock and heard it strike the rock base, and hoped the two men in the cave were still waiting for the second alarm.
With comforting level ground under him, and bush all about him, he waited for just one minute to see if Joe or Red would descend by that perilous pathway, and when neither appeared, he slipped further into the bush, and, with no thought of following the track, hastened as fast as the terrain and the night permitted back to the settlement.
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