Death of a Swagman

by Arthur W. Upfield

  People were shopping in the few stores and gossiping in the shade of the pepper-trees. Cars and trucks were arriving from west and east, to stop at the hotel as though their engines would fall out should they be driven past it. The mail car from Mildura arrived at eleven, from the west. It was the only vehicle to pass the hotel. It continued on to the post office, then it was turned and driven back to the hotel to unload its passengers. At the garage young Jason was kept busy pumping petrol and serving oil and examining engine defects.

  At noon the humming of the blowflies was subdued by the burst of children’s voices released from school. Rose Marie came flying up the street, to give Bony a wave and a smile before darting through the police station gate and into the house.

  Everyone who passed along Bony’s side of the street said “Good dayee” to him. The words of the greeting never varied, nor was it ever omitted. Several passers-by paused to speak to the painter and to sympathize with him in his bad luck at having been chosen by the sergeant to paint that fence.

  In the afternoon there came the Rev. Llewellyn James. His greeting was minus the final long e.

  “Good dayee,” responded Bony, straightening his back and turning about to see the youngish man who gazed at him intently with pale blue eyes. He wore no hat, and his fine brown hair was unruly. His hands were large and white and soft, and from the crook of an arm dangled a walking stick. Grey flannel trousers and black lustre coat failed to hide his flabbiness. He spoke with the unmistakable accent of the Welshman.

  “I regret being informed of your fall and subsequent arraignment before the court,” he said. “However, I am glad to find you at honest labour in the pure sunshine, for which you must thank Sergeant Marshall. What is your name?”

  “First I’d like to know who you are,” Bony said with pretended sullenness.

  “I am Mr James, the clergyman.”

  There was now superciliousness in the voice, and an expression of hardness had flashed into the pale blue eyes. Bony thought that he knew his man and assumed humility.

  “Sorry, Padre,” he began. “My name’s Robert Burns. I’m a stranger to this part of the state.”

  Mr James smiled, and Bony could actually see the shaft of wit being fashioned in the man’s mouth.

  “No descendant of the great Scotch poet, I presume. I cannot trace the Highland burr in your voice.”

  It was a different Bony from the one who had spoken that morning to Rose Marie.

  “I am Australian-born,” he said. “My father may have been a poet. I don’t know. I was reared in a North Queensland mission station, and I roam about Australia whenever I want.”

  Mr James was made glad that he knew his parents. It was a feeling he found comforting and pleasant. He began to press questions as though fully entitled. What was Bony’s age; what had been his education; what were his domestic responsibilities; and what was the reason of his being here in the south-western quarter of New South Wales? He did not inquire concerning Bony’s religion. Presently he said unctuously:

  “Well, Burns, remember that you would not have found yourself in your present predicament had you not succumbed to the temptation of taking alcoholic refreshment. It is the greatest pitfall to entrap the unwary. At the expiration of the term of your imprisonment, have you any employment to go to?”

  Sadly Bony shook his head.

  “Then I will speak to Mr Leylan about you. He is the owner of Wattle Creek Station and is a great friend of mine. Can you ride a horse?”

  “So long as it’s a quiet one, Padre.”

  “Good! Well, we’ll see about it. Meanwhile, ponder on your delinquency so that profit may emerge to you. Did I see you accompanying Sergeant Marshall and Gleeson and Dr Scott to the late Mr Bennett’s hut the day before yesterday?”

  “Yes, Padre, that’s so.”

  “What were you doing walking round and round the hut when the others were inside?”

  “Just having a look around, Padre.”

  “Oh!”

  Mr James appeared to be happier about Robert Burns. The word “Padre” sounded well. He had been resolute in his attitude against serving with the armed forces, but he understood that the title was used by both the officers and the men.

  “Looking around!” he echoed. “For what?”

  “Nothing in particular, Padre,” Bony replied, gazing over the minister’s shoulder. “You see, the sergeant thought that, being half aboriginal, I might find tracks that were peculiar, sort of, the sergeant thinking at that time that the old man might have been killed.”

  “Ah ... yes ... certainly. And you are a tracker?”

  “Just ordinary, I suppose. I’m not much good at anything.”

  “Perhaps not, Burns, but we must all try to make something of our lives.” Into the minister’s voice had crept a whine. “Keep to the straight and narrow path. I will not forget you. It may be possible to reclaim you, for I observe only a trace of degradation in your face. Good day to you.”

  Bony essayed his first smile.

  “Good dayee, Padre,” he responded. “I’ll think over what you have told me. As I read somewhere: no man ever becomes a saint in his sleep.”

  Mr James had proceeded towards the garage, but he turned sharply to look back with swift suspicion at the half-caste, who was dipping a paintbrush into the pot. He came to the verge of saying something, but checked himself.

  Bony began his work mechanically. His eyes were engaged with the footmarks left on the soft earthen sidewalk by the Rev. Llewellyn James.

  Chapter Seven

  A Scar on Nature’s Handiwork

  ON THE SEVENTH DAY of his “imprisonment,” Bony suggested to Sergeant Marshall that they visit the hut at Sandy Flat in which the body of George Kendall had been found. The suggestion was readily accepted by the sergeant, who had been tied more than he liked to his desk.

  That Bony should wait seven days before indicating a desire to visit the scene of the crime he was in Merino to unravel was to Marshall peculiar, to say the least, but those seven days had not been spent merely in painting government property. There had been the prolonged study of large-scale maps of the district to imprint on Bony’s mind the situation and layout of every surrounding station property, every road and track, every water hole and well. There had been hours spent on Detective Sergeant Redman’s reports and on the statements he had gathered. And Bony had got to know nearly every man and many women who lived at Merino.

  It was a little before eleven o’clock on the morning of December fifth that they left Merino in the sergeant’s car, in the boot of which Mrs Marshall had herself placed a hamper and a tea billy. Once clear of the town, Bony said to the sergeant, who was wearing flannels and an open-necked shirt:

  “I am a great believer in intuition. For instance, intuition never fails to warn me when my eldest son is about to ask for financial accommodation.”

  “Doing well?” inquired Marshall, now hopeful that following a period of “closeness” Bony would be confidential.

  “Very well. I am, secretly, proud of him. For that reason, when intuition warns me that a loan is about to be requested, to avoid paining him by a refusal, I make excuses to rush away. What is your opinion of the Rev. Llewellyn James?”

  “Not much.”

  “Do you mean that the opinion is not much in length or of value, or that the opinion is not favourable?”

  “Even now I can’t tell whether you are serious or pulling my leg. I don’t like the Rev. Llewellyn James.”

  “Officially or privately?”

  “Privately, of course. Why be legal this morning?”

  “I am in the mood for exactitude,” Bony told him, although his voice indicated the opposite. “What is the general opinion of James held by the people?”

  The sergeant did not at once answer this question.

  “The best way to deal with the subject,” he began, “is to make a comparison with the previous parson. James has been here four years and a bit. He arrived eight
months after the other man left. The previous man was very well liked. He was elderly and a really great man who inspired love as well as respect. You know what is wanted in a parson by bush folk. To get on well with bush people, a parson has to be a man’s man as well as a churchman. James may be a good churchman, but he’s not a man’s man.”

  “You do not seem confident that he is or is not a good churchman?” pressed Bony.

  “That’s so. I don’t go to church. My wife does, however, and she says that James is better than no minister at all, and also that what he lacks is compensated by his wife.”

  “Oh!” Bony made no other comment for a period. Then he said lazily: “You would not have had time to spare, as the statistician of every government department, to study criminology. That is a study thought unsuitable for real policemen, and so no time is allowed for it. I used once to compile data on the physical features of murderers and near-such, when it was proved how remarkably high is the percentage of killers having light blue eyes. James, you will recall, has light blue eyes.”

  “Eh!” exclaimed the startled sergeant.

  “Don’t let it worry you. Millions of people having light blue eyes go through life without committing a murder. We must not allow our natural reactions to Mr James to cloud our common sense. I mentioned the matter only for interest value. So that is the cemetery! Well! Well! It tells us its own history.”

  “What does it tell?”

  “It is elementary, my dear Watson. In bygone years people hereabouts died and were taken to their rest over there. Then came the motor car, to transport sick people swiftly to the hospital at the much larger town of Mildura. And so only very poor persons, and those who died suddenly or from accident, have been buried at Merino. Right?”

  “Yes. Before Kendall was buried there the last was several years ago.”

  “It is likely that another will be buried there shortly.”

  “What!”

  “Imagination, Marshall, just imagination. It runs away with me sometimes. Hullo! Here is the left-hand turning.”

  Instead of taking the road turn to the north, Marshall stopped his car at a gate through which a lesser track continued eastward towards the Walls of China. They were now two miles out from Merino and three miles from the homestead of Wattle Creek Station along that north road. The great barrier of white sand dominated the scene far more powerfully than it dominated the township, rising several hundred feet in a series of whaleback ridges. The sparse scrub trees and blue bush and saltbush growing on red soil verged on the limits of vegetation.

  Bony alighted and opened the gate in the five-wire fence, then stayed to regard the track beyond whilst the sergeant drove through. Not since the rain had a vehicle been driven down this track, the wheel ruts semi-filled with drift sand making progress slower for Marshall’s car.

  “Those Jason men are singular in their individual ways, don’t you think?” remarked Bony.

  “You’re telling me,” agreed the sergeant succinctly.

  “Which of them is the boss? I went into the garage the other morning and was just in time to hear young Jason tell his father to ‘get to hell away from that’. Old Jason was standing by the engine of a truck. The engine was running and he was peering in at it under the raised bonnet. When the son shouted at him from a wall bench the father straightened up and moved away after switching off the engine. He said nothing; made no attempt even to remonstrate with his son for speaking as he did.”

  “They’re a peculiar pair,” Marshall further agreed. “The son is the motor mechanic, and a good one too, and the old man does all wheelwrighting and coffin making. He’s a bit of a brick, in his way, for he takes a lot from the lad and seldom asserts himself. Pities him, I suppose, for his deformities, and the son resents it.”

  “Where do they come from?”

  “Bathurst, I think.”

  “Redman doesn’t record their origin, although in his reports he is hostile to young Jason. There is a lot in origins, you know. The history of murders and lesser crimes doesn’t begin five minutes before they are committed. The origin of some murders began generations before the—er—blunt instrument was used.”

  Now the country was swiftly changing. The trees were thinning out and the barley and spear grass were giving place to tussock grass, that wiry, seemingly indestructible grass growing in clumps in the drier, more inhospitable parts of the inland. The red sand was becoming heavier, and on the east side of every clump of tussock grass the sand was raised into a small mound. Quite abruptly the trees and bush shrubs ended in an irregular line, and the car passed out onto a half-milewide ribbon of plain land bordering the Walls of China. The red sand gave place to white sand, and now the tussock grass gave out. Nothing grew here on the white sand foundations of the Walls of China.

  Ahead stood a corrugated iron hut, with, a hundred yards south of it, the windmill over the well and the iron reservoir tank perched on its high stand. The lines of troughing radiating from it appeared like the fire-hardened hafts of aboriginal throwing spears, black on the white sand.

  The door of the hut was in its east wall. Beyond it by a dozen yards was a construction of cane grass in which was kept the cool safe for the storage of meat. And beyond that, some three hundred yards away, was the base of the sand range.

  Marshall halted his car between the hut and the meat house. The hut was the usual monstrosity of iron nailed to a wood frame. There was not even a window to it, an opening in its west wall being closed at this time by a trap on hinges.

  “What a salubrious resort at which to spend the summer vacation,” observed Bony. “How one would enjoy the summer breezes, the rarefied air, the perfume of flowers, the song of birds. Don’t get out yet.”

  “Quite enough, any way,” Marshall said, reaching for pipe and tobacco.

  “Were it not for the blowflies and the crows somewhere up there on the Walls of China, there would be no sounds our human ear could register,” Bony noted, and become busy with tobacco and paper. “You wouldn’t think, would you, that in this place of spotless white—if we can disregard that hut—a man could meet with a violent end? Ah me, how truthfully it was written: ‘The evil men do lives after them.’ For years and years to come men will say: ‘A murder was committed here.’ They may even say: ‘Two murders were committed here.’”

  Marshall had struck a match, had brought its flame against the tobacco in his pipe, but he did not draw upon it.

  “What’s that?” he demanded.

  “What is what?” countered Bony mildly.

  “What was that about two murders being done in this place?”

  “Oh, I was just letting my imagination have a little freedom. But let us be serious. Take note, and profit by it, of the difference of my approach to the scene of a crime from that of your own and Redman’s. I sit back in the comfortable seat of this car and leisurely smoke a cigarette whilst observing the scene of a crime now several weeks old, and give my imagination a slack rein. What did you and Gleeson and Redman do? What was your approach?”

  Marshall grunted.

  “Go on, I’ll buy it,” he urged.

  “Firstly, then, you and Gleeson arrived here in a car with such speed that the car probably skidded to a halt. You threw open the doors, leapt out, and rushed pell-mell into the hut to take a look-see at the body. Secondly, Redman and his colleagues arrived in manner similar but probably much faster. It is unlikely that they gave themselves time to open the car doors. It is likely that they fell out before the car was stopped, bounced on the white sand and, with the maintained velocity, shot into the hut to stare at the alleged bloodstains and make notes in small books. Ah ... me! Why will men persist in thinking that accomplishment is regulated by muscular activity?”

  “Search me,” responded Marshall, who knew that Bony’s picture was actually an exaggeration. He had got his pipe alight, and he half turned to look at his companion, to see the well-moulded nostrils of the slender nose appreciating the aroma of tobacco smoke.
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  “Listen, Marshall, for sometimes I talk downright common sense,” Bony went on. “That hut is not a house, or a flat, or an office. This Sandy Flat is not a city. Therefore an investigation of a crime committed here must be conducted on vastly different lines. Let us assume that at this very moment there is in that hut the body of a murdered man, and that we are about to investigate the circumstances under which he died, and, further, to establish who killed him.

  “Now you and Redman—Gleeson might not because he is accustomed to bush work—would rush into that hut to note the position of the body and the interior generally, because the interior of that iron monstrosity is a room, or the scene of the crime. You would search for the weapon with which the deed had been done, and for clues which might identify the killer. Now wouldn’t you?”

  Marshall nodded. Bony looked at him thoughtfully.

  “But what do I do?” he asked blandly. “I leave the body to a uniformed constable, and the cause of death to the doctor and the coroner, and to the experts at headquarters I leave the fingerprints if any, the weapon if any, and objects more closely associated with the crime. In a city the scene of the crime is of paramount importance, for there the scene of a crime is confined to a room, an office, a flat, and, if on a street, to a space within a few feet of the body.

  “Here in the bush the scene of a crime is extended far beyond its immediate locale. Someone has had to go to the scene of the crime in order to commit it, and, afterwards, to leave the scene of the crime. As the criminal does not grow wings, he needs must walk, and he does not walk about without leaving tracks of his passage for me to see. To the city detective his fingerprints: to Bony his footprints. So you will now understand how it is that I am much more interested in the ground outside a house or hut or camp than I am with the interior.

  “Again assuming that there is a dead body in that hut, what do we note about its exterior?” Bony continued. “We see that Redman’s photographer made quite a good negative of the hut with the door closed, precisely as we see it today. I am almost sure that photographing the hut with the door shut was a fluke, and a very lucky one, too. Anyway, the picture shows that now blurred mark on the door which you and I see from this distance. By the way, what do you make of that chalk mark?”