Murder Must Wait b-17

by Arthur W. Upfield

  Murder Must Wait

  ( Bony - 17 )

  Arthur W. Upfield

  Arthur W. Upfield

  Murder Must Wait

  The Murder of Mrs Rockcliff

  ITHAPPENEDat Mitford some time during Monday night. Sprawled on the northern bank of the River Murray, and in the State of New South Wales, Mitford is wide open to the cold southerlies of winter and the hot northerlies of summer. A broad tree-shaded boulevard skirts the river, and Main Street is flanked by squat emporiums crammed with goodslikely, and unlikely, to be needed by people who own the surrounding vineyards and who operate the canning works for ten weeks every year.

  It wasn’t Sergeant Yoti’s first homicide case, but it was destined to give him a new and not altogether unpleasant experience. He wasn’t much to look at… in civilian clothes. He was square andgrey, and the foolish ones thought him soft. You think of a kind, understanding uncle when at the point of inebriation you own the town, and you may wake up and faintly recall that what Sergeant Yoti failed to do with his fists, he accomplished with his boots.

  This Wednesday opened as every other day in February: hot and windy and dusty outside the Police Station, still and hot and boring within. The morning was governed by dull routine, and the afternoon was given by the Sergeant to polishing his cases for presenting to the magistrates the following day. Shortly after three o’clock the mail was delivered, and Yoti read a letter penned by the Chief of the State CID, in Sydney.

  Dear Yoti [wrote Superintendent Canno], I’ve seized the opportunity of snaffling Napoleon Bonaparte to look into those baby cases out your way. Don’t know if you have ever met this bloke, but you must have heard of him. Anyway, give him all the rope and he’ll pay dividends. You’ll find him the most aggravating feller you could think of, but there’s nothing lousy in his makeup. How’s things up your street? Drop me a line sometime. Remember me to Joan. Your George is shaping well in the Traffic Branch, I’m told…

  Yoti permitted himself to smile. Canno had gone high; he himself had remained almost stationary, and the day was long back on life’s road when they had joined the Department together.

  Napoleon Bonaparte! What a name! And, by all accounts, what a man! Sergeant Yoti pondered, his friend’s letter gripped by a sizeable fist. The tales he had heard about this Napoleon Bonaparte, this detective-inspector of the Queensland CID, this cross between Sir Galahad and Ned Kelly.

  Well, the stolen babies would deflate this Bonaparte. They’d stir his grey matter and dry up his sinuses. He boasted that he’d never failed to finish an investigation. Well, well! Old Canno must be putting the yoke on this Mister Bonaparte, doing a snigger up his sleeve while urging him on to tackle the disappearances of four babies, babies who had just vanished, vanished from a pram or a cot, out of a house, off a veranda, even off Main Street one busy afternoon.

  Yoti wasn’t amused when thinking about it, even though the only gleam of comfort in a dark night was the failure of Canno’s city experts to do better than he had done… which was just nothing in clear results. The first baby had been a routine job; the second baby, an upheaval. The third child had brought Canno’s boys; photographers andfingerprinters and dust collectors. And the last baby had loosened all hell in Mitford so that even his wife had looked at him with eyes of disillusionment.

  Napoleon Bonaparte! Coming to try his luck weeks after Baby Number Four had vanished like a penny in the river. No wonder the cat laughed.

  Sergeant Yoti loved cats, and was stroking the enormous black specimen on his desk when the telephone in the outer office blasted the peace. Yoti smiled at the cat, almost unconscious of the voice acknowledging the telephone call. He heard the receiver being replaced, then the quick, heavy footfalls of the uniformed constable who entered his office and stood stiffly beyond the desk.

  “Essen rang through, Sergeant,” reported the constable, not yet old enough to keep his face masked or his voice controlled. “His brother-in-law rang him to say he was worried about a Mrs Rockcliff who lives next door. Essen went round. The woman hadn’t been seen for a couple of days and the milk and mail not taken in. He tried the front door and found it unlocked, and went in. The woman’s lying dead in a bedroom. Essen says he thinksit’s homicide.”

  No eruption rocked the Police Station at Mitford. No sirens screamed through Main Street. The police car driven by a constable negotiated the cross-street with normal care, and Yoti smoked his pipe and returned the greeting of a man who waved to him.

  Elgin Street consisted of detached villas, guarded by small front gardens. At the gate of No 5 two men waited: one obviously a policeman in mufti, the other elderly and obviously nervous. First Constable Essen came forward.

  “Woman appears to have been murdered,” he said. “Body’s in the front bedroom. This is my brother-in-law, who last saw the woman alive on Monday. Rang me about it because there mightn’t have been anything to it.”

  Yoti nodded.

  “I live next door, Sergeant,” admitted the elderly man. “The name’s Thring. We haven’t seen Mrs Rockcliff since Monday, andthere’s two lots of milk and letters at the gate. I thought…”

  “You did right, Mr Thring. Stay here with the constable. We’ll go in, Essen.”

  Essen opened the door by the handle of the ordinary catch, and Yoti noted the Yale-type lock was snibbed. The hall was small and had the imprint of the house-proud slave. A hat and umbrella stand stood against one wall, a small table flanked by a chair fronted another. On the table was a bowl of dying roses; above it hung an oval mirror reflecting the open front door. Dark green linoleum covered the floor of the hall and passage leading to the rear.

  “Room to the right, Sergeant,” Essen said tightly. “The door was shut, but I managed to open it without mucking up possible prints. She’s lying on the floor at the foot of the bed. And the baby’s cot is empty.”

  Yoti closed the door, and the light from the open fanlight emphasised the lines which suddenly appeared about his wide mouth. Abruptly he strode to the bedroom, paused just within the door frame. The scene was registered as a succession of pictures: beginning with the meticulously made bed, then the blind-protected windows, the body of the woman on the floor, and finally the empty cot beyond the foot of the bed.

  “Thring says he and his wife are sure that Mrs Rockcliff left the child alone in the house,” Essen said. “None of the neighbours have seen it since last Monday. Looks like the woman returned to find the baby-thief on the job, and was done in because she recognised him.”

  It was a pleasant room, the drawn linen blinds creatinga pseudo -coolness, and the sunlight penetrating at one side to fashion a finger of gold to caress a dead hand upon a blue rug. There was light enough to see the lacy draperies of the baby’s cot, the feeding bottle on the small table, the miniatures on the walls.

  Only now was he conscious of the flies blundering about, of the staleness of the air, of the silence about him and of the noises without. On tiptoe he left the doorway to step over the body and reach the cot. He could see the valley on the tiny pillow where the baby’s head had rested, and his mind was so crowded with the consequences of that empty cot that the murder of the mother was then of small moment.

  He went back the road he had come… over the body… again paused in the doorway, to look at the cot before permitting his eyes to concentrate on the dead woman, lying partially on her back, one arm above the head, the other outflung.

  “You been through the house, of course?” he said to Essen.

  “Yes. Back door locked. All the windows fastened. Nothing out of place.”

  “We’ll begin at the beginning… your brother-in-law.”

  Passing to the porch and so into the brilliant sunlight, Yoti add
ressed himself to Thring.

  “You live next door, Mr Thring. When did you see Mrs Rockcliff last?”

  “Matter of fact, several days ago,” replied the neighbour. “My wife last saw her about eight on Monday evening. Mrs Rockcliff was then going out.”

  “Without the baby?”

  “She never took the baby out with her at night.”

  “Just left it in the house… alone?”

  “Yes. That’s what made us worry. Yesterday morning Mrs Rockcliff didn’t take in her milk and paper, and didn’t collect her mail from the box. When more milk was left this morning, and more papers, and another letter, we got concerned about the baby in case Mrs Rockcliff hadn’t come home on Monday night. I knocked at the front door several times this morning. I went round the back and knocked again. I didn’t think to try if the front door was unlocked.”

  “Mrs Rockcliff never left the baby with anyone when she went out?”

  “Not that we know of, and the wife’s a pretty observant woman. In fact, she’s said more than once it was a shame to leave the infant all alone in the house at night.”

  A car slid to a halt beyond the knot of people gathered at the street gate.

  “How old was the baby?”

  “Eleven weeks.”

  “You were on speaking terms with the mother, I suppose?”

  “No more than that,” Thring replied, adding: “Exceptingthat I’ve done her garden now and then. We know the baby’s age because we knew when Mrs Rockcliff went to hospital and when she came home.”

  A blind man could have told by the footsteps on the cement path that a doctor was walking it. Dr Nott was tall, large and dark. He wore no hat, and the leather bag appeared as having been tormented by rats.

  “Spot of bother, Sergeant?” he surmised as though commenting on the weather.

  “Mrs Rockcliff, Doctor, seems to be dead.”

  “H’m! And the baby?”

  “No baby. Crib’s empty. Looks crook to me.”

  “It will be crook… if the baby has been abducted. What’ll it be? The fifth?”

  Yoti went into the house, followed by the doctor. Essen planted himself in the doorway, and the constable stolidly regarded Mr Thring and continued to say nothing.

  At the bedroom, Yoti stepped aside to permit Nott to enter. He watched the doctor release the spring blinds, turn to regard the cot. It seemed that the baby was of prior importance even to Doctor Nott, for he came back to the cot to peer into it and at the feeding bottle on the low table, having no apparent interest in the dead woman. He gained Yoti’s approval by touching nothing… till he came to examine the body. Presently he said:

  “Lower the blinds.”

  Yoti nodded, waited for the blinds to reduce the starkness of Death, withdrew before the doctor and crossed the hall to the lounge. The doctor thumped his bag on the polished table, sat on the table-edge and produced cigarette-case and lighter.

  “Been dead, I’d guess, about thirty-six hours,” he stated.“Takes it back to last Monday night… sometime. Hit with something blunt and heavy. Could be a hammer, or the point of a walking-stick handle.”

  “Was done as she entered the bedroom, I suppose?”

  “Looks like it. Merely the one blow was enough.”

  “Know anything about her?”

  “A little. Came to me early in December. Wanted to book in at the hospital. Managed it all right, although she’d left it very late. She told me she had come up from Melbourne after her husband had been killed in a road accident.”

  “Why come to Mitford, d’you know?”

  “Yes. Said she thought the dry conditions here would be better for her lungs. I agreed when I found that one was touched.”

  “Where did she live in Melbourne?”

  “I don’t know that, Yoti. She did say that her doctor was in practice in Glen Iris. Doctor Allan Browner.”

  “You contact him about her?”

  “No reason to. Can’t you get her background?”

  “Haven’t tried so far. Neighbours aren’t helpful.” Their eyes clashed. “If the baby isn’t located we’re going to have our backs bent.”

  “Can’t go on,” Nott said, sadly, and Yoti fancied he saw disapproval on the large white face. “Whatd’youthink they’re stealing babies for?”

  “I’ve been asking myself that one. Can understand a woman pinching a baby because she had to have one, but no woman wanting a baby would pinch five, and commit murder. And don’t sit there being superior. You ought to know why a lunatic pinches babies, lunatics being up your street, not mine.”

  The table rocked when Nott slid off.

  “I can make four guesses, one for every infant,” he said, his dark eyes wide and hard. “And each guess would make you shiver, tough as you have to be. You’ll have the CID crowd out here again, I suppose?”

  “Possibly, depends.” Nott saw relief come to Yoti. “They’re sending a detective-inspector to look into these baby cases, a man who boasts he has never fallen down on a job. He can have this one and welcome. As young George used to tell me when he couldn’t do his home lessons, I’ve ‘had’ it.”

  “You have my sympathy, Yoti. Well, I’ll be seeing you. I’ll do the p.m. tonight. About nine do?”

  “Yes.”

  The doctor took up his tattered bag. Footsteps in the hall halted his first step to the door. He looked at Yoti, and knew they were in agreement about the footsteps not being made by First Constable Essen, or one of Yoti’s constables.

  The sunlight shimmered upon the table, flowed across the linoleum, to frame in the illumined doorway a grey-suited figure carrying a velour hat. It was like looking at a framed portrait. They could see the faint stripe in the grey cloth of the creased trousers and the creaseless double-breasted coat, the sheen of the maroon-coloured tie about the spotless collar. They noted the straight black hair parted low to the left, the dark complexion of the face, the white teeth, and the whimsical smile. They could not evade the sea-blue eyes, or side-track the feeling that everything about themselves, inside and out, was being registered by those blue eyes.

  “What the devil…!” thought Dr Nott.

  Although Sergeant Yoti had never before seen this man, he experienced swift release from depression.

  Chapter Two

  ‘Am I Correct?’

  “SERGEANTYOTI? I am Inspector Bonaparte.”

  Dr Nott, the practised observer, noted the evidence of physical and mental virility, how the light gleamed on the black hair like newly broken coal. Yoti, who stood with military stiffness, said:

  “Glad to see you, sir. This is Doctor Nott.”

  Nott inclined his head, continuing to be intrigued by a name.

  “The constable at the Station told me where to find you. Homicide?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Oh! Of little concern to me… unless…” The blue eyes were abruptly masked.“Unless the absence of an infant is in question.”

  “The baby is missing,” Yoti said. “It could be the Fifth Baby.”

  “Ah!” The grey velour was dropped on the table, andfascinated, Dr Nott watched slim fingers make the worst cigarette he had ever seen. “Could this murder be assumed to be an effect of the theft of a fifth infant?”

  “Assumed, yes,” replied Yoti.

  “Then the murder is within the assignment given me to locate the thief or thieves of several infants. Do you agree?”

  The senior police officer stationed at Mitford hesitated before nodding assent, for, being a civil servant by training and by nature, it was natural to avoid wherever possible the awful bugbear-responsibility.

  “I am pleased you are willing to concede so much,” Bony went on, and puffed out the match. “Fourkidnappings, and not a lead gained by the CID, and now the fifth… assumed… supported by a murder which, also assumed, wasn’t premeditated and thus should give a dozen leads. Having one lead in hand, I require but one more. You are about to leave, Doctor? Please delay a moment until I learn the m
eagre details from Sergeant Yoti.”

  It was Bony who first left the room, preceding the doctor and Yoti to the porch, where waited Essen with the constable and Thring.

  “There is a point concerning which there must be no disagreement,” he told them. “Mr Thring, to your knowledge the only persons who have been inside this house since Mrs Rockcliff was last seen alive are we five men?”

  “That’s so, Inspector.”

  “Thank you, Mr Thring.” Mr Thring failed to understand what prompted the smile in and about the friendly blue eyes. “Now please return home. I shall be calling on you soon. Oblige me by ignoring the cement path leading to the gate and by walking on the bordering flower-bed.”

  The strip of cultivated ground between the path and the drought-stricken lawn was four feet wide, and the surface was dry and sandy. Mr Thring obliged, and Bony walked the cement path halfway to the gate, when he turned and called to Dr Nott to walk the flower-bed. Essen was asked to follow the doctor, and only Yoti was annoyed when requested to make his footprints to be studied by a man who never forgot footprints. The rubbernecks at the gate were entranced.

  “Now Sergeant, you and I will re-enter the house, see what is to be seen and what is to be felt. I want no one else inside the house until we have done.”

  They stood in the hall, Yoti having closed the door and released the lock snib. Bony switched on the light.

  “I detest wall-to-wall carpets,” he said. “Harbours all manner of wogs… and cannot register footprints. Mrs Rockcliff was a wise woman when she selectedlinoleum, and a good housewife when she polished it, I should think, at least once a week. You might stay here while I look over the scene. Where is the body?”

  Yoti indicated the bedroom and then, like those at the street gate, became an entranced spectator. He watched Bony sidle along the walls to reach the bedroom, noted how he placed his feet as close to the skirting as possible, and as closely to the door-frame when he sidled into the bedroom. The light went on, and he regretted he was unable to watch the man who had never failed to finish an assignment.