He was thinking sadly of Napoleon Bonaparte, hoping that he would be found alive, recalling the man’s likeable personality and those wonderful minutes when he fought a giant swordfish in a rising gale. The light in the engine-room was switched off, and he heard Marshall’s feet padding towards the companion-way. He saw Joe’s bulk move slightly, was gratified to see Joe’s arm rise high, and in his hand the two-foot-long monkey wrench.
Joe made no mistake, for he had served apprenticeship to this trade of violence early in life on the waterfronts of a dozen notorious cities. Marshall made no out-cry. He sank beneath the wrench to fall down the companion-way, and with astonishing agility Joe was after him.
“’E’s ours,” he said to Wilton who had sprung to the jetty and then to the launch’s cockpit. “Get a torch.”
Wilton went below, lifted a torch from a hook at the entrance to the saloon and masked its light with a handkerchief. Between them they so trussed Marshall that self-release was impossible, for they displayed their mastery of rope and of rope knots. At speed they worked, and then they rolled the unconscious man under the saloon table and ran up on deck.
Now continuing the plan worked out when on the way to Wapengo Inlet, they lowered the Dolfin’s dinghy into the water and cast off the launch’s mooring ropes. Joe jumped to the jetty with a boat-hook, and from there pushed the launch seaward. The wind obtained its hold and assisted him until he was forced to let her go. Without a word to Wilton he turned and ambled shoreward along the jetty, leaving his partner aboard the Dolfin busy with the anchor and its long heavy chain.
Twenty minutes later the Dolfin was nearing the southern shore of the Inlet and nearer the bar whose roaring voice effectually engulfed the noise made by the anchor chain when Wilton let go. He waited a minute to be sure the anchor held fast, and then he stepped down into the dinghy and rowed for the jetty against wind and current, with the lights in Rockaway’s house harbour lights to guide him.
He was half-way across the Inlet when from the big house came a low thunderous crash. His harbour lights went out.
Joe, meanwhile, had gained the entrance to the cavern he knew so well by having camped in it for several lengthy periods while really prospecting. There he discovered a huge boulder pressing hard into the entrance which debouched on to a narrow, flat and grassy ledge. He remembered this boulder which had stood for centuries just beside the entrance, and he knew well that its change of position was not due to accident. Up the hill slope he scrambled to reach the hole in the roof of the cavern down through which Bony had been lowered and by means of which food had been given daily to the imprisoned Spinks and his mate. On his chest, Joe peered down the dark orifice the size of a manhole and two feet thick.
“You there, Bill?” he called.
Garroway answered him and then frantically cried:
“Bill! Wake up, Bill! Ole Joe Peace is at the ’ole in the roof. Wake up, Bill. Are you dead?”
“What’s that? Help! I musta been dozing. What d’you say?”
“It’s me, Joe, I’m up at the ’ole in the roof, Bill.”
“Joe Peace! You old devil, Joe!” cried Spinks. “Cripes! I’m glad to hear your voice. Where’s Bony?”
“I dunno. Ain’t ’e down with you?”
“No. We watched for the house people through a chink between the entrance wall and the boulder they levered across it, and when Tatter came twice Bony pretended to be still out to it. He’s only been gone less’n half-hour. Me and Bob, here, got close together, and when Bony stepped up on us we gripped him by the feet and lifted him up so’s he could catch a holt on the roof hole. We got chains on us so that we can’t stand. Get us out, Joe, quick. I want to get me hands on Rockaway.”
“I’ll get you out, Bill, and get them chains off you, too. Wait a tick.”
Joe slid down the slope with care not to dislodge loose surface stones. At the entrance he tested his strength against the boulder, and from within the cave, Spinks advised him to look about for a pole and a smaller stone that had been used for leverage.
Joe found the pole and the stone, and setting the stone in position he laid the end of the pole under the boulder and across the stone. But, try as he might, exerting all his strength, he could only move the boulder a foot. It fell back into its position when he eased the levering pole.
Undaunted he moved stone and pole to the other side of the boulder and tried again, and again could move the great weight but not sufficiently to clear it of the entrance. Still undaunted he took a purchase with the pole at another angle, and this time found he could master the boulder with the slight slope away from the entrance to assist him. Grunting with effort, sweat streaming from his face and neck and arms, he put every ounce of power into a grand final pull on the levering pole. Over went the boulder, to stay poised for a split second on the edge of the narrow ledge, then to topple over and down the hill-side.
Joe laughed as he gasped for air. Then he slapped his thighs, and urged Spinks and Garroway, who were at the entrance, to just wait and listen. Immediately below was Rockaway’s fine house.
Chapter Twenty-two
Mr Rockaway Is Upset
MR ROCK was not happy.
Unhappiness produced a remarkable change in Mr Rockaway, as though it were that strange drug used by Dr Jekyll. Normally, Mr Rockaway’s long white hair was carefully brushed back from a magnificent forehead, his blue eyes were indicative of the joy of living, and his fresh-complexioned, large but not over-fleshed face bore an expression of goodwill towards all men.
This evening while sitting at his desk in his sumptuously appointed study his hair was ruffled, his eyes were small and hard and his mouth was drawn into a fixed scowl. He was unhappy because Fate had thrown a bar into the machine of contentment and peace he had created beside this sylvan inlet, wrecking the creation. The bar was ex-Superintendent Ericson, late of New Scotland Yard; and then, when he had begun to re-build the machine. Fate had wrecked it again in the person of this Bonaparte fellow. And to crown everything poor old Dan Malone must go and get strangled.
Poor old Dan! His brain was weak but his loyalty was as strong as steel, and to go and end like that was a crying shame.
That Dan Malone has messed up the Do-me business was less that unfortunate man’s fault than his own. He ought to have gone out with Dave and Dan on the Dolfin that day, when there would not have been all this bother of sending Tatter to burgle a safe after ten years’ retirement from his profession, and then having to send him and Marshall to sea the next morning and drown three men, two of whom should have been disposed of when Ericson was shot. Yes, he was a fool to have expected so much from poor old Dan.
Of course, he was a fool. Living here and quietly enjoying life had sapped his mentality. He had lost his punch. Here he was thinking of poor old Dan as weak-minded when he himself was a thundering sight worse. When the Dolfin brought back Spinks and Garroway he should have ordered poor old Dan to go out to sea straight away and drown them. But he hadn’t, and there was the kick. Throughout his long and somewhat exciting career he always had avoided murder because an early study of this crime convinced him that murder is an excessive spur to police activity, and that one murder very often demands another. And then there always had been the unpleasant thought of a rope about his neck.
Of course, Mavis was a disturbing influence clouding his matured judgment. Like her mother she was soft-hearted, and once she knew about the prisoners in the cavern she opposed their disposal in deep water. That created a problem the solution of which was extremely difficult if the disposal of the prisoners in deep water was not to be accepted. Retirement from business and settlement in a place like this free from the probability of enforced imprisonment, and with unlimited angling nearly all the year round, had not been accomplished easily, and a move to another place to achieve the same objective would be much more difficult. He had hated to think of leaving this machine he had created, and he wasn’t going to leave it.
Ah well! He had got
rid of Mavis for a week or two, and she would spend a devil of a lot of money. But now he could clean up the mess made by poor old Dan and prolonged by Mavis who was so like her wonderful mother. He could still hear the dwindling hum of Tatter’s motor-bike, and with satisfaction he counted on having Bonaparte’s brief-case in his hands within three hours. With the evidence in that case destroyed, and with the prisoners, including Bonaparte if he still lived, drowned in deep water, the rocks lying in the stream of his life would have been removed and the stream once again would run quietly and smoothly. And then, hey ho! for the swordfishing in earnest.
Mr Rockaway was sitting facing the tall french windows with his back to the door. So intense was his grief at the passing of Captain Malone, he failed to hear the infinitesimal sound of oil being squirted into the lock of the door and about the handles and catch. The uneconomic application of oil prevented Mr Rockaway from hearing the handle turned and the catch drawn inward to permit the door being opened. Rich though he was he would have denied the necessity of the oiling, but the person outside obviously thought otherwise, because having opened the door a fraction, he squirted more oil into the hinges.
Even when in possession of a large amount of oil it was no mean feat to enter the room without Mr Rockaway being aware of it. It was a still greater feat for the intruder to close and lock the door without disturbing Mr Rockaway’s train of thought.
However, Mr Napoleon Bonaparte was wholly successful.
If unhappiness was a drug converting Dr Jekyll Rockaway into Mr Hyde Rockaway, the effect of pain and mental anguish produced by the sufferings of others was similar in Bonaparte, Inspector, C.I.B. His general appearance was the antithesis of that of the being known to his colleagues. The veneer of civilization, so thin in the most gently nurtured of us, was entirely absent. He was wearing nothing. A film of oil caused his body to gleam like new bronze. His hair was matted with blood. His eyes were big, and the whites were now blood-shot. His lips were widely parted, revealing his teeth like the fangs of a young dog.
The oil-can he had obtained from the garage he had left outside the door, but he had with him an old shot-gun he had discovered in the garage and had loaded with number BB shot which, as everyone knows, is substantial in size. Mr Rockaway was oblivious to Bony’s advance from the door to a position behind his back, of the gun being pointed at him and the pink-nailed finger touching the gun’s front trigger.
Soundlessly, Bony blew between pursed lips, and the white hair on the crown of Mr Rockaway’s head trembled in the miniature breeze. With slight irritability, Mr Rockaway turned round in his chair. The degree of shock he received can be understood. He was like a man petrified by the sight of a car rushing straight at him.
Bony had observed in the face of the man above the menacing pistol resolution to be obeyed. Mr Rockaway now saw above the muzzle of the double-barrelled gun a human face implacably determined to kill. He knew that, should he move a fraction of an inch, he would die instantly, and he did not want to die instantly. When he was dead he would not be able to enjoy life, to live well, to feel the stupendous thrill of fighting a swordfish. He knew, too, that had he wished to move he could not. Even his hearing was affected. He could see Bony’s lips moving, but the sound of the words spoken by Bony appeared to come from another direction.
“Malone was just an ordinary brute,” Bony said, sibilantly. “He killed Ericson swiftly because he thought himself in danger. You, you are much worse than Malone, much worse than a brute. You are something inexpressibly foul to have condemned two men to a semi-solitary confinement for more than three months, chaining them so that the use of their legs was cruelly restricted, with probable crippling for life, denying them mental recreation in reading and the ordinary common necessaries of life.
“I am going to give you a chance to live, Rockaway, not because you deserve it but because it pleases me to give it. It pleases me to give it because I dislike using this gun with which to kill you, a gun being an impersonal method of destroying vermin. I want to feel you dying. I want to feel you struggling futilely in my hands while you are dying—as Malone did. In a moment I am going to drop this gun and employ my hands in your destruction.”
The paralysing inertia of the nightmare still imprisoned Mr Rockaway. He now tried to move and he tried to speak, but he was unable to do one or the other. He thought that his mind was cracking when the electric light blinked once. He thought how strange it was that he continued to gaze at a limited circle in the centre of which were two blazing orbs of blue surrounded by scarlet. Although he was unable to look away from those orbs he did see the rusty gun fall to the carpeted floor and wondered why it did not discharge. He saw, too, Bony’s dark hands rise and slowly approach him, their fingers distended and curved. He wanted to gain relief from the paralysing inertia by screaming, but he could not even scream.
At this instant Joe’s boulder arrived, its last bounce on the hill-side having blinked the electric light.
The rear of the house faced a low cliff cut into the hillside where a level building area had been formed, and the chimney carrying smoke from the kitchen range was built into this rear wall. The boulder struck the chimney a few feet above the range, passed cleanly through the brickwork, sped through the large kitchen to crash into the passage between it and the dining-room, and there to fall through the floor and sever the electric light and power lines.
There followed an instant of complete silence. Then began a roar of extraordinary intensity when the tall brick chimney fell and cut through the roof and the kitchen ceiling. It collected all of Mr Rockaway’s table china from the racks and glass-fronted cupboards, and reached the linoed floor in a succession of thuds.
The sound effects of Joe’s boulder produced opposite results in the two men facing each other in the study. They momentarily froze Napoleon Bonaparte, and they released Mr Rockaway from the bonds of inertia. He leaped to his feet, sending the chair over against Bony’s legs, and rushed towards the door. But the light was out and he became lost, so that he crashed into an antique Venetian cabinet containing still more antique Chinese porcelain. On his rebound from this he felt Bony’s hands clutching at his coat, and he then provided proof of his abhorrence of being throttled by screaming, or rather squealing much like a rabbit when caught in a gin trap.
When he stopped to take in air he heard Bony laughing like a devil, and he again screamed, this time keeping it up. He saw the faint grey oblongs of the french windows and dashed to them, but he did not see his own desk and fell sprawling over it. Now he felt Bony’s hands on the back of his legs, felt them slip up his back towards his neck. It was not a soothing feeling, and he continued to scream.
Bony’s hands were at his shoulders when the door was smashed in and the windows crashed inward to admit half a dozen burly men. One of them flashed a torch, and the remainder fell on Mr Rockaway and Bony and tore them asunder at the instant Bony’s hands closed on Mr Rockaway’s throat and stopped his screaming.
More men entered the untidy study. More torches were flashed on. Mr Rockaway recognized the intruders as policemen and he craved their protection. Bony recognized among the visitors Detective-Sergeant Allen and Constable Telfer. It was only then that he was recalled to his educational attainments, his professional rank, and his pride in his father’s race. He was overwhelmed by a flood of shame that had nothing to do with his nakedness.
Chapter Twenty-three
Bony Again Rises
WHEN MR ROCKAWAY’S many clocks struck the hour of two in the morning he was seated in his own luxurious car in mixed company. Besides several policemen, under Sergeant Lester, were his cook and his housekeeper, and Dave Marshall who was still thoroughly indisposed. The rough road over Dr George Mountain was no sedative to Marshall’s violent headache, but this route to Bega was dictated by the police desire to leave Bermagui and Tatter severely alone.
The damage occasioned to the electric light and power lines by Joe’s boulder had been repaired, and behind carefu
lly drawn curtains much activity followed the departure of the prisoners. Detective-Sergeant Allen decided to wait at the house for Tatter’s return in preference to going to Bermagui after him, or attempting to arrest him on the road coming from the township, this decision being largely based on knowledge of Tatter’s past and his known character.
A constable was stationed outside the house to give warning of Tatter’s approach along the private road. Another was stationed at the front door in conformity with routine, and a third, who was a first-aid expert, was detained to attend Bony, Spinks and his mate. Wilton assisted him, and Joe maintained the supply of hot water.
When Mr Rockaway’s numerous clocks chimed the hour of three in the morning Bony, Allen and Telfer sat in the study sipping coffee and eating ham sandwiches, while in the lounge Spinks and Garroway, bathed and barbered and shaved and massaged, were being dined on the best that the absent Mr Rockaway could supply.
Bony, also having bathed and resumed his clothing, was in a state of mind most despondent, and he listened to Detective-Sergeant Allen with no great attention. Allen was disclosing the basis of his decision to take Tatter here on his return from Bermagui, but Bony revealed an irritating lack of interest in Tatter.
His careful descriptions of Rockaway and his daughter, Malone and Marshall, sent to the New South Wales Commissioner of Police, with the suggestion that Scotland Yard be asked immediately if these men were known prior to Superintendent Ericson’s retirement, had resulted in money being spent like water on beam wireless and cable services both in Sydney and London, and the dispatch to Bermagui of D-S Allen to act under and with D-I Napoleon Bonaparte.
Rockaway was thought to be an Australian who emerged as a financier and company promoter in London in the year 1910. Shortly after the war he failed, but made a comeback in 1924, rising to rocket heights in three years. Unlike so many of his kind he chose his own time to get out—with a sum estimated at a round million. His confidential valet, David Marsden, disappeared with him and his daughter in 1927.
The Mystery of Swordfish Reef Page 22
