Venom House

by Arthur W. Upfield

  “Well, that’s about all. Blaze! I’ll telephone you if I should want to be ferried over before Dr Lofty returns this afternoon. Meanwhile, don’t repeat the story of the little aborigine boy who tracked his sister to the lagoon where she was taken by an alligator.”

  The cook nodded and grinned, nearly lost his empty pipe whilst holding the boat steady for his passengers, and pushed off. Bony watched the boat for a full minute before turning back to the house.

  As though he were the owner, he strolled into the hall and looked into the room opposite the lounge that now was a ward. He had previously entered this room with Mawson and Blaze, but on that occasion had remained by the door while they searched by the light of his torch. Despite distance from the kitchen it was used as a dining-room, being furnished with an exceptionally long and solid cedarwood table. At the table stood twelve cedarwood chairs. There was a vast cedarwood dresser which because of its antiquity was not incongruous. Above the fireplace hung a portrait in oils of a man who had lived in a bygone era and who could have been anything from a pirate to the official flogger. As Mary Answerth looked something like him, Bony guessed he was one of her forebears.

  Almost languidly, he passed up the staircase to pause on the gallery once again to admire the window. Anguish and blood, toil and sweat and brutality, had gone into the erection of this sombre house, and a ruthless man had conceived and brought into being the glory of this staircase, and the window to emphasize its beauty, making of it a wondrous jewel in a cold, stone casket. Perhaps he it was whose portrait hung above the mantel in the dining-room.

  Proceeding into the wing opposite that where Morris had his rooms, he entered the bedroom normally occupied by Mary Answerth, again examined the window, and leaned out to observe the position of the porch below. The next room, Mrs Leeper had said, had been Mrs Answerth’s bedroom. It was clean and dustless, but the four-poster bed was stripped, and the chest contained neither linen nor blankets. Standing before the window, he watched the boat now drawing close to the opposite shore, and he unfastened the catch and leaned out to estimate how far he was from the window of Mary Answerth’s bedroom.

  He looked into four more rooms before arriving at the end of the passage beyond the right-angle. All these rooms had been undisturbed for decades. At the end of the passage was a curtained recess, and nothing there excepting two pails, several scrubbing brushes, and brooms flanking a water tap. The pails were dusty. The brooms looked as though never used, and two wall brooms reminded him of his wife, Marie, who appeared to like nothing better than to whisk imaginary cobwebs from the ceiling of his study when he was working there.

  He descended to the ground floor by the back stairs, noting that Mawson had returned the key to the door at the end. Hearing Mrs Leeper in her kitchen, he passed its door and sauntered to the refreshingly modern room in which he had first met Janet Answerth.

  This room was so markedly dissimilar to the rest of the house that to enter it was like emerging from a dungeon into a sunlit garden. The risen sun flung wide bars of gold across the rugs in effort to reach the baby grand of natural walnut. The divan was aloof but the chairs said let me caress you.

  From a small table he took up a copy of My First Two Thousand Years, and wondered how Janet Answerth reacted to the adventures of The Wandering Jew. Taste in literature is invariably an excellent guide to character. A wide, glass-fronted bookcase drew him. Next to a set of Bishop Thurlow-Elswick’s Notes on the Book of Revelations were two beautifully bound volumes of The Decameron. Jane Austen’s work was well to the fore, with Somerset Maugham representing the moderns. A volume which made Bony’s heart ache with envy was Milton’s Paradise Lost. With the exception of the tale of the lass who went to sea without a chaperon, works by Australian authors were conspicuous by their absence. Not a fraction of an inch was given to mystery fiction.

  Doubtless, the music sheets and albums would have assisted him in his reading of character, had he understood music. The few pictures were originals, their subjects so varied as to give no clue to the psychologist. And women of all ranks are buyers of sleek magazines devoted to cosmetics and clothes.

  There was a further door, and, receiving no acknowledgement to his knock, he entered a room whose outer wall was entirely of glass. The parquet floor was lightly waxed. The furniture was voluptuous ... what there was of it. There were several easels bearing paintings in varied stages of development, and upon the wall facing the window was an art gallery. All these pictures were unsigned, and amateurish even to Bony, whose taste was old-fashioned. Save that the artist favoured the out-of-doors, they told him nothing. He found no weapons, no phial of poison, no flex, no treatise on the art of garrotting. He glanced into the drawers of a roll-top desk, and found no reports of inquests on drowned bodies.

  Again in the sitting-room, he was sure that these rooms were solely occupied by Janet, for he found no evidence of her sister Mary. Even the spittoon Mary had brought in during that first visit was gone. Surely no two sisters could be more widely apart than these.

  On his sauntering into the kitchen, Mrs Leeper turned from the immense wood-burning stove to regard him with undisguised astonishment. Her house frock was almost wholly concealed by the starched apron, and once again Bony was sharply reminded of the advertisement for the pot and pan polish.

  “I thought you had gone, Inspector,” she said.

  “The aroma of bacon and lamb cutlets detained me, Mrs Leeper. Am I in the way?”

  “No. You will be staying for breakfast?”

  “That is the ambition at the moment.”

  “Then I’ll prepare more cutlets. One of the advantages of working here is that you can eat the meat they kill on the place.”

  “My wife and I are thinking of turning vegetarians,” Bony lied, seating himself in a chair at the centre table. “On my meagre salary, we can no longer afford to pay a shilling for one small, stringy chop from an animal who lived to the age of twenty. Did you suggest a cup of coffee?”

  “I didn’t. But I’ll pour you one.”

  “You haven’t been able to recall what happened to that flex you used to tie up your trunk?”

  Mrs Leeper sighed as though her patience was taxed by yet another mental invalid. Without speaking, she filled a coffee cup and placed it before him. She brought a dish of cutlets from the refrigerator, added several to the grill and returned the dish. She sighed again, then made her pronouncement.

  “When I accepted a position in a lunatic asylum, I learned the art of self-defence. Pressure on certain nerves in the neck will cause temporary paralysis. If the pressure is maintained on another nerve for five seconds the patient will not survive. I’ve often felt like committing murder, Inspector. If ever I do it won’t be with power flex.”

  “I’ve heard of that jujitsu hold,” Bony said, blandly. “You must try it on me sometime. Meanwhile, I feel I ought to point out that there are necks and necks. There are swan necks and bull necks, and, Mrs Leeper, there are hippopotamus necks. I suggest that one might meet with difficulty when trying to apply pressure to the nerve you mentioned, in the alleged neck of Miss Mary Answerth.”

  “I wouldn’t find it difficult,” boasted the cook.

  “I was not so impolite as to infer that you tried to murder Miss Answerth,” proceeded Bony, and added thoughtfully: “Although you could have used that long-handled wall broom upstairs to tap against Miss Mary’s window from the window of the room next to hers, and then followed her downstairs and out to the porch. By the way, you are quite sure that when finding Miss Mary on the hall floor the front door was wide open?”

  “It was wide open, and breaking a hippopotamus neck is easier than breaking a swan neck.” Mrs Leeper completed the loading of a tray. “Take the passage to the left if you want the bathroom. Breakfast’s ready ... in the dining-room.”

  Thanking her, Bony passed from the kitchen, hearing behind him the rustle of the woman’s starched apron and feeling himself rebuked by one to whom cleanliness was g
reater than life and death. Refreshed by cold water and the application of a pocket comb, he entered the dining-room to be greeted by Janet Answerth, who rose from the table.

  “What a surprise, Inspector! Do come and eat. You must be famished.”

  She was wearing a yellow linen dress with Chinese collar of white, and in the dimness of the room her hair was the colour of old copper. Petite and vital, it occurred to Bony how peculiar it was she had not married.

  “How is Miss Mary?” he asked, when helping himself to a cereal.

  “Still sleeping, Inspector. At least I suppose her drugged condition could be called sleeping. Doctor Lofty said she would wake about eleven, and told us to be very firm if she insisted on getting up. She has to stay in bed for a week.”

  “My study of her causes me to think she will rebel.”

  “Mrs Leeper will win,” Janet said with the vocal tones she had used with Morris. “Mrs Leeper is a very capable woman.”

  “That is my opinion also. It is her ambition to own a mental hospital, she tells me. She is experienced.”

  “I am not aware of her ambition, but of her experience. She is a good cook and a reliable housekeeper, which is all that interests me. I am much more interested in you.”

  “In me?” Bony pretended to be startled more than he actually was.

  “Yes,” Janet said slowly. “You know, you don’t look a bit like a detective. Are you an Australian?”

  “I am Australia,” Bony claimed, a pause between each word.

  “But you have such a wonderful accent.”

  “Due, perhaps, to the fact that I was reared at a Mission Station with children of the aboriginal race who speak English like the Dubliners of Ireland. Not having been to Dublin I cannot vouch for it.”

  “And you are actually on the same level as Inspector Stanley?”

  In this light, the large eyes were grey, and Bony was sure of it as he looked deeply into them. There was a limit to the depth, however, and he recognized a clever woman so absurdly foolish as to believe in her power over all men. Well, why disillusion her? In his grandee manner, he murmured:

  “Madam, I have the same rank as Inspector Stanley, but I am far above his level, intellectually.”

  “I am sure you are, Inspector Bonaparte. I found Inspector Stanley rather dull. Do you think you will ever discover who murdered poor Mother?”

  “Naturally, Miss Answerth.”

  “You have reasons for being confident?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh! Do tell me.”

  “One reason is because I have never yet failed to finalize a murder investigation.”

  Her lips were still and slightly apart, and her eyes wide with admiration until scepticism crept into them.

  “But some murderers are very clever, don’t you think?” she said. “Not all murderers are found out.”

  “They would be were there a dozen Napoleon Bonapartes instead of but one. I am myself unable, Miss Answerth, to investigate every crime of homicide.”

  “Of course. You think, then, that this case won’t defeat you?”

  “I am sure of it. The murderer made one mistake, and will make others. They all do, Miss Answerth, but often when a crime is investigated by men like Inspector Stanley, the murderer outwits them. By the way, during my wanderings about the house before breakfast ... to make sure that the man who attacked Miss Mary isn’t in the house ... I found myself in your sitting-room, and entered the studio. Are all those your paintings?”

  “Yes. I spend quite a lot of time there. I found I had to do something to keep myself alive. Do you like them?”

  “Very much. Especially those of the Folly. I thought your treatment of light on the water-killed trees particularly good. You play, too?”

  “I love the piano. Outside Morris, my music and my painting are my chief interests. Father was wise in his dealings with us, Inspector. He sent me to school in Brisbane. Poor Mary was too boorish to bother with. Often she is horribly crude. I’ll never forgive her for bringing that beastly spittoon into my sitting-room. Her place is at the men’s quarters. Do tell me what mistake the murderer has made.”

  Bony looked doubtful. He was not pleased that this Janet Answerth should have the effrontery to think he could be ensnared by her feminine charm and beauty, to think that he, with all his experience of life and people, would fall at her feet and pour from his palpitating heart all his secrets. So he smiled into her eyes, and played her game, just a little better.

  “You wouldn’t mention it to anyone, would you?”

  “You may trust me, Inspector.”

  “I feel that I can, Miss Answerth. Well, you see, the man who killed your mother also attempted to kill your sister. His mistake was in twice using a lasso, betraying the fact that he was an expert. When I find the man who is such an expert, I shall arrest him at once.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Writing on the Wall

  THE DAY WAS growing up ... an unruly child. On Bony’s emerging from the house after breakfasting with Janet Answerth, he found that the sun was Chinese yellow instead of Australian gold. The wind was coming from the nor-west, and already little waves were throbbing against the island called Venom House.

  Standing on the levee, he could see the mark in the bank made by the prow of Blaze’s boat. There were several similar marks obviously older than twelve hours. He could not observe marks made by a swimmer wading to and climbing over the levee. To be sure that no one had swum or come by boat to the island the previous night, he followed the levee clockwise.

  The levee, of earth and stone, was sufficiently broad at the top to provide a pathway six to eight feet above the water. Half a dozen sheep were feeding inside the levee, and they followed him with the expectancy of hand-fed animals until a fence stopped them.

  Beyond the fence was the vegetable garden, the fowl pens, the woodstack and, protected by tarpaulins, the sawing-bench and the oil engine to power the circular saw. Here Bony was at the rear of the house, and he paused to watch the busy hens, among which were two mothers fussing with many chicks, at the same time noting the position of the kitchen and back doors. There was much more land on this, the north, side, and the rising wind was vigorously flapping the clothes on two lines. Near the kitchen door was built an open-fronted shed containing the split wood. The man who came over specially to saw and chop wood, and do other chores, might be worthy of examination. At the moment, the situation of the covered sawing-bench and oil engine in the lee of the stack of unsawn wood was of greater import.

  Eventually the levee conducted him to the east side of the house and so opposite that corner where Morris Answerth had his rooms. There was nothing out of position with the steel lattice guarding the bedroom window. The casement was open a few inches, but he could not see Morris, probably because he was sleeping after his exciting night. The thought brought awareness of his own need of sleep.

  On coming again to the causeway, he was sure that no stranger or unauthorized person had landed from a boat or had emerged from the water to attract Mary Answerth’s attention and so lure her out of the house, and thus there could be no argument to contest the fact that her assailant lived at Venom House.

  Bony turned to gaze once more at the front of the mansion, for mansion it was. He fancied someone was watching him from the lounge. The front door was open as he had left it, but long since the dew on the grass had vanished, and with it the tracks which he had read as easily as the printed page. There was slight movement at the first of Morris Answerth’s two living-room windows and he saw the hand from which a dun-coloured line was creeping down the grey stone face. Morris was fishing, not sleeping. It would be Janet who watched from the lounge, as Mrs Leeper would be in her kitchen.

  Just why was Morris Answerth confined to those two rooms? Unable to swim, the “island” itself was for him a prison. Was that eternal confinement dictated by periods of violence when restraint was difficult even to such a pair as Mary and Mrs Leeper? Save for the one exhi
bition of violence when Morris had threatened to throw the lamp, Bony had seen nothing indicating that he required such constraint.

  On the occasion when he had escaped from the house, he had taken the boat, aimlessly rowed on the Folly and landed to play with young lambs. Blaze had supported that story, in addition to Mrs Leeper. The thought that Morris, by watching his sister and others wading over the causeway, also knew the pathway hidden by the muddy water, had previously been explored by Bony. Had he managed to escape on occasions other than when he had rowed on the Folly? It inferred, of course, that his door had been accidentally left unlocked, and this in turn inferred a habit of forgetting to lock his door. That no one knew of his escape via the window could be accepted.

  The hiding-place of the blanket rope, the old trousers and the sand shoes was sufficient proof of planning and cunning to outwit his sisters. He was much more than an obedient, polite boy of ten or twelve years, and Bony wondered how much, if anything, had his mother contributed to that part of his seemingly arrested mind.

  Bony walked to the magnet being lowered from the upper window. The string was ordinary parcel twine and the magnet was large and powerful. On touching the ground, the fisherman manoeuvred it as much as the window opening would permit, and it collected a toy railway line, two nuts and a metal knob which had probably come from the top of a chair. Although the fisherman could not have felt the “bites”, the magnet was drawn up and disappeared through the window.

  Bony noticed many metal objects lying so wide that the fisherman would never catch them, and, the magnet again being lowered, gently he moved it to catch so many objects that it fairly bristled.

  This catch eventually disappeared, and a hand was thrust far out and waved to him. Again the bait was lowered, and again raised bristling with the catch. Then a shower of objects fell from the window, and the game was continued.

  It was played for half an hour, and might have continued longer had not Janet Answerth appeared on the porch and come to investigate. Solemnly, Bony loaded the magnet, and, solemnly, he watched it being drawn up by the fisherman.