An Author Bites the Dust

by Arthur W. Upfield

“Johannesburg,” Bony lied. “I am on the Johannesburg Age, and I’ve come to this country to visit my late brother’s wife and to gather material for a series of articles and perhaps a novel or two.”

  “Oh, a writer!” Red-head was impressed. It was obvious that she wanted to linger with them, but she had noted the look of disapproval on the face of the major-domo that a member of his staff should be familiar with the patrons. With a rustle of starched clothes, she departed, and Mrs Farn began to pour the tea.

  “Did I do it rightly?” she asked.

  “Superbly, Mrs Farn,” he told her, smilingly. “I am sure, even thus early, that I am going to fall for her. She will be worth my broken heart, and my wife’s amusement when I tell her. Can you see Mr Wilcannia-Smythe on the terrace?”

  Mrs Farn’s dark eyes went into action, and without a hint of the conspirator, she examined their fellow guests.

  Then, “He’s sitting on your right—three tables away—with a blonde dressed in blue. The man with the white hair.”

  “A beautiful position,” Bony remarked loudly. “A magnificent view, indeed. It was a happy thought to come here.”

  He moved carelessly so that he could examine the man with the white hair and the beautiful blonde he was entertaining. She was laughing and he was presenting his open cigarette-case.

  Forty-two was his recorded age. His hair was snow-white and worn over-long, sweeping back from the broad forehead in leonine waves. His eyes were hazel, and at the moment were regarding his companion with light mockery. It was an extraordinary face, but without the strength that should have been there in accordance with his hair and the shape of his head.

  “Yes, a restful place, indeed,” Bony went on, and added softly, “D’you know the woman?”

  “I’m sure I’ve seen her,” replied Mrs Farn, two vertical lines deep between her eyes. “How vexatious!”

  “Perhaps the Lacy girl would know,” Bony suggested.

  “Yes, she might. I’ll try to attract her attention.”

  “Do. Is there anyone else here you recognize, and in whom I could be interested?”

  Mrs Farn once again surveyed the company, the frown still deep between her eyes. This suddenly vanished, and she said, “Yes. Mrs Mervyn Blake is coming up the steps.”

  Beyond Wilcannia-Smythe and his friend, Bony observed the widow of the dead author, and his first impression was one of slight disappointment. It puzzled him why this should be, for she was dressed in a natural linen frock, wore smart shoes and stockings, and her abundant hair was correctly groomed. Wearing neither hat nor gloves, she appeared as though she were staying at the hotel. She was still handsome, still graceful as she walked from the steps towards the main entrance to meet the major-domo.

  To him she said something and the man nodded and spoke, but with what he said she disagreed, shaking her head with sharp protest. The major-domo then conducted her to a table at the back of the terrace near the main entrance.

  “I’d like another cup of tea,” Bony said.

  The major-domo seated Mrs Blake and beckoned to a boy uniformed in white. He gave an order and the boy sped away into the building. He took Mrs Blake’s order and stalked to an alcove of palms where waitresses not engaged waited to serve. Neither Wilcannia-Smythe nor his companion—if she knew Mrs Blake—was aware of that woman’s entry on to this stage. The boy issued from the building carrying a blotting pad and note-paper, which he set down before Mrs Blake. She proceeded to write with a silver stylograph. When the waitress reached her with the tea things, she was slipping the note into an envelope and looking round for the boy.

  Under cover of light conversation with Mrs Farn, Bony watched the little play with profound interest, his insatiable curiosity sharpened. The waitress set out the tea things and the boy stood back with the envelope on a salver. People left their tables and drifted away, and others were conducted forward by the magnifico. The boy came forward, weaving between guests and tables. When almost at their table, he turned towards Wilcannia-Smythe and his friend, and they heard him say, “For you, sir.”

  Wilcannia-Smythe looked at him and then at the note preferred on the tray. Bony expected to see surprise registered on his face when he saw the handwriting, but Wilcannia-Smythe’s smiling face indicated no recognition. He spoke to his companion, obviously begging to be excused, opened the envelope and read the contents. She looked away and towards Mrs Farn and Bony, but not quickly enough to meet his gaze.

  Wilcannia-Smythe slipped the note into a pocket and asked again to be excused, saying something that changed her expression. She nodded, and he rose to follow the boy, and Bony noted that he walked with the easy grace of the dancing master.

  “Please get that waitress again, Mrs Farn,” Bony said urgently.

  Having crossed the terrace, Wilcannia-Smythe stood before Mrs Blake. His back was towards Bony, but a man’s back can reveal much, and the straight and narrow back of Mr Wilcannia-Smythe revealed his suave greeting. Mrs Blake smiled frostily and waved her hand in invitation to him to be seated. He sat with his back to Bony, which was unfortunate.

  The blonde in blue was undisguisedly perplexed, her eyes puckered, her left hand nervously teasing her handbag. No longer did she smoke with any evidence of enjoyment.

  The distance between Mrs Blake and the unobtrusively watching blue eyes was not less than eighty feet, but every shade of expression, every movement of the dark brows, and the slight trembling of hands were noted. She was talking rapidly and she was not in a pleasant frame of mind. The light was reflected by her glasses in dots and dashes. The white head of the man she was addressing seldom moved save now and then to indicate dissent.

  Had he been a lip reader, Bony could have followed what Mrs Blake was saying. Mrs Farn’s voice had become a gentle sound against the babel of over-loud voices. He had not forgotten the honey blonde and he regretted that he could not keep both her and Mrs Blake under observation. Mrs Blake had to have priority.

  Mrs Blake was becoming positively angry, and repeatedly Wilcannia-Smythe was shaking his head in denial of what appeared to be accusations. Then the red-headed waitress was standing between Mrs Blake and himself, and Mrs Farn was asking for another pot of tea.

  “Who’s the girl who was with Mr Wilcannia-Smythe?” asked Mrs Farn. “Don’t look that way. She might think we are talking about her.”

  “Oh, her! That’s Miss Nancy Chesterfield.”

  Nancy Chesterfield! Bony covertly regarded the blonde. Nancy Chesterfield, indeed! One of the six guests staying with the Blakes that night he died. She was the woman who had accompanied Blake from the literary meeting to the hotel lounge, and from the lounge to his home in his car.

  “I think she’s the loveliest woman I’ve ever seen,” the waitress declared softly. “She knows how to dress, and that’s a gift, not an art. Wonder why that Wilcannia-Smythe left her to talk to Mrs Blake? Funny Miss Chesterfield didn’t go over there as well. Must be something up. Mrs Blake’s in a real tantrum. I must go. See you later, perhaps.”

  Mrs Blake was fumbling in her handbag. Her face was coloured by emotion, and her eyes maintained their gaze on Wilcannia-Smythe. The hand groping in her bag seemed to be energized more by unrestrained anger than mental direction, because the result was delayed a full minute. Eventually she produced a handkerchief. It was a man’s handkerchief. She held a corner of it towards Wilcannia-Smythe. He became perfectly still, until after Mrs Blake had dropped the handkerchief on the table near him.

  The watchful Bony thought it probable he was now seeing the light. The very last thing he had observed inside Blake’s writing-room before Wilcannia-Smythe had switched off his torch was a handkerchief lying on the writing desk. That was a white handkerchief, and so was this one produced from Mrs Blake’s handbag. If it were the same then it could be assumed that Mrs Blake had discovered it on the writing desk, that it bore Wilcannia-Smythe’s initials, and that, believing he had entered the building unknown to her, she had examined her husband’s possess
ions and missed the typescript and the notebook. Now she was demanding an explanation; most likely she was demanding the return of the note-book and typescript.

  The fresh pot of tea was brought and Bony had to withdraw his attention from the play. He heard Ethel Lacy remark to Mrs Farn, “I don’t think they hit it off very well when he was staying there. He’s a mealy-mouthed, sarcastic devil whose face I’d like to slap. He was pretty thick with the Montrose woman and Mervyn Blake.”

  She drifted away and Bony asked Mrs Farn what had led to the statement.

  “I asked her what she thought of Mr Wilcannia-Smythe, and that’s what she said,” replied Mrs Farn. “I think Miss Chesterfield is going to leave.”

  “H’m! Interesting, Mrs Farn, most interesting. Please go on talking. I think the subject was chickens. Thank you. Yes, I will take another cake.”

  Once again stealthily observing Mrs Blake and the white-haired man, Bony saw that he was now standing and that the handkerchief was no longer lying on the table. Had not the interruption come, he might have been certain that Wilcannia-Smythe had taken possession of the handkerchief, instead of merely assuming that he had done so. Mrs Blake was now looking appealingly at Wilcannia-Smythe. Her mouth was trembling, and her hands were betraying her emotion. Wilcannia-Smythe sat down in the chair opposite, to her, thus enabling Bony to see his face.

  He began to speak, his face devoid of emotional stress, the manner in which his lips moved denoting deliberate speech. He spoke for at least two minutes, Mrs Blake regarding him intently. Then abruptly, he rose and stood smiling down at her, made a little bow of finality and walked unhurriedly, not back to Miss Chesterfield but to the main entrance of the building. When he had gone, Bony’s gaze returned to Mrs Blake. She was biting her nether lip, and her left hand resting on the table was spasmodically clenching.

  From the corner of his eyes, Bony saw something in blue rise up. The gorgeous Miss Chesterfield floated across the terrace to the front steps, daintily went down them, walked like Venus across the open space to the car park and there entered a smart single-seater. Its engine burred, and slowly Miss Chesterfield drove down to the highway and turned citywards.

  “She’ll be furious, being left like that,” said Mrs Farn. “I know I’d be.”

  “My wife often is,” Bony averred, absently. “Let us wait for the curtain. Will you have a cigarette?”

  Mrs Farn declined to smoke. Mrs Blake was writing a letter, and Bony proceeded to talk of Johannesburg, where he had once stayed for a week. Mrs Blake covered one sheet of the writing pad and began on the second. She covered that, half filled a third, folded the sheets, and placed them in an envelope, which she addressed. A stamp was obtained from a little book in her handbag. That done, she rose and made her way to the post box at the top of the front steps. Two minutes later she also left, driving a car.

  “Well, Mrs Farn, that was a very nice interlude,” murmured Bony. “Thank you so much for bringing me here. We must come again. It has been most enjoyable.”

  Chapter Ten

  The Debunker

  It was seldom that Bony felt the need of advice, for he was master in the vast pastoral lands and the semi-deserts of inland Australia. But he was experiencing the need when lounging on Miss Pinkney’s front veranda on the morning following his visit to the Rialto Hotel, for now he was moving in a world in which he was not master, a world of human sophistication in a settled community.

  It is often extremely difficult to bring to a successful conclusion an investigation of a plain case of homicide. Nevertheless, in every such case there is the body of the victim to announce the cause of death, be it by bullet or blunt instrument, by knife or poison. In effect, Superintendent Bolt had said, “A man named Mervyn Blake died suddenly one night. The medical men cannot tell us what killed him, only that he appears to have died from natural causes, as most of us die. Still, I’ve got a hunch that someone put the skids under him. My men have done their stuff, and they can’t produce any likely motive for murder.”

  Bolt’s men had tackled the circumstances surrounding Blake’s death with the relentless efficiency of modern scientific detection. They placed under their microscopes much more than the dead man’s viscera and under microscopes of a different kind they had placed the dead man’s widow and his guests and his household staff in their search for a motive for murder.

  There must be a motive for homicide unless the killer is an utter idiot. There was no evidence that Blake had committed suicide; in fact, the evidence of his death was opposed to the theory of suicide. And for all their probing, the Victorian C.I.B. under the redoubtable Inspector Snook had not been able to unearth one fact that would lift the finger of suspicion against any person.

  Inspector Snook had written the summary, and it revealed that Inspector Snook had reached the opinion that there was no proof whatsoever that Mervyn Blake had died illegally, and that being so, he did not believe Blake had been murdered. Superintendent Bolt, on the other hand, thought he smelled homicide. He was not satisfied to pigeonhole that material gathered and, perforce, placed it in cold storage, and so in a spirit of friendship, he offered to take the case out of cold storage and give it to Bony to smell. And Bony smelled blood.

  It is one thing to smell blood and another thing to find it. The only way to locate it in this Blake case was to discover a motive for killing Mervyn Blake.

  Bony felt rather than knew that there was a something deep below the surface that Snook had not troubled to search for because he did not know it existed. To understand the stage, one must go behind the scenes and study the mechanism of the theatre, and Bony felt that to understand the profession of authorship and those who practised it, it would be necessary to delve and burrow into the lives of living writers and critics of literature to ascertain how they ticked.

  Coming against this Blake case, he came to a world with which he was absolutely unfamiliar. How to gain entry into the world of literature inhabited by the Blakes and their friends was becoming a problem to Bony—until he remembered Clarence B. Bagshott.

  Clarence B. Bagshott lived on a mountain top, and Bony had once accompanied him on a swordfishing trip to Bermagui, since when they had exchanged letters at long intervals. It had not been Bagshott’s mystery tales but his feet that had gained Bony’s interest in the man. His feet were exceptionally large, and the boots on them became professionally important in a case known as “The Devil’s Steps”. Inclined to call a typewriter a blood-drenched stone-crusher Bagshott had no guile, very little culture, and the vice of exaggeration.

  Tall, lean and hard, middle-aged and active, Bagshott welcomed Bony in the manner of the prodigal’s father. Bony’s left arm was gripped and he was propelled forward into the house, and into the writer’s study where he was forced down into an easy chair beside the desk. A little breathless, he was left alone for five minutes, a period he occupied by making a number of his distinguished cigarettes, and then was presented with tea and cake, and urged to “relax, Bony, relax”.

  Bagshott grabbed a chair, dragged it into position, and added, “You’re the very last bloke I expected to see, and yet—the pleasure’s all my very own. How’s things up your street?”

  “Quite well. And you?”

  “Oh, just so-so. I’ve got another five weeks, three days and—let me see—yes, and nine hours to go before starting off for Bermagui and the swordies. But I’m holding out with astonishing fortitude. My launchman learnt a new tip from an American angler. Remember how we used to let the bait and the flanking teasers troll about forty feet astern of the boat? The new dodge is to increase that distance to a hundred feet astern.”

  Bony sighed loudly, resignedly.

  “Wish I were going with you,” he said.

  “What’s going to stop you?” demanded Bagshott.

  “Work, my Chief Commissioner, and all the circumstances that keep my nose to the grindstone, my dear Bagshott. I am even now using my annual leave to work for Superintendent Bolt.”

>   “Referring to?”

  “The late Mervyn Blake.”

  Bagshott grinned, his hazel eyes suddenly hard.

  “I’ve had the thought that the passing of the great Mervyn Blake might attract you,” he said. “Can I do anything?”

  Bony nodded and lit another cigarette. He inhaled deeply, drank half a cup of tea and then exhaled before saying, “An extraordinary case because of its lack of clues and the absence of any likely motive either for suicide or homicide. I am finding it delightfully absorbing. Bolt and his fellows got nowhere, and so far I’m not getting anywhere, either. Actually I’ve come to talk about personalities. Did Mervyn Blake ever criticize your books?”

  “Mine! Lord, no ! I don’t produce literature.”

  “Then what do you produce?”

  “Commercial fiction.”

  “There is a distinction?”

  “Terrific.”

  “Will you define it, please.”

  “I’ll try to,” Bagshott said slowly. “In this country literature is a piece of writing executed in schoolmasterly fashion and yet so lacking in entertainment values that the general public won’t buy it. Commercial fiction—and this is a term employed by the highbrows—is imaginative writing that easily satisfies publishers and editor because the public will buy it.”

  “Go on,” urged Bony.

  “Don’t know that I can,” Bagshott said, doubtfully. “Let’s get back to the starting point. You began it by asking if Blake ever criticized my work, and I said no.”

  “And then you added that Blake did not criticize your work because you wrote commercial fiction,” Bony pressed on. “On several occasions I have felt an immovable object. I am feeling it now. Also I am feeling the current of hostility in you towards Blake and his associates. Do you think it reasonable to assume that that hostility in another would be strong enough to produce the act of homicide?”

  “No,” was Bagshott’s answer. “I’ll tell you why I say no to that. The Blake-Smythe coterie in number is very small. It’s influence a few years ago was powerful, but it’s rapidly on the wane now. My hostility to it isn’t engendered by what it is doing to the growth of Australian literature but rather by what it’s done in the past.”