Death of a Swagman b-9

by Arthur W. Upfield

  The frowning sergeant did not reply.

  “The man reached the hut along its north wall, and he came to the door and went inside. He went inside, I repeat, and he closed the door and he has not come out.”

  “Then he must be still in there?” asserted Marshall.

  “Naturally. The tracks proved that he arrived and went in. There are no tracks to prove that he has come out.”

  “Well, what’s it all mean? You seem to know.”

  “Let us get out of the car.”

  On alighting from the car, Bony stood beside its rear mudguard and invited Marshall to join him. The sergeant’s interest was kindled.

  “You see,” Bony continued, melodramatically waving his hands, “you see a work of wondrous artistic beauty, a work revealing the ultimate in balance and mathematical exactitude. There the perfect beauty of line etching the Walls of China against the sky, and all about us the same beauty of line in the miniature waves of the sand ripples. To the undiscerning eye, inall this vast picture presented to our eyes today, there are no straight lines save those made by man when he erected that hut, the tank stand and the mill and the lines oftroughing. Even that natural gutter over there which carried water the other day down from the higher land is not straight for even an inch. It would seem that the Master Potter is incapable of moulding a straight line. Satan’s hell is probably built on straight lines-the flames even having no curves in them. Do you see the spent match which I flicked away a moment ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “Look at the ground immediately to the left of the match. What do you see?”

  “Nothing. The ground is smooth.”

  “I can see straight lines immediately to the left of the match, and also beyond the match and this side of the match. I am confident that when we approach the door of the hut we shall see straight lines also imprinted on the nice, clean, and apparently smooth sand. Come with me to the match, and with it I will trace the straight lines for you to see more clearly.”

  Bony squatted beside the match and the sergeant bent down beside him. With the point of the match Bony indicated lines so finely drawn that even then Marshall found difficulty in following them. When they stood up Marshall waited for his superior in bushcraft as well as in rank to speak.

  “There are no straight lines in nature,” Bony repeated. “Therefore those straight lines were made by a man. A man walks direct from Wattle Creek Station to that hut, goes inside and then comes out again, shuts the door, and walks backwards away from it, at the same time carefully wiping out his boot prints with the aid of lengths of sacking strips tied to the end of a stick. Why he left like that, why he was so anxious to prevent others seeing that he had left, is a problem which can wait awhile. We can, meanwhile, read it in another way. The man from Wattle Creek went into the hut and has not come out. A second man came and went, and flailed out his tracks from the sand in order to prevent others from knowing that he had visited the place. Being human, he could not do other than make straight lines with his flail. I am almost sure that there were two men, and that one of them is still inside the hut.”

  “Well, let’s go and find out,” pressed the sergeant.

  “Slowly! Slowly!” murmuredBony, and Marshall noted that when he walked towards the closed door of the hut he walked on the toes of his feet and his hands were clenched tightly. They halted two yards from the door.

  “Again I offer thanks to that police photographer for unwittingly introducing me to a nice meaty case,” Bony said softly. “The man who so carefully flailed out his boot prints was most careful not to tread on the tracks made by the man who is still inside. Look! He reached the hut at its south-east corner, or left by it, and he did not put foot on the low doorstep, as the man did who is still inside. When you open the door, sergeant, you are going to receive a surprise.”

  Sergeant Marshall was now standing stiffly erect. His face was a mask in which his eyes were unwinking orbs. He said, ice in his voice:

  “I think I can smell the surprise.”

  “I have done so for the last half hour. Will you open the door, or shall I?”

  “Me… I’m no chicken,” growled Marshall.

  “One moment. The door handle. It may possibly have retained the fingerprints of the man with the flail.”

  “Of course,” snapped Marshall. “I’m a fool.”

  He whipped a handkerchief from a pocket, wrapped it about the brass handle, and with a firm grip turned it and flung inward the door.

  Their gaze became riveted for an instant on a pair of old boots suspended about twelve inches from the floor. Then, slowly, their gaze rose upward, up the trousered legs, up the old blue shirt, up to the awful face of the man hanging from a crossbeam.

  A great swarm of blowflies came out through the open doorway to break the silence with hateful buzzing.

  “Do you know him?” Bony asked with apparent calmness.

  “No. Never seen him before. What do you think-suicide or murder?”

  “I give murder first preference because of the man with the flail. He was probably here when that poor wretch arrived. I would that the interior was much larger, but we must go inside.”

  The interior measurements of the hut were ten feet by ten feet. More swiftly than he had moved for some time, Bony stepped by the suspended corpse and reached the far side, where he quickly raised the trap-door opening which served as a window.

  “Ah, the obvious story is as follows,” he said. “The man entered the hut. Then he tossed his swag on to the bunk and removed from it the two leather straps. Having done that, he dragged the table almost beneath the crossbeams, climbed up on it, joined the two straps together after making a noose with the end of one passed through its own buckle, fastened the end of the other to the beam and slipped the noose over his head and about his neck, and then stepped off the table. But why, if he arrived with the intention of committing suicide, did he close the door? And if he had no intention of suiciding when he arrived, why did he not visit the well for water? For he did not possess a water bag.”

  “You think he was hanged, then?” Marshall asked.

  “I think he was hanged. You had better go back for Dr Scott and Gleeson. Phew! Let’s get out.”

  Having hastily closed the trap window, they went outside and closed the door.

  “What about making arrangements for having the body removed to the morgue?” Marshall suggested. “TheJasons can do that.”

  “Wait! Er -no. Not a word about this affair to anyone in Merino, not even to Gleeson and the doctor until you have left with them. And also, not a word to a living soul, now or in the future, about that game of noughts and crosses on the door, and about the blemish of straight lines on Nature’s handiwork. They shall remain two little secrets to be shared only by you and me.”

  Chapter Eight

  Tracks on the Walls of China

  DURING THOSE SECONDS of horror following the opening of the hut door, Sergeant Marshall changed from the very human being he had permitted himself to become back to the coldly calm, efficient police administrator. He refrained from saluting only by a fraction of time before striding to his car and driving away across the waste of white sand to the fringe of bush and scrub timber.

  There had also occurred a subtle change in Bony. The easy and apparently careless movement familiar to Sergeant Marshall was replaced by taut, spring-controlled action-the difference marked in a cat when, following its master about a garden, it sights its prey within stalking distance.

  Despite his long association with crime in its worst degree, he had never become indifferent to the proximity of death, for beneath the veneer of the cultured white man the black man’s fear of the dead lurked deep within his subconsciousness. It was, therefore, with unusual haste that he set to work to remove the door handles, thankful that the screw gave easily to the point of his penknife.

  He had seen a pair of old trousers in a far corner of the hut and for the second time he edged past the swinging corpse, th
e soul of him in revolt. When he regained the open air he wrapped the door handles within the trousers and the parcel he pushed under the raised floor of the hut near the doorstep. The door he wedged shut with a wood chip from the wood heap. And then, with a feeling of thankfulness, he crossed to the cane-grass meat house, peeped inside at the safe on its tall legs set in jam tins filled with water, and finally squatted on its south side with its wall as a back rest.

  It was noonday and the shadow cast by the meat house would not have covered a plate. He was oblivious to shadow and sunlight; the making of a cigarette was entirely automatic. He was unconscious of the nearer, the inner, languorous silence which lay heavily over the dazzling white scene of white sand, but the buzzing of the blowflies was a constant and sinister reminder of what was within the hut, whilst the noise created by a party of distant crows at first made no impression on his mind.

  A state of ecstasy lifted him up, urging him into activity which had to be resisted. What he had predicted to Sergeant Marshall but an hour since, that another would be buried shortly in the cemetery, would take place. For a lie will beget lies, and murder will beget murder. And now he knew for certain what he hadexpected, that the man who had killed Kendall had not fled but remained in or close to Merino.

  The whys and wherefores of this latest death could be divided into two sections: those concerning the dead man and the circumstances of the discovery of the body; and those concerning the living man who had so carefully obliterated his tracks. The dead could wait, could be left to Dr Scott and Marshall, and to Coroner Jason. The living was his concern, for that living man who flailed out his tracks was the quarry he, Napoleon Bonaparte, was here to hunt. It was the ecstasy of the hunter that was now lifting him up, that was coursing through his veins like a fire, liquid fire refined by generations of the most cunning, the most patient, and the most relentless hunters this world has ever known.

  Rising to his feet, he walked to the place where he had outlined with a match the marks made by a flail of strips of hessian sacking. Slowly he followed the regular series of marks over the steps made by a man, visualizing the action of the flail on the fine sand. First the hard pressure on the ground to fill in the deep indentations, then the lighter touches with the ends of the strips. The flail could smooth the sand, leaving the faintest marks for only the most expert of trackers to see, but the flail wielder could not re-create the delicate sand ripples made by the fingers of the West Wind.

  Time must have been necessary, and also daylight. The operation was carried out most probably immediately following the dawn of the day, for the wind of yesterday would certainly have covered those hair-fine marks had they been made the morning before. Presently he stopped to find himself close to the well.

  The marks led him to the windmill over the well, and from there to the stand on which was the iron reservoir tank. There was an iron ladder giving access to the wooden platform on which the tank rested some fifteen feet above the ground. The marks were closer here at the foot of the ladder, as though for some reason or other the man had gone up that ladder to the tank. The marks continued on past the ladder and Bony continued to follow them east towards the Walls of China. And at the foot of the Walls, where the foot of the lowest sand dune rested on the plain, the flail marks ceased and there began larger, light indentations which at this shadowless time of day were barely more easily followed.

  From this point back to the hut the flail had been used. From here on and up the Walls the man had considered the flail unnecessary to wipe away the tracks made by his feet encased in loose hessian.

  Whether the man had come down this way or had gone back this way Bony could not determine; therefore he could not know if he was following the man’s tracks or backtracking him, and the only way to find out was to continue.

  On the soft and fine sand of the slopes the imprints were hardly deeper than the cover of a book and as large as the impression made by an elephant. They led him up a minor gully between the lower dunes, twisting about to take still other gullies, until finally they reached the comparative flat top of the Walls of China. Onward they went directly eastwards over the field of dazzling white sand. Bony halted to take stock of his position.

  The sunlight was reflected by the iron roofs of Merino situated midway up the vast rise of land reaching to the western horizon. The bush lay like an old and moth-eaten brown carpet, the holes in it red with the sandy soil; and the green of the pepper-trees lining the street of the township made striking contrast. To the north, close to the huge sand range, were the roofs of Wattle Creek homestead, and the sun glinted on the fans of a windmill in action. At Bony’s feet was the little iron hut and mill at Sandy Flat; whilst to the south, also close to the Walls of China, roofs and a windmill marked the home of Mrs Sutherland.

  It appeared mathematically impossible for the entire bulk of this mighty sand range to have been raised from the strip of white sand country upon which it was founded. As yet he could see no eastern limits, for the bushlands to the east were lower than the “roof” on which he stood. Here and there pillars of sandstone rose like monoliths from the “roof”, some twenty feet, others thirty feet high. And those pillars possibly indicated that the Walls of China had not been raised by the wind but by an earth upheaval, that out of the bowels of the earth this section of white sand had been heaved to become the sport of the West Wind, to wear it out and away from the hard cores.

  Bony turned to the east and continued to follow the almost invisible tracks of the man who wore sacking about his feet. Ahead, about midway to the farthest limits seen of the sand range, a party of crows were vociferously engaged with something lying on the sand. The object he could not see, but their antics proved that something did lie there. Some of the birds were flying in erratic circles; others were on the white sand like blots of ink on paper.

  The man tracks did not extend directly to the object of interest to the crows, but when they reached a point close to it, he left the tracks and walked the short distance to ascertain what it was. At his approach the birds whirled upward in flight, cawing angrily, some to alight on the sand and continue their loud protest at his intrusion.

  In a small and shallow declivity lay the body of an animal which Bony instantly recognized as young Jason’s brown and white dog with the nail missing in its right forepaw: The crows had ripped out its entrails, but the manner in which the dead animal lay revealed clearly that it had died from takinga poison bait.

  Bony considered, thoughtfully gazing over the roof of sand and thereby maintaining the anger of the crows. He could see nothing other than the roof of the Walls of China, limited to the east and west by the blue of the sky, to the south and north by endless slopes and summits of whalebacks lying in shimmering faintly purple opalescence. And here and there those strange cores of sandstone behind which could shelter a corps of spies… or one man armed with a rifle.

  Within yards of the carcass the crows had obliterated the last tracks made by the living animal. Bony found them at the edge of the crow-disturbed area, and backtracked. He came to the place where the unfortunate animal had lain in a spasm of agony and, still farther along, to another where it had endured probably its first. Continuing to backtrack, he reached the slight indentations made by the man who had visited Sandy Flat, and then it was established that the man had been on his way to Sandy Flat from the east country, and that the dog had been following his trail when it picked up the poison bait.

  Question: Was the bait dropped by one of the station men to destroy a dingo, or had it been dropped by the man to prevent the dog with one toenail missing from following him and thus probably drawing attention to his own tracks so carefully smoothed out by a flail made with strips of sacking? The answer could be established by inquiries made at Wattle Creek homestead.

  The answer was in favour of the poisoning having been done by the man who wore sacking on his feet. Was that man the owner of the dog? That was possible but not probable, for Bony had himself seen the same dog
following Mr Jason, Constable Gleeson, two stockmen, and Fanning, the butcher.

  When Bony continued with his work it was tobacktrack not only the man’s faint impressions but also to backtrack the perfectly plain tracks of the dog. He was led to the eastern side of the Walls, their leeward side, and here the flank of the sand range abruptly fell more sheerly than the slope of a house roof down to hard whiteclaypans.

  Beyond theclaypans, many covering unbrokenly an acre or more, lay a strip of wire-grass country varying in width from half to a full mile away to the edge of thick mulga scrub.

  Bony pursed his lips. Had he been a profane man, he would have sworn, for it was useless to attempt to track across that dense growth of wire grass growing to a height of eighteen inches, grass so springy that beneath the tread of a rhinoceros it would rise again within the hour.

  The man and dog had obviously come up from those clay-pans and, most probably, from across that wire grass, which would bend but never break and then stand up again within the hour. They could have traversed either theclaypans footing the Walls or the wire-grass country for miles from the south or from the north, and now to continue backtracking them would be time ill spent. Where man and animal had climbed up the steep face of the sand cliff, huge dislodgments had scarred the perfectly symmetrical face.

  Having established from which point the man had travelled to the hut at Sandy Flat, it remained for him to ascertain in which direction the man had left. Even that was less important than other work to be done. And after all, with all his minute care to avoid discovery, the man had failed to frustrate Napoleon Bonaparte, failed in his attempt to lead justice to believe that the unfortunate man within the hut had committed suicide, if, indeed, he had been hanged.

  Bony walked southward slowly, rolling the inevitable cigarette now that the tenseness of the chase was relaxed. The great cores of sandstone were not found on this side of the Walls. He stood looking downward upon a huge claypan containing water two inches deep, and down he went in a flurry of sand to reach its edge and follow it round to see if the dog had taken a drink there. The tracks of sheep were left on the softer edge of the pan against the water, and there, too, were the tracks made by two dingoes and many birds and several horses. There were no tracks of the dog having a toenail missing from its forepaw.