A Cold Wind Down the Grey

by Wendy M Wilson

  The cawing of seagulls and the smell of the docks assailed his nose, reminding him once more of that smell, and that thing sticking up from the ground, when he found the body…

  “Mr. Inspector James, sir…”

  He turned. Constable Crozier was hurrying down Bell Street, holding the testimonial under his arm. Blast. He’d forgotten to ask Crozier to bring it to his house tomorrow, and now everyone would assume he didn’t want it.

  “You forgot your testimonial, and…”

  “So I did.” He raised his loaded arms and forced a smile. “But I had no room. I intended to…well. Perhaps you’d be so kind as to accompany me home with it?”

  “I’d be happy to, sir,” said Crozier. “As I said at the presentation earlier on, when you arrived to take charge, I felt as if…”

  “Yes, yes.” He glanced at Crozier. Might as well make it up to him. “Now, let’s walk along the riverbank. It isn’t the fastest way to my house, but it’s the prettiest, and today I feel like looking at something pleasant…with a good companion, of course.”

  They set off along the river, James thinking once more about all the deaths from that time, and the body he had found in his own district when he saw something sticking up from the muddy ground.

  2

  Greymouth, 1866: Finding George Dobson

  Twenty-Two Years Earlier

  It was the toe he was remembering…the toe of a scuffed leather boot sticking up from the earth just a stone’s throw from the track that told him he’d finally found the body he sought. That and the sickly stench of death that hung in the air, making it hard to breath. Inspector James stood looking at the area, and felt exasperated with himself. The body was buried beneath a high terrace, just thirty yards from where he’d stood on the first day of his search. There was even the appearance of a slight track down to where the body lay. How had he missed seeing it?

  He stared at the tip of the boot and felt it pointing back at him accusingly. You could have stopped this, it said. Why did you not arrest them when you had the chance?

  Tearing his eyes away from the burial site he squinted towards the river. A group of men were disembarking from a flat boat, clearly about to head his way. He thought he could see Todhunter among them. Cupping his hands around his mouth, he cooeyed. An answering cooey came from the group, and an arm rose in a wave.

  He’d calculated the possible burial site using information from Mr. Fox, the gold buyer from Maori Gulley, who had parted from George Dobson at the Arnold River, and a report from a couple who’d seen a group of suspicious-looking men putting up a tent near the iron shanty down towards Greymouth. He and his team had spent the best part of three days searching the bush, wading through icy streams that numbed feet, and deep, rock-strewn gullies that twisted ankles and bruised shins, along the Arnold track, upriver from Greymouth.

  By then he knew the time for finding George Dobson alive had passed. But where the hell was the body? He’d been struggling up a blind dry creek, Constable McIlroy behind him, when they had both smelled something putrid, something that caused the constable to stop and gag. He’d gone towards the smell, pushing aside ferns, and had seen the toe of a boot, thrusting up through the damp earth and rotting leaves like a beacon.

  The sound of boots knocking on stones made him turn and look back along the track. Matthew Russell, a storekeeper with a supply shack a mile or so away, was hurrying down towards him, a shovel in hand.

  “Ya got ‘im then, Mr. Inspector James? I heard your cooey and thought I’d come and help. I been looking…”

  “More than likely.” James nodded towards the burial site. “We’ve certainly got someone. We’ll have to have a formal identification, but…”

  “I can do that. I knew him, I knew Mr. Dobson,” said Russell. He directed a stream of brown spittle at the ground, then plunged his shovel into the dirt beside the grave. “A wonderful young bloke. I hope you get them bastards who did this to him. You want me to dig ‘im up?”

  “Thank you, yes. But there’s a party on the way down from the river. We’ll wait for them. I believe it’s Mr. Todhunter, Mr. Dobson’s brother-in-law. He’ll want to be here.”

  They stood silently, both now staring at the burial site, waiting for the group from the flat boat to make its way to them. Guilt nagged at the edge of his mind. He’d known about the Burgess gang for some time, had even been warned they were planning a robbery. When he threw them out of town he’d believed his problems with them were over, that Shallcrass up in Nelson, with a much bigger force, would deal with them. Now five men had been reported in missing in Nelson, believed murdered by the gang, and he understood that they may have also murdered the young man in the grave at his feet.

  He glanced at the burial site again, then glanced away. Greymouth, his town, was immersed in a massive gold rush that brought with it the loafers and the scoundrels who circled the half-eaten carcass of the rush like vultures, making life difficult for honest men. It galled him that such a good and decent young man could be murdered in his district.

  James was confident that Shallcrass would prove Burgess and his crew were guilty of the Nelson murders and see them all twisted. They would die in torment like the four murderers of Reverend Volkner, who had all gone to the gallows not long since up in Gisborne. Of course, those killers were Maori with a grievance. They’d believed Volkner was a spy for the government and were waiting for him. Volkner, the damn fool, had been warned not to go, but leaning on his faith he had gone anyway, and ended up with his head in a bag and pieces of his heart being devoured by his killers.[i]Fortunately, the hostilities and atrocities of both sides in the land wars were confined to the North Island, not down here in the South Island. Until now, all he’d had to put up with were the sins of the dregs of humanity from Victoria…and some stupidity by the diggers, of course: theft, drownings, arguments, drunkenness, and suicides, lots of suicides.

  But James had been warned that Burgess might be up to something worse than robbery. One of Burgess’s followers, Jimmy Wilson, had come to his house back in May, scared crazy about something, with a story about a plot to rob and kill Mr. Fox the gold trader, and James had gone looking for them. Wilson had claimed the gang had bought a shovel to take Mr. Fox by surprise from behind, because Fox carried a revolver in his hand to fend off bushrangers. Wilson was worried that the gang meant to use the shovel to kill the gold trader and didn’t want any part of it. Robberies were common around Greymouth, with all that gold on the move, but murders were not; James had worried about protecting Mr. Fox from harm, not death. But now Wilson’s fear of murder had taken on a darker aspect. He must have known—or seen something that spooked him.

  He’d acquired an arrest warrant on conspiracy to rob, but the gang had decamped to Nelson by steamer… as James himself had suggested they do. He’d sent an urgent letter to Broham in Hokitika, and Broham sent a formal letter on to Shallcrass in Nelson, eschewing the use of the newly installed telegraph, warning of a possible robbery; but too late. Five men were missing on the Maungatapu track near Nelson and the gang had been arrested under suspicion of murdering them. Shallcrass had already managed to turn one of them against his fellows and a desperate search for the bodies was underway.

  James had put Jimmy Wilson in the lockup at the police camp back in June on suspicion of conspiracy to rob Mr. Fox, but had begun to believe he had a murder on his hands, a murder that Wilson knew about. Wilson had denied all knowledge of a murder, had refused to say where the body of George Dobson might be buried. He would get the truth from Wilson, and if he was involved in this crime, if he had been present at the murder of George Dobson, he would go down for it. Let the rest of the gang swing for the Nelson murders; if Wilson was guilty he would swing for this one; Inspector James would make sure he did.

  Standing on the stump of a totara tree near the burial site, he surveyed the track towards the Grey River. It was going to be difficult to carry a body along that winding and rocky track, and now a light rain was
falling, making the trip even more slippery and treacherous. In the distance, he could see the group getting closer and hoped they had a stretcher with them.

  He slapped his pockets to check for his pipe; there was just time for a quick puff to ward off the smell. But the pipe was not there. It must have fallen out at the coal pits when he lay last night, fully clothed, his head against a log, trying to sleep next to a small coal fire. His neck still ached. Wishing he had his pipe, he watched as the group struggled in his direction. They would appreciate that he had waited for them, but would be sickened by what they were about to see, he knew that.

  Mr. Todhunter, the victim’s brother-in-law, reached him first, hurrying frantically up the last hundred yards of the track. Todhunter had been in the district the entire time, even after Mr. Edward Dobson, George’s father, had taken Cobb’s Coach back to Christchurch.

  “You have found him, Mr. Inspector James? You have found George?”

  “Sorry sir, but I believe we have. We smelled something in the area, and at first thought it came from an empty bottle of brandy lying nearby. But we noticed these footprints,” he indicated the indentations leading towards the burial site, “and then we saw that.”

  Todhunter reeled back, seeing the tip of the boot for the first time.

  “That,” he said, then stopped and took a step towards the toe, stooping slightly to look at it more closely. “That…I believe that to be George’s boot. Is his body here?”

  Not much of an identification. Most men owned such boots in this district, a good pair of sturdy leather walking boots for the rough mountain tracks. A coroner’s jury would need more than a boot.

  James nodded at Russell, who began to uncover the corpse slowly and carefully. The earth had been trodden down into a heavy mass of clay and fern, making it difficult to remove. Todhunter stood nearby, his face barely under control, waiting for what was to come, while other members of the search party stood back respectfully, some with handkerchiefs over their noses to mitigate the smell, others trying to look anywhere but at the emerging body.

  The two constables knelt beside Russell and scrabbled at the grave with branches and bare hands. One of the constables had arrived from Nelson the day before with the rough map provided by a gang member who had turned Queen’s evidence, showing where the gang had pitched their tent to await Mr. Fox. The map had sent them in the wrong direction. James led his team to the spot indicated, and spent a rigorous day scouring the bush and wading through every creek near where the tent should have been, but found nothing. He’d refused to give up. He would find the body, he had to. He took his small group of searchers back to the coal pits above the river, where they passed the night, dispirited and defeated—and bloody uncomfortable to boot.

  On the final day, inspired by the dark, bone-chilling night spent at the coal pits, he wondered if the map might be wrong—the memory of the sketcher flawed. The husband and wife who’d passed by the gang shortly before the time Dobson would have been in the area had arrived at the coal pits in the dark. Perhaps the site was closer to the town?

  He’d made a decision. One of the constables would go back to Arnold Township and find out who the couple were and, if possible, bring them back to identify the site. James and the other two constables would start searching closer to town, a mile further down the track.

  And a mile down the track was where they had smelled that sickening odour, one they knew well, of a decaying body, and, after finding the footsteps, had seen the toe sticking up through the mud.

  As the diggers removed the earth, the outline of a body took shape. It lay with the feet pointing up the gully, the head pointing down. The men scraped away the dirt carefully, making sure not to disturb anything, while James stood at the head and looked down, watching for evidence. Once he’d convicted a man with little more than some hair from the back of his head and a smear of blood on his trousers. Nothing should be overlooked.

  The first identifiable thing to appear was an Inverness cape, draped across the lower part of the body. Charles Todhunter dropped to his knees and touched the cape gently: “This is George’s. I’ve seen him wearing it many…”

  James moved the cape to the side of the gravesite, causing a cloud of blowflies to rise lazily. Next came a prismatic compass in a case and a field book, from between the legs. Surveyors tools—a strong indication this was George Dobson. As he lay the compass and the field book on top of the cape, he noticed something odd. Two leather straps lay each side of the body. Not Mr. Dobson’s, by the look of them. He retrieved those as well, for further study.

  The three diggers stopped and leaned down to clasp the arms of the body and release it from the earth, keeping it steady so as not to disturb the vestiges of dirt still covering the face; Dr. Foppoly would remove that during the autopsy. As the body came free of its damp tomb, James could see that much of the lower half of the face was missing. The watchers gasped and held handkerchiefs more tightly against their lips. Then, as the diggers lifted the body to drier ground, the skin of one hand slipped off like a glove and dropped to the dirt beside the grave. Todhunter made a choking sound, and two of the watchers dashed into the bush retching loudly, returning a few minutes later wiping their lips.

  Given that the lower half of the face was mostly gone, the jaw ravaged, the entirety of the protruding tongue visible, the next best item useful for identification was the timepiece. The courts would certainly agree, especially as Todhunter had already identified the cape and the boots. James removed a gold chain and silver watch from the left-hand pocket of the vest and held them towards Todhunter.

  “Can you identify this watch and chain as belonging to your brother-in-law?”

  “I recognize the chain.” Todhunter sniffed and wiped away a tear with the back of his hand, smearing dirt across his cheek. “But the watch—I’m not sure of the watch. He has one like that, however.”

  James picked up the field book, opened it, and passed it to Todhunter. You couldn’t go wrong with handwriting in court. Forged cheques, threatening letters, the courts saw those all the time. A jury would understand handwriting evidence.

  “And do you recognize the handwriting in this field book?”

  Todhunter nodded, his face grey and bloodless; no doubt he was thinking about his new wife Caroline, George’s younger sister. Todhunter would find it difficult to tell his wife her beloved older brother was dead, murdered.

  And murdered he was, that was clear. The wounds on the jaw and neck were man-made, never mind the fact that someone had deliberately buried the body and stamped down the soil that covered it.

  The two constables loaded the corpse onto the stretcher, threw a piece of tent canvas over it, and hoisted up the stretcher, one each end, sides raised to stop parts of the body from falling to the ground. As they maneuvered their way along the track, Inspector James followed. The canvas was pulled up to cover the face, leaving the boots exposed. Over the left shoulder of Constable McIlroy, he could see the leather sole of one boot as it flopped from side to side with the movement of the men carrying it, and silently swore he would follow this case to the end. Nobody would get away with it, whatever his part had been. Especially not Jamie Wilson.

  3

  Greymouth, 1866: Down the River to Town

  A group of pipe-smoking boatmen sat waiting for them on the rocks where the boat was moored, and they hopped up quickly as they saw the group approach, gathering around the stretcher.

  “Ya got ‘im? Ya got ‘im?”

  Word spread through town as the flat boat pulled slowly abreast of the Greymouth wharf; despite the threat of rain and biting cold wind, a large crowd had gathered, flooding from the shops on Boundary Street and the hotels and offices along the quay. As the constables hoisted the stretcher and carried it on foot to the Union Hotel, the crowd trailed behind quietly. They had all been following the search, wanting the young man found, but dreading confirmation of his death. James nodded to the men of the town as he walked behind the stretche
r, confirming he had found Dobson. Some women sobbed quietly, some wailed.

  Mr. Edward Dobson, father of the victim, had spent time in Greymouth leading search after desperate search for the missing man, and townspeople had seen the quiet grief etched on the man’s face when he had found no clue to the fate of his eldest son. He was not a man to show emotion, but the town had united behind him. One way or another, George Dobson must be reunited with his father.

  The autopsy was scheduled for the next morning, followed by an inquest in the afternoon, so he returned to his home in Arney Street to prepare his inquest notes. He would attend the autopsy, as unpleasant as it would be, to learn what he could about the murder. He wasn’t obliged to go, but doctors were trained to look for different things than he was, and not everything said in the autopsy room made it to the report. He needed to be there, to see and hear for himself.

  Elizabeth was in the kitchen kneading bread for the next day, stopping occasionally to stir a hearty stew of mutton, onions and potatoes for their tea. The first ships since the recent floods had arrived in port and the price of mutton had dropped back to normal, making it the first meal she thought to cook each night. However, she refused to eat stew herself—she said it turned her stomach. Often a little bread dipped in gravy was all she could manage. Perhaps things would improve in the coming months—they had every other time. But perhaps not, at her age—nearly forty.

  “Did you find him?”

  He nodded without speaking.

  “Oh dear.”

  He went to his Davenport thinking about the details he needed to cover in his notes. What a pity the soil had been so damp, causing the grave to fill with water once the body was removed. He’d marked the area, but any preservation of material was increasingly unlikely after the six weeks it had taken to find the poor young gentleman lying in his water-soaked grave. The leather straps were interesting, however. He had a theory about those—he’d seen them before…