Man of Two Tribes (7 page)

Chapter Ten

THEY were young and deeply in love. He was a tally clerk on the wharves, and she worked in a city shop. They were saving to build a home, but in these days it takes a long time to meet the rising costs of building.

So Nature won. Their dream was a home, not a hasty marriage and return to the parental country home. Only in the city could they earn ‘real' money. Eventually, following much discussion, the man talked with another, who suggested the name of a woman; the girl consulted the helpful nurse who arranged her admittance to a private ‘hospital', together with a goodly proportion of the money they had saved.

It was all very mysterious. Shortly after, the body was found in a ditch fifty miles out of town, the young tally clerk was interviewed by a detective and taken to the morgue to identify his sweetheart. He was asked where the operation had been performed, and he explained that a taxi had called for the girl at the shop at close of business. This was in accordance with agreement made by the girl with someone of whom he knew nothing.

He admitted that he knew the girl's intention to enter a hospital, but nothing beyond this. The taxi-driver came forward to report that he had picked up the girl outside the shop, having received instructions by radio from his garage. The garage manager said that the instructions were the result of a telephone call.

At the passenger's request, the driver had put his fare down in the main street of an outer suburb. The girl paid the charge. He took particular notice of her because she was pretty, and was obviously under a great strain. Then by a
quirk of fate his engine stopped, and he had to tinker with it. It was while doing so that a private car stopped and collected the girl. He remembered the car because it was a late model Lagonda. He remembered, too, the registration number.

The Lagonda was owned by Doctor Carl Havant.

So Doctor Carl Havant, the well-known psychiatrist, was charged with murder, found guilty of manslaughter, sentenced to ten years.

That was in 1947, and now in 1956 he was with Inspector Bonaparte in a cavern under the Nullarbor Plain. Even with the normal remissions for good conduct, the dates seemed wrong.

“Inspector of what?” asked Dr. Havant, and Edward Jenks of the springy knees chortled:

“Detective-Inspector, of course.”

Edward Jenks was thirty-five and employed as cook on a small station property when Bony arrested him. Now he looked over sixty. He was of middle height, thick-set, still powerful, and his large head was set on a short thick neck. A sailor ashore in Brisbane, he had been bilked one night by a prostitute, which so annoyed him that subsequently he waylaid her for the satisfaction of strangling her. The death sentence having been abolished in Queensland, he was sentenced to life, but had served only nine years when released on parole.

“A detective-inspector,” echoed Dr. Havant, and the woman laughed with a hint of hysteria. “And Bonaparte is the name. Happy to meet you Inspector Bonaparte. I'm sure we are all glad you have found us.”

The sunlight was now funnelling directly upon Bony who still sat at apparent ease on the mass of his gear. The doctor's face, and that of another, had the cretaceous quality of chalk. They had shaved quite recently. A tall man who looked to be about thirty had cultivated a brown vandyke beard, and in the shadows the little nervous man looked old and ill.

Mere impressions. The figures were tense, the least taut being the woman. Her hands were well kept, and her hair
neatly coiled and pinned. Bony recalled the voices deep in the tunnel, and decided to take control of a situation which neither they nor he could yet understand.

“Are you Myra Thomas?” he asked.

“I am,” she replied calmly. “You should know that.”

“You must admit to your identity.”

“Of course. Sorry, Inspector.”

“I have been looking for you.”

The psychiatrist-abortionist chuckled, then sniffed.

“Do I smell coffee, Myra?”

“You do. But there's a body if anyone is interested. I was preparing breakfast when Igor was killed.”

The little man began denial of something, and the man with the vandyke beard began to talk him down, when the doctor loudly ordered silence. A huge fellow now inserted himself into Bony's notice by saying:

“Have some common. This bloke's a d. Blimey! Do we want trouble piled on? Gimme the lamp, Mark. I'll fix the business.”

“It can wait, Joe, till we sort of straighten things,” Vandyke said impatiently. “Forget the d. He can't do anything. We'll have breakfast and let him tell us how he came here, and what he intends doing now he is here.”

“Quite,” murmured Havant. “Breakfast, Myra. Coffee.”

They dispersed. The woman and Jenks faded into the natural annexe where Bony had seen the large kerosene stove. Vandyke said:

“I'll give you a hand to shift this stuff to one side, Inspector. The name's Brennan, Mark Brennan.”

What
was
all this? Mark Brennan! Bony glanced sharply at him, and encountered light-blue eyes, steady and candid.

Mark Brennan! Bony knew the name and the circumstances, and created a picture from what he had read:

The golden shafts of sunlight poured upon the little church set amid encircling gums a few miles from Orange, New South Wales. The small crowd outside the main door
could hear the Wedding March. The year was 1939, and the military camps were beginning to accept volunteers.

Among the people outside the church was a young man in uniform, not yet accustomed to wearing it. Beside him were several other young men, obviously a little envious of his attraction for the girls who cast admiring glances at him as they waited to see the bride. The young man was the son of a local storekeeper, and now on his first leave.

Others watched him with covert curiosity, for inside the church his one-time sweetheart was being married—to his rival of long standing. He stood there, hands in pockets, the loose stance of the recruit already seeing himself a veteran.

Out upon the low porch stepped the bride and groom, well matched, beautiful in youth, blessed by the vows they had exchanged. They came down the porch steps and people began tossing confetti at them.

Mark Brennan did not throw confetti. From his military coat he drew a pistol and shot the bride between the eyes. The groom was almost dragged to the ground by her lifeless body. Then, with one arm about her, he straightened and confronted the murderer—who shot him in the stomach.

The case caused wide public interest. Tragic young man! Torn apart by duty to his country, and grieved by the loss of his sweetheart. The jury recommended mercy. The judge passed the death sentence. The Executive Council automatically commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, and marked his papers:
Never To Be Released.

Never to be released! And here he was assisting Bony to move his gear to the side of the cavern under the Nullarbor Plain. The beard made him look arty, and handsome. The eyes were cold, as they must have been when he pressed the trigger of the pistol, twice.

The chore accomplished, Bony sat on Curley's saddle and rolled a cigarette. Watchful, he waited for these riddles to be solved. A cloth of clean canvas had been spread on the rock floor, and on this the woman was placing sliced baking
powder bread, opened tins of sardines, a bottle of sauce, a tin of jam.

The man Jenks appeared with a jug of coffee and a fruit tin of sugar. He filled tin pannikins with coffee, and Mark Brennan said:

“Help yourself, Inspector.” Bony returned to his saddle with a pannikin of coffee.

“You have had breakfast, Inspector?” Doctor Havant enquired solicitously.

“Yes, thank you,” politely replied Bony.

“You find yourself in a strange community, Inspector; in fact, an unique community. I shall eventually write several books about it, I hope. You know, the effect of complete isolation on the human mind. Also I shall write a thesis on the herd instinct in humans.

“Jenks has spoken much of you, Inspector. He bestows upon you the mantle of Javert, although he has never read Hugo's masterpiece. Entirely in his favour is a lack of animosity towards you, who found him and had him arrested. In that he is unlike our friend there, Joseph Riddell, to whom all policemen are anathema.”

Joseph Riddell! Riddell in 1941 was working on a farm near Brisbane. He was then a taciturn man of thirty years, strong, a good worker, and treated with consideration by his employer. One afternoon there arose dissension between them, concerning a head wound suffered by a cow, and that evening Riddell shot his employer dead with a shot-gun belonging to the victim. He vanished with the farmer's car which he abandoned, and stole another, to abandon that also when the petrol gave out.

Eventually caught, he received a sentence of twelve years. Another recommendation for mercy. Lonely unfortunate man, living in a hut on a farm when the farmer and his wife lived in luxury in a fine house. If he had bashed the milking cow, the ruddy boss had no right to jaw him about it! Having served nine years he was freed.

Here was Joseph Riddell, still of powerful physique, his hair and beard barely touched with grey.

Observing Bony looking at him, he leaned back on his haunches and grinned. The grin preceded rumbling laughter.

“Hell! It's damn funny all right,” he asserted, voice deep. “By hell, it's funny. You'll be able to write plenty about all this, Doc.”

“What's funny about it?” snarled the little man with thin sandy hair and weak eyes. “If he is really a police detective, then he can get us all out of here. There's nothing funny about walking on the earth instead of living like a colony of rats under it.”

Emotion raised the voice but did not disguise the accent, and there lingered still in this man's voice the tone of authority. He reminded Bony of someone he had seen pictured in the newspapers, and now Havant gave the picture its name.

“My dear Clifford Maddoch, I am strongly in agreement with Joe that the situation existing at this moment is truly funny. I dislike the word, but repeat it because used by you and Joseph. It is funny, because we of the R.M.I, happen to be at a slight disadvantage precisely when Inspector Bonaparte drops in to bid good morning.”

So this was Clifford Maddoch. At the time he had given his wife a measure of strychnine, thallium not then having come into favour for this purpose; he was the manager of an important branch of a wool brokerage firm, the president of the local golf club, and the secretary of the Urban District Committee. For fourteen years he had suffered torture from the battering voice which had probed and pierced the recesses of his mind. It was a strange coincidence that the judge committed him to prison for fourteen years. And having served ten years, he was released.

“You shut up, Clifford,” snarled Riddell. “No good you crawling to the Inspector now, after what you just done.”

The little man leaped to his feet. It seemed that every nerve in his face began to twitch violently.

“I'm not guilty,” he shouted, having to struggle for articulation. “I old you all I didn't do it. I liked Igor Mitski ... for everything bar his voice.”

Bony recalled the case of Igor Mitski, the displaced, the singer, serving his period of grace in Australia on a northwest station in New South Wales. Cultured, able to speak a little English, banished to live with strange people in a strange land. A Polish Jew who had suffered badly.

The employer and his wife were kindly people. Instead of making Mitski a gardener, they appointed him music teacher to their little girl aged eight. Circumstances climbed high and smashed both Mitski and the child. Mitski still mentally wounded by the treatment received from the invaders of his country; the child spoiled and stubborn, as an only child can be. In a rage, Mitski hit her. Released on parole when having served twenty months of the sentence for manslaughter.

Mitski! Bony had been in a far western town when Mitski was tried. He had arrived there on the last day of the trial and was in court when the prisoner was sentenced. A woman had run from the witnesses' seat to the dock, and a man had quickly caught her in his arms and tried to pacify her. Bony hadn't been in court officially, and the incident therefore had not been mentally docketed. He said now:

“Mitski slew a little child.”

“That was so, Inspector,” replied Doctor Havant. “All here know the history of everyone. We often discuss personal experiences, desires, ambitions, satisfactions. We are, actually, a very conservative body.” He chuckled in his dry humourless way, and taking the others into his range, he went on: “I suggest, gentlemen, that we nominate and accept the Inspector into our honoured Association. I have pleasure in putting forward the name of Inspector Bonaparte. I feel that he will do what in him lies to succour and encourage every member, that he will conduct himself worthily, and toil ever on behalf of the defenceless and the unfortunate. What say you?”

“Taking a ruddy risk,” growled Riddell. “He don't qualify.”

“I propose Inspector Bonaparte,” chirped Clifford Maddoch.

“I take pleasure in seconding the proposal, Mr. President,” drawled Brennan.

Doctor Havant stood. He beamed on the assembly, and his chalky complexion appeared likely to fall off in flakes. The dark eyes regarding Bony recalled to him the eyes of the woman at Mount Singular. Then he remembered where he had seen her before, and the probability of this extraordinary development was like a star born in his mind. He heard the doctor say:

“Welcome, Inspector Bonaparte, into our exclusive Association. I publicly announce your elevation to a Fellowship of the Released Murderers' Institute.”

Chapter Eleven

“I APPRECIATE the honour,” Bony said gravely. “I have many questions which must wait, and doubtless you have many to ask, but first things first. The body. Take me to it.”

“Better arrest this twirp,” offered Joseph Riddell. “He hated Igor Mitski 'cos his voice reminded him of his missus. Didn't like Igor singing to us, an' Igor was better than the blasted wireless singers too.” Maddoch again shouted his innocence, and when Riddell once more taunted him the girl broke in with:

“That will be all from you, Riddell. You're taking a back seat from now on. You've no proof that Clifford killed Mitski, so keep your silly big mouth closed.”

Bony swiftly intervened.

“It would seem that all of you are murderers, that all but one have been convicted and released on licence. Other than not having periodically reported, you are of no official interest to me. But you say you have a dead man on your hands, that he was killed, and you infer that one of you killed him. Where is the body of this man?”

“Jenks! The lamp,” said the doctor, adding to Bony: “Jenks is the custodian of the lamps and the oil, which is in short supply.”

The ex-sailor struck a match and applied it to the wick of a hurricane lamp. The doctor took it from him and led the way into the tunnel. They could walk upright, and the floor was level. They passed on the left a branch tunnel from which issued a faint moaning sound. The main tunnel entered a chamber, the limits of which the power of the lamp failed to reach. Bony was conducted past a huge boulder which had
fallen from the roof, and over a clear space. Havant stopped, and his lamp revealed a man lying on his chest, and a narrow stream of blood extending into the darkness. He was dressed in working clothes, rough and durable.

“He hasn't been moved?” he asked the doctor.

“No. I lifted his head by the hair. The frontal bone has been crushed. Death was obvious, and before I could examine him further, my attention was distracted by the arrival of your dog.”

“Turn him over, someone.”

Jenks did so, and the woman cried out.

Bony estimated that the dead man was close to six feet in height. The body was reasonably well nourished, the face clean-shaven, and the iron-grey hair clipped short.

“With what was he killed?” asked Bony.

“We don't know,” the girl answered. “Probably with a piece of stone.”

“We haven't looked for the weapon yet,” volunteered Brennan.

“Bring more lights, if you have them. We'll look for it now.”

Jenks departed, and Bony watched his departing figure in the tunnel against the daylight at its far end. He asked who found the body, and Mark Brennan said he had found it about half an hour before they discovered the arrival of Bony. When asked under what circumstances, he went on:

“I was with Myra looking for her scarf in the passage leading to the air shaft. We heard Igor shout out something like ‘Do not! Do not!' Then he shouted once, ‘Help!' I left Myra and ran with our lamp to see what was wrong. I collided with Doctor Havant just as I reached the main passage, and he said he'd been in what we call the hall, so Igor wasn't there. We came here, and met Riddell carrying a lamp and Maddoch was with him.”

“Leaves Jenks. What about Jenks?”

“Jenks just turned up to hunt for Mitski with us,” replied Brennan. “We looked around here, and I happened to find the body. It's a pretty large place as you can see.”

Bony couldn't see until Jenks arrived with three hurricane lamps. The four lamps standing on the boulder enabled him then to see the extremities of this cavern.

“It is obvious, Inspector, that one of us is a murderer,” tritely observed Dr. Havant.

“Any other passages leading off this place?”

“One that ends in a cul-de-sac. Another goes down to what we call the Jeweller's Shop, and from there on to what I named Fiddler's Leap.”

“Other than those present, there are no more of you?”

“No. One of us killed Mitski with a rock.”

“How d'you know it was a rock?”

“Because he was killed with a blunt instrument. We have no blunt instruments other than rocks ranging from small pebbles to the size of this boulder. We have knives, table knives. Mitski wasn't killed with a table knife.”

“In your opinion, Doctor, would the blunt instrument have blood on it?”

“The answer is difficult, Inspector. Probably not if only the one blow was struck; most likely if more than one blow.”

Bony bade them stand back, and he spent several minutes looking for the weapon. The floor was entirely clean of debris, and on his mentioning it, he was informed that all debris had long since been removed to the short passage which ended in a cul-de-sac.

“We will return to the place where we met,” he said, and the obliging Doctor Havant explained that that had been named the hall.

The return to ‘the hall' was welcomed by Bony who felt distinctly uneasy in that eerie cavern. They stood watching him, waiting, as he sat on the pack-saddle and fell to making the inevitable cigarette. Their behaviour was unlike normal people, who would have sought information and explanation,
and he wondered what this attitude could mean. He recognised the wisdom of delaying satisfaction of his own curiosity.

“Make yourselves easy,” he said. “I'll talk first, and before I begin one of you answer a question. Are you being kept here against your will?”

All spoke at once, and he waved them to silence. That some of them had been imprisoned here for a long time was evidenced by their faces, and a child could have deduced that they would not have remained had they found a way of escape.

“You know who I am, and what I represent,” he began. “You know that I am a tracker of men, but you don't know my personal views on crime and criminals.

“I did not frame the laws. Officially, I am not concerned whether a law is sound or futile. Officially, I am not concerned with whatever penalty is imposed for breaking a law. Personally, as a private citizen, I have an abhorrence of murder, the crime which concerns us. To make myself clear, there is another point.

“Each of you men committed a crime and was released when constituted authority chose to think you had been sufficiently punished. Because you did not comply with certain conditions I am able, officially, to prove that you were forcibly prevented from compliance. That isn't a rash statement, for I believe I have the key to the reason behind this enforced detention, if you do not know it. Do you?”

“We do not, Inspector,” Havant said.

“We'd ruddy well like to,” snorted Riddell.

“We'll pass it for the moment,” Bony continued. “I was assigned to find a missing woman known as Myra Thomas, who disappeared from a train. The Police held nothing against her, following her acquittal, but the Police were, and are, interested in her because she is a missing person. You are all missing persons, and it is the duty of every policeman to search for such.

“I set out to look for Myra Thomas, and eventually was led to this place by the aid of several clues, including her scarf. Having located her, I would have freed you also, had I not been found wanting in wariness. As I see it now, I am one with you, a prisoner. I have no doubt that you have tried many times to find a way to freedom, and with the introduction of my fresh mind, we may solve this problem.

“Now for the crux of future relations between you and me. If anything happened to me, and eventually you found a way of escape from this hole, you would never find your way back to civilisation, even if you were not hunted down by the persons who brought you here, or by their agents. We are now more than two hundred miles from the nearest homestead, and in the most relentlessly hostile country in Australia.

“So that, as convicted murderers, you may have strong animosity toward me, a police officer, but you must realise that even at this stage you are dependent on me to get you out from this hole and back to civilisation. To employ a nautical cliché, we sink or swim together.”

“I'm not swimmin',” growled Riddell.

Myra Thomas would have spoken had not Dr. Havant turned to stare at the gorilla. He said, quietly:

“Riddell.”

“I don't aim...”

“Riddell, I am reading your thoughts.”

Riddell's eyes avoided Havant. He looked at his naked feet, and his huge body seemed to shrink. Bony had never seen a human being so quickly reduced to abjectness. There was no threat expressed in the doctor's words or by his face, yet his domination was supreme. Bony, feeling the sudden tension, asserted himself.

“Two tasks confront me,” he told them. “To apprehend those who have unlawfully restricted your freedom; the other, to apprehend the slayer of Igor Mitski.”

“I hope you get him, Inspector,” declared the girl who had been acquitted of murder. “He never harmed anyone here.”
Stooping, she gathered the breakfast things, and as she conveyed them to the annexe she added: “And don't think that because one of you killed Igor that the rest of you now have a chance.”

“You can't never tell,” Jenks said. “Hey, Doc, some day you'll be able to write a book called
Make Mine Women.”

“You won't be in it, Ted,” drawled Mark Brennan.

“Says you, Mark. We'll all be in it. The wench has been looking for strife ever since she came here. She likes strife, she does. S'why she bumped off her husband.”

“All right! All right! Think of something else.”

The girl came from the annexe and gathered the remainder of the breakfast things, pausing to look down contemptuously at the ex-sailor, who was seated on the floor with his back to the rock bench. The resultant action by Jenks was so swift that Bony was barely able to follow it. Jenks shot forward and gripped her ankle, pulled. The action of her fall was slow motion by comparison with his.

Bony rose to his feet, as body after body piled on top of Jenks and the girl until there was a heap of fighting lunatics. Dr. Havant crossed to Bony's side, waved him back to his seat on the saddle. He said:

“It's nothing, Inspector. Like water over a fire which must eventually come to the boil. I have found it essential in order to maintain a modicum of sanity to permit the steam to escape. While they fight over the woman, they won't fight us.”

“But the woman, she'll be hurt,” objected Bony.

“Be not distressed,” urged Havant, icily calm. “She came up the slum way, and it sticks to her and always will, despite the veneer of education.”

Myra Thomas was now trying hard to sink her teeth into Jenks's arm, as he did his utmost to pull her scalp off, gripping her hair with a hand trained to grip rope. Mark Brennan was hammering Jenks with one fist, and with the other attempted to flatten Riddell's navel against his backbone. To counter this,
the big man was pulling Brennan's hair upward with one hand, and his vandyke beard downward with the other.

When little Maddoch appeared with a can of boiling water, the doctor called to him, shook his head disapprovingly, and Maddoch's reaction was to shrug his narrow shoulders and trot back to the annexe with the dampener. It was extraordinary that he heard the doctor's voice above the shouts, yells, and screams. Returning, Maddoch came carefully round the human heap, and to Bony he said with mouth close:

“It's the cavern, Inspector. They behave like this now and then, but more often when the woman is around. She's an unsettling influence.”

“A truthful and original statement,” drily agreed Havant. “You know, Inspector, human hair has remarkable tensile strength to withstand assault. The girl started this fracas. I think she enjoys it, although at the moment one must admit to being faintly alarmed by her present predicament.”

There was, however, no cause for perturbation. The girl suddenly extricated herself from the tangled mass, her violet eyes glittering with triumph. She smiled defiantly at both Havant and Bony, handed Jenks a right smart face slap, lifted a blanket revealing a second annexe, and disappeared.

Brennan sat up and tenderly combed his beard with his fingers, as though needing assurance that he still had one. The others rose unsteadily, and sheepishly inspected the damage.

With the cessation of violence there was silence.

Unnoticed, the dog had departed.