The Chiefs are Worried
THE‘BOYS’ room’ at the police residence, now occupied by Bony, faced the south and therefore was on the coolest side of the house… a distinct advantage in February. In addition to the open door and the raised window, one end of the room was merely fly-netted, and could be shuttered were the wind too unfavourable. Thus the ‘boys’ room’ was ideal in which to work on a hot afternoon.
When Alice knocked on the open door and was bidden to enter, Bony was seated at the desk, minus his coat and arrayed in tussore silk shirt, the rolled sleeves showing the smooth texture of dark skin and deceptively flaccid muscles. He smiled at Alice and indicated the chair opposite himself.
“Essen still busy?” he asked.
“Yes. Rushed back to hislab., as he calls his darkroom, immediately after lunch. He’s got something cooking in thatrathole. He says he’s on an important lead in that Library job, but I think he’s brewing something.”
“It could be the heat, Alice, but it does sound involved. Something cooking… we think… brewing something.”
“Must be,” Alice agreed, removing her hat and gently mopping her forehead. The short-sleeved dress revealed the almost masculine arms, and the plunging neck-line mocked the scrawny neck supporting the large head so ill served by the full blonde hair drawn so tightly back.
“So Essen is excited,” murmured Bony. “It’s possible that that Library theft might concern us, and what you say of Essen’s speed from lunch table to darkroom tends to promote possibility to probability. You know what was stolen?”
“Yes, although you didn’t tell me.”
“You distracted my mind by discussing interior decoration. Anyway, we must wait for Essen. He has made an excellent job of these pictures.”
Alice accepted the copies made of the picture of Mrs Rockcliff and her baby, and the manner in which she studied them almost convinced Bony that her primary interest was in the infant and remained so. Without doubt, the mother instinct in Policewoman Alice McGorr was exceedingly strong.
“As you say, a good job,” conceded Alice. “You ought to see Essen’s pictures of his wife and baby. Just perfect. What did you have these done for?”
“Chiefly for the newspapers. Yoti has been complaining about the reporters from both Melbourne and Sydney, and we must give them something. Someone might recognise the dead woman under another name.” Alice sniffed, and Bony detected the thought it expressed. “You dislike my methods?”
“It’s not for me to say.”
“You are thinking I am being too deliberate, too slow. You are remembering that the murder was forty hours old when discovered and that it’s now seventy-odd hours later… with nothing to show.”
“Perhaps I am. Murder is a job for a team.”
“Two teams are working on it: one in Melbourne, the other in Sydney. A good team would have telephoned me last night or this morning the examination results of those clothes’ tags, that wall section containing the hair grease of the murderer, the analysis of the floor sweepings. I am still waiting. Teams of experts rushed to Mitford to investigate the abductions of Babies 2, 3 and 4. Teams rushed about, wearing out Sergeant Yoti, annoying Essen, drawing their salaries and expenses and achieving precisely nothing.
“Now you just browse through these Summaries on the four stolen babies prepared by Inspector Janes, who conducted the three investigations. Note anything contradictory, abnormal, even absurd when applied to your own knowledge of backgrounds, and finally give me your opinion of Inspector Janes’s team work.”
As Alice accepted the closely-typed documents there was faint resentment in her brown eyes, for even now she was unable to be sure if Bony mocked her, was being sarcastic or merely teasing. She read the first Official Summary and made a note. The second Summary produced two notes written in a sprawling hand and with the deliberation of the poorly educated. Once she looked up at Bony to see him completely relaxed, eyes closed, and in her own was something akin to wonderment, for Alice McGorr had been brought up in a world of cynicism and distrust.
She was engaged on the last Summary when voices without upsetconcentration, and again looking at Bony, found him in the same position but with one eye open.
“Hi, get up out of that and polish my car,” roared Essen. “It’s no time for sleeping, and if you don’t want to workget back to the Settlement.” Mumble… mumble. “I’m just telling you, Fred, that’s all.”
Essen came in, broadly smiling. Bony’s second eye opened, and he nodded to a vacant chair, saying:
“Your tracker loafing on the job?”
“Does little else but sleep on the job. Got a favourite shrub just beyond your door. Don’t blame the coot really. It’s hot enough to make anyone go on strike.”
“Catch your burglar?” Bony asked.
“No. What a fool thing to achieve. Slab of rock four by five feet and about three inches thick. Got in through a back window, easing the catch with a knife. Left glove smudges on the window glass. One smudge on the inside of the window tallies with the glove print we found under Mrs Rockcliff’s bed, the mended glove.”
“I hate to express doubt, but are you sure?”
“Camera proves it,” answered the enormously satisfied Essen.
“Go on,” commanded Bony. “You have my attention, I assure you.”
“There was more than two in this robbery, but how many I don’t know. The windows open over a cement path encircling the entire building. There must have been more than two because the object stolen was carried out via the back door, round the side of the building to the front, where they must have had a utility or truck waiting.”
“Right on Main Street! In full glare of street lights!”
“Street lights are switched off at one am. Constable Robins made his last round at 2.15 am. There was then no vehicle outside the Library. Near-by residents don’t recall hearing a motor arrive or start up, but as Main Street is on a slight slope, the vehicle could have coasted from the west end, stopped at the Library, and then pushed off down to the other end. It could have travelled a full half mile without the engine running.
“What is certain is that they went to the Library to pinch that rock drawing, and that one of them was the woman who crept under Mrs Rockcliff’s bed at the time she was murdered.”
“The librarian told me he doesn’t know the meaning of the drawing, and, further, that old Professor Marlo-Jones doesn’t know what it means, either,” Bony added. “It would appear that the meaning has no significance, that it was stolen for its value as a museum piece, or stolen at the behest of an unscrupulous collector. Marlo-Jones may be able to help. He might know of such a collector. Being busy with the burglary, you were unable to interview Mrs Ecks on the lines I suggested?”
“I was, but the Sergeant agreed to let Robins do it. Found out that when Mrs Ecks’s baby was pinched there were altogether four prams, as we know. Of the five babies outside the pub, Mrs Ecks’s baby was the only boy.”
“Good. Substantive evidence that the abductor wanted only male children.” Bony made a note. “I think we ought to do something about the hospital, see that every precaution is taken that a baby boy or two isn’t stolen from the infants’ ward. There were male twins born there last night.”
“Be hell and damnation if those twins were pinched,” Essen said. “Whatd’youreckon is behind these abductions? I don’t get it.”
“You will, eventually. Patience, Essen, patience. The enemy is on the move. They made a slip when putting Mr Bertrand Marcus Clark to tail Alice. They… now, as Alice would say, what’s brewing?”
Voices, deep and loud, drew near. Heavy feet clomped on the cement outside the door, and then the door was filled by a mighty man having short, straight, grey hair, a ponderous paunch, and the feet of a dancer. After him came Yoti.
Essen jumped to attention. Alice, observing the movement, also stood. Bony stepped forward, a smile on his face, but no smile in his eyes.
“Why, it’s Superintendent Canno, and all the way from Sydney.”
“Good day, Bonaparte. How are you?”
“Excellent. But, being among friends, Bony to you. Permit me to present my cousin, Alice McGorr, Miss McGorr is studying my methods. Hopes to set up a private school for third-rate detectives.”
“Haw! How do, Miss McGorr?” Canno sank gracefully into Essen’s chair. Yoti said something and went out. Alice and Bony sat. And Canno added: “Friend of mine, name of Bolt, mentioned something about you assisting Bony. You must find him very trying at times. Everyone else does.”
“I find him always original, and so nothing else matters,” replied Alice, who then thought that association with Bony had destroyed all discipline in her. “Shall I go along and ask Mrs Yoti for some tea?”
The Chief of the Sydney CID chuckled like rumbling thunder.
“Damn good idea, Miss McGorr. And I’m not going to argue with you over our mutual friend.” He stood when Alice got up, chuckled again, and sat when she had gone.
“Thatlass has a hell of a reputation,” he announced. “What are you up to with her, Bony?”
Bony washed his hands, saying:
“You ask her that, Super, and then find out how it feels to be bounced out of the room and on the path outside. Anyway, I am pleased to be seeing you. Why come?”
“Just for the pleasure of seeing you.”Canno loaded a large pipe and applied a match, Bony waiting. Essen, now seated, waiting as he had not been dismissed. “Had to run down to Albury, so decided to come over here to see how you’re going. How are you going?”
“I am satisfied.”
“Yes, I know that, Bony. But what progress?”
“Decidedly more and decidedly faster than that made on three cases undertaken by your best men, Super.”
“Yes, but… Look, Bony, my ‘Commish’ is getting windy over press opinion sent from here. They aren’tso hostile to us over this Rockcliff murder as over the baby series. I know Janes and all his men fell down, but we have public opinion to cope with. The ‘Commish’ said last night if there’s another baby bust up in Mitford we’ll all be kicked out of our jobs.”
“And what does your Chief Commissioner suggest is to be done about it?”
“That every man jack of us rushto Mitford and tear the town to shreds.”
“Do you agree with your Chief Commissioner?”
“Well, I think we ought…”
“Relax, Super.” Bony slowly rolled a cigarette, and the large CID Chief smoked a shade too vigorously, thereby betraying perturbation. “I will run over with you these Summaries, and then say that which will enable you to tell your Chief Commissioner to take a running jump at himself. Tell me, first, could you or Janes, or any other senior officer in your Department, look at a six-weeks’-old baby in a pram and tell its sex?”
Canno pursed his lips and spurted a thin shaft of smoke at the ceiling.
“Go on, answer me,” urged Bony. “You’re the father of a family of six. Janes has a son and a daughter. Both familymen, like me. You answer my question.”
Superintendent Canno slowly complied.
“I don’t think I could say with certainty. I’m no chicken sexer.”
“Of course you couldn’t. Yet what happened? Among your experts there wasn’t one woman. How, then, could you expect teams of men to dig successfully into this series of abductions? I had Alice McGorr in mind when I accepted this assignment. I want printsphotographed, I call on Essen here who is an expert photographer and who is wasted in a small town like this. And when I want to know about babies, do I ask a policeman? I ask a policewoman.
“Now for these fool Official Summaries. There’s no mention that the other babies outside the pub where Mrs Ecks’s baby was stolen were females, proving that the abductors wanted a male child, as were the babies previously stolen. There’s no mention that the child belonging to Mrs Delph was reared, nursed and minded by the cook while Mrs Delph ran around Mitford attending plonk parties. There is no mention in the relative Summary that the telephone in the manager’s office at the Olympic Bank is an old-fashioned contraption nailed to a wall, and not one theory put forward concerning the theft of the child from that bank.
“So I could go on and on, but to do so would weary you with the crass stupidity of your teams of alleged experts. I’ve been assigned to this case only three days, and you want the murderer and the abductors handed in right away. Essen, step outside and make sure your tracker isn’t listening. Not once but fifty times I’ve been given an assignment when the great white investigators have fallen on their big fat… yet I’m to be bullied into producing the criminal from a hat within three days. That’s why I cock asnook at you now, at your Commissioner, at my own, at every detective officer in the country. You can take it or leave it. I will produce the murderer of Mrs Rockcliff, and the abductor of her baby, when it suits me, and with or without your leave.”
“Now, now, Bony old friend,” rumbled Canno. “There’s no argument, only a spot of worry over what the blasted papers are stirring up. All we want to do is to help as much as possible.”
“Then why the devil didn’t you chase the reports on that stuff we sent to your lab? Why haven’t those reports been flown to me if they were too revealing to be telegraphed or telephoned?”
“Surely you have received them?”
“Of course not. I’ll tell you what you can do. Arrange with District Headquarters to let Yoti have another four constables out of uniform, when Yoti will assign two or more to Essen. We have to guard the infants at the hospital, and keep an eye on the babies of fool women who still leave them outside pubs. Was that tracker lounging about outside, Essen?”
“No, sir.”
“Why not agree to my men coming in?” Canno asked.
“Because, Super, your men had their opportunity here, and seemingly preferred to play ‘two-up’.”
“Insulting little pal, aren’t you?”
“I could do better.”
Alice was there with a large tray, which she placed on the desk. She began to arrange plates and cups in their saucers, and Bony went on:
“There isa traffic in babies as you know. Doubtless you have covered all the ins and outs of such traffic where you suspected it, and Bolt will have done the same. Now make your men work, Super, on another angle of the same traffic. You will rememberDavos in Vienna, andLumsdon in Argentina. The same horrors could be practised in our own cities, in a hideout anywhere; even in a supposedly respectable house.”
“What?” Canno almost shouted. A cup clattered, spilled some of its hot tea over the tray. Then Alice was gripping Bony’s shoulders, her hands rigid and her face frozen.
“Davos! You don’t think… Devil worship… black mass… babies being crucified upside down… babies… not here in Australia…”
“Steady, Alice McGorr,” Bony quietly urged, and Alice stood stiffly while one could count four, and then proceeded to serve them with afternoon tea.