The Enemy Strikes
ALICEMCGORRand Essen tapped for admittance to Bony’s room shortly after seven, when the sun-god was losing his grip on the world and showing his anger by splashing the sky with blood. Indoors, room corners were beginning to melt into shadow and the mosquito that had forced an entry during the day was now lusting.
They found Bony slumped in his chair, on the desk his notes and reports. He was minus his coat and the white linen shirt looked as though recently donned.
“Come and sit down, both of you. After such a hot day you must be tired. Light up and relax.”
“I came in after I got back from the hospital, and you weren’t here,” Alice said, and proceeded to remove her gloves and produce a cigarette-case and lighter from her handbag.
“I was calling on the elite.”
“A woman?” she asked, suspiciously. Essen chuckled.
“Free and easy, aren’t we?” he mocked. “We could be reminded about our place.”
“I don’t need to be reminded,” snapped Alice. “We were both told to call him Bony. He said all his friends call him Bony, and that we were his friends. Now, didn’t he?”
“He did,” agreed Essen, lighting his pipe. “Still, we are lowly constables and he’s a DI. Wonder if he ever wears all the doings… braided peak hat, striped pants, gold-mounted tunic, etc.”
“The wife has the lot, including a sword, wrapped in tissue paper and in her treasure chest,” Bony said proudly, and then joined in the laughter againsthimself.
“And now, my friends, with your permission, a few questions.”
Alice and Essen looked at each other, challengingly.
Bony spoke: “Competitor Number One. What did you think of the hospital, Alice?”
“Hospital first-rate. Got everything, from what I could judge. Nine babies in the Infants’ Ward. Those boy twins! Gorgeous kids… well worth the effort. But, anyone could sneak in at midnight and pinch the lot. Ward is wide-open to a fly-netted veranda, and the door in the veranda’s never locked. I told Constable Essen about it at dinnertime.”
“Sister on duty all night through?”
“Yes, but she has other duties which take her away from the Infants’ Ward, although not so far that she couldn’t hear a baby cry.”
“And you, Essen? What have you done?”
“I spent a couple of hours with the Registrar of Births and Deaths and obtained the addresses of all parents with children under three months.”
“Did you make a note of the sex of the children?”
“Yes.”
“Concentrate on the safety of the male children. Have you plans?”
“Yes, I think I can cover it. The reinforcements from Albury are due in at half-past eight. The Sergeant says I can have Robins, who knows the town, and two of the Albury men. Robins is now visiting the homes of all the male infants to warn the parents. We’ll guard the infants at the hospital and, with the other men, take general duty in the town. You got a hunch the kidnappers will try again?”
“History has produced one kidnapping per month,” replied Bony. “I am taking these measures to satisfy Superintendent Canno, and to rid myself of mental distraction created by the possibility of another kidnapping. Do you think it possible that Sergeant Yoti instructed your tracker, Fred Wilmot, to trail me today?”
“Trail you! Lord, no.”
“How long has he been employed by the Department?”
“Oh, some three years, I think.”
“Mrs Rockcliff was murdered last Monday night. The next morning Wilmot came here to work. I am wondering if that were coincidence or arrangement made by Yoti or yourself.”
“Don’t think. I’ll ask the Sergeant.”
Essen departed in some haste, and Bony slid over the desk top a print made by a glove finger which had been repaired.
“Would you say that sewing was done by an expert or by a woman not really proficient?” he asked Alice, and then silently watched her.
She took the print to the window, wasn’t satisfied and switched on the light, standing directly beneath the globe.
“Finely darned and evenly spaced,” she said. “Yes, the person who did the mending is an expert.”
“Would you be able to recognise her work on another garment… from memory of that print?”
“I might, but I wouldn’t guarantee it. Alice continued to study the print. “I’d say that the person who mended the glove was used to doing a lot of sewing, and also that she was used to making her things last as long as possible, not being one of the idle rich.”
Essen came back to report, that Sergeant Yoti had certainly not put Fred to shadow Inspector Bonaparte, and further that the arrangement made with Fred to act as police tracker had been elastic. Fred often failed to come to work for days and even weeks unless sent for. He had not been sent for when he came to work on the previous Tuesday. Hisjob was to keep the yard tidy, scrub out the cells, cut the wood for Mrs Yoti, and accompany an officer when required.
“You sure he was tailing you?” asked Essen, and Bony replied at zero.
“Of course. Marcus Clark tailed Alice. Now Frederick Wilmot tails me. There is the robbery from the Library, a large slab of rock on which an aborigine has made a crude drawing. It would not surprise me if the rock drawing was stolen to prevent me seeing it.”
“No one seems to know what the drawing means, according to Oats, the librarian,” Essen said. “Not even oldMarlo-Jones, and being a professor of anthropology he’d know most things about theabos.”
“Mr Oats told me that the Professor believes the drawing has something to do with rain-making,” Bony continued. “Oats knows nothing about the drawing, where it came from, or who gave it to the Library Museum. I must pay a visit to the Mission Station tomorrow.” Bony lit a cigarette he had been toying with for several minutes. “There is in these baby thefts something of the aborigine, and, so far, nothing of the whites. And by the way, Alice, you and I have been invited to a sherry party tomorrow afternoon. What is a good antidote for Australian sherry, d’youknow?”
“A drop of battery acid, my old man used to say,” replied Alice.
“H’m! I remember hearing that one before,” Bony said, faintly disapproving. “I have a less drastic formula. Well, here is the invitation. Reads: ‘Sherry at five. Marlo-Jones. Do come. Inspector Bonaparte and Cousin.’The last written in green ink in a style rarely seen these days. Cousin! Knowledge from gossip, Alice. You cannot escape.”
“I’m not going,” Alice declared. “I won’t drink plonk.”
“You will accompany me, Alice,” Bony ordered, the smile leavening the flat evenness of authority. “You will drink plonk with me. I will have at hand an efficient antidote so that neither will suffer… much
… in performance of duty.”
“There’s nothing in the Oath of Allegiance about having to drink plonk,” argued Alice, tossing her head and having to re-tighten the roll of hair.
“You won’t drink plonk for a reason other than to please me,” soothed Bony. “I must accept the invitation. I must be supported by someone, decidedly you for preference, and if eventually we swing down Main Street arm in arm and minus decorum, well…”
“I don’t like it,” Alice continued to protest. “Could I take a bottle of gin or something?”
“I fear not,” Bony gravely told her. “Our hosts would feel insulted. So, sherry it must be.”
“I hate the filthy stuff.”
“They say you get to acquire a taste for it,” Essen observed. “Don’t mind it myself.”
“You’re not going; I am,” announced Alice… all objection banished by the thought that Bony might substitute Essen for her.
A few minutes later Bony dismissed them for the day and, having gathered his papers and locked them in his case, he strolled into the warm and balmy night to call on the Reverend Mr Baxter, who received him with smiling friendliness and kept him talking for an hour.
Nothing came of that interview additional to the sparse information already obtained from the Methodist Minister, and for a further hour and a half Bony walked the streets of Mitford, feeling within his mind a growing restlessness, which sprang from intuitive promptings that forces were gathering against him rather than from impatience with the progress and speed of his investigations.
He could think of nothing left undone, no avenue left unexplored. There was no Pearl Rockcliff on any Electoral Roll in the States of New South Wales and Victoria, and the Income Tax authorities knew of no tax payer of that name. Teams of patient men were delving into the background of all persons whose name began with Q on the chance of finding a woman absent from her usual abode… a gigantic task seemingly without end and without prospect of success.
People were leaving the cinema when he passed down Main Street to reach the Police Station. The police residence was in darkness, but there was a light in the office across the way, and there Bony found a constable on duty. He had nothing to report.
With thought of a shower before bed, Bony entered his room physically and mentally tired. Switching on the light, he sat on the bedside chair to remove his shoes for slippers, when bodily movement abruptly ceased.
Something was wrong with the room.
Standing, his eyes registered this pleasant interior, accepting every item with suspicion and finding no fault. The suitcase against the wall was as he had left it when brushing his hair before dinner. The chest of drawers was normal, and things upon it unmoved. The desk was neat and almost bare, the ashtray littered with cigarette-ends. But numerically less than when he had gone out. The ends were of cigarettes smoked by Alice McGorr. All the ends ofhis own self-made cigarettes had vanished.
Oh yes, something was wrong. He sniffed, without sound and without cease, like a hound silently hunting a scent. He lowered the blinds and prowled like a cat suspicious of danger, often bringing his nose close to the furniture, and sometimes to the linoleum covering the floor. The linoleum was old and the light was of little use to show tracks.
The bed was as when expertly made by Mrs Yoti, the upper sheet folded down over the blankets, his pyjamas neatly folded and lying upon the pillow. He sniffed at the pyjamas, the pillows. He studied the bed again, and again sniffed at the pillows, and the pyjamas. The coarse cream linen bedspread was without a rumple anywhere.
He looked under the bed. Nothing. He opened the wardrobe and burrowed among the clothes there. He opened the suitcase and carefully examined every item. Still nothing. But the prickling at the nape of his neck, the reaction to danger which had never yet fooled him, continued to warn, warn insistently.
Back again at the bed, he sniffed it all over and now with loud vigour. He fancied he detected a strange odour, could not be positive, and the doubt put springs to his shoeless feet and magnified sensitivity at his fingertips. Gingerly he took up the pyjamas and dropped them on the chair. The top pillow he lifted as carefully, and then the second pillow. Deliberately cautious, he rolled down the bedclothes, over and over to the foot of the bed.
And then he leapt to the dressing-table for his hairbrush to smash five red-back spiders which had been lying in wait to inject their poison into his feet.
Lurking under cover, often in colonies, this insect’s attack is to be countered by swift medical attention, or surely culminates in long illness if not death.