Sleuths on the Wing
SINCELEAVINGAgar’s Lagoon, Bony had been strangely silent, and now he stood surveying Black Range, hands in pockets and shoulders relaxed. Irwin was grilling chops on the blade of the shovel, content with his role, and lazily speculative concerning Bony’s next move.
Calling his two trackers from the little fire they had made for themselves, he served them with slabs of bread and underdone chops, and sent them back. Then he announced that lunch was ready, and Bony came to sit beside the canvas-cum-tablecloth, still thoughtful. Not until they had eaten did he speak of this new mission.
“I want you to pay a call onAlverston,” he said. “We can exclude him from this case, and therefore use him as we cannot use theWallaces , theBreens and theBundreds. When do you think you could reachAlverston’s homestead?”
“About four o’clock.”
“Then askAlverston to contact your sergeant on his transceiver and get him to ascertain where Jasper and Ezra Breen are now. They should be approaching Wyndham by this time, if not already there. I want to know if those twoBreens are still with the cattle, or if only one is, or if Silas has joined the team. Remembering that the air is free, do you think you could obtain that information without other people knowing it?”
Irwin chuckled.
“Sergeant Booker was an Intelligence bloke during the war, being acypher expert, and we’ve been trying to evolve a languagecypher instead of one with letters or figures. Youknow, a sort of jive. Booker got the idea from his school days when the kids added to words, or inserted into the middle of them a sound like ‘arp’. Harpavearpacharpop?”
“And that, translated?”
“ ‘Havea chop?’ I could have contacted the sergeant from Agar’s.”
“Only transceiver there is that at the post office. Too close to home. Well, then, you raise Booker and obtain that information. Stay the night atAlverston’s homestead and return here tomorrow. By the way, you may learn something useful fromAlverston -behaviour of his blacks, suspected cattle-duffing, something which might link theWallaces toStenhouse, or to theBreens.”
“All right! What about you?”
“I am going to poke about the country.”
“You’ll need to look both ways at once. Better take one of the trackers with you.”
“Which is the more reliable?”
Irwin named Charlie, explaining that this was Charlie’s country, and that Larry came from the coast. Bony objected to Charlie on the ground that he would have too many tribal relations working for both theBreens and theWallaces, and decided he would talk to Larry.
“You see, Irwin, the bits and pieces we’ve collected, added to the geographical points at which the bodies werefound, strongly indicate theWallaces and theBreens, either separately or in collusion. We must find where these murders took place, and I think the scene of the double murder is near whereStenhouse was found or near where we found Jacky Musgrave. Have you any theory to account for those four hundred and fifteen pounds being posted to Ezra Breen inside a book?”
“It might be that theBreens got on to payable gold and are secretly exporting it,” replied Irwin. “Silas mightn’t have gone off on a croc shoot at what Kimberley called the Swamp. He might have gone farther west to a coastal inlet to meet Chinese or Indonesian smugglers. Looks like that’s whatStenhouse was on to.”
“I see a grave defect in your theory,” Bony argued. “The smugglers would pay cash on delivery for gold taken out by Silas. Why make payment through a bookseller? I’ll put another question. Why gouge a hole in a perfectly good book in which to send Ezra a packet of treasury notes? The sender could have posted the money in a stout registered envelope. He could have placed the notes individually between the pages of the book if an ordinary envelope could not be used. There seems little doubt that theBreens are sending to that bookseller something of value to the jeweller partner. It could be gold melted to slugs, and sent down in books once a fortnight, and payment remitted monthly in a similar receptacle.”
“If gold, why do that?” Irwin objected. “Gold sent to a jeweller wouldn’t bring more than the storekeeper at Agar’s would pay for it. Least, I don’t think so.”
“Doubtless you’re right. Let’s tackle the trackers.”
They crossed to the aborigines and Irwin spoke to them, saying he would like Charlie to go with him and Larry with Bony, and that Bony was his very good friend and brother by initiation as a police-feller. There was no hint of acommand, and first one and then the other assented. It was evident that both knew the Musgrave blacks were now in this country, for they were decidedly uneasy. Bony talked to Larry, telling him how valuable he was to the police and that together they would be safe enough, and he emphasized the fact that Pluto’s Mob were interested only in the fate of Jacky Musgrave.
On Irwin’s departing, leaving tucker sufficient for two days and a blanket apiece, Bony invited Larry to conference. To Larry this was foreign country, and he was now cut off from the white man with whom he had been closely associated for years, and from his own racial companion, and it was essential that he be brought to complete confidence in Bony and himself.
They squatted on a sandy patch, and Bony drew a map showing the Wyndham track skirting Black Range, the place whereStenhouse was found, and the position of the Wallace homestead. Then he led Larry to show the area of country covered by Charlie and himself in their search for clues. With patience and the expenditure of time, the tracker was presented with several pictures, any one of which could cover the actual scene of the murders. Bony stressed the certainty that the crimes had been committed by a white man assisted by aboriginal stockmen.
Previously, Larry had been sent out to find suspicious tracks, or those of the jeep, and now understanding that all such clues had been obliterated, his mind would seek evidence of the work of obliteration.
Bony chose to search the country between the road and Black Range, and, if not successful, to extend the search across Black Range to Black Well.
The hours passed and miles were covered, and when the sun was westering, and they were deep in the shadow of Black Range, Larry signalled a halt and stood like a colonial soldier at a coronation ceremony. Beside him Bony listened. There was no wind. The scrub trees drowsed in the warm air of lovely evening. All that could be heard was a crow cawing.
Two men had been killed andblood had been shed, and where blood is shed there gather the birds. As a dog will bark joyfully, angrily, mournfully, expectantly, so do the crows betray a mood to those able to hear, and the crow they now heard was angry. The note of anger was not defiant. The bird was not confronted by an enemy or robbed of a morsel by another crow. It was angered by something not understood.
Only men such as these two would have detected the distant bird’s mood, and, deciding to investigate, they followed the Range southward to a small forest of trees growing in a dell. At their approach several crows flew from the trees, now cawing with unmistakable anger occasioned by the intrusion.
Larry again listened intently, and his gaze was everywhere. There seemed to be nothing unusual about this bush scene duplicated by a million like it. Larry’s wide nostrils were quivering, and Bony waited, recognizing his own inferiority to this semi-wild aborigine.
“Jeep feller him bin here,” Larry said, as though his big flat nose registered the fumes of petrol. “That crow feller him binkickup hell that jeep feller no leave-um tucker.”
“Have a look-see,” Bony ordered.
They found a low mound covered with stones and leaves, and on a stick being thrust into it and the earth levered upward, it was discovered that the mound was of fire ashes. The ashes had been carefully covered, but the crows knew about it, for the prints of their feet proved that. They also knew of something beneath leaves which had ‘drifted’ into spaces between stones, and Bony proceeded to dig with his hands, Larry assisting him.
They dug down a little more than a foot and lifted from the shallow grave the carcass of a black goat whose throat had been cut. The animal had been dead about a week. It had not been killed for meat, for the only injury to the carcass, other than the severed throat, was the removal of a strip of hide along its back.
The trackerwas not liking this place, and, to maintain his confidence in human agency, Bony asked him how he knew the jeep had been here.
“Smellumtyres,” replied Larry.
“Findumtracks,” Bony said, and leaving the carcass they proceeded to prospect the ground about… until Bony came across the oil patch covered expertly with dry earth and leaves. This last discovery gave Larry great satisfaction, and Bony made a point of congratulating him on his bushcraft… which included his remarkable sense of smell.
However, the story was not yet told, the picture not complete. That the dead policeman’s jeep had been here was not proven, but that a car or truck had been parked amid these trees was certain, and that a goat had had its throat cut for its blood was permissible assumption. Bony was immensely gratified… and tired.
There yet being an hour of daylight, they circled the dell in the hunt for tracks, then walked in a greater circle, and when on the point of camping for the night, they cut the tracks of men making to cross the Range. He and Larry agreed that the number of the party was five. They were all stockmen, for all wore riding boots, and, from the manner of their stride, one was a white man and four were aborigines. The reading was a commendable feat, the five men having walked in single file, the white man leading.
“We’ll camp before it grows dark,” Bony said, and they built a fire which gave less smoke than a cigarette, made tea and ate, then smothered the fire and sought a place to sleep at the base of a great boulder providing a roof against the dew.
The night was long and, towards dawn, made cold by a wind from the south. Larry, wearing his military overcoat and the blanket wrapped over that, managed to sleep, fitfully and uneasily. Bony, who had only a blanket for coverage, fared worse, and he sat with his back to the rock and smoked cigarettes until his tongue was a chip.
Having eaten and packed their scanty equipment, they followed the tracks made by the five men, walking in single file, and Larry quite happy that with Bony behind him he was protected from attack, for the wild man loves to set an ambush and permit the quarry to pass through it before throwing his long spear.
Where a naked shoulder of the Range rested on a wide ledge of grey sand, Larry halted. The shoulder extended steeply towards the sky, dull red and smooth save for small patches of rock loosened by the weather. They had reached the ledge by one of three small gullies, and it was clear that the party whose footsteps they were following had taken one of the other gullies when making their descent to the camp where the goat had had its throat cut.
Having come down from the top of the Range, the party had halted on this sandy ledge, and no attempt had been made to smother the evidence that here the men had rested. They had been carrying a burden on two poles, stretcher fashion. The goats had been led by a man who followed the stretcher.
Had his mind not been so crowded, Bony would have been enthralled by the astonishing colours of the unclothed shoulders partially concealed by nets ofspinifex. They were now two thousand feet or more above Dead Goat Camp, and the higher summits of the Range appeared to be yet another thousand feet. There were no signs of cattle, and very few of kangaroos. Bird life, excepting the omnipresent eagles, was entirely absent.
When the sun said it was half past ten, Bony decided to halt at the foot of a precipitous cliff of purple ironstone and watch the eagles, for the eagles were now telling the story.
Under normal circumstances, eagles work in their individual areas, singly or in pairs when nesting, and the eagles now seen by the shrewd Larry and the no less perspicacious Bony were drawn into the wide limits of a circle immediately westward. The height maintained by the birds told of their interest in something on the ground… and their suspicion of it.
There was no necessity for Bony to urge Larry to still greater caution when they proceeded.
They crossed the bare back of the Range between two mighty red-gold crowns of pillared rock, and, with many halts for Larry to probe ahead, they began the westward descent.
Having crept about the base of a shoulder pimpled by Devil’s Marbles, poised to tempt any boy to push them to flight like falling meteors, they came to a cut through the back of a great hump. The cut was level, a hundred yards long, ten feet in width all the way from the floor to the top at seven to eight hundred feet. The light was green, the translucent green of the jungle floor.
The floor was sandy. It was trampled by men’s boots, and when Larry saw the imprints of naked feet, he stopped, pointing and saying nothing. Bony smiled, nodded forward, and Larry went on. And at the far end of the gigantic sword-cut, he halted.
“They got-um Jacky Musgrave,” he whispered. “They find-um who kill Jacky Musgrave.”
Bony edged round the left-hand corner of the cut. A shallow depression of several acres in extent was walled on three sides by iron slopes and on the fourth by space in which lay theBreens ’ valley. In the centre of the shallow bowl was a platform on poles twelve feet high. Something was lying on the platform, and now and then the wind fluttered the torn cloth of a military greatcoat similar to that worn by Larry.