Trail’s End
WAITED UPON BY the cheerful and tireless Mrs Washfold, Bony lunched in solitary state. As Mrs Washfold was inclined to linger beside his table, he asked her if Fred Ayling had returned to his camp, and was informed that the wood cutter was staying with the Wessexes.
“I never cottoned to him, Mr Rawlings,” she added.“Too moody for my liking. Up in the air one day and down in the dumps the next. Same with his ideas about you. One time praising you to the sky, and then crying you down. Don’t mean anything, of course. Way he’s made.”
“I have sensed that peculiarity in him,” Bony admitted. “What did he cry me down about?”
“Oh, you know how these country people can be, suspicious and all that. If they don’t know just what you do and how much money you have in the bank, they imagine things. Never give credit to people for being natural. Fred can’t understand why you have such an old car when you’re a pastoralist and wool’s over a hundred pounds a bale. Can’t understand a man wanting to have a holiday in winter time. Can’t understand this and that, so has to imagine you’re a detective, or a Russian spy, even a city gangster in smoke. Take no notice, Mr Rawlings.”
“Of course not, Mrs Washfold. I must tell my wife about that. She’ll say she wished I were a spy or a policeman and then I’d talk romantically instead of about wool and taxes.”
After lunch he sat on the veranda and pondered on his next move. Penwarden had given him much thatmorning, and no man could be less unsophisticated and less prone to dissimulation. That Penwarden had spoken the truth, as he knew it. Bony believed, but doubted that the truth as known to Penwarden was all the truth.
The doubt was that Dick Lake had driven Eldred Wessex to Ballarat. Had he done so, had Eldred Wessex travelled as far distant as possible, why had Lake taken such risk to retrieve the clothes and suitcase, and why had Ayling told Penwarden that cock and bull yarn that he, Bony, was an accomplice of the dead man? Were Eldred Wessex a thousand or ten thousand miles away, would it actually have mattered greatly that a detective had discovered the dead man’s effects? The clothes and the contents of the suitcase had given little by comparison with that given by the death of Dick Lake.
Ayling had warned Penwarden not to gossip to the stranger Mr Rawlings, and Ayling, who had served in the war-time Navy, would not be so simple as to think Bony was a criminal’s accomplice. He had tried to influence the Washfolds against him, and had tried with less success to warn Moss Way. This action was more in keeping with the probability that Eldred Wessex was living somewhere on his father’sfarm, or beyond Sweet Fairy Ann with or near Fred Ayling.
Assuming this, it was unlikely that the fact would be conveyed to a friend and neighbour like Edward Penwarden, who already had done so much incupboarding the skeleton of family dishonour.
Ayling was the next move.
As Ayling could be difficult, Bony sought BertWashfold and told him he intended visiting Eli Wessex and would most certainly be back for dinner that night. He adopted a further unusual precaution of transferring from his suitcase to his pocket a small automatic.
Choosing to walk, Stug accompanied him.
Passing Penwarden’s workshop he observed that the door was shut, an interesting item as it was then ten minutes after two. One hour after passing the workshop, he rounded a bend in the track and came in sight of the road gate to the Wessex farm.
Outside the gate stood Ayling’s old car. It was facing towards the hills and Sweet Fairy Ann. At the gate appeared Mary Wessex and Fred Ayling. Ayling carried a suitcase and, like a raincoat on his shoulder, several grey blankets.
Concealed by a tree, Bony watched Ayling pass the blankets and suitcase into the back of the car, go to the front and crank the engine. It was then obvious that the girl was disinclined to enter the car, resulting in a protracted discussion which terminated when Ayling nodded assent. Whereupon the girl walked off the road and entered the forest opposite the farm, Ayling sitting on the running board and lighting a cigarette, clearly prepared to wait.
Bony waited too, keeping Stug with him. The suitcase was normal luggage for a man to bring from camp, but in view of the fact that Ayling habitually stayed with the Wessexes, he would not bring his own blankets.
After five or six minutes, Mrs Wessex appeared at the gate, and Ayling joined her. They talked for several minutes, when Mrs Wessex returned to the house and Ayling to thecar, and from the pantomime of their actions Bony was sure that Ayling had succeeded in quietening the woman’s perturbation.
When the girl reappeared, and stepped down the low bank to the road, she tiptoed to the car. Ayling caught her by the arm and without fuss put her into the front seat, and getting in behind the wheel he drove off.
Bony smoked two cigarettes before he moved on.
Some time previously he had noted that where the girl had gone into the forest a truck had been driven in and out again, and he had thought the truck had been used for collecting firewood. On reaching this point, which was opposite the gate and in full view of the homestead, he, too, entered the forest.
The abnormal rain which fell on the night Dick Lake crashed to death had obliterated the track of the vehicle, but there were tracks made since that night by a woman’s and a man’s boots size six… the boots Mary Wessex had worn when she listened outside the door of the Lighthouse, and again when she tiptoed to the veranda that afternoon Bony talked with her father. Prior to this afternoon the girl had entered the forest four times since the great rain. She had been alone.
Her tracks ended in a little dell shadowed by white-gums and littered with flakes of limestone and windfalls from the trees. It was a pretty place even on this cold and windy day. Magpies were made angry by the intrusion, and small scarlet-capped brown finches twittered their alarm.
The girl had come here and stood about a long splinter of stone. There was nothing remarkable about the stone: for, as Bony had noted, the floor of the dell was littered with these fragments of limestone. On her previous visits the girl had come to this particular fragment.
Walking back to the lip of the natural basin, he listened to the birds, watching them, tarried till assured no human was in the vicinity. On returning to the stone splinter, he turned it over.
Beneath, buried flush with the ground, was a small cedar-wood box. He lifted the lid. The box contained a photograph of Eldred Wessex in a cheap metal frame and, within a dainty blue silk handkerchief, the fourth ring.
Returning the ring and the photograph, he put back the box and replaced the stone. To the dog who watched, he said:
“You will not come here again and dig up that box, Stug. Your load of fleas and my heaviness of heart are as nothing to the tragedy of that poor mind groping in the world of reality for a world she has lost, and finding no resting place in either. How blessed are we!”
Stug wagged his tail and followed Bony from the dell. Soberly the man returned to the road, and docilely the contented dog followed. They came to the Wessex farm gate, and there Bony leaned upon it and pensively regarded the neat homestead, and the cleared paddocks beyond. No one was in view. Smoke slanted sharply from one of the three chimneys. Powerfully disinclined to open the gate, Bony did so and walked slowly to the house.
Mrs Wessex answered his knock. There was no welcoming smile. The weather-ruined face held no expression, the voice no inflection.
“Please come in.”
Eli Wessex sat between the window and the brightly burning fire. He was wearing a dressing gown, and his pathetic hands were resting uselessly in his lap. At Bony’s entrance he neither looked up nor spoke, and it was his wife who invited the visitor to be seated at the other side of the fire. She drew forward a chair to sit between them.
“Mr Penwarden telephoned that I was on my way?” asked Bony.
“He spoke to Fred Ayling,” replied Mrs Wessex, dully, staring at the fire. “Fred told us. He’s taken Mary away to the Lakes. They will look after her, and so will Fred. Fred has always loved her. You mustn’t blame Fred for anything.”
“Did Mr Penwarden know that Eldred came home?”
The woman shook her head.
“I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “Ayling knew that Eldred came home, stopped here?”
“Yes, Inspector. He got it all out of Dick.” Abruptly, she turned to him, a human being divested of its personality. “I am to blame for everything. Upon me is the mark. I am to blame for Eldred. And for Dick. I am to blame for dear old Mr Penwarden, and for my husband.”
Turning, she confronted the fire. Eli said nothing, nor did he move.
“I know already what was done about the killing of the man from Sydney,” Bony said. “I know of Mr Penwarden’s contribution. Tell me how Eldred came to die.”
“You found his grave?”
“Yes.”
A long silence which Bony did not interrupt. When Mrs Wessex spoke, Bony had to lean forward to hear what she said.
“We’d like you to know, Inspector Bonaparte, that we feel no animosity towards you. You are the agent of Nemesis which we were silly enough to think we could escape. Had it not been you it would have been another. Shall I tell him, Father, or will you?”
“You tell it, wife.”
“We had only the one son, and we loved him above all else. I won’t waste time by telling you about his boyhood, excepting to say he was lovable and impetuous, quick of temper and imaginative. You know all that. What I am going to tell you about Eldred we didn’t know until the other day.”
“Early in March,” amended Eli.
“Early in March. Very early in the morning, Eldred came home, and Dick Lake was with him. Eldred wanted to give us a surprise, and he did. He was much altered, for we hadn’t seen him for eleven years, but there was something new about him we couldn’t make out, and didn’t try to at first.
“He told us he wanted to keep his visit a secret, even from the Owens, our near neighbours all ourlives, and we didn’t ask him why because we were so happy to have him home again. Dick went off to his camp about ten o’clock and Eldred went to bed and stayed there all that day. That evening he told us how well he was doing in Sydney, and it was then that I thought the business was ruining his health and that I’d have to insist on his staying home so I could look after him.
“The next morning I heard about the murder. I happened to telephone to the grocer about an order, and he mentioned it. Naturally, I wanted to hear more, and learned that if Mr Fisher hadn’t had to come down specially the body mightn’t have been discovered for months.
“Late that same day, Dick came to see Eldred, who hadn’t got up, and they were together for a long time. After Dick had gone, I went in to see Eldred. He looked awful. He was shaking all over, and he frightened me. When I said I would call the doctor, he shouted at me not to be a fool, as he was suffering only from a bout of malaria he’d got in the jungle.
“He told me to get him a glass of brandy. After I’d done that I took him a bowl of soup and some toast as he said he wasn’t hungry. Then he seemed better, but kept asking me if I’d told anyone he was at home. He’d already seen Mary, of course, but he was desperately anxious that she shouldn’t say anything.
“A cold dread began to creep through me, he acted so strangely. I remembered that when Dick came with him in the early morning, and again that late afternoon, he never once smiled as he always did. The dread in my mind I wouldn’t face, not till Dick came again the next night.
“Dick brought brandy, three bottles of it, and he was with Eldred for more than an hour, Eldred still lying abed. It was about eleven when Dick went, and I walked with him to the road gate. At first he wouldn’t tell me anything. I pleaded with him for some time, I mentioned Father, saying how worried he was about Eldred, and that it couldn’t go on. I’ve known Dick since he was a tiny tot, and I knew he would tell me eventually.
“When he’d told me everything, it was he who pacified me, and I came back to the house having agreed to do nothing and to say nothing.
“But I broke the agreement when I went in to Eldred after I’d put Father to bed. I told Eldred he would have to give himself up in the morning. He shouted that he would never do that. Then he laughed and told me I would see him sentenced to death, how I would live through the second when he would be put on the trap and hanged. He got out of bed and fell upon his knees, and implored me not to betray him.
“Then he boasted about his life in Sydney, the money he had made and how he had made it, how he had at first peddled cocaine and finally had taken it himself. He whimpered like a dog. He said he’d run out of the drug, and that I’d have to get some somehow at Geelong. He got up and drank brandy from the bottle, and I didn’t recognize him as Eldred. He… he wasn’t a man any more.
“He said the man deserved what he got. He blamed him for everything, for smuggling drugs off the ship, for supplying him with other things he sold. He swore about Ed Penwarden suggesting what to do with the body, when they had the chance to take it over to Fred’s camp.
“So it went on for hours, now and then Eldred drinking from the bottle although there were already three glasses on the table by the bed. I thought of Father’s sleeping tablets, and blamed myself for not thinking of them earlier. I fetched two and gave them to Eldred, and presently he fell asleep.
“That must have been near dawn. I sat on the foot of the bed looking at him. He lay comfortably on his back, one arm out-flung, the other under the clothes. All the ugliness had gone from his face. He looked like he did when he went off to the war. He was my boy again. He was safe and asleep in his own room with the two pictures of ships under full canvas on the walls, and the text in the frame above the bed. After all the years, my empty heart was full again.
“When he woke, he was just as bad as he’d been before. I said if he’d not give himself up, then the only thing to do was for Dick to drive him to Melbourne, anywhere to get away. He wouldn’t hear of it, shouting that by now someone would have told the police about him and the dead man in the Lighthouse. I stayed with him most of that day until Dick came in the evening. Dick quieted him just a little, and when he left I went again with him to the road gate. He asked if I’d told Father about the murder, and I reminded him I’d never kept anything from Father. I begged him to think what we could do for Eldred, and Dick said there was nothing we could do exceptkeep him full of brandy until the craving for cocaine passed off. Dick didn’t sound hopeful, and then he told me that what Eldred was suffering from chiefly was fear. Said Eldred’s way of living had rotted him, and fear was sending him insane.
“As I walked back to the house, I thought of Mary, of all that Mary had suffered. I thought of Father, how wise he had been and how foolish I had been to override his views and advice. I thought of Mr Penwarden, and what he had done to save Father and me and Dick. I thought of allthat, was thinking of it as I went into Eldred’s room.
“He was sitting on the side of the bed, the fingers of one hand clawing the side of his mouth, and his eyes glassy with fear and horror. I must have walked slowly to the door, for he shouted at me never to do that again, that I reminded him of the coming of the hangman.
“I said: ‘You’ll have to sleep, son. You must sleep!’ So I went out to the kitchen and mixed him a sedative and took it to him, and he drank it.
“He became calmer, and finally he lay down and I lay with him and held him in my arms. All night long, I held him excepting once when I got up to put out the light. When he died… there was no struggle, just no more breathing… I got up and went to Father and told him Eldred was dead.”
There was silence. Eli Wessex, who had been so still that it could be thought he was dead, uttered one short sob. The woman’s voice came again, thin, without tone, reminding Bony of the wind among the white-gums surrounding the little dell in the forest.
“All my love for Eldred was wasted. There was nothing left in me to give but pity. In half a glass of brandy, I gave him ten of Father’s tablets.”