The Angler Wins
TO sit comfortably for thirty minutes and meditate on pleasing subjects is, in these hectic years, an experience. To sit on a hard chair for three hours, with hearing strained to locate the approach of a multiple murderer is perhaps one degree easier to bear than lying on a bed and imaginatively dying a hundred deaths by strangulation. Had Mrs. Sayers screamed: “I can’t bearit! ” Bony would have been neither surprised nor angered.
The cessation of a sound so prolonged as to become unnoticed was at first not registered by Bony, and it was several seconds before he realised that the wind in the taut telephone wires had stopped. There could be only the one explanation-the murderer had cut the wires.
Holding the edge of the window curtain one inch from the frame, Bony kept watch on the veranda. He hoped that Mrs. Sayers had noted the cessation of wind playing on telephone wires, for then she would at least know that her ordeal was drawing to a climax.
A measureless period of emptiness was endured when imperceptibly the darkness of the veranda waned before the waxing of light. The light grew but not sufficiently to illumine the furniture, and suddenly Bony saw its source, the round opaque disc of a flashlight masked by a cotton handkerchief.
The murderer was now facing the master light switch. He appeared to be standing there a long time, but actually was with infinite care raising the switch bar to prevent any metallic sound. A master in the art of noiseless movement, Bony felt admiration for the practitioner who equalled himself. The disc of light disappeared, and again imperceptibly the light waned. He was coming back into the passage.
Bony sat with one hand on the rod and the other about the brake controlling the reel-drum… one hand holding the camera release shutter and a finger of the other touching the smooth surface of the press-button. When fishing, he sat with the base of the rod swivelled to the seat between his knees: now his knees gripped a sizeable flashlight.
The murderer must now be outside the bedroom door. Bony could not hear him. Not a sound of him. Why the delay? There was no further precaution he need take. The telephone wires had been cut. The overhead wire to Briggs’ alarm bell would have been cut, and the light power had been switched off. The victim was beyond communication with the outside world, as Mrs. Eltham had been and Mrs. Overton.
The door was being opened so silently and so slowly that there was no detectable difference in air pressure. Then as silently and slowly the door was closed.
Mrs. Sayers moved. She sighed. She breathed with soft rhythm.
Bony was wondering what was keeping the shark from taking the bait-fish when he saw the brute’s head rising above the surface. He was hearing the tapping of teeth, the sound he had heard once before.
The small disc of light appeared. It was directed to the floor. The diffusedilluminant revealed the man standing with his back to the closed door. It revealed the foot-board of the bed and the small table at the head of the bed whereon stood the useless telephone. The man who appeared to have the body of a giant advanced to the bed. Silence! And then the whispered command:
“Mrs. Sayers, I want you! Mrs. Sayers, I want you!”
Then Bony saw Mrs. Sayers sitting on the edge of the bed, and slowly she stood up.
“Oh, Mr. Rose, this is so sudden,” she murmured.
The shark’s jaw opened wide. The torch he carried he dropped as his hands darted towards his victim’s throat.
Bony pressed his finger on the bell button and kept it there. He pulled on the camera shutter release. There was a flash of white light which lingered behind the eyes. A cry of astonishment. A woman’s laughter which Bony remembered for many a year. A shout of fury.
Bony’s torch beam revealed Mr. Rose. He was facing towards Bony, his back arched, his knees sagging, his mouth gaping, and his eyes white with agony. Mrs. Sayers was behind him. She was doing something to his left arm and something to his neck, as she shrieked:
“You dirty beast! You scum! I’ll snap your neck like a carrot, you dirty, filthy, murderous swine.”
A terrific blow was given to the back door. Bony laid his flashlight on the tall-boy, directing its beam on the struggling Mr. Rose. He rushed forward, shouting:
“Don’t injure him, Mrs. Sayers! Don’t injure him!”
He swung a sock nicely filled with sand down hard on the head of Mr. Rose, and the abrupt weight sent Mrs. Sayers to the floor. There was a pounding of feet in the passage. The door was flung inward, and Briggs dived for the unconscious Mr. Rose, whom he thought was lying on Mrs. Sayers and strangling her.
“Let him be!” Bony shouted. “Let him be!”
“Let up, Briggs, you ruddyfool,” screamed Mrs. Sayers. “Can’t you see the scum’s out to it. Pull him off me, d’you hear?”
Bony rushed out to the master switch. On re-entering the passage, he collided with Mr. Dickenson, made no apology and darted into the bedroom, where he tugged the light cord.
Mr. Rose was now lying on his back on the floor. Briggs was bending forward, his hands working and extended towards the inert body. Mrs. Sayers was getting to her feet, and in a fit of wild hysteria. Bony dragged Briggs back and ordered him to attend to Mrs. Sayers. Briggs attended to her… slapping her face and shouting:
“Cut it out, Mavis. What’s biting you?”
There came the roar of the police jeep. Mr. Dickenson, who had switched on the veranda lights, was in time to unlock the front door. And then Mrs. Sayers’ bedroom was full of men.
Inspector Walters claimed that he was damned!
“What’s the matter with him? Someone kill him?”
“I was persuaded to sandbag him,” admitted Bony. “I had to be cruel to be kind.”
“Why, it’s a beaut!” shouted Sawtell. He rocked the developing dish, and Bony wanted to stop him that he could appraise the value of the negative.
“It’s got everything,” chortled the sergeant as he transferred the plate from the developer to the fixing bath. “We’ll have a proper look in a minute or two. How in hell did you pick on him?”
Bony did not answer the question. He was too absorbed by the promise of the picture he had taken to bother with explanations at this moment, and he waited with a mental breathlessness as he had so often done when the club secretary was weighing his marlin at the end of the jetty. Then Sawtell lifted the plate and held it before a white light.
Mr. Rose was turned three-quarter full to the camera. He had both hands about Mrs. Sayers’ throat. The face was like that of a gargoyle but unmistakably his.
“Pretty, isn’t he?” said Sawtell. “We could sell this picture to the newspapers for a million.”
“I’d like a copy of it,” murmured Bony. “It’s unique. That woman! She behaved magnificently although a little too roughly. I feared for Mr. Rose.”
“Did you expect him to play up on amnesia?”
“Of course. Hiskind always do. Probably practised the surprised look before his mirror, just in case he was nabbed. This picture will rule out that defence when the case goes on trial. The politicians, though, will step in if we don’t find those four nightgowns.”
The police jeep and Inspector Walters’ private car were loaded with men when they stopped before the main entrance of Cave Hill College. With them was Mrs. Sayers.
Mr. Percival met the party, astonishment plain on his florid face.
“I have here a warrant signed by Mr. Willis, Justice of the Peace, to conduct a search of the apartments occupied by Mr. Rose,” Walters said in his official manner. “Mr. Rose was arrested early this morning and charged with wilful murder.”
“Was charged… Mr. Rose was…” stuttered Mr. Percival.
“With murder, Mr. Percival,” interrupted Mrs. Sayers. “You must manage the school until the Board meets. Meanwhile, take us to Mr. Rose’s rooms.”
Bony, Walters and Sawtell, Mrs. Sayers and Briggs and Mr. Dickenson, the two constables and Mr. Willis passed up the wide stairs to the first floor. They entered the study, a handsome room overlooking the town. Books were ranged on shelves half-way up three of the walls. Behind the door stood two safes.
“Mr. Percival, these are Mr. Rose’s keys,” Bony said. “Kindly open these safes.”
Without comment, Mr. Percival accepted the keys. The larger safe contained account books and cheque books, an amount of cash and severalunpresented cheques. All were the property of the college. The smaller safe was opened, and Sawtell extracted its contents, comprising documents and bank pass-books. The silence in the headmaster’s study was significant. Walters and the sergeant were grim.
“Where is the headmaster’s bedroom?” quietly asked Bony.
“Beyond those curtains,” replied Mr. Percival.
The party entered a room as large as the study and also overlooking the town. It was Sawtell who discovered the safe in the corner behind the wardrobe. Mr. Percival was asked to open it. He was dazed by this extraordinary intrusion and the implications behind the search warrant. He tried four of the keys on the ring before succeeding in unlocking the safe, everyone present crowding behind him.
It was Sawtell who removed its contents comprising a pair of binoculars; a pair of old shoes, with a drawing-pin still attached to the left sole, which had not been worn after Abie’s attempted blackmail; and four silk nightgowns.
“That’s the nightie he stole from my line,” stated Mrs. Sayers a little shrilly. “And that one belonged to Mrs. Overton. I remember the time she bought it.”
Bony spoke.
“Mr. Willis, kindly prepare the declarations to be signed by every person in the room, setting out the contents of this safe as produced by Sergeant Sawtell in the presence of us all, and adding what Mrs. Sayers has said concerning two of the nightgowns. She will assist you to describe the nightgowns.”
“We may return to the study?” asked the Justice of the Peace.
“Yes, of course.”
Bony turned to the window. Before him was Broome. Aided by the binoculars found in the headmaster’s private safe, he could clearly see the empty clothes lines behind the houses of the Widows of Broome.
Bony spent the entire afternoon compiling his report for the Criminal Investigation Branch, for Rose was to be taken to Perth by the two constables on the aircraft scheduled to leave at six that evening.
On returning from the airport, Inspector Walters found Bony already at dinner with his wife and two children. The relief from the strain under which he had been suffering was marked by unwonted joviality.
“It’s me for a good long sleep tonight,” he declared, and to Bony added: “And you’re due for a good sleep, too.”
“We shall all sleep soundly tonight,” Bony agreed. “By the way, I have taken the liberty of asking Mrs. Sayers and Briggs, Mr. Dickenson and Sawtell to be here at seven-thirty. I feel I owe it to them to give a short summary of my investigation. I presume you wish to be present.”
“Of course I do.”
“And you, Mrs. Walters, will be most welcome to join us. As you have cooked the dinner, your husband and I will do the washing up. It will be quite a little party with us all in the office.”
“Blow the washing up!” snorted Walters.
“You will assist me in the washing up,” Bony said with mock severity.
“Let the kids do it for once,” argued the inspector.
Keith and Nanette looked uncomfortable and wordlessly appealed to Bony. Bony was firm.
“I am sending Keith and Nanette to the pictures to commemorate.”
Inspector Walters and Inspector Bonaparte did accomplish the washing up of the dishes, and the children did eventually go off happily to the cinema, and Mrs. Walters did change her frock and join the party which gathered in the station office.
“I would like every one of you to accept my grateful thanks for your co-operation in the difficult investigation just concluded,” Bony began. “From each I was given much, and together we have done excellent team work with which the great police organisations of the world’s capitals would be well pleased.
“On this occasion I’ve been confronted by an adversary who was exceptionally intelligent, and, moreover, one who committed his crimes under the most favourable circumstances to himself… The murder of Mrs. Cotton provided no leads to her slayer and gave no indication of his motive. The murder of Mrs. Eltham was accompanied by similar negative results until I was informed that on the night after the homicide squad from Perth had left Broome a man was seen to leave her house in the early hours of the morning.
“What I discovered in Mrs. Eltham’s wardrobe, and subsequently in Mrs. Cotton’s wardrobe, was actually the first lead to the mind of the man who had strangled these women. The second lead was the discovery that both the victims had previously lost a nightgown from their clothes line, and this second lead was closely allied with the first. Other than those two leads I had nothing. I was shown the mentality of the murderer but gained nothing to assist in identifying him, other than the fact that he suffered from a peculiar skin disease named psoriasis.
“Most people, I think, are aware that police investigators very often know who has committed a crime and yet are unable to bring the criminal to trial through lack of sufficient evidence to place before a judge and jury. I had not sufficient evidence to suspect a particular person of these murders, and therefore, to my profound regret, was not in time to safeguard other possible victims.
“The murder of Mrs. Overton revealed that the murderer had adopted a plan of action which was fairly rigid, and this very plan indicated his type of mind and hinted, for that is the word, hinted at his background. His background was made a littlemore clear through his acts, which revealed several of his habits in normal life, such as his passion for tidiness.
“His knowledge of criminology was less than that of the average boy of sixteen. He wore rubber gloves to prevent leaving his finger-prints about the scene of his murders, and then illogically wiped clean the articles he did touch. It became obvious that the man who did that was, although intelligent, quite ignorant of crime detection with which the general public is superficially familiar. I began to think the murderer was a man who had never wasted his time at the cinema and never read fiction less than a century old.
“That he stole women’s silk nightgowns and destroyed women’s silk underwear did not indicate the sex maniac but rather the introvert. His motive was certainly not material gain, and thereinlay my greatest obstacle. I found clues which were extremely promising, but they turned out to be of value only as substantiating evidence. They did not lead to the murderer.
“The most promising of these clues was the shoe-prints of the murderer in and about the house of Mrs. Overton. I have made a study of footprints, and am sure that the science of footprints could be far greater than the science of finger-prints. The shoe-prints of the murderer assisted me further to build a picture of him, the picture of a man without a face. My picture grew to be that of a man weighing at least twelve stone, having a size-eight foot, burdened with an inferiority complex, and enjoying good physical health.”
Bony paused to light an alleged cigarette, and no one commented. Mrs. Sayers was looking at him as though he were a visitant from another world; Mr. Dickenson was steadily regarding his shabby shoes; Inspector Walters was fiddling with a ruler. Briggs, of course, continued his chewing, and Sawtell and Mrs. Walters were tensed.
“Had I come across the man wearing the shoes in which he murdered Mrs. Overton,” Bony proceeded, “I should have seen the face of the man of my picture. But before I could do that, poor misguided Abiemust needs attempt to blackmail him. What I am going to say regarding Abie is off the record.
“Abie did not die of petrol poisoning but of another poison given him by the murderer he tried to blackmail. The fact that Abie was poisoned and not strangled took me another step toward the murderer. He poisoned Abie because he was a man, and an aborigine at that. He did not strangle Abie because it would have dulled the memory of the ecstasy he experienced when strangling young and attractive women.
“Who of the men in Broome could this be? He was one having the attributes I have itemised and he suffered from psoriasis. I was left with threeprobables, and one of them I discarded when Bill Lung, the shell-packer, quoted his father as saying: ‘The wise man feasts in the morning before the night brings gall to his palate.’ The discarded probable had certainly feasted in the morning, whilst the murderer had gall on his palate.
“When for the fourth time he stole a woman’s nightgown, thus beginning for the fourth time a cycle of acts which with one exception had not varied, for me the two remainingprobables were reduced to one certainty.
“He killed those three women and attempted to kill Mrs. Sayers because he hated them, and he destroyed the silk underwear because he hated something in himself. Psychologically it is too involved to present to a jury, which is why I took a picture of him attempting to strangle Mrs. Sayers, so that material proof against him would be strengthened.
“Hatred is often inspired by fear. This murderer was governed by fear… fear that what he had built would be destroyed. He had raised himself to a position of power, power over other minds, power to be increased by and through affection in those minds. He wanted to maintain that affection, because he had left it too late to gain the affection of even one woman. He wanted the affection of the boys whom he controlled, and these four women of Broome, with perhaps others, threatened his power to dominate affection.
“He murdered the attractive Mrs. Cotton because to him she was not fitted to be the mother of one of his boys. She sold liquor over the bar to leering, roystering men. She encouraged men and thus she was a menace to her son, and through him, to other of his boys.
“He murdered the attractive Mrs. Eltham because of the easy bestowal of her favours. Her reputation was well known in the town and, he was sure, would be known to his older boys. What he had denied in himself was monstrous when he imagined it stirring in those boys.
“Now why should he have murdered the attractive Mrs. Overton? I’ll return to Mrs. Overton after I’ve told you why he attempted to murder Mrs. Sayers. He tried to murder the attractive Mrs. Sayers because she was a dominant influence in the school. She was the most influential member of the Board of Control, and on occasions he had felt himself humiliated by her, and he the headmaster. She was held in great esteem by the boys, for on many occasions she had provided real schoolboy feasts.
“And so when he stole the nightgown belonging to Mrs. Sayers and thus gave warning that she was to be his next victim, I knew who of the twoprobableswas the murderer, and I knew why Mrs. Overton was murdered. The attractive Mrs. Overton was a great favourite with the college boys, and on the day she was buried at least one of the older boys openly wept. The murderer was he who was frantic for the affection of the boys. My discarded probable, whom we will call Happy, never cared a hoot for their affection. Ah, the car is coming.”
Smiling, Bony rose to his feet. Mrs. Sayers crossed to him and took his hands. She wanted to speak, but could only look at him. Mr. Dickenson regarded Sawtell and smiled, and the sergeant nodded agreement with what he saw in the old man’s expression.
From without came the noise of skidding tyres and then a sudden stoppage of a roaring car engine.
“Mr. Dickenson and I promised ourselves an evening at Dampier’s Hotel when the investigation was finished,” Bony said. “Therefore, please excuse our hurried departure. Thank you for listening to me, and again for your unswerving co-operation.”
“So you’re going out to Dampier’s Hotel, eh!” Walters said. “Well, I’m going out with you.”
“Me, too,” added Sawtell.
“Hold everything!” cried Mrs. Sayers. “What a nice little party… to be left out of. Briggs, we shall also try the gin at Dampier’s Hotel. Come on, Esther! Don’t you be leftout. ”
“I’m not going to be left out, Mavis,” determinedly announced Mrs. Walters.
Johnno came bounding into the office.
“I arrive!” he said gravely, impressed by the gathering.
“Come along!” gurgled Mrs. Sayers. “We’ll all pile into Johnno’s car.”
They trooped outside. The resplendent new edition of an automobile was ignored. Johnno held doors open and bowed them into his taxi. Mrs. Walters was obliged to sit on Sawtell’s knees and Mrs. Sayers giggled as she settled herself on the knees of Inspector Walters. Johnno forced his way in behind the steering-wheel, and Mr. Dickenson said:
“Johnno, drive like hell.”
The loaded car shot forward, and proceeded to gather speed.
“I drive… like hell,” shouted Johnno. “We arrive. We always arrive.”