The Boss of Edison
MAWSONHADRETURNEDfrom thefuneral, and Bony was writing notes, when heavy feet pounded on the floor of the outer office.
“Herecomes a customer,” Bony murmured, adding data to matter headed: “The Wool Clip.”
Mawson stood, and Bony secretly commended him for this respect for superior rank, this refusal to take a yard when given a foot. Abruptly, the room appeared to be full of Mary Answerth, and Bony stood.
“Good afternoon, Miss Answerth.”
“Gud-dee, Inspector. I’ve come to pick a bone with Constable Mawson. They tell me, Mawson, you’ve locked up my head stockman.”
The window light was full upon her, and Bony noted the whiteness about the woman’s nostrils and the smallness of the black eyes with the peculiar uniform of the irises. She was wearing gabardine trousers into which was tucked a khaki blouse having a high and close-fitting collar. Mawson admitted his crime.
“Yes, marm. Drunk in a public place.”
“Drunk my back… my foot, Mawson. Foster was sitting on the bench outside the hotel, reading theSporting News, when you arrested him. Just like that.” She accepted the chair offered by Bony, and the chair was no longer visible. “I want Foster on the job. We got to dip cattle in the morning. I’m taking him back to the quarters.”
“It was necessary, Miss Answerth,” Bony interposed. “It was necessary for Foster to answer certain questions I wished to put to him. As he had been drinking, and was not sober, I ordered his incarceration.”
The black brows shot upward.
“You did?”
“I did.”
The silence was brittle until Bony rested his elbows on his papers which crinkled like breaking glass. Mawson saw his superior join his hands and rest his chin on the finger-tips, but his mind was engaged with the picture of the wrecked office as it would surely be.
“I ordered Foster’s arrest because he was present when the body of Mrs Answerth was removed from the water, because it was necessary to question him, because he was not sober, and, Miss Answerth, because a witness must be sober when questioned.”
“Have you finished with him?”
“I have questioned him. And I have considered charging him with several additional counts which should result in a month in gaol.”
The hard mouth widened and the chin jutted. The black eyes almost met above the bridge of the beak nose. The face, the personality, was so masculine that Bony was repelled. Her gaze clashed with his, and he felt her mental strength. She said, slowly and almost hesitantly, as though the situation beat her and she could not believe defeat:
“Well, if that’s how it is, Inspector.” Swiftly she recovered. “Mycattle’s got to be dipped in the morning and I want Robin Foster out of gaol.”
“Then, Miss Answerth, you can have him and welcome,” Bony told her. “Doubtless he is well soused again. Should you have any trouble in persuading him to return to his job, tell him that if he’s in town at six tonight, he’ll be taken inside again.”
Mary Answerth’s face broke into pieces and was refashioned by a smile in which there was much of anticipatory triumph. “You can bet a couple of deaners that Robin Foster won’t be in town at six tonight. Can I have a word or two in your ear?”
Bony glanced at Mawson, and the constable withdrew to the outer office. The visitor produced her pipe and tobacco and proceeded to load it from a paper bag. Bony thoughtfully rolled a cigarette.
“ ’Spectyou think I’m pretty wild and woolly,” remarked Miss Answerth whilst puffing the pipe into action. “I am. There ain’t a horse I can’t master, nor a man.” She paused to add a rider: “Exceptin’p’raps you. With you I has me doubts.”
Bony smiled and, like Brer Rabbit, “said nuffin”.
“You see, Mr Bonaparte, I’m the eldest of this generation of Answerths, being forty-four and Janet forty-one. I was dragged up by me back hair. You could say I never had no schoolin’, but I had the sort of schoolin’ to fight life and all them what lives it with me. I’m noweakling, I’m not going to blow my head off like my father did.
“You take Janet. Janet’s a lying little bitch. She was always a crawler, always clinging and lith-ping, always a liar. Time after time I’ve seen her putting it over men, watched ’em go all soft-like and moo at her like poddy calves when she looked ’em over, and wanted something. She got at Father, too. He gave her all she asked for: sent her up to Bris for an education, to learn the piano and paint pictures and gabble out poetry like a baby that’s wet itself. And me rounding up cattle, and brandin’ them, and throwing young stallions in the yards, and helping with the shearing, and driving loafers of men, and knocking ’em down, too, if they tried to tell me my business. I’ve slept more times under a tree than a roof. And the roof Janet sleeps under every night I’ve kept over her and Morris.
“If I wasn’t able to master men like Robin Foster and old Harston, Janet would now be on the streets and Morris put away in a lunatic asylum. And strangers would be living on all thatus Answerths bent our backs to build up.
“Don’t you go and fall for Janet, Inspector. There’s nothin’ weak about Janet. She can talk polite, and she can read novels and spout poetry, and she can use her brain better’n most. If anything happens to me, she gets all the estate… gets the ruddy lot.”
“Surely you haven’t reason to think that anything will happen to you?” enquired Bony.
“Well, something happened to my stepmother, didn’t it?” She waited for agreement, then insisted, “Didn’t it?”
“Yes, Miss Answerth, something certainly happened to Mrs Answerth.”
Now Bony waited. The huge woman knocked out her pipe against the heel of her riding-boot and stood. She was regardless of the smouldering tobacco strewing the floor. Bony would have risen, but with the weight of one hand upon his shoulder, she kept him to his seat.
“You took a bird’s-eye view of our Morris,” she said grimly. “As you don’t go round with your eyes shut, you saw that he’s like me, pretty hefty. You know, there’s something about him what reminds me of a tame bear that came to this town. The man with the bear whispered into its ear to sit down, and it sat down. He told it to stand on its hind feet, and it did. Janet is like the man with the bear, telling Morris that some day he’ll be strong enough to break my neck like a carrot, and mindful of telling him to have a go when she’s sure he’ll manage it. Now I’ll be going after that Foster. Gud-dee, Inspector!”
“Good afternoon, Miss Answerth!” he gave her when her hand was lifted and he was able to rise. He accompanied her through the outer office and along the short path to the gate in the wicket fence, and there she said, seriously:
“Be careful you don’t tell anyone what I’ve said. And don’t you go getting notions that Janet or Morris strangled Mother. Janet hasn’t got the guts, and Morris wasn’t out of his room that night. ’Sides, he liked his mother. Gud-dee!”
“Does your brother know that Mrs Answerth is dead?”
“Yes. I told him before leaving for the funeral.”
“What did he say, do?”
“Nothing. He went on playing with his train. Be seein’ you.”
Standing just within the gateway, Bony watched Mary Answerth climb into the station wagon, which she drove up the street to park outside the hotel. The attitude of a lounger on the sidewalk betrayed the fact that she asked him a question, and also the fact that she received his respect, for he “dipped his lid”.
She reappeared, to walk to the back of the vehicle and throw open the two doors. Leaving them open, she strode into the hotel. Bony waited, laying odds with a sparrow in favour of the head stockman. He lost. The stockman appeared. He emerged like a rabbit from its burrow, a rabbit that never paused to look about before leaving its sanctuary. Behind him appeared Mary Answerth. One of her great hands was gripping the Neanderthal’s collar, and the other had gathered the slack of his trousers’ seat. The unfortunate was propelled to the back of the station wagon, lifted and tossed within. The doors were slammed and locked, and Miss Mary Answerth climbed in behind the wheel.
Slowly the vehicle was turned, to be driven down the incline past the police station. The woman waved her hand. Hatless, Bony bowed acknowledgement.
Bony sauntered up the street. The sun was red and the shadows were long and dark. It wanted but nine minutes to six, and within the hotel the disgraceful National Swill was in full flow, men pouring as much liquor down their throats as possible before the fatal hour of drought arrived. Across the street, a woman dressed in black and a youth smoking a cigarette were regarding the broken wheel-barrow outside their shop, and near them Mr Harston was conversing with a minister. Women loaded with parcels were entering cars and gigs drawn by horses, and men were impatient to be out of town.
Before entering his lodging at the very top of the street, he stood to survey the world of hill and dale and dune and sea lorded by this small cut-off township of Edison. To the northward he could see Answerth’s Folly, and the grey roof of Venom House above the tree tops. He could see the stark dead trees standing in water over near the blocked outlet to the sea.
The sins of the fathers visited upon the children. There was no escape from what is an irrevocable law of nature. But little more than a century ago, those dead trees were alive, that water wasn’t there, and the camps of the inhabitants dotted the river-side, the smokes rising high into this still air. With but little trouble, game and fish were to be had to keep stomachs full and maintain the laughter of women and children. In those far-away days, morality was of iron. Laws, customs, beliefs, in which fear played no small part in gaining compliance, ruled benignly a people who, satisfied with little, wanted for nothing.
All had vanished before the human offal tossed out by England, and, as Bert Blaze, that keen and knowledgeable cattleman from the Interior, had averred, before all those aborigines had perished they had employed their pointing bones at the Answerths and those with them, and through them down through the years to their children and their children’s children.
Clearing the land taken by murder had not brought good to the Answerths. Creating pastures, breeding stock, fighting fire and flood, had done them no good. They had lived by brutality and suffered from hate. Power had withered them. Greed had rotted them. The mighty whiteman, armed with his guns and riding swift horses, never laughed, never knew happiness. And now his abode was called Venom House.
He whose maternal forebears were of that vanished race, and in whom the best and the worst of the white race constantly warred, lingered in the evening glow and wished his wife were with him. She, also of his duality of races, would, even as he, experience the thrill of satisfaction that before those long-dead aborigines had fallen to the gun, had been outraged and flogged and hanged, they had buried their sting in those who had encompassed their agony.
“Would youmind coming in to dinner before it’s spoiled, Inspector Bonaparte?”
He turned about to see Mrs Nash beckoning to him from the garden fence, and he hurried to the gate and joined her.
“You do right to scold me, Mrs Nash,” he told her and rewarded her with a beaming smile. “Am I so very late?”
“It’s gone half past six.”
“I was day-dreaming.”
“What about?”
“A problem couched in the question: ‘Is unhappiness due to glandular irregularity or to the blacks pointing the bone at an ancestor?’ ”
Mrs Nash laughed, and he liked that, because when she laughed her pale face glowed.
“You don’t think I can help you, I hope,” she said.“Cooking problems, now…”
There was a daughter, but she was not at dinner this evening.
“Did you go to the funeral?” Bony asked, after the soup.
“I went down the street to see it start. They say it was the biggest funeral ever at Edison. Poor woman.”
“Her life was not a happy one?”
“I think she felt unwanted.”
“And her stepdaughters are not happy?”
“I can’t say as to that, Inspector. Miss Mary seems to enjoy rioting and shouting at people.”
“D’youthink she is a little… er… touched?”
“No. Do you?”
“Yes. Must be. She actually told me her age. I have never known a reputedly sane woman to do that.”
Mrs Nash studied her guest, and not till he looked directly at her did she understand his mood.
“How old did she say she is?” she asked.
“Now, now! That would never do. A policeman must never gossip. What is your opinion of Janet Answerth?”
“We’re not gossiping, by the way?”
“Oh no! No, certainly not. Tell me about Miss Janet.”
“Miss Janet is everything that Miss Mary is not,” said Mrs Nash, and there was in her eyes that which told him here was a champion. “No one is in trouble for long before Miss Janet comes to help out. When my husband was killed in a car accident, Miss Janet paid for everything until the insurance came in. When young Carlow died, Miss Janet did everything for Mrs Carlow. And that after what she did for her and the boys when they had to leave the farm. There are others, too, who owe her a very great deal. She is kindness itself, and we all have come to rely on her advice.”
“H’m! Good. Mrs Answerth was born in this district, I’m told. Why was she unhappy?”
“It’s a long story, Inspector. My husband used to tell of her, he being born here. Mrs Answerth was the youngest of a family of nine. ’Tis said she was a very pretty girl when Jacob Answerth married her. He was such a brute that twice she ran away from him.”
“Then what happened?” Bony prompted as Mrs Nash appeared disinclined to continue with the subject.
“Her mother was dead when she ran away the first time. When Jacob came for her, her father told him to begone. Old Jacob knocked him down and stormed into the house. He found his wife hiding in a cupboard, and he dragged her back to Venom House. When she ran away the second time, her father was dead, and her eldest brother owned the property. He refused to take her in, and old Jacob refused to take her back, and went there to say so.
“He was speaking his mind when Miss Mary arrived. She told her father he was a disgrace, and she told Mrs Answerth’s brother that he was a… was a… you know. Then she made Mrs Answerth get up behind her on the horse, and she took her back to Venom House. Miss Mary was only a chit of a girl at that time, but already she was bossing her father. And she’s bossed everyone ever since. Excepting Miss Janet.”