“Yes, I put up at the hotel. What delayed me was the karri trees beside the road. They are tremendous. I feel I have left Australia on the far side of the world.”
“You love trees, I can see, Mr Bonnar. Would you like a cup of tea?”
“When my wife asks me for a little extra money, I can resist,” Bonnar said. “Not for long, of course. But when she asks if I would like a cup of tea I do not resist for a fraction of a second.”
“One of our mob,” Sasoon said cheerfully. Elsie Sasoon smiled her appreciation and left for her kitchen; Bonnar was invited to be comfortable and smoke. Sasoon was not at ease, for he knew who this Bonnar was and the assignment given him.
“I’ve been told that not far from Timbertown an old-time settler found the hollow trunk of a karri tree which must have fallen a century or so ago, and that inside the trunk he built a floor and made of it a two-storied house. Was I taken for a sucker?”
“No,” replied the policeman, now discovering that the depression of the last weeks was lifting. “A feller was out looking for his cows, seven of them. It was wet weather and he found ’em inside the trunk of a standing tree. It was big enough for him to have his milking and dairy equipment in there too. You’ve come to the right place to see real trees.”
“True enough, and I haven’t lived in a sand desert all my life. By the way, here are my identity papers. Inspector Hudson told you by telephone of my coming, I take it.”
“That’s right, sir. He didn’t mention your real name, though. Not on the phone.”
“It was decided I should assume an alias. It has also been worked out with a verifiable background that I am the manager of a pastoral property in the Murchison District. I am now on a holiday tour and hope to see something of the country and do a little fishing. It has been suggested that a Mr Matthew Jukes might put me up as a paying guest.”
“That could be arranged I’m sure, sir.”
“Did you know Jukes’s son, Ted, who was drowned, and his daughter, Rose, who married a store executive and now lives in Geraldton?”
Mrs Sasoon who came in with a supper-tray answered for her husband.
“Oh, yes, we know all of them. Sam and I belong to this south-west. The Brass wanted Sam to take promotion to another station more than once, but this is our country.”
“Then you would be aware of the crime committed against Rose, née Jukes, many years ago?”
“That’s so,” replied Sasoon. “No charge was laid, and there was no official action, and no publicity.”
“So I understand. Well, in support of my spurious background, I have a letter of introduction to Matthew Jukes from his daughter. How far can I take them into my confidence to secure complete co-operation?”
“All the way, sir.”
“Good! Now from this moment I am Nathaniel Bonnar, from up-country on a holiday. You may call me Nat. And relax. I have read a summary of what took place at the conference in Manjimup, at which you were present. I am familiar, therefore, with the proposition you put up and which was overruled, and I can say that I feel sure you were right and the Brass were wrong.” Inspector Bonaparte accepted a second cup of tea.
“The broad plan of operations I insisted upon before consenting to accept this assignment is this. But first let me summarize the position as it is. Following a series of sex crimes in Sydney over a period of thirteen years, Marvin Rhudder seems to have wanted to tour in stolen cars. He came to a place called Elton in South Australia, and there represented himself to a church minister as a theological student on holiday. The minister invited him to be his guest. He actually preached on two occasions, and borrowed money from the minister’s wife.
“At the end of two weeks, he was popular in Elton, and it was at the beginning of the third week that he waylaid and ravished a woman one dark night. On the Wednesday night following this crime, he waited outside the garage of a bookmaker returning from the races at Gawler. He bashed the bookmaker, got away with somewhere about fifteen hundred pounds, and bolted in the minister’s car. The car was subsequently found near Mildura, over the border in Victoria.
“Marvin Rhudder’s prints were found on three parts of the car body, but not, of course, on the steering-wheel. It was taken for granted that he had abandoned the car on his rush journey back to Sydney, and that at that point he did not know he had killed the bookmaker. The day following the abandonment of the car, he must have learned of the murder from the press and the radio, and would also know later on that the police were seeking a man in connexion with it. At no time has the murderer’s name been published.
“Abandoning the car at Mildura was clever, for this led the police towards Sydney. Rhudder, however, doubled back to Port Pirie where he signed on a ship taking horses to India. He left the ship at Albany on 3 January when thousands of policemen were hunting for him in Sydney.
“Now this is where it comes close to us,” Bony continued. “On the night of 9–10 January the man Karl Mueller saw him in the bright moonlight. Eight days later Matthew Jukes almost casually mentions it to you, knowing nothing to associate Rhudder with murder. Before that day, you also knew nothing of Rhudder being wanted for murder or any other crime, due to the fact that everyone thought he had run back to Sydney. The genesis of the report, which reached you that day Jukes mentioned Mueller’s doubts, was the delayed discovery of his prints in the shipping office at Port Pirie.
“He had been home eight days, when you knew he was there. You acted with shrewdness, and Inspector Hudson admits that you were opposed to the course of action on which he insisted. You went to Rhudder’s Inlet and there inquired after the son Marvin, and told them that he was suspected of being concerned with the Elton murder. As you anticipated, results were nil. Further, you were opposed to police action, like an organized raid and search, because of the extraordinarily difficult terrain where Rhudder could stay in hiding. You said that, where an army would fail, one man with a tracker could dig him out, and you suggested that you be the man. Instead, and I think they were wise because you are known, they have sent me.
“It is now 27 January and Rhudder has been home, perhaps, for seventeen days. He could have left for a far-away place at any time during the period, so that I may have to hunt for a man who isn’t there to locate. Unless you or Matthew Jukes gained evidence that he’s still there.”
“Nothing of recent date,” said Sasoon, obviously pleased by Bony’s support. “To get home Rhudder had to cross the main stream into the Inlet. He left his boot-tracks on the mud either side. I took an aborigine there, and I made plaster casts of the tracks. The aborigine was definite about those tracks.”
“Definite! Meaning?”
“Quite sure they were Marvin Rhudder’s tracks, having remembered the manner of his walking in the early days. They don’t forget things like that.”
“Go on, more, please,” urged Bony, and then aside to Mrs Sasoon: “Do forgive us for talking shop at this hour.”
“Following my instructed visit to the Rhudder homestead, I had Lew and another tracker camped a bit off an old track from Albany, just to check if Marvin should break back that way. They report every morning, and so far he hasn’t. He could go west to the railheads at Nannup and Augusta, and there police are on their toes. He hasn’t come north unless he kept to the forest. Although we’ve done what we can to close him in, there’s plenty of escape routes for anyone born hereabouts.”
Sasoon fell silent whilst watching Bony make one of his dreadful cigarettes. He was recharging his pipe when Bony said:
“Your visit to the homestead could have resulted in blurring a clear picture. It is probable that, until you went there, his people would think that the bad egg had turned up having been released from gaol. He would know he was wanted for murder, and would tell them he had broken the condition of his parole and must lie low. I, for one, wouldn’t blame his parents