“Yes. But . . .”
“Pardon me. At this stage my mind is open. The murder could have been committed by the local Aborigines, the wild ones, or whites in this wide area. What I desire to pin down is this. The dead man could not have been put in the Crater without the knowledge of the Aborigines and, further, he could not, in the first instance, have entered this area of the Kimberleys in the north and desert in the south without it being a news item to all the tribes and sections. Do you agree?”
“As you put it, yes.”
“Then we have three suppositions. One, that the murder was done by the whites. Two, that it was done by the blacks. And three, that it was committed by the whites and the blacks in collusion. Thus white, black, black-white. Pity we cannot add yellow. I like my investigations most involved.”
“You have an involved one here,” Howard dryly observed.
“Mrs Leroy thinks that your Aborigines are allied with those at Beaudesert who are Kimberley blacks. How do your Aborigines get along with the wild men?”
“There’s been no real trouble for many years. The tribal grounds belonging to our people extend to about forty miles to the south, and include the Crater.”
“Tell me, do you think your Aborigines are assimilated with the whites as much as, say, the Beaudesert tribe?”
Brentner was positive when he answered in the negative.
“Forgive me for being boring. Can you say to whom your people are closer . . . the wild blacks or the Beaudesert blacks?”
“It’s hard to be sure about that. I’d say they were nearer to the desert blacks. And you’re not being boring.”
“Thank you. Tell me about Tessa, how you came to adopt her.”
“Well, my wife and I were sitting in the day-house one evening nine years ago, when a child ran in and threw herself at my wife’s feet, hugged her legs and begged to stay with us. She was to be married the next day tribal fashion to an Abo old enough to be her grandfather. The wife said I’d have to stop it. She was new up here and didn’t understand the problem. Not nearly like the kid did, and I did, too.
“Anyway, Rose took her off to the bathroom, scrubbed her down, put her in her own bed, locked the door and left me sitting up expecting trouble. Trouble didn’t come, and early the next morning, Rose still determined, I went to the camp and yabbered to Chief Gup-Gup and Poppa, the Medicine Man. The upshot was I bought the kid for a few plugs of tobacco and, finally, we adopted her. She’s turned out well, as no doubt you noticed.”
“I agree. How close is she to her people?”
“Goes along now and then to visit her mother and the others, that’s all. Lives with us, of course. She’s one of the family. Calls me Kurt and the wife Rose. Rose educated her to the point that we had ambition to send her down to a teachers’ college. She’s teaching our kids now. She turned out well, and we are both proud of our Tessa. Shows what can be done if you get ’em early, and get ’em away from their elders.”
“I think it shows, rather, what love can do. What of the man called Captain?”
“My own kids called him that,” Brentner explained. “Leroy managed the place before me, and he was married to a Salvation Army lass in Broome. You met her, of course. Tragedy she went blind. Anyway, she got the Abo children together and tried to give them something of Christianity. The lad we call Captain was fast at picking up ideas, but I think Mrs Leroy didn’t do much with the rest. She sent him to the padre at Derby who put him to school, and he got along real well until fifteen. Then he did what we all expected. He just turned up. Get him serious and he’ll talk better than me. His handwriting is something to admire. But, well you know how it is.”
“Please dig deeper.”
“When he came back he was a real mixed up kid, as they say,” proceeded the cattleman. “We’d been here only a few months, and Rose tried hard to get him to continue his schooling under her. But no, he couldn’t be assimilated like our Tessa. It was too late. He belonged to the camp and, as he is the son of Gup-Gup’s son, I’ve always thought they influenced him. But they didn’t get him back a hundred per cent.
“He got to like being with the cook, looking after the chooks, doing odd jobs without being asked. A few years after he came back from Derby I found him asleep in the saddlery shop, and he’d gone to sleep reading a book. We had a quiet talk, and the upshot of that was I let him have an out-house to himself. Rose got him books to read, and eventually he became a sort of overseer with the blacks. I want stockmen; he singles them out. He breaks in the horses. Comes running if Rose whistles. Eats most times with the cook. Plays tracking with my kids and tells ’em Abo legends, and is a damned good go-between with the tribe.”
“How old, d’you think?”
“About twenty-five.”
“A lubra?”
“Never took one that we know of.”
“Now for the cook. His name is . . .” Bony stopped and rose to his feet when Mrs Brentner entered, “Welcome to our little conference.”
Chapter Three
The Honoured Guest
Rose Brentner’s business training had sharpened her perception of trifles, and she didn’t fail to note that Bony had conducted her to a chair to sit with her back to the strong light and that he faced the light. She wondered if this was due to purpose or to vanity. She noted, too, that his easy manner when in the day-house was replaced by restrained assertiveness, giving him a command of this conference which her husband and Constable Howard had already acknowledged. She had expected brashness, flamboyancy and, in the dayhouse, she had met charm and ease; now she felt strength and the poise given by experience.
As her husband told of their cook, Jim Scolloti, of his long service and his dependability, so long as he did not smell alcohol, she noted that Bony was missing nothing although his blue eyes were almost lazily directed beyond the windows.
“You have two white stockmen,” pressed Bony.
“Just the two,” replied the cattleman. “As the kids named Captain, they have named them Old Ted and Young Col. You’ll meet them at dinner. Old Ted is twenty-six, and Young Col is twenty. Both are a cut above the old time bush-rider, being college-educated. Old Ted has money of his own, having inherited from his parents, who were killed in a road accident. Young Col’s father owns farming properties down in the Riverina, wants him to manage one but, like old Ted, he won’t leave these parts. Col’s been with us four years; Old Ted seven.”
“And you have been here ten years, I understand, having taken over from Mr Leroy, who established the station eighteen years ago. There are your two white stockmen, your cook and yourself; four white men. Can you tell me just what your men did during six days prior to the discovery of the dead man in the Crater?”
Brentner made as though to get up, and was waved back.
“Wait, please. Be patient. The medical opinion is that the man was dead from three to six days. He was found three miles from this homestead, on the Deep Creek Pastoral Property and in this part of Australia three miles is reckoned as being just outside the back door.”
Brentner took from one of the steel cabinets a normal business diary. Flicking open the pages his fingers betrayed impatience, and, in speaking, he tried without success to control his voice.
“You want six days of work, Inspector. Well, here they are beginning at 21 April. That day Old Ted and four black stockmen from the local tribe were driving a mob of cattle to Beaudesert to be handed to a drover taking them to Derby. Young Col and one black stockman were looking over the grass country at Eddy’s Well. They were camped there. On this day, with Rose and the kids, I left at ten o’clock for Hall’s Creek.
“On 22 April