“I didn’t like to,” he confessed, chuckling. “It looks quite nice as it is, anyway. Have you read any novels by Mervyn Blake?”
“No. I don’t care for Australian novels. I borrowed one of Wilcannia-Smythe’s just because I saw the man in the next door garden. It was all about the bush, you know, and gum-trees and things, but the characters were just too terribly, crashingly boring. He’s frightfully clever, you know. At least the paper says he is. I like a book that tells a story—you know, books by Conrad and John Buchan and S. S. Van Dine.”
“There was a Mr Marshall Ellis staying with the Blakes when he died. Did you see him?” Bony pressed, and Miss Pinkney almost snorted.
“He was English,” she said. “And a big lout of a man. Mr Blake spoke through his adenoids. Mr Wilcannia-Smythe spoke like a Canberra trickster. Mr Lubers spoke like an Oxford man. And Mr Marshall Ellis spoke like an—like an angel. But, oh my! He had a face like a Manchester bargee.”
Bony chuckled and helped himself to another sandwich.
“We are getting along famously, Miss Pinkney. Permit me to compliment you on the art of cutting sandwiches. What about the ladies who were at that last house party?”
Now Miss Pinkney did giggle. She said, “The Montrose woman reminded me of a picture I saw of Marie Antoinette going to the guillotine. Talks with grapes in her tonsils like some of those women on the screen. Used to make eyes at Mervyn Blake. Anyway, that didn’t matter much because when the Spanish gentleman was staying there he used to ogle Mrs Blake and they’d walk arm in arm about the garden.”
“Indeed! Do you think there were any marital differences between the Blakes?”
“No, I think not,” Miss Pinkney replied slowly. “You see, the Blakes and their friends appear to be people who were too much in love with themselves to have any capacity to love anyone else. The Miss Chesterfield who stayed there the night Mr Blake died had often stayed with the Blakes. She’s on a newspaper or something. I wish—” Miss Pinkney sighed, and then went on, “I wish I could dress as she does. I wish—but I mustn’t be stupid. Hark! That’s the picture bus coming. I’ll run.”
Bony heard her hurrying along the passage, and helped himself to another sandwich. Nowhere in the official summary did Miss Pinkney’s name appear, and he wondered if her name was also absent from the official file still waiting to be read by him. He heard the bus pass the house and then stop at the corner, heard it go on. Half a minute later Miss Pinkney returned to say that Mrs Blake’s cook had alighted from the bus; she had recognized her by the hat she was wearing.
Chapter Six
Bony Seeks Collaboration
The police station at Yarrabo was situated at the lower end of the straggling settlement, and the officer in charge was tolerant but efficient. His interests were few and sharply defined. Outside his official duties he had three loves, his daughter, his garden, his painting. From the front veranda one had to bend back one’s head to look up at the summit of Donna Buang.
There was a picture in oils of Donna Buang, as seen through the policeman’s eyes from his front veranda. The picture was a little distracting to Bony, who was seated opposite the constable.
“Anything I can do, sir, to help I’ll be delighted. I assume that you read my report, among all the others, on the Blake case.”
Constable Simes spoke quickly, crisply. If he was yet forty, his face belied it. He was large, hard, fair, blue-eyed and round-jawed. He was impervious to Bony’s examining eyes.
“I read the entire official file on the Blake case before I went to bed at four forty-five this morning,” Bony stated, as though giving evidence. “Reports and statements, however, are limited to facts, whereas the summary provides a few assumptions based on the known facts. When you and I have to make a report, we confine ourselves strictly to facts as we think we know them. When a person makes a statement, he also sticks to facts—unless he has reason to give false information. Strangely enough, the majority of cases successfully finalized have rested on the ability of the investigator to prove facts from assumption. Care to work with me?”
“Yes, certainly, sir.”
Simes said it with official stiffness, and now Bony smiled, and all the little stirrings of hostility towards the Queenslander vanished from the constable’s mind.
There was genuine happiness in Bony’s voice when he said, “Good! Let me explain a few points that will assist us in getting together. Firstly, I am not a policeman’s bootlace. We have the authority of my Chief Commissioner for that, and he is a man of astonishing acumen. Now and then, however, he does admit that I am that paradox, a rotten policeman but a most successful detective. I am glad to hold the rank of inspector only on account of the salary.
“My present task is to reveal how Mervyn Blake came by his death. No one knows that, and the medical experts seem to have agreed that he died from natural causes. I am here simply because your own C.I.B is snowed under with work, and Superintendent Bolt doesn’t want the case to grow too cold. He asked me to keep it warm for him, believing it would interest me—which it does.”
He lit the cigarette he had been making and again smiled. Simes looked at the cigarette, and wanted to smile.
“I would like you to banish two things from your mind,” Bony went on. “The one is to forget that I am an inspector, and the other is to forget to call me ‘sir’. I want you to be entirely free in your attitude to me, because I want your collaboration off the record as well as on it. I want you to have no hesitation in expressing assumptions and presenting theories, not because I want to use you up, as the current expression goes, but because if you are able to be free with me, you will, doubtless, provide valuable data which you would not do did you continue to regard me as an official superior. I have all the known facts. Now I want your opinions, your assumptions, your suspicions. Do you get it?”
For the first time, Constable Simes smiled.
“You make it easy to collaborate—er—er—”
“Bony. Just Bony. Now I want to ask questions. Ready?”
“Go ahead,” Simes invited, and then added, “Of course, not remembering what you asked me to forget, I am permitted to smoke?”
“Naturally,” agreed Bony. “You see already how well it works. No stiffness, no official barriers. Well, to begin. How long have you been stationed here?”
“Slightly more than nine years.”
“Happy here?”
“Yes. I like these mountains and the people who live among them. I was born at Wood’s Point. I went to school there, and for six years I worked among the timber.”
“Like promotion?”
“Of course. It’s overdue.”
“It’s habit with officers who collaborate with me to gain promotion.” Bony said, seriously. “You do that painting?”
Simes nodded, saying, “Yes, but I’m no artist. Several real artists have told me my work shows promise, and they urged me to study. But I paint to amuse myself, and some day I may have the chance to study.”
“Not being an artist, I think it a fine picture of Donna Buang. What do you know of Miss Pinkney?”
“Nice old thing,” Simes said, and Bony was glad he had succeeded in getting behind the policeman’s official facade. “She and her sea-captain brother settled here in the early thirties. He was a bit of a tartar, and he didn’t approve when she fell in love with a timber faller. My sister knew him. Despite the captain’s ruling, they were to be married, when he was killed at his work. Miss Pinkney’s never been the same since, and when her brother died she stayed on and lived alone. You are her first paying guest. Treating you all right?”
“Better