“Naturally, neither Black Mark nor anyone else there believed it, but they trooped out to the yard with lamps and there was Mrs. Cotton, her body nude and her nightgown lying beside her. Pedersen and I, with Abie the tracker, got out there at ten minutes to one. The body hadn’t been moved and was then covered with the nightgown. All about the body the ground had been tramped on by the boots of thirty-odd people.
“That Mrs. Cotton had been strangled was obvious. The doctor arrived a few minutes after we did. The woman was so man-handled that her neck was broken. We checked up on the man who found her body. The time he left the bar and the time he rushed in to tell what he had stumbled over, as well as other facts we gained from those thirty-odd people, let him out.”
“Is the time known when she went to bed?” asked Bony.
“Yes. It was nine-twenty. The drunk found her in the yard at approximately eleven-thirty. Her injuries, according to the doctor ...”
“The medical report later. What was the condition of Mrs. Cotton’s bedroom?”
“Quite in order. She had gone to bed. A bottle of aspirin and a tumbler partially filled with water lay undisturbed on the bedside table. There was no evidence of a struggle in the bedroom.”
“The weather that night?”
“Calm and dark. There was a slight haze masking the stars.”
“Warm?”
“Not so warm that a woman would wander around in the yard in her nightgown only.”
“Her moral reputation?”
“Excellent.”
“The examination of the twenty men in the bar produced nothing of interest?”
“Nothing. And nothing was obtained from the staff and the guests who were not in the bar at the time.”
“The nightgown ... was it damaged in any way?”
“Yes,” replied Sawtell. “It was ripped at the back from top to bottom. That was done deliberately, because the neck seam was extremely hard to rip apart. I tried it.”
“I was out at the hotel at daybreak,” said Walters. “We think that Mrs. Cotton walked in her sleep as she had sometimes done, and that the murderer found her in the yard and killed her. We examined and cross-examined every man jack on the place, and every one had an alibi from one or more of the others.”
“And we couldn’t nail down any motive,” supplemented the sergeant. “I’ve known Mrs. Cotton even longer than the inspector, and I’m sure she wasn’t up to any hanky-panky with a man in one of the bedrooms off the yard. Besides, if she were, she wouldn’t leave her room on an adventure of that kind wearing only a thin silk nightgown. Motive is what baffled us.”
“H’m! And now it’s June 25th ... more than nine weeks since the night of the murder,” murmured Bony. “Well, I have great distaste for easy cases. Tell me about the next murder.”
Chapter Three
Backgrounds
“A Mrs. Eltham was the second victim,” Sawtell proceeded. “She came here to work at one of the hotels. That was in 1945 when there wasn’t much doing in the pearl-shelling business. There’s only twenty-two luggers operating even now, and there used to be more than three hundred before the war. Anyway, this woman arrived at Broome on an Air Force tender from Nooncanbah, and no one seems to know where she joined the tender. She came here to work, and she worked. Pretty girl about twenty-five. Could have married better than she did, and could have married worse, too. She married a lugger owner, and then there was plenty of money. During the fishing season from April to December when her husband was at sea. Mrs. Eltham worked as a barmaid, and we became a little uneasy about her behaviour with her husband absent.”
“Moral?” interrupted Bony.
“Not flagrant. Well, one morning at sea during the ’47 season, Eltham himself went below. He had been down several times before but he wasn’t an experienced diver. Something got him, and no one knows what because neither of the regular divers were down with him. All they brought up of Eltham was what was left behind inside his helmet.
“That was brought in and there was the usual inquest and funeral. After the funeral Mrs. Eltham left her work at the hotel and stayed at home, setting up as a discreet entertainer of gentlemen. The local parson and the head of the college both asked us to move her on, but ...”
“She didn’t keep a disorderly house,” interrupted the inspector. “She did permit me to glance at her bank book, which showed a balance of well over four thousand pounds, and so she could not be charged with having no means of support. Besides, she wasn’t a bad little woman. In fact, she had more culture than the majority of the women here. If we booted out all the victims of gossip and spite, there would be no one left here at all. Go on, Sawtell.”
The sergeant eased his slightly emphasised paunch, opened his shoulders and lit a cigar.
“As the inspector says, the Eltham woman had character as well as good looks. She liked parties, and at the parties in her own house she always behaved well. Her gentlemen friends were carefully chosen. She dressed well, never flashily. When we went through her house we found pictures and paints and things, pictures signed with her initials, and books, dozens of the best books. It added up to what we learned about her afterwards.”
“That she lived that way because she rebelled against society, following three years or four of freedom in one of the Services?”
“That’s about the strength of it. She had no domestic living with her. A woman reported every morning at eight, and left again at six. This woman usually found the kitchen door open on her arrival in the morning. If it was locked, she would go home and return again at midday.
“On the morning of May 6th, she found the kitchen door locked. When she returned at noon it was locked. She went away and came back again at four, and the door was still locked. The milk, delivered at seven in the morning, was on the doorstep. She came to us, and I went along. I broke in through the kitchen door. There was no key in the lock, and the key was never found. All the fly-screens on the windows were fastened on the inside. The remains of Mrs. Eltham’s supper was on the bench at the kitchen sink and the house was in perfect order. We don’t know how the man got in.”
“We think he crept into the house and hid himself before Mrs. Eltham closed it for the night, or he could have been admitted by Mrs. Eltham and when leaving, in his excitement, he took the key of the kitchen door after locking it,” supplemented the inspector.
“One or other of those things happened,” Sawtell agreed. “I found Mrs. Eltham lying on her bed. The clothes were pushed back as though she had either left the bed or found the clothes too warm and folded them back herself to sleep on top of them. The body was unclothed; the nightgown tossed beside the bed was ripped from top to bottom. The doctor said she had been strangled in the same way as had Mrs. Cotton. The neck, however, was not broken.”
“Pedersen was here then and he took Abie along ...”
“One moment, please. Do you think that the murderer tidied Mrs. Eltham’s bedroom after he had killed her, or was there evidence that he held her down on the bed as he strangled her?”
“We think that he tidied the bedroom. We think he removed the nightgown from the body and for some reason or other ripped it and left it on the floor beside the bed. You’ll remember that Mrs. Cotton’s nightgown was found beside her body.”
“You have photographs?”
“Yes.”
“Pedersen being home, where was the tracker he had away with him when Mrs. Cotton