Mr Jelly pushed aside the empty picture frame and drew towards him an album which he opened at random. Turning back a page, he revealed the original picture of a man named Fling. He said:
“Arthur Fling was the son of a parson and a highly respected mother. He had received a first-class education. He had great opportunities. Almost certainly he would have made his life successful. Why, therefore, should he coldly plan to and murder a man in order to gain two hundred pounds? Had his father known his need, he would have given his son the money. Result: the trap for the son, a broken heart for the mother, and an overdose of sleeping draught for the father.” The pages flickered. “Now, Henry Wilde was born in a Sydney slum of vice-ridden parents. For nine years he committed minor crimes. He shot at and killed a man who surprised him when attacking an office safe. His parentage urged him to crime and finally to the scaffold. The minor crimes produced the major crime. You follow me?”
“Easily,” assented the detective, who subconsciously was wondering at Mr Jelly’s concise speech. It almost seemed that the man’s speech was the result of training. He did not say, “cold-bloodedly plan and murder a man”, and “shot and killed a man”, but “coldly plan to and murder” and “shot at and killed a man”. This subtle difference Bony was quick to notice. Mr Jelly continued:
“We have here two killers born in wholly different circumstances and living on quite different planes of life. On the surface the two are totally dissimilar, yet they are blood brothers to Cain. For a moment we will leave them. Here is William Marks who murdered three women at various times and places for their insurance money, and over here is Frederick Nonning of Charlton, Victoria, who killed five little children without motive. Nonning was a wealthy man; Marks was an artisan born of respectable parents.
“Now here we have four killers, no two of them in the same class of society. Two killed for money, one killed to avoid detention, and the fourth killed for the pleasure of killing. The question arises, why should all those men hang on my walls, why should they commit a deed which to you and me would be horrible even when contemplated? I’ll tell you. I’ll explain a theory which I think can be termed a fact.
“Murder is the visible expression of an hereditary trait. On these walls are the pictures of twenty-seven killers. Of those twenty-seven cases I have been able to construct the genealogical tables of nineteen back to the fifth generation. In all cases save two the tables reveal lunacy and self-destruction. The descendant of such ancestors today faces the probability of the legal death.”
“I take it that you believe that murderers are mental defectives?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“And, as insane people, should not be hanged?”
Mr Jelly was emphatic when next he spoke.
“Let us get down to brass tacks, as my old father used to say,” he went on. “In the bad old days, when they hanged a man for looking crossways at the squire, it was considered that man was a free agent, able to distinguish right from wrong. In these days if a man brains his wife with a beer bottle, and more especially if the man belongs to the professional class, and he acts mad, the alienists will prove that he is, and their opinion is taken as accurate. You see, we have swung right round to the opposite outlook or viewpoint of crime and criminals.”
Mr Jelly crossed his legs. Enthusiasm for his subject was warming him.
“The only man who ever really understood criminals was Lombroso, the Italian. He said, and could prove what he said, that a murderer, or any felon guilty of brutality, inevitably bore certain physical marks. These people can be picked out as easily as he picked ’em out in his day. I can pick them out: a very shrewd man, who wasn’t a doctor, taught me how. Never mind who he was or where he taught me. The fact stands that Lombroso was right as regards killers. I give in to the oh-my-poor-brother fools when dealing with lesser criminals, because stealing and like offences are the result largely of environment; but, as I have said, if a man or a woman is a potential killer, either or both can be detected by physical abnormalities. So that, assuming you were branded, as God branded Cain before and not after he killed Abel, as many people think, you should be put away before you cut my throat, not after, because when my throat has been cut it can never again be uncut.”
“But the difficulty would be in setting up the authority in the first place, and, in the second place, the examination of the people,” Bony objected.
“I realize that,” Mr Jelly agreed thoughtfully. “Still, the fact remains that many murderers should never have been allowed outside a lunatic asylum. Nonning and Fling, Wells and Mann were mentally unbalanced. I visited Wells and Nonning in jail and found the Lombrosian brand on them. Wilde, the burglar, was sane, but he was branded too. Like many criminals, his final crime was the culmination of a life of crime.”
“You do not believe in the death penalty?” asked Bony quickly.
Mr Jelly’s grey eyebrows became one straight bar. He said sternly:
“Every right-minded man must believe in the extinction of killers. The death sentence is a tremendous deterrent. It bulks large in the mind of a man who would like to kill, or who regards killing lightly, but himself fears death. No punishment would ever stop the subnormal or the abnormal, but abolish the death penalty and murders committed by sane men will increase mightily. No, what I think is that many murders need never have happened at all. I believe that penal control should be exercised over potential killers who have once come into a prison to serve a sentence for a lesser crime.”
Mr Jelly was now fingering idly the empty picture frame. He talked on and on about his killers, interesting Bony with his wonderful memory of their trials, with, now and then, grim allusion to the manner in which it was reported that they died. Presently the detective’s mind was jolted back to his business at Burracoppin.
“Yes, I am sure poor Loftus was murdered,” Mr Jelly was saying. “He would not have disappeared voluntarily. I have got my own ideas, of course. It will all come out some day. Someone will find him under a stone or in a hole. I am a great believer in the saying ‘Murder will out’, and I am going to put the picture of Loftus’s killer in this frame, after he is hanged. Poor old Loftus! He didn’t ever do anyone a bad turn.”
Yes, Bony was extremely interested in Mr Jelly. He thoroughly enjoyed his visit at the farm, and when he and Hurley reached the Rabbit Department Depot he said as much.
“I am glad you enjoyed yourself,” Hurley said with a yawn. “I did—thank you!”
Chapter Five
Theories
The morning of the fourteenth day since the disappearance of George Loftus witnessed Bony dump a load of posts near the wrecked car. Somewhat to his annoyance Eric Hurley’s dog accompanied him, the boundary rider having departed on his long northern trip of inspection.
It was a superb day—warm, cloudless, brilliant. What little wind there was came from the east. The air was filled with a low pulsating sound produced by the combined action of harvester machines and tractors in the wheat paddocks far and near. Already so early in the season the bags of wheat were being rushed by truck and wagon to the rail sidings. The land, having peacefully dozed for nine months, had quickened to feverish life.
To Bony, used to the solitudes of the eastern side of the great heart of Australia, this bustle and noise of Western Australia’s wheat belt seemed to push him spiritually farther away from his aboriginal ancestry than at times had the roar and the bitter grimness of the cities. Here was the white man’s life in all its naked virility, all its indomitable courage, its inventive genius. From the spot on which he was standing he could see mile beyond mile of land, which had been abandoned in its desolation by the hardy nomadic aborigines and now was one huge chequered garden. This morning Bony was proud that he was half white and wistfully longed to escape the environment of the mid-race for the upper plane of the white.
He had thoroughly examined every inch of the ground, giving only five minutes to the