Bony novels by Arthur W. Upfield:
1 The Barrakee Mystery / The Lure of the Bush
2 The Sands of Windee
3 Wings Above the Diamantina
4 Mr Jelly’s Business/ Murder Down Under
5 Winds of Evil
6 The Bone is Pointed
7 The Mystery of Swordfish Reef
8 Bushranger of the Skies / No Footprints in the Bush
9 Death of a Swagman
10 The Devil’s Steps
11 An Author Bites the Dust
12 The Mountains Have a Secret
13 The Widows of Broome
14 The Bachelors of Broken Hill
15 The New Shoe
16 Venom House
17 Murder Must Wait
18 Death of a Lake
19 Cake in the Hat Box / Sinister Stones
20 The Battling Prophet
21 Man of Two Tribes
22 Bony Buys a Woman / The Bushman Who Came Back
23 Bony and the Mouse / Journey to the Hangman
24 Bony and the Black Virgin / The Torn Branch
25 Bony and the Kelly Gang / Valley of Smugglers
26 Bony and the White Savage
27 The Will of the Tribe
28 Madman’s Bend /The Body at Madman's Bend
29 The Lake Frome Monster
This corrected edition published by ETT Imprint, Exile Bay in 2020.
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publishers.
ETT IMPRINT & www.arthurupfield.com
PO Box R1906,
Royal Exchange
NSW 1225 Australia
First published 1951.
First electronic edition published by ETT Imprint in 2013.
Copyright William Upfield 2013, 2020
ISBN 978-1-922384-08-9 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-922384-59-1 (ebk)
Digital distribution by Ebook Alchemy
Chapter One
The Split Point Light
The evening sky was a true prophet. Smoky-yellow cloud-fingers presented as clear a warning as the yellow-gloved hand of a traffic policeman, and all the birds obeyed the warning save the foolish one.
The cloud-fingers turned to crimson, and tinted the Southern Ocean with opalescent hues. The foolish one sported with the little fish, diving and turning in the colours, and when the colours had gone and the sea mirrored the stars, he slept contentedly on the deep.
The wind came before the day, came swift and cold and strong. The day brought rain to scat upon the grey water from the grey sky, and to reveal the land far distant and shrouded in sea-mist. Unlike the gulls and the gannets, the foolish one couldn’t fly, but he could swim, and with frantic haste he steered for the sanctuary of the shore.
His dinner suit kept him warm for a little while and gave him buoyancy, but steadily the white horses grew in number and in strength, charging down upon him, thrusting him deep beneath their salted hooves, each one taking a little of his buoyancy before speeding onward in the race for the land. The end was as inevitable as Greek drama: the price exacted for all foolishness. He became a spent and water-logged vessel, and the cold clamped about his valiant heart. Then lethargy quieted all his fears.
The sea surged him onward to the rocks footing the headland bearing high the Split Point Lighthouse. It failed to whiten more his shirt front, or dim the blackness of his dinner jacket, but its anger increased because its triumph was cheap and its revenge was thwarted by the currents which carried the body clear of the rocks, to deposit it at the feet of Napoleon Bonaparte.
The sea thundered its rage and the wind shrieked its fury. A gull cried with grief, and Detective-Inspector Bonaparte took up the half-grown penguin, carried it above high-water mark and buried it in the dry sand.
He thought no one was near to laugh at him.
It was late afternoon in May. The rain had been swept from the sky and the clouds were being torn to shreds by the wind which whipped the overcoat about his legs and carried the spray to sting his eyes. The one venturesome gull vanished from this place of rock and water, cliff and narrow beach, and when Bony turned his back to the sea, the wind pressed against him in effort to make him run.
Split Point is not unlike the distended claws of an angry cat’s paw, forever thwarted by Eagle Rock standing safely out at sea. Bony surveyed two of these claws rising sheerly from the beach for a hundred feet and more, and then at the less precipitous slope of paw rising to the base of the Lighthouse. At the base of the right cliff two caves offered cold shelter, and within the rock funnel in the face of the left cliff the wind swirled grass and dead bush round and round without cease. At his low elevation, he could see all the Lighthouse save its foundation upon the grassy sward, a tapering white stalk holding aloft the face of glass beneath the cardinal’s red hat.
Thirty years before, Split Point Light was changed from manual to automatic control, since when it is inspected four times annually by an engineer from the Commonwealth Lighthouse and Navigation Department.
On March 1st an engineer had begun his tour of inspection at nine in the morning. He found the Light in perfect operation, and saw nothing to indicate anything unusual until he discovered the body of a man entombed in the thick wall.
Before nightfall that same day, the investigators from Melbourne were like ants in a piece of rotten wood. They dusted for fingerprints, and they searched high and low for the dead man’s hat, his boots and his clothes. Subsequently, they interviewed a hundred people, and scratched their heads over the result. Hope that they would swiftly draw an ace murderer from the pack dwindled till finally the only card they held was the Joker.
They preserved the body in a glass tank of formalin, and scattered pictures of the dead face to every newspaper in Australia. They chivvied the crooks in Melbourne and other capital cities, and annoyed respectable folk by their questioning. Some became red with anger and others white with frustration, and in his office at Police Headquarters in Melbourne Superintendent Bolt glared at the Joker.
A day nine weeks after the engineer had found the body, Napoleon Bonaparte, on his way back to his department in Brisbane, called on Bolt to talk about the weather. Bolt took him home and talked about a dead body no one knew, or wanted to. He admitted failure to his superior in tenacity if not in rank, and he agreed to all Bony’s demands and plans for attacking the case.
Thus was this product of two races in time to bury a drowned penguin at the very foot of the now famous Lighthouse, and hoping no one was laughing at him. Hope was banished.
At the edge of the cliff to his right stood a woman. She was almost directly above him. She swayed against the buffeting wind, and, did she take one step forward, she would plunge to death. She appeared to be young, and certainly was dark of hair. The grey skirt fluttered like a flag at a mast-head.
It