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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 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 1953.
First electronic edition published by ETT Imprint 2013.
Copyright William Upfield 2013, 2020
ISBN 978-1-922384-07-2 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-922384-61-4 (ebk)
Digital distribution by Ebook Alchemy
Chapter One
The Murder of Mrs Rockcliff
It happened at Mitford some time during Monday night. Sprawled on the northern bank of the River Murray, and in the State of New South Wales, Mitford is wide open to the cold southerlies of winter and the hot northerlies of summer. A broad tree-shaded boulevard skirts the river, and Main Street is flanked by squat emporiums crammed with goods likely, and unlikely, to be needed by people who own the surrounding vineyards and who operate the canning works for ten weeks every year.
It wasn’t Sergeant Yoti’s first homicide case, but it was destined to give him a new and not altogether unpleasant experience. He wasn’t much to look at ... in civilian clothes. He was square and grey, and the foolish ones thought him soft. You think of a kind, understanding uncle when at the point of inebriation you own the town, and you may wake up and faintly recall that what Sergeant Yoti failed to do with his fists, he accomplished with his boots.
This Wednesday opened as every other day in February: hot and windy and dusty outside the Police Station, still and hot and boring within. The morning was governed by dull routine, and the afternoon was given by the Sergeant to polishing his cases for presenting to the magistrates the following day. Shortly after three o’clock the mail was delivered, and Yoti read a letter penned by the Chief of the State CID, in Sydney.
Dear Yoti [wrote Superintendent Canno], I’ve seized the opportunity of snaffling Napoleon Bonaparte to look into those baby cases out your way. Don’t know if you have ever met this bloke, but you must have heard of him. Anyway, give him all the rope and he’ll pay dividends. You’ll find him the most aggravating feller you could think of, but there’s nothing lousy in his makeup. How’s things up your street? Drop me a line sometime. Remember me to Joan. Your George is shaping well in the Traffic Branch, I’m told... .
Yoti permitted himself to smile. Canno had gone high; he himself had remained almost stationary, and the day was long back on life’s road when they had joined the Department together.
Napoleon Bonaparte! What a name! And, by all accounts, what a man! Sergeant Yoti pondered, his friend’s letter gripped by a sizeable fist. The tales he had heard about this Napoleon Bonaparte, this detective-inspector of the Queensland CID, this cross between Sir Galahad and Ned Kelly.
Well, the stolen babies would deflate this Bonaparte. They’d stir his grey matter and dry up his sinuses. He boasted that he’d never failed to finish an investigation. Well, well! Old Canno must be putting the yoke on this Mister Bonaparte, doing a snigger up his sleeve while urging him on to tackle the disappearances of four babies, babies who had just vanished, vanished from a pram or a cot, out of a house, off a veranda, even off Main Street one busy afternoon.
Yoti wasn’t amused when thinking about it, even though the only gleam of comfort in a dark night was the failure of Canno’s city experts to do better than he had done which was just nothing in clear results. The first baby had been a routine job; the second baby, an upheaval. The third child had brought Canno’s boys; photographers and fingerprinters and dust collectors. And the last baby had loosened all hell in Mitford so that even his wife had looked at him with eyes of disillusionment.
Napoleon Bonaparte! Coming to try his luck weeks after Baby Number Four had vanished like a penny in the river. No wonder the cat laughed.
Sergeant Yoti loved cats, and was stroking the enormous black specimen on his desk when the telephone in the outer office blasted the peace. Yoti smiled at the cat, almost unconscious of the voice acknowledging the telephone call. He heard the receiver being replaced, then the quick, heavy footfalls of the uniformed constable who entered his office and stood stiffly beyond the desk.
“Essen rang through, Sergeant,” reported the constable, not yet old enough to keep his face masked or his voice controlled. “His brother-in-law rang him to say he was worried about a Mrs Rockcliff who lives next door. Essen went round. The woman hadn’t been seen for a couple of days and the milk and mail not taken in. He tried the front door and found it unlocked, and went in. The woman’s lying dead in a bedroom. Essen says he thinks it’s homicide.”
No eruption rocked the Police Station at Mitford. No sirens screamed through Main Street. The police car driven by a constable negotiated the cross-street with normal care, and Yoti smoked his pipe and returned the greeting of a man who waved to him.
Elgin Street consisted of detached villas, guarded by small front gardens. At the gate of No 5 two men waited: one obviously a policeman in mufti, the other elderly and obviously nervous. First Constable Essen came forward.
“Woman appears to have been murdered,” he said. “Body’s in the front bedroom. This is my brother-in-law, who last saw the woman alive on Monday. Rang me about it because there mightn’t have been anything to it.”
Yoti nodded.
“I live next door, Sergeant,” admitted the elderly man. “The name’s Thring. We haven’t seen Mrs Rockcliff since