‘I found that in the vicinity of the site of a large fire,’ Bony said. ‘It might establish that William Reynolds is no longer alive.’
Although Harry Larkin was supremely confident, he was not quite happy. He had not acted without looking at the problem from all angles and without having earnestly sought the answer to the question: ‘If I shoot him dead, burn the body on a good fire, go through the ashes for the bones which I pound to dust in a dolly pot, and for the metal bits and pieces which I dissolve in sulphuric acid, how can I be caught?’ The answer was plain.
He had carried through the sundowner’s method of utterly destroying the body of the murder victim, and to avoid the million-to-one-chance of anyone coming across the ashes of the fire and being made suspicious, he had shot a calf as kangaroos were scarce.
Yes, he was confident, and confident that he was justified in being confident. Nothing remained of Bill Reynolds, damn him, save a little grayish dust which was floating around somewhere.
The slight unhappiness was caused by a strange visitation, signs of which he had first discovered when returning home from his work one afternoon. On the ground near the blacksmith’s shop he found a strange set of boot tracks which were not older than two days. He followed these tracks backward to the house, and then forward until he lost them in the scrub.
Nothing in the house was touched, as far as he could see, and nothing had been taken from the blacksmith’s shop, or interfered with. The dolly pot was still in the corner into which he had dropped it after its last employment, and the crowbar was still leaning against the anvil. On the shelf was the acid jar. There was no acid in it. He had used it to dissolve, partially, buttons and the metal band around a pipestem and boot sprigs. The residue of those metal objects he had dropped into a hole in a tree eleven miles away.
It was very strange. A normal visitor, finding the occupier away, would have left a note at the house. Had the visitor been black, he would not have left any tracks, if bent on mischief.
The next day Larkin rode out to the boundary fence and on the way he visited the site of his fire. There he found the plain evidence that someone had moved the bones of the animal and had delved among the ashes still remaining from the action of the wind.
Thus he was not happy, but still supremely confident. They could not tack anything onto him. They couldn’t even prove that Reynolds was dead. How could they when there was nothing of him left?
It was again Sunday, and Larkin was washing his clothes at the outside fire when the sound of horses’ hoofs led him to see two men approaching. His lips vanished into a mere line, and his mind went over all the answers he would give if the police ever did call on him. One of the men he did not know. The other was Mounted Constable Evans.
They dismounted, anchoring their horses by merely dropping the reins to the ground. Larkin searched their faces and wondered who was the slim half-caste with, for a half-caste, the singularly blue eyes.
‘Good day,’ Larkin greeted them.
‘Good day, Larkin,’ replied Constable Evans, and appeared to give his trousers a hitch. His voice was affable, and Larkin was astonished when, after an abrupt and somewhat violent movement, he found himself handcuffed.
‘Going to take you in for the murder of William Reynolds,’ Evans announced. ‘This is Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte.’
‘You must be balmy – or I am,’ Larkin said.
Evans countered with, ‘You are. Come on over to the house. A car will be here in about half an hour.’
The three men entered the kitchen where Larkin was told to sit down.
‘I haven’t done anything to Reynolds, or anyone else,’ asserted Larkin, and for the first time the slight man with the brilliant blue eyes spoke.
‘While we are waiting, I’ll tell you all about it, Larkin. I’ll tell it so clearly that you will believe I was watching you all the time. You used to meet Reynolds at the boundary fence gate, and the two of you would indulge in a spot of gambling – generally at poker. Then one day you cheated and there was a fight in which you were thrashed.
‘You knew what day of the week Reynolds would ride that boundary fence and you waited for him on your side. You held him up and made him climb over the fence while you covered him with your.32 high-power Savage rifle. You made him walk to a place within a mile of here, where there was plenty of dry wood, and there you shot him and burned his body.
‘The next day you returned with a dolly pot and a sieve. You put all the bones through the dolly pot, and then you sieved all the ashes for metal objects in Reynolds’ clothes and burned them up with sulphuric acid. Very neat. The perfect crime, you must agree.’
‘If I done all that, which I didn’t, yes,’ Larkin did agree.
‘Well, assuming that not you but another did all I have outlined, why did the murderer shoot and burn the carcase of a calf on the same fire site?’
‘You tell me,’ said Larkin.
‘Good. I’ll even do that. You shot Reynolds and you disposed of his body, as I’ve related. Having killed him, you immediately dragged wood together and burned the body, keeping the fire going for several hours. Now, the next day, or the day after that, it rained, and that rainfall fixed your actions like words printed in a book. You went through the ashes for Reynolds’ bones before it rained, and you shot the calf and lit the second fire after it rained. You dropped the calf at least two hundred yards from the scene of the murder, and you carried the carcase on your back over those two hundred yards. The additional weight impressed your boot prints on the ground much deeper than when you walk about normally, and although the rain washed out many of your boot prints, it did not remove your prints made when carrying the dead calf. You didn’t shoot the calf, eh?’
‘No, of course I didn’t,’ came the sneering reply. ‘I burned the carcase of a calf that died. I keep my camp clean. Enough blowflies about as it is.’
‘But you burned the calf s carcase a full mile away from your camp. However, you shot the calf, and you shot it to burn the carcase in order to prevent possible curiosity. You should have gone through the ashes after you burned the carcase of the calf and retrieved the bullet fired from your own rifle.’
Bony smiled, and Larkin glared.
Constable Evans said, ‘Keep your hands on the table, Larkin.’
‘You know, Larkin, you murderers often make me tired,’ Bony went on. ‘You think up a good idea, and then fall down executing it.
‘You thought up a good one by dollying the bones and sieving the ashes for the metal objects on a man’s clothes and in his boots, and then – why go and spoil it by shooting a calf and burning the carcase on the same fire site? It wasn’t necessary. Having pounded Reynolds’ bones to ash and scattered the ash to the four corners, and having retrieved from the ashes the remaining evidence that a human body had been destroyed, there was no necessity to burn a carcase. It wouldn’t have mattered how suspicious anyone became. Your biggest mistake was burning that calf. That act connects you with that fire.’
‘Yes, well, what of it?’ Larkin almost snarled. ‘I got a bit lonely livin’ here alone for months, and one day I sorta got fed up. I seen the calf, and I up with me rifle and took a pot shot at it.’
‘It won’t do,’ Bony said, shaking his head. ‘Having taken a pot shot at the calf, accidentally killing it, why take a dolly pot to the place where you burned the carcase? You did carry a dolly pot, the one in the blacksmith’s shop, to the scene of the fire, for the imprint of the dolly pot on the ground is still plain in two places.’
‘Pretty good tale, I must say,’ said Larkin. ‘You still can’t prove that Bill Reynolds is dead.’
‘No?’ Bony’s dark face registered a bland smile, but his eyes were like blue opals. ‘When I found a wisp of brown wool attached to the boundary fence, I was confident that Reynolds had climbed it, merely because I was sure his body was not on his side of the fence. You made him walk to the place where you shot him, and then you saw the calf and the other cattle in the distance, and you shot the calf and carried it to the fire.