LITMIR.BIZ

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was informed on current subjects, was passionately fond of music, was seldom careless in speech, and was self-controlled. What caused Bony to speculate was why such an isolated place as Baden Park Hotel could hold such a man?

      There were moments when Bony had seen Simpson regarding him with cold calculation. There were moments when an icy barrier had been raised to thwart questions possibly thought to be too probing. The man was completely confident in himself. Proof of his vanity was forthcoming during the visit of a man and his wife lasting from late one afternoon until the following morning. The presence of a young and good-looking woman produced in Simpson unsuspected fires which went unnoticed by the husband. The observant Bony saw the threat to the woman and knew that was the reason for her desire to leave. She felt the sex menace in Simpson and feared it.

      Like almost every vain man, Simpson was a liar. He had said that his theory of the vanishment of the two hikers was that they had fallen into a gully at least a mile deep and located a mile westward of the hotel. According to his father, there was no such gully, and Bony had checked that by exploring the country.

      In his unobtrusive manner he had done much exploring, the objective being the re-creating of an event which took place five months previously. And by observation as well as the spoken word, he was sure that both Simpson and Glen Shannon were extremely interested in his activities.

      It was now the fifteenth day of March, and on October twenty-second last two young women had left the hotel to walk the track to the Lake George guest-house. It was not likely that they had not left the hotel that morning, because Ferris Simpson had stated they had done so. Together with her brother, she had watched them until the bend in the track had taken them to itself. Simpson’s statement, unsupported by his sister, could have been regarded with doubt.

      What Bony had learned, and what was not contained in the statements, was that Ferris Simpson had been dressing her father when the two girls were about to depart, and that her brother had been insistent that she leave the old man to join him in farewelling the guests. After they had left, so all the statements agreed, Simpson had started on a repair job on the garage which had occupied him for the remainder of that day. Bony had scouted along the track from the hotel to the guest-house. He had repeatedly left the track to explore the natural paths through the scrub. With the patience of his maternal forebears, he had hunted for signs imprinted on this page of the Book of the Bush five months before. His task was more difficult than that of the geologists who came to study these mountains and could say how they had been formed ages since.

      Despite the passage of five months since the girl hikers had left the hotel, the lack of clues was becoming significant. Normally they must have left clues for such as Bonaparte to discover and so reconstruct their fate as geologists are able to reconstruct the formation of mountains. In his field Bonaparte was equally a scientist.

      It was the afternoon of the eighth day of his stay at Baden Park Hotel. He had slipped away shortly after lunch when aware that Simpson and the yardman were repairing the pumping engine up the creek, and for the twentieth time he was examining the ground on either side of the track to Lake George. Today, as previously, he could find nothing and he was now convinced that the two girls had not become lost in the bush.

      A possible lead to their fate might lie upon an area of small shingle over which the track passed about a mile from the hotel. Bony was approaching it now on the return walk to the hotel, his deep blue eyes ceaselessly alert.

      On reaching the shingle, he sat down with his back to a boulder and rolled a cigarette. Where the shingle lay, nothing grew. A few feet to his front the track crossed the shingle, the motor traffic laying down twin ruts like the lines of a railroad track. Despite the successive weights passing along the ruts, they were barely two inches deep, so firm was the ground beneath.

      At some time in the past a motor vehicle had been turned here. It had come from the hotel, had been driven off the track, backed across it, and then angled to run into the ruts and to be stopped just before it would pass on to the softer earth. The marks made by the turning were so faint that Bony had crossed and re-crossed the area on several occasions before he sighted them, and so followed their story-telling curves.

      According to the gathered statements and the Official Summary, no vehicle had passed the hotel during the visit of the hikers and the following two days and nights. When the two hikers left the hotel they passed out of sight round that first bend which was but a hundred yards or so from the watching Simpsons on their veranda. They would walk on and pass that old turn-off to Baden Park Station marked on Bony’s map and subsequently disused in favour of the track down by the hotel and its vineyard. Eventually they would arrive at this shingle area. Supposing that on that day they came to a halted motor vehicle facing towards the hotel? Supposing they were seized, assaulted, killed? Leave motive alone for the nonce. Concentrate on that picture five months old.

      Well, having arrived at the waiting motor vehicle, nothing would have persuaded the girls voluntarily to enter it. It wasn’t going their way—or had it been turned after they were kidnapped and thrust inside it? Bony was not sure about this, but inclined to believe the turn had been made before they arrived.

      When people are struggling items become detached from them. The more severe the struggle, the greater the number of items. Buttons, hairpins, dress ornaments, and even hairs. The struggle would occur in the vicinity of the parked car, and that portion of the shingle area would now receive his concentrated attention.

      Take another step. Assuming the girls had been assaulted at this place and either killed or abducted to be killed elsewhere, how had the car passed the hotel that day? Old Simpson, James Simpson and his sister, Mrs. Simpson and O’Brien, the yardman, all had stated that no car passed the hotel that day—or on either of the two following days and nights.

      But what if the car was Simpson’s Buick? That would not pass the hotel. In the minds of all those questioned would be the picture of a visitor’s car, a passing tourist’s car. It could be a car from Baden Park Station, and still the people at the hotel would answer in the negative: Did any car pass that day or the day after?

      But it was silly to prognosticate further. It was not Simpson’s car. Simpson was not in it, anyway. After the girls had left the hotel he was known to have worked about the place. Did he, however, know what waited on the track for the hikers? And, knowing, did he provide an alibi by insisting on his sister’s leaving their father’s dressing to stand with him and wave farewell to them? If only the evidence of a struggle could be found where the car had waited!

      The air was heavy with eucalyptus. The dominating mountain watched. One could not get away from those grey-and-brown granite eyes. Even in the dense scrub they sought one out. The impression they created was strong with Bony when he rose and sauntered over the loose shingle. Most of the shingle comprised white quartz, a carpet of some two inches thick. The sunlight was reflected in snowy whiteness, causing his eyes to contract to mere pin-points. The hours passed, and square foot by square foot the carpet all about the position of the parked car was diligently examined.

      A grey fantail came from nowhere to watch and chirp and dance. The ants were diverted by quartz chips being disturbed. Once a bull ant crouched back upon its hind legs and glared at the man with cold, agate-hard hate. The shadows lengthened, but the passing of time was shut out of the mind of this man whose patience could accomplish the finding of a needle in a haystack.

      He did, indeed, make an interesting discovery. He found a splinter of pink quartz in which was embedded a tiny shot of gold. The splinter was dropped into a side pocket with the nonchalance of a boy finding a rusty pocket-knife. The fantail continued to dance and flirt. Twice it flew into the bordering scrub and danced on the boughs and gave the alarm to anyone not preoccupied with gazing upon shingle square foot by square foot.

      Of no interest to the crouching Bonaparte was a nut discarded by a car or truck, a half-smoked cigarette upon which no rain had fallen and therefore had not lain there longer than eleven days, and the remains of a glass bottle which had certainly been there for several years.

      A detective who has no luck is sooner or later returned to the uniformed branch and the street beat. For an instant Luck smiled at the implacable Bony.

      Now

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