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 was lunacy to stand there at the edge of that weathered cliff, before her was a drop of a hundred feet at least, and Bony’s reaction first was of admiration for her courage, changing then to ire at the woman’s stupidity. She seemed to lean against the wind, oblivious to the possibility of a sudden fall in pressure which would suck her into the gulf. He shouted up to her to draw back, but either she did not hear, or, hearing, ignored the plea.

Then she slid her right foot forward to the very verge. It seemed she was going to jump. In Bony, perturbation changed to horror. The foot was withdrawn. The woman turned a fraction, and as though from her heels there rose behind her a man. The man was shorter and more stockily built. He appeared to wrap his arms about the girl’s waist, and proceeded to drag her back.



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