“I was out at the hotel at daybreak,” said Walters. “We think that Mrs. Cotton walked in her sleep as she had sometimes done, and that the murderer found her in the yard and killed her. We examined and cross-examined every man jack on the place, and every one had an alibi from one or more of the others.”
“And we couldn’t nail down any motive,” supplemented the sergeant. “I’ve known Mrs. Cotton even longer than the inspector, and I’m sure she wasn’t up to any hanky-panky with a man in one of the bedrooms off the yard. Besides, if she were, she wouldn’t leave her room on an adventure of that kind wearing only a thin silk nightgown. Motive is what baffled us.”
“H’m! And now it’s June 25th… more than nine weeks since the night of the murder,” murmured Bony. “Well, I have great distaste for easy cases. Tell me about the next murder.”
Chapter Three
Backgrounds
“A Mrs. Eltham was the second victim,” Sawtell proceeded. “She came here to work at one of the hotels. That was in 1945 when there wasn’t much doing in the pearl-shelling business. There’s only twenty-two luggers operating even now, and there used to be more than three hundred before the war. Anyway, this woman arrived at Broome on an Air Force tender from Nooncanbah, and no one seems to know where she joined the tender. She came here to work, and she worked. Pretty girl about twenty-five. Could have married better than she did, and could have married worse, too. She married a lugger owner, and then there was plenty of money. During the fishing season from April to December when her husband was at sea. Mrs. Eltham worked as a barmaid, and we became a little uneasy about her behaviour with her husband absent.”
“Moral?” interrupted Bony.
“Not flagrant. Well, one morning at sea during the ’47 season, Eltham himself went below. He had been down several times before but he wasn’t an experienced diver. Something got him, and no one knows what because neither of the regular diverswere down with him. All they brought up of Eltham was what was left behind inside his helmet.