“A promise to let me in at the showdown. It’s easy guessing why you’re here.”

“You might not be worth it. Whatd’you know of the people of Broken Hill?”

“Everything,” Luke Pavier claimed. “I know everyone. I know all the two-up schools, all the baccarat joints, all the molls. I know the inside of every mine and the contents of every mining manager’s report to his directors before they get it.”

“But you don’t know who poisoned two men with cyanide,” interposed Bony. “Be patient, and some day I’ll tell you. You will co-operate?”

“I always co-operate with the police.”

“Rubbish,” inserted his father.

The young man smiled, waved a hand, departed, and his father conducted Bony to the Sunset Club, where they were given a table in an alcove.

“I think you’ll get along well with Crome,” Pavier said when they were engaged with cheese and celery. “Crome is a good man, but we don’t have the opportunities of unravelling subtle crime. He’s the chief of the Detective Office. You’ll come to understand all our limitations, and our difficulties in a place like Broken Hill. People here are prosperous, healthy, and clean mentally as well as physically. Contented, too, because of the amity between the workers and the companies-not without former years of strife. Before these cyaniding cases, crime hasn’t been serious for several decades, and often the visiting magistrate was presented with the white gloves of a clean register.”

“Your son Luke-is he a journalist?”

“He is, and, I’m told, a good one. With him his paper comes first, as with me the department does. At home we never talk shop. He’ll use you up if you’re not wary, but he can be helpful. He flayed Stillman in his paper.”

“I have always found Stillman a most unpleasant person,” Bony said. “His observations are coloured by a singularly distorted outlook. It was hinted to me that a change in the commissionership might be to his detriment.”