A damn-fool woman complained that during her absence from home at North Broken Hill someone had stolen one hundred and eighty pounds she had kept in the American clock on the sitting-room mantel. Barmy! Served her right. What the hell were banks for? Stillman, the swine! Ha! Ha! The wonderful Stillman was bogged down too. The mighty brain from Sydney wasn’t able to produce any results.
Leads… blanks. Theories built… and pulled down. Questions, and ever more and more questions, leading nowhere, giving nothing. Stillmancrawfishing out from under, pulling strings in Sydney to let him out and so leave the bag with Crome. Statements… reports… theories… conferences… disappointment… hope… disappointment… patience… patience.
The inquest on Alfred Parsons adjournedsine die.
Chapter Two
Conference
IT WAS a large room overlooking Argent Street, and only when the heavy door was open did the clacking of typewriters penetrate. Through the wide-open windows drifted the distant noise of mining machinery and the nearer sound of trams and cars. A room befitting the senior officer of the South-Western Police Division of New South Wales.
Superintendent Luis Pavier had never been known to betray irritability. He seldom smiled, and when he did the placid features blurred like a pond disturbed by a stone. There was a stillness about Pavier which had nothing to do with physical control.
One after another he was lifting reports from his ‘in’ basket, reading and initialling, and dropping them into the ‘out’ basket. It was routine work, the pulse of a virile community with his finger ever on the pulse, the patient mostly normal, and occasionally revealing bouts of fever. There remained three documents on his blotter when he pressed his desk bell.