Blood Ties (Little Town) by JD Nixon

Author:JD Nixon [Nixon, JD]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: mystery, relationships, free book, crime, romance, chick lit
Publisher: JD Nixon via Smashwords
Published: 2012-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

It took both of us to manhandle Lola Bycraft to the cell. For a tiny woman, she had the fury and strength of a titan. While he struggled to restrain her, I quickly rushed around to find the mattress for the bed. We weren’t well prepared for someone to occupy one of the cells so quickly after I had cleaned them out. Luckily though, the smell of bleach had dissipated in the fresh air, not that Lola could probably smell anything after so many years of smoking.

The lockup’s two cells were very basic, erected in the late 1880s when the station itself was built and nothing except the lighting and a primitive alarm buzzer had been modernised in them since. And the lighting merely consisted of the addition of glaring fluorescent tubes that dangled from the ceiling by rusting chains and flickered annoyingly, their wiring inexpertly tacked to the timber walls and painted over at least twenty times since then. The wiring led out to two round and clunky cracked Bakelite switches located outside on the veranda. The cells themselves were bare squares, furnished with only a metal bunk bed firmly bolted to the wall and floor, normally covered by a thin, lumpy ancient mattress.

One of those mattresses was possibly even the same bedding lain on by the lockup’s most notable inmate, roguish Theodore Bycraft, a local boy turned bushranger of some infamy, who once terrorised the road from here to Big Town. He was known as Mountain Ted because of his regular and notoriously slippery escapes from the police into the thick bush and rugged ground of Mount Big.

Ted had enjoyed an overnight stay in one of the lockup’s cells in 1894 after being captured by Little Town’s sole constable while naked, drunk and asleep at his temporary camp at the base of Mount Big. Humiliatingly, the constable’s own young wife had been happily and firmly clasped in Ted’s arms at the time of his arrest, also naked, drunk and asleep, her petticoats strewn around his campsite with shocking abandon.

Somehow, Mountain Ted had managed to escape from custody the next day. I’d read the station’s observation book in which the poor constable had noted nothing in his elaborate script that very day but the forlorn words: Bycraft – disappeared again. He’d moved on himself from Little Town soon after, so there was no record of how his marriage had fared. But out of curiosity I’d researched the good constable and his wife on the internet and discovered on a government database that they’d had seven children together after they left town, so I guess they soon made up from her indiscretion.

Eventually, Mountain Ted was recaptured and hanged for his many crimes in Big Town in 1897. His execution drew the biggest crowd ever documented for a public hanging in these parts. All the contemporary accounts of his death by male journalists not only noted the extraordinary number of weeping women in attendance, but also reluctantly admired him for the sheer cockiness he showed at meeting his death.

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