Death Leaves the Station by Alexander Thorpe

Author:Alexander Thorpe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fremantle Press
Published: 2020-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘He’s not dead,’ the detective sergeant bellowed as they careened around a corner, his voice elevated by the combined efforts of excitement and engine noise.

‘Who isn’t?’ yelled Ana, clinging to the seat in front of her.

‘Beynon! The dead man!’

These seemingly contradictory statements were eventually untangled, but only to the accompaniment of a great deal of interference, interjection and general disagreement. In the interests of clarity and narrative flow, a more succinct precis is provided below.

While his charges were making their way down to the beach, Parkes had returned to the police station. Armed at last with an identity, he had placed a call to J. H. Sweetingham & Company, manufacturers and wholesalers of fine electrical wares, informing them that Arthur Beynon, their sales representative for the northern and coastal regions, had met with an ignominious end. For the sake of both formality and forensics, he had requested that all available information on the man be cabled through to the station at once. Then, pausing only to acquire a pot of fresh tea and a cigar, he had sat down to build a profile of the unfortunate victim.

‘Beynon was a total madman,’ he summarised, for the benefit of his passengers. ‘He was on the road for more than three months at a time, with only a week’s break between each trip. On his last jaunt, he went all the way up the coast from Fremantle to Carnarvon—nearly six hundred miles, mind you—and then back down through the goldfields.’

This trip was made all the more astounding by dint of being conducted wholly via horse and cart: despite Arthur Beynon’s well-honed sales patter about technology lighting the way to the future, he had evidently been unwilling to embrace the internal combustion engine.

‘It looks as if he sold bulbs and filaments to general stores and garages, for the most part, with a sideline in motor components for fishing vessels. That’s on the coast, mind you,’ clarified Parkes, somewhat unnecessarily. ‘On the way back down, he managed to make it through just about every one of the larger stations and mining towns, moving electric lamps by the crateful. Much safer than the old gas lanterns, they say.’

This amount of merchandise, of course, could not be accommodated in a single sulky—the bulk of Beynon’s load was demonstration stock. Once a purchase had been arranged, a system of regularly scheduled telegrams enabled the warehouse team in Fremantle to dispatch all stock within two days of the order being placed.

It was at this point in the retelling that the detective sergeant’s audience began to protest. They still had not been told where they were going—or, perhaps more pressingly, why—and were unable to see the merit in sitting through a brief but thorough commercial history of north-western electrical hardware distribution.

In response, Parkes handed a single piece of paper into the rear of the vehicle and waited wordlessly for his critics to reach their own conclusions. They peered at it, squinting in the dim, dusty air. It was a typewritten sheet of dates, locations and quantities.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.