The Mystery of the Deserted House

A true detective story

Deep in the shadows of the dark, damp forest there stands a quaint little house perched high upon a rock.  The small-paned windows are closed; the door is locked; weeds grow lank to the walls.  It has only ever been used as an occasional weekend retreat.  I walk over there now and then to see that all is well.

            On the evening of October 18th, 1978, when passing through, I found that, for the first time, windows were broken, one on the west side, one on the east.  It was too late then to do anything more than notify the local defence authorities – which in this case, was me.

            Next morning, in the cold grey dawn, I collected the keys and the .410 shotgun and, suitably disguised in dark glasses and a moustache, stole through the dripping forest to the deserted house.

            Mist coiled among the trees.  The wind moaned around the walls.  The key grated loudly in the lock and the door creaked ominously as I eased it open with the barrel of the gun.  A black bat shuddered out past my head.

            Before me narrow steps wound upwards out of sight.  Turning my collar up and pulling my trilby over my brows I crept cautiously up the steps, gun at the ready.

            Rounding the bend in the stairway I came to the alcove that is the kitchen.  Slit-eyed I surveyed the scene.  Picnic items under a chequered cloth were disarranged but as far as I could see, nothing was missing.

            I examined the dust on the floor, black dust that had filtered in from earlier bush fires.  There were no tracks to be seen.  A pile of droppings below a beam showed where a very small bat, probably a banana bat, dined nightly.  I examined the bathroom and tiny unfurnished bedroom. Nothing amiss.

            Two wooden steps creaked as I stepped up to the dark livingroom.  In this room a pane in the east window was shattered, all the glass lying on the floor and the sofa below it.  The glass from the broken west window, on the other hand, had fallen outside.  Simple, one might conclude.  Someone threw, or fired, a missile through the east window and out the west. I viewed this theory from every angle but the alignment of the two windows showed it to be impossible.  No such missile was in the room.

            I crept up more hollow wooden steps to the bedroom at the top of the house. Dust and bat droppings yielded no tracks or signs of disturbance.  I returned to the livingroom.

            The dust on the westward end of the table had been swept by something such as a sleeve with a stiff cuff.  No other marks were visible.  On the sofa there were droppings unfamiliar to me.  They were a light brown in colour, averaging 3 centimetres in length and 1 cm wide, blunt-ended and consisting entirely of fig seeds.

            What forest animal would have a diet so exclusively of fig seeds?  Somango monkey, sun squirrel, bushbaby, and tree civet.  I was familiar with the droppings of all of them except the last.  Nevertheless, with these four species in mind I reviewed the situation.

            I noted that the windows were inaccessible from the ground.  The nearest branches of the trees were slender and would not make good take-off points.  I could not visualise any of these animals being able to jump from them with enough force to break a window.  That was not to say that the breaker of the windows had to be the dropper of the droppings.  The plot thickened.

            In vain I scanned the jagged edges of glass and the narrow, sloping sills for a single hair, a single fliff of fluff or fur.  Finally, with no other clues whatsoever I collected a couple of the droppings.  Exhibit A.  These I took to Dr Don Broadley of the Museum; he did not recognise them.  He took them with him to Dr Reay Smithers on the eve of that great mammalogist’s departure for South Africa.  Dr Smithers did not recognise them either.  Therefore: they were not mammal droppings.  The tall, authoritative figure of Mr Des Jackson entered the case.  The dryness and formed appearance of the droppings, and the complete absence of white guano, caused him to shake his ornithological beard in puzzlement.

            At this time, having secretly watched the house for long stiff hours from the dark shadows of the forest, sometimes disguised as an inoffensive rock, sometimes as a naturalist interested in something else, my suspicions began to fall upon a certain Silvery-Cheeked Hornbill, adult (code name SCHA) seen on two separate occasions lingering in the vicinity of the crime without good cause.

            This splendid individual, I reasoned, might be able to get a foothold on the sloping sill, and with his great bill and enormous casque would surely be capable of pecking in the pane.  This would account for the fact that, unlike the damage expected from a stone or a bullet, there was very little glass left in the frames – a small edging only.  Furthermore, large though he was , he could have squeezed through the resultant gap.  Could SCHA have attacked his reflection in the east window with such vigour that he found himself breaking and entering – or more accurately, broken and entered?  Might he then have flapped around seeking an exit, knocked over the picnic things in the kitchen window in his efforts, returned to the livingroom, perched on the end of the table, disturbing the dust with his undercarriage and his stiff tail, and from there launched himself towards the sun shining through the west window?  I had already noted that the reflections were at their best when the sun was on the other side of the house.

            I endeavoured to increase my vigilance, but being on my own I found myself too short of manpower to do this as effectively as I wished.  The vandal eluded me.  More windows were broken in my absence, all the glass being knocked out of the frames and lying inside the rooms.

            To lend weight to my theory I noticed that as the sun shifted its orbit slightly southwards, so were the corresponding windows being broken.  I drew what curtains there were and these windows ceased to be attacked.  Also the one set of louvres, that gave a distorted reflection, remained intact.

            Meanwhile I submitted a report that I could find no human involvement in the affair.

            “Why, then,” came the question, “has this not happened before? The house has been empty for years.”

            I reasoned that for the first time there was no caretaker on the premises.  He had done little work around the place but had occupied nearby quarters.  Without him about SCHA may have been emboldened to choose his nest hole nearer the house than he would otherwise have done.

            On November 30th, disguised as a rather portly tree stump in raincoat and gumboots, munching nonchalantly on a bunch of grapes, I disturbed SCHA sitting on the concrete ledge above the door of the deserted house.  In helping me with my enquiries he produced a dropping.  This I collected with some acrobatical difficulty and compared it with the original being held at the Museum.  The two specimens were identical except that the fig content of the last was replaced to some extent with the seeds of other fruits.

            This might have seemed evidence enough but I was keen to wrap up the case by actually witnessing SCHA committing the crime.  In any case, there was no question of arresting him since he was the sole supporter of his wife and family at that time.

            Then the bedroom windows came under attack.  I found the now familiar droppings on the floor and even on the bed.  The intruder was growing bolder with familiarity.  It was only a matter of time, I felt, before he made his fatal mistake.

            That time came on January 3rd, 1979.  In the cool early dawn of that day, disguised as a lovely slender shrub wandering harmlessly about in the forest, I saw SCHA perched upon a sill of the deserted house, beak to beak with his reflection in a south-east window – sound asleep!  Once in a while he twitched in his sleep, muttered, “Jerk!” and pecked the pane.  He had knocked a sizable hole in it when his lady love suddenly appeared, for the first time as far as I knew.  So besotted with her beauty was he that he forsook forthwith his juvenile pranks of breaking windows in deserted houses.

            Until that time SCHA had been most silent and secretive. Now he became more vocal and I abandoned several ideas I had as to the location of his nest hole in favour of a group of trees quite impossible to reach undetected.

            On January 7th there was a tremendous noise from all the hornbills in the forest that lasted most of the day.  After that the entire population left for less depleted feeding grounds. I imagine that was when the chicks broke out of the nests – they would have been walled in with mud in tree-holes for weeks – all of them on that same day it would seem.

           

The exercise had posed several questions.  Was SCHA attacking his own reflection or did he think it was another hornbill to be fed?  I feel aggression is the most likely answer although one would not consider these great birds as being aggressive.  Certainly he seemed to tolerate other males of his species also nesting in that part of the forest.  These would have been members of his own group with which he was familiar, while he would not, of course, be familiar with his own image.  Besides, he would surely have seen that his reflection had a mighty casque and therefore was another male – and who would want to feed another male?

            And why were SCHA’s droppings so completely unbirdlike?  Perhaps the female and chicks, in order to keep the nest clean, must pick up the droppings and throw them outside, in which case they would have to be fairly dry and formed.

            There being nothing more to report, the case was adjourned sine die.

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Having occupied this little house myself for a while, I can attest to the accuracy of this story.  Except the moustache, perhaps. - DW

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