confused but his gun was pointing to the ground so they didn’t shoot him.
One officer ordered stentoriously:
“Place your gun on the ground very slowly and step away from it.”
The Bad Man hesitated but then did as he had been ordered. He was handcuffed and one officer searched him. He was listing the things as he found them:
“A home made nunchuck, flick knife, packet of what looks like dried Marihuana, tablets, ten packets of white powder. After a through search he announced:
“No other weapons.”
By this time the gang of four had arrived and so had the lady from across the road.
The senior constable in charge started questioning the man:
“What is your name and address?”
The Bad Man just snarled.
Fuji said:
“His name is Wilberforce Darwin.
The police laughed, but the old lady confirmed:
“Yes, that really is his name.”
“Thank you madam.”
Then to the Bad Man:
Mr. Darwin, where do you live?
“Snarl!”
The officer turned to the lady:
“Do you know his address?”
“No.”
Fuji said:
“He lives on a farm along the road, we can show it you.
“Thank you.
“Sir, it’s an offence to discharge a fire arm in a public place. What were you shooting at?”
“Snarl!”
Fuji said:
“He was trying to kill Luna, and then he fired at us; he didn’t hit us but we were showered with small pebbles from the bank.”
The old lady added:
“Yes, and he aimed the gun at me. I went and called Triple 0 from home.
The senior constable said:
“Yes, I think half the people in the town called the emergency number.”
Then he asked:
“Who is Luna?”
I had stayed in the tree, but when Fuji called me I climbed down and jumped into his arms. He said:
“This is Luna, she manages the post office.”
The officer laughed again; I could tell by his attitude that the relief of arresting the Bad Man without anyone getting hurt after facing a very dangerous situation had made him tend to laugh more easily than usual.
He turned to one of the other officers:
“Report what’s happened; they’ll have to send drug specialists to help us search his farm.”
Then he turned to the gang of four and the old lady:
“We’ll need formal statements from all of you later. Please give your names and addresses to Probationary Constable Smith.”
Probationary Constable Smith was a very young woman police officer, and took down all the details in her notebook. I could see that she was shaking slightly. This was obviously the first time she had faced an armed offender.
Then the senior constable asked:
“Fuji, how far is the farm”
Fuji replied:
“Maybe two or three kilometres.”
The police put the Bad Man in one car and Fuji got into the back of the other one, still carrying me. The police smiled when they realised I was also coming.
When we got to the farm, I meowed in fright and Fuji held me closer. The whole place radiated EVIL much worse that the other times I was there. I could see that the police felt it as well. They became silent as they observed the cat tree with its gruesome burden of dead cats. And then further on they saw the possum tree with nearly 30 dead possums hanging on its lower branches. Then they saw three dead Koalas on another tree.
We heard some pathetic sounding barking and investigated finding several mother dogs with puppies in tiny cages. The Bad Man was breeding puppies in terrible conditions, probably for sale to unscrupulous pet shops. I’m Cat, and definitely not a Dog lover, but I don’t like cruelty to any animal, not even Dogs.
The senior constable ordered:
“Contact the RSPCA and the wildlife people.”
The drug officers arrived under the command of a sergeant and went into the house. The sergeant in charge soon came out and said:
“There’s drug laboratory inside. This whole property is now officially a crime scene. All civilians will have to leave.”
Fuji’s three friends had arrived after a fast jog along the roads, and the sergeant had looked at them when he said about civilians leaving.
Probationary Constable Smith escorted us off the farm, she was worried that we might be traumatised by what had happened and promised to check up on the boys later. We were very happy to get out of that evil place and the boys walked back along the roads with Fuji carrying me.
Once we were away from the evil aura, we got an aerial escort. The Sulphur Crested Cockatoos were flying overhead making a lot of noise in their repeated fly pasts.
We saw a van of the Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals heading for the evil farm. They would take care of the miserable Dogs and underfed birds of the farm.
As we got into the more densely populated parts of Charleston, the noise increased as the Dogs barked, the Crows cawed, the Kookaburras laughed, the Magpies warbled and the Humans talked. We were heroes and the walk down Newman Road turned into a triumphal procession. I even heard approving barks from my old enemy, the Big Fat Ugly Dog.
We went right along to the Bookpost to hold a celebration. Fuji made a paper crown for me and I was crowned Queen of Charleston in an impromptu coronation.
I was thinking about an odd thing I thought I had seen on the way back. In a clump of trees a few hundred metres from the Bad Man’s farm I’d glimpsed a small boy. He was watching the comings and goings of the police and other vehicles. I wasn’t sure, but the boy looked a bit like Charlie, our friendly intruder.
A while later, David Fox came into the Bookpost and talked to Michael about a problem:
“Our landlord has been arrested; he’s been charged with attempted murder, cultivating cannabis for sale, manufacturing and selling drugs, multiple counts of cruelty to animals, killing protected animals and several other offences I had never even heard of before. They’ve thrown the book at him.
“The rental agreement is just that we have to put the money into his account every week, so I suppose we are legally safe if we just keep doing that.”
I thought that throwing a book at someone was totally inadequate punishment for the things he had done. I looked around at the books in the shop. I hoped it was a very big book that they had thrown at him.
Hit the Ground Running
Two weeks later, we received an odd communication. Most of the people in Charleston with post boxes pay the annual rent promptly soon after they get the account. A few people take a long time to pay. One of the people who hadn’t paid in 2012 was the Bad Man. Now he was in custody awaiting trial so we had no expectation of ever being paid. We were no longer putting his mail into the box, but it was being held in at the counter for collection, as the law requires except that there was no one likely to collect it.
We were bemused by an envelope sticking out of the Bad Man’s otherwise empty post-box. Whoever had put it into the box must have had a key to the box and have had thin arms to push it so far into the box that it stuck out into the mail sorting area. The envelope was addressed to the Bookpost so Michael opened the envelope and found a letter in childish handwriting saying that the money enclosed was for the rent of the box, and please put the mail into the box. The letter was unsigned.
This was an odd way of paying for the rent, but quite legal. Post Office people are bound by strict laws. Michael put the Bad Man’s mail into the box, and that night someone collected it.
Two days later, I was sitting on Michael’s lap as he worked on the computer when Charlie the intruder came in. He was still very thin, but no longer looked or smelt as if he was about to die of starvation. His clothes looked second hand and didn’t all fit him, but were much better than the rags he wore bef
ore and they were clean. I hoped he hadn’t stolen them from someone’s washing line. Charlie also looked and smelled as if he had had a shower that morning.
He went to the icecream fridge and got a magnum icecream. He paid Michael and went to sit down. He called me and I jumped up onto his table. He carefully gave me a bit of the vanilla ice cream from the middle of the Magnum, avoiding giving me any of the nasty chocolate. Before he left he bought a ten kilogram bag of parrot mix.
The next day he came back and bought a 20 kilogram bag of Golden Yolk pellets for laying hens.
He asked Michael to put it into his wheel barrow. He looked silly pushing a full sized garden wheel barrow, but he had probably got very tired the previous day carrying the 10 kilogram bag. Then the day after that he bought a 20 kilogram bag of Wheat.
We soon got used to seeing the little boy buying odd things like a litre of milk. He didn’t buy any soft drinks.
A couple of week later I was exploring, but realised that I had strayed close to the Bad Man’s farm. I hadn’t been warned by the evil aura of the malevolent place. As I cautiously went closer I saw the cat tree, but all the dead cats had been removed. All the other dead animals were gone and the cages were all empty.
I marvelled at the transformation of the whole place. There was a new crudely made wooden table set up on the lawn with a flock of Sulphur Crested Cockatoos eating parrot mix. On the very dry but newly cut lawn underneath the table were six hens. The very large garden pond had been refilled and two ducks and a drake were contentedly swimming on its placid surface amongst the water lily leaves and flowers. A bubbling stream of water was flowing into the pond even though it was now high summer, and this was just after a record heat wave; I