Pride's Harvest (11 page)

“Maybe because Waring, I gather, is the South Cloud lawyer. He's also a partner in it.” He saw Baldock frown again. “Didn't you know that?”

“No. Why would I, if Waring didn't broadcast it? It's not a public company.”

“Sure, why should you? Why would Waring keep it quiet, though? Did you know Doc Nothling and Gus Dircks were also partners?”

“No, I didn't know Dircks was. But yes, I knew about Max Nothling—I think everybody in the district knew it. The Doc runs off at the mouth sometimes, especially when he's had a few.”

“Does he drink much?”

Baldock pursed his lips, then nodded. “Too much for a doctor. We've had him turn up as GMO to pass on a corpse and I've had to talk one or two of the uniformed guys out of handing him a ticket for driving under the influence. He hasn't always been like that, only the last few years or so.”

“Why is he kept on as GMO?”

“It would be too much of a scandal to sack him. Chess Hardstaff would be down on Hugh Narvo like a ton of bricks if Hugh, or any of us, for that matter, put in a bad report on him. He's a good doctor, when he's sober. I have to say that's most of the time. He just lapses, that's all.”

“Did he come here to inspect Koowarra's body?”

“No, he was out at one of the properties on his rounds, I believe. Anyhow, he was somewhere else. Dr. Bedi came and told us to move it to the hospital.”

“
Who's Dr. Beddy? How do you spell his name?” said Clements, always the note-taker.

“B-E-D-I, Dr. Anju Bedi, and she's a she, not a he. An Indian, from somewhere in the Himalayas, I think. Not a bad sort,” he added. “And a good doctor, too, so they tell me up at the hospital.”

“Would Doc Nothling be at the hospital now?”

Baldock looked at his watch. “He should be, he's usually there from two till four. You want me to take you up there?”

“No, I'll walk up with Russ. I need the exercise—I had two helpings of bread-and-butter pudding.”

Baldock nodded appreciatively. “Narelle serves a good meal, doesn't she? She serves a lot else, so my wife says. I wouldn't know.” The lechery in his eye made a mockery of the piety in his voice. “She's a bit of a fool, Narelle, playing around the way she does. Everybody talks,” he said, seemingly unaware of his own contribution.

Malone felt, rather than saw, Clements shift uneasily in his chair. Not looking at his sidekick, he said to Baldock, “Go down and see her, ask her to find a room for Mr. Koga. I want him in the hotel with me and Russ.”

“But the pub's full up!”

“Curly, use your influence on Narelle. If she won't listen to reason, charge her with something. What's the one you use, Russ?”

Clements had regained his composure. “Obscene language in a public place, abusing a police officer. It never fails, Curly.”

Baldock grinned. “They talk about us bastards from the bush, but we're not a patch on you guys. Okay, I'll talk to Narelle, she can tell some poor coot who's booked in weeks ago for tonight and tomorrow night that she made a mistake, that she double-booked. She's—maybe I shouldn't say this, she's a good sort otherwise—but she's a bit of a bigot when it comes to non-whites, Asians and that.” Evidently he could forget his own prejudice about Lebanese and other Wogs.

“
Tough titty—or maybe I shouldn't say that about a lady. But I want Koga in the Mail Coach with Russ and me. At least at night. I don't want us called out to the farm to find another body chopped up by those spikes. I'm sure you don't, either.”

Malone and Clements went down the stairs and out into the street. A slight wind had sprung up, coming from the south-west, cooling the town; but it was a dry wind, no hint of rain in it, and there was still the promise of a fine weekend. The main street and the side streets were now full of cars and trucks, many of them dust-caked. Today, instead of Saturday, was shopping day. Tomorrow everyone would be at the races; no one was going to allow the murder of a Japanese and the suicide of an Aborigine to spoil the Big Weekend. Yet as Malone and Clements walked the four blocks to the district hospital, they both remarked the total absence of Aborigines. In a town of this size the percentage of them would have been small anyway; yet Malone, in the drive into town yesterday afternoon, without looking for any of them, had seen groups loitering on almost every corner. This afternoon there was none in sight.

“Has someone told the boongs to get outa town?” Clements had his own prejudices, but it was usually in language rather than deed. The tongue is the loosest of cannons.

But when they got to the hospital a small group of Aborigines stood under a peppercorn tree in the hospital's small front garden. The building was a one-storeyed structure stretched across perhaps two hundred feet, with two wings running back to the rear. It was built of red brick, featureless and undistinguished, a monument to the dull creativity of government architects of the 1920s. An ambulance station, its doors open to expose two ambulances, stood on a narrow lot to one side.

Wally Mungle detached himself from the group as Malone and Clements came in the open front gate. “You after me, Inspector?”

“No, Wally, we came over to see Dr. Nothling. I'm sorry about Billy. Is that his family?”

“Yeah, his mum and dad, a coupla his brothers, an uncle and aunt. And my mum, she was an aunt, too.”

“I'd like to meet them.”

Mungle looked dubious for a moment; then he led the way across to the shade of the
peppercorn
tree and introduced Malone and Clements. The Aborigines just nodded, but none of them said anything. Malone and Clements were
police
and strangers into the bargain.

Mungle was embarrassed by the silence; but Malone was gazing at Billy Koowarra's father. He was holding his cap in his hands now, but his hair still stuck out on either side like a Viking's helmet horns; he was no longer drunk but he was still suffering the effects of his drinking bout. He stared back at Malone, but it was obvious he did not recognize the plainclothes cop who had gently steered him out of the way of the traffic in the main street. Shock had not only sobered him, it had shrunk him till he could take in only one thought: his son was dead.

“Uncle Les,” said Mungle, “it wasn't the Inspector's fault Billy did what he did. He wanted Billy released.”

The father said slowly, not looking at all at Malone, “Don't matter who's to blame. Billy's still dead, only nineteen.”

He had the voice one found so often in his race, deep and soft and sounding as if coming up through rough pebbles in his throat. He had a deeply lined, leathery face and eyes that had been affected by trachoma; no matter what he had looked like when drunk, he now looked old enough to have been Billy's grandfather. Sadness lent him a dignity he had not had this morning, but, Malone thought, it was a hell of a way to have earned it.

Malone nodded; he had no words that would not have sounded hollow and hypocritical in his mouth. He went up the steps into the hospital, followed by Clements and, after a moment's hesitation, by Wally Mungle. They found Max Nothling in the end office of the doctors' wing. With him was Dr. Bedi, an attractive plump woman in her early thirties, with placid eyes and an air of patience that suggested nothing short of the end of the world would disturb her. Malone wondered what Indian catastrophes, floods, cyclones, religious riots, had prepared her for life here in this unexciting Australian outback town.

“Ah, the gendarmes!”

Nothling rose from his chair and put out his hand as Mungle introduced the two Sydney men. The doctor was not quite as tall as Malone, but he was bulkier than Clements. Most of his weight was lard;
there
might have been muscle under the fat but it wasn't easily discernible. He had thick, greying hair and a two-chinned face in which the effects of his drinking showed like a watermark, except that he usually drank something much stronger than water. He was fifty years old; he looked the sort of man who might catch a glimpse of old age but die before reaching it. Surprisingly, the hand that took hold of Malone's had a lot of strength within its fat. Malone just wondered how strong and steady it would be performing any surgery.

“Well, to what do we owe the pleasure of this visit?” He had a loud, fruity voice; his phrases, it seemed, were also fruity. “The late lamented Mr. Sagawa or our departed Abo friend? Sorry, Wally,” he added, as if for the moment he had forgotten Mungle was in the room. “No offence.”

“I don't think Billy cares very much now what he's called,” said Mungle. “Abo, boong, coon, anything.”

“No, I suppose not,” said Nothling, taking the rebuff better than Malone had expected. “Well, which one is it, Inspector?”

“Billy Koowarra is not our case. Sergeant Clements and I would like to ask a few questions about Sagawa. You examined the body out at the gin?”

“Well, no. No, I didn't, actually. I was otherwise occupied.” He didn't look at Dr. Bedi, and Malone wondered if it had been a hangover that had otherwise occupied him. “Dr. Bedi went out to the scene of the crime. Anju often helps out, don't you, old girl?”

Anju, old girl, gave him a tolerant smile. “Just occasionally. Yes, I inspected the body, Inspector. Then I gave instructions for it to be brought in here to the hospital morgue.”

“Did you prepare the report?”

“No, I have no official standing as a GMO. I just instructed them to bring the body in here and then left it to Dr. Nothling. He was here at the hospital by then.”

“I took over right away,” said Nothling, taking over now. “The body was a mess, not a pretty sight at all.”

“How long did it take you to find out Sagawa had been shot?”

“
Well, actually—” Nothling glanced at the Indian doctor, who just returned his gaze with what looked almost like a half-smile in her eyes. She's mocking the pants off him, Malone thought. “Well, actually, Anju discovered that. I was called away, an emergency here in one of the wards, and Anju went on with the examination.”

“You hadn't noticed the bullet wound when you first examined the body out at the gin?”

Dr. Bedi shook her head slowly; all her movements were unhurried. She was dressed in skirt and blouse and white coat, but one could imagine her in a sari, the silk floating like a drifting mist around her slow grace. “I wasn't looking for anything like that, Inspector. The damage done by the spikes of the roller would have been enough to kill him.”

“So how did you come to find the bullet wound?”

“Sheer accident.”

There was something in the air that made Malone uneasy, a friction that rubbed almost indiscernibly against his own awareness. It was a moment or two before he remarked that Nothling and Anju Bedi were not looking at each other, as if deliberately avoiding each other's gaze, while she spoke. Had there been some professional negligence, had Nothling not been present in the morgue at all and she was covering up for him?

“Do you do many autopsies, Dr. Bedi?”

She was unhurried, taking time to fold her long white coat over her plump knees. “No, I don't. Dr. Nothling usually does those. I'm just the staff doctor here at the hospital. He is the senior surgeon.”

There was an edge to her voice that was unmistakable, and Malone all at once wondered just how placid she really was. The tension between her and Nothling was like that of lovers who were trying to keep private their quarrel.

“You called Dr. Nothling at once?”

“Of course. He came as soon as he could get away from the—from the emergency in the ward.”

Malone looked at Nothling. “What was your reaction to the news, Doctor?”

“Oh, astonishment, old chap, absolute astonishment. Anju will tell you, I just stood there
shaking
my head.”

“You're not used to seeing murder victims who have been shot?”

Nothling's eyes narrowed just a little; almost as if, for the first time, he was taking Malone seriously. “We don't get that many murder victims out here, Inspector.”

“No, I guess not. Things are different where Sergeant Clements and I come from. So you're satisfied that death was due to the gunshot wound?”

“Oh yes, yes.” Nothling appeared to relax again. “It was right through the heart, dead centre. Oh, the bullet killed him, all right.”

“Did the bullet lodge in the heart?”

Nothling looked at Dr. Bedi, who said, “Just. It didn't break through the wall of the heart—it was in the right atrium. It entered the body near the spine.”

“Near the spine? You mean he was shot in the back?”

“Yes. I don't know much about guns—”

“Why should you, old girl?” Nothling interrupted. “That's the Inspector's trade, right, old chap?”

“Yes,” said Malone, old chap.

“The murderer probably hoped we wouldn't find it, that we'd think the spikes on the roller had killed him.”

“Why try to hide it?” said Clements, who had been taking his usual notes. “After he'd killed him, why put him in the module feeder? He must've known the body wouldn't be chewed up. It wouldn't be like feeding bits of a body into a sausage grinder.”

Nothling looked at Clements as if he were a gate-crasher; then he looked back at Malone. “The sergeant has a vivid imagination. Or is something like that an everyday occurrence in your trade?”

“Not everyday. But we did have a case like that once, a butcher minced a girl in a supermarket. Business at the supermarket fell off for a while. But you see Sergeant Clements's point? The body was never going to finish up any further than the roller.”

Nothling
shrugged, a major displacement. “I'm no detective, Inspector, no talent for that sort of thing at all. Every man to his last, eh?”