Pride's Harvest (27 page)

“Do you know anyone in the district who was a POW, Wally?”

Mungle shook his head. “None, as far as I know. But maybe they wouldn't wanna talk about it. Not if they had a bad time.”

“I'll ask Ray Chakiros tonight. He'll be at the ball, you can bet.”

“Maybe you wouldn't have to be a POW,” said Clements slowly, “to want to kill the son of a war criminal.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Doc Nothling was born in Burma. I wonder what happened to his parents? His old man, for instance?”

IV

The gin manager's house had been the farmhouse on one of the original properties that had been bought up for the cotton acreage. It was an old timber, one-storeyed structure that had been renovated and re-painted; the small garden at its front had almost the neatness and formalism of a Japanese garden. The yards at the back had been cleaned up, but, with a bow to local heritage, some of the old, weathered buildings had been retained. The woolshed, not a large one, was still there; the machinery shed had been repaired, its missing timbers replaced, and now housed a Nissan Patrol wagon. The chutes, slippery as brown ice, still ran from the woolshed into the yards, but the yards themselves had been reduced in size, though their railings had been replaced. Even the outdoor dunny had been renovated and painted pale blue, a monument to the fact that men may come and men may go, but their waste goes on forever. Malone sometimes felt that half the nation's literary education had been taken in while sitting on
a
toilet seat. There was no rusting machinery lying about, the usual skeletons of a farmyard.

Koga and his three bosses were sitting in comfortable chairs on the front veranda when Malone and Clements arrived. Koga was on his feet at once; the older Japanese rose more leisurely.

Koga introduced them, deferential as a court page to both his executives and the two detectives. Malone felt like an ambassador presenting his credentials. “I told Mr. Tajiri you would probably be coming out to see him.”

Tajiri was the president of Okada Corporation, the parent company of South Cloud. He was in his mid-sixties but well preserved, with iron-grey hair neatly parted and brushed flat on his head, a firm square jaw and rimless glasses with gold sidebars. He wore a green golf shirt, a yellow cashmere cardigan, cavalry twill trousers and expensive walking shoes. Malone wondered if he had brought his golf gear with him.

“So you are investigating Mr. Sagawa's death.” His English was as good as Koga's, perhaps a little more precise, as if he did not want to make any mistakes in front of a very junior employee. “Very sad. We hope it will not mean the severing of our relations with Collamundra.”

The other two men, Hayashi and Yoshida, both in their mid-forties, as neatly and expensively dressed as their president but not as casually, nodded their neat heads. It was the neatness of all three and their smallness that made Malone feel that he and Clements probably looked like a couple of football oafs.

“Very sad,” said Hayashi and Yoshida, but none of the three executives appeared to be overwhelmed by Sagawa's death. Still, Malone told himself, he knew nothing of what emotion Japanese showed in public.

“Had he been with your company long?”

Tajiri looked at Hayashi, evidently the personnel man; or perhaps he had been a friend of Sagawa's, but first and foremost was a company man. That was supposed to be the big thing with Japanese . . .
Come on, Malone. You're jumping at judgements.

“He came to us straight from high school. We sent him to university in Japan, then to
university
in the United States. He was a very valued worker.”

“Do you have a photo of him?”

Malone looked at Koga. It struck him that he had no idea what Sagawa looked like, not that it mattered now. He had not gone to the morgue to look at the body; when they had told him how it had been chopped up by the spikes, he had chickened out. He could still be squeamish at what could be done to what had once been living flesh.

Koga went into the house and Malone gestured to the other three Japanese to resume their seats. He and Clements sat on the veranda railing. All around them the fields stretched away, silent and deserted now, darker patches showing like sharp-edged currents where the harvesters had sailed through the white sea.

“Will you gentlemen be staying long?”

“Not long,” said Tajiri. “We shall wait till Mr. Sagawa's body is released to us, then we shall take it back with us to Japan for cremation. Those are his family's wishes.”

“You have tidied up all your business here? With your partners?”

The eyes were still for a moment behind the glasses. “You know our partners?”

“Were they supposed to be secret? I didn't realize that.”

Tajiri lost his composure for just a moment; he said hastily, “Oh no, not at all. I just had not appreciated the thoroughness of Australian police investigation.”

Wait till I tell you how thorough we can be
. . . But he said nothing about that. He took the eight-by-six photo Koga had brought out. “It was with his belongings, Inspector. I packed them all in his suitcase this morning. I took that photograph only two weeks ago.”

Malone held up the photo and Clements leaned close to him to look at it. Clements said, “He's nothing like I expected.”

“Me, neither.”

They were looking at a full-length photo of a slimly-built man whose energy seemed to spring out at them; his head was thrown back and he was laughing, showing good-looking teeth in a broad good-
looking
face. His hands were on his hips and he seemed to be rocking backwards and forwards on the balls of his feet. He looked like a man who would have had a zest for life, who would never have had the patience for Zen or other ancient contemplations, who would have been thoroughly modern . . .

“The hair,” said Malone.

Tajiri glanced at Hayashi, who said, “Ah yes, that did sometimes disturb us. It did not fit—”
our company image:
but he stopped before he said that. “We turned a blind eye to it. He was too good a manager for us to quarrel over whether he went to a hair stylist or a plain barber.”

Malone looked at Sagawa again. He had seen pictures of young Japanese swingers wearing their hair like this: shoulder-length, blow-waved. But they would probably have been half Sagawa's age, rock musicians or in television, maybe a sanitized Tokyo chapter of Hell's Angels; but they would not have been cotton gin managers, field technocrats. Sagawa was not at all what the two detectives had imagined him to be; not that that mattered, either. He still was dead, murdered, blow-waved or short-back-and-sides.

Malone handed back the photo. “Was he a good family man?”

The three older Japanese looked at each other at the question. Then Yoshida, who had been silent up till now, said, “His wife never complained.”

“Do your employees' wives complain to the company if their husbands are not good family men?”

“No. It is not our custom. Do Australian wives complain like that?”

“No, Australian wives handle things like that in their own way.”

“How?”

“Sometimes they shoot them,” said Clements, the bachelor.

The senior men looked at each other, glad that Japanese wives were better behaved than that.

Then Malone said casually, as if he had only just thought of it, “Did you know Mr. Sagawa's father was executed as a war criminal?”

There was a long silence. The timbers of the house creaked as the warmth of the day went out of them in the gathering dusk. The veranda faced east and the house's fading shadow stretched away to
take
the colour out of the garden. A crow went overhead, heading home, its croak scratching the silence. When Tajiri spoke, his voice, too, sounded like a croak.

“Yes, we knew. I served under Major Nibote in Burma, before he was invalided back to take charge of a prisoner-of-war camp. I was a very junior officer and he saved my life in action.”

“So you sponsored his son as a sort of repayment for that?”

“It was a debt, Inspector. What we call
giri.”

“Did Sagawa know what his father had been and how he died?”

“Yes.”

“Did he ever discuss it with you?”

“I would never have allowed it.”

Malone glanced at Koga. “Did he ever mention it to you, Mr. Koga?”

It was plain from the look on Koga's face that the revelation of Sagawa's father's execution was a shock. “Never.”

Malone turned back to Tajiri. “Sagawa was killed in the service of your company, Mr. Tajiri. He would probably still be alive if he had not been sent here. Do you have a debt to
his
children?”

The three younger Japanese did not look at their company president; but Malone felt they were as interested in the answer as he himself was. Perhaps they had their own idea of what corporate debt was. Tajiri stared at Malone, looked away for a moment, then back at the detective.

“We shall take care of his family, Inspector. Just find his murderer.”

“You want him found?”

That shook Tajiri; his head reared back a little as if Malone had shoved something under his nose. “Of course, Inspector. Why not?”

“Indeed,” said Malone, as formal as the four Japanese, “why not?”

Clements, lounging on the veranda rail, as informal as a pub drinker except for the lack of a singlet and a pair of thongs, said, “There's one thing, Mr. Koga. I've been through everything Sergeant Baldock took into the station from Mr. Sagawa's desk. There's no sign of a business diary.”

Malone
loved Clements's little surprises, even if they were sometimes a surprise to himself. He always left the “murder box” and its contents of general evidence to Clements: the big man was sometimes a magician in what he could produce from it.

Koga said, “I noticed it was missing the day after Mr. Sagawa was murdered. I looked for it to see if he had made any appointments that I would have to keep for him. When it wasn't there, I assumed Sergeant Baldock had taken it along with everything else.”

“What sort of diary did he keep?” Koga frowned and Clements went on, “I mean, was it a meticulous one? You know, detailed entries for every day?”

“Oh very. Mr. Sagawa was a most meticulous person.” The young man looked over his shoulder at his three superiors; Malone wondered if he was laying it on for their benefit. “He would not only write down his appointments, but later would enter up his remarks on what had taken place. It was the basis for his monthly report.”

Clements looked at Malone. “It looks as if the killer came back afterwards and pinched the diary. That means the chances are whoever killed him came to see him on business, otherwise his name wouldn't be in the diary.”

Malone nodded; then turned to Koga. “Test your memory, Mr. Koga. Write down the names of everyone who came to see Mr. Sagawa the week before he died. Take your time, but I'd like it by tomorrow morning.” Then he glanced at Tajiri. “You wanted to say something, Mr. Tajiri?”

“If—
when
you catch the murderer, what will happen to him? Will he be hanged or electrocuted or what?”

“We don't have capital punishment in this country, Mr. Tajiri. Sorry.”

Tajiri made a small deprecating gesture with his hand. “Civilization has many modes. Major Nibote would be interested if he knew that his son's murderer would not be executed.”

“Yes,” said Malone, wishing he had a more telling answer. Then he said, “I don't notice any security men around here today. You're not afraid the killer will come back?”

All four Japanese looked at each other; then Tajiri looked back at Malone. “The thought had
occurred
to us, Inspector.” If it had, they had made a good job of concealing the thought. If Tokyo cops had to put up with Oriental inscrutability, Malone didn't envy them their job. “But we don't want to turn the cotton farm into an armed camp.”

“I'll suggest to Inspector Narvo that he post a man out here, three of them doing eight-hour shifts.”

“Will that be popular with the townspeople? I understand the feeling . . .” His voice tapered off.

“The police have to do a lot of things that aren't popular with the voters, Mr. Tajiri.” He stepped off the veranda and Clements followed him. “Incidentally—” He paused. “Just on sixty per cent of the people in this State are in favour of capital punishment. If that's any satisfaction to you.”

“Not really, Inspector,” said Tajiri, his face a blank page. “But perhaps we are all much more alike than we think.”

6

I

THE CUP
ball was held in the only building at the showground. It stood just outside the showground itself, an iron-roofed, timber-walled structure that had begun life a hundred years ago as a woolshed, been added to and renovated and now was an all-purpose building. It served as a home crafts' pavilion for the annual Collamundra show; as the occasional display showroom for agricultural equipment salesmen; and as the venue for the monthly dances and the annual Cup ball. It was two hundred feet long and a hundred feet wide and tonight it was overflowing, despite the fact that a second dance floor had been laid outdoors on a hard, dusty patch between the hall and the carnival inside the showground proper. A six-piece band, Five Drovers and Their Dog, were belting out their version of “Lola,” while over at the carnival the horses on the merry-go-round were still waltzing to “The Sidewalks of New York.” The circus elephants trumpeted; a lion roared, carnival spruikers shouted; young bucks, already well liquored, yahooed; girls screamed with delight and fake resistance as their panties came down ahead of schedule. Bedlam on the Noongulli:
It's so restful out here,
Lisa had said. Out in the scrub and timber the night-birds gave up and fled, wondering if the world had gone mad.