Pride's Harvest (3 page)

Baldock returned with her from the main bar. She was a tall, full-figured woman in her mid-thirties with dark hair that looked as if it had just come out from under a hairdresser's blower, an attractive face that appeared as if it had become better-looking as she had grown older and more sure of
herself.
She had an automatic smile, a tool of trade that Malone knew from experience not all Australian innkeepers had learned to use. Narelle Potter, he guessed, could look after herself, even in a pub brawl.

“Gentlemen—” She had to adjust her voice from its strident first note; the gentlemen she usually addressed were those in her bars, all of them deaf to anything dulcet. “Happy to have you. We'll try and make you comfortable and welcome.”

She looked first at Malone, then at Clements, who gave her a big smile and turned on some of his King's Cross charm. It worked well with the girls on the beat in that area; but evidently Narelle Potter, too, liked it. She gave him a big smile in return.

Baldock left them, saying he would meet them tomorrow out at the cotton farm, and Mrs. Potter took them up to their room. It was big and comfortable, but strictly hotel functional; the heritage spirit ran dry at the door. There were three prints on the walls: one of a Hans Heysen painting of eucalypts, the other two of racehorses standing with pricked ears and a haughty look as if the stewards had just accused them of being doped.

“You like the horses?” said Clements, whose betting luck was legendary, at least to Malone.

“My late husband loved them, he had a string of them. I still have two, just as a hobby. One of them is running in the Cup.” She looked at Malone. “You're here about the murder out at the cotton gin?”

Malone had put his valise on the bed and was about to open it; but the abrupt switch in the conversation made him turn round. If Mrs. Potter's tone wasn't strident again, it had certainly got a little tight.

“That's right. Did you know Mr. Sagawa?”

“Oh yes. Yes, he was often in here at the hotel. He was unlike most Japs, he went out of his way to mix with people. He tried too hard.” The tightness was still there.

“In what way?”

“Oh, various ways.” She was turning down the yellow chenille bedspreads.

“Do you get many Japanese out here?”

“
Well, no-o. But I've heard what they're like, they like to keep to themselves. The other Jap out at the farm, the young one, we never see him in here.”

“There's another one?”

“He's the trainee manager or something. I don't know his name. He's only been here a little while.”

“So you wouldn't know how he got on with Mr. Sagawa?”

She paused, bent over the bed, and looked up at him. He noticed, close up, that she was either older than he had first thought or the years had worked hard on her. “How would I know?”

He ignored that. “Did Mr. Sagawa have any friends here in town?”

“I don't really know.” She straightened up, turned away from him; he had the feeling that her rounded hip was bumping him off, like a footballer's would. “He tried to be friendly, like I said, but I don't know that he was actually
friends
with anyone.”

“Is there any anti-Japanese feeling in the town?”

She didn't answer that at once, but went into the bathroom, came out, said, “Just checking the girl left towels for you. Will you be in for dinner?”

Now wasn't the time to push her, Malone thought. Questioning a suspect or a reluctant witness is a form of seduction; he was better than most at it, though in his sexual seduction days his approach had been along the national lines of a bull let loose in a cow-stall.

“Sergeant Clements will be. I'm going out of town for dinner.”

“Oh, you know someone around here?” Her curiosity was so open, she stoked herself on what she knew of what went on in the district. She'll be useful, Malone thought, even as he was irritated by her sticky-beaking.

“No, I just have an introduction to someone. I'd better have my shower.”

He took off his tie, began to unbutton his shirt and she took the hint. She gave Clements another big smile, swung her hips as if breaking through a tackle, and went out, closing the door after her.

Clements's bed creaked as he sank his bulk on to it. “I don't think I'm gunna enjoy this.”

Malone
nodded as he stripped down to his shorts. He still carried little excess weight, but his muscles had softened since the days when he had been playing cricket at top level. So far, though, he didn't creak, like an old man or Clements's bed, when he moved. He tried not to think about ageing.

“Get on the phone to Sydney while I have my shower, find out if they're missing us.”

When he came out of the bathroom five minutes later Clements was just putting down the phone. “Another quiet day. Where have all the killers gone?”

“Maybe they've come bush.”

“Christ, I hope not.”

II

It was almost dark when Malone got out to Sundown. The property lay fifteen kilometres west of town, 20,000 acres on the edge of the plains that stretched away in the gathering gloom to the dead heart of the continent. On his rare excursions inland he always became conscious of the vast loneliness of Australia, particularly at night. There was a frightening emptiness to it; he knew the land was full of spirits for the Aborigines, but not for him. There was a pointlessness to it all, as if God had created it and then run out of ideas what to do next. Malone was intelligent enough, however, to admit that his lack of understanding was probably due to his being so steeped in the city. There were spirits
there,
the civilized ones, some of them darker than even the Aborigines knew, but he had learned to cope with them.

He took note of the blunt sign, “Shut the gate!”, got back into the car and drove along the winding track, over several cattle grids, and through the grey gums, now turning black no matter what colour they had been during the day. He came out to the open paddocks where he could see the lights of the main homestead in the distance. His headlamps picked out small groups of sheep standing like grey rocks off to one side; once he stamped on the brakes as a kangaroo leapt across in front of him. Then he came to a second gate leading into what he would later be told was the home paddock. Finally he was on a gravel driveway that led up in a big curve to the low sprawling house surrounded by lawns and backed to the west by a line of trees.

Lisa
was waiting for him at the three steps that led up to the wide veranda. “Did you bring your laundry?”

“We-ell, yes. There's some in the boot—”

“I thought there might be.” But she kissed him warmly: he was worth a dirty shirt or two. He looked at her in the light from the veranda. She was blonde, on the cusp between exciting beauty and serenity; he tried, desperately, never to think of
her
ageing. “Oh, I've missed you!”

Then their children and the Carmody clan spilled out of the house, a small crowd that made him feel as if he were some sort of celebrity. He hugged the three children, then turned to meet Sean Carmody, his daughter Ida, her husband Trevor Waring and their four children. He had met Ida once down in Sydney, but none of the others.

“Daddy, you know what? I've learned to ride a horse!” That was Tom, his eight-year-old. “I fell off, but.”

“Have you found the murderer yet?” Maureen, the ten-year-old, was a devotee of TV crime, despite the efforts of her parents, who did everything but blindfold her to stop her from watching.

“Oh God,” said Claire, fourteen and heading helter-skelter for eighteen and laid-back sophistication. “She's at it again.”

Malone, his arm round Lisa's waist, was herded by the crowd into the house. At once he knew it was the sort of house that must have impressed Lisa; he could see it in her face, almost as if
she
owned it and was showing it off to him. This was one of half a dozen in the district that had seen the area grow around it; a prickling in his Celtic blood told him there would be ghosts in every room, self-satisfied ones who knew that each generation of them had made the right choice. Sean Carmody had bought it only ten years ago, but he had inherited and cherished its history. This was a
rich
house, but its value had nothing to do with the price real-estate agents would put on it.

“I live here with Sean,” Tas, the eldest of the Carmody grandchildren, told Malone over a beer, “I manage the property. Mum and Dad and my brothers and sister live in a house they built over on the east boundary. You would have passed it as you came from town.”

He
was a rawboned twenty-two-year-old, as tall as Malone, already beginning to assume the weatherbeaten face that, like a tribal mask, was the badge of all the men, and some of the women, who spent their lives working these sun-baked plains. His speech was a slow drawl, but there was an intelligence in his dark-blue eyes that said his mind was well ahead of his tongue.

“He's a good boy,” said Sean Carmody after dinner as he and Trevor Waring led the way out to a corner of the wide side veranda that had been fly-screened. The three men sat down with their coffee and both Carmody and Waring lit pipes. “Ida won't let us smoke in the house. My mother's name was Ida, too, and she wouldn't let my father smoke in their tent. We lived in tents all the time I was a kid. Dad was a drover. He'd have been pleased with his great-grandson. He's a credit to you and Ida,” he said to Waring. “All your kids are. Yours, too, Scobie.”

“The credit's Lisa's.”

“No, I don't believe that. Being a policeman isn't the ideal occupation for a father. It can't be ideal for your kids, either.”

“No, it isn't,” Malone conceded. “You can't bring your work home and talk about it with them. Not in Homicide.”

“The kids in the district are all talking about our latest, er, homicide.” Trevor Waring was a solidly built man of middle height, in his middle forties, with a middling loud voice; moderate in everything, was how Malone would have described him. He was a solicitor in Collamundra and Malone guessed that a country town lawyer could not afford excess in opinions or anything else. Especially in a district as conservative as this one. “I noticed at dinner that you dodged, quite neatly, all the questions they tossed at you. I have to apologize for my kids. They don't get to meet detectives from Homicide.”

“I hope they don't meet any more. You said the
latest
murder. There've been others?”

“We've had three or four over the last fifteen or twenty years. The last one was about—what, Sean?—about five or six years ago. An Abo caught his wife and a shearer, up from Sydney, in bed together—he shot them, killed the shearer. They gave the Abo twelve years, I think it was, and took him to Bathurst Gaol. He committed suicide three months later, hung himself in his cell. They do that, you probably know
that
as well as I do. They can't understand white man's justice.”

“Are there any Aborigines linked with the Sagawa murder? You have some around here, I gather.”

There was no illumination out here on the side veranda other than the light coming through a window from the dining-room, where Lisa and Ida were now helping the housekeeper to clear the table. Even so, in the dim light, Malone saw the glance that passed between Waring and his father-in-law.

“I don't think we'd better say anything on that,” said Carmody after puffing on his pipe. “There's been enough finger-pointing around here already.”

Malone was momentarily disappointed; he had expected more from Carmody in view of Baldock's description of him. The old man was in his late seventies, lean now but still showing traces of what once must have been a muscular back and shoulders, the heritage of his youth as a shearer. His hair was white but still thick and he had the sort of looks that age and an inner peace and dignity had made almost handsome. He had lived a life that Malone, learning of it from Lisa, envied; but he wore it comfortably, without flourish or advertisement. Despite his years abroad he still had an Australian accent, his own flag. Or perhaps, coming back to where he had grown up, he had heard an echo and recaptured it, a memorial voice.

“The police haven't pointed a finger at anyone. Not to me.”

Occasional confession to the public, though it did nothing for the soul, was good for a reaction.

“The police out here are a quiet lot.” Carmody puffed on his pipe again. “But you've probably noticed that already?”

“You mean they don't like to make waves?”

Carmody laughed, a young man's sound. “The last time we had a wave out here was about fifty million years ago. But yes, you're right. Maybe you should go out and see Chess Hardstaff. He rules the waves around here.”

“Chess Hardstaff? Not
the
Hardstaff?”

Carmody nodded. “The King-maker himself. He owns Noongulli, it backs on to our property
out
there—” He nodded to the west, now lost in the darkness. “The Hardstaffs were the first ones to settle here—after the Abos, of course. He runs the Rural Party, here in New South Wales and nationally. They call him The King to his face and he just nods and accepts it.”

“I'm surprised he's not Sir Chess,” said Malone.

“His old man was a knight, same name, and Chess wanted to go one better. He didn't want to be Sir Chester Hardstaff, Mark Two. He wanted a peerage, Lord Collamundra. He should've gone to Queensland when the Nats were in up there, they'd have given him one. But he'd have had to call himself Lord Surfers' Paradise.”

Carmody said all this without rancour; it was an old newspaperman speaking. He had left his life as a youthful shearer and drover, gone to Spain, fought in the civil war there on the Republican side, begun covering it as a stringer for a British provincial paper, moved on to being European correspondent for an American wire service, covered World War Two and several smaller wars since and finally retired twenty years ago when his wife died and he had come home to take over Sundown from his mother, who was in her last year. It had been a much smaller property then, but he had added to it, put his own and his dead wife's money into it, and now it was one of the showplaces of the district, producing some of the best merinos in the State. He was a successful grazier, running 12,000 head of sheep and 500 stud beef cattle, having achieved the dream of every old-time drover (though not that of his father Paddy, who would have remained a drover all his life if Sean's mother had not been the strong one in the family). He was all that, yet he was still, deep in his heart, one of the old-time newspapermen, the sort who brushed aside the quick beat-up, who would dig and dig, like ink-stained archaeologists, to the foundations of a story. Malone, recognizing him for what he was, decided he would take his time with Sean Carmody.