Pride's Harvest (31 page)

He said off-handedly, not glancing back at her, “I noticed that Gus Dircks turned up at the ball. I wonder what kept Trevor? Does he get on that well with Chess Hardstaff?”

“I don't know.” Ida sounded listless; or perhaps disappointed. He wondered if she had hoped for a better response from Clements. “He never discusses business with me. I don't have a head for it.”

Malone felt Lisa's hand on his knee, pressing it warningly. He took heed of her and said nothing for the rest of the journey home. When they drew up in front of the Waring homestead Ida was asleep and they had to wake her. She stretched, sat up, leaned forward and kissed each of them on the cheek.

“Lucky people,” she said and got out of the car and went quickly into the house.

The Malones sat silent till they heard the front door close behind her. Then Lisa said, “You
almost
put your foot in it tonight.”

“How?”

“Asking where Trevor was.”

“Was he with some woman somewhere?”

“I don't know where he was. He was in a bad mood all the way in to the ball this evening—it was damned uncomfortable being with them. He and Ida had a row before we left the house, a pretty fierce one. They kept it as quiet as they could, but I happened to pass their room . . .” She stopped, put her hand on his. “I'm glad we're not like them. Their marriage is falling apart.”

“You want to get in the back seat?”

“No, it's too uncomfortable. I'm not going to tear a hamstring—or whatever it is all those marvellously fit sportsmen are always tearing.”

“You think love-making is a sport?”

“It is in the back seat of a car, unless it's a stretch limousine. A feel is as far as we go tonight.”

“You're disgusting.”

“You want to give me a ticket?”

They kissed; then he said, “Do you think our marriage will ever fall apart?”

She stroked the back of his neck. “Darling . . . No, I don't. But don't ask me questions like that—not with your hand down
there.
I'm practical about most things, but not about love. If anything ever went wrong between us—and I'll kill you if ever it does—”

“That would be something wrong for a start.”

“What?”

“Killing me.”

“Be serious . . . If something went wrong, I couldn't sit down and analyse it. When you have to analyse what went wrong with love, there isn't any love left.”

“You think that's what's wrong with the Warings?”

“I suspect so. There's probably fault on both sides, but she's more romantic than he is, so she
feels
it more. Women are supposed to be the stronger of the sexes, but I sometimes think we feel disappointment more than men do.”

“Is Trevor chasing another woman?”

“Maybe. I don't know. I think it's mainly business they argue about. Trevor wants to be rich,
really
rich. He's just got the bug in the last couple of years, just when so many others are going broke. Don't you ever get that way.”

His doubts about Trevor Waring came back. If Waring was so keen to be rich, would he kill for it? But now was not the moment to think about that possibility.

He pressed his head back against Lisa's loving hand. It was moments like this when he wished he was retired, when he would be able to spend every hour of every day with her. Then, he told himself,
he
would be rich.

Ten minutes later he left her, promising not to be late for Mass the next morning. He drove down the long drive to the front gate, pulled up and got out as the other car, its headlights suddenly snapped off, stopped on the opposite side of the gate. Malone felt the tightening in his belly and he cursed himself for not having taken his Smith & Wesson out of the car boot where he had left it during the ball. Clements's was in there, too.

He saw the man get out of the car; then he relaxed when he recognized Trevor Waring. “You brought Ida home?” said Waring, opening the gate. “Thanks. I went in to the ball, but they said she'd left with you and Lisa. Sorry I'm late.”

If Waring had been out at Noongulli all night with Chess Hardstaff, why hadn't he called in at his own place to check if Ida was home before going all the way into the ball? The doubts scratched away in Malone's skull again.

But he came at them from side-on: “The Japanese giving you trouble?”

Waring stopped, the gate half-open. “What makes you say that?”

“Nothing. It was just a shot in the dark.”

Malone had left the lights of the Commodore on. He was standing with his back to them; but
Waring
was brightly exposed. He was wearing a dinner suit, his black tie neatly tied, and he looked out of place, lost, even though he was standing in the gateway of his own property. He doesn't belong here any more than I do, thought Malone; and wondered if Waring realized it. He was one with the silvertail stockbrokers and entrepreneurs, who were feeling the pinch now but for a decade had flown high, who were photographed every week at expensive charity balls, who drank only vintage champagne, French, none of your native piss, who drove Porsches and Ferraris and Rolls-Royces, who stood on the top branches of the plum tree that they had thought would fruit forever. He decided he must look into Waring's background, find out if he, like Hardstaff, had secrets locked away behind his sternum. All at once he understood, if only vaguely, why the Waring marriage was falling apart.

“No,” said Waring slowly, “there are no problems.”

“Just minor ones?”

“Such as?” Then Waring nodded, pushed the gate wide open. “Oh, you mean finding the murderer?”

“Did you discuss that this evening?”

“Of course.” But somehow Waring made it sound as if the discussion had been perfunctory. “Are you any further advanced than you were at my office this morning?”

“Of course . . . There's one thing, Trev. Curly Baldock says he's found someone who saw you driving through town last Monday night, going east. Did you go out to the gin?”

“What time is this supposed to be?”

“Around seven o'clock.”

Waring fiddled with his bow-tie; it suddenly came loose and he let it hang down his shirt-front. “Well, yes. Yes, I did. Perhaps I should have mentioned it, but you know how it is . . .”

“How?”

“It—” Waring sounded as if he were trying to choose his words carefully; but the right ones wouldn't come. “It would only have added suspicion to me. I was there twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, no more. That was when Ken Sagawa showed me the latest letter he had received. I didn't kill him,
Scobie.
He was alive when I left him. He said he'd think about my advice about going to the police.”

It was simple enough to be believable. “Did you notice if he had a business diary on his desk?”

Waring frowned, then nodded. “Yes, he did. I made a date for Gus Dircks, who was coming up from Sydney, and I to meet him out at the gin Friday evening. He wrote it down.”

“Doc Nothling wasn't to be there at the meeting? He's a shareholder.”

“No,” said Waring, choosing his one word carefully this time.

Malone said nothing, letting his silence say it for him.

Waring waited; then he said, “I'll back my car out of the way. Thanks again for bringing Ida home. I hope you all had a good time.”

Malone nodded, turned to walk back to the Commodore in the moment that, right in front of him, one of the headlights went dark with a shattering of glass. Instinctively he dropped flat in the dust, shouting, “Get down!” as a second, ricocheting shot went whining away into the darkness. He crawled up beside the car, reached up through the open front door, switched off the headlights and fumbled for the keys. Then, still flat to the ground, he snaked his way to the rear of the car, flinching as another bullet thudded into the fender right above him. He unlocked the boot lid, pushed it up, rose to his knees and groped frantically in the darkness for one of the guns. A fourth bullet hit one of the tail-lights and he felt a piece of the red plastic bite into his hand. Then he had both guns, had dropped flat again and rolled over, looking for the flash of the next shot.

He called out: “Are you all right, Trev?”

“I'm okay.” He didn't know why, but he was surprised there was no hint of fear in Waring's voice. Unless he knew who was shooting and knew, too, that he was not the target . . . “Where is he?”

Malone didn't reply at once; he was trying to stifle the doubts that kept recurring about Waring. He was becoming paranoid about him, as he had been about Hardstaff. Then he called out, “I'm not sure. Somewhere over to the right. Have you got a gun?”

“There's a Twenty-two in the boot. I don't know if I can get to it—”

“Leave it there.”

Then
he saw the flash out in the scrub an instant before the bullet thumped into the car right above him. He brought up one of the S & Ws and fired two quick shots, then he rolled away from the car, fearful that another shot might explode the petrol tank. He lay waiting for another flash in the darkness; the seconds seemed to turn into minutes, time stretching out like a rubber band; but he knew only a minute at the most could have passed before he heard the car start up out on the highway. He stood up, but he could see nothing through the trees that bordered the road. He heard the car accelerating, the hum of it coming distinctly on the still air; then he saw its headlights in the distance, the arrow of their beam growing thinner and smaller as the car, its sound now gone, sped away.

Waring, dusting himself down without looking at himself, staring off into the darkness, came up beside him. “Is it any use going after him?”

“Forget it. Are there any back roads that'll take him back to town?”

“There are a couple. You think that's where he'll head?”

“The only other likely place out in that direction, other than your father-in-law's, is Noongulli. I don't think Chess Hardstaff or anyone working for him would be stupid enough to head straight for home.”

“Oh, for Chrissake! Chess? Shooting at you?”

Malone tried one for size: “He could've been shooting at you.”

Even in the dimness of the starlight he saw Waring jerk. “Me? Why me?”

He changed tack, another shot in the dark: “Have you seen young Phil Chakiros since this afternoon?”

“Phil? You mean about the doping of my horse? Yes. But he's not a—”

“Killer? What did you tell him when you spoke to him?”

“I sacked him, told him he was on his own if there was an inquiry. If he's found guilty, then I'll sue him for the value of the dead horse. He has nothing, but his father can pay—he pays for everything for him. It's not the money I'm after . . . Jesus, do you really think Phil was out there in the scrub shooting at me?”

“
I don't know. Him—or it could've been two or three other people.”

“But they were shooting at
you.
There wasn't a bullet came near me—” He stopped. “You're having me on. What's the point of this, Malone? You're still trying to tie me in with the Sagawa murder, aren't you?”

“Forget it, Trev,” said Malone wearily, all at once wanting to be rid of the doubts; at least for tonight. “Why did you have anything to do with Phil Chakiros in the first place?”

“He's a good trainer, he really understands horses. That's what he wants to do eventually, go down to Sydney, take out a licence for city tracks.”

“He can say goodbye to that ambition. Righto, move your car, Trev. Will they be worried if they've heard the shots up at the house?”

“Maybe, but I don't think so. „Roo shooters often come out here at night. Saturday nights, too, we sometimes get the local louts, they drive out along this road shooting at the road signs. I've appeared for some of them in court.”

“Don't say anything, then. Lisa worries enough about me.”

“All right.” He went back to his car, stopped by its open front door. “You still think I had something to do with the murder.”

“Did I ever say I thought that?”

“You implied as much. But maybe that's the lawyer in me. We're always looking for implication and inference.”

Waring got into his car and drove past the Commodore and up towards his house, out of sight behind the black screen of trees. Malone stood in the darkness, listening to the receding sound of the car till there was only the silence of the bush, that heavy hush in which any noise, the snapping of a twig, the call of a bird, is only an accent of the stillness. He felt himself tightening, the flesh contracting on his bones; he backed up against the car and looked around. He was used to the dark of city streets; his ears were attuned to city sounds. But there was a menace to this stillness, the aboriginal threat that the first explorers and settlers had found so unnerving, something primeval that the country's civilization had yet
to
conquer. Suddenly he felt his hands, each still holding a gun, begin to tremble.

He heard a rustling on the other side of the car and he swung round, both guns coming up. Then a kangaroo came out of the scrub and loped across the drive; then another and another. A dozen or more of them came out of the scrub and disappeared again into the darkness, ghostly and silent but for the faint thump-thump as they hit the ground in their unhurried rhythm, arrogantly unafraid of the threat of
him.

III

Though it was one o'clock in the morning, the lights were on in the Chakiros home. It was a large one-storeyed house, built perhaps twenty years ago and undistinguished in style, the sort one saw in developers' brochures, stamped out like biscuits from a tract of dough. There were three cars in the driveway, Chakiros's Mercedes and two Fairlanes. Malone felt the bonnets of all three; they were barely warm, almost cold. Then he went up the three steps to the wide front veranda and rang the bell on the front door.