Pride's Harvest (40 page)

“But why didn't you just divorce her?”

“Amanda, my dear—”

He raised a hand, but then it stopped in mid-air of its own accord. As if she understood, she raised her arm and put her wrist within the lock of his fingers, felt them close on her with what she knew was love. Max Nothling, watching from a distance, wondered at the gesture of affection, of intimacy, between the two people he feared and hated most.

“My dear—” There was no hint of tears; he was not capable of them. “Pride. You and I both killed for pride.”

III

Malone was aware of the momentary hush as he and Clements appeared at the party. As they got out of the Commodore and joined Lisa and the Warings, alighting from the Mercedes, he felt the sudden chill come across the lawns from the crowd of fifty or sixty who were congregated between the swimming pool and the artificial-turfed tennis court. Faces turned towards them, small satellite dishes ready for any message the outsider cops might have brought with them. Then Max Nothling, face flushed from an early start to his drinking, came towards them.

“
Welcome, welcome! I trust you and your colleague are off duty, Inspector? Oh, this is
Mrs.
Inspector Malone? How can anyone so charming be married to a cop?”

“We're not married,” said Lisa, giving him what Malone recognized as her cut-your-throat smile. “He's just my parole officer.”

Nothling recognized the smile for what it was; he showed some true charm by graciously retreating. “I apologize, Mrs. Malone. I'm not always the best of hosts, am I, Ida?”

“You do all right, Max,” said Ida, adding her own touch of graciousness. “What's the champagne this evening, Aussie or French?”

“French for you ladies, local stuff for the natives. May I offer an arm to you both?”

He took the women away and Waring said, “He spreads more bullshit than a yard full of Herefords.”

“He's as nervous as a bull that's just about to be turned into a bullock,” said Clements.

“You haven't come to arrest him, have you? Not at his own party?”

“No,” said Malone.

Waring, about to move away to greet another guest, turned back. “Who
have
you come to arrest?”

“No one,” said Malone. “Not yet . . . Before you go, Trev. How'd your meetings with the Japanese turn out?”

“I see them over there. Why don't you go and ask them?”

“No, Trev, I'm asking you.”

“I don't know that it's any of your business, Scobie. But if you must know—they're not selling. They are staying on. They set a price we just couldn't meet.”

“So they're not worried about the anti-Jap feeling?”

“Evidently not. But then, all that far away in Japan, they don't have to suffer it, do they? It's the consuls of empire who cop the spears in the back.”

Malone grinned. “You haven't become anti-imperialist, have you?”

Waring
smiled, the first time since getting out of his car. “Lawyers have to believe in empires, of one sort or another. Otherwise we'd all finish up just working for Legal Aid.”

As he walked away, Dr. Bedi came floating towards them, shimmering like a green-and-gold butterfly in another sari. She carried a small tray on which was a flute of champagne and two glasses of beer. “Your wife told me you were both beer drinkers.”

“Are you a hostess?”

She put down the tray when the two men had taken their beers, then held the champagne flute in the long, elegant fingers which had none of the plumpness of the rest of her. “No, I'm just standing in for the moment. Lady Amanda has just gone into the house with her father.”

“Lady Amanda?”

“A slip of the tongue. That's what the nurses at the hospital call her. Don't quote me.”

“How are the jockeys? Recovering?”

“Some of them are going to be out of action for quite a while. I believe they are going to sue the Turf Club for not policing the track properly—it's the Age of Litigation, sue anyone and everyone. We in the medical profession know all about that.”

“They're not going to sue the Aborigines?”

“What's the point? There's no money there.”

“Dr. Bedi, if we come to you to make a statement about the Sagawa case, will you do it?”

She lifted her flute, looked at it as if it were a test-tube. Then she drained it in one gulp and said, “No. All I'm going to say is what was in the autopsy report.”

“But that was signed by Dr. Nothling.”

“Precisely.”

“We could report you to the medical ethics council, or whatever it is.”

“I don't think it would be worth your time and trouble, Inspector. You are not going to solve the murder that way.”

She raised the flute again, seemed surprised to find it empty, then turned and walked away, the
sari
fluttering about her like wings that couldn't be lifted to bear her away to somewhere where she would feel more at home. Because, Malone thought, I don't think she'll ever really be at home here in Collamundra.

The crowd had turned away from watching the two detectives and were intent on enjoying themselves. These people looked on themselves as the salt of the nation; Malone, grudgingly like a true city type, had to concede their right to their self-esteem. A great part of the country's export wealth still came, after almost two hundred years, from the efforts of these men and women on the land. But, like the Veterans Legion, they no longer had the political clout they had once had. The trouble was that the new rulers, the city bankers and entrepreneurs and developers, were going bankrupt and so, said the men and women on the land, was the country. Serves it right, they said, never loudly but emphatically. They, too, might go bankrupt eventually, but they would never starve. They would kill the fat lamb, slaughter the unsold beef, eat the grain the Wheat Board could no longer afford to hoard. All they had to do was stave off the banks when the time came. In the meantime they looked prosperous, kept a more watchful eye on the dry sky than on the banks and discussed the proliferation of taxes; the diminishing of subsidies; the price of wool, grain and cotton; and exchanged what gossip had sprouted since their last get-together. They discussed everything but the Sagawa murder, but occasionally some eyes would glance towards Malone and Clements, as if the grit of conscience had got under their lids.

“Well,” said Malone.

“Well, what?”

“Well, there's no point in putting it off. I think we'd better go in and talk to Hardstaff.”

“What, about Lady Amanda?”

“We don't have any hard evidence on her—yet. If she's as smart as I think she is, she'll have got rid of her gun.”

“She hung on to it after she'd shot Sagawa, at least till last night when she took the shots at you. Maybe she's held on to it to have another crack at you.”

“Why me? Why not you?”

“
Privileges of rank, mate. What do we do? Go into the house uninvited?”

“I think the invitation said it was open house, at least for the elite. We won't have to break the door down.”

“That's good. I didn't bring the sledgehammer.”

IV

Inside the house, in the large study-library, Amanda had just told her father what she had done last night. He was aghast, was
shocked,
a reaction so strange to him that for a moment he felt physically ill.

She saw how pale he had suddenly become. “Sit down, Dad—you look as if you're going to faint. I didn't mean—”

“No, I'm all right.” He pulled himself together, settled his stomach with a dose of cold humour: “Are you going to make a habit of it?”

“Don't joke. Last night I thought it would be a solution—”

He interrupted brutally: “Killing a policeman? A solution? You were either drunk or mad!” Even in his own ears he sounded like the father of old, the one who had never had any encouragement for his children because he had never known how to express it without embarrassment. He retreated at once, not wanting to sever the tenuous bond that had been woven in the past twenty minutes: “No, you're not mad. But you must have been drunk?”

It was almost a plea for her to say yes; and she obliged: “I'd had too much to drink, more than I usually do. I was all of a sudden
afraid
of him, he's so—so tenacious. He'd never give up on trying to solve who killed Ken Sagawa, not the way the others gave up on Mother's killing.” She hadn't meant to be cruel and she hurriedly said, “I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like that.”

“It's all right, I didn't have anything to do with that. It was your grandfather—I don't know whom he spoke to or what he said, but the police all at once stopped looking for whoever killed her. At least here in the district.”

“Malone is outside now. I saw him arriving as we came in here.”

“
I don't understand why you invited him.”

“I think
you
invited him.”

He was puzzled. “Me?”

“I mean that part of you that's inside me. We're alike, Dad, more than you know. Or perhaps you know it now. You used to invite your political enemies, the ones who wanted to kill you—politically anyway—you used to invite them to your parties at the national conference. It was almost as if you were betting that if you were close enough to them, you could see the knives coming. Inspector Malone isn't going to go away just because I turn my back on him.”

He had to admire her courage, even if it was reckless; after all, it was only a repeat of what he had done himself, a recklessness born of arrogance. He felt proud of her, in a
mad
sort of way. Then he decided it was time to start campaigning: “Did you use the same gun?”

She nodded. “The Tikka.”

“That wasn't smart. You should have used another gun, that would have confused them—” He was about to say he was disappointed in her; but that would have sounded like the old days. “We'll have to get rid of the gun. Where is it?”

“There, in the rack.”

He went to the rack against the one wall not lined with books, where a dozen rifles and shotguns were stood like billiard-cues. He took out the Tikka. “I'll get rid of it. Put it away somewhere till I'm leaving.”

He paused and looked at a framed photograph on a shelf above the gun rack. A much younger Amanda and Max stood arm-in-arm, smiling at the camera with genuine happiness; her figure had hardly changed over the years, but Max had not then become fat, was big but muscular and handsome. He thought it odd that the photo should be placed immediately above the weapons and he wondered who had put it there and when.

“Dad,” she said, “don't put yourself at risk for me. Please.”

“Amanda—” He wanted to touch her again, but he was holding the gun with both hands. “Let
me
handle it my way. There'll be no risk, but if there is, whatever I do, don't interfere. I'm the boss, remember that. There's young Chester to be considered. I'm expendable now—” It would have rocked his enemies to their heels if they had heard him say that. “But don't worry. We'll come through this all right.” Then someone knocked on the closed door.

V

When Malone entered the house with Clements he saw Lisa at the far end of the long hall that ran right through to the rear. She was with Ida and he recognized what they were doing: the females of the species sticky-beaking in another female's lair. Lisa turned, saw him and raised her hand; her thumb and forefinger were linked in the circle of approval.
This will do me, hurry up and make Commissioner.
But one look told him no Commissioner would ever be able to afford this house, not an honest one.

A mixed-blood Aboriginal girl in a white smock came down the hall carrying a tray loaded with steaks and sausages for the barbecue outside. “Where can I find Mr. Hardstaff and Mrs. Nothling?”

She jerked her head backwards. “They're in the library. The fourth, no, the third door down.”

They walked down the hall, past the Rees, the Drysdale and the Whiteley hanging on the walls, and knocked on the third door down. There was no answer, but Malone sensed, rather than heard, the movement behind the door. He turned the knob; at least he and Clements were not using the sledgehammer. The door swung back and the first thing he saw was Hardstaff putting the gun back in the gun rack.

“Returning a borrowed gun, Mr. Hardstaff?”

There was a moment's silence; then Hardstaff, not looking at his daughter, said, “Yes. You seem to make a habit of barging in on other people's privacy, Inspector.”

“People expect their privacy to be respected, but they don't seem to appreciate that without law and order they wouldn't have much privacy.”

“This is a law and order intrusion, then? A nice distinction.”

“If you like. Can we see you a moment? Alone, preferably.”

“
This is my house, Inspector,” said Amanda, “not my father's.”

“I appreciate that, Mrs. Nothling, and I apologize. But we'd rather talk to your father alone first. Then, if he wishes, we'll call you in.”

She looked at her father, who, his hands now empty, the gun back in the rack, put a hand on her arm. “It won't take a minute, Amanda. Go out and take care of young Chester.”

His expression didn't change; but his message was clear. She hesitated, then she nodded and went out of the room, closing the door behind her. Clements took out his notebook and Hardstaff gestured at the large desk behind him.

“If you're going to make notes, Sergeant, make yourself comfortable. I'm sure my son-in-law won't mind. There's a dictionary there if you need it, and a thesaurus.”

Clements looked at Malone, shrugged and went and sat down behind the desk. Malone said, “Don't waste your wit on us, Mr. Hardstaff. We're not in the mood for it.”