Read the book: «Pride’s Harvest»

Dedication

FOR ISABEL

Collamundra is a dozen towns.

Each character in the story is a dozen people.

A novel is the only cocktail I know how to mix.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE
1

‘You should take a week’s leave and come out here,’ said Lisa. ‘It’s so restful, just what you need.’

That had been the day before the murder; Lisa’s timing, usually so reliable, had been way off. Scobie Malone, missing his wife and children, already weary after only four days of getting his own meals, making his bed and trying to iron his shirts so that they didn’t look as if he had pressed them by sleeping on them, had hung up the phone and thought seriously of applying for a week’s leave. Murder had taken one of its rare holidays in the city and now would be as good a time as any to ask for a few days off. Then the very next day the routine telexed report had come in of the murder at Collamundra and later that afternoon there had been the telephoned request to Regional Crime Squad, South Region, in Sydney, asking for assistance.

Malone was the acting officer-in-charge of Homicide and he had assigned himself to the case without mentioning to any of his superiors at Police Centre that his wife and family were staying in the district where the murder had occurred. He had learned one thing, amongst others, from crims he had interviewed: the less police, especially superior officers, know, the better.

‘We’ll leave first thing in the morning,’ he told Russ Clements.

‘We flying or driving?’

‘We’ll drive. Another day won’t matter, and I’d rather have our own wheels out there than borrow some. The tracks are probably cold, anyway. They didn’t mention any suspects.’

‘Collamundra. Isn’t that where Lisa and the kids are staying?’

‘Keep your voice down. Why do you think I want to load myself with a homicide out in the bush? The last time we went bush the local cops were as unco-operative as the cow cockies.’

‘This is a Jap cow cocky who’s been murdered. Does that make any difference?’

‘He wasn’t a cow cocky, he was the manager of a cotton farm and gin. Yeah, that does make it interesting.’

‘So seeing Lisa and the kids wasn’t what interested you?’

‘Are you kidding?’

‘Are you taking your laundry with you? You’re beginning to look like me, a bachelor.’

Now Malone and Clements, in their unmarked police car, were approaching the end of the four-hundred-kilometre drive from Sydney to Collamundra. They had left early this Thursday morning, come over the Blue Mountains through the charred landscape of the summer bushfires, down the western slopes and out here to the rolling country that, beyond Collamundra, became the vast flat terrain of the western plains. The holdings hereabouts were not as huge as those farther west, but they were big enough; this was rich country and men had made comfortable fortunes on as little as five thousand acres. The landscape had begun to open out, unfolding till the eye could not take it all in without turning the head, and the sky had become immense, not anchored as it was on the coast by city skylines but dropping away behind the distant horizon to what one knew was eternity.

‘You know anything about trees, one from another?’ Malone was a city boy and sometimes he was ashamed at his ignorance of the native flora. Australia was still at least ninety per cent open space and he was almost as ignorant of it as the most recently arrived immigrant from over-crowded Europe and Asia. Crocodile Dundee, though the creation of a city-bred comedian, would have turned his back on him.

Clements was no more bucolic: ‘I know some shed their leaves and some don’t. But I wouldn’t know a river-gum from a Wrigley’s, so don’t ask me.’

Malone felt better: ignorance is an acceptable bond if nothing better offers.

As he had on previous sorties into the bush, he remarked the seeming absence of any livestock. The broad paddocks, dotted with (though he didn’t know their names) clumps of white cypress pine or kurrajong for shade, seemed to be raising more timber than sheep or cattle. The grazing paddocks were on one side of the main road, brown-tinted and dusty from summer; thin stands of yellowbox lined the road and behind them was the broad stock route, not used as much today as in the old heyday of droving when sheep flowed in slow motion along these tracks to the rail-head stockyards or, in time of drought, looking for better pasture. On the other side of the road were the wheatfields stretching away to a low line of hills that was no more than a wavering of the flat line of the horizon. It was now mid-April, the long drawn-out tail of a long hot summer, and the harvest out here would have been finished by late January, early February; the harrows were at work now, raising dust that drifted away as a grey-pink haze in the westering sun. A flock of galahs rose up from the fields, looking for a moment like a thickening of the haze. In the distance two kangaroos loped along, a jumping nervous tic in the tired eye.

A little later Clements said, ‘That’s where it must’ve happened.’

For some time they had been noticing the sprinkling of wisps of cotton on either side of the road, like a scattering of last year’s snow; except that no one had ever known snow to fall out here. Now they were passing the cottonfields, which stretched away into the distance on both sides of the road. Amidst the white glare the mechanical cotton-pickers moved like top-heavy houseboats on a broad white lake; the operators sat up front in their air-conditioned, glass-sided cubicles, remote and bored-looking. Trailers stood in access tracks beside the rows of cotton, waiting to be loaded by the pickers. Two trailers were being hauled by small tractors to a long low truck that would take the cotton, now compressed into modules, to the big steep-roofed shed at which Clements had nodded.

‘That’s the gin, I guess. You wanna call in there now?’

‘No, let’s go into town. I’m buggered. We’ll start tomorrow.’ He also wanted to stick by protocol: you did not land unannounced in another cop’s territory and start your investigations at once. No bird, animal or Cabinet minister enforces the territorial imperative more than does a policeman with rank.

They drove on, came to the edge of town, drove in past the wheat silos and the railway siding with its empty stockyards, past the BP and Shell service stations, the used car lots and the farm equipment sales yards, and then they were in the main section of town. They had passed a sign that said: ‘Collamundra, Pop. 9400’; and it seemed that the 9400 Collamundrans, give or take a few, were a civic-minded lot of voters. It was not a pretty town, it was too flat and sunbaked for that, but it was attractive; or had been made so. They passed a pleasant tree-shaded park; beside it, amidst sun-browned lawns, was a large community swimming pool. They went round the war memorial standing in the middle of an intersection. The memorial was a bronze Anzac on a marble plinth, staring up the street into the distance, his bayonet-topped rifle held up threateningly against any invader. It struck Malone that the Anzac was gazing eastwards, towards Sydney, home of the State government and city Homicide cops, as if the enemy was expected to come from there.

‘This is Rural Party country,’ said Clements, as if reading his mind. ‘That guy with the bayonet was probably a local party secretary. Our friend Mr Dircks comes from here.’

‘Oh crumbs,’ said Malone, to whose tongue stuck some of the phrases of a childhood more innocent than today’s; his mother had been a great believer in mouth-washing with soap and he could still taste the bar of Sunlight she had shoved down his throat when, in a moment of anger and forgetfulness, he had told the kid next door to fuck off! Dircks was the Police Minister, a bigger handicap to the Department than a cartload of corrupt cops. ‘I’d forgotten that.’

Clements spotted a marked police car parked on the corner of a side street and he swung the Commodore over alongside it. Malone wound down his window. ‘Where’s the station, constable?’

The young officer, slumped behind the wheel, looked at him without much interest; then his eyes narrowed. ‘You the guys from Sydney?’

‘Yes,’ said Malone and thought he had better establish rank at once. ‘Detective-Inspector Malone and Detective-Sergeant Clements, from Regional Crime Squad, South Region. You’re in that Region – just, but you’re in it. Your name is – ?’

The young constable decided he had better sit up straight. ‘Constable Reynolds, sir. If you’d like to follow me . . .’

They followed his car down the main street. It was a wide street, cars and trucks angle-parked at the kerbs on both sides. The stores were the usual one- or two-storeys, the fronts of almost all of them shaded by corrugated-iron awnings; they were characterless, stamped out of the mould of country-town stores all over the State, as if no architect had ever found it worth his while to come this far west. There were four banks, two of them solid as forts, built in the days when men took time to build with care and pride; the old names were cut into the stone just below their cornices, still there as defiant mockeries of the new names, dreamed up by corporation image makers, on the brass plates by the doors. The other two banks were new structures, as unimposing as a depositor’s shaky credit rating.

Clements had not been impressed by the young constable’s attitude. ‘Do you think we’re gunna be welcome?’

‘They sent for us. But we’re outsiders, don’t forget that. Be diplomatic.’

‘Look who’s talking.’

They turned into a wide side street after the car in front. The police station was a cream-painted stone building that had been erected in 1884; the date was chipped out of the stone above the entrance; this, too, had been built by men who took time and pride. It was a good example of the solid public buildings of the period: nothing aesthetic about it, squatting as firmly on its foundations as Queen Victoria had on hers. Behind it had been added a two-storeyed brick building, painted cream so that it would not clash too much with its parent. There was a side driveway leading to a big yard and a row of garages and a workshop at the rear. A peppercorn tree stood on the width of thin lawn that separated the police station from the courthouse, another Victorian building on the other side from the driveway. It was a typical country town set-up, the law and justice keeping each other company. It wasn’t always that way in the city, thought Malone.

Clements waved his thanks to the young constable, who drove on; the Commodore swung into the side driveway and went through to the rear yard. Clements parked the car by a side fence and he and Malone got out and walked back down the driveway, aware of the sudden appearance of half a dozen heads from the doorways of the garages, like rabbits that had smelled ferret on the wind. Not frightened bunnies, but hostile ones.

‘You feel something sticking in your back?’ said Clements. ‘Like, say, half a dozen ice picks?’

They went in through the front door, asked the constable at the desk for Inspector Narvo and were taken along a short hallway to a large corner office that looked out on to both the street and the courthouse next door. There was a fireplace, topped by a marble mantelpiece, above which was a framed colour photograph of the Queen; its glass, unlike that on most portraits in public offices where the Queen was still hung, was not fly-specked but looked as if it were washed every day. The grate and ornamental metal surrounds of the fireplace had been newly blackened. On the wall opposite the fireplace was a manning chart, as neatly ruled and lettered as an eye chart; there were no erasures, as if a new manning list was put up each day. Between the two windows that looked out on to the street was a desk and a man seated behind it, both as neat as everything else in the room. Malone, sweaty and rumpled from the long drive, felt as if he were about to be called up for inspection.

‘I’m Hugh Narvo.’ The man behind the desk stood up, his immaculate uniform seeming to creak with the movement. Malone had only ever met one cop as neat as this man and that was Police Commissioner Leeds. Narvo was as tall as Malone, rawboned in build and face, with dark brown eyes under thick brows, dark hair slicked down like a 1920s movie star and a mouth that looked as if it might have trouble sustaining a smile. Malone judged he could be the sort of officer-in-charge who would never be popular with his men nor attempt to be. ‘What plane did you get in on? I’d have had someone out there to meet you.’

Narvo was studying the men as carefully as they were studying him. Cops in the New South Wales Police Department, like crims, do not take each other at face value; it is a legacy of the old days, still there in pockets, when corruption started at the top and filtered down like sewage. Narvo looked at these two strangers, whom he had sent for only on the insistence of his detective-sergeant. He saw two tall men, Clements much bulkier than Malone. The latter, whom he knew by repute, was the one who engaged him. He was not given to thinking of men as handsome or plain or ugly: he looked for the character in their faces. Malone, he decided, had plenty of that: tough, shrewd but sympathetic. He wished, in a way, that they had sent him a bastard, someone he could turn his back on. Malone had a reputation for integrity, for not caring about repercussions, and that, Narvo decided, was going to make things difficult.

‘We drove,’ said Malone. ‘Russ likes driving.’

‘Do I?’ Clements grinned.

But Narvo didn’t seem to see any humour in the small joke. ‘You must be expecting to stay here a while. It’s a long way to drive just for a day or two.’

‘You expect it to be cleared up as soon as that?’

‘We hope so. You probably know how it can be in a town like this – we don’t like a homicide hanging over our heads. Especially with so many visitors in town.’

‘What’s on?’

Narvo looked mildly surprised. ‘I thought you’d have known – but then, why should you? It’s the Collamundra Cup weekend, the big event of the year.’

‘Russ is the racing expert. Did you know about it?’

Clements shook his big head. He looked even more sweaty and rumpled than Malone; but that was almost his natural state. ‘I’d forgotten about it. I never bet on bush races.’

‘Don’t let the locals hear you call it a bush race.’ Narvo for an instant looked as if he might smile. ‘They think the Collamundra Cup is a cousin to the Melbourne Cup and the Kentucky Derby.’ Then he said abruptly, ‘I’ll get Sergeant Baldock in here, he’s in charge of my detectives.’

He spoke into his phone and almost immediately, as if he had been waiting outside for the call, Sergeant Baldock appeared. He was a burly man in his mid-thirties, already bald, hard-faced, ready to meet the world square-on. Yet he seemed friendly enough and put out a hand that looked as, if closed into a fist, it could have felled a bullock.

‘Jeff will look after you,’ said Narvo; and Malone, his ear, as always, sensitive to a new environment, thought that Narvo spoke with relief. ‘I have to go over to Cawndilla first thing in the morning to see the District Super. I’ll tell him you’re here. Will you want to see him?’

No cop in his right mind ever wanted to see a District Superintendent, especially one who might resent strangers on his turf. ‘I don’t think so.’ Out of the corner of his eye he saw Baldock grin and nod appreciatively. ‘Just give him my respects and tell him we won’t kick up too much dust.’

‘He’ll be glad to hear that. We all will, won’t we, Jeff?’ Baldock seemed to hesitate before he nodded; but Narvo was already looking back at Malone. ‘We’ve booked you into the Mail Coach Hotel. We were lucky to get you a room. You don’t mind sharing?’

‘So long as we don’t have to share the bed. Does it have a bathroom or do we have to queue up down the end of the hall?’

He knew there were still some country hotel owners who thought they were spoiling their guests if they gave them too many amenities. If the explorers Burke and Wills, starving to death on their last ill-fated expedition, had chanced to stop at one of those hotels they would not have been fed, not if they had collapsed into the dining-room after eight p.m.

The Collamundra cops looked as if local pride had been hurt. Baldock said, ‘It has a bathroom. Narelle Potter, the owner, likes to stay on side with us. It can get a bit rowdy down there sometimes. You know what country pubs can be like, especially when everyone comes in from out of town.’

‘I’d like a shower before I go out to see my family.’ Malone enjoyed the look of surprise on both men’s faces, especially Narvo’s. ‘My wife and kids are staying out at Sundown, the Carmody property – or rather, they’re staying with Mrs Waring, Carmody’s daughter. My wife and her are old friends, they worked together down in Sydney.’

He wondered why he was telling them so much about a relationship that was no concern of theirs. But he had noticed how both Narvo’s and Baldock’s faces had closed up, as if they were abruptly suspicious of him.

‘Well,’ said Baldock, ‘you’ll get all the dirt on the district out there. Old Sean Carmody’s not one of your back-fence gossips, but he can never forget he was a journo, a big-time foreign correspondent.’

‘He’s probably got the Sagawa murder already solved,’ said Narvo. ‘Enjoy your stay, Scobie. Russ.’ But he said it without conviction, as if he knew there would be no enjoyment for any of them.

Malone and Clements went out with Baldock and up to the detectives’ room on the first floor of the rear building. It was an office in which there had been an attempt at neatness, probably under Narvo’s orders, but it had failed; this was a room which would have more visitors than Narvo’s, many of them obstreperous or even still murderous, and neatness had bent under the onslaughts. There was one other detective in the room, a short, slight dark man in a suit that looked a size too large for him.

Baldock introduced him. ‘Wally Mungle. He was the first one out to the crime scene. A pretty gory sight, he tells me.’

‘Gruesome.’

Now that they were standing opposite each other, Malone saw that Mungle was an Aborigine, not a full-blood but with the strain showing clearly in him. He had a beautiful smile that made him look younger than he was, but his eyes were as sad as those of a battered old man.

He held out a file. ‘Maybe you’d like to see the running sheet.’

‘We don’t run to computers here in the detectives’ room,’ said Baldock. ‘We’re the poor cousins in this set-up. Both computers are downstairs with the uniformed guys and the civilian help.’

Again Malone had a feeling of something in the atmosphere, like an invisible shifting current. He took the file from Mungle and flipped through it: so far it was as meagre as the report on a stolen bicycle:

Kenji Sagawa, born Kobe, Japan, June 18, 1946. Came to Collamundra August 1989 as general manager South Cloud Cotton Limited. Family: wife and two children, resident in Osaka, Japan.

Body discovered approximately 8.15 a.m. Tuesday April 12, by Barry Liss, worker in South Cloud cotton gin. First thought was accidental death due to body being trapped in cotton module travelling into the module feeder. Later inspection by Dr M. Nothling, government medical officer, established that death was due to gunshot wound. (Medical report attached.)

‘That’s all?’

‘The bullet has been extracted,’ Mungle said. ‘Ballistics had a man sent up from Sydney last night. He left again this morning. The bullet was a Twenty-two.’

‘What about the cartridge?’

‘No sign of it.’

Malone frowned at that; then glanced at the file again. ‘This is pretty skimpy.’

Mungle said almost shyly, ‘It’s my first homicide, Inspector. I’ve only been in plain-clothes a month.’

Malone decided it wasn’t his place to teach Mungle how to be a detective. He nodded, said he would see Mungle again, and he and Clements went downstairs and out to their car. Baldock followed them.

‘Wally will do better. He’s the first Abo cop we’ve had in this town. He’s done bloody well to make detective.’

Malone decided on the blunt approach; he was tired and wanted the picture laid out for him. ‘Tell me, Jeff, do you coves resent Russ and me being called in?’

‘It was me who called for you. And call me Curly.’ He took off his hat and ran his hand over his bald head. ‘I get uptight when people call me Baldy Baldock. My mates call me Curly. Does that answer your question?’

Malone grinned and relaxed; he was surprised that he had begun to feel uptight himself. Several uniformed men, in their shirt-sleeves, two of them with chamois washcloths in their hands, had come to the doors of the garages again and stood in front of the cars and patrol wagons they had been cleaning. There was a stiffness about all of them that made them look like figures in an old photograph. Through a high barred back window of the two-storeyed rear building there came the sound of a slurred voice singing a country-and-western song.

‘One of the Abos in the cells,’ said Baldock. ‘Today’s dole day. They start drinking the plonk as soon as the pubs and the liquor shop open and we’ve usually got to lock up two or three of ’em by mid-afternoon. We let ’em sober up, then send ’em home.’

‘How do they feel about Constable Mungle?’

‘He’s an in-between, poor bugger. But it’s a start. Come on, I’ll take you down and introduce you to Narelle Potter. She’s a good sort, you’ll like her. She’s a widow, lost her husband about five years ago in a shooting accident. Let’s go in your car. You may need me to make sure you get a parking place.’

‘How do you do that out here in the bush?’ said Clements, the city expert.

‘Same as you guys down in Sydney, I guess. I give some poor bugger a ticket, tell him to move his vehicle, then I take his place. What do you call it down in the city?’

‘Emergency privilege. Makes us very popular.’

But miraculously, just like in every movie Malone had seen, there was a vacant space at the kerb in front of the Mail Coach Hotel. Clements squeezed the Commodore in between two dust-caked utility trucks. Some drinkers on the pavement, spilling out from the pub, looked at them curiously as the three policemen got out of their car.

‘It’s the most popular pub in town,’ said Baldock. ‘Especially with the races and the Cup ball coming up this weekend. There may be a brawl or two late in the evening, but just ignore it. We do, unless Narelle calls us in.’

The hotel stood on a corner, a two-storeyed structure that fronted about a hundred and twenty feet to both the main street and the side street. It was the sort of building that heritage devotees, even strict teetotallers, would fight to preserve. The upper balconies had balustrades of yellow iron lace; the windows had green wooden shutters; the building itself, including the roof, was painted a light brown. It was one of the most imposing structures in town, a temple to drinking. The congregation inside sounded less than religious, filled with piss rather than piety.

Baldock led Malone and Clements in through a side-door, past a sign that said ‘Guests’ Entrance’, a class distinction of earlier times. They were in a narrow hallway next to the main bar, whence came a bedlam of male voices, the Foster’s Choir. In the hallway the preservation equalled that on the outside: dark polished panelling halfway up the cream walls, a polished cedar balustrade on a flight of red-carpeted stairs leading to the upper floor. Mrs Potter, it seemed, was a proud housekeeper.

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 Auscralian 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.’

2

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.

‘Did you know Kenji Sagawa?’

‘Not really. I’ve never been interested in cotton. My dad would never have anything to do with grain – wheat, barley, sorghum, stuff like that. He was strictly for the woollies. I’m much the same. They approached me, asked me if I wanted to go in with them on raising cotton and I said no. They never came back.’

‘Who?’

’Sagawa and his bosses from Japan. Chess Hardstaff introduced them.’

‘Is he involved with the cotton growing?’

‘Not as far as I know. As I said, he just rules, that’s all.’

‘Did you know him, Trev?’

Waring took his time, taking a few more puffs on his pipe before tapping it out into an ashtray. He was like an actor with a prop; he didn’t appear to be at all a natural pipe-smoker. If he thought it gave him an air of gravity, he was wrong; there was a certain restlessness about him, like a man who wasn’t sure where the back of his seat was. Trevor Waring would never be laid back.

‘He was unlike what I’d expected of a Japanese, I’d been told they liked to keep to themselves. He didn’t. He joined Rotary and the golf club and he’d even had someone put his name up for the polo club, though he didn’t know one end of a horse from another and it only meets half a dozen times a year.’

‘So he was popular?’

‘Well, no, not exactly. For instance he was rather keen on the ladies, but they fought shy of him. You know what women are like about Asians.’

‘Some women,’ said Carmody, defending the tolerant.

‘Er, yes. Some women. He came to see me last week at my office. He said he’d got three anonymous letters.’

‘From women?’

‘I don’t know about that. I didn’t see them. They told him Japs weren’t wanted around here. I told him I couldn’t do anything, the best thing was to go to the police.’

‘Did he?’

‘I don’t know. You’d better ask Inspector Narvo about that. He and Ken Sagawa were rather friendly at the start, I think it was Hugh Narvo who put him up for the golf club.’

‘Friendly at the start? Did something happen between them?’

‘I don’t know.’ Waring shrugged, did some awkward business with his pipe. ‘They just didn’t seem as – ’ well, as close as they had been. Not over the last few weeks.’

‘There’s a second Japanese out at the farm, isn’t there? What’s he like?’

‘Tom Koga? He’s young, rather unsure of himself, I’d say. I should think this, the murder, I mean, would make him even more jumpy.’

Sean Carmody sat listening to this, his pipe gone out. Now he said, ‘This isn’t a simple murder. Am I right?’

‘Most murders aren’t,’ said Malone. ‘Even domestics, which make up more than half the murders committed, they’re never as simple as they look. Sometimes you have to peel off the layers to find out why the murder happened – you hate doing it. You realize you’re going to make a lot of people unhappy, the family usually, who are unhappy enough to begin with.’

Then Ida Waring came out on to the veranda. ‘Time to take the kids home to bed, Trevor.’

She was in her early forties, two or three years older than Lisa. Her mother, Cathleen, had been half-Irish, half-Jewish, a featured player on the MGM lot in Hollywood in the 1930s. She had gone to Berlin looking for her Jewish mother, who had disappeared, and there, in the last month of peace in 1939, she had met Sean. Cathleen had been successful in her search and the two women had escaped to England, where she married Sean, who had managed to get out of Germany in October of that year. Sean had become a war correspondent and Cathleen had gone back to New York, where, instead of returning to Hollywood, she had gone on the stage and become a minor Broadway star. Ida had been born in 1947 and she had been twenty-three, already married and divorced, when Cathleen died of cancer. Unhappy in New York, she had been glad to accompany Sean back to his homeland. She had her mother’s beauty, most of her fire and all of her father’s love of the land. It was difficult to guess what sort of love she had for her husband. All Malone felt was that it did not have the passion and depth that he and Lisa had for each other. But then married love, like politics, came in so many colours.

‘We’ll take all the kids in the Land-Rover. Lisa can ride back with Scobie. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ She gave Malone a half-mocking smile.

He smiled in return, liking her, but wondering if he would come to know her properly in the short time he would be here. He was all at once glad of the Carmody clan: they might prove to be the only friendly oasis in the Collamundra shire.

While Lisa was helping to put all the children into the Warings’ Land-Rover, Malone waited by the Commodore for her. Sean Carmody came across to him, moving with the slow deliberation of a man who now told time by the seasons and no longer by deadlines or the clock.

‘Take things slowly, Scobie.’

‘Don’t make waves, you mean?’

‘No, I don’t mean that at all. Certain things around here need to be changed and Mr Sagawa’s murder may be the catalyst.’

‘If things have needed to be changed, Sean, why haven’t you tried it before?’

‘Do you know anything about opera or musical comedy?’

It was a question that came out of nowhere; but Malone was used to them. He had faced too many high-priced barristers in court not to know how to be poker-faced. ‘No, I think I’m what they call a Philistine, even my pop-mad kids do. I like old swing bands, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, all before my time.’

‘Mozart was before my time.’ Carmody smiled.

‘The only thing that saves me, according to Lisa, is that my favourite singers are Peggy Lee and Cleo Laine. Lisa’s an opera fan, but she likes them, too.’

‘Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw used to be favourites of mine when I went overseas before the war. My war, that is. There have been a dozen wars since then, but it’s still the one I remember . . .’ He stopped for a moment; then shook his head, as if he did not want to remember after all. ‘In Vienna and Berlin I started going to the opera – I heard Gigli and Schmidt and Flagstad.’ He paused again, nodded. ‘Just names now – and echoes. Anyhow, there’s an operetta called Die Fledermaus, by Johann Strauss, the younger. It’s lightweight, but its theme song is “Happy is He who Forgets what Cannot Be Changed.” You want me to sing it?’

‘No, I get the message.’

‘No, Scobie, you get only half the message. It was my theme song for quite a while after I came home. But lately . . . If I can help, come out again. Any time.’

Driving back to the Warings’ house Lisa said, ‘I’m glad you’re here. I missed you.’

He leaned across and kissed her, almost hitting a tree stump as he took his eyes off the winding track. ‘I’ve missed you, too. I didn’t realize how big a queen-sized bed is till you’re in it alone.’

‘Just as well we didn’t get a king-sized one. You haven’t invited anyone home to fill up the space, have you?’

‘Just three girls from the Rape Advisory Squad. How are the kids making out? You’d better keep an eye on Tom. He could hurt himself falling off horses.’

‘Don’t be so protective. They’re all right. Claire’s fallen in love with Tas.’

‘She’s only fourteen, for God’s sake! Tell her to get that out of her head!’

‘You tell her. You’ll be more diplomatic and sympathetic than I would. Relax, darling. She’s going to fall in and out of love ten times a year from now till she’s twenty-one. I know I did.’

‘I never did ask you. How old were you when you lost your virginity?’

‘It’s none of your business. And don’t you ever ask Claire a question like that. That’s my business.’They were out on the tarmac of the main road now, running smoothly; she leaned back against the door of the car and looked at him. ‘How’s the investigation going?’

‘We haven’t really started yet, but it’s already beginning to look murky.’ He noticed in the driving mirror that another car was behind them, but he gave it only a cursory look. A semi-trailer hurtled towards them, front ablaze with rows of small lights, so that it looked like the entrance to a travelling strip show. It went by with a roar, the wind of its passing rocking the Commodore. ‘Bastard!’

‘How long do you think you’ll be out here?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine. A coupla days, maybe more. Depends on what Russ and I dig up.’

‘What’s Russ doing this evening?’

‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s investigating Narelle.’

‘Who’s Narelle?’

‘She owns the pub where we’re staying. A very attractive widow.’

‘Does she have a queen-sized bed?’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ll ask her.’

‘Never mind. I’ll ask Russ.’

‘Mind your own business. This where we turn in?’

They drove up another long track, this one straight and lined on either side by what looked, in the darkness, like poplars. He pulled up in front of another large one-storeyed house, but this one more modern than the main Sundown homestead. The lights were on in the house and the Land-Rover had been taken round to a garage at the back. Off to one side the wire netting surrounding a tennis court looked like a huge wall of spider’s web. Malone wound down the car window and listened to the silence.

‘It’s so peaceful,’ said Lisa.

He said nothing, thinking of Sagawa lying dead in the silence.

But Lisa could shut out the world from herself and him. ‘Every time I’m away from you for even a night, I realize how much I love you. It’s not so bad when I’m home in our own bed, I can feel you there beside me even when you’re not. I’ve even had an orgasm in my sleep.’

‘Sorry I wasn’t there.’

‘But in a strange bed, it’s so empty . . .’ The Commodore had bucket seats; detectives were not encouraged to embrace each other, even those of the opposite sex. But the Malones managed to reach for each other and their kiss was as passionate as if they were back in Randwick in their own bed. At last she drew away from him, taking his hands off her. ‘That’s enough. I don’t want to have to call up one of your girls from the Rape Advisory Squad. Will you be out tomorrow night?’

‘I’ll try. I’d like some time with the kids. Keep an eye on Claire and Tas.’

‘You want to leave your Smith and Wesson with me?’

He loved her for her sense of humour; it kept him anchored. They kissed again, then she got out of the car and he drove off down between the poplars. He went through the main gate, closing it after him, and turned on to the main road leading towards town. He had the feeling of leaving a harbour: town was where the wild waves broke. Or would, if he and Clements stirred them up.

He had gone perhaps a mile before he realized there was another car behind him, not attempting to overtake him but keeping a steady distance between them. He frowned, wondering where it had come from, certain that it had not come out of another gate along the road. He slowed down, but the car behind also slowed; the distance between them remained constant. Then he speeded up again, but this time the following car dropped back, though it continued to trail him.

He was not afraid, just curious. He went into town, slowed as he came to the main street. He looked in the driving mirror, saw the other car slow, then make a quick turn into a side street. He caught a glimpse of it, a light-coloured big car, a Mercedes or the largest Ford, before it disappeared.

He parked the Commodore, locked it and set the alarm and went into the Mail Coach Hotel. The bars were still open and full, but he wasn’t looking for company; he just wanted to go to bed and dream of Lisa and the kids. But first to lie awake and wonder why anyone should drive all the way out of town and sit in their car and wait for him to return to town, as if they wanted to account for every minute of his movements. That was the sort of surveillance that, usually, only police or private investigators went in for.