Pride’s Harvest

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?’