Pride's Harvest (13 page)

He looked sideways at her. “You said that like someone who's been on the land all her life. No sympathy at all for the poor bloody „roos.”

“
Maybe it's being married to a Homicide detective. You get callous after a while.” He glanced at her again; but she was only joking. Or he hoped she was. “How's the case going?”

“Round and round. We lost one of our witnesses this morning. A young Abo committed suicide in his cell at the station.”

Ida stopped sharply. “Oh no! Who?”

“A young feller named Billy Koowarra, he used to work out at the cotton gin.”

“I knew him. Oh God!” Ida resumed walking.

“I think we're going to be here longer than I expected,” Malone told Lisa.

“Good. Maybe you can find an hour or two for me. We might even find somewhere to make love,” she whispered.

“Here we are,” said Ida and led them into the coffee lounge.

It was run by an Italian couple, who obviously knew and admired Ida. They brought cappuccinos and carrot cake piled high with thick cream. Malone said, “Is there a coffee shop anywhere now that doesn't serve carrot cake? Whatever happened to lamingtons? Or Chester cakes?” He remembered the lumps of lead-in-pastry of his schooldays.

Ida sipped her coffee, decided it was too hot and looked across the Laminex-topped table at Malone. “Why did Billy Koowarra commit suicide?”

“Who knows?”

She thought a moment, then nodded. “Yes, who does? It's not always easy to understand why
white
people commit suicide.” She tried her coffee again; then said, “So who murdered Mr. Sagawa or aren't I supposed to ask?”

“You can ask all you want,” said Malone, smiling at her. He liked this pleasant, forthright woman and wished that more of Lisa's women friends were like her. Lisa had an unfortunate habit of befriending women she thought were lonely or unhappy with their husbands. Then, like an unexpected itch, he wondered how happy Ida was with Trevor Waring. It was a thought that was somehow ungracious towards her and he put it out of his mind. “Right now, we don't have any answers.”

“
Everyone hopes it was some itinerant,” she said. “Someone none of us knows. But I suppose you've guessed that.”

“How long have you lived here, Ida?” Clements, it seemed, was giving her more than just a policeman's attention.
Eat your carrot cake,
Malone told him silently,
and think of Narelle.

“I came home with Dad in nineteen seventy.” Ida was giving Clements as much attention as he was giving her. “But I'm still a newcomer to some of the people around here, especially since they never met my mother. The Hardstaffs, for instance. They look on anyone who arrived after nineteen hundred as weekenders.”

“Has there been much scandal in the district?” Malone said.

“Oh yes, several times. What place doesn't have a scandal or two? There was a divorce that surprised everyone—a happily-married couple who, we found out, couldn't stand each other. A couple of affairs that had everyone talking. The well-known family, I shan't name them, their son came back from the Gold Coast a heroin addict. Oh yes, we've had them.”

Malone looked out at the main street, busy in a slow, deliberate way with traffic and people. It seemed to him that, in their short walk up here to the coffee lounge, he had noticed a change in the atmosphere of the town, the heavy brittleness one felt before a summer storm. The people had come out of their houses here in town and in from the big station homesteads and the small farmhouses, they had come in and brought the main street alive; they had come in for groceries or to pay bills or place bets for tomorrow's races with the SP bookies or the TAB or just to gossip; but whatever had brought them in to this wide sun-baked street with its shops sheltering in the shadows of their corrugated-iron awnings had been forgotten or put aside in the absorption with the deaths, the murder and the suicide, which had been flung at them and which they resented, as if the bodies had been dropped from the back of a truck right there in the middle of the main street. The atmosphere had not been in the air this morning: the murder, the greater crime, had somehow been accepted, almost as if it could be ignored till the Cup meeting was over. Then Billy Koowarra, the Abo, had piled it on by suiciding in the town lock-up: that, it seemed, was too much.

Malone
had noticed the townspeople watching him and Clements and Lisa and Ida as the four of them had traversed the hundred yards from the corner of the cross-street to the coffee lounge; some of them had nodded to Ida, but most of them had just looked at them without turning their faces, their glances sidelong, in the same way crims had looked at him when he had gone out to the State prison at Long Bay to question a prisoner who had decided, after two years in jail, to turn informer on a gangland killing. But those had been crims, wary of any cop. The Collamundra elements were ordinary law-abiding citizens, people who claimed, with some justification, whenever there were State or Federal elections, that they were the production rock on which the nation was built, that they were the ones who voted for law and order and proper Christian values (for there were no Jews or Muslims or Buddhists here; and if there were any heretics, there was no room on the voting card for them to say so). He knew in his heart that the great majority of them were hard-working and honest and unhypocritical; yet they had looked at him and Clements, not with hate but with suspicion and resentment, though some of them did look shamefaced about the way they felt. It seemed to him that he and Clements were even more unwelcome than Sagawa's murderer, if he were known, would have been. Without the two city detectives, the townspeople of Collamundra would have solved their own problems, buried them neatly with the bodies, and settled back into their steady, unhurried ways, troubled by nothing more than drought, crown-and-root disease in the wheat, and sheep hit by fly-strike. Their conscience might have worried some of them for a time, but public conscience is like public goodwill: it has to feed on itself and that is no sort of sustenance at all.

He turned his gaze away from the street outside and looked at Ida, who had just said something. “What?”

“And there were the two murders,” said Ida.

“Two? I heard about only one. About five or six years ago—your father told me about that one. Some Aborigine shot his wife and a shearer he caught in bed with her. What was the other one?”

“Seventeen years ago, three years after Dad and I came home.” Ida drank the last of her cappuccino. “Chess Hardstaff's wife was murdered.”

4

I

“I THOUGHT
you knew,” said Curly Baldock. “It would've been on the reports sent down to Sydney.”

“Did you see it?” Malone asked Clements.

The latter shook his head. “I wasn't in Homicide then. You were away overseas and I was working on something with Special Branch, I'd been seconded to them. I think it was those suspected Croat terrorists.”

“It was nineteen seventy-three, towards the end of the year. November, I think. You were overseas, you say?” Baldock sounded envious; all the plums fell to the city boys. “What on, a course?”

“No, my honeymoon. My wife was kidnapped while we were in New York.” He had no trouble recalling the year; he had not yet reached the age when all the past years merged into one long calendar. That year would always stand out.

“Oh, sure! I remember reading about that.” Baldock looked expectant, but Malone didn't elaborate: that was another story, one he preferred not to re-run. It had been a terrifying start to their marriage, his wife and the wife of the Mayor of New York kidnapped by two anarchists, and he and Lisa never discussed it. The children knew nothing of it and he hoped it would be a long time before they did learn of it.

“Does anyone talk about the murder of Hardstaff's wife now?”

Baldock shook his head. They were in the otherwise empty detectives' room, the windows open to the late afternoon sun; two galahs sat in the peppercorn tree next door, pink-and-grey blooms against the drooping green. Wally Mungle had not yet come back from the hospital and the other two detectives
were
on “routine enquiries” down at one of the pubs, getting tips not on crime but on tomorrow's Cup. It was almost as if the Sagawa investigation had been put on hold by the locals.

“It's history,” said Baldock. “They managed to play it down when it happened. The local rag ran a front-page story on it the day after it happened, but the next edition after that it was somewhere on the inside pages. I know it sounds hard to believe, but Gus Dircks owned the paper even then and he did what he was told.”

“Who told him—Chess Hardstaff?”

“Not
our
Chess. His old man. The old bloke,
Sir
Chester, was still alive then and he ran the district just like Chess does now. It didn't get a great spread in the Sydney papers, either, but I think that was because Chess wasn't the big shot he is now, he was just Old Chess's son. There's a difference in country districts.”

“There's a difference in other places, too,” said Malone, but he doubted that he would take second place in people's minds to Con Malone. And, as he often did, he felt sorry for his father, the battler who had never won but still didn't know he had been defeated. “What happened?”

“She was strangled, as I remember it. I was never on the case, I was stationed over in Cawndilla then—I'd just joined the force. You ask Hugh Narvo, I believe he was on it.”

“Would the report and running sheets still be in the files?”

“I've never seen them. But then I never went looking for „em.”

“Anyone ever arrested for it?”

“Never. As far as I can remember, it went down as by „person or persons unknown.' The guess was that it was someone passing through, someone who tried to rob her. Ask Hugh, he knows more than I do.”

“Is he back yet?”

“He came in about an hour ago. The Billy Koowarra business brought him back. He's bloody ropeable about that. How were the boys down in the lock-up to know Billy would string himself up? It's never happened before, not out here.”

Malone
remembered the shouted agitation of Billy Koowarra, a boy bursting out of his nerves; but all he said was, “Sure, who'd have known?”

He stood up, saying he would go down and see Hugh Narvo; but he stopped at the door. “Curly, is young Tas Waring Trevor's son?”

Baldock looked up, surprised. “Why do you ask that?”

“Just something Ida Waring said this afternoon. It hadn't struck me before, but I was told last night that Tas was twenty-two, yet Ida said she came back here with her father in nineteen seventy . . .”

“No, he's her son by her previous marriage. I gather he took the Waring name by deed poll. He's always been known as Tas Waring, as long as I've known him.”

“How does he get on with Trevor?”

Baldock chewed on the ballpoint he had picked up. “Not too well, I hear. That's why he lives with his grandfather.”

“They seemed okay together last night, Tas and his stepfather.”

“Well, we're all good at putting on a face for outsiders, aren't we? I mean, if we have to.”

He gazed frankly at Malone:
make what you like of that.

Malone said nothing, just nodded. He left Baldock and Clements to work up today's running sheet, not that there was much to add, and went downstairs to Narvo's office. He passed several uniformed men and they nodded and one or two smiled; they were slowly coming to accept him and he wondered how much influence Curly Baldock had had on them. But the latter's remark about putting on a face for outsiders had made him begin to doubt the bald-headed man again.

“Yes?” Narvo looked up impatiently as Malone paused in the doorway. He was seated at his desk and a typist, a blonde girl in her mid-twenties, was standing beside him, leaning over to point out something in some letters laid out in front of Narvo. There was an intimacy about their closeness, but Narvo looked uncomfortable about it. Despite his stern look, he was a good-looking man with a suggestion of controlled virility about him, and Malone could imagine a young girl being attracted to him. He shuffled the letters together and handed them to the girl. “We'll finish this later, Janine.”

Janine
went out past Malone as he stood in the doorway, giving him a frank stare but no smile. She was just the right side of plainness, but there was a sexuality about her that one knew she would be aware of as much as any man would.

“I'm busy, Scobie.” It was difficult to tell whether Narvo's rudeness was deliberate or not. “This bloody suicide . . . I'm going to string someone up for this—” Then his rudeness fell away from him. “Sorry, I didn't mean to put it like that. I'm upset for where this puts Wally Mungle. He's my protégé, you know.”

“I didn't know.” It surprised Malone; somehow he hadn't expected the starched station chief to have a protégé, least of all an Aborigine. “I saw him out at the hospital, with Billy's family. The poor bugger's caught in the middle.”

Narvo sat back in his chair, waving to Malone to sit down. Whatever had been keeping him busy, he had evidently decided to forget it. “How are things going on the Sagawa case?”

“Round and round,” said Malone, remembering he had told Lisa the same thing less than an hour ago. “Hugh, what can you remember about the murder of Chess Hardstaff's wife?”

It was as if Narvo suddenly coated himself in a thick glaze. “What has that got to do with the Sagawa case?”

“Nothing, as far as I know. I'm just curious.”

“Who mentioned it to you?”

“I just heard it. I've queried Curly Baldock on it, but he couldn't tell me much. Is the file still available?”