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.

TWO
1

‘You must’ve got in pretty late last night,’ he said to Clements over a country breakfast of sausages and eggs and bacon, toast, honey and coffee. ‘Did you learn anything?’

‘A few things. Nothing to do with the case, though.’

Malone refrained from asking if what he had learned had come from Mrs Potter. ‘Well, we’ll get down to work this morning. We’ll go out to the gin. Get what background you can out of the workers, those in the fields as well as the gin.’ He looked up as the waitress came to offer them more coffee. ‘We’ll be in for lunch, say one o’clock. Can you keep us this table?’

‘I’m afraid it’s taken for lunch.’ She was a stout cheerful woman who liked her job; she gave better service than many of the more highly trained waiters and waitresses Malone had met in Sydney. ‘Gus Dircks is in town. He’s the Police Minister, but then you’d know that, wouldn’t you?’

‘We’d heard a rumour.’

She laughed, her bosom shaking like a water-bed in an earth tremor. ‘Yeah, you would of. Anyhow, when he’s in town he comes in here every day for lunch. He sorta holds court here by the window, if you know what I mean. You gotta vote for him.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Well, there’s no one else, is there? Not even the sheep would vote for Labour, around here. You’re not Labour, are you?’

‘He’s a Commo,’ said Clements.

The waitress looked doubtful. ‘Well, I wouldn’t broadcast that around here. You oughta get someone to tell you what they done to the Commos in this town back in the nineteen-thirties.’ She looked at them, suddenly dark and secretive. ‘But don’t say I suggested it.’

Later, driving out to the South Cloud cotton farm in the Commodore, Malone said, ‘I’m beginning to think this district has got more secrets than it’s got sheep droppings.’

‘You mean about the Commos? Narelle was hinting at a few things last night. Not about the Commos, she never mentioned them, but just gossip. I gather there was quite a lot of it when her hubby was killed.’

‘It was a shooting accident, wasn’t it?’

‘Yeah. She hinted people said other things about how it happened, but it’s all died down now. Then she suddenly shut up. I’d picked the wrong time to pump her. We – well, never mind.’

Malone could guess what would have been the wrong time; Clements had probably been intent on pumping of another kind. Sensible, experienced women don’t let their hair down, not figuratively, the first time they go to bed with a stranger; and Narelle Potter was a sensible, experienced woman if ever Malone had seen one. ‘Don’t get yourself too involved. This is your commanding officer speaking.’

Clements grinned. ‘You sound just like my mother.’

They bumped over the cattle grid at the entrance gates to the cotton farm and Clements pulled up. Four cotton-picking machines were moving slowly down the rows, plucking the cotton locks from the bolls and dumping them into a large basket attached to each machine. As soon as a basket was filled, the picker moved along to a second machine – ‘That’s a module maker,’ said Clements – where the cotton was compressed. When sufficient baskets of cotton had been deposited in the module maker, a module was completed.

‘I read up on it last night while I was waiting for dinner,’ said Clements; and Malone knew that, with his usual thoroughness, he would have absorbed all the information available to him. ‘Those modules are approximately thirty-six feet by eight by eight – there’s about eleven tonnes of seed cotton in each one. If one of ’em fell on you, you’d be schnitzel.’

Malone grimaced at the description.

‘Those loaders you see, they call ’em module movers, load them on to those semi-trailers, who take ’em up to the gin, where they’re off-loaded by what they call a moon buggy.’

‘How long does the cotton harvest go on?’

‘I don’t know when they expect to finish here. It usually begins late March and goes till the end of June.’

‘This is one harvest they won’t forget.’

Sergeant Baldock and Constable Mungle were waiting for them at the cotton farm’s main office. The weather was still reasonably warm and Baldock had discarded his jacket. In his tattersall-checked shirt, wool tie, moleskin trousers and R. M. Williams boots, he looked more like a man of the land than a detective. As Malone and Clements drew in alongside him, he put on a broad-brimmed, pork-pie hat, completing the picture in Malone’s mind of a farmer on his way to market, more interested in crops than in crime.

‘Here comes Mr Koga, the assistant manager,’ Baldock said.

A young man, slim and taller than Malone had expected of a Japanese, came out of the office and approached them almost diffidently. He had a thin, good-looking face, a shy smile and wore fashionable and expensive tinted glasses.

‘Some senior executives are coming down from Japan at once.’ He had a thin piping voice, made thinner by his nervousness. He had come to this country, which he had been told was xenophobic, at least towards Asians, and after only a month he was temporarily in charge, only because his immediate boss had been murdered. Xenophobia could not be more explicitly expressed than that. ‘I don’t suppose you can wait till then?’

‘Hardly,’ said Malone as kindly as he could. He had never been infected by racism, though his father Con had done his best to tutor him in it, and he was determined to lean over backwards to avoid it in this particular case. ‘Who discovered the body, Mr Koga?’

‘Barry Liss.’ Koga had difficulty with the name. ‘He is over at the gin now. We shall go over there, yes?’

‘Sergeant Clements would like to talk to the men out in the fields. Could you take him out there, Constable Mungle?’

Clements looked out at the white-frothed fields stretching into the distance, said, ‘Thanks, Inspector,’ then he and Mungle got back into the Commodore. The Aboriginal cop, in fawn shirt and slacks and broad-brimmed hat, looked like a Boy Scout against the bulk of Clements.

Malone followed Koga and Baldock over to the gin, aware as they drew closer of the faint thunder within the huge shed.

‘He’s probably inside,’ said Koga and opened a door that immediately let out a blast of noise. They went inside and Malone knew at once that there would be no questioning in here.

The thunder in the hundred-feet-high shed was deafening; maybe a rock musician would have felt at home in it, but Malone doubted it. He was not mechanically-minded and he could only guess at the functions of most of the machines, which he noted were all American-made, not Japanese as he had expected. The seed cotton seemed to move swiftly through a continuous cleaning process, streaming through from one type of machine to another. He stood in front of one which Koga, screaming in his ear like a train whistle, told him was a condenser.Behind large windows in the condenser he saw the flow of now-cleaned cotton, like thick white water out of a dam spill. Behind him a supervisor stood at a console, watching monitor screens; Malone looked around and could see only three other workers, a man and two girls, in the whole building. All four workers wore ear-muffs and seemed oblivious of Koga and his guests. It struck Malone that if Kenji Sagawa had been killed in this shed during working hours no one would have heard the shot.

Koga and the two detectives moved on, past blocks of solidly packed cotton coming up a ramp to be baled; the two girls were working the baling machine, unhurriedly and with time for one of them occasionally to glance at an open paperback book on a bench beside her. The man, Barry Liss, was marking the weight of each bale as it bumped down on to an electronic scale. He looked up as Koga tapped him on the shoulder and nodded towards the exit door. He handed his clipboard to one of the girls and followed the three men out of the shed, slipping off his ear-muffs as he did so.

‘I understand you found Mr Sagawa’s body,’ said Malone when he had been introduced to Liss.

‘Jesus, did I!’ Liss shuddered. He was a wiry man, his age hard to guess; he could have been anywhere between his late twenties and his early forties. He had black hair cut very short, a bony face that had earned more than its fair share of lines, and a loose-jointed way of standing as if his limbs had been borrowed from someone else’s torso and had not yet adjusted to their new base. ‘It was the bloodiest mess I ever seen. I don’t wanna see anything like it again. But I told you all this, Curly.’

‘I know you did, Barry. But Inspector Malone is in charge now.’

Malone looked at Baldock out of the corner of his eye, but the local detective did not appear to imply anything more than what he had simply said. Malone looked back at Liss. ‘Where did you find him, Mr Liss?’

‘Over here. He was packed in one of the modules that had been brought in and he finished up against the spiked cylinders in the module feeder. It made a real mess, all that blood. Ruined that particular load.’

‘I’m sure it did,’ said Malone, who wasn’t into cotton futures.

Liss led the way over to the huge machine that was inching its way along a length of track, eating its way into the long, high compacted cotton that stood, like a long block of grey ice at the open end of this annexe to the gin shed. A long loader was backing up to the bulked cotton, adding more to the supply.

‘These moon buggies bring the cotton in,’ said Liss. ‘Maybe Mr Sagawa’s body was in one of the loads, I dunno. I only found him when his body jammed the cylinders.’

‘Was the module stack as long and as high as this the night before you found the body?’

‘No, it wouldn’t of been more than, I dunno, four or five metres.’

‘So the body could have been brought in in one of those trailers from out in the fields?’

Liss looked at him, shrewdness increasing the lines on his face. ‘You don’t miss much, do you?’

‘We try not to. How long was the stack when you started up this machine Tuesday morning?’

The lines didn’t smooth out. ‘Bugger! I didn’t think of that.’ He looked at Baldock. ‘Sorry, Curly.’

‘It’s okay,’ said Baldock, but looked as if he had asked the question, and not Malone.

Malone said, ‘What was your first reaction when you found the body?’

Liss shook his head, shuddered again. He looked tough, as if he might have seen a lot of blood spilled in pub brawls, but obviously he had never seen anyone as mangled as Sagawa must have been. ‘I thought it was some sorta incredible bloody accident – how the hell did he get in there? Then that night, the night before last, they told me the Doc had said he was murdered. Shot. If they’d shot him, why let him be chewed up like that? If they knew anything about the works here, they’d have knew his body was never gunna go right through the system and be chopped up like the green bolls and the hulls and that.’

Malone’s smile had no humour in it. ‘That’s pretty graphic.’

‘Eh? Oh yeah, I guess it is. I just think it’s a bloody gruesome way to get rid of someone, that’s all. There was nothing wrong with him, he was a good bloke. He expected you to work hard, but you wouldn’t hold that against him. Most of us work hard out here in the bush, right, Curly?’

‘Right,’ said Baldock; then saved the face of the city bludger. ‘But down in Sydney the police are flat out all the time. Right, Scobie?’

‘All the time,’ said Malone.

‘Well, I guess you would be,’ said Liss. ‘From what I read, half the population of Sydney are crims, right?’

‘Almost.’ Malone wasn’t going to get into a city-versus-country match. ‘Well, thanks, Mr Liss. We’ll be back to you if we have any more questions.’

‘Be glad to help. Hooroo, Curly. Give my regards to the missus.’

Liss went back into the gin, adjusting his ear-muffs as he opened the door and the noise blasted out at him.

‘He’s all right?’ said Malone.

Baldock looked surprised. ‘You mean is he a suspect? Forget him. He’s a tough little bugger, but he’d never do anything like this.’

‘Who’s the government medical officer? He got a mention in the running sheet.’

‘Max Nothling. He’s got the biggest practice in town, but he doubles as GMO. He’s Chess Hard-staff’s son-in-law. He told us he’d had Sagawa’s body on the table in the hospital mortuary for an hour before he woke up there was a bullet in him, that it was the bullet in his heart that’d killed him, not the chewing-up by the spikes in the module feeder.’

‘I’d better have a talk with him.’ Malone looked at the huge module feeder slowly, inexorably eating its way into the slab-sided glacier of cotton. He did not like coming on a trail as cold as this; he preferred the crime scene to be left as undisturbed as possible.

‘Did your Physical Evidence Section get everything before you let them start up the gin again?’

‘We got the lot, photos, everything. They sent a Fingerprints cove over from District Headquarters. Their reports are on my desk back at the station, they came in just before I left.’

‘You said there was no sign of the cartridge.’

‘The Ballistics guy went through the office, all around here, right through the gin, he went through the lot with a fine-tooth comb. He found nothing.’

‘Who was he?’

‘Constable James. Jason James.’

‘There’s only one man better than him at his job and that’s his boss. Who, incidentally, is three-parts Abo.’

Baldock didn’t react, except to say, ‘It’s a changing world, ain’t it?’

Not out here, thought Malone.

They walked away from the gin shed towards the office a couple of hundred yards away. It was a silver-bright morning with patches of high cloud dry-brushed against the blue; one felt one could rub the air through one’s fingers like a fine fabric. A moon buggy rumbled by with another load of cotton, raising a low, thin mist of dust. Life and work goes on, Malone thought: profits must be made, only losses of life are affordable. Crumbs, he further thought, I’m thinking like a Commo: I wonder what they would have done to me in this town fifty years ago?

‘You got any suspects?’

They had reached the police vehicles and Baldock leaned against his car. ‘None. Or a dozen. Take your pick. It’ll be like trying to find a particular cotton boll in one of those modules.’

‘Any Jap-haters in the district?’

Baldock hesitated, then nodded. ‘Yeah, but I think they’re a bit too obvious to go in for murder. There’s Ray Chakiros. He’s president of the local Veterans Legion.’

The Veterans Legion all over the nation harboured a minority of ex-servicemen who were still consumed by a hatred of old enemies; they got more media space than they deserved and so were continually vocal. Moderation and a call to let bygones be bygones don’t make arresting headlines or good sound bites.

‘Chakiros?’

‘He’s Lebanese, but he was born here in Collamundra. His old man used to run the local café back in the days when we had only one. Now we’ve got coffee lounges, a McDonald’s, a Pizza Hut, a French restaurant, a Chinese one. Ray Chakiros owns the McDonald’s and one of the coffee lounges and he’s got the local Mercedes franchise. He’s got fingers in other pies, too – you know what the Wogs are like.’

Baldock wasn’t embarrassed by his prejudices; he was one of many for whom they are as natural as dandruff.

‘What’s he like?’ said Malone, wondering about Chakiros’s prejudices.

‘He runs off at the mouth about Japs or any sorta Asians, but I don’t think he’d pull a gun on any of ’em. He’s all piss and wind. He served in World War Two in New Guinea, but they tell me he never saw a Jap till the war was over. I’ve interviewed him, but I think he’s in the clear.’

‘Anyone else?’

Again Baldock took his time before answering. ‘There’s an Abo kid they had working here, but Sagawa sacked him last month. Wally Mungle knew him, they’re cousins. Then maybe there are half a dozen others, but we’ve got nothing on any of ’em.’

‘Where do we start then?’

Baldock shrugged. ‘Start at the bottom and work up.’

‘Who’s at the bottom?’ But Malone could guess.

‘The Abo, of course.’ Baldock said it without malice or prejudice. It struck Malone that the local sergeant was not a racist and he was pleased and relieved. Baldock might have his prejudices about Wogs, but that had nothing to do with race. Malone did wonder if there were any European Jews, refugees, in Collamundra and how they were treated by Baldock and the locals. He hoped there would be none of those on the suspect list.

‘His name’s Billy Koowarra,’ said Baldock.

‘Where can I find him?’

‘At the lock-up. He was picked up last night as an IP.’ Intoxicated Person: the all-purpose round-up lariat.

Malone saw Clements and Mungle come out of the office, where they had been questioning the office staff. He said delicately, a tone it had taken him a long time to acquire, ‘Curly – d’you mind if I ride back with Wally? You go with Russ.’

Baldock squinted, not against the sun. ‘Are you gunna go behind my back?’

‘No, I promise you there’ll be none of that. But you’ve had some trouble with the blacks out here, haven’t you? I read about it in a quarterly report.’

‘That was six or eight months ago, when all the land rights song and dance was going on. All the towns with Abo settlements outside them had the same trouble. It’s been quiet lately, though.’

‘Well, I think Wally will talk more freely to me about his cousin Billy if you’re not listening to him. Am I right?’

Baldock nodded reluctantly. ‘I guess so. He’s a good bloke, Wally. It hasn’t been easy for him, being a cop.’

‘It’s not that easy for us, is it?’

Baldock grinned. ‘I must tell him that some day.’

Then Clements and Mungle arrived. At the same time Koga, who had gone back into the gin shed, came out and walked towards the policemen. He was wide of them, looking as if he wanted to avoid them; his step faltered a moment, then he went on, not looking at them, towards the office. The four policemen looked after him.

‘How did he get on with Sagawa?’

‘We don’t know,’ said Baldock. ‘I asked Barry Liss about that, but he said he couldn’t tell. He said the two of them were like most Japs, or what he thought most Japs were like. Terribly polite towards each other. I gather Koga never opened his mouth unless Sagawa asked him to.’

‘Is he on your list?’

‘He will be, if you want him there.’

‘Put him on it.’ Then Malone turned to Clements. ‘Well, how’d you go?’

‘Bugger-all. Nobody understands why it happened. None of the drivers saw anything unusual in any of their loads, not when they brought the loads in from the fields.’

Malone glanced at Baldock. ‘Did the Physical Evidence boys find any blood on any of the trucks or buggies?’

‘None.’

‘What time do they start work here?’

‘The pickers start at seven in the morning,’ said Mungle in his quiet voice; it was difficult to tell whether he was shy or stand-offish. ‘The gin starts up at seven thirty. If the feeder was stopped at eight fifteen or thereabouts, that means the body must of been in the first or second load brought in the day before the murder. No one can remember who would have been driving that particular buggy.’

‘Our only guess,’ said Clements, ‘is that he was shot during the night and the killer scooped out a module, put the body in and re-packed the cotton again. They tell us that would be difficult but not impossible.’

‘He could have been brought in by the murderer in a buggy,’ said Malone. ‘Wally, would you ask Koga to step out here again?’

Mungle went across to the office and while he was gone Malone looked about him, faking bemusement. Baldock said, ‘What are you looking for?’

‘Media hacks. Down in Sydney they’d be around us like flies around a garbage tip. Don’t you have any out here?’

‘There’s the local paper and the radio station.They were out here Tuesday morning, getting in our way, as usual. They’ll be making a nuisance of themselves again, soon’s they hear you’re taking over.’

‘I thought they’d have heard that anyway,’ Malone said drily. ‘I don’t want to see ’em, Curly. This is your turf, you handle them. You’re the police spokesman, okay?’

Then Koga, diffident as before, came back with Wally Mungle. ‘You wanted me, Inspector?’ The thin, high voice broke, and he coughed. ‘Excuse me.’

‘What sort of security do you have out here, Mr Koga?’

‘None, Inspector. Mr Sagawa and I live – lived over there in the manager’s house.’ He pointed to a farmhouse, a relic of whatever the farm had once been, a couple of hundred yards away. ‘We were our own security. It was good enough, Mr Sagawa thought . . .’

But not good enough, Malone thought. ‘Where were you Monday night?’

The question seemed to startle Koga; he took off his glasses, as if they had suddenly fogged up; he looked remarkably young without them. ‘I – I went into town to the movies.’

‘What did you see?’ Malone’s voice was almost too casual.

Koga wiped his glasses, put them back on. ‘It was called Sea of Love. With Al Pacino.’

Malone looked at Baldock and Mungle. ‘I saw that down in Sydney at Christmas.’

‘It’s already been on out here,’ said Mungle. ‘They brought it back – by popular demand, they said. I think the locals were hoping the cop would be bumped off the second time around.’

Malone looked at Clements. ‘I thought you said this was a conservative district?’ Then he turned back to Koga, who had listened to all this without really understanding the cops’ sardonic acceptance of the public’s attitude towards them. ‘Was Mr Sagawa at the house when you got back from town?’

Koga shook his head. ‘No, he did not come home at all that night.’

‘Did that worry you?’

‘Not really. Mr Sagawa liked to – ’ he looked at Baldock; then went on, ‘ – he liked to gamble.’

Malone raised an eyebrow at Baldock, who said, ‘Ray Chakiros runs a small baccarat school out at the showgrounds a coupla nights a week, Mondays and Thursdays. We turn a blind eye to it. It never causes us any trouble.’

Malone wondered how much money had to change hands for no trouble to be caused; but that wasn’t his worry. ‘All right, Mr Koga, that’ll do. Thanks for your time.’

Koga bowed his head and Malone had to catch himself before he did the same; he did not want to be thought to be mocking the young Japanese. Koga went back to the office and Malone turned to the others. ‘Righto, let’s go back to town. Russ, you take Curly. Wally can ride with me.’

Clements was not the world’s best actor, but he could put on an admirable poker face. Wally Mungle’s own dark face was just as expressionless. He got in beside Malone and said nothing till they had driven out past the fields and on to the main road into town. As they did so, Malone noticed that all the cotton-pickers, the trucks and the buggies had stopped and their drivers were staring after the two departing police cars. He looked back and saw that Koga had come out on to the veranda of the office and was gazing after them. He wondered how far the young man, with his thick glasses, could see.

Mungle said, ‘Are you gunna ask me some questions you didn’t want Sergeant Baldock to hear? I don’t go behind his back, Inspector.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. No, Sergeant Baldock knows what I’m going to ask you. It’s about your cousin Billy Koowarra.’

‘Yeah, I thought it might be.’ Mungle nodded. He had taken off his hat and a long black curl dangled on his forehead like a bell-cord. He was a good-looking man, his features not as broad as those of a full-blood; his nose was straight and fine, and Malone wondered what white man had dipped his wick in tribal waters. He knew, from his experience in Sydney, that the mixed-bloods were the most difficult to deal with. They saw the world through mirrors, all of them cracked.

‘How long have you been a cop, Wally?’

‘Four years.’

‘Any regrets?’

Mungle stared ahead of them down the long black strip of macadam, shining blue in parts as if pools of water covered it. A big semi-trailer came rushing at them and he waited till it had roared by. ‘Sometimes.’

‘They treat you all right at the station?’

‘I’m the token Abo.’ He smiled, as much to himself as to Malone. ‘No, they’re okay.’

There had been a recruiting campaign to have more Aborigines join the police force, but so far there had been a scarce response. Every time Malone saw a TV newsreel of police action in South Africa, he was amazed at the number of black Africans in uniform, many of them laying into their fellow blacks with as much enthusiasm as their white colleagues. That, he knew, would never happen here.

‘What about amongst your family and the other blacks?’

‘My mum’s proud of me. I never knew my dad.’ He offered no more information on his father and Malone didn’t ask. ‘The rest of the Kooris – ’ He shrugged. ‘Depends whether they’re sober or not. When they’ve had a skinful, some of ’em get real shitty towards me.’

‘What sort of education did you have?’

‘I got to Year Eleven. One time I dreamed of getting my HSC and going on to university.’ He was a dinkum Aussie: he had said haitch for H. It was a characteristic that always brought a laugh from Lisa, the foreigner. ‘We Kooris are supposed to live in the Dreamtime. Some of us have different dreams to others.’

Malone could think of nothing to say to that; so he said, ‘What about your cousin Billy?’

‘Is he a suspect?’

‘I don’t know. What about him?’

‘He’s a silly young bugger, but that’s all I’m gunna say about him. We Kooris stick together,Inspector. Anyone will tell you that, especially the whites.’

Malone abruptly pulled the car into the side of the road, just opposite the grain silos on the edge of town. ‘Wally, let’s get one thing straight from the start. I’ve got my faults, but I’m not a racist. I don’t care what yours or Billy’s or anybody else’s skin is like, I treat them with respect till something happens to make me change my mind. But whatever changes my mind, it has nothing to do with the colour of their skin. Now can you get that through your black skull?’

Wally Mungle, like most Aborigines Malone had known, had a sense of humour. He suddenly smiled his beautiful smile. ‘Fair enough.’

Malone started up the car again. ‘Before we see Billy, take me down to the black settlement. I don’t want to talk to anyone, just look at the conditions there.’

‘I don’t live down there, y’know. My mother does, but I don’t.’

‘Where do you live?’ Malone put the question delicately. Twice in fifteen minutes he had had to be delicate: it might lead to cramp in a tongue that, too often, had got him into trouble.

‘I’ve got three acres over the other side of the river. I live there with my wife and two kids.’

‘Is she black?’

Mungle looked sideways at him. ‘Does it matter?’

They went round the war memorial; it seemed to Malone that the Anzac was ready to swivel on his pedestal, his bayonet at the ready. They drove down the main street, which was full now with cars and trucks parked at an angle to the kerb. It seemed to Malone, imagination working overtime, that people coming out of the stores stopped to stare at him and Wally Mungle. In the shade of the stores’ awnings men and women stood motionless, heads turned in the unmarked police car’s direction, ears strained for Malone’s answer.

They had reached the far end of the main street before Malone said, ‘No, it doesn’t matter if she’s black. But I’m a stranger here, it’s a whole new turf to me, and people around here don’t look at things the way I’m used to. I’ve learned that just since I got in last night.’

‘Fair enough. Yeah, Ruby’s black. She’s a mixed-blood, like me. We would of been called half-castes in the old days, but that’s out now. Ruby’s what the Yanks call a quadroon, or used to. She’s got more white blood than me, it shows.’

‘She got white relatives around here?’

A slight hesitation, then a nod: ‘Yeah, but they’d never admit to it. She doesn’t press it, she’s quite happy with things the way they are. By the time our kids grow up, things will have changed – we hope. They’ll be white enough to be accepted.’

‘What are they, how old?’

‘A boy, six, and a girl, three. Nobody would know they’re Kooris, they could pass for Wogs.’

‘Is that what you want for them when they grow up, to pass for Wogs?’

‘No.’ He said it quietly, but his voice was emphatic. ‘I want ’em to be Kooris. I just don’t want ’em discriminated against because of the colour of their skin. I’ve had enough of that. You got any kids?’

‘Yes. Pure white, all three of them. The only discrimination against them is that their father is a cop.’

‘My kids have got that, too.’ But he smiled his beautiful smile again. ‘Okay, turn off here.’

They were just beyond the edge of town, coming to a two-lane bridge over the river, the Noongulli. Malone turned off on to a red-dirt track that led parallel to the river and soon came to the Aboriginal settlement. At first glance the location was idyllic. There was a wide bend in the river and a small beach of flood-washed sand on the far side of the grey-green stretch of slow-moving water. Red river-gums, their trunks blotched like an old man’s skin, hung over the river as if looking for fish to jump to the bait of their leaves. Shade dappled the ground under a stand of yellowbox and on the far side of the river Malone could see the white rails of the racecourse seeming, at this distance, to hover above the ground like a giant magic hoop that had become fixed without any visible support. A white heron, looking in the reflected sunlight from the river almost as insubstantial as if it were made of no more than its own powder-down, creaked in slow motion up towards the bridge. Then Malone saw the reality.

The settlement, standing back about fifty yards from the river bank, was a collection of tin shacks flung together without any pattern, as if the shacks had been built where the corrugated iron for the walls and the roofs had fallen off a truck driven by a drunk. Four abandoned cars, stripped of their engines, wheels gone, lay like dead shrunken hippos between a patch of scrub and the shacks. The cars’ seats rested in a neat row under two yellowbox trees, seats in a park that had been neglected and forgotten. Two drunken Aborigines lay asleep on two of the seats, just as Malone had seen other, white drunks in inner city parks in Sydney. The track through the settlement was a rutted, dried-out morass of mud in which half a dozen raggedy-dressed children played as he had seen his own children play in the sand on Coogee beach. The shacks themselves, some of them supporting lean-tos roofed over with torn tarpaulins, looked ready to be condemned. The part of the settlement’s population that Malone could see, perhaps thirty or forty men and women of all ages, did not appear to have anything to occupy them. They sat or lolled on shaky-looking chairs, against tree-boles or on the ground, just waiting – for what? he wondered. Wine flagons were being passed around, unhurriedly, without comment, every drinker waiting patiently for his or her swig. None of the boisterousness of white beer-swillers here: these blacks were prepared to take their time in getting drunk. And maybe that’s what they’re waiting for, he thought: to get drunk, to have the mind, too, turn black. He couldn’t blame them and never had. It was just a pity they could make such a bloody nuisance of themselves. But that was the cop in him, thinking a policeman’s thoughts.

‘Well, that’s it,’ said Wally Mungle, making no attempt to get out of the car; silently advising Malone not to do so. ‘Dreamtime on the Noongulli.’

‘How did you get out of it?’

‘Because I wanted to.’

‘What about the others?’ He tried to sound uncritical, but it was an effort.

Mungle didn’t appear to resent the implied criticism. ‘Most of ’em are full-bloods. I think they’ve given up the fight. This district has always had a pretty bloody attitude towards us Kooris. It’s hardly changed in a hundred and fifty years, ever since Chess Hardstaff’s great-grandfather came out here and started Noongulli Station. There was a massacre here, right where we’re sitting, in eighteen fifty-one – a dozen Koori men and half a dozen women were shot and killed. There was a trial, but nobody went to gaol for it. The shire council showed a lot of sensitivity when they nominated this spot for the settlement – they thought they were doing us a favour, giving us a river view. It was put up twenty years ago when there was a conservative government in and when Labour got in, they did nothing about moving it from here. Now we’ve got a conservative coalition again and there’s been promises about improvements, but so far there’s been bugger-all.’

‘Does everyone here live on the dole?’

‘Practically everyone. In the old days, when I was a kid, some of the men got work at shearing time, but now the shearing teams come in from outside and none of the local graziers want to have anything to do with the Kooris.’

‘What about Sean Carmody out at Sundown?’

‘Well, yeah, him and his grandson take on a few. But they’re looked on as radicals. His son-in-law,Trevor Waring, who lives next door, doesn’t take on any.’

‘What about out at the cotton farm? Billy worked there.’

‘He was the only one. Practically all the work there is mechanized – these guys here ain’t trained for anything like that. Billy was just a sorta roustabout out there. The token Abo for the Japs.’

‘Why was he sacked?’

Mungle said nothing for a long moment; then decided to be a cop and not just a Koori: ‘Billy likes the grog a bit too much. If he had a hangover, he wasn’t always on time for work. Sagawa didn’t like that, so he fired Billy. I don’t blame him.’

‘Does Billy blame him?’

‘You better ask him that. You seen enough out here?’

Malone looked out at the depressing scene once more. The three or four circles of drinkers, aware all at once that their kin, Wally Mungle, was in the car with the stranger, had stopped passing the wine flagons and had all turned their heads to look at the two cops in the Commodore. Their faces were expressionless, mahogany masks. Sitting in their shapeless clothes in the dirt, surrounded by squalor, they still suggested a certain dignity by their very stillness.

‘Christ!’

‘I don’t think He wants to help,’ said Wally Mungle. ‘The God-botherers pray for us Kooris every Sunday, but it goes right over the heads of their congregations. I think Jesus Christ has given up, too.’

‘Are you religious?’ Malone remembered it had been bush missionaries who had first brought education to the Aborigines.

‘I used to be. Not any more, though.’

Malone started up the car, swung it round and drove back along the river and up on to the main road. He and Mungle said nothing more to each other till Malone pulled the car into the yard behind the police station.

‘Do you want to come in with me while I question Billy?’

Mungle hesitated, then shrugged. ‘I better. I can’t go on dodging the poor bugger.’

Malone wondered how many other Kooris he had dodged in the past. It struck him that, even in his mind, he had used the word Koori, the blacks’ own name for themselves.

The lock-up cells were clean and comfortable, but that was all that could be said of them. There was an old-fashioned lavatory bucket in one corner, two narrow beds and that was it. These were for one-night or two-night prisoners; they weren’t meant as home-from-home for long-term inmates. Malone had been told that remand prisoners were taken over to Cawndilla, the District headquarters town. There was a steel door to the cell, with a small barred opening in it; a small window high in the outer wall also had bars on it. Malone guessed that dangerous crims would not be locked up here, but would be taken immediately to District. Five minutes with Billy Koowarra told Malone that the boy was not dangerous.

He was nineteen, stringily built, with long curly hair and a sullen face that at certain angles made him look no more than a schoolboy who had just entered high school, one that he hated. He nodded when Mungle introduced Malone and stood leaning flat against the wall, like someone waiting to be shot.

‘This the first time you’ve been locked up, Billy?’

The boy looked at Mungle, who gave him no help; then he looked back at Malone. ‘Nah. I been in here, I dunno, two or three times.’

‘Drunk each time?’

‘That’s what they said.’

Malone decided to hit the boy over the head, shake him out of his sullenness. ‘Billy, what do you know about Mr Sagawa being murdered?’

The boy’s eyes opened wide in sudden fright, as if he had just realized why this stranger from the city was in here to question him. He looked at Mungle, then leaned away from the wall as if he were about to run; but he had nowhere to run to. ‘Jesus, Wally, what the fuck is this? Why’d you bring him in here, let him ask me something like that?’

‘Take it easy, Billy. If you dunno anything about Mr Sagawa’s death, just say so. Inspector Malone isn’t accusing you of anything.’

‘I wanna get outa here!’ Koowarra looked around him in panic. ‘Shit, all they locked me up for was being drunk! I ain’t done nothing!’

‘We’re not saying you have,’ said Malone. ‘When did you last see Mr Sagawa?’

Koowarra had begun to shuffle along the wall, his back still to it. ‘This fucking place is getting me down, Wally! Get me outa here!’

‘I can’t do that, Billy, not till Inspector Narvo comes back. This is the fifth time you’ve been in here, not the second or third. You’ll probably have to stay here another night, I dunno. But that’s the worst that’s gunna happen to you. Now why don’t you tell us? When did you last see Mr Sagawa?’

Koowarra had stopped shuffling, was flattened against the wall again. He looked from one detective to the other, then he said, ‘Monday. I went out to see him, I dunno, about seven o’clock. I was gunna apologize and ask for my job back.’

Malone had not expected such a direct answer, but he knew that often a prisoner being questioned told the truth, or what sounded like the truth, in the hope of a favourable reaction from his questioner. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Wally Mungle frown as if he, too, hadn’t expected such a frank answer.

‘That was all you had in mind, Billy? Just to apologize and ask for your job back?’

The boy suddenly seemed to realize that he might have been too honest; his face abruptly got older, seemed to become wooden and darker. ‘What else would I wanna see him for?’

Malone shrugged, careful not to press too hard. ‘I don’t know, Billy. What did he say when you apologized?’

‘I didn’t see him. When I got out there – ’

‘How did you get out there?’

‘I walked. I don’t own no wheels. I tried to thumb a lift, but nobody around here gives a Koori a lift, not after dark. Right, Wally?’

‘Right.’ Mungle sounded even quieter than usual.

‘Why didn’t you get to see Mr Sagawa? Wasn’t he in his office or anywhere around the gin?’

‘I think he was in his office. His car, he’s got a blue Toyota Cressida, was parked outside.’

Malone looked at Mungle. ‘Was the car still there the next morning, when they found his body?’

Mungle nodded. ‘It was still there. The car keys were in the ignition.’

‘Any prints on the car?’

‘The Crime Scene fellers didn’t find any. Not even Sagawa’s.’

‘Didn’t you find that queer? The owner’s print nowhere on his own car? You didn’t mention that in the running sheet.’

Mungle worked his mouth in embarrassment. ‘I forgot, Inspector. I thought it was queer at the time, but I didn’t make a note of it. Sorry.’

Malone wasn’t going to tick him off any further, not in front of a prisoner, even if the latter was his cousin. He looked back at Billy Koowarra. ‘Why didn’t you go in to see Mr Sagawa?’

‘There was someone with him, I think. I waited about twenty minutes, but nobody came out. So I started walking back to town.’

‘What time was this?’

‘I dunno, about seven thirty, I guess. Mebbe eight o’clock, I dunno. I don’t own a watch.’

‘Was there another car there?’

‘Yeah, a fawn Merc.’

‘You recognize whose it was?’

The boy shook his head. ‘I didn’t get close. I stayed, I dunno, about a hundred yards away, by the kurrajong tree near the inside gate as you come up from the road.’

‘How many Mercedes in the district?’ Malone asked Mungle.

‘Half a dozen, I guess. Ask Billy, he’s the car man.’

For a moment there was a spark of – something: a dream, a hope? – in the boy’s dark eyes. ‘Yeah, I can’t wait till I get a car of me own – ’ We Kooris are supposed to live in the Dreamtime. Some of us have different dreams to others. ‘There are seven Mercs around here. Not all the same model, though.’

‘Did the car pass you when you were walking back to town?’

Koowarra spread his hands, almost an Italian gesture. ‘I dunno. There was half a dozen cars passed me, maybe more, and a coupla semi-trailers. One of the cars was a Merc, but I dunno whether it was the one out at the gin.’

‘You didn’t hear any row going on in the office?’

‘No, I was too far away. I told you,’ he added petulantly. He was edgy again, pressing himself back against the wall. Somewhere in another cell a man’s voice, a little slurred, had begun to sing: Like a rhinestone cowboy . . .

Malone looked enquiringly at Mungle, who said, ‘Another cousin. He knows all the country-and-western ballads.’

Malone wanted to ask why the other cousin had to borrow his sad songs from another culture; but didn’t. Instead, he said, ‘Righto, that’ll do for now, Billy. When you’re released, don’t leave town. We’ll need you as a witness.’

‘Shit, where’m I gunna go? I’m stuck here, like everyone else.’ He banged the back of his head against the wall, then leaned towards Mungle, grabbing the front of the latter’s shirt. ‘Get me outa here, for Chrissake! I can’t stand being locked up no more!’

Mungle gently pulled the boy’s hand away, said quietly, ‘Billy, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Nobody’s gunna do anything to you.’

“What about him?’ Koowarra jerked his head at Malone.

‘Inspector Malone’s not charging you with anything. You’ll just be needed as a witness, that’s all.’

‘I’m still gunna be locked up!’

‘Only till Inspector Narvo gets back. He’ll probably authorize bail, maybe fifty bucks or something, then you’ll have to wait till the magistrate comes in, he’s due in town for the Cup. Just one more night in here, Billy, that’s all.’

‘You’re on their fucking side, ain’t you?’ The dark eyes blazed: not with hatred of his cousin, the cop, but out of sheer frustration and despair. Malone had seen it before, even amongst the city Kooris.

Wally Mungle sighed. ‘Don’t start that again, Billy. Can we go now, Inspector?’

Without waiting for Malone’s assent, he went out of the cell. Koowarra stared at the open door, looked for a moment as if he might make a break for it; then he looked at Malone, all the fury and frustration draining out of his face. All at once he looked as old as some of the elders Malone had seen down at the settlement by the river.

‘It’s fucking hopeless, ain’t it?’

Malone had heard the same complaint from nineteen-year-old whites on the streets of King’s Cross; but he had had no answer for them, either. ‘Make the best of it, Billy. I’ve got no authority here, otherwise I’d have you released on bail now. I’ll see you tomorrow. Just remember – when you do get out, don’t leave town.’

He went out, pulling the door gently closed behind him, not wanting to slam it on Billy Koowarra. Along the corridor the Koori rhinestone cowboy was still singing softly to himself.

Upstairs in the detectives’ room Clements, Baldock and Mungle were waiting for him. He took off his jacket and slumped down in the chair Baldock pushed towards him. Baldock then went round and sat behind his desk, the presiding officer. Malone wondered if Baldock had stage-managed the placing of the chairs, but he didn’t mind. He would observe protocol, be the visitor on Baldock’s turf. He wanted as many people as possible, few though there might be, to be on his side.

‘Well, what d’you think?’ said Baldock.

‘He’s in the clear, he’s too open. You agree, Wally?’

Mungle, standing with his back to the wall just as Koowarra had done in his cell, nodded. ‘Billy’s not a killer.’

‘Wally, did the Crime Scene fellers go right over Sagawa’s car for prints?’ Mungle nodded again. ‘It hadn’t just been washed, had it?’

‘No, but it was pretty clean. Sagawa kept his car like that. Billy used to wash it for him every coupla days. But there were no prints inside the car. On the steering wheel, on the dash – nothing. It had been wiped clean, the Fingerprint guy said.’

Malone looked at Baldock. ‘What does that suggest to you?’

‘That someone had driven the car in from somewhere else. Then wiped his and Sagawa’s prints off everything.’

‘Did they go over the car for bloodstains?’

‘Nothing,’ said Mungle. ‘They’ve got the car over at Cawndilla. I was talking to them yesterday – they’ve found nothing. I don’t think Sagawa was killed in his car or that the killer brought the body back to the farm in it.’

‘So it could’ve been brought back in the Merc that Billy saw. Assuming Sagawa was dead by then. What time did the GMO put as the time of death?’

‘He was guessing,’ said Baldock. ‘Doc Nothling said the time of death was probably somewhere between ten and twelve on Monday night. Sagawa had eaten, there was food still in the stomach.’

‘Well, whoever was in the Merc that Billy saw might not have had anything at all to do with Sagawa’s murder.’ He looked at Clements in mock despair. ‘Let’s go home, Russ.’

Clements munched on his lower lip. ‘Wally’s been telling me about that Merc. He says there are seven in the district. Let’s start running ’em down. Who owns them, Curly?’

‘Off the top of my head, I can name four of ’em. Chess Hardstaff, Narelle Potter, Trevor Waring, Ray Chakiros. Oh, and one of the local graziers,Bert Truman. He’s a Flash Jack, plays polo, wants his own plane next, I’m told. He’s a ladies’ man.’

‘What about Doc Nothling?’

‘He drives a Ford Fairlane. Or is it an LTD? Anyhow, it’s a Ford. Chess Hardstaff doesn’t want a son-in-law who tries to match him in everything.’

That was one good thing about a bush investigation: gossip flowed like an irrigation channel. Malone said, ‘Rustle up the names of the other owners. Check on where they all were last Monday night.’

‘You want me to check with Mrs Potter?’ Clements’s face was absolutely straight, virginal.

Malone kept his own face just as straight. ‘No, you’re coming with me.’

‘Where are you going?’ said Baldock, trying to hang on to a rein on his own turf. ‘You want me to come with you?’

‘I think it’d be better if you didn’t, Curly. We’re going out to see Mr Hardstaff.’

Baldock got the message: when this was all over, he’d still have to go on living here. ‘Sure. You can’t miss his place, Noongulli, it’s out past the Carmody place, about another five kilometres to the turn-off. You want me to ring and say you’re coming?’

‘I don’t think so. Surprise is the spice of a policeman’s life.’

‘Who said that? Gilbert and Sullivan?’

‘No, Russ did. He’s Homicide’s resident philosopher.’

The resident philosopher jerked a non-philosophical thumb.

2

Chester Hardstaff poured two stiff whiskies and soda, handed one to his guest and took a sip of his own. He usually had nothing to drink before lunch, but this morning he took his visitor’s habit as his excuse for breaking his own. Gus Dircks was a man who would accept a drink any time of day, but Hardstaff could not remember ever having seen him drunk.

‘It’s not good for the district, Gus.’

‘I know, I know. That’s why I came up a coupla days early, Chess. I wasn’t going to come up for the Cup till Saturday morning. But when I heard they were sending up two Homicide blokes from Sydney, I thought I better get up here and see what you thought of the murder.’

‘I don’t like it, Gus. It’s upset the whole district. It’s dampened everyone’s spirit.’

‘I hadn’t noticed that. You been into town since it happened? Everybody’s talking about the murder, but I don’t think you could say it’s dampened anyone’s spirit. Nobody’s going to stay away from the Cup because of it.’ Lately he had begun to think that Chess Hardstaff had lost his touch, that he had become too unbending even to notice what was happening at the grass roots.

Most people’s names go unremarked; it is just the sound signature for who a person is. Most of them have lost their original meaning: Johnson need no longer be John’s son, he can be Bert’s son or, if the father is insignificant, Doreen’s son. But some names do retain their meaning, have their warning: Hardstaff was one of those names. It suggested mastership, discipline; the Weakreeds of the world would bend before it. Even the diminutive of Chester Hardstaff’s first name fitted the man: Chess never made a move solely on instinct. Except once . . . And Gus Dircks didn’t know about that.

Hardstaff had said nothing and Dircks grew uncomfortable in the silence. He sipped his drink and said, ‘This is a nice drop.’

‘I buy only the best,’ said Hardstaff, though he sometimes wondered if he could say that about some of the candidates he bought for the Party. Especially the purchase sitting opposite him in his office now.

Australia has never bred any aristocrats, though more than a few of the natives have aspired to the stud-book. Chester Hardstaff was one of them: he thought of himself as better bred than any of the champion merinos he raised. His great-great-grandfather had come to the colony of Sydney with the First Fleet, a midshipman scion of a middling wealthy farming family from Yorkshire. The midshipman’s son, Chess’s great-grandfather, had come west in 1849 and taken up the Noongulli run; at one time it had covered 150,000 acres, but now it was down to 50,000 acres, or almost 25,000 hectares, a measure he never used. The homestead, a showpiece of colonial architecture, had been built in 1870, a fit dwelling for a pastoral aristocrat. Chess Hardstaff felt at home in it and he had decided that, when he passed on (for he was of the sort who would never just die), his ghost would come back to see that it remained in the family. He had no doubt that he would be master of his own movements in the next world: the Rural Party, like all conservative parties, believed it had been made in Heaven.

Chess Hardstaff looked an aristocrat; or what the popular conception was of such a rare breed in this flat land of flat social levels. There was something un-Australian about his looks; as if his eighteenth-century forebear had risen from the grave to provide the clay for him. He was seventy-five years old, but carried himself like a much younger man: tall, straight-backed, silver head held high. He gave some lesser men the impression that he was gazing down his handsome nose at them, an impression that was correct. Arrogance was a virtue in his eyes and he polished it till God Himself would have put on dark glasses against the shine of it. He looked every other inch the patrician he thought he was; but the alternative inches hid the son-of-a-bitch his enemies thought he was. He had many enemies and would have been disappointed if he hadn’t; he had no time for people with neutral feelings. He had always been a passionate man, but always controlled. Or had been except for one occasion.

“We’ve got to keep this played down, Chess.’

Augustus Dircks looked the very opposite of Hardstaff. In his late fifties, short, nuggety, blunt-faced and with close-cropped ginger hair, he lboked as if he could be the foreman of a shire road gang. He was, instead, a reasonably wealthy wheat and wool farmer; his family had been in the district since the turn of the century and he had been the Rural Party’s member for the electorate of Noongulli for the past twenty years. He had been an odd and bad choice for Police Minister, but Coalition politics and Chess Hardstaff had got him the job when the joint conservative parties had deposed the long-time Labour government in the recent State elections. He had never had an original political thought in his life, but that has never been a handicap to any politician anywhere in the world. Dircks’s saving grace was that he knew his limitations: without his mentor, he would be a nobody. It hurt, however, to have heard the New South Wales police call him Gus Nobody. It is one thing to know your own limitations, it is another to have everyone agree with you.

‘What are these detectives from Sydney like? Busybodies?’

‘I don’t know much about them, I didn’t have time to look into ’em. Except that Malone, the inspector, is supposed to be dogged, he doesn’t give up easily. He’s solved one or two tough cases the last coupla years.’

‘Will he solve this one?’

‘Who knows?’ Dircks sipped his drink; then said carefully, ‘Do we want it solved?’

Hardstaff had been gazing out the window at the garden that surrounded the house; Mick, the Aboriginal gardener, was cutting back the rose bushes. But at Dircks’s question, he turned round and sat down at his desk. It was a large desk, an English antique that had come from the original family home in Yorkshire; the leather top had had to be replaced, but the wood of the desk had a patina to it that pleased him every time he looked at it. Had it been possible, he would have totally avoided the new. Only the old, the tried and true, could be trusted.

‘What do you mean by that, Gus?’ His deep voice was toneless, as unhurried as ever.

‘Well, we don’t know what’s going to come out, do we? We want the Nips to stay here, don’t we?’

‘Yes.’ Though Hardstaff had invested no money of his own in the consortium that had set up South Cloud Cotton, it had been he who had persuaded the Japanese to come in as major partners. ‘We want more foreign investment in this country and the Japanese are our best bet.’

‘Sure. But they’re not going to feel too bloody welcome if it turns out one of our locals is out to murder them.’

‘What makes you think it’s one of the locals?’

‘Who else could it be? I saw Hugh Narvo last night, he told me they haven’t found any trace of strangers hanging about out at the gin.’

‘Does Hugh think it’s a local who’s the murderer?’

Dircks shrugged. ‘You know him, he never commits himself. Not even to the Police Minister.’ He laughed: it sounded like a sour joke.

‘Is he still in charge of the case? Or are these outsiders from Sydney taking over?’

‘Nominally, he should be in charge. But I don’t know that he wants to be. He seems to be leaving everything to Curly Baldock.’

‘I think you’d better have a word with Hugh.’ He looked up as his housekeeper, a stout middle-aged woman with glasses that kept slipping down to the end of her snub nose, came to the door of the office. ‘Yes, Dorothy?’

It had taken him a long time to be able to say her name without thinking of his dead wife, that other Dorothy.

‘There are two detectives here, Mr Hardstaff.’ She sounded puzzled; she pushed her glasses back up her nose, squinted through them at him. ‘From Sydney?’

Hardstaff rose from his desk, not looking at Dircks. ‘I’ll see them in the living-room. You’d better come too, Gus.’

Dircks lifted his bulk from his chair, breathing heavily: it was difficult to tell whether he was overweight or over-anxious. ‘They didn’t take long to get out here, did they?’

‘Leave them to me,’ said the King-maker, who could break as well as make men.

3

When Clements had switched off the engine of the Commodore, Malone sat for a moment looking at Noongulli homestead. ‘Take a look at how the squattocracy lives.’

One didn’t much hear the word squattocracy these days. It had been coined near the middle of the last century to describe the then colonial aristocracy, or what passed for it. The original squatters had been ticket-of-leave men, emancipated convicts, who, legally or otherwise, had taken up land in remote areas and prospered as much by rustling from neighbours as by their own sheep- or grain-raising efforts. Gradually the word squatter had gained respectability. All countries can turn a blind eye to the sins of their fathers, but none was blinder than that of the local elements. Men, and women, have killed for respectability.

Clements nodded appreciatively. He had been impressed as they had come up the long drive, half a mile at least, from the front gates; an avenue of silky oaks had lined the smoothly graded track and the fences behind them had had none of the drunken lurch one found on so many of the properties as large as this one. The gardens surrounding the house were as carefully tended as some he had seen on Sydney’s North Shore; an elderly Aborigine stood unmoving in the midst of a large rose plot, gazing at them with stiff curiosity like a garden ornament. Trees bordered the acre or so of garden: blue-gum, liquidambar, cedar and cabbage tree palm, though Clements knew only the name of the liquidambar. On one side of the house was a clay tennis court and beyond it a swimming pool. The house itself, though only one-storeyed, suggested a mansion: there was a dignity to it, an impressive solidity, that told you this was more than just a house. This was where tradition and wealth and, possibly, power resided. Its owner was not to be taken lightly.

‘Not bad, eh?’ Clements said. ‘I think I might’ve liked being a squatter. A rich one.’

‘You’d have buggered the sheep. I don’t mean literally. Russ, you couldn’t raise a pup even if it gave you a hand. Lassie would have turned up her nose at you and gone home. Come on, let’s go inside and see what we can get out of Mr Hardstaff.’

He had seen Hardstaff on television, but he was not prepared for the presence of the man in person. He fitted the dignity of his home; it was a proper setting for him. Dignity is not an Australian characteristic, the larrikin element is too strong in the national psyche. Hardstaff stood in the middle of his living-room, a heavily elegant chamber, and looked at the two larrikin intruders.

Malone introduced himself and Clements and was greeted by, ‘You might have telephoned me first to let me know you were coming.’

‘We slip up sometimes on politeness,’ said Malone; and looked at the Police Minister. ‘It’s Mr Dircks, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Dircks. ‘I think Mr Hardstaff has a point. You shouldn’t come charging in here, you don’t have a warrant, do you?’

‘No, sir. I wasn’t aware we were charging in. You’re the Minister, you’d know we’d get nowhere if we stuck to protocol all the time.’ Oh crumbs, he thought, there goes the Malone tongue again. He glanced to his right and saw Clements looking around as if seeking a way out of the room before the roof fell in.

Dircks’s face reddened, but Hardstaff was not going to have a Police Department row in his home. ‘Let’s start again, Inspector. Why did you want to see me? Sit down.’

Malone and Clements lowered themselves into armchairs. This was a man’s living-room, leather and tweed and polished wood; there was no chintz or silk. Brass glinted at various points around the room and the paintings on the walls were bold and challenging, though not in any modern style: de Kooning or Bacon or Blackman would have finished up in the marble-topped fireplace. The challenge was within the subject of the paintings: a hold-up by bushrangers, a horse-breaker trying to tame a buck-jumper. There were, however, vases of flowers on side tables around the room, the only soft touch, like that of a ghostly woman’s hand.

Clements had taken out his notebook and Hard-staff gave him a hard stare. ‘You are going to take notes?’

‘Only if necessary.’

‘Will it be necessary?’ Hardstaff looked back at Malone.

‘I don’t know, Mr Hardstaff, not till I start asking the questions.’ He plunged straight in, freezing though the water might be: ‘Can you tell us where you were Monday night, the night Mr Sagawa was murdered out at the cotton gin?’

‘Jesus!’ said the Police Minister. ‘What sort of question is that?’

‘A routine one,’ said Malone. ‘It’s normal police procedure in cases like this. Where were you, Mr Hardstaff?’

Hardstaff had shown no expression at the question. His long handsome face could turn into a stone replica of itself; he turned his head slightly and, in a trick of light, his pale blue eyes seemed suddenly colourless. A classicist might have described him at that moment as a Caesar in his own museum. But Malone was no classicist, just a cop who had learned to read stone faces, no matter how faint the script.

‘I was at a meeting of the Turf Club. I’m the chairman.’

You would be, thought Malone: you’re probably chairman of everything with more than two members in this district. ‘Where was that held?’

‘At the Legion club. From seven o’clock till nine.’

‘And after that?’

‘After that I went to my daughter’s home, the other side of town. I was there about an hour, I suppose. Then I drove home.’

‘Alone?’

‘Of course.’ He didn’t attempt to explain why of course he would drive home alone.

‘What sort of car do you have?’

‘A Mercedes, last year’s model. A 500SEL.’ He did not say it boastfully, but as if mocking Malone’s questioning of him. He looked at Clements taking notes. ‘Got that, Sergeant?’

‘Colour?’ said Clements.

‘Beige, I think they call it. I don’t have a good eye for colour, I’m colour-blind.’

‘Does that apply to people, too?’

‘Jesus Christ!’ Dircks sat up in his chair. Hard-staff had left his drink in the study, but the Police Minister had brought his with him and now the ice rattled in his glass like dice. ‘That’s enough of that sort of insult, Malone! The interview’s over!’

My bloody tongue again, thought Malone. But Hardstaff’s air of arrogance, his apparent resentment that the police should interrogate him without making an appointment, acted on Malone like a burr in his pants.

Hardstaff did not appear disturbed by the question. He looked at Malone with new interest, as if the detective were an adversary who might prove hard to put down. Weak opponents bored him. Without looking at Dircks he said, ‘It’s all right, Gus. Perhaps the inspector has some point to his question?’

Malone saw that Hardstaff suddenly had some respect for him. ‘Yes, there was a point to it. I’ve heard that there is some strong anti-Japanese feeling in the district.’

‘Not from me, Inspector. I brought the Japanese investment in here. Mr Dircks will confirm that. He’s one of the partners in South Cloud.’

Malone saw Clements’s ballpoint suddenly slip, scratching across the page of his notebook. Then the big hand was steady again, waiting to make a note of Dircks’s reply.

‘I didn’t know that, Mr Dircks,’ Malone said.

‘It’s in the records. You’d have seen it if you’d looked at the books of the company.’ But Dircks sounded as if he wished the connection hadn’t been mentioned.

‘We’ve only just started. There’s a lot we still have to look into. Have you visited the cotton farm lately, Mr Hardstaff?’

‘No, I have no financial interest in it.’

‘Did you know Mr Sagawa?’

‘Yes. He came to dinner once. And he came out once or twice to tennis parties we had. He was an enthusiastic tennis player. He was enthusiastic at everything, come to think of it. Everyone liked him.’

‘Except the person who murdered him.’

‘Christ, you’re blunt!’ said Dircks, a politician never known for his subtlety in parliament.

Malone stood up, ignoring the Minister’s remark. ‘Did you know anything about Mr Sagawa other than that he was enthusiastic and popular?’

The other three men were now on their feet. Hardstaff said, ‘No, I don’t believe I did. Perhaps the other Japanese out at the farm, the assistant manager, Mr Koga, might help you there.’

‘You know Mr Koga? I thought you said you had no interest in the cotton farm?’

Hardstaff smiled, a crack in the stone. ‘I’m interested in everything that goes on in this district, Inspector. This is my turf, I think is the expression.’

‘Oh,’ said Malone, letting his tongue have its way this time, ‘I thought it was the Minister’s.’

‘Enjoy your stay, Inspector,’ said Hardstaff, the crack widening. The bugger’s enjoying this, thought Malone. ‘Come and see me again if you have any more questions. Just telephone me first, that’s all. I’m not always available to every Tom, Dick and Harry.’

‘Scobie and Russ,’ said Malone. ‘Thanks for your time.’

As he and Clements went down the steps from the wide front veranda, Dircks came hurrying out the front door. ‘Inspector!’

Malone turned. ‘Yes, sir?’

‘I heard you’re staying at the Mail Coach.’ Narelle Potter would have told him that. ‘Have lunch with me there. One o’clock. Just you and me.’ He didn’t look at Clements.

‘Yes, sir.’

They got into the Commodore and halfway down the driveway to the front gates Clements said, ‘You’ve stirred up something back there. I think we could be on our way outa town by this evening. I was looking forward to going to the races tomorrow afternoon.’

‘What are you going to put your money on? Narelle or her horse?’

‘Okay, wipe the shit off your liver. It’s just a bit of innocent nooky with her.’

‘She hasn’t been innocent since she got out of kindergarten.’

‘Geez, we have got S.O.L., haven’t we? You’ve let those two bastards get to you.’

Malone nodded morosely. ‘You’re right . . . Look, as soon as we get back to the station, get on to Sydney. Get Andy Graham, if you can. Have him contact the Tokyo police, I want a full background on Mr Sagawa – so far we know practically bugger-all about him. Tell him to phone you when he’s got something, not put it on the computer.’

‘We keep it to ourselves? Okay.’

‘Tell him to tell the Japs it’s urgent. I’d like it by Monday morning at the latest.’

‘It’s Friday now, for Chrissakes.’

‘Let’s see if the Japs are as industrious as I’m always reading. We work weekends, don’t we?’

‘Not tomorrow, I hope. Not while I’m out at the course, putting my money on Narelle’s horse.’

‘She’s really conned you, hasn’t she? Lisa’s going to be disappointed when I tell her. She’s still hoping she can marry you off to some convent virgin. What happened to that girl Sheila from Forensic Science?’

‘She was too clinical. She wanted to take a blood sample every time we did it.’

‘Excuses, excuses. You’re just afraid of marriage.’

They drove back to town, being overtaken several times by cars hurtling towards the Big Weekend; there was no respect for the speed limit out here in the backblocks. They went by the entrance to Sundown and Malone wondered what Lisa and the kids were doing right now; maybe Tom was falling off another horse, Claire was still mooning over Tas Waring, Maureen was chatting away, careless of whether anyone was listening to her or not. All at once he wished he could retire now, while the kids were still young; perhaps they wouldn’t need him by the time he got to retirement age. The thought suddenly saddened and frightened him.

They passed the racecourse, where workers were preparing the track for tomorrow’s meeting. Bunting was being hung from the small grandstand and several marquees had been erected. In a small showground beside the course a travelling circus and carnival was setting up its tents and stalls; two elephants were being used as fork-lift substitutes, raising up a long thick pole. Clements slowed the car.

‘You gunna bring the kids to the circus tomorrow?’

‘I’ll try. Depends whether we’re working or not.’ A day with Lisa and the kids would be a nice break. ‘I might even watch the Cup and put a dollar or two on something.’

‘Don’t get rash. That’s money you’re throwing around.’

They drove on into town, which now seemed full of cars and utility trucks and four-wheel-drive wagons. The sleepy air of the town had disappeared; Collamundra looked as if it might be getting ready to get drunk. Some drunks were already evident, but Malone noticed from the police car, slowed by the traffic, that they were mostly Aborigines. He wondered if Cup weekend was a cause for celebration for them or whether this was how they marked every weekend.

One of the drunks stepped off the footpath, walked unsteadily to the middle of the road, then stopped, facing the traffic. Clements slammed on the brakes. The Aborigine was middle-aged, thin but for a bloated belly; he wore a tweed cap, with his hair sticking out on either side and curling up like the horns on a Viking’s helmet. He grinned foolishly at the two strangers in the Commodore, raising his hand and giving them a slow wave. The traffic had banked up behind the police car and horns were being sounded in temper. The Aborigine leaned sideways, slowly, without moving his feet, and peered past the Commodore to the cars behind. He gave their drivers the same slow wave, still grinning foolishly.

Jesus Christ,’ said Clements, ‘is it any wonder people have no time for the stupid bastards?’

Malone was smiling back at the Aborigine. ‘This might be his only happy moment in the whole week.’

Clements turned his head. ‘Don’t be a bloody bleeding heart. Down in Redfern you’d have been out of the car in a flash and grabbed him if he’d done that to us.’

Malone opened the door of the car, got out, the chorus of car horns still hooting behind him, and walked up to the Aborigine. He took the man by the arm.

‘Come on, Jack. You’re going to get sun-struck standing out here in the open.’

The man giggled. ‘Sun-struck?’

‘Sun cancers, too. Your complexion’s all wrong. Come on, back in the shade.’

The man didn’t struggle. With Malone still holding him by the elbow, he walked unsteadily back to the footpath and stood under a shop awning. A small crowd had gathered, all whites, men and women; they were silent, their faces full of a hostile curiosity. He’s a cop, why doesn’t he arrest the drunken Abo?

Malone looked over their heads, searching for another Aborigine, saw two young men standing in a doorway. He raised his hand and beckoned them over. They hesitated, looked at each other, then came towards him, the crowd opening up to let them through.

‘Take him home,’ Malone told the two young Aborigines. Then to the drunk: ‘Go with them, Jack. Otherwise I’ll have to lock you up.’

‘You’re a copper?’ The man’s look of surprise was comical. He looked around at the crowd, shaking his head in wonder. ‘Wuddia know! He’s a copper!’

He grabbed Malone’s hand, giggled, shook his head again, then let the two young men lead him away. As Malone stepped off the kerb to get back into the Commodore, which Clements had pulled out of the way of the traffic, a thickset farmer, a redneck if Malone had ever seen one, said, ‘You’re wasting your sympathy, mate. They’re just a bloody nuisance when they’re like that, to ’emselves and everyone else.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ said Malone. ‘But you don’t have to play at being a cop, do you?’

As he got into the car beside Clements a man’s voice said from the back of the crowd, ‘Why don’t you go back where you belong?’

‘Drive on,’ Malone said quietly and Clements pulled the car out into the traffic again.

They said nothing more; then Clements was pulling the Commodore into the police station yard. As soon as they got out of the car they were aware of the tension amongst the half a dozen uniformed men in the yard. At first Malone thought they were waiting to say something to him and Clements; he stiffened, seeking some sort of answer to a question he hadn’t yet heard. Then, as they reached the steps leading up to the back door of the rear annexe, Baldock, hatless, his face tight and red as if he were holding his breath, came out through the doorway. He stopped abruptly on the top step and looked down at the two Sydney men.

‘Billy Koowarra’s just hung himself.’

THREE
1

‘Looks like he did it, don’t you reckon?’ said Dircks.

He and Malone were at lunch at the reserved table by the corner window. The dining-room was crowded, mostly with men but also with a few women. Narelle Potter had refurbished the big room, but its restored old-time charm fought a losing battle against the rough, loud bonhomie of the male diners. The women guests tried hard, but they were just whispers in the chorus of shouts, laughter and loud talk. Malone, as sometimes before, wondered how people could manage to eat and yet still make such a hubbub.

He caught what Dircks had just said in the moment before it was lost in the noise. ‘What?’

‘He’s the obvious suspect. I’m not saying shut the book on Sagawa’s murder, but it might be better if we just let it die quietly.’

You’re the one who’s obvious. ‘Why do you think Koowarra’s the one who did it?’

‘I didn’t say that. I’m just suggesting you take advantage of what’s happened.’ Dircks dipped his handkerchief in his glass of water and sponged a spot of gravy off the lapel of his expensive suit. Everything he wore was expensive, but he didn’t look comfortable in it, as if his wife or perhaps a daughter had bought his wardrobe and each morning he just put on what was laid out for him. He didn’t look comfortable at the moment and Malone wondered if Chess Hardstaff had laid out instructions for him. ‘His suicide is tantamount to a confession. Use it. We know he’d been sacked, there was bad feeling between him and Sagawa.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I know.’ Dircks finished his wet-cleaning, picked up his knife and fork again. Whatever he felt about the two deaths, the murder and the suicide, his appetite had not been affected. He began to chew on a mouthful of steak that would have satisfied a crocodile.

‘No court would accept a case built on that. There was no note of confession, he didn’t say a word to any other prisoner or any officer.’ Malone cut into his rack of lamb. The menu was written in English, no fancy French handles to the dishes, and the chef, Malone guessed, probably cooked with the Australian flag hanging over his stove. The dessert list, he had noted, contained such local exotica as bread-and-butter pudding, sherry trifle and lamington roll; somehow the national dish, passion-fruit pavlova, had missed out. ‘Frankly, Mr Dircks, I don’t think Koowarra killed Sagawa and I’m not going to waste my time following that line.’

Dircks picked up his napkin to wipe his mouth, noticed it was wet and gestured to a passing waitress for a fresh one. Malone had remarked that only he and the Minister had crisp linen napkins; all the other diners, including the women, had paper ones. Narelle Potter herself brought the fresh linen, flipped it open and spread it on Dircks’s broad lap.

‘You’re still as careless as ever, Gus. I thought Shirley would’ve smartened you up, down there in the city, now you’re a Minister. Look at Inspector Malone. Spotless, and he’s just a policeman.’

Malone, just a policeman, said, ‘Thanks.’

She gave him her hotel-keeper’s smile, as dishonest as the collar on a badly-poured beer, and went away. Dircks looked after her admiringly. ‘Nice woman. One of my best campaign workers when an election’s on . . . Malone, I don’t think you understand me.’

The remark caught Malone a little off-balance; Dircks had still been looking after Mrs Potter when he said it. But now he turned to face Malone and there was no mistaking the antagonism in the small blue eyes. He could be authoritative, though in only two months as Minister he had already acquired a reputation for making wrong decisions. But the incompetent don’t necessarily give up trying: it is why a few of them occasionally succeed and rise to the top.

Malone took his time, finishing his mouthful of lamb, then cutting some baked pumpkin in half. At last he said, holding his gaze steady against Dircks’s, ‘I understand you perfectly well, Minister. You want me to close the case, not make waves, just go back to Sydney and leave everything to the locals. Right?’

‘Put as bluntly as that . . . Well, yes, that’s the gist of it.’

‘I’ll have to talk to my superiors in Sydney.’ He chanced his arm: ‘It could go up to the Commissioner. He takes a personal interest in anything I’m working on.’

Dircks looked disbelieving, but also uncertain. In his short time as Minister he had come to know that the Police Department had its own way of working; more so, perhaps, than any other public service department. The men responsible for law and order, it seemed to him, had their own laws. The conservative coalition had not been in government for fifteen years and its ministers were learning that power, no matter what the voters might say about its democratic transfer, was an abstract, not something that could be handed over in a file. In the Police Department there was power at every level, something he had not yet come to terms with.

‘The Commissioner and I get on very well together,’ he said, though that was not strictly true; he hardly knew John Leeds, a reserved man. ‘How come he takes a personal interest in what you do?’

‘Past association,’ said Malone and closed up his face, as if to imply there were police secrets, as indeed there were, that even ministers should not be privy to.

Dircks neatly backed down; weak-willed men are adept at a few things. ‘Well, I don’t want to bring politics into this – there was too much of that from the last government.’ He waited for Malone to comment, but got no satisfaction. Then he went on, ‘You have to realize, out here things are different from what you’re used to, I mean in a community like ours. Everybody has to live with everybody else.’

‘I understand that was what Mr Sagawa was trying to do. But somebody didn’t want to live with him.’ Malone had finished the main course; he picked up the menu. ‘Do you mind if I have dessert? I’ve got a sweet tooth.’

‘So have I. I can recommend the bread-and-butter pudding, a real old-fashioned one. Yes, I never thought anything like this would ever happen to Sagawa.’

‘There’s Mr Koga. He could be next. Bread-and-butter pudding,’ he told the stout waitress as she loomed up beside their table.

‘The same for you, Mr Dircks?’

‘No. No, I think I’ve had enough.’ Dircks waited till the waitress had gone, then he leaned forward, his wide-set eyes seeming to close together on either side of the two deep lines that had suddenly appeared between them. ‘Christ Almighty, I hadn’t thought of that! You’d better stay, catch the murderer before he has the Japs pulling out of the district. They not only grow the cotton, they buy ninety per cent of the crop for their own mills.’

‘Then you don’t think Billy Koowarra did it?’

‘Forget him! Just find out who killed Ken Sagawa.’

‘Mr Dircks, you said you had an interest in South Cloud ...’

Dircks remained leaning forward on the table for a long moment; then he eased himself back, said quietly, ‘Yes. The shares are in my wife’s name. It’s common knowledge, you’ll find it in the declaration of MPs’ interests down at Parliament House in Sydney. There’s nothing to hide.’

‘I didn’t suggest there was. But I think it might be an idea if you stayed at arm’s length from me and the investigating team, don’t you? You know what the media are like.’

‘I own the local paper, the Chronicle. You don’t have to worry about it.’

That would explain why no reporter had tried to by-pass Baldock to get to him or Clements. ‘What about the radio station?’

‘Chess Hardstaff owns that.’

I might have guessed it. ‘I wasn’t thinking so much of the local media as those down in Sydney.’ He usually tried to keep the media at his own arm’s length; but they were always useful as a weapon, especially with politicians. ‘How much interest do you have in South Cloud? Or how much is in your wife’s name?’

‘Twenty per cent.’ The answer sounded a reluctant one.

‘Any other local shareholders?’

Dircks hesitated, looking at his front to see if he had spotted it with any more gravy. ‘Well, I guess you’ll look it up in the company register. Yes, there are two others. Max Nothling, Chess Hardstaff’s son-in-law, and one of the town’s solicitors, Trevor Waring.’

Malone didn’t mention that he had already met Waring; but he wondered why Sean Carmody’s son-in-law had said nothing about his interest in the cotton farm. ‘How much do they hold?’

‘Ten per cent each. The Japanese own sixty per cent.’

The waitress brought Malone his bread-and-butter pudding; it looked and tasted as good as Dircks had claimed. Dircks watched him eat, seemed undecided whether to say anything further, then went ahead, ‘If you have to arrest someone for the murder, ring me first.’

Malone stopped with a mouthful of pudding halfway to his mouth; his mouth was open, as if in surprise, a reaction he never showed. ‘Why?’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.