by Jon Cleary
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.
II
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 looked 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.”
Dirck
s 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.
III
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, liquidamber, cedar and cabbage tree palm, though Clements knew only the name of the liquidamber. 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.”