by Jon Cleary
The eyebrows came down again. “You better ask him.”
“And your past president—” Malone nodded at the portrait of Hardstaff. Whoever had painted it had been inspired, or instructed, first to study the portraits of Spanish kings; all that was missing from Chester II was the breastplate and the sword on which to rest the royal hand. “Didn’t he introduce the Japanese to the district?”
Now only the nose separated the eyebrows from the moustache; the dark eyes were almost hidden. “You better ask him, too.”
Malone decided it was time to change tack. “Do you own a Mercedes, Mr. Chakiros?”
The eyebrows climbed again. “Yes. I’m the local distributor—you wouldn’t expect me to drive a Jaguar or something, would you? Why?”
“What colour?”
“Beige. I think there’s a fancy name for it, but that’s what it is, beige.”
“Seems a popular colour out here.”
“It doesn’t show the dust. We do a lotta travelling on gravel roads, not like in the city. Some money spent on roads out here wouldn’t go astray.”
“Maybe Mr. Dircks will be able to fix that for you, now he’s a minister.” Malone chanced his arm, an old fast bowler’s ploy: “I’m sure Chess Hardstaff is working on him.”
Again the irony bounced off Chakiros; he saw the world in black and white, preferably white. “That’s what governments are for, to look after the people who put them in.”
Cronyism: but Malone stopped his tongue from going too far. “Were you driving your car last Monday night?”
“I drive my car every night. I come here to the club every night, never miss. I don’t always stay, the wife’d complain if I did. Women don’t always appreciate the value of a club like this.”
“Where do you live, Mr. Chakiros?”
“Right here in town, in River Street, the best part of town. Why d’you want to know was I driving the car Monday night? That was the night the Nip was murdered, right? Do you think I had something to do with that?”
“Mr. Chakiros, all I’m doing is making enquiries. At the moment I’ve got no theories at all.”
“Well, you’re making a bloody good fist of sounding like you got a theory!” Chakiros slapped a big plump hand on his desk. “Jesus Christ, you come in here, shoving your nose in—”
“We don’t shove our noses in unless we’re invited.”
“I didn’t invite you in here to badger me like this!”
“No, that’s true. Are you saying you’re refusing to answer any questions I want to put to you?”
The bluster went out of Chakiros; he backed down. “No. Well, no, I’m not saying that. I’ll answer your questions. Except if they get too personal.” But he didn’t define what he meant by too personal; and he was not sure himself. He was a man of finite wisdom, not even approaching the boundaries of himself. He lived on dreams which had turned into false memories; he had wanted to be a hero, but had been denied the opportunity. The war had finished too soon for him: he was still fighting it, though he had never really got into it. He had cousins in Beirut, relatives in a city he had never visited, who had seen far more of war than he ever had. “Stick to Sagawa and what happened to him.”
“Did you ever go out to the cotton farm?”
Chakiros hesitated. “Yeah, I did. Once.”
“When?”
Again the hesitation; he tugged nervously at his moustache, as if it were no more than a cheap disguise he wanted to remove. “Monday night.” Then the tongue began to roll: “He was getting—assertive. Yeah, that’s the word, assertive. He’d been to Chess Hardstaff and told him I’d said he couldn’t join the club. He was carrying tales.”
“Did Chess Hardstaff want him admitted to the club?”
“No. Chess is an old Digger, like m’self. Well, not a Digger, exactly. He was in the air force, a fighter. He got a DFC and bar.” He looked up at the portrait. “We wanted him painted in his uniform with decorations, but he wouldn’t have that. He’s modest about those sorta things.” He said it wistfully, as if he wished for those sorta things himself.
“I’m sure he’s modest about other things,” said Malone; and wondered if Hardstaff would be offended if he knew that he was considered modest. “Did he tell Sagawa that he wasn’t wanted in the club?”
“Yes, he did. Chess doesn’t pull punches, he tells you exactly what he thinks. He’s never—ambivalent. Yeah, that’s the word, ambivalent.” Malone had always thought of ambivalence as a two-eyed stance in a one-eyed batting line-up; he would never have taken Hardstaff for anything but one-eyed. It might be the only thing on which he and Chakiros would agree. “He rang me to tell me Sagawa had been to see him. I went out there to the gin to tell Mister Sagawa to keep his complaints to himself, that we didn’t want any discrimination talk around here.”
“But there is, isn’t there?”
“What?”
“Discrimination.”
“Well, there’s a bit of that everywhere, isn’t there?” He had known it in his youth; and so had his father, even more so. The town’s Dagoes: “Wog” hadn’t yet come into fashion. But he never mentioned that now, not even to his own son. “Not least in the police force. You read about it in the papers, what the police are like towards the darkies over in West Australia or up in Queensland. It’s only natural, no one’s a hundred per cent bloody Christian, kissing the arses of black, brown or brindle.” He could taste the bile of long ago. “Sure, there’s bloody discrimination, it’s a fact of life.”
Malone thought of his father Con, who didn’t mind the blacks but couldn’t stand a bar of the brown or brindle. Con still believed in White Australia and cursed all the politicians and do-gooders who had muddied its waters with their immigration policies. But Con’s prejudices went even further: he would never join any Veterans Legion club, couldn’t understand anyone who had gone away to fight for King and Country. For Country, all right; but not for the bloody King of England. Con was Irish to the core and Malone sometimes had to struggle against the Irish in himself. Heritage has its prickles.
“Did you see Sagawa?”
“No, I didn’t. His car was outside the office, but he wasn’t around anywhere. I went looking for him, but couldn’t find him.”
“What time was this?”
“Ten o’clock, ten thirty, somewhere around then. After I left here.”
“That was a bit late to go visiting him, wasn’t it?”
“I—I just wanted to make sure no one was around when I talked to him.”
“Did you go to the manager’s house?”
“No. That other one, that Koga, would’ve been there. I didn’t want to talk to Sagawa in front of him, just in case things got a bit sticky. You know what the Nips are like, they’ve got this bloody losing face thing that means so much to them.”
It might yet become an Australian thing, thought Malone: so many local high flyers had lost face recently. He suspected that Chakiros would hate to lose face, but would brazen it out. “Were the lights still on in the office?”
“Yeah, that was why I thought he was still around the gin somewhere. But he wasn’t.”
“No other car there?”
Chakiros shook his head, the black line forming above his eyes again. “No.”
“You’re sure? Come on, Mr. Chakiros, don’t fart-arse with me. I’m getting a bit bloody tired of running up against brick walls in this town. Make it easier for yourself. Because as sure as Christ, I’m gunna get to the bottom of this, no matter how high you build the wall!”
Chakiros looked genuinely surprised at Malone’s burst of temper; he had been fooled by the detective’s low-key, almost casual approach. He flushed, suddenly looking very dark in the dusk of the small office. He got up and switched on the light. He came back to stand behind his desk, but didn’t sit down again immediately. He stood for a moment looking out through the window to the car park; standing up, he was surprisingly short, a barrel of a man. At last he turned and sat down.
> “There wasn’t another car outside the office, but one passed me as I drove up from the gate on the main road, up the gravel track to the office. That’s a coupla hundred yards, I’d say. I saw its lights coming down towards me and I dipped mine, but he didn’t dip his. He seemed to speed up when he was about, I dunno, about fifty yards in front of me and he went past me like a bat outa hell, plastering my car with gravel. It’s chipped all down one door. I couldn’t see a bloody thing because of his lights, he was on high-beam, and I went off the track. I was bloody lucky I didn’t turn over.”
“Did you catch a glimpse of the car as it went past?”
“How could I? I was blinded by his lights.” A few bricks of the wall had been removed, but now they were replaced. “If you’re gunna ask me did I recognize the car, no, I didn’t. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Was it a Mercedes, light-coloured like yours?”
“No.” But the lie was plain in the dark, uneasy eyes.
III
When Malone got outside to his car he found the front and rear doors on the passenger’s side had been bashed in; they had either been kicked in by heavy boots or thumped with a solid object. Whoever had done it could have worked without being seen from the club; the Commodore was hemmed in on both sides by other cars. There would have been some noise, but if anyone had noticed it, it had brought no one to the scene.
He looked about him; he could feel eyes watching him, but he could see no one in the car park. Then he looked over the roof of his car towards the club and saw the line of faces, flushed but frozen, stupid with malice, in the long windows that faced out on to the car park. He felt himself flush, with anger not drink; but he was not going to let them dent him further by showing it. He got into the Commodore, backed it out of the line, swung it round and drove sedately out of the car park: to burn rubber would only show his anger. He could imagine the faces in the windows breaking like cracked plates as they laughed; but he didn’t look back. He had been subjected to treatment like this before, it was part of a policeman’s lot, but he could not remember ever having been as angry as this. He slowed down when, out in the street, he realized he was driving almost blind.
To give himself time to cool down before he went back to the Mail Coach and probably more open aggression, he went looking for the shire library. He found it on the other side of the courthouse from the police station, a cream building almost a twin of the station. It was still open, the lights now on, but it was virtually empty. There was an old man with a beard sitting at a table in a far corner reading a newspaper file; and the librarian sitting at the front desk filing some cards. She looked up as Malone stood in front of her.
“We’re just about to close—”
He showed her his badge and introduced himself. “I’d like to look at the editions of the local paper for November nineteen seventy-three. You have them on file, I take it?”
She looked at him carefully, taking off her glasses as if to get him into focus. She was young, in her late twenties, pretty, with big short-sighted eyes and a small mouth that detracted from her prettiness. She pursed it now.
“It’s already out. You’ll have to wait till that gentleman down the back has finished with it. I gave it to him about twenty minutes ago.”
Malone looked towards the old man, but decided not to approach him. “I’ll wait.”
“I’m waiting to close,” the librarian said primly. Were all librarians prim? he wondered; or was that just their best way of dealing with unwelcome borrowers? She got up from behind her desk, went and locked the front doors and came back. “All my staff have gone home, I’d like to do the same. It’s Friday night.”
He smiled, hoping to break through her primness. “I’m sorry, Miss—?”
“Mrs.” She had a low pleasant voice, not prim at all. “Mrs. Dircks. Veronica Dircks.”
He showed no surprise; but felt some. Then remembered that in country districts it was not unusual to have large clans. “Any relation to Gus Dircks?”
“His daughter-in-law. My husband is editor of the Collamundra Chronicle.”
It seemed that Gus Dircks, indirectly, had a finger in every information pie in the district. He mentally put Gus Dircks’s son on his visiting list, if only to see how much freedom the press enjoyed in Collamundra.
The old man came up from the back of the library to the desk, laid down the file, said, “Thank you,” went to the front doors and tried to open them, but failed. He looked back at Mrs. Dircks. “You’ve locked me in,” he said and sounded shocked, almost a little panic-stricken.
“No, just pull back the bottom lock,” said Mrs. Dircks, not moving to help him.
The old man stared at her, not looking at Malone at all. He was tall and thin, with a long thin face half-hidden by a white beard; his clothes were stained and patched, but he was wearing what looked to be brand-new black boots. He carried a battered old broad-brimmed hat in a gnarled hand and, for all his trampish appearance, looked clean and had a certain presence. But the locked door seemed for the moment to have unsettled him; then he recovered and pulled back the bottom lock. “Thank you,” he said again and went out into the gathering evening.
“Who’s he?” asked Malone.
“I don’t know. A stranger—the town’s full of them this weekend. It’s odd you both wanted to see the same edition of the Chronicle, one so old.” Seventeen years old: that would make her no more than ten or eleven when the paper had run its story on the murder of Dorothy Hardstaff. “What happened then?”
Evidently the Hardstaff murder was never discussed in the Dircks family circle. “You don’t come from Collamundra?”
“No, I’m from Queensland.” Another country, some said another planet. A murder, even of the daughter-in-law of a prominent man, in one State rarely raised a ripple of interest in another State; there is a federalism of curiosity as well as of politics. It would, of course, be different if Chess Hardstaff’s wife were murdered today; he was now a national figure, far more so than his father had ever been. “Do me a favour, Inspector—hurry up. I have an appointment with my dressmaker. There’s the Cup ball tomorrow night.”
He took the file across to a nearby table, sat down and opened its thick cardboard covers. The Chronicle was a twice-weekly newspaper, Tuesdays and Fridays: ten pages of agricultural news, stock and grain prices, local news and gossip and six pages of classified advertisements. It took him less than a minute to discover that the story he had come to check was missing; the two editions that had run the murder story had had the relevant pages torn out. He was on his feet at once, running for the door.
“What’s the matter? Where—?”
But he was out in the street and heard no more of what Mrs. Dircks said. He stood on the top of the library steps looking both ways up and down the street; but there was no sign of the bearded old man. Dusk had folded into night; the street-lights were on. But they didn’t spotlight the stranger.
He went back into the library. Mrs. Dircks stood just inside the doors, puzzled and a little frightened. He smiled at her to put her at ease; frightened women always troubled him. “It’s all right. Come over here.”
He led her towards the table where he’d left the newspaper file. “I wanted to look up a particular story which I know the Chronicle ran. The pages have been torn out.”
She put on her glasses and looked at the ragged edges of the strip that had been left on the foldover of the paper. She was ragged-edged herself; she hated the thought of anyone’s coming into her library and defacing her stock, even old newspapers. She looked sideways at him, not at all frightened now. “What story was on those pages?”
“The murder of Chess Hardstaff’s wife.”
“Do you think the old man tore out those pages?”
“I don’t know, but I’d guess so. Has anyone asked for that file in the past day or two?” Since I came into town: but he didn’t add that.
“I wouldn’t know. We don’t enter up anything on a book or newspaper t
hat is not taken out of the library. I could check with my staff.”
“Do that, would you, please?” He noticed that she had made no comment on the Hardstaff murder; had she, too, been warned not to talk about it? “You know about the murder?”
There was a pause before she said, “Yes. We’re getting together a history of the district—there’s never been one written.”
Malone wondered why: most country towns or districts had an enthusiastic historian, amateur or otherwise. “Why was that?”
“I think there are certain things in the past that the town doesn’t want remembered.”
“But you’re going to take the risk?”
All her primness had gone; she was relaxed and trusting. She took off her glasses again, as if aware that they spoiled her looks; but she was not coquettish, it was no more than a small vanity in the company of a man. He always felt uncomfortable with feminists who made an aggression of looking as unattractive as possible: all he wanted to do with women was meet them on equal terms. Especially when on police business.
“You take risks, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. “A good deal of the time.”
He had taken too many risks in his career, not all of them physical; bullets and knives and iron bars were only part of the danger. He was not recklessly adventurous, but to live without risk was never to get one’s feet off the ground. He never thought of himself as idealistic, but there were certain essentials for which one occasionally had to jump off a cliff: truth, justice, personal judgement. He smiled at Mrs. Dircks and wished her well here in Hardstaff territory.
“It’s always worth it,” he said and picked up his hat from the table. “I’m keeping you from your dressmaker. Enjoy the Cup ball tomorrow night.”
“Will you be coming?” She switched off the lights and opened the front doors.
“I doubt it.” But Lisa, always protective of him, not wanting him to wear out his detective’s nose on the grindstone, had suggested they go to the ball with the Warings.