Pride’s Harvest. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ 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. СКАЧАТЬ