Pride’s Harvest. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ