Pride’s Harvest. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ