Pride’s Harvest. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ he drove off down between the poplars. He went through the main gate, closing it after him, and turned on to the main road leading towards town. He had the feeling of leaving a harbour: town was where the wild waves broke. Or would, if he and Clements stirred them up.

      He had gone perhaps a mile before he realized there was another car behind him, not attempting to overtake him but keeping a steady distance between them. He frowned, wondering where it had come from, certain that it had not come out of another gate along the road. He slowed down, but the car behind also slowed; the distance between them remained constant. Then he speeded up again, but this time the following car dropped back, though it continued to trail him.

      He was not afraid, just curious. He went into town, slowed as he came to the main street. He looked in the driving mirror, saw the other car slow, then make a quick turn into a side street. He caught a glimpse of it, a light-coloured big car, a Mercedes or the largest Ford, before it disappeared.

      He parked the Commodore, locked it and set the alarm and went into the Mail Coach Hotel. The bars were still open and full, but he wasn’t looking for company; he just wanted to go to bed and dream of Lisa and the kids. But first to lie awake and wonder why anyone should drive all the way out of town and sit in their car and wait for him to return to town, as if they wanted to account for every minute of his movements. That was the sort of surveillance that, usually, only police or private investigators went in for.

TWO

      1

      ‘You must’ve got in pretty late last night,’ he said to Clements over a country breakfast of sausages and eggs and bacon, toast, honey and coffee. ‘Did you learn anything?’

      ‘A few things. Nothing to do with the case, though.’

      Malone refrained from asking if what he had learned had come from Mrs Potter. ‘Well, we’ll get down to work this morning. We’ll go out to the gin. Get what background you can out of the workers, those in the fields as well as the gin.’ He looked up as the waitress came to offer them more coffee. ‘We’ll be in for lunch, say one o’clock. Can you keep us this table?’

      ‘I’m afraid it’s taken for lunch.’ She was a stout cheerful woman who liked her job; she gave better service than many of the more highly trained waiters and waitresses Malone had met in Sydney. ‘Gus Dircks is in town. He’s the Police Minister, but then you’d know that, wouldn’t you?’

      ‘We’d heard a rumour.’

      She laughed, her bosom shaking like a water-bed in an earth tremor. ‘Yeah, you would of. Anyhow, when he’s in town he comes in here every day for lunch. He sorta holds court here by the window, if you know what I mean. You gotta vote for him.’

      ‘Why’s that?’

      ‘Well, there’s no one else, is there? Not even the sheep would vote for Labour, around here. You’re not Labour, are you?’

      ‘He’s a Commo,’ said Clements.

      The waitress looked doubtful. ‘Well, I wouldn’t broadcast that around here. You oughta get someone to tell you what they done to the Commos in this town back in the nineteen-thirties.’ She looked at them, suddenly dark and secretive. ‘But don’t say I suggested it.’

      Later, driving out to the South Cloud cotton farm in the Commodore, Malone said, ‘I’m beginning to think this district has got more secrets than it’s got sheep droppings.’

      ‘You mean about the Commos? Narelle was hinting at a few things last night. Not about the Commos, she never mentioned them, but just gossip. I gather there was quite a lot of it when her hubby was killed.’

      ‘It was a shooting accident, wasn’t it?’

      ‘Yeah. She hinted people said other things about how it happened, but it’s all died down now. Then she suddenly shut up. I’d picked the wrong time to pump her. We – well, never mind.’

      Malone could guess what would have been the wrong time; Clements had probably been intent on pumping of another kind. Sensible, experienced women don’t let their hair down, not figuratively, the first time they go to bed with a stranger; and Narelle Potter was a sensible, experienced woman if ever Malone had seen one. ‘Don’t get yourself too involved. This is your commanding officer speaking.’

      Clements grinned. ‘You sound just like my mother.’

      They bumped over the cattle grid at the entrance gates to the cotton farm and Clements pulled up. Four cotton-picking machines were moving slowly down the rows, plucking the cotton locks from the bolls and dumping them into a large basket attached to each machine. As soon as a basket was filled, the picker moved along to a second machine – ‘That’s a module maker,’ said Clements – where the cotton was compressed. When sufficient baskets of cotton had been deposited in the module maker, a module was completed.

      ‘I read up on it last night while I was waiting for dinner,’ said Clements; and Malone knew that, with his usual thoroughness, he would have absorbed all the information available to him. ‘Those modules are approximately thirty-six feet by eight by eight – there’s about eleven tonnes of seed cotton in each one. If one of ’em fell on you, you’d be schnitzel.’

      Malone grimaced at the description.

      ‘Those loaders you see, they call ’em module movers, load them on to those semi-trailers, who take ’em up to the gin, where they’re off-loaded by what they call a moon buggy.’

      ‘How long does the cotton harvest go on?’

      ‘I don’t know when they expect to finish here. It usually begins late March and goes till the end of June.’

      ‘This is one harvest they won’t forget.’

      Sergeant Baldock and Constable Mungle were waiting for them at the cotton farm’s main office. The weather was still reasonably warm and Baldock had discarded his jacket. In his tattersall-checked shirt, wool tie, moleskin trousers and R. M. Williams boots, he looked more like a man of the land than a detective. As Malone and Clements drew in alongside him, he put on a broad-brimmed, pork-pie hat, completing the picture in Malone’s mind of a farmer on his way to market, more interested in crops than in crime.

      ‘Here comes Mr Koga, the assistant manager,’ Baldock said.

      A young man, slim and taller than Malone had expected of a Japanese, came out of the office and approached them almost diffidently. He had a thin, good-looking face, a shy smile and wore fashionable and expensive tinted glasses.

      ‘Some senior executives are coming down from Japan at once.’ He had a thin piping voice, made thinner by his nervousness. He had come to this country, which he had been told was xenophobic, at least towards Asians, and after only a month he was temporarily in charge, only because his immediate boss had been murdered. Xenophobia could not be more explicitly expressed than that. ‘I don’t suppose you can wait till then?’

      ‘Hardly,’ said Malone as kindly as he could. He had never been infected by racism, though his father Con had done his best to tutor him in it, and he was determined to lean over backwards to avoid it in this particular case. ‘Who discovered the body, Mr Koga?’

      ‘Barry СКАЧАТЬ