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‘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 in October of that year. Sean had become a war correspondent and Cathleen had gone back to New York, where, instead of returning to Hollywood, she had gone on the stage and become a minor Broadway star. Ida had been born in 1947 and she had been twenty-three, already married and divorced, when Cathleen died of cancer. Unhappy in New York, she had been glad to accompany Sean back to his homeland. She had her mother’s beauty, most of her fire and all of her father’s love of the land. It was difficult to guess what sort of love she had for her husband. All Malone felt was that it did not have the passion and depth that he and Lisa had for each other. But then married love, like politics, came in so many colours.
‘We’ll take all the kids in the Land-Rover. Lisa can ride back with Scobie. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ She gave Malone a half-mocking smile.
He smiled in return, liking her, but wondering if he would come to know her properly in the short time he would be here. He was all at once glad of the Carmody clan: they might prove to be the only friendly oasis in the Collamundra shire.
While Lisa was helping to put all the children into the Warings’ Land-Rover, Malone waited by the Commodore for her. Sean Carmody came across to him, moving with the slow deliberation of a man who now told time by the seasons and no longer by deadlines or the clock.
‘Take things slowly, Scobie.’
‘Don’t make waves, you mean?’
‘No, I don’t mean that at all. Certain things around here need to be changed and Mr Sagawa’s murder may be the catalyst.’
‘If things have needed to be changed, Sean, why haven’t you tried it before?’
‘Do you know anything about opera or musical comedy?’
It was a question that came out of nowhere; but Malone was used to them. He had faced too many high-priced barristers in court not to know how to be poker-faced. ‘No, I think I’m what they call a Philistine, even my pop-mad kids do. I like old swing bands, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, all before my time.’
‘Mozart was before my time.’ Carmody smiled.
‘The only thing that saves me, according to Lisa, is that my favourite singers are Peggy Lee and Cleo Laine. Lisa’s an opera fan, but she likes them, too.’
‘Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw used to be favourites of mine when I went overseas before the war. My war, that is. There have been a dozen wars since then, but it’s still the one I remember . . .’ He stopped for a moment; then shook his head, as if he did not want to remember after all. ‘In Vienna and Berlin I started going to the opera – I heard Gigli and Schmidt and Flagstad.’ He paused again, nodded. ‘Just names now – and echoes. Anyhow, there’s an operetta called Die Fledermaus, by Johann Strauss, the younger. It’s lightweight, but its theme song is “Happy is He who Forgets what Cannot Be Changed.” You want me to sing it?’
‘No, I get the message.’
‘No, Scobie, you get only half the message. It was my theme song for quite a while after I came home. But lately . . . If I can help, come out again. Any time.’
Driving back to the Warings’ house Lisa said, ‘I’m glad you’re here. I missed you.’
He leaned across and kissed her, almost hitting a tree stump as he took his eyes off the winding track. ‘I’ve missed you, too. I didn’t realize how big a queen-sized bed is till you’re in it alone.’
‘Just as well we didn’t get a king-sized one. You haven’t invited anyone home to fill up the space, have you?’
‘Just three girls from the Rape Advisory Squad. How are the kids making out? You’d better keep an eye on Tom. He could hurt himself falling off horses.’
‘Don’t be so protective. They’re all right. Claire’s fallen in love with Tas.’
‘She’s only fourteen, for God’s sake! Tell her to get that out of her head!’
‘You tell her. You’ll be more diplomatic and sympathetic than I would. Relax, darling. She’s going to fall in and out of love ten times a year from now till she’s twenty-one. I know I did.’
‘I never did ask you. How old were you when you lost your virginity?’
‘It’s none of your business. And don’t you ever ask Claire a question like that. That’s my business.’They were out on the tarmac of the main road now, running smoothly; she leaned back against the door of the car and looked at him. ‘How’s the investigation going?’
‘We haven’t really started yet, but it’s already beginning to look murky.’ He noticed in the driving mirror that another car was behind them, but he gave it only a cursory look. A semi-trailer hurtled towards them, front ablaze with rows of small lights, so that it looked like the entrance to a travelling strip show. It went by with a roar, the wind of its passing rocking the Commodore. ‘Bastard!’
‘How long do you think you’ll be out here?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine. A coupla days, maybe more. Depends on what Russ and I dig up.’
‘What’s Russ doing this evening?’
‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s investigating Narelle.’
‘Who’s Narelle?’
‘She owns the pub where we’re staying. A very attractive widow.’
‘Does she have a queen-sized bed?’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ll ask her.’
‘Never mind. I’ll ask Russ.’
‘Mind your own business. This where we turn in?’
They drove up another long track, this one straight and lined on either side by what looked, in the darkness, like poplars. He pulled up in front of another large one-storeyed house, but this one more modern than the main Sundown homestead. The lights were on in the house and the Land-Rover had been taken round to a garage at the back. Off to one side the wire netting surrounding a tennis court looked like a huge wall of spider’s web. Malone wound down the car window and listened to the silence.
‘It’s so peaceful,’ said Lisa.
He said nothing, thinking of Sagawa lying dead in the silence.
But Lisa could shut out the world from herself and him. ‘Every time I’m away from you for even a night, I realize how much I love you. It’s not so bad when I’m home in our own bed, I can feel you there beside me even when you’re not. I’ve even had an orgasm in my sleep.’
‘Sorry I wasn’t there.’
‘But in a strange bed, it’s so empty . . .’ The Commodore had bucket seats; detectives were not encouraged to embrace each other, even those of the opposite sex. But the Malones managed to reach for each other and their kiss was as passionate as if they were back in Randwick in their own bed. At last she drew away from him, taking his hands off her. ‘That’s enough. I don’t want to have to call up one of your girls from the Rape Advisory Squad. Will you be out tomorrow night?’
‘I’ll try. I’d like some time with the kids. Keep an eye on Claire and Tas.’
‘You want to leave your Smith and Wesson with me?’
He loved her for her sense of humour; it kept him anchored. They kissed again, then she got out of the car and 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 (#ulink_dfb6ab1c-07c1-5313-b6f6-59185812fed9)
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 Liss.’ Koga had difficulty with the name. ‘He is over at the gin now. We shall go over there, yes?’
‘Sergeant Clements would like to talk to the men out in the fields. Could you take him out there, Constable Mungle?’
Clements looked out at the white-frothed fields stretching into the distance, said, ‘Thanks, Inspector,’ then he and Mungle got back into the Commodore. The Aboriginal cop, in fawn shirt and slacks and broad-brimmed hat, looked like a Boy Scout against the bulk of Clements.
Malone followed Koga and Baldock over to the gin, aware as they drew closer of the faint thunder within the huge shed.
‘He’s probably inside,’ said Koga and opened a door that immediately let out a blast of noise. They went inside and Malone knew at once that there would be no questioning in here.
The thunder in the hundred-feet-high shed was deafening; maybe a rock musician would have felt at home in it, but Malone doubted it. He was not mechanically-minded and he could only guess at the functions of most of the machines, which he noted were all American-made, not Japanese as he had expected. The seed cotton seemed to move swiftly through a continuous cleaning process, streaming through from one type of machine to another. He stood in front of one which Koga, screaming in his ear like a train whistle, told him was a condenser.Behind large windows in the condenser he saw the flow of now-cleaned cotton, like thick white water out of a dam spill. Behind him a supervisor stood at a console, watching monitor screens; Malone looked around and could see only three other workers, a man and two girls, in the whole building. All four workers wore ear-muffs and seemed oblivious of Koga and his guests. It struck Malone that if Kenji Sagawa had been killed in this shed during working hours no one would have heard the shot.
Koga and the two detectives moved on, past blocks of solidly packed cotton coming up a ramp to be baled; the two girls were working the baling machine, unhurriedly and with time for one of them occasionally to glance at an open paperback book on a bench beside her. The man, Barry Liss, was marking the weight of each bale as it bumped down on to an electronic scale. He looked up as Koga tapped him on the shoulder and nodded towards the exit door. He handed his clipboard to one of the girls and followed the three men out of the shed, slipping off his ear-muffs as he did so.
‘I understand you found Mr Sagawa’s body,’ said Malone when he had been introduced to Liss.
‘Jesus, did I!’ Liss shuddered. He was a wiry man, his age hard to guess; he could have been anywhere between his late twenties and his early forties. He had black hair cut very short, a bony face that had earned more than its fair share of lines, and a loose-jointed way of standing as if his limbs had been borrowed from someone else’s torso and had not yet adjusted to their new base. ‘It was the bloodiest mess I ever seen. I don’t wanna see anything like it again. But I told you all this, Curly.’
‘I know you did, Barry. But Inspector Malone is in charge now.’
Malone looked at Baldock out of the corner of his eye, but the local detective did not appear to imply anything more than what he had simply said. Malone looked back at Liss. ‘Where did you find him, Mr Liss?’
‘Over here. He was packed in one of the modules that had been brought in and he finished up against the spiked cylinders in the module feeder. It made a real mess, all that blood. Ruined that particular load.’
‘I’m sure it did,’ said Malone, who wasn’t into cotton futures.
Liss led the way over to the huge machine that was inching its way along a length of track, eating its way into the long, high compacted cotton that stood, like a long block of grey ice at the open end of this annexe to the gin shed. A long loader was backing up to the bulked cotton, adding more to the supply.
‘These moon buggies bring the cotton in,’ said Liss. ‘Maybe Mr Sagawa’s body was in one of the loads, I dunno. I only found him when his body jammed the cylinders.’
‘Was the module stack as long and as high as this the night before you found the body?’
‘No, it wouldn’t of been more than, I dunno, four or five metres.’
‘So the body could have been brought in in one of those trailers from out in the fields?’
Liss looked at him, shrewdness increasing the lines on his face. ‘You don’t miss much, do you?’
