by Jon Cleary
Malone and Clements went out with Baldock and up to the detectives’ room on the first floor of the rear building. It was an office in which there had been an attempt at neatness, probably under Narvo’s orders, but it had failed; this was a room which would have more visitors than Narvo’s, many of them obstreperous or even still murderous, and neatness had bent under the onslaughts. There was one other detective in the room, a short, slight dark man in a suit that looked a size too large for him.
Baldock introduced him. “Wally Mungle. He was the first one out to the crime scene. A pretty gory sight, he tells me.”
“Gruesome.”
Now that they were standing opposite each other, Malone saw that Mungle was an Aborigine, not a full-blood but with the strain showing clearly in him. He had a beautiful smile that made him look younger than he was, but his eyes were as sad as those of a battered old man.
He held out a file. “Maybe you’d like to see the running sheet.”
“We don’t run to computers here in the detectives’ room,” said Baldock. “We’re the poor cousins in this set-up. Both computers are downstairs with the uniformed guys and the civilian help.”
Again Malone had a feeling of something in the atmosphere, like an invisible shifting current. He took the file from Mungle and flipped through it: so far it was as meagre as the report on a stolen bicycle:
Kenji Sagawa, born Kobe, Japan, June 18, 1946. Came to Collamundra August 1989 as general manager South Cloud Cotton Limited. Family: wife and two children, resident in Osaka, Japan.
Body discovered approximately 8.15 a.m. Tuesday April 12, by Barry Liss, worker in South Cloud cotton gin. First thought was accidental death due to body being trapped in cotton module travelling into the module feeder. Later inspection by Dr. M. Nothling, government medical officer, established that death was due to gunshot wound. (Medical report attached.)
“That’s all?”
“The bullet has been extracted,” Mungle said. “Ballistics had a man sent up from Sydney last night. He left again this morning. The bullet was a Twenty-two.”
“What about the cartridge?”
“No sign of it.”
Malone frowned at that; then glanced at the file again. “This is pretty skimpy.”
Mungle said almost shyly, “It’s my first homicide, Inspector. I’ve only been in plainclothes a month.”
Malone decided it wasn’t his place to teach Mungle how to be a detective. He nodded, said he would see Mungle again, and he and Clements went downstairs and out to their car. Baldock followed them.
“Wally will do better. He’s the first Abo cop we’ve had in this town. He’s done bloody well to make detective.”
Malone decided on the blunt approach; he was tired and wanted the picture laid out for him. “Tell me, Jeff, do you coves resent Russ and me being called in?”
“It was me who called for you. And call me Curly.” He took off his hat and ran his hand over his bald head. “I get uptight when people call me Baldy Baldock. My mates call me Curly. Does that answer your question?”
Malone grinned and relaxed; he was surprised that he had begun to feel uptight himself. Several uniformed men, in their shirt-sleeves, two of them with chamois washcloths in their hands, had come to the doors of the garages again and stood in front of the cars and patrol wagons they had been cleaning. There was a stiffness about all of them that made them look like figures in an old photograph. Through a high barred back window of the two-storeyed rear building there came the sound of a slurred voice singing a country-and-western song.
“One of the Abos in the cells,” said Baldock. “Today’s dole day. They start drinking the plonk as soon as the pubs and the liquor shop open and we’ve usually got to lock up two or three of „em by mid-afternoon. We let „em sober up, then send „em home.”
“How do they feel about Constable Mungle?”
“He’s an in-between, poor bugger. But it’s a start. Come on, I’ll take you down and introduce you to Narelle Potter. She’s a good sort, you’ll like her. She’s a widow, lost her husband about five years ago in a shooting accident. Let’s go in your car. You may need me to make sure you get a parking place.”
“How do you do that out here in the bush?” said Clements, the city expert.
“Same as you guys down in Sydney, I guess. I give some poor bugger a ticket, tell him to move his vehicle, then I take his place. What do you call it down in the city?”
“Emergency privilege. Makes us very popular.”
But miraculously, just like in every movie Malone had seen, there was a vacant space at the kerb in front of the Mail Coach Hotel. Clements squeezed the Commodore in between two dust-caked utility trucks. Some drinkers on the pavement, spilling out from the pub, looked at them curiously as the three policemen got out of their car.
“It’s the most popular pub in town,” said Baldock. “Especially with the races and the Cup ball coming up this weekend. There may be a brawl or two late in the evening, but just ignore it. We do, unless Narelle calls us in.”
The hotel stood on a corner, a two-storeyed structure that fronted about a hundred and twenty feet to both the main street and the side street. It was the sort of building that heritage devotees, even strict teetotallers, would fight to preserve. The upper balconies had balustrades of yellow iron lace; the windows had green wooden shutters; the building itself, including the roof, was painted a light brown. It was one of the most imposing structures in town, a temple to drinking. The congregation inside sounded less than religious, filled with piss rather than piety.
Baldock led Malone and Clements in through a side-door, past a sign that said “Guests’ Entrance,” a class distinction of earlier times. They were in a narrow hallway next to the main bar, whence came a bedlam of male voices, the Foster’s Choir. In the hallway the preservation equalled that on the outside: dark polished panelling halfway up the cream walls, a polished cedar balustrade on a flight of red-carpeted stairs leading to the upper floor. Mrs. Potter, it seemed, was a proud housekeeper.
Baldock returned with her from the main bar. She was a tall, full-figured woman in her mid-thirties with dark hair that looked as if it had just come out from under a hairdresser’s blower, an attractive face that appeared as if it had become better-looking as she had grown older and more sure of herself. She had an automatic smile, a tool of trade that Malone knew from experience not all Australian innkeepers had learned to use. Narelle Potter, he guessed, could look after herself, even in a pub brawl.
“Gentlemen—” She had to adjust her voice from its strident first note; the gentlemen she usually addressed were those in her bars, all of them deaf to anything dulcet. “Happy to have you. We’ll try and make you comfortable and welcome.”
She looked first at Malone, then at Clements, who gave her a big smile and turned on some of his King’s Cross charm. It worked well with the girls on the beat in that area; but evidently Narelle Potter, too, liked it. She gave him a big smile in return.
Baldock left them, saying he would meet them tomorrow out at the cotton farm, and Mrs. Potter took them up to their room. It was big and comfortable, but strictly hotel functional; the heritage spirit ran dry at the door. There were three prints on the walls: one of a Hans Heysen painting of eucalypts, the other two of racehorses standing with pricked ears and a haughty look as if the stewards had just accused them of being doped.
“You like the horses?” said Clements, whose betting luck was legendary, at least to Malone.
“My late husband loved them, he had a string of them. I still have two, just as a hobby. One of them is running in the Cup.” She looked at Malone. “You’re here about the murder out at the cotton gin?”
Malone had put his valise on the bed and was about to open it; but the abrupt switch in the conversation made him turn round. If Mrs. Potter’s tone wasn’t strident again, it had certainly got a little tight.
“That’s right. Did you know Mr. Sagawa?”
“Oh yes. Yes, he w
as often in here at the hotel. He was unlike most Japs, he went out of his way to mix with people. He tried too hard.” The tightness was still there.
“In what way?”
“Oh, various ways.” She was turning down the yellow chenille bedspreads.
“Do you get many Japanese out here?”
“Well, no-o. But I’ve heard what they’re like, they like to keep to themselves. The other Jap out at the farm, the young one, we never see him in here.”
“There’s another one?”
“He’s the trainee manager or something. I don’t know his name. He’s only been here a little while.”
“So you wouldn’t know how he got on with Mr. Sagawa?”
She paused, bent over the bed, and looked up at him. He noticed, close up, that she was either older than he had first thought or the years had worked hard on her. “How would I know?”
He ignored that. “Did Mr. Sagawa have any friends here in town?”
“I don’t really know.” She straightened up, turned away from him; he had the feeling that her rounded hip was bumping him off, like a footballer’s would. “He tried to be friendly, like I said, but I don’t know that he was actually friends with anyone.”
“Is there any anti-Japanese feeling in the town?”
She didn’t answer that at once, but went into the bathroom, came out, said, “Just checking the girl left towels for you. Will you be in for dinner?”
Now wasn’t the time to push her, Malone thought. Questioning a suspect or a reluctant witness is a form of seduction; he was better than most at it, though in his sexual seduction days his approach had been along the national lines of a bull let loose in a cow-stall.
“Sergeant Clements will be. I’m going out of town for dinner.”
“Oh, you know someone around here?” Her curiosity was so open, she stoked 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.”
II
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 gue
ssed 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 from the dining-room, where Lisa and Ida were now helping the housekeeper to clear the table. Even so, in the dim light, Malone saw the glance that passed between Waring and his father-in-law.
“I 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.
