by Jon Cleary
“Well, anyway, I can get him to make a statement, I think . . . Ruby, did your mother ever say anything to you about the murder after that first day?”
She shook her head. “We never discussed it. She brought me in here that morning and left me with her sister, my aunt—she’s dead now, like Mum. But coming in in the back of the truck—”
“Who brought you in?”
“One of the station hands, I forget his name—he left the district ages ago, I dunno where he’d be now . . . Mum told me to forget anything I’d seen, not to talk to anyone about it, not even to my aunt. When I asked her why, you know the way kids do, she said we had to go on living out at Noongulli, that what the whites might do to each other wasn’t no concern of ours. She loved her job as cook and she didn’t wanna lose it. She didn’t want me to grow up in the blacks’ camp.”
And now here she was sitting on the edge of the blacks’ camp telling her secret of so many years ago. “Why’d you choose here to talk to us?”
“I wanted to come back and look at my people—” There was just a fleeting glance at her husband; Malone wondered if this was the first time she had ever used that phrase. “Yesterday out at the racecourse I was sick, really sick, at the way Mr. Hardstaff looked at my people, at the way he yelled for them to be arrested, as if he owned the district and everyone in it—”
Malone avoided looking at Narvo; but the latter said quietly, “We understand what you mean, Mrs. Mungle. Would you like to come back to the station now and make a formal statement and sign it?”
She looked at her husband and he pressed her hand. “I think you better, love.”
“This is only the beginning, isn’t it?” She looked around at all three men.
“Yes,” said Malone, “but it could be the end of something, too.”
She stood up from the tree-trunk, still holding Mungle’s hand; and at once two children came running towards her from a group that had been playing some quiet game with stones under a river-gum farther along the bank. They were a boy and a girl, about four and five, with dark curly hair, pale coffee-coloured skin and huge black eyes; they were beautiful but too young to be aware of it, still innocent of man’s vanities and cruelties. Malone felt a sudden wish for his own children to be friends of these two, but he knew it would never happen. There were probably children as innocent and beautiful and shy in Redfern, no more than five kilometres from where the Malones lived, but they and his own children were separated by more than geography, by something that only tolerance and goodwill, notoriously unreliable transport, could conquer.
The children were introduced to Malone and responded with shy, polite smiles. Then the little girl said, “Can we stay, Mummy? It must be nice living here by the river, all the kids to play with.”
Wally Mungle looked around at the settlement; then he ruffled the hair of his daughter. “We gotta go, Kylie. Some other time, okay? Go and say goodbye to Granma. We’ll follow you in our truck, Inspector.”
Driving back to town Malone said, “Well, what d’you think?”
“I don’t think you have enough yet to issue a warrant for murder, do you?”
“No.”
“This has got nothing to do with the Sagawa murder, you know.”
“Are you telling me to stay away from Hardstaff?”
“No. But if you don’t wrap up the Sagawa case, but go back with Hardstaff indicted for a murder he committed seventeen years ago, what’s Police HQ going to think? They don’t like crossed lines. They like to keep everything neatly compartmentalized.”
“Do you?”
“I used to. But now . . . Keep digging. What’s your next step?”
“I’ll have another chat with Fred Strayhorn. Then we—you and I and Curly—can decide what to do? Okay?”
The car window was down and the slipstream was ruffling Narvo’s hair. The neat, steam-pressed man Malone had met two days ago was gone; at least for the time being. “Do you mind if we take the credit?”
“That’ll make waves. No, Hugh, I don’t mind. It was never my case, anyway. I’ve just had a suspicion all along that Hardstaff somehow—I haven’t got a clue how—had something to do with the killing of Sagawa. I still think he might have.”
“You’re stretching it, Scobie.” But Narvo’s argument was no stronger than that. He knew as well as anyone the web that bound men and their actions together. In one way or another the Hardstaffs had created Collamundra; it was not beyond the Hardstaff name, involuntarily or otherwise, to destroy it. He was not versed in history, but he knew the effects of human nature, which is much the same thing.
The Mungles arrived at the station almost immediately after Malone pulled the Commodore into the yard. Twenty minutes later Ruby Mungle’s statement had been typed and signed and the Mungles were gone. The statement had been taken in Narvo’s office, so it would not be overheard, and Clements, a quick if not expert typist, had come down from the detectives’ room and typed it.
Curly Baldock had been called in again from home and he arrived just after the Mungles had left. This time he was no longer in shorts and thongs, but in slacks and shoes. Narvo told him what had occurred.
Baldock was still distant from Malone and Clements. He read the statement, then said flatly, “You’ll need more than this.”
“We’ve agreed on that,” said Narvo, at once catching the coolness in Baldock’s attitude. “But it’s our case, Curly, not Scobie’s and Russ’s, and I’ve decided we should follow it up.”
“I’ll try and get a statement from Fred Strayhorn.” Then Malone looked at his watch. “Crumbs, is that the time? We’re supposed to go out and see Hardstaff. I’ll ring him and put him off. When I’ve got Strayhorn to put something down on paper, you can present it and Ruby’s statement to Hardstaff and see if it scares him into a confession.”
“Do you think it will?” Clements looked at Baldock.
The local detective’s coolness was lessening. “We’ll never scare Chess Hardstaff into anything. But it’s worth a try. Who takes the blame for this, Hugh? I mean if it goes wrong. You or me?”
“I do.” Narvo leaned back in his chair, a sailor ready to take on the roughest waves. “But you’ll have to carry your fair whack. The only one who stays off this case is Wally Mungle.”
Baldock pondered a moment, as if wondering what life would be like if he were in the vanguard of a revolution against the Kingmaker and it failed. Then he nodded at Malone and Clements, all his coolness suddenly gone. “Thanks for the leg-work. And for the kudos. It’ll be a feather in our cap if we bring it off.”
Narvo smiled. “A feather in your cap is no use if you’ve lost your head in the process. We’ll just have to see that doesn’t happen. In the meantime . . .” He looked at Malone.
“We still have to find out who killed Sagawa.”
“Clarrie Binyan phoned from Ballistics,” said Clements, switching back to basics. “That bullet from last night’s crack at you matches the one taken from Sagawa’s body.”
“That means the murderer is someone from the district,” said Malone. “How many gun dealers are there in town, Curly?”
“Just the one with a licence. He runs a general sports store.”
“Can you get him to open up his store today? Get him to go through his books, check on everyone who’s bought any Twenty-twos from him over the past five years. Go back even further if he’s still got the records. Check, too, if he’s sold any „scopes, especially night „scopes. Russ will go with you.”
“What are you going to do?” Clements asked.
“I’m going out to have lunch with my wife and kids.” He grinned at Narvo, the other inspector in the room. “Privileges of rank, eh, Hugh?”
VI
That morning the two old men sat in the doorway of the big woolshed on Noongulli. It had once been the biggest shearing shed in the State, with a hundred and two stands, giving it one more than the shed outside Cunnamulla in Queensland that had claimed to be the largest in the whole
country. Now there were only thirty stands that were still operated, but the long shafts, with their rusting wheels, still ran the length of the shed on both sides. The board floor was dark and shiny with a century of grease from the fleeces, but there were lighter patches where the shearers’ sweat had bleached their own memorial marks. The huge shed smelled of wool, but it also smelled of something else: of history that was winding down.
The two old men now and again gazed westwards during pauses in their slow conversation, staring out at the illimitable distance that stretched, unbroken but for the occasional, unseen range or two of low hills, to the heart of the continent. Chess Hardstaff sometimes dreamed of what might have been, had his grandfather been farsighted and avaricious enough to have owned everything west of here, to have been king of the biggest livestock empire in the wide, wide world, to have owned more even than Kidman, the biggest king of them all. It was, of course, a madman’s dream, but Hardstaff knew, as well as any psychiatrist, that one did not have to be crazy to have mad dreams. It was enough just to be greedy, and greed was not a certifiable offence. It was just one of the seven deadly sins and Hardstaff had never given much thought to such warnings. He recognized the existence of good and evil, but he left it to others to tell the difference; the difference, he reasoned, changed with circumstances. In the meantime he gazed westwards, especially now that behind him, to the east and south, in Sydney and Canberra, his power was waning.
“Do you believe in the existence of evil, Strayhorn?”
“I dunno, Hardstaff, whether I’ve ever thought of evil, I mean as evil. The world is chock-a-block with crookery and bastardry and skulduggery, though, and in some cases something a bloody sight worse. But yeah, I suppose I do believe in the existence of evil. Are you thinking of yourself or anyone in particular?”
Hardstaff smiled. “You have a sardonic sense of humour. Is it natural or did you have to cultivate it?”
“I think it crept up on me, like old age and a cranky prostate.”
Hardstaff himself had driven into the showground to pick up Strayhorn. He had not trusted the latter to the care of one of the station hands, not because he thought the station hand might drive both of them off the road, though that might be a simple solution to what could prove to be a complex problem, but because he was afraid that Strayhorn might talk. He guessed now that Strayhorn would have held his tongue, not wanting to waste his dearly held secret on a stranger. On the drive back to Noongulli the two old men had said hardly anything to each other, more like old friends who had exhausted every topic than adversaries who had only one topic to discuss. Hardstaff rarely, if ever, spoke when he was driving and this morning he had not broken the habit.
“To answer your question, no, I’m not evil. I just work to my own design, not to some moral plan worked out by theologians who don’t recognize the facts of life. God has never had to be political, that’s one thing they’ll never acknowledge.”
“What you did seventeen years ago, are you saying that was political?”
Hardstaff looked out across the pens and drafting yards, over the dipping troughs, all of them empty till mustering began and the shearing team arrived. In one of the far paddocks a willy-willy whirled up out of nothing, the spinning red-brown dust looking like a genie about to materialize; then it spun away into nothing again, magic dying before it could be called upon. Over towards the river, which here curled northwards, a station hand on a motorbike was herding some sheep towards a calico fold where a truck waited for them. In a solitary bluegum just beyond the yards a dozen white cockatoos, come up from the river, sat in uncharacteristic silence; then abruptly they took off with a loud screech, curling up like an explosion of white smoke. He remembered that that morning long ago the cockatoos had been out in force, shrieking at him as he had driven aimlessly along the river.
“I haven’t admitted to doing anything seventeen years ago.”
“Chess—you mind if I call you Chess? What we’re talking about is—well, pretty intimate. We’re sorta old mates, at least for this morning. How does that strike you?”
“It doesn’t make me jump up and down.”
“I don’t think you ever jumped up and down, Chess. I’d say you were always a cold-blooded bugger. Who made you like that—your old man? He was cold-blooded enough, the way he paid me off that morning. Why did you kill your wife, Chess?”
It was the first time in all those years he had been asked the question; not even his father had asked, though he had known why. Neither had his daughters asked, though he sometimes wondered if Amanda had guessed what had happened. Rosemary had come home from London for the funeral, bringing with her her English friend Viola, but they had stayed only two days; Rosemary had shown some grief about her mother’s death but no curiosity. She and her friend had walked about with their arms around each other, even Amanda excluded from their circle of two, and when she had left he had been no closer to her than he had been in all the years till she had grown up and left home at eighteen. Now a man he hardly knew, whom he had met less than half a dozen times in his life that he could recall, had asked him the bluntest question he had ever been hit with.
“Are you planning to blackmail me, Fred?” The smile was so thin it was no more than a flattening of the lips. “Since we’re sort of intimate.”
“But not old mates, eh?”
“No.” There had never been any old mates, not even in his political life.
Strayhorn smiled with genuine amusement, holding nothing back; it was almost a laugh. “No, Chess, I’m not gunna blackmail you. I’ve done some dodgy things in my time, but blackmailing ain’t on the list. But from all accounts your wife was a charming woman, everyone liked her, and you put her nightie around her neck and choked her to death. I’d just like to know why you did it?”
Hardstaff thought for a moment that he would not reply: he didn’t owe Fred Strayhorn an answer. He put it off with a question? “Have you ever been married?”
“No. I got close once or twice and I lived with a nice woman for some months up near the Snowy River—up there you need someone to keep you warm on winter nights. But no, I never married. I didn’t like the thought of being chained up. Did your wife have you chained up? I’d of thought it was the other way around.”
“You don’t have much of an opinion of me, do you?”
“No, Chess, I don’t.”
“I’m held in rather high regard by the rest of the country. They may not like me, some of them, but they respect me.”
“Chess, that’s your public figure. You don’t believe in it any more than I do. Look at President Reagan. From what I read when he was in the White House, half of America thought he was the greatest public figure since Jesus Christ. But I’d bet New York to a brick that ninety-nine point nine per cent of the whole bang lotta them wouldn’t have a clue what made him tick.” He paused, studied Hardstaff as if seeing him properly for the first time; the stare was not offensive, instead almost pitying. “I think what makes you tick, Chess, is nothing but bloody pride. Well, it cometh before a fall.”
“You’re going to contribute to my fall?”
“I’ll be straight with you. I still ain’t made up my mind. I come back to Collamundra this time, pretty sure I was gunna dob you in. You and your old man, Chess, you killed my mum and dad. You choked the life outa them, too, only you done it by degrees and it probably never crossed your minds that you done it. But you did. They were never the same again after you kicked us outa Collamundra and within four years of us leaving here they both died.”
Hardstaff forced himself to say, “Sorry,” but he wasn’t sure that he meant it. He could not remember the elder Strayhorns at all, they were faceless players in that opera on that Sunday afternoon too many years ago.
Then the old-fashioned box-phone on the wall just inside the doorway rang; it was an extension connected to the small switchboard in the homestead office. Hardstaff rose, feeling suddenly weary and—old? He had never felt like this before; at least
not till last Monday night. “Yes?” He looked at his watch. “You’re late, Inspector.”
“Something’s come up, Mr. Hardstaff. Will you be at your daughter’s party this evening? Maybe we can have a talk then?”
“You’ve been invited?”
“I gather I’m eligible, despite the fact that your daughter thinks I’m a Commo, and I’m also a cop. I just hope it doesn’t get around back in Sydney.”
“What—that you’re a Communist?”
“No, that I’ve been to a Rural Party shindig.”
Hardstaff found himself smiling as he hung up. There were still some formidable opponents left to make life interesting, even though life itself was coming to a close.
He came back and sat down. “That was Inspector Malone. Will you be talking to him?”
“He’ll be the one, if I decide to say anything.” Strayhorn sipped the Scotch he had hardly touched. Hardstaff had brought over a bottle of twelve-year-old Glenfiddich, but he had soon realized he was pouring good stuff down the wrong gullet. Strayhorn had made no comment on it and the small omission had irritated Hardstaff, who hated wasting quality whisky on dull tongues. “You said you were sorry about my mum and dad, Chess, but I don’t believe you are. But it don’t matter now. Your old man was the ring-leader that day and I dunno that he’d be sorry, either . . . I don’t suppose you even remember what happened that Sunday?”
“No.”
Strayhorn sipped the Scotch again; then irritated Hardstaff even further by saying, “A nice drop. It must be nice to be able to afford the good stuff like this . . . Maybe it’s going back too far for you, since it didn’t mean that much to you. It was just another Sunday afternoon outing. But you remember the morning you killed your wife, right? When we get on, Chess, sometimes we can’t remember even yesterday. But long ago . . .” He smiled into the past, without pleasure. “Long ago, it seems you can remember every detail of it.”
