by Jon Cleary
“It was not an easy shot, not at that distance. Just as I pressed the trigger, Sagawa stepped in front of Max.” She said it so coolly that she could have been discussing a loose shot in some weekend competition. She regretted the death of Kenji Sagawa, a harmless little man who had paid her the proper respect on the few occasions they had met, but it was something that was distinctly apart from the anger and contempt she still felt for her husband. Later, she might feel guilt; but not now.
“You’re sure she’s not making you squirm?”
“Perhaps,” she admitted. “But I’ll never let her see it.”
“Were they together last Monday night? Max hasn’t even mentioned her. Matter of fact, he’s said hardly a word to me since that night. She could have been with him out at the cotton farm.”
He looked across the lawns to Narelle Potter standing beside a liquidamber. The garden lights had just come on and she was standing in the glow of one of them. She was a good-looking woman, he had to admit, but no man was paying court to her now; certainly not his son-in-law, who had removed himself to the far side of the lawn and had his back to her. “Where was she?”
“He must have dropped her off somewhere. I’d been following them, but I lost them—” Amanda stopped, aware of his stern disapproval. “I know. It’s embarrassing and shameful, spying on one’s husband . . .”
“I don’t know why you didn’t just kick him out, then divorce him.”
“And have everyone learn I’d lost my husband to the town bike? That’s what you men call her, isn’t it?”
“I use a more old-fashioned term.”
“Don’t be so bloody pompous, Dad!”
He was suddenly aware of the tension in her; he had never seen her like this before. He wanted to comfort her, put a hand on her arm or round her shoulders; but he hadn’t done that with her, or her sister, since she was a small child. It struck him, with shame, that he couldn’t express sympathy properly even to his own daughter.
“I haven’t thanked you for what you did last Monday night,” she said.
They hadn’t discussed the murder till now; he wondered why she had chosen this awkward moment. Was she planning some spectacular confession? He hoped not. Confession was only good for the souls of those who heard it, it gave them a feeling of superiority without feeling sinful about it. All it gave the confessor was trouble.
“I had to do something. When Max rang me . . .”
He had been at home in Noongulli, listening to a Bach concerto before going to bed. He preferred the work of composers of the first half of the eighteenth century; the orderly architecture of their music suited his temperament. Then the phone rang and the night fell into disorder. It was his son-in-law ringing from the office at the cotton gin in a state of panic.
“But why call me, Max? Ring the police.”
“No, no! I know who shot him—it was Amanda!”
“What the hell are you saying? Just a minute.” He went across to the player and turned off the music. Then, unhurriedly, he went back to the phone. “Amanda? You’re not drunk again, I hope.”
“For Christ’s sake, Chess! She’s been following us—following me! She must have thought Sagawa was someone else—”
“Who?”
“Never mind that, Chess! Just come and help me—it’s your fucking name that’s in danger, not mine!”
“Where’s Amanda now?”
“I don’t know! For Chrissakes, hurry!”
Chess hung up, went out and got into his Mercedes and drove fast but with steady control into Collamundra and out the other side to the cotton gin. As he drove he thought of the madness of what he was doing, but, as always, he thought he could control it. Just as long as Max did not fall apart.
Nothling was waiting for him, the dead Sagawa lying between the Ford LTD and the Cressida. Max’s panic seemed to have subsided, but there was still more blubber to him than bone.
“He’s been shot in the back—the bullet’s still in there. They’ll trace it to her gun, won’t they?”
“I don’t know. I’m not experienced in police procedure—you’re the government medical officer.” He looked down at the inert form of the Japanese. He felt more anger than anything else, an intense annoyance that something as stupid as this had happened. But, of course, it had happened before . . . “What are we going to do with him now I’m here?”
“I’ve been thinking—”
Hardstaff looked at the darkened office cottage. “Were the lights on when he was shot?”
“Yes, he was expecting me—”
“Go and put them on again. If someone drives past and sees three cars parked here and no lights, they’ll wonder what’s going on. If the lights are on in the office they’ll assume we’re having some sort of meeting.”
“But it’s risky—”
“Do it!”
Nothling turned and went into the office and switched on the lights. When he came back he said, “We have to hide the fact that he’s been shot. We can take the body somewhere, out to the river, perhaps, and I’ll try and extract the bullet, then we can throw the body in the river—Jesus Christ, what am I saying?”
Hardstaff said calmly, “You are proposing a way of getting rid of incriminating evidence against your wife and my daughter.” He looked towards the cotton gin, a huge, black angular hill against the stars. “Isn’t there some way we can get rid of the body in there? All that machinery—it must have its destructive uses. Machinery usually does.” Unconsciously he had spoken like a Luddite, a thought which would have horrified him in a saner moment.
Nothling stared at him, his nervousness suddenly chilled by the cold calm of the older man. “Christ, you beat everything, Chess!”
“Am I right? That’s all you have to tell me. You know the workings here better than I do.”
Nothling looked towards the gin, said nothing for at least half a minute, then turned back to Hardstaff. “Yes, there is a way. We could hollow out one of those modules that are ready to go into the feeder first thing tomorrow morning . . .”
It had taken them twenty minutes, working quickly but methodically, to bury the body and then re-pack the cotton around it. They were left with a quantity of cotton equal to Sagawa’s bulk; Hardstaff, his mind even now acute to irony, wondered if Archimedes, turning from water, had considered such a principle. Nothling gathered up the surplus cotton and dropped it on a bundle of sweepings in the annexe.
They walked briskly back to their cars. “What time did you get here?” Hardstaff asked.
“I’m not sure. About nine, I think.”
Hardstaff looked at his watch. “It’s ten fifteen now. Go home, find Amanda and tell her what we’ve done and impress on her that the two of you have been home all evening. Is your housekeeper home tonight?”
“No, she’s away for two days in Bathurst, her sister’s sick. What about yours?”
“She’s in town at the films . . . All right, you leave first. I’ll follow. And Max—” He could have been starting another political campaign; but, of course, it was a campaign, if not political. “Get a grip on yourself. You’re the GMO, you’ll examine the body tomorrow morning when they find it. If that feeder back there works the way you say it does, there should be no need for an autopsy. Good night.”
“Will you talk to Amanda?”
“Not unless she speaks to me first about what’s happened.”
Nothling had got into the LTD and driven away, going too fast and almost clipping the gates as he passed through them and out on to the main highway.
Hardstaff waited till he saw the LTD’s tail-lights disappearing eastwards. Then he went into the office, went through Sagawa’s desk and found the diary with Nothling’s name marked in it for a meeting this evening. He took out his handkerchief, wiped where his hands had rested on the desk; then, on his way out, wiped the light switch where Nothling would have touched it. He did the same with the interior of Sagawa’s car, just in case Nothling had sat in it with the Japanese.
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He went out, got into the Mercedes and pulled away towards the driveway that led out of the farm. He had just turned on to the gravelled track when he saw the headlights turning in from the highway. His foot lifted for a moment, then he pressed it down again, switched his own headlights on to high-beam and went down the driveway towards the approaching car as fast as he dared. He went by it, spattering gravel, bounced over the cattle-grid at the gates, swung hard right on to the highway and headed west towards the town, home and safety.
He had, however, miscalculated; which was so unlike him. As a political boss he should have allowed more for human weakness; or anyway, for his son-in-law’s weakness. Max Nothling had gone straight home, but it had taken him till the next day to tell Amanda what he and her father had done to cover up her crime. Instead, that Monday night he had got drunk, blind paralytic drunk, and next morning he had been in no fit condition to respond to the police call when the body was discovered. Dr. Bedi had done the autopsy and then, slowly, everything had started to unravel.
Now here was Hardstaff on the lawns of his daughter’s home, calmly discussing with her how and why she had murdered an innocent man whom she had mistaken for her husband’s lover; the lover who now stood no more than thirty paces from them.
Then he was aware that Amanda had said something that he had missed. “What?”
“I said, why did you kill Mother?”
It was the first time in seventeen years she had asked him that. He had expected to be shocked or frightened by the question, coming from her; instead, it was almost like the breaking of a boil, one he had kept hidden for so long. It was not a matter of conscience, he had never been troubled by such a weakness. There are just some secrets that, even in the most secretive of men, are cancerous.
“She was sleeping with Frank Kilburn,” he said.
“And he never said anything? Did he know it was you who did it?”
“I presume so,” he said calmly: Kilburn, too, was now dead and no longer to be feared.
“But why didn’t you just divorce her?”
“Amanda, my dear—”
He raised a hand, but then it stopped in mid-air of its own accord. As if she understood, she raised her arm and put her wrist within the lock of his fingers, felt them close on her with what she knew was love. Max Nothling, watching from a distance, wondered at the gesture of affection, of intimacy, between the two people he feared and hated most.
“My dear—” There was no hint of tears; he was not capable of them. “Pride. You and I both killed for pride.”
III
Malone was aware of the momentary hush as he and Clements appeared at the party. As they got out of the Commodore and joined Lisa and the Warings, alighting from the Mercedes, he felt the sudden chill come across the lawns from the crowd of fifty or sixty who were congregated between the swimming pool and the artificial-turfed tennis court. Faces turned towards them, small satellite dishes ready for any message the outsider cops might have brought with them. Then Max Nothling, face flushed from an early start to his drinking, came towards them.
“Welcome, welcome! I trust you and your colleague are off duty, Inspector? Oh, this is Mrs. Inspector Malone? How can anyone so charming be married to a cop?”
“We’re not married,” said Lisa, giving him what Malone recognized as her cut-your-throat smile. “He’s just my parole officer.”
Nothling recognized the smile for what it was; he showed some true charm by graciously retreating. “I apologize, Mrs. Malone. I’m not always the best of hosts, am I, Ida?”
“You do all right, Max,” said Ida, adding her own touch of graciousness. “What’s the champagne this evening, Aussie or French?”
“French for you ladies, local stuff for the natives. May I offer an arm to you both?”
He took the women away and Waring said, “He spreads more bullshit than a yard full of Herefords.”
“He’s as nervous as a bull that’s just about to be turned into a bullock,” said Clements.
“You haven’t come to arrest him, have you? Not at his own party?”
“No,” said Malone.
Waring, about to move away to greet another guest, turned back. “Who have you come to arrest?”
“No one,” said Malone. “Not yet . . . Before you go, Trev. How’d your meetings with the Japanese turn out?”
“I see them over there. Why don’t you go and ask them?”
“No, Trev, I’m asking you.”
“I don’t know that it’s any of your business, Scobie. But if you must know—they’re not selling. They are staying on. They set a price we just couldn’t meet.”
“So they’re not worried about the anti-Jap feeling?”
“Evidently not. But then, all that far away in Japan, they don’t have to suffer it, do they? It’s the consuls of empire who cop the spears in the back.”
Malone grinned. “You haven’t become anti-imperialist, have you?”
Waring smiled, the first time since getting out of his car. “Lawyers have to believe in empires, of one sort or another. Otherwise we’d all finish up just working for Legal Aid.”
As he walked away, Dr. Bedi came floating towards them, shimmering like a green-and-gold butterfly in another sari. She carried a small tray on which was a flute of champagne and two glasses of beer. “Your wife told me you were both beer drinkers.”
“Are you a hostess?”
She put down the tray when the two men had taken their beers, then held the champagne flute in the long, elegant fingers which had none of the plumpness of the rest of her. “No, I’m just standing in for the moment. Lady Amanda has just gone into the house with her father.”
“Lady Amanda?”
“A slip of the tongue. That’s what the nurses at the hospital call her. Don’t quote me.”
“How are the jockeys? Recovering?”
“Some of them are going to be out of action for quite a while. I believe they are going to sue the Turf Club for not policing the track properly—it’s the Age of Litigation, sue anyone and everyone. We in the medical profession know all about that.”
“They’re not going to sue the Aborigines?”
“What’s the point? There’s no money there.”
“Dr. Bedi, if we come to you to make a statement about the Sagawa case, will you do it?”
She lifted her flute, looked at it as if it were a test-tube. Then she drained it in one gulp and said, “No. All I’m going to say is what was in the autopsy report.”
“But that was signed by Dr. Nothling.”
“Precisely.”
“We could report you to the medical ethics council, or whatever it is.”
“I don’t think it would be worth your time and trouble, Inspector. You are not going to solve the murder that way.”
She raised the flute again, seemed surprised to find it empty, then turned and walked away, the sari fluttering about her like wings that couldn’t be lifted to bear her away to somewhere where she would feel more at home. Because, Malone thought, I don’t think she’ll ever really be at home here in Collamundra.
The crowd had turned away from watching the two detectives and were intent on enjoying themselves. These people looked on themselves as the salt of the nation; Malone, grudgingly like a true city type, had to concede their right to their self-esteem. A great part of the country’s export wealth still came, after almost two hundred years, from the efforts of these men and women on the land. But, like the Veterans Legion, they no longer had the political clout they had once had. The trouble was that the new rulers, the city bankers and entrepreneurs and developers, were going bankrupt and so, said the men and women on the land, was the country. Serves it right, they said, never loudly but emphatically. They, too, might go bankrupt eventually, but they would never starve. They would kill the fat lamb, slaughter the unsold beef, eat the grain the Wheat Board could no longer afford to hoard. All they had to do was stave off the banks when the time came. In the meantime they looked
prosperous, kept a more watchful eye on the dry sky than on the banks and discussed the proliferation of taxes; the diminishing of subsidies; the price of wool, grain and cotton; and exchanged what gossip had sprouted since their last get-together. They discussed everything but the Sagawa murder, but occasionally some eyes would glance towards Malone and Clements, as if the grit of conscience had got under their lids.
“Well,” said Malone.
“Well, what?”
“Well, there’s no point in putting it off. I think we’d better go in and talk to Hardstaff.”
“What, about Lady Amanda?”
“We don’t have any hard evidence on her—yet. If she’s as smart as I think she is, she’ll have got rid of her gun.”
“She hung on to it after she’d shot Sagawa, at least till last night when she took the shots at you. Maybe she’s held on to it to have another crack at you.”
“Why me? Why not you?”
“Privileges of rank, mate. What do we do? Go into the house uninvited?”
“I think the invitation said it was open house, at least for the elite. We won’t have to break the door down.”
“That’s good. I didn’t bring the sledgehammer.”
IV
Inside the house, in the large study-library, Amanda had just told her father what she had done last night. He was aghast, was shocked, a reaction so strange to him that for a moment he felt physically ill.
She saw how pale he had suddenly become. “Sit down, Dad—you look as if you’re going to faint. I didn’t mean—”
“No, I’m all right.” He pulled himself together, settled his stomach with a dose of cold humour: “Are you going to make a habit of it?”
“Don’t joke. Last night I thought it would be a solution—”
He interrupted brutally: “Killing a policeman? A solution? You were either drunk or mad!” Even in his own ears he sounded like the father of old, the one who had never had any encouragement for his children because he had never known how to express it without embarrassment. He retreated at once, not wanting to sever the tenuous bond that had been woven in the past twenty minutes: “No, you’re not mad. But you must have been drunk?”
