Pride’s Harvest

Augustus Dircks looked the very opposite of Hardstaff. In his late fifties, short, nuggety, blunt-faced and with close-cropped ginger hair, he lboked as if he could be the foreman of a shire road gang. He was, instead, a reasonably wealthy wheat and wool farmer; his family had been in the district since the turn of the century and he had been the Rural Party’s member for the electorate of Noongulli for the past twenty years. He had been an odd and bad choice for Police Minister, but Coalition politics and Chess Hardstaff had got him the job when the joint conservative parties had deposed the long-time Labour government in the recent State elections. He had never had an original political thought in his life, but that has never been a handicap to any politician anywhere in the world. Dircks’s saving grace was that he knew his limitations: without his mentor, he would be a nobody. It hurt, however, to have heard the New South Wales police call him Gus Nobody. It is one thing to know your own limitations, it is another to have everyone agree with you.

‘What are these detectives from Sydney like? Busybodies?’

‘I don’t know much about them, I didn’t have time to look into ’em. Except that Malone, the inspector, is supposed to be dogged, he doesn’t give up easily. He’s solved one or two tough cases the last coupla years.’

‘Will he solve this one?’

‘Who knows?’ Dircks sipped his drink; then said carefully, ‘Do we want it solved?’

Hardstaff had been gazing out the window at the garden that surrounded the house; Mick, the Aboriginal gardener, was cutting back the rose bushes. But at Dircks’s question, he turned round and sat down at his desk. It was a large desk, an English antique that had come from the original family home in Yorkshire; the leather top had had to be replaced, but the wood of the desk had a patina to it that pleased him every time he looked at it. Had it been possible, he would have totally avoided the new. Only the old, the tried and true, could be trusted.

‘What do you mean by that, Gus?’ His deep voice was toneless, as unhurried as ever.

‘Well, we don’t know what’s going to come out, do we? We want the Nips to stay here, don’t we?’

‘Yes.’ Though Hardstaff had invested no money of his own in the consortium that had set up South Cloud Cotton, it had been he who had persuaded the Japanese to come in as major partners. ‘We want more foreign investment in this country and the Japanese are our best bet.’

‘Sure. But they’re not going to feel too bloody welcome if it turns out one of our locals is out to murder them.’

‘What makes you think it’s one of the locals?’

‘Who else could it be? I saw Hugh Narvo last night, he told me they haven’t found any trace of strangers hanging about out at the gin.’

‘Does Hugh think it’s a local who’s the murderer?’

Dircks shrugged. ‘You know him, he never commits himself. Not even to the Police Minister.’ He laughed: it sounded like a sour joke.

‘Is he still in charge of the case? Or are these outsiders from Sydney taking over?’

‘Nominally, he should be in charge. But I don’t know that he wants to be. He seems to be leaving everything to Curly Baldock.’

‘I think you’d better have a word with Hugh.’ He looked up as his housekeeper, a stout middle-aged woman with glasses that kept slipping down to the end of her snub nose, came to the door of the office. ‘Yes, Dorothy?’

It had taken him a long time to be able to say her name without thinking of his dead wife, that other Dorothy.

‘There are two detectives here, Mr Hardstaff.’ She sounded puzzled; she pushed her glasses back up her nose, squinted through them at him. ‘From Sydney?’

Hardstaff rose from his desk, not looking at Dircks. ‘I’ll see them in the living-room. You’d better come too, Gus.’

Dircks lifted his bulk from his chair, breathing heavily: it was difficult to tell whether he was overweight or over-anxious. ‘They didn’t take long to get out here, did they?’

‘Leave them to me,’ said the King-maker, who could break as well as make men.

3

When Clements had switched off the engine of the Commodore, Malone sat for a moment looking at Noongulli homestead. ‘Take a look at how the squattocracy lives.’

One didn’t much hear the word squattocracy these days. It had been coined near the middle of the last century to describe the then colonial aristocracy, or what passed for it. The original squatters had been ticket-of-leave men, emancipated convicts, who, legally or otherwise, had taken up land in remote areas and prospered as much by rustling from neighbours as by their own sheep- or grain-raising efforts. Gradually the word squatter had gained respectability. All countries can turn a blind eye to the sins of their fathers, but none was blinder than that of the local elements. Men, and women, have killed for respectability.

Clements nodded appreciatively. He had been impressed as they had come up the long drive, half a mile at least, from the front gates; an avenue of silky oaks had lined the smoothly graded track and the fences behind them had had none of the drunken lurch one found on so many of the properties as large as this one. The gardens surrounding the house were as carefully tended as some he had seen on Sydney’s North Shore; an elderly Aborigine stood unmoving in the midst of a large rose plot, gazing at them with stiff curiosity like a garden ornament. Trees bordered the acre or so of garden: blue-gum, liquidambar, cedar and cabbage tree palm, though Clements knew only the name of the liquidambar. On one side of the house was a clay tennis court and beyond it a swimming pool. The house itself, though only one-storeyed, suggested a mansion: there was a dignity to it, an impressive solidity, that told you this was more than just a house. This was where tradition and wealth and, possibly, power resided. Its owner was not to be taken lightly.

‘Not bad, eh?’ Clements said. ‘I think I might’ve liked being a squatter. A rich one.’

‘You’d have buggered the sheep. I don’t mean literally. Russ, you couldn’t raise a pup even if it gave you a hand. Lassie would have turned up her nose at you and gone home. Come on, let’s go inside and see what we can get out of Mr Hardstaff.’

He had seen Hardstaff on television, but he was not prepared for the presence of the man in person. He fitted the dignity of his home; it was a proper setting for him. Dignity is not an Australian characteristic, the larrikin element is too strong in the national psyche. Hardstaff stood in the middle of his living-room, a heavily elegant chamber, and looked at the two larrikin intruders.

Malone introduced himself and Clements and was greeted by, ‘You might have telephoned me first to let me know you were coming.’

‘We slip up sometimes on politeness,’ said Malone; and looked at the Police Minister. ‘It’s Mr Dircks, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Dircks. ‘I think Mr Hardstaff has a point. You shouldn’t come charging in here, you don’t have a warrant, do you?’

‘No, sir. I wasn’t aware we were charging in. You’re the Minister, you’d know we’d get nowhere if we stuck to protocol all the time.’ Oh crumbs, he thought, there goes the Malone tongue again. He glanced to his right and saw Clements looking around as if seeking a way out of the room before the roof fell in.

Dircks’s face reddened, but Hardstaff was not going to have a Police Department row in his home. ‘Let’s start again, Inspector. Why did you want to see me? Sit down.’

Malone and Clements lowered themselves into armchairs. This was a man’s living-room, leather and tweed and polished wood; there was no chintz or silk. Brass glinted at various points around the room and the paintings on the walls were bold and challenging, though not in any modern style: de Kooning or Bacon or Blackman would have finished up in the marble-topped fireplace. The challenge was within the subject of the paintings: a hold-up by bushrangers, a horse-breaker trying to tame a buck-jumper. There were, however, vases of flowers on side tables around the room, the only soft touch, like that of a ghostly woman’s hand.

Clements had taken out his notebook and Hard-staff gave him a hard stare. ‘You are going to take notes?’

‘Only if necessary.’

‘Will it be necessary?’ Hardstaff looked back at Malone.

‘I don’t know, Mr Hardstaff, not till I start asking the questions.’ He plunged straight in, freezing though the water might be: ‘Can you tell us where you were Monday night, the night Mr Sagawa was murdered out at the cotton gin?’

‘Jesus!’ said the Police Minister. ‘What sort of question is that?’

‘A routine one,’ said Malone. ‘It’s normal police procedure in cases like this. Where were you, Mr Hardstaff?’

Hardstaff had shown no expression at the question. His long handsome face could turn into a stone replica of itself; he turned his head slightly and, in a trick of light, his pale blue eyes seemed suddenly colourless. A classicist might have described him at that moment as a Caesar in his own museum. But Malone was no classicist, just a cop who had learned to read stone faces, no matter how faint the script.

‘I was at a meeting of the Turf Club. I’m the chairman.’

You would be, thought Malone: you’re probably chairman of everything with more than two members in this district. ‘Where was that held?’

‘At the Legion club. From seven o’clock till nine.’

‘And after that?’

‘After that I went to my daughter’s home, the other side of town. I was there about an hour, I suppose. Then I drove home.’

‘Alone?’

‘Of course.’ He didn’t attempt to explain why of course he would drive home alone.

‘What sort of car do you have?’