Dilemma

When he stepped out of the plane on to the tarmac Malone felt the heat hit him like a soft physical blow. El Niño, reaching out all the way from the Peruvian and Chilean coasts, had had its effect here on the western plains. Further west, beyond the cotton belt, wheat and sheep farmers watched the cracks widen daily in the soil of their paddocks. Things were tough enough out here without a cop arriving from Sydney to kick up more dirt.

Wally Mungle was waiting for him in an unmarked car. ‘You haven’t changed, Inspector.’

Mungle had. He was still slight, still seemingly too small for his suit, but the years had doubled in his dark-coffee face. Somewhere back in his lineage was a white man; there was a hint of blue in the young detective’s eyes. The eyes were sad, sadder than Malone remembered, and the cheeks were already showing lines.

‘How’re things? You had kids – how are they?’

‘Fine. Neither of them wants to be a cop …’ Then he looked sideways at Malone as he took the car out on to the main road to town. ‘This bloke Roger Gibson. I’m sure he’s the one you’re looking for.’

‘It’s going to upset Inspector Gombrich, if he is. You still in the shithouse?’

‘With the door shut and no paper,’ said Wally Mungle.

‘I’d better see him first. How are things around here?’

‘You mean the locals? There’s no money in wool any more – most of the sheep cockies have gone into cotton. There’s still wheat, but even they are beginning to think there’s more money in cotton. Water’s the trouble. The blokes downstream, still in wheat or wool, they’re complaining they’re not getting enough water. Irrigation takes most of it.’

‘I’ve read about it. You country people fight each other, you forget how much you hate us city folk.’

Mungle looked sideways at him, grinned thinly. ‘You wait till you pick up Roger Gibson and charge him.’

They went in past the avenue of silky oaks that was the entrance to the town, past the two used-car lots, then came to the roundabout at the eastern end of the main street. Malone suddenly remembered the war memorial, the bronze figure of the World War I Anzac, bayonet at the ready to repel the invaders from the coast, from the city.

‘He’s still there. Looks as if he could do with a polish.’

‘He doesn’t mean much any more,’ said Mungle.

‘Did he ever mean much to you?’

‘No.’ Mungle swung the car into the yard behind the police station. ‘He didn’t go away to fight for any of our mob, us Abos. But don’t quote me.’

He went to get out of the car, but Malone put a hand on his arm. ‘Wally, when I go out to pick up this feller Gibson, I think you’d better not come with me.’

Mungle’s gaze was direct. ‘I’m not gunna get anywhere in the Service by dodging issues.’

‘How far are you going to get by going looking for them?’

‘I dunno. But if Gibson is the man you’ve been looking for, then I want the credit for picking him up. All the other blokes here at the station look in at that TV programme – none of them picked him.’

‘Including Inspector Gombrich?’

‘Including him.’

Malone offered no further argument. Don’t start playing the do-gooder, chum. Wally Mungle had chosen his own path.

As they went into the station Malone saw two uniformed men stop by a marked car and look back at himself and Mungle. Their stare was almost readable: Why don’t you mind your own business?

The station was a one-storeyed Victorian stone building built to last, to withstand everything, including prejudice; the white ants were inside it. It was backed by a 1950s’ addition, a two-storeyed brick building as characterless as a butter-box. Gombrich’s office was in the front section: high-ceilinged, cold-looking. Malone felt the chill as soon as he walked into the room; the heat beyond the big window was an illusion. But at least the man behind the big table-desk was polite. He rose, though he did not put out his hand.

‘Inspector Malone—’ No welcome, nice to see you. ‘Leave us for a few minutes, Constable.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Mungle turned at once and went out, not looking at Malone.

The two inspectors gazed at each other for a few moments, then Gombrich sat down and gestured for Malone to do the same. ‘I think you’ve come a long way for no purpose.’

‘It happens. If I’m wrong—’ Malone shrugged, waiting for the other man to develop the argument.

Gombrich was tall, overweight, with a shock of greying curly hair and a mismatch of features: a blue and a grey eye, a fine handsome nose and loose cheeks and a double-chin. From the voice on the phone Malone had expected an austere man: cold, bony, a human rule-book. Instead, he looked as if, away from this room, he might enjoy life and company. In the locker room of the golf club, on the walk between the seventeenth and nineteenth holes he would be telling jokes, even perhaps ones about dumb cops.

There were no jokes now: ‘Roger Gibson came to this town three years ago. He got a job as a casual salesman at one of the car lots – Ron Harvey says he’s the best salesman he’s ever had, but to keep him on full-time would have meant putting off someone else. He couldn’t do that, not in this town – you keep your old hands. Except if you work for a bank.’ Malone then guessed Gombrich was a long-time bush cop. The closing down of bank branches in country towns was a treason that would never be forgiven. ‘Then Roger went to work for Ollie McBride, he owned the nursery on the edge of town. Ollie was killed in a car accident about six months later. Roger ran the business – he just took over and made it even better than it had been under Ollie. Then about a year ago he and Ollie’s widow, Roma, became – partners. He’s only been here three years, but he’s one of the most respected men in town. He told me he had at last found his niche in life. He’s in Rotary, he’s on the committee of the golf club—’

Malone held up a hand. ‘I don’t doubt any of that. Look, Sam – mind if I call you by your first name?’ The name had been on the door. Not the usual first initials, but spelled right out: Inspector Samuel Gombrich.

‘Go ahead.’ Coldly, as if he had been asked if he minded being called Boofhead.

‘Sam, I’ll go out to the nursery and if this feller can convince me he’s not Ron Glaze, then okay, I’ll catch the seven o’clock plane back to Sydney and nobody’ll be the wiser.’

‘Everyone here in the station knows why you’re here.’

‘Then put a lid on them if I’m wrong. If they talk, they’ll be the ones putting the mark on Mr Gibson. Do you want to come out to the nursery with me?’

Gombrich for the first time looked uncertain. He had a habit, Malone remarked, of looking past one: as if each of the oddly matched eyes, the blue and the grey, had its own direction. Then they appeared to focus, glared at Malone. ‘No.’

‘Then can I take Constable Mungle? Or would you rather I took someone else? I have to have someone local – this is your turf.’

‘Take Mungle – it’s his pigeon.’

Malone stood up. ‘Will it still be his pigeon if he’s right? If Mr Gibson is Ron Glaze?’

Gombrich hadn’t risen; he just looked up at Malone. ‘Let’s hope he’s dead wrong.’

2

McBride’s Nursery was on the western edge of town, across the wide road from the railway siding and the wheat silos. Here was where the country spread out, flat and limitless, to the edge of the world; the sky was, as Malone remembered it, vast and uncaring. There had been much talk this past year of El Nino, but it was only an occasional visitor. The locals had known for 150 years which way to look for trouble and, after prayer, for help. The nursery, here on the edge of the plains, was a faint green shout of defiance.

Ollie McBride, or someone, had planted trees round it: silky oak, cypress pine, kurrajong and a red river gum that looked lost without its companions along a river-bank. Its three acres, within a high wire fence, bloomed greenly, like a last oasis.

On the way out Malone had asked Wally Mungle about the town and the people he had met, no matter how fleetingly, on the murder case eight years ago.

‘Chess Hardstaff and Sean Carmody and Fred Strayhorn, they’re all dead. They were all old men, even then. Chess Hardstaff died in prison. While he was there he still thought he was king of the castle and they let him get away with it.’

Malone remembered the old man, stiff with pride and ego and the dignity of another age. But who had murdered his wife for sleeping with another man, had got away with it but taken the blame for the later murder that his daughter had committed.

‘They brought him home and he was buried with full honours by some of the locals, almost like a State funeral. Being a murderer was just incidental alongside the number of Germans he shot down during the war.’

‘You’re cynical about us whites, Wally. What about Narelle Potter – she still run the Mail Coach Hotel?’

Mungle nodded. ‘Still. She’s married now and doesn’t play around like she used to. Roger Gibson, when he first came to town, went out with her a coupla times – that was before she married. She still raises the colour bar, though. One of us has one too many, out he goes or she calls the cops. Whitey can get blind paralytic and she just leaves him to his mates.’