Читать книгу Pride’s Harvest - Jon Cleary, Jon Cleary - Страница 8

‘You must’ve got in pretty late last night,’ he said to Clements over a country breakfast of sausages and eggs and bacon, toast, honey and coffee. ‘Did you learn anything?’

‘A few things. Nothing to do with the case, though.’

Malone refrained from asking if what he had learned had come from Mrs Potter. ‘Well, we’ll get down to work this morning. We’ll go out to the gin. Get what background you can out of the workers, those in the fields as well as the gin.’ He looked up as the waitress came to offer them more coffee. ‘We’ll be in for lunch, say one o’clock. Can you keep us this table?’

‘I’m afraid it’s taken for lunch.’ She was a stout cheerful woman who liked her job; she gave better service than many of the more highly trained waiters and waitresses Malone had met in Sydney. ‘Gus Dircks is in town. He’s the Police Minister, but then you’d know that, wouldn’t you?’

‘We’d heard a rumour.’

She laughed, her bosom shaking like a water-bed in an earth tremor. ‘Yeah, you would of. Anyhow, when he’s in town he comes in here every day for lunch. He sorta holds court here by the window, if you know what I mean. You gotta vote for him.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Well, there’s no one else, is there? Not even the sheep would vote for Labour, around here. You’re not Labour, are you?’

‘He’s a Commo,’ said Clements.

The waitress looked doubtful. ‘Well, I wouldn’t broadcast that around here. You oughta get someone to tell you what they done to the Commos in this town back in the nineteen-thirties.’ She looked at them, suddenly dark and secretive. ‘But don’t say I suggested it.’

Later, driving out to the South Cloud cotton farm in the Commodore, Malone said, ‘I’m beginning to think this district has got more secrets than it’s got sheep droppings.’

‘You mean about the Commos? Narelle was hinting at a few things last night. Not about the Commos, she never mentioned them, but just gossip. I gather there was quite a lot of it when her hubby was killed.’

‘It was a shooting accident, wasn’t it?’

‘Yeah. She hinted people said other things about how it happened, but it’s all died down now. Then she suddenly shut up. I’d picked the wrong time to pump her. We – well, never mind.’

Malone could guess what would have been the wrong time; Clements had probably been intent on pumping of another kind. Sensible, experienced women don’t let their hair down, not figuratively, the first time they go to bed with a stranger; and Narelle Potter was a sensible, experienced woman if ever Malone had seen one. ‘Don’t get yourself too involved. This is your commanding officer speaking.’

Clements grinned. ‘You sound just like my mother.’

They bumped over the cattle grid at the entrance gates to the cotton farm and Clements pulled up. Four cotton-picking machines were moving slowly down the rows, plucking the cotton locks from the bolls and dumping them into a large basket attached to each machine. As soon as a basket was filled, the picker moved along to a second machine – ‘That’s a module maker,’ said Clements – where the cotton was compressed. When sufficient baskets of cotton had been deposited in the module maker, a module was completed.

‘I read up on it last night while I was waiting for dinner,’ said Clements; and Malone knew that, with his usual thoroughness, he would have absorbed all the information available to him. ‘Those modules are approximately thirty-six feet by eight by eight – there’s about eleven tonnes of seed cotton in each one. If one of ’em fell on you, you’d be schnitzel.’

Malone grimaced at the description.

‘Those loaders you see, they call ’em module movers, load them on to those semi-trailers, who take ’em up to the gin, where they’re off-loaded by what they call a moon buggy.’

‘How long does the cotton harvest go on?’

‘I don’t know when they expect to finish here. It usually begins late March and goes till the end of June.’

‘This is one harvest they won’t forget.’

Sergeant Baldock and Constable Mungle were waiting for them at the cotton farm’s main office. The weather was still reasonably warm and Baldock had discarded his jacket. In his tattersall-checked shirt, wool tie, moleskin trousers and R. M. Williams boots, he looked more like a man of the land than a detective. As Malone and Clements drew in alongside him, he put on a broad-brimmed, pork-pie hat, completing the picture in Malone’s mind of a farmer on his way to market, more interested in crops than in crime.

‘Here comes Mr Koga, the assistant manager,’ Baldock said.

A young man, slim and taller than Malone had expected of a Japanese, came out of the office and approached them almost diffidently. He had a thin, good-looking face, a shy smile and wore fashionable and expensive tinted glasses.

‘Some senior executives are coming down from Japan at once.’ He had a thin piping voice, made thinner by his nervousness. He had come to this country, which he had been told was xenophobic, at least towards Asians, and after only a month he was temporarily in charge, only because his immediate boss had been murdered. Xenophobia could not be more explicitly expressed than that. ‘I don’t suppose you can wait till then?’

‘Hardly,’ said Malone as kindly as he could. He had never been infected by racism, though his father Con had done his best to tutor him in it, and he was determined to lean over backwards to avoid it in this particular case. ‘Who discovered the body, Mr Koga?’

‘Barry Liss.’ Koga had difficulty with the name. ‘He is over at the gin now. We shall go over there, yes?’

‘Sergeant Clements would like to talk to the men out in the fields. Could you take him out there, Constable Mungle?’

Clements looked out at the white-frothed fields stretching into the distance, said, ‘Thanks, Inspector,’ then he and Mungle got back into the Commodore. The Aboriginal cop, in fawn shirt and slacks and broad-brimmed hat, looked like a Boy Scout against the bulk of Clements.

Malone followed Koga and Baldock over to the gin, aware as they drew closer of the faint thunder within the huge shed.

‘He’s probably inside,’ said Koga and opened a door that immediately let out a blast of noise. They went inside and Malone knew at once that there would be no questioning in here.

The thunder in the hundred-feet-high shed was deafening; maybe a rock musician would have felt at home in it, but Malone doubted it. He was not mechanically-minded and he could only guess at the functions of most of the machines, which he noted were all American-made, not Japanese as he had expected. The seed cotton seemed to move swiftly through a continuous cleaning process, streaming through from one type of machine to another. He stood in front of one which Koga, screaming in his ear like a train whistle, told him was a condenser.Behind large windows in the condenser he saw the flow of now-cleaned cotton, like thick white water out of a dam spill. Behind him a supervisor stood at a console, watching monitor screens; Malone looked around and could see only three other workers, a man and two girls, in the whole building. All four workers wore ear-muffs and seemed oblivious of Koga and his guests. It struck Malone that if Kenji Sagawa had been killed in this shed during working hours no one would have heard the shot.

Koga and the two detectives moved on, past blocks of solidly packed cotton coming up a ramp to be baled; the two girls were working the baling machine, unhurriedly and with time for one of them occasionally to glance at an open paperback book on a bench beside her. The man, Barry Liss, was marking the weight of each bale as it bumped down on to an electronic scale. He looked up as Koga tapped him on the shoulder and nodded towards the exit door. He handed his clipboard to one of the girls and followed the three men out of the shed, slipping off his ear-muffs as he did so.

‘I understand you found Mr Sagawa’s body,’ said Malone when he had been introduced to Liss.

‘Jesus, did I!’ Liss shuddered. He was a wiry man, his age hard to guess; he could have been anywhere between his late twenties and his early forties. He had black hair cut very short, a bony face that had earned more than its fair share of lines, and a loose-jointed way of standing as if his limbs had been borrowed from someone else’s torso and had not yet adjusted to their new base. ‘It was the bloodiest mess I ever seen. I don’t wanna see anything like it again. But I told you all this, Curly.’

‘I know you did, Barry. But Inspector Malone is in charge now.’

Malone looked at Baldock out of the corner of his eye, but the local detective did not appear to imply anything more than what he had simply said. Malone looked back at Liss. ‘Where did you find him, Mr Liss?’

‘Over here. He was packed in one of the modules that had been brought in and he finished up against the spiked cylinders in the module feeder. It made a real mess, all that blood. Ruined that particular load.’

‘I’m sure it did,’ said Malone, who wasn’t into cotton futures.

Liss led the way over to the huge machine that was inching its way along a length of track, eating its way into the long, high compacted cotton that stood, like a long block of grey ice at the open end of this annexe to the gin shed. A long loader was backing up to the bulked cotton, adding more to the supply.

‘These moon buggies bring the cotton in,’ said Liss. ‘Maybe Mr Sagawa’s body was in one of the loads, I dunno. I only found him when his body jammed the cylinders.’

‘Was the module stack as long and as high as this the night before you found the body?’

‘No, it wouldn’t of been more than, I dunno, four or five metres.’

‘So the body could have been brought in in one of those trailers from out in the fields?’

Liss looked at him, shrewdness increasing the lines on his face. ‘You don’t miss much, do you?’

‘We try not to. How long was the stack when you started up this machine Tuesday morning?’

The lines didn’t smooth out. ‘Bugger! I didn’t think of that.’ He looked at Baldock. ‘Sorry, Curly.’

‘It’s okay,’ said Baldock, but looked as if he had asked the question, and not Malone.

Malone said, ‘What was your first reaction when you found the body?’

Liss shook his head, shuddered again. He looked tough, as if he might have seen a lot of blood spilled in pub brawls, but obviously he had never seen anyone as mangled as Sagawa must have been. ‘I thought it was some sorta incredible bloody accident – how the hell did he get in there? Then that night, the night before last, they told me the Doc had said he was murdered. Shot. If they’d shot him, why let him be chewed up like that? If they knew anything about the works here, they’d have knew his body was never gunna go right through the system and be chopped up like the green bolls and the hulls and that.’

Malone’s smile had no humour in it. ‘That’s pretty graphic.’

‘Eh? Oh yeah, I guess it is. I just think it’s a bloody gruesome way to get rid of someone, that’s all. There was nothing wrong with him, he was a good bloke. He expected you to work hard, but you wouldn’t hold that against him. Most of us work hard out here in the bush, right, Curly?’

‘Right,’ said Baldock; then saved the face of the city bludger. ‘But down in Sydney the police are flat out all the time. Right, Scobie?’

‘All the time,’ said Malone.

‘Well, I guess you would be,’ said Liss. ‘From what I read, half the population of Sydney are crims, right?’

‘Almost.’ Malone wasn’t going to get into a city-versus-country match. ‘Well, thanks, Mr Liss. We’ll be back to you if we have any more questions.’

‘Be glad to help. Hooroo, Curly. Give my regards to the missus.’

Liss went back into the gin, adjusting his ear-muffs as he opened the door and the noise blasted out at him.

‘He’s all right?’ said Malone.

Baldock looked surprised. ‘You mean is he a suspect? Forget him. He’s a tough little bugger, but he’d never do anything like this.’

‘Who’s the government medical officer? He got a mention in the running sheet.’

‘Max Nothling. He’s got the biggest practice in town, but he doubles as GMO. He’s Chess Hard-staff’s son-in-law. He told us he’d had Sagawa’s body on the table in the hospital mortuary for an hour before he woke up there was a bullet in him, that it was the bullet in his heart that’d killed him, not the chewing-up by the spikes in the module feeder.’

‘I’d better have a talk with him.’ Malone looked at the huge module feeder slowly, inexorably eating its way into the slab-sided glacier of cotton. He did not like coming on a trail as cold as this; he preferred the crime scene to be left as undisturbed as possible.

‘Did your Physical Evidence Section get everything before you let them start up the gin again?’

‘We got the lot, photos, everything. They sent a Fingerprints cove over from District Headquarters. Their reports are on my desk back at the station, they came in just before I left.’

‘You said there was no sign of the cartridge.’

‘The Ballistics guy went through the office, all around here, right through the gin, he went through the lot with a fine-tooth comb. He found nothing.’

‘Who was he?’

‘Constable James. Jason James.’

‘There’s only one man better than him at his job and that’s his boss. Who, incidentally, is three-parts Abo.’

Baldock didn’t react, except to say, ‘It’s a changing world, ain’t it?’

Not out here, thought Malone.

They walked away from the gin shed towards the office a couple of hundred yards away. It was a silver-bright morning with patches of high cloud dry-brushed against the blue; one felt one could rub the air through one’s fingers like a fine fabric. A moon buggy rumbled by with another load of cotton, raising a low, thin mist of dust. Life and work goes on, Malone thought: profits must be made, only losses of life are affordable. Crumbs, he further thought, I’m thinking like a Commo: I wonder what they would have done to me in this town fifty years ago?

‘You got any suspects?’

They had reached the police vehicles and Baldock leaned against his car. ‘None. Or a dozen. Take your pick. It’ll be like trying to find a particular cotton boll in one of those modules.’

‘Any Jap-haters in the district?’

Baldock hesitated, then nodded. ‘Yeah, but I think they’re a bit too obvious to go in for murder. There’s Ray Chakiros. He’s president of the local Veterans Legion.’

The Veterans Legion all over the nation harboured a minority of ex-servicemen who were still consumed by a hatred of old enemies; they got more media space than they deserved and so were continually vocal. Moderation and a call to let bygones be bygones don’t make arresting headlines or good sound bites.

‘Chakiros?’

‘He’s Lebanese, but he was born here in Collamundra. His old man used to run the local café back in the days when we had only one. Now we’ve got coffee lounges, a McDonald’s, a Pizza Hut, a French restaurant, a Chinese one. Ray Chakiros owns the McDonald’s and one of the coffee lounges and he’s got the local Mercedes franchise. He’s got fingers in other pies, too – you know what the Wogs are like.’

Baldock wasn’t embarrassed by his prejudices; he was one of many for whom they are as natural as dandruff.

‘What’s he like?’ said Malone, wondering about Chakiros’s prejudices.

‘He runs off at the mouth about Japs or any sorta Asians, but I don’t think he’d pull a gun on any of ’em. He’s all piss and wind. He served in World War Two in New Guinea, but they tell me he never saw a Jap till the war was over. I’ve interviewed him, but I think he’s in the clear.’

‘Anyone else?’

Again Baldock took his time before answering. ‘There’s an Abo kid they had working here, but Sagawa sacked him last month. Wally Mungle knew him, they’re cousins. Then maybe there are half a dozen others, but we’ve got nothing on any of ’em.’

‘Where do we start then?’

Baldock shrugged. ‘Start at the bottom and work up.’

‘Who’s at the bottom?’ But Malone could guess.

‘The Abo, of course.’ Baldock said it without malice or prejudice. It struck Malone that the local sergeant was not a racist and he was pleased and relieved. Baldock might have his prejudices about Wogs, but that had nothing to do with race. Malone did wonder if there were any European Jews, refugees, in Collamundra and how they were treated by Baldock and the locals. He hoped there would be none of those on the suspect list.

‘His name’s Billy Koowarra,’ said Baldock.

‘Where can I find him?’

‘At the lock-up. He was picked up last night as an IP.’ Intoxicated Person: the all-purpose round-up lariat.

Malone saw Clements and Mungle come out of the office, where they had been questioning the office staff. He said delicately, a tone it had taken him a long time to acquire, ‘Curly – d’you mind if I ride back with Wally? You go with Russ.’

Baldock squinted, not against the sun. ‘Are you gunna go behind my back?’

‘No, I promise you there’ll be none of that. But you’ve had some trouble with the blacks out here, haven’t you? I read about it in a quarterly report.’

‘That was six or eight months ago, when all the land rights song and dance was going on. All the towns with Abo settlements outside them had the same trouble. It’s been quiet lately, though.’

‘Well, I think Wally will talk more freely to me about his cousin Billy if you’re not listening to him. Am I right?’

Baldock nodded reluctantly. ‘I guess so. He’s a good bloke, Wally. It hasn’t been easy for him, being a cop.’

‘It’s not that easy for us, is it?’

Baldock grinned. ‘I must tell him that some day.’

Then Clements and Mungle arrived. At the same time Koga, who had gone back into the gin shed, came out and walked towards the policemen. He was wide of them, looking as if he wanted to avoid them; his step faltered a moment, then he went on, not looking at them, towards the office. The four policemen looked after him.

‘How did he get on with Sagawa?’

‘We don’t know,’ said Baldock. ‘I asked Barry Liss about that, but he said he couldn’t tell. He said the two of them were like most Japs, or what he thought most Japs were like. Terribly polite towards each other. I gather Koga never opened his mouth unless Sagawa asked him to.’

‘Is he on your list?’

‘He will be, if you want him there.’

‘Put him on it.’ Then Malone turned to Clements. ‘Well, how’d you go?’

‘Bugger-all. Nobody understands why it happened. None of the drivers saw anything unusual in any of their loads, not when they brought the loads in from the fields.’

Malone glanced at Baldock. ‘Did the Physical Evidence boys find any blood on any of the trucks or buggies?’

‘None.’

‘What time do they start work here?’

‘The pickers start at seven in the morning,’ said Mungle in his quiet voice; it was difficult to tell whether he was shy or stand-offish. ‘The gin starts up at seven thirty. If the feeder was stopped at eight fifteen or thereabouts, that means the body must of been in the first or second load brought in the day before the murder. No one can remember who would have been driving that particular buggy.’

‘Our only guess,’ said Clements, ‘is that he was shot during the night and the killer scooped out a module, put the body in and re-packed the cotton again. They tell us that would be difficult but not impossible.’

‘He could have been brought in by the murderer in a buggy,’ said Malone. ‘Wally, would you ask Koga to step out here again?’

Mungle went across to the office and while he was gone Malone looked about him, faking bemusement. Baldock said, ‘What are you looking for?’

‘Media hacks. Down in Sydney they’d be around us like flies around a garbage tip. Don’t you have any out here?’

‘There’s the local paper and the radio station.They were out here Tuesday morning, getting in our way, as usual. They’ll be making a nuisance of themselves again, soon’s they hear you’re taking over.’

‘I thought they’d have heard that anyway,’ Malone said drily. ‘I don’t want to see ’em, Curly. This is your turf, you handle them. You’re the police spokesman, okay?’

Then Koga, diffident as before, came back with Wally Mungle. ‘You wanted me, Inspector?’ The thin, high voice broke, and he coughed. ‘Excuse me.’

‘What sort of security do you have out here, Mr Koga?’

‘None, Inspector. Mr Sagawa and I live – lived over there in the manager’s house.’ He pointed to a farmhouse, a relic of whatever the farm had once been, a couple of hundred yards away. ‘We were our own security. It was good enough, Mr Sagawa thought . . .’

But not good enough, Malone thought. ‘Where were you Monday night?’

The question seemed to startle Koga; he took off his glasses, as if they had suddenly fogged up; he looked remarkably young without them. ‘I – I went into town to the movies.’

‘What did you see?’ Malone’s voice was almost too casual.

Koga wiped his glasses, put them back on. ‘It was called Sea of Love. With Al Pacino.’

Malone looked at Baldock and Mungle. ‘I saw that down in Sydney at Christmas.’

‘It’s already been on out here,’ said Mungle. ‘They brought it back – by popular demand, they said. I think the locals were hoping the cop would be bumped off the second time around.’

Malone looked at Clements. ‘I thought you said this was a conservative district?’ Then he turned back to Koga, who had listened to all this without really understanding the cops’ sardonic acceptance of the public’s attitude towards them. ‘Was Mr Sagawa at the house when you got back from town?’

Koga shook his head. ‘No, he did not come home at all that night.’

‘Did that worry you?’

‘Not really. Mr Sagawa liked to – ’ he looked at Baldock; then went on, ‘ – he liked to gamble.’

Malone raised an eyebrow at Baldock, who said, ‘Ray Chakiros runs a small baccarat school out at the showgrounds a coupla nights a week, Mondays and Thursdays. We turn a blind eye to it. It never causes us any trouble.’

Malone wondered how much money had to change hands for no trouble to be caused; but that wasn’t his worry. ‘All right, Mr Koga, that’ll do. Thanks for your time.’

Koga bowed his head and Malone had to catch himself before he did the same; he did not want to be thought to be mocking the young Japanese. Koga went back to the office and Malone turned to the others. ‘Righto, let’s go back to town. Russ, you take Curly. Wally can ride with me.’

Clements was not the world’s best actor, but he could put on an admirable poker face. Wally Mungle’s own dark face was just as expressionless. He got in beside Malone and said nothing till they had driven out past the fields and on to the main road into town. As they did so, Malone noticed that all the cotton-pickers, the trucks and the buggies had stopped and their drivers were staring after the two departing police cars. He looked back and saw that Koga had come out on to the veranda of the office and was gazing after them. He wondered how far the young man, with his thick glasses, could see.

Mungle said, ‘Are you gunna ask me some questions you didn’t want Sergeant Baldock to hear? I don’t go behind his back, Inspector.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. No, Sergeant Baldock knows what I’m going to ask you. It’s about your cousin Billy Koowarra.’

‘Yeah, I thought it might be.’ Mungle nodded. He had taken off his hat and a long black curl dangled on his forehead like a bell-cord. He was a good-looking man, his features not as broad as those of a full-blood; his nose was straight and fine, and Malone wondered what white man had dipped his wick in tribal waters. He knew, from his experience in Sydney, that the mixed-bloods were the most difficult to deal with. They saw the world through mirrors, all of them cracked.

‘How long have you been a cop, Wally?’

‘Four years.’

‘Any regrets?’

Mungle stared ahead of them down the long black strip of macadam, shining blue in parts as if pools of water covered it. A big semi-trailer came rushing at them and he waited till it had roared by. ‘Sometimes.’

‘They treat you all right at the station?’

‘I’m the token Abo.’ He smiled, as much to himself as to Malone. ‘No, they’re okay.’

There had been a recruiting campaign to have more Aborigines join the police force, but so far there had been a scarce response. Every time Malone saw a TV newsreel of police action in South Africa, he was amazed at the number of black Africans in uniform, many of them laying into their fellow blacks with as much enthusiasm as their white colleagues. That, he knew, would never happen here.

‘What about amongst your family and the other blacks?’

‘My mum’s proud of me. I never knew my dad.’ He offered no more information on his father and Malone didn’t ask. ‘The rest of the Kooris – ’ He shrugged. ‘Depends whether they’re sober or not. When they’ve had a skinful, some of ’em get real shitty towards me.’

‘What sort of education did you have?’

‘I got to Year Eleven. One time I dreamed of getting my HSC and going on to university.’ He was a dinkum Aussie: he had said haitch for H. It was a characteristic that always brought a laugh from Lisa, the foreigner. ‘We Kooris are supposed to live in the Dreamtime. Some of us have different dreams to others.’

Malone could think of nothing to say to that; so he said, ‘What about your cousin Billy?’

‘Is he a suspect?’

‘I don’t know. What about him?’

‘He’s a silly young bugger, but that’s all I’m gunna say about him. We Kooris stick together,Inspector. Anyone will tell you that, especially the whites.’

Malone abruptly pulled the car into the side of the road, just opposite the grain silos on the edge of town. ‘Wally, let’s get one thing straight from the start. I’ve got my faults, but I’m not a racist. I don’t care what yours or Billy’s or anybody else’s skin is like, I treat them with respect till something happens to make me change my mind. But whatever changes my mind, it has nothing to do with the colour of their skin. Now can you get that through your black skull?’

Wally Mungle, like most Aborigines Malone had known, had a sense of humour. He suddenly smiled his beautiful smile. ‘Fair enough.’

Malone started up the car again. ‘Before we see Billy, take me down to the black settlement. I don’t want to talk to anyone, just look at the conditions there.’

‘I don’t live down there, y’know. My mother does, but I don’t.’

‘Where do you live?’ Malone put the question delicately. Twice in fifteen minutes he had had to be delicate: it might lead to cramp in a tongue that, too often, had got him into trouble.

‘I’ve got three acres over the other side of the river. I live there with my wife and two kids.’

‘Is she black?’

Mungle looked sideways at him. ‘Does it matter?’

They went round the war memorial; it seemed to Malone that the Anzac was ready to swivel on his pedestal, his bayonet at the ready. They drove down the main street, which was full now with cars and trucks parked at an angle to the kerb. It seemed to Malone, imagination working overtime, that people coming out of the stores stopped to stare at him and Wally Mungle. In the shade of the stores’ awnings men and women stood motionless, heads turned in the unmarked police car’s direction, ears strained for Malone’s answer.

They had reached the far end of the main street before Malone said, ‘No, it doesn’t matter if she’s black. But I’m a stranger here, it’s a whole new turf to me, and people around here don’t look at things the way I’m used to. I’ve learned that just since I got in last night.’

‘Fair enough. Yeah, Ruby’s black. She’s a mixed-blood, like me. We would of been called half-castes in the old days, but that’s out now. Ruby’s what the Yanks call a quadroon, or used to. She’s got more white blood than me, it shows.’

‘She got white relatives around here?’

A slight hesitation, then a nod: ‘Yeah, but they’d never admit to it. She doesn’t press it, she’s quite happy with things the way they are. By the time our kids grow up, things will have changed – we hope. They’ll be white enough to be accepted.’

‘What are they, how old?’

‘A boy, six, and a girl, three. Nobody would know they’re Kooris, they could pass for Wogs.’

‘Is that what you want for them when they grow up, to pass for Wogs?’

‘No.’ He said it quietly, but his voice was emphatic. ‘I want ’em to be Kooris. I just don’t want ’em discriminated against because of the colour of their skin. I’ve had enough of that. You got any kids?’

‘Yes. Pure white, all three of them. The only discrimination against them is that their father is a cop.’

‘My kids have got that, too.’ But he smiled his beautiful smile again. ‘Okay, turn off here.’

They were just beyond the edge of town, coming to a two-lane bridge over the river, the Noongulli. Malone turned off on to a red-dirt track that led parallel to the river and soon came to the Aboriginal settlement. At first glance the location was idyllic. There was a wide bend in the river and a small beach of flood-washed sand on the far side of the grey-green stretch of slow-moving water. Red river-gums, their trunks blotched like an old man’s skin, hung over the river as if looking for fish to jump to the bait of their leaves. Shade dappled the ground under a stand of yellowbox and on the far side of the river Malone could see the white rails of the racecourse seeming, at this distance, to hover above the ground like a giant magic hoop that had become fixed without any visible support. A white heron, looking in the reflected sunlight from the river almost as insubstantial as if it were made of no more than its own powder-down, creaked in slow motion up towards the bridge. Then Malone saw the reality.

The settlement, standing back about fifty yards from the river bank, was a collection of tin shacks flung together without any pattern, as if the shacks had been built where the corrugated iron for the walls and the roofs had fallen off a truck driven by a drunk. Four abandoned cars, stripped of their engines, wheels gone, lay like dead shrunken hippos between a patch of scrub and the shacks. The cars’ seats rested in a neat row under two yellowbox trees, seats in a park that had been neglected and forgotten. Two drunken Aborigines lay asleep on two of the seats, just as Malone had seen other, white drunks in inner city parks in Sydney. The track through the settlement was a rutted, dried-out morass of mud in which half a dozen raggedy-dressed children played as he had seen his own children play in the sand on Coogee beach. The shacks themselves, some of them supporting lean-tos roofed over with torn tarpaulins, looked ready to be condemned. The part of the settlement’s population that Malone could see, perhaps thirty or forty men and women of all ages, did not appear to have anything to occupy them. They sat or lolled on shaky-looking chairs, against tree-boles or on the ground, just waiting – for what? he wondered. Wine flagons were being passed around, unhurriedly, without comment, every drinker waiting patiently for his or her swig. None of the boisterousness of white beer-swillers here: these blacks were prepared to take their time in getting drunk. And maybe that’s what they’re waiting for, he thought: to get drunk, to have the mind, too, turn black. He couldn’t blame them and never had. It was just a pity they could make such a bloody nuisance of themselves. But that was the cop in him, thinking a policeman’s thoughts.

‘Well, that’s it,’ said Wally Mungle, making no attempt to get out of the car; silently advising Malone not to do so. ‘Dreamtime on the Noongulli.’

‘How did you get out of it?’

‘Because I wanted to.’

‘What about the others?’ He tried to sound uncritical, but it was an effort.

Mungle didn’t appear to resent the implied criticism. ‘Most of ’em are full-bloods. I think they’ve given up the fight. This district has always had a pretty bloody attitude towards us Kooris. It’s hardly changed in a hundred and fifty years, ever since Chess Hardstaff’s great-grandfather came out here and started Noongulli Station. There was a massacre here, right where we’re sitting, in eighteen fifty-one – a dozen Koori men and half a dozen women were shot and killed. There was a trial, but nobody went to gaol for it. The shire council showed a lot of sensitivity when they nominated this spot for the settlement – they thought they were doing us a favour, giving us a river view. It was put up twenty years ago when there was a conservative government in and when Labour got in, they did nothing about moving it from here. Now we’ve got a conservative coalition again and there’s been promises about improvements, but so far there’s been bugger-all.’

‘Does everyone here live on the dole?’

‘Practically everyone. In the old days, when I was a kid, some of the men got work at shearing time, but now the shearing teams come in from outside and none of the local graziers want to have anything to do with the Kooris.’

‘What about Sean Carmody out at Sundown?’

‘Well, yeah, him and his grandson take on a few. But they’re looked on as radicals. His son-in-law,Trevor Waring, who lives next door, doesn’t take on any.’

‘What about out at the cotton farm? Billy worked there.’

‘He was the only one. Practically all the work there is mechanized – these guys here ain’t trained for anything like that. Billy was just a sorta roustabout out there. The token Abo for the Japs.’

‘Why was he sacked?’

Mungle said nothing for a long moment; then decided to be a cop and not just a Koori: ‘Billy likes the grog a bit too much. If he had a hangover, he wasn’t always on time for work. Sagawa didn’t like that, so he fired Billy. I don’t blame him.’

‘Does Billy blame him?’

‘You better ask him that. You seen enough out here?’

Malone looked out at the depressing scene once more. The three or four circles of drinkers, aware all at once that their kin, Wally Mungle, was in the car with the stranger, had stopped passing the wine flagons and had all turned their heads to look at the two cops in the Commodore. Their faces were expressionless, mahogany masks. Sitting in their shapeless clothes in the dirt, surrounded by squalor, they still suggested a certain dignity by their very stillness.

‘Christ!’

‘I don’t think He wants to help,’ said Wally Mungle. ‘The God-botherers pray for us Kooris every Sunday, but it goes right over the heads of their congregations. I think Jesus Christ has given up, too.’

‘Are you religious?’ Malone remembered it had been bush missionaries who had first brought education to the Aborigines.

‘I used to be. Not any more, though.’

Malone started up the car, swung it round and drove back along the river and up on to the main road. He and Mungle said nothing more to each other till Malone pulled the car into the yard behind the police station.

‘Do you want to come in with me while I question Billy?’

Mungle hesitated, then shrugged. ‘I better. I can’t go on dodging the poor bugger.’

Malone wondered how many other Kooris he had dodged in the past. It struck him that, even in his mind, he had used the word Koori, the blacks’ own name for themselves.

The lock-up cells were clean and comfortable, but that was all that could be said of them. There was an old-fashioned lavatory bucket in one corner, two narrow beds and that was it. These were for one-night or two-night prisoners; they weren’t meant as home-from-home for long-term inmates. Malone had been told that remand prisoners were taken over to Cawndilla, the District headquarters town. There was a steel door to the cell, with a small barred opening in it; a small window high in the outer wall also had bars on it. Malone guessed that dangerous crims would not be locked up here, but would be taken immediately to District. Five minutes with Billy Koowarra told Malone that the boy was not dangerous.

He was nineteen, stringily built, with long curly hair and a sullen face that at certain angles made him look no more than a schoolboy who had just entered high school, one that he hated. He nodded when Mungle introduced Malone and stood leaning flat against the wall, like someone waiting to be shot.

‘This the first time you’ve been locked up, Billy?’

The boy looked at Mungle, who gave him no help; then he looked back at Malone. ‘Nah. I been in here, I dunno, two or three times.’

‘Drunk each time?’

‘That’s what they said.’

Malone decided to hit the boy over the head, shake him out of his sullenness. ‘Billy, what do you know about Mr Sagawa being murdered?’

The boy’s eyes opened wide in sudden fright, as if he had just realized why this stranger from the city was in here to question him. He looked at Mungle, then leaned away from the wall as if he were about to run; but he had nowhere to run to. ‘Jesus, Wally, what the fuck is this? Why’d you bring him in here, let him ask me something like that?’

‘Take it easy, Billy. If you dunno anything about Mr Sagawa’s death, just say so. Inspector Malone isn’t accusing you of anything.’

‘I wanna get outa here!’ Koowarra looked around him in panic. ‘Shit, all they locked me up for was being drunk! I ain’t done nothing!’

‘We’re not saying you have,’ said Malone. ‘When did you last see Mr Sagawa?’

Koowarra had begun to shuffle along the wall, his back still to it. ‘This fucking place is getting me down, Wally! Get me outa here!’

‘I can’t do that, Billy, not till Inspector Narvo comes back. This is the fifth time you’ve been in here, not the second or third. You’ll probably have to stay here another night, I dunno. But that’s the worst that’s gunna happen to you. Now why don’t you tell us? When did you last see Mr Sagawa?’

Koowarra had stopped shuffling, was flattened against the wall again. He looked from one detective to the other, then he said, ‘Monday. I went out to see him, I dunno, about seven o’clock. I was gunna apologize and ask for my job back.’

Malone had not expected such a direct answer, but he knew that often a prisoner being questioned told the truth, or what sounded like the truth, in the hope of a favourable reaction from his questioner. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Wally Mungle frown as if he, too, hadn’t expected such a frank answer.

‘That was all you had in mind, Billy? Just to apologize and ask for your job back?’

The boy suddenly seemed to realize that he might have been too honest; his face abruptly got older, seemed to become wooden and darker. ‘What else would I wanna see him for?’

Malone shrugged, careful not to press too hard. ‘I don’t know, Billy. What did he say when you apologized?’

‘I didn’t see him. When I got out there – ’

‘How did you get out there?’

‘I walked. I don’t own no wheels. I tried to thumb a lift, but nobody around here gives a Koori a lift, not after dark. Right, Wally?’

‘Right.’ Mungle sounded even quieter than usual.

‘Why didn’t you get to see Mr Sagawa? Wasn’t he in his office or anywhere around the gin?’

‘I think he was in his office. His car, he’s got a blue Toyota Cressida, was parked outside.’

Malone looked at Mungle. ‘Was the car still there the next morning, when they found his body?’

Mungle nodded. ‘It was still there. The car keys were in the ignition.’

‘Any prints on the car?’

‘The Crime Scene fellers didn’t find any. Not even Sagawa’s.’

‘Didn’t you find that queer? The owner’s print nowhere on his own car? You didn’t mention that in the running sheet.’

Mungle worked his mouth in embarrassment. ‘I forgot, Inspector. I thought it was queer at the time, but I didn’t make a note of it. Sorry.’

Malone wasn’t going to tick him off any further, not in front of a prisoner, even if the latter was his cousin. He looked back at Billy Koowarra. ‘Why didn’t you go in to see Mr Sagawa?’

‘There was someone with him, I think. I waited about twenty minutes, but nobody came out. So I started walking back to town.’

‘What time was this?’

‘I dunno, about seven thirty, I guess. Mebbe eight o’clock, I dunno. I don’t own a watch.’

‘Was there another car there?’

‘Yeah, a fawn Merc.’

‘You recognize whose it was?’

The boy shook his head. ‘I didn’t get close. I stayed, I dunno, about a hundred yards away, by the kurrajong tree near the inside gate as you come up from the road.’

‘How many Mercedes in the district?’ Malone asked Mungle.

‘Half a dozen, I guess. Ask Billy, he’s the car man.’

For a moment there was a spark of – something: a dream, a hope? – in the boy’s dark eyes. ‘Yeah, I can’t wait till I get a car of me own – ’ We Kooris are supposed to live in the Dreamtime. Some of us have different dreams to others. ‘There are seven Mercs around here. Not all the same model, though.’

‘Did the car pass you when you were walking back to town?’

Koowarra spread his hands, almost an Italian gesture. ‘I dunno. There was half a dozen cars passed me, maybe more, and a coupla semi-trailers. One of the cars was a Merc, but I dunno whether it was the one out at the gin.’

‘You didn’t hear any row going on in the office?’

‘No, I was too far away. I told you,’ he added petulantly. He was edgy again, pressing himself back against the wall. Somewhere in another cell a man’s voice, a little slurred, had begun to sing: Like a rhinestone cowboy . . .

Malone looked enquiringly at Mungle, who said, ‘Another cousin. He knows all the country-and-western ballads.’

Malone wanted to ask why the other cousin had to borrow his sad songs from another culture; but didn’t. Instead, he said, ‘Righto, that’ll do for now, Billy. When you’re released, don’t leave town. We’ll need you as a witness.’

‘Shit, where’m I gunna go? I’m stuck here, like everyone else.’ He banged the back of his head against the wall, then leaned towards Mungle, grabbing the front of the latter’s shirt. ‘Get me outa here, for Chrissake! I can’t stand being locked up no more!’

Mungle gently pulled the boy’s hand away, said quietly, ‘Billy, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Nobody’s gunna do anything to you.’

“What about him?’ Koowarra jerked his head at Malone.

‘Inspector Malone’s not charging you with anything. You’ll just be needed as a witness, that’s all.’

‘I’m still gunna be locked up!’

‘Only till Inspector Narvo gets back. He’ll probably authorize bail, maybe fifty bucks or something, then you’ll have to wait till the magistrate comes in, he’s due in town for the Cup. Just one more night in here, Billy, that’s all.’

‘You’re on their fucking side, ain’t you?’ The dark eyes blazed: not with hatred of his cousin, the cop, but out of sheer frustration and despair. Malone had seen it before, even amongst the city Kooris.

Wally Mungle sighed. ‘Don’t start that again, Billy. Can we go now, Inspector?’

Without waiting for Malone’s assent, he went out of the cell. Koowarra stared at the open door, looked for a moment as if he might make a break for it; then he looked at Malone, all the fury and frustration draining out of his face. All at once he looked as old as some of the elders Malone had seen down at the settlement by the river.

‘It’s fucking hopeless, ain’t it?’

Malone had heard the same complaint from nineteen-year-old whites on the streets of King’s Cross; but he had had no answer for them, either. ‘Make the best of it, Billy. I’ve got no authority here, otherwise I’d have you released on bail now. I’ll see you tomorrow. Just remember – when you do get out, don’t leave town.’

He went out, pulling the door gently closed behind him, not wanting to slam it on Billy Koowarra. Along the corridor the Koori rhinestone cowboy was still singing softly to himself.

Upstairs in the detectives’ room Clements, Baldock and Mungle were waiting for him. He took off his jacket and slumped down in the chair Baldock pushed towards him. Baldock then went round and sat behind his desk, the presiding officer. Malone wondered if Baldock had stage-managed the placing of the chairs, but he didn’t mind. He would observe protocol, be the visitor on Baldock’s turf. He wanted as many people as possible, few though there might be, to be on his side.

‘Well, what d’you think?’ said Baldock.

‘He’s in the clear, he’s too open. You agree, Wally?’

Mungle, standing with his back to the wall just as Koowarra had done in his cell, nodded. ‘Billy’s not a killer.’

‘Wally, did the Crime Scene fellers go right over Sagawa’s car for prints?’ Mungle nodded again. ‘It hadn’t just been washed, had it?’

‘No, but it was pretty clean. Sagawa kept his car like that. Billy used to wash it for him every coupla days. But there were no prints inside the car. On the steering wheel, on the dash – nothing. It had been wiped clean, the Fingerprint guy said.’

Malone looked at Baldock. ‘What does that suggest to you?’

‘That someone had driven the car in from somewhere else. Then wiped his and Sagawa’s prints off everything.’

‘Did they go over the car for bloodstains?’

‘Nothing,’ said Mungle. ‘They’ve got the car over at Cawndilla. I was talking to them yesterday – they’ve found nothing. I don’t think Sagawa was killed in his car or that the killer brought the body back to the farm in it.’

‘So it could’ve been brought back in the Merc that Billy saw. Assuming Sagawa was dead by then. What time did the GMO put as the time of death?’

‘He was guessing,’ said Baldock. ‘Doc Nothling said the time of death was probably somewhere between ten and twelve on Monday night. Sagawa had eaten, there was food still in the stomach.’

‘Well, whoever was in the Merc that Billy saw might not have had anything at all to do with Sagawa’s murder.’ He looked at Clements in mock despair. ‘Let’s go home, Russ.’

Clements munched on his lower lip. ‘Wally’s been telling me about that Merc. He says there are seven in the district. Let’s start running ’em down. Who owns them, Curly?’

‘Off the top of my head, I can name four of ’em. Chess Hardstaff, Narelle Potter, Trevor Waring, Ray Chakiros. Oh, and one of the local graziers,Bert Truman. He’s a Flash Jack, plays polo, wants his own plane next, I’m told. He’s a ladies’ man.’

‘What about Doc Nothling?’

‘He drives a Ford Fairlane. Or is it an LTD? Anyhow, it’s a Ford. Chess Hardstaff doesn’t want a son-in-law who tries to match him in everything.’

That was one good thing about a bush investigation: gossip flowed like an irrigation channel. Malone said, ‘Rustle up the names of the other owners. Check on where they all were last Monday night.’

‘You want me to check with Mrs Potter?’ Clements’s face was absolutely straight, virginal.

Malone kept his own face just as straight. ‘No, you’re coming with me.’

‘Where are you going?’ said Baldock, trying to hang on to a rein on his own turf. ‘You want me to come with you?’

‘I think it’d be better if you didn’t, Curly. We’re going out to see Mr Hardstaff.’

Baldock got the message: when this was all over, he’d still have to go on living here. ‘Sure. You can’t miss his place, Noongulli, it’s out past the Carmody place, about another five kilometres to the turn-off. You want me to ring and say you’re coming?’

‘I don’t think so. Surprise is the spice of a policeman’s life.’

‘Who said that? Gilbert and Sullivan?’

‘No, Russ did. He’s Homicide’s resident philosopher.’

The resident philosopher jerked a non-philosophical thumb.