Pride's Harvest (36 page)

“I was reading that at the bottom of my copy of the running sheets when you came in. What do you make of it?” Narvo showed neither surprise nor excitement.

“
What do you?”

“Someone's out of his twisted mind if he thinks that would stop the investigation. I'll ask for everyone that Sydney can spare, if you want me to.”

“No, leave it for the time being . . . You've changed, Hugh.”

They turned into the main street and headed west out of town. Church bells were ringing somewhere, a sound one rarely heard in the city any more, especially in the newer suburbs. The bells rang in Randwick, but it always sounded to Malone as a forlorn sound, a farewell to departed congregations. He wondered what the church attendance was in country towns these days.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. You're ready to make waves.”

Narvo was silent for a while, staring straight ahead; then he said, “It was Chess Hardstaff at the races yesterday afternoon. Up till now I've—I'm ashamed to admit it, so it's just between you and me—I've bent the rules if he's leaned on me. Sometimes you have to do it in a country district. Nothing serious, just enough to, well, not make waves, if you like. I used to get angry with myself, sometimes I despised myself, but I put up with it. Then yesterday . . . Yesterday I finally had had enough. When he stood over me and demanded I arrest all the Abos, right there in front of them, I'd had more than enough. I didn't tell him to get stuffed, but that was what I was thinking and he knew it.”

“Did it make you feel better?”

Narvo smiled. “It was like knocking over the school bully.”

They turned off the main highway and drove down along the river bank and into the settlement. There was a subdued air about the place; even the children were playing quietly with no shouting or laughing. Eight or nine older men sat in a circle under a tree, exchanging looks rather than words, as if everything had been said and now they were waiting for some resolution. They could have been a sculptured tableau of patience, but Malone wondered when the stone would crumble.

Wally Mungle came up from the riverbank, where Ruby sat on a fallen tree gazing out at the skin of the river being broken by the occasional leaping fish. He said hello to the two senior men and led
them
back to Ruby.

“It's about Chess Hardstaff,” he said and stood back, more like a policeman than a husband.

Ruby Mungle didn't rise from the tree-trunk but just looked up at the two white men. Her pretty face looked older this morning, as if a long sleepless night had aged her. Mungle, too, looked as if he hadn't slept.

“You wanted to see us, Ruby?” Malone remarked at once that Narvo had relegated himself to the background by stepping back a pace.

She glanced at Narvo, her husband's boss, then looked back at Malone. “Yeah. I thought about what you said last night . . .” She stopped; but he held himself back from asking her to go on. Like the old men across the clearing, who were watching them closely, she was not to be hurried. “I'll tell you what happened the morning Mrs. Hardstaff was murdered.”

Out of the corner of his eye Malone saw Narvo stiffen. He said, “Do you mind if I take notes, Ruby? I'll write a full statement later and Inspector Narvo can have someone back at the station type it up for you to sign.”

She turned her head towards her husband. “Is that what I have to do, sweetheart?”

Mungle nodded; then decided to be husband and not policeman. He sat down on the tree-trunk and took her hand. “It's gotta be done, love. Go ahead. Don't change your mind, not now.”

“What's it gunna do to you? I mean your job?”

Mungle looked back at Narvo. “She's worried I might be transferred or something. We don't wanna leave Collamundra.”

“You won't be,” said Narvo quietly. “I promise.”

Mungle pressed his wife's hand. She paused a while, then she began: “That morning when Mrs. Hardstaff was murdered, I'd got up early to go to the toilet. Us blacks had to use the outdoor dunny, Mum and I weren't even allowed to use the one next to the kitchen where she worked. Old Sir Chester insisted on that. When I come out of the toilet, Chess Hardstaff,
Young
Chess, as everyone called him, was coming out of the wing of the house where his and Mrs. Hardstaff's bedroom was. He saw me and he
ducked
back inside. I didn't take that much notice, I was only eleven years old then and kids don't understand lotsa things adults do. But then I walked across to the kitchen, I dunno, I think I was gunna wash my hands or something, I looked back and he was running along the back veranda and around the corner of the house. Then I heard the Land-Rover start up and then I seen him driving away through the paddocks.”

Malone had been scribbling furiously in his own peculiar shorthand. “Ruby, all this was—what?—seventeen years ago. I've got to say this—you're quoting a child's memory. That's not always the most reliable source.”

“Do you wanna hear this or not, Inspector?” She was not belligerent; more disappointed, it seemed.

“Yes, I do. But if this goes any further, there are going to be lawyers who'll tear your evidence to pieces. I've had it happen to cases of my own, where I thought I had everything sewn up.”

“Mr. Malone, I
remember.
Mrs. Hardstaff was the only one I liked on the whole place. She was kind to me and Mum, she treated us almost like—like
equals.
When Mum went in an hour later with her usual tray and she found her dead . . .” She stopped and, for some reason, gritted her teeth as if against pain. “I
remember,
Mr. Malone. I was right behind Mum with the teapot . . . I've only ever seen one murdered person. That was Mrs. Hardstaff. I
remember.
There's nothing wrong with my memory about that morning—
nothing.
It don't matter whether I was eleven years old or a hundred and eleven. I
remember.”

“Fair enough. I'm sorry.”

“Tell „em the rest, love,” said Wally Mungle.

Above them in the red-gum that shaded them, a magpie sharpened its beak on a branch, wishing it were spring and nesting-time, so that there would be a reason for dive-bombing the humans below and moving them out of its territory. A small boat, with an outboard motor fitted, came puttering down from under the bridge and went past, the man in it looking neither to right nor left: as if he doesn't want to see the blacks' camp? Malone wondered. If Chess Hardstaff was toppled on the evidence of a black girl, what would happen to the blacks here in the camp? Would they be run out of town as Fred
Strayhorn
and the communists had been all those years ago?

Ruby Mungle went on, “Old Sir Chester come to Mum and told her he wanted her to take me into town, to bring me here—” She nodded back over her shoulder at the settlement; which in those days, Malone guessed, might have been no more than a collection of shanties. “He said Noongulli was no place for me to be while the police were there and all, that it would be too upsetting for me.”

“When was this? Before or after someone had phoned for the police?”

“I dunno. It was after Mr. Hardstaff, Young Chess, come back to the house.”

Malone looked at Narvo. “You said the file's missing. So we don't know what time the call came in to the duty officer. Can you remember what time it was when you heard the call over your car radio?”

Narvo shook his head, “I'd only be making a guess, it could be twenty minutes or more out. I'd have made a note of it on my board, but that sheet would have gone into the daily file. Seventeen years ago, that wouldn't still be around. When I took over the station, I decided we'd have a clean-up, the place was a mess. We burned a lot of old paper—Christ!” He shook his head at the stupidities committed in the name of neat housekeeping.

“Ruby, you said Chess Hardstaff came back to the house. How long was that after you'd seen him drive away in the Land-Rover?”

“I dunno, I'd only be guessing. It was after Mum and me had had our breakfast, before we went in to Mrs. Hardstaff and found her dead. Maybe half an hour, maybe more. I know he was standing outside on the veranda when Mum screamed and we both came running out of the bedroom.”

She gritted her teeth again and Malone gave her a little time. “Hugh, I talked with Fred Strayhorn, that old cove with the beard at the races yesterday, the one who's going out to see Hardstaff this morning.” He gave a quick explanation of the relationship between Hardstaff and Strayhorn; he noticed that the Mungles both sat up with interest, “Sir Chester paid him to tell the police that Chess had been out at the site of the new dam with him—”

“I remember him now!” It was the first time Malone had seen Narvo show any excitement, though it would never get him arrested for riotous behaviour. “They brought him in from wherever he was
working
on the property—I didn't do the interviewing, I was just the junior officer staking out the crime scene—”

“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.