it happened? Everybody’s talking about the murder, but I don’t think you could say it’s dampened anyone’s spirit. Nobody’s going to stay away from the Cup because of it.’ Lately he had begun to think that Chess Hardstaff had lost his touch, that he had become too unbending even to notice what was happening at the grass roots.
Most people’s names go unremarked; it is just the sound signature for who a person is. Most of them have lost their original meaning: Johnson need no longer be John’s son, he can be Bert’s son or, if the father is insignificant, Doreen’s son. But some names do retain their meaning, have their warning: Hardstaff was one of those names. It suggested mastership, discipline; the Weakreeds of the world would bend before it. Even the diminutive of Chester Hardstaff’s first name fitted the man: Chess never made a move solely on instinct. Except once . . . And Gus Dircks didn’t know about that.
Hardstaff had said nothing and Dircks grew uncomfortable in the silence. He sipped his drink and said, ‘This is a nice drop.’
‘I buy only the best,’ said Hardstaff, though he sometimes wondered if he could say that about some of the candidates he bought for the Party. Especially the purchase sitting opposite him in his office now.
Australia has never bred any aristocrats, though more than a few of the natives have aspired to the stud-book. Chester Hardstaff was one of them: he thought of himself as better bred than any of the champion merinos he raised. His great-great-grandfather had come to the colony of Sydney with the First Fleet, a midshipman scion of a middling wealthy farming family from Yorkshire. The midshipman’s son, Chess’s great-grandfather, had come west in 1849 and taken up the Noongulli run; at one time it had covered 150,000 acres, but now it was down to 50,000 acres, or almost 25,000 hectares, a measure he never used. The homestead, a showpiece of colonial architecture, had been built in 1870, a fit dwelling for a pastoral aristocrat. Chess Hardstaff felt at home in it and he had decided that, when he passed on (for he was of the sort who would never just die), his ghost would come back to see that it remained in the family. He had no doubt that he would be master of his own movements in the next world: the Rural Party, like all conservative parties, believed it had been made in Heaven.
Chess Hardstaff looked an aristocrat; or what the popular conception was of such a rare breed in this flat land of flat social levels. There was something un-Australian about his looks; as if his eighteenth-century forebear had risen from the grave to provide the clay for him. He was seventy-five years old, but carried himself like a much younger man: tall, straight-backed, silver head held high. He gave some lesser men the impression that he was gazing down his handsome nose at them, an impression that was correct. Arrogance was a virtue in his eyes and he polished it till God Himself would have put on dark glasses against the shine of it. He looked every other inch the patrician he thought he was; but the alternative inches hid the son-of-a-bitch his enemies thought he was. He had many enemies and would have been disappointed if he hadn’t; he had no time for people with neutral feelings. He had always been a passionate man, but always controlled. Or had been except for one occasion.
“We’ve got to keep this played down, Chess.’
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