Pride's Harvest by Jon Cleary

ever.
    â€œWell, we don’t know what’s going to come out, do we? We want the Nips to stay here, don’t we?”
    â€œYes.” 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.”
    â€œSure. But they’re not going to feel too bloody welcome if it turns out one of our locals is out to murder them.”
    â€œWhat makes you think it’s one of the locals?”
    â€œWho 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.”
    â€œDoes 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.
    â€œIs he still in charge of the case? Or are these outsiders from Sydney taking over?”
    â€œNominally, he should be in charge. But I don’t know that he wants to be. He seems to be leaving everything to Curly Baldock.”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œThere 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?”
    â€œLeave them to me,” said the King-maker, who could break as well as make men.
    III
    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, liquidamber, cedar and cabbage tree palm, though Clements knew only the name of the liquidamber. 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