Jon Cleary - Pride’s Harvest

‘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.’