Pride's Harvest Read Online Free Page A

him warmly: he was worth a dirty shirt or two. He looked at her in the light from the veranda. She was blonde, on the cusp between exciting beauty and serenity; he tried, desperately, never to think of her ageing. “Oh, I’ve missed you!”
    Then their children and the Carmody clan spilled out of the house, a small crowd that made him feel as if he were some sort of celebrity. He hugged the three children, then turned to meet Sean Carmody, his daughter Ida, her husband Trevor Waring and their four children. He had met Ida once down in Sydney, but none of the others.
    â€œDaddy, you know what? I’ve learned to ride a horse!” That was Tom, his eight-year-old. “I fell off, but.”
    â€œHave you found the murderer yet?” Maureen, the ten-year-old, was a devotee of TV crime, despite the efforts of her parents, who did everything but blindfold her to stop her from watching.
    â€œOh God,” said Claire, fourteen and heading helter-skelter for eighteen and laid-back sophistication. “She’s at it again.”
    Malone, his arm round Lisa’s waist, was herded by the crowd into the house. At once he knew it was the sort of house that must have impressed Lisa; he could see it in her face, almost as if she owned it and was showing it off to him. This was one of half a dozen in the district that had seen the area grow around it; a prickling in his Celtic blood told him there would be ghosts in every room, self-satisfied ones who knew that each generation of them had made the right choice. Sean Carmody had bought it only ten years ago, but he had inherited and cherished its history. This was a rich house, but its value had nothing to do with the price real-estate agents would put on it.
    â€œI live here with Sean,” Tas, the eldest of the Carmody grandchildren, told Malone over a beer, “I manage the property. Mum and Dad and my brothers and sister live in a house they built over on the east boundary. You would have passed it as you came from town.”
    He was a rawboned twenty-two-year-old, as tall as Malone, already beginning to assume the weatherbeaten face that, like a tribal mask, was the badge of all the men, and some of the women, who spent their lives working these sun-baked plains. His speech was a slow drawl, but there was an intelligence in his dark-blue eyes that said his mind was well ahead of his tongue.
    â€œHe’s a good boy,” said Sean Carmody after dinner as he and Trevor Waring led the way out to a corner of the wide side veranda that had been fly-screened. The three men sat down with their coffee and both Carmody and Waring lit pipes. “Ida won’t let us smoke in the house. My mother’s name was Ida, too, and she wouldn’t let my father smoke in their tent. We lived in tents all the time I was a kid. Dad was a drover. He’d have been pleased with his great-grandson. He’s a credit to you and Ida,” he said to Waring. “All your kids are. Yours, too, Scobie.”
    â€œThe credit’s Lisa’s.”
    â€œNo, I don’t believe that. Being a policeman isn’t the ideal occupation for a father. It can’t be ideal for your kids, either.”
    â€œNo, it isn’t,” Malone conceded. “You can’t bring your work home and talk about it with them. Not in Homicide.”
    â€œThe kids in the district are all talking about our latest, er, homicide.” Trevor Waring was a solidly built man of middle height, in his middle forties, with a middling loud voice; moderate in everything, was how Malone would have described him. He was a solicitor in Collamundra and Malone guessed that a country town lawyer could not afford excess in opinions or anything else. Especially in a district as conservative as this one. “I noticed at dinner that you dodged, quite neatly, all the questions they tossed at you. I have to apologize for my kids. They don’t get to meet detectives from