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Homicide.”
    â€œI hope they don’t meet any more. You said the latest murder. There’ve been others?”
    â€œWe’ve had three or four over the last fifteen or twenty years. The last one was about—what, Sean?—about five or six years ago. An Abo caught his wife and a shearer, up from Sydney, in bed together—he shot them, killed the shearer. They gave the Abo twelve years, I think it was, and took him to Bathurst Gaol. He committed suicide three months later, hung himself in his cell. They do that, you probably know that as well as I do. They can’t understand white man’s justice.”
    â€œAre there any Aborigines linked with the Sagawa murder? You have some around here, I gather.”
    There was no illumination out here on the side veranda other than the light coming through a window from the dining-room, where Lisa and Ida were now helping the housekeeper to clear the table. Even so, in the dim light, Malone saw the glance that passed between Waring and his father-in-law.
    â€œI don’t think we’d better say anything on that,” said Carmody after puffing on his pipe. “There’s been enough finger-pointing around here already.”
    Malone was momentarily disappointed; he had expected more from Carmody in view of Baldock’s description of him. The old man was in his late seventies, lean now but still showing traces of what once must have been a muscular back and shoulders, the heritage of his youth as a shearer. His hair was white but still thick and he had the sort of looks that age and an inner peace and dignity had made almost handsome. He had lived a life that Malone, learning of it from Lisa, envied; but he wore it comfortably, without flourish or advertisement. Despite his years abroad he still had an Australian accent, his own flag. Or perhaps, coming back to where he had grown up, he had heard an echo and recaptured it, a memorial voice.
    â€œThe police haven’t pointed a finger at anyone. Not to me.”
    Occasional confession to the public, though it did nothing for the soul, was good for a reaction.
    â€œThe police out here are a quiet lot.” Carmody puffed on his pipe again. “But you’ve probably noticed that already?”
    â€œYou mean they don’t like to make waves?”
    Carmody laughed, a young man’s sound. “The last time we had a wave out here was about fifty million years ago. But yes, you’re right. Maybe you should go out and see Chess Hardstaff. He rules the waves around here.”
    â€œChess Hardstaff? Not the Hardstaff?”
    Carmody nodded. “The King-maker himself. He owns Noongulli, it backs on to our property out there—” He nodded to the west, now lost in the darkness. “The Hardstaffs were the first ones to settle here—after the Abos, of course. He runs the Rural Party, here in New South Wales and nationally. They call him The King to his face and he just nods and accepts it.”
    â€œI’m surprised he’s not Sir Chess,” said Malone.
    â€œHis old man was a knight, same name, and Chess wanted to go one better. He didn’t want to be Sir Chester Hardstaff, Mark Two. He wanted a peerage, Lord Collamundra. He should’ve gone to Queensland when the Nats were in up there, they’d have given him one. But he’d have had to call himself Lord Surfers’ Paradise.”
    Carmody said all this without rancour; it was an old newspaperman speaking. He had left his life as a youthful shearer and drover, gone to Spain, fought in the civil war there on the Republican side, begun covering it as a stringer for a British provincial paper, moved on to being European correspondent for an American wire service, covered World War Two and several smaller wars since and finally retired twenty years ago when his wife died and he had come home to take over Sundown from his mother, who was in her last year. It had been a much smaller property