[Challis #5] Blood Moon

by Garry Disher

  There was a way of finding out, though. All Pam needed was for Challis and the others to leave the building for an hour or two.

  * * * *

  18

  While Challis and Murphy drank their coffee that Wednesday morning, Ellen Destry was standing in the grounds of the Landseer School with the deputy head, watching as buses, BMWs and Range Rovers pulled in, unloaded and pulled out again. She saw one Chinese face and one Indian, but the school community was pretty much a monoculture. The Landseer School for Blonde Children, she thought.

  ‘That’s Zara,’ Moorhouse said, pointing suddenly.

  Tall, fair, faintly voluptuous, gloriously self-absorbed. Ellen began to move, saying from the corner of her mouth, ‘I’ll need you to sit in while I interview her.’

  ‘I’d have insisted anyway,’ Moorhouse said.

  Ellen nodded. It was playing out as she wanted it to play out. It would look bad if she questioned Zara Selkirk without an appropriate adult present. Moorhouse had status but was not, it seemed, in thrall to the money, power and prestige that surrounded the school; and the school was a better environment for Ellen’s purposes than Zara’s home, where she might find herself obstructed by a parent or a lawyer.

  Besides, she wanted to ambush the kid.

  Five minutes later, they were in Moorhouse’s office, an environment of papery smells and disordered bookshelves and files, Zara Selkirk saying, ‘I was sick yesterday. I brought a note from my mother.’

  ‘Cut the crap,’ Ellen said. ‘You wagged school. You went up to the city after school on Monday afternoon, attended a concert that evening, and spent the night in your family’s Southbank apartment. A day’s shopping with your mother yesterday, and back home last night.’

  Zara Selkirk sulked. ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘I’m not a truant officer. I’m investigating the assault on the school chaplain.’

  ‘You can’t pin that on me. I wasn’t even here.’

  ‘But you were at school on Monday. Yours was the only appointment in his diary.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So tell me about it.’

  ‘Not fair.’

  ‘Zara,’ said the deputy head, ‘the sooner you answer the sergeant’s questions the sooner you can return to class.’

  There was a moment when the girl seemed almost to weigh these options. Her face cleared and she said, ‘Because of some stuff that wasn’t even my idea I had to like you know, apologise to some old ... the library lady. Like she’s not even a teacher or anything.’

  Ellen said distinctly, ‘Zara, you and your friends set up a fake Facebook page that caused immense distress to an innocent middle-aged woman who’s not in a position to defend herself

  ‘Well it was a joke. She should learn to take jokes.’

  ‘Why did you meet with Mr Roe on Monday?’

  ‘He was like the go-between.’

  ‘He was the mediator between you and Mrs Richardson?’

  Zara Selkirk said, ‘Yeah,’ as though everything was obvious and why didn’t Ellen get it.

  ‘But she didn’t attend?’

  ‘Bitch went to a lawyer.’

  ‘Zara,’ warned Moorhouse.

  The girl’s face grew drowsy with satisfaction. ‘Well she is.’

  Ellen stepped in. ‘What did you and Mr Roe talk about?’

  With a twist of her mouth, Zara Selkirk said, ‘Pervert. He said I should write to her but mainly he was interested in my tits.’

  Ellen, remembering what Hal had discovered about the Roe brothers’ upbringing, visualised the scene. Lachlan Roe, forty years old, the Landseer chaplain but an unloved or unlovely man, waits in his poky office for the only appointment of the day. The Year 12s are no longer around, they’re off enjoying Schoolies Week—not that they’d ever sought his advice or counselling anyway. It’s a long morning. All of his mornings are long. Maybe he wanders the corridors, looking for lost souls, a staff member perhaps, but no one wants him. He returns to his office and logs on to a pornography site or his brother’s blog or reads and sends e-mails.

  Then soon after lunch there’s a knock on his door. ‘Come,’ he calls, in his smooth, disarming way.

  The sixteen-year-old who slips into his room has the breasts of a woman and the face of a child. The chaplain notices these things in that order. She’s wearing aspects of the Landseer girls’ uniform, a white blouse over a long charcoal skirt, so he can’t assess her legs, but her wrists and hands are soft and plump. He takes in her hair, which is the kind of blonde that is almost white, her expressive lips and her body language, which both entices and expresses contempt for him. She doesn’t want to be in the same room with him.

  ‘How did he seem to you?’ said Ellen now.

  ‘Who?’

  Ellen closed and opened her eyes and said carefully, ‘What kind of mood was Mr Roe in?’

  ‘A dirty-old-man mood.’

  Lachlan Roe is slender, of medium height, and believes he has an air of boyish charm. He’s the same age as the child’s father but he’s not uncool, like most fathers. He’s youthful looking in his black silk T-shirt and grey linen jacket with the cuffs turned back.

  The jacket that later collected another person’s mucus.

  He lets Zara wait on his strip of carpet for a long moment, then loads his face and body with soulful gentleness and murmurs, ‘Hello, Zara, please take a seat.’

  She’s a gawkily lovely teenager, and an old ugliness stirs inside him. There in his sterile office the drowsy mid-November sun streams in, banding the threadbare carpet, the girl’s lap and one forearm, her fine hairs fairly glowing, so that he swallows and coughs nervously.

  Ellen could see it all. ‘Was there any specific thing Mr Roe did or said that made you feel uncomfortable?’

  ‘You think I attacked him. I told you, I was at a concert.’

  ‘I know that. I’m trying to get a feeling for the kind of man Mr Roe was...is.’

  Zara considered this, looking for traps. ‘If you think I paid someone to attack him, well I didn’t. And my dad didn’t do it, ‘cause he’s away.’

  ‘Zara, what did Mr Roe do and say?’

  ‘He goes, do my parents know why I’m here? I go, yes, they said I had to apologise to old Merle. He goes, “Well, Zara, they are your parents, one does have a duty to one’s parents.” Moron.’

  ‘Zara,’ said Moorhouse.

  ‘Well, it’s not fair. He said I had all these unworldly people around me and I was like, defiled by them.’

  ‘Defiled? What did he mean by that?’

  ‘I told him it wasn’t my idea, the Facebook thing, it was Amber and Megan. He said purity comes from separating yourself from defiling influences and was I a lesbian. Pervert.’

  Ellen thought she was probably right. ‘What else?’

  ‘He got this mad look on his face. He said he could see my future. Drugs, sex, backpacking in Europe and stuff.’

  ‘Backpacking in Europe?’

  ‘He was barking mad. He said I would meet some guy with caramel skin and liquid eyes who would ask me to deliver a package.’

  ‘What package?’

  ‘How should I know? I’m supposed to listen to this guy?’

  ‘What else? Did he touch you?’

  Zara shuddered. ‘No way. Just told me as chaplain he understood the teenage mindset. I said, Yeah, but do you have any like, formal qualifications?’

  Ellen and Moorhouse exchanged a smile. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said, forget further study, university is too narrowing, forget travel, I’ll meet drug couriers and terrorists. He said it’s my duty to get married and have children and honour my parents. “You young people come to me with your tight clothes and your soul-damaging mobile phones, wanting Godless freedoms,”‘ Zara said mincingly, hooking her fingers in quotation marks around the chaplain’s words.

  ‘What then?’

  With an apologetic glance at Moorhouse, Zara Selkirk said, ‘I cleared out, sorry.’
<
br />   ‘He didn’t raise the issue of your apology to Mrs Richardson?’

  ‘He said, “I am the elect,” like he was God or Jesus or something. I was a bit scared, actually. He was so weird.’

  ‘Did you tell anyone about the session?’

  Zara looked away. ‘No.’

  ‘No one?’

  ‘Like, who would believe me?’ Zara said.

  * * * *

  19

  The morning passed. Pam Murphy followed up on a handful of residents’ complaints that probably stemmed from schoolies’ exuberance—used condoms on the front lawn of a house opposite the foreshore tents, a parked car sideswiped in the same area, the shoplifting of Bolle sunglasses from HangTen—but mostly she was waiting for CIU to empty.

  Finally Challis left to interview Dirk Roe’s office colleagues and the members of Lachlan Roe’s congregation, and Scobie Sutton headed out to track down a ride-on mower. The poor guy looked wretched.

  Still, there was always a lot of traffic on the first floor, uniforms coming and going with paperwork that demanded attention, the station’s new sergeant and senior sergeant keeping an eye on things, the IT geek returning with Lachlan Roe’s laptop, someone from the canteen taking lunch orders... Pam ordered a tuna salad, and she thanked the sergeant for letting her have Tank and Cree as backup that night, during the eclipse, but mostly she kept her head down and waited.

  When it was quiet, she logged on to the Law Enforcement Database. Strict protocols were in place for using LED, and she was breaking most of them, but the image of this morning’s wilful destruction wouldn’t leave her alone and soon she had Hugh Ebeling’s details on the screen. The man who’d torn down Somerland just so he could dominate the ridge and the sky above Penzance Beach was forty-two years old, a property developer, married to Mia, aged forty. Mia was a senior executive with Lotto Link, a Swiss company that had recently acquired licences to sell scratch cards and install poker machines in Victorian pubs and clubs. So, not short of a dollar. No children.

  They lived in Brighton—pronounced ‘Brahton’, Pam believed, by the nipped, tucked and Botoxed men and women who lived there. Presumably Penzance Beach would be their weekend residence. Two houses overlooking the water, lucky devils.

  They owned a Range Rover, a Maserati and BMW. Hugh had lost two points for speeding, Mia nine. Various parking infringements. No criminal record for either person but Hugh had been sued by a consortium of clients for building on a flood plain in northern New South Wales, and Mia was a discharged bankrupt.

  But casual dishonesty and steering close to the wind were probably not unusual in the nouveau riche circles the Ebelings moved in. Pam continued her search, and by way of links to the Age and Brighton Argus newspapers and a residents’ action group, discovered that numerous well-established trees on the roadway between the Ebelings’ Brighton house and the waters of the bay had been chopped down or poisoned. The Ebelings had expressed outrage at the destruction, but it was widely believed that they’d ordered it, wanting a sea view from their top windows.

  Finally, Mia’s cousin was Justice Stephen Marlowe of the state’s planning appeals tribunal. You might as well give up, Pam thought, throwing down her pen in disgust. You’re never going to beat the bastards.

  * * * *

  Scobie Sutton drove to a dealer in second-hand farm machinery in Cranbourne and found the stolen ride-on mower. He knew the dealer was vaguely bent, but he was too deeply fatigued and discouraged to pursue that angle. Instead, he said, ‘Can you give me a name?’

  ‘I can give you a numberplate.’

  Which belonged to a van owned by Laurie Jarrett on the Seaview Park estate in Waterloo. Jarrett was well known to the police.

  After that he drove to the hospital and there was his wife, at the bedside of Lachlan Roe. ‘Sweetheart, come home please, we need you.’

  ‘He hasn’t moved. He hasn’t said anything.’

  They looked at Roe’s pinched, bruised face, the bandages swaddling his head. ‘Sweetheart, let the nurses do their job.’

  ‘I’ve been talking to him non-stop,’ Beth wailed. ‘Not a flicker.’

  ‘Come home. You’re tired. You need to sleep. It’s Ros’s concert tonight. Please, Beth.’

  ‘Full moon tonight,’ said Beth in her new, wild-eyed way.

  ‘Ros’s concert tonight,’ said Scobie firmly, feeling that his heart would break.

  She came eventually, as though drugged with something you could never measure or trace.

  * * * *

  After viewing the bulldozed remains of Somerland with Carl Vernon, Ludmilla Wishart returned to Planning East and made a flurry of phone calls. Yes, the minister had received the emergency application to protect Somerland, but hadn’t intended to act on it until Friday, after he’d had further advice and consultation. His minder said that the minister wished to convey his deepest regrets, but the demolition had, on the face of it, proceeded lawfully, thank you, goodbye.

  Then the calls began. A journalist from the local paper. Distressed Penzance Beach residents. And anonymous callers, abusive callers, placing her in the pockets of wealthy developers. ‘I’m not!’ she insisted, but these were not people who were interested in debating the point.

  In fact, she was pretty sure who had tipped off the Ebelings. She’d gathered plenty of evidence over the past weeks and months, but when and how she should use it, she didn’t quite know.

  She also fielded calls and e-mails from Adrian. Nothing unusual about that. Sometimes he contacted her several times a day; had done so for the past three years, ever since they got married. This morning the calls came every thirty minutes, always beginning, ‘It’s me: where are you?’

  And she’d say, ‘In my office.’

  Given that he always seemed to know when she hadn’t been in her office, she found this question puzzling. The morning progressed. At one point she stood in a corner of the window and peered out. The planning office sat with Centrelink, the Neighbourhood House and a childcare centre opposite a small park, and there was her husband, at a park bench with his laptop. The fact that he was sending her e-mails meant that he was piggybacking on someone’s wireless network. Her heart began its arrhythmic palpitations and soon she was on her back gulping for air, one hand over her chest until the scary beat evened out, until she was a normal person.

  When she looked again, he was gone.

  Then Carmen arrived to take her to lunch, Carmen’s glossy black hair, red skirt and green top brightening the drab grey world of the planning office. ‘For you, madam,’ she said with a curtsy, presenting Ludmilla with a small parcel wrapped in royal blue paper decorated with gold stars and moons, a parcel almost too beautiful to tear open.

  A tennis racquet?’

  Carmen’s big, clever, expressive face fell. Aww, you guessed.’

  It was an MP3 player, sleek and black. ‘I’ve loaded it with some albums I think you’ll like,’ Carmen said. ‘Plus it plays FM radio, video clips and voice recordings—I thought you could use it to record your field notes.’ She snatched it from Ludmilla. ‘Here, let me show you.’

  Ludmilla was intrigued. ‘I need never leave home.’

  A little cloud passed over Carmen’s face. ‘Oh, you’d better leave home, Mill.’

  They went out, Mr Groot coming to his office door and looking pointedly at his watch.

  * * * *

  Josh Brownlee rose at lunchtime that Wednesday, feeling wrecked. He wanted some kind of release. He wanted to hurt someone. He stumbled from his motel room opposite the yacht club and made for High Street, passing the Chillout Zone at the Uniting Church, the Zone pretty quiet, no schoolies, only a handful of volunteers wearing the hallowed look of people who work uncomplainingly, sunnily, with Young People.

  He wandered up to McDonald’s, where he ate a hamburger, followed by an ecstasy tab washed down with a can of Red Bull, and overheard a slag from Grover Hall say she was taking the ferry across to Phillip Island. So he hung back and followed her, n
othing particular in mind, except that she really filled out her T-shirt. But when he reached the dock a dozen other schoolies greeted her, all with that healthy glow, wearing shorts, hats and daypacks, many of them wheeling bicycles. God he despised them, even as he felt a tiny, nasty, carnal bite to see all those bare legs.

  * * * *

  20

  Challis bought a ham and salad roll for lunch and ate it in his office. He’d spent all morning driving from house to house, office to office, trying to get a fix on Lachlan Roe and the First Ascensionists. He heard the same story, over and over again: ‘Lachlan is a lovely, lovely man.. .Can’t think who would want to hurt him like that…I hope you find the monster who did it...’