by Garry Disher
Pam climbed down the slick rocks and reached the spongy mud. The moon above her was no longer red but a high, misty white orb that slipped in and out of scrappy clouds. Tricky light, but Pam saw, as she got closer, that the boy was naked. It wasn’t cotton fabric on and around his groin but something like paint or lipstick, applied in thick, bold stripes.
‘The bitch poisoned me,’ Josh Brownlee said wretchedly.
* * * *
24
Thursday morning.
The two friends had been walking between Shoreham and Flinders at seven-thirty when they found the body. Not that they stumbled upon it: rather, they stumbled upon some cows. They’d never seen cows on the beach before. Joggers, yes, dogs, dead seals, daily fitness walkers like themselves, but never cows, even though farmland abutted the beach.
Two women aged in their forties, one with short brown hair, the other with shoulder-length dirty blonde hair. Short Brown Hair indicated the cliff looming above their heads and said, ‘We climbed to the top and found a hole in the fence.’
Challis followed her pointing finger. Trees and bushes clung thickly to the sloping face of the cliff and along the ridge. He’d left Ellen up there with the crime scene officers and taken the women back down to the beach, so that he could sort it all out. ‘You saw the cows and went to investigate.’
‘Wouldn’t you? There’s a big house up there. We thought we should tell someone.’
Challis smiled a kind of apology. He really didn’t want anyone to be stroppy with him right now. ‘I need to write a simple narrative of events,’ he said. ‘You climbed to the top, and then what happened?’
‘We went to the house,’ said the blonde one. Both women were approaching middle age but were lithe and fit, comfortable with their bodies, the beach and their daily walk together.
‘There was no one home,’ the other woman said.
Challis nodded. He’d already knocked. A huge new house, Swiss chalet style with sheds and a barn, set a couple of hundred metres back from the cliff where the land began to rise again, allowing commanding views along the beach in both directions and far out to sea. Views achieved at a cost, Challis thought: he’d counted five huge ash circles and dozens of tree stumps.
‘And that’s when you saw the car.’
‘Yes.’
Challis pictured the setting on the headland above him. Apart from bashing your way up through the bushes on the cliff face, or climbing fences on neighbouring farmland, your only access to the chalet was via a newly gravelled farm road that wound across paddocks from Frankston-Flinders Road, a kilometre away. You’d pass the driveway entrance on your way to Flinders and wonder what lucky sods lived along it. There were mystery driveways and private roads all over the Peninsula and they all led to money. This driveway stopped at a double gate in a post-and-rail fence one hundred metres uphill and behind the house and sheds.
‘The car was...’ prompted Challis.
‘Stopped at the gate with the driver’s door open. We didn’t touch it.’
‘Go on.’
‘At first we didn’t know if it belonged to the house or to someone visiting,’ said the short-haired one, ‘but we needed to tell someone about the cows.’
‘So you approached the car...’
The friends, until then enlivened by their adventure, seemed to flinch. ‘And that’s when we saw Ludmilla lying on the ground,’ said the blonde.
Challis was astonished. ‘You recognised her?’
‘When I got closer,’ the blonde said.
He’d already called in the numberplate. The car, a silver Golf, was registered to one Ludmilla Wishart—not that he’d made the mistake of assuming victim and registered owner were one and the same person, a fuck-up he’d made many years ago, back when he was a probationary constable. But he’d taken one look at the body and recognised her from the photographs left by Adrian Wishart last night.
‘I need to know if either of you touched the body.’
‘I did,’ said the woman with short hair. ‘I’m a midwife. I couldn’t feel a pulse.’
‘Did either of you stand or crouch near her?’
‘Yes.’
Challis nodded. The ground around the body was hard, but the women might have shed hair, lint or threads. One of them had vomited some distance from the car and the body. The other contaminants? The weather, the killer, the various experts attending at the scene.
‘You called it in by mobile phone?’
‘Yes. The ambulance got here first, the police soon afterwards.’
A couple of uniforms from Waterloo, who had called CIU, getting Scobie Sutton. ‘How well did you know Mrs Wishart?’
‘I recognised her, but I don’t.. .didn’t know her except professionally. She struck me as strict about regulations, but also fair. Not a planning Nazi—not with me, anyway.’
Challis tried to put that with what he’d seen up on the headland thirty minutes earlier. Ludmilla Wishart was lying on her side at the rear of the car, blood pooled beneath the spread of auburn hair, upper body in the dirt, feet in the roadside grasses. The driver’s door was open.
She’d been felled with one powerful blow to the back of the head, according to Dr Berg, the pathologist on duty today. Rigor was fully established, Dr Berg said, meaning she’d been dead for twelve hours or more.
‘No one else came along while you waited?’
‘It’s not a through road.’
Challis nodded. ‘Thanks for your time.’
He took their details and watched them walk back toward Shoreham, shoulders touching, deep in conversation. If the owners of the chalet were away and no one used the access road, the body could have remained undiscovered for days. He turned and made for the shallowest incline on the cliff face, where a rudimentary path switchbacked between bracken, ti-trees, mossy logs and blackberry canes. Two minutes later he was at the top again, scratched, burred and out of breath. With one hand on a rotting post for a fulcrum, he vaulted the fence. It was a poor excuse for a fence, broken wires snaking through tangles of grass, the top barbed strand almost rusted through, the posts leaning or fallen away to friable remnants.
He trudged along a newer fence line that ran perpendicular to the cliff top and past the chalet. The grass was damp and cow pats sat like broad plates of evil black mould wherever he put his feet. But at least he’d thought to bring rubber boots with him.
And there was Ellen, by the victim’s car. Since yesterday evening he’d almost told her several times that McQuarrie wanted her to head a new unit, but the super had sworn him to secrecy for the time being. He wanted Challis to think about which unit, given her abilities and inclinations. ‘Take your time and get back to me,’ he’d said.
Feeling burdened suddenly, Challis waved as he climbed the slope. She waved back. ‘Having fun?’ she called.
He joined her, replying, ‘My daily exercise. Any joy?’
‘Not yet.’
Together they gazed past the silver Golf to where Scobie Sutton and the two uniforms were performing a grid-pattern search for the murder weapon. ‘The doc thinks a tyre iron.’
‘From the victim’s car?’
Ellen shook her head. ‘Hasn’t been disturbed.’
At that moment a tow truck appeared. Scobie put up his hand to stop it. The driver nodded, switched off, settled with a newspaper. He might be there an hour before the scene was released so that he could load the car and cart it to the forensic science centre in the city.
Meanwhile the pathologist was still examining the body and the crime scene officers were searching the immediate area around it, stepping from one metal plate to another and often ducking with paper sacks and tweezering up some tiny fragment of possible evidentiary value. Others were examining the dirt for tyre impressions, and one was poking around inside the car.
‘Are we thinking the husband?’ asked Ellen.
‘He’s first on the list. But she was the shire’s planning infringements officer, so she probably made enemie
s.’
Ellen nodded. Scobie was approaching, holding an evidence bag carefully. ‘Found some dry mud.’
‘This is the countryside, Scobie,’ Ellen said.
He flushed. ‘It’s not soil from this area. This is dark clay, the mud is reddish.’
They peered into the evidence bag. A faint odour of the grassy earth wafted from the neck. Not an ordinary clump but smooth and regular on two sides. ‘Well spotted, Scobie,’ Challis said. ‘From the inside of a wheel arch?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘Get it to forensics along with everything else, ask them to work out the make and model of car, if possible, and where on the Peninsula the mud comes from.’
‘Will do.’
‘And when you get back to CIU, start checking the victim’s last known movements since lunchtime yesterday. Check if she used her credit card anywhere, phone calls, the usual.’
‘Boss,’ said Sutton. He looked more alive than he’d done for days, Challis thought.
‘We also need to know who owns this property and why Mrs Wishart was here.’
‘Can’t Pam do that?’
‘Pam’s working an assault from last night.’
‘Fair enough,’ Scobie said. He looked inquiringly at Challis and Ellen. ‘The husband?’
‘First port of call.’
The technician searching inside the car called, ‘Found a laptop, inspector—under the passenger seat.’
Challis called his thanks and sat in the CIU Falcon with Ellen, trying to think his way into the desires, hurts and fears of the killer. He always did it, always did it immediately, even at the risk of jumping to early conclusions. Of course they’d look at the husband first. Statistics told them to look at a family member ahead of anyone else. Also, Challis knew to search for the simple answer first. It would involve the five key factors of victim, motive, weapon, evidence and culprit. So far, all he had for sure was a victim and by implication a culprit.
* * * *
25
When the forensics officers had finished with the scene, Challis and Destry left, Ellen driving, Challis working his mobile phone, arranging for the loan of a couple of detectives from Mornington. That completed, he folded his arms in the passenger seat and mused for a while. ‘The victim’s car,’ he said.
‘What about it?’
‘There was no mud inside the wheel arches.’
‘Or the road corrugations shook it loose.’
Challis shaded his eyes, for they were heading into the rising sun. ‘The mud Scobie found wasn’t from her car. The shape was wrong.’
‘Or it came from a car that was on that road legitimately.’
‘Yeah, yeah, rain on my parade.’
‘Just doing my job,’ Ellen said. It was what they did, floated scenarios and sank the weak ones.
Challis placed his hand on her thigh. That was wrong on all kinds of professional levels but McQuarrie had offered a way out yesterday and besides, he wanted to feel the coiled strength in her, the heat and promise.
‘Don’t,’ she said, adding, ‘boss.’
He folded his arms. ‘Approximate time of death, according to Freya Berg, was sometime late yesterday afternoon or evening. The husband came into the station at around eight.’
‘It was cool by late afternoon, early evening,’ Ellen said, ‘but she hadn’t put her cardigan on, it was still on the back seat. She was wearing just a T-shirt. That points to an earlier rather than a later time of death.’
‘Unless she was someone who never felt the cold; or she’d been sitting in the car, waiting for someone.’
Ellen turned down the corners of her mouth, thinking about it. ‘Either way, we need to know the husband’s movements for the whole afternoon.’ She paused. ‘Does it seem personal to you, Hal? She was bashed by someone she knew rather than a passing fruitcake?’
Challis thought about it. ‘There was real anger there. Same with Lachlan Roe.’
‘God, they’re not connected?’
‘I didn’t mean that, only that we might not be looking at a stranger in either case.’
They crested small hills and slowed for the township of Balnarring, stuck behind a Landseer School bus, which pulled into the shopping centre and stopped to collect a handful of kids. Ellen accelerated away, past the garage, the fire station and dwindling houses until they were in a region of rampant spring grasses, kit homes, boutique wineries and alpaca herds. There was a sign outside one house, ‘Giant Garage Sale Saturday’. A low, moist field was dotted with ibis and herons. A bouquet of flowers lay wilting at the base of a tree, a death tree, scarred where a car had collided with it.
Challis daydreamed. He’d miss working with Ellen. He wouldn’t miss being her boss, though. She should head the new sex crimes unit, he thought suddenly. With the population explosion and increased social distress on the Peninsula, reported rapes and sexual assaults were on the increase, meaning that the true figures were much higher. The only drawback was that Ellen would be expected to operate out of Mornington. ‘I can’t have you both in the same station, Hal, surely you see that,’ the super had said.
But Mornington was only twenty minutes away.
Soon Ellen was steering past more houses and over a school crossing, and the smudge in the distance was Waterloo. On the outskirts she turned left and up a winding rise to where big new homes sat on large lots and the sounds of the weekends were ride-on mowers, trail bikes, clopping hooves and barbecues. Professional people like the Wisharts lived on this estate, alongside prosperous shopkeepers and expert tradespeople. They had huge mortgages, distant bay views across Waterloo on the flatland below and all the space they needed for their kids and their gardens.
A prosperous enclave, but still a million dollars away from the cliff-top property where Ludmilla Wishart had died. What had she been doing there? Who lived there? City people, guessed Challis, remembering the long grass and dusty windows. They visit the place only occasionally and therefore don’t need a vast chalet but merely want one.
‘Where to?’ asked Ellen.
She’d come to a couple of branching roads named for ex-prime ministers. ‘Menzies,’ said Challis. ‘Lot 5.’
She steered with a twist of the wrist. Challis liked watching her, even as he was thinking about the murder and how he’d inform Adrian Wishart that his wife was dead. ‘Where was her handbag?’ he said suddenly.
‘Exactly.’
‘Opportunistic? A mugging? But it’s not a through road. The handbag was taken to make it look like a robbery? They missed the laptop under the seat.’
‘Scobie’s checking out her credit card, so that might tell us something. Especially if it’s been used to buy a surfboard or something.’
Ellen eased the CIU Falcon gently over the kerb and into the driveway of a corrugated iron house. Challis decided that he liked the house. It was partly the iconic appeal of the corrugated iron, which could be found on every roof and woolshed in rural Australia, and partly the design of this particular house, which was saved from looking like an outback shed by dormer windows set in a steeply pitched roof, a balcony and broad verandas. And he was feeling anticipatory: he wanted to take a closer look at Wishart, know that he was the killer, and wrap this up by teatime, but, at the same time, he was dreading being the bearer of bad news.
A red Citroen was parked in a carport hung with vines. ‘Won’t be a moment,’ he said, and as Ellen marked time with her seatbelt, keys, mobile phone, jacket and notebook, he trotted to the Citroen and crouched at each wheel arch. There was dust, no mud, and the recess was a different configuration from the one that had shaped the mud found at the murder scene.
He rejoined Ellen and they walked along a patterned concrete path to the front door, which opened before they reached it. Adrian Wishart, unshaven, red-eyed, hair awry, in tracksuit pants and a T-shirt.
‘You’ve found her.’
Ellen said gently, ‘May we come in, Mr Wishart?’
‘You’ve found her.’
‘Let’s go inside,’ Ellen said, Challis admiring the ease and effectiveness of her ways. It was a combination of her voice, level gaze and decisiveness. It worked on bullies, drunks, the grieving, the hostile and the disturbed.
The door opened onto a short hallway, rooms on either side, one of them a working studio with drafting tables, pens, rulers, angle-poise lights and coiled blueprints. At the end of the hallway was a vast room with thick beams, a fireplace, wall-to-ceiling bookcases, island benches and discrete sitting, dining and TV watching areas. Four huge sofas, shaggy rugs on wooden floors. Framed architectural drawings shared wall space with avant-garde photographs, watercolour paintings and a couple of Central Australia dot paintings.
