by Garry Disher
Pam said, 'Sounds to me like an innocent mistake. She dialled the wrong number, that's all. Heard your voice and assumed you were her gran.'
A note of impatience entered the caller's voice. 'Let me finish. You didn't let me finish. The child went on to say that she wished her father would hurry up and get out of bed. She'd gone into his bedroom several times and given him a good shake but he wouldn't wake up. Then she said she thought he might need a doctor because there was blood on his pillow.'
That got Pam's attention. 'Why didn't you report this straightaway?'
'Because the child didn't seem alarmed and I thought there might be all kinds of reasons why her father was in bed with blood on his pillow. Maybe he's a drunk and had been in a fight and had passed out.' She paused. 'But you're right, I should have called earlier.'
'You've called now,' Pam said warmly, 'that's the main thing. Did you ask if the child's mother was there?'
'Yes. I had my marbles about me to that extent, at least. She told me her mother always left early for work and sometimes stayed away overnight. Perhaps she works up in the city. A lot of people do, you know. They commute every day.'
'Yes. What else can you tell me? Anything at all to help us locate the house or who these people are.'
'That's all, I'm afraid.'
'Perhaps if you gave me your phone number…'
Pam scrawled it on her pad as the woman recited it. 'That's Penzance Beach,' she said. 'That's where I live.'
'Do you, dear? You must be one of the few young ones. The place is full of old ducks like me.'
'The kid probably transposed a couple of digits or pressed an incorrect key,' Pam said. 'I'll try dialling a few permutations. I might get lucky.'
The old woman chuckled. 'Just don't call my number again. Well, dear, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that you get lucky sooner rather than later.'
Pam got lucky thirty minutes and nineteen calls later. Another quavering grandmotherly voice, confirmed that, yes, she had a granddaughter called Clare, and demanded to know what it was about.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Two uniforms had investigated the murder-suicide call, reported back breathlessly that there were two bodies, massive wounds, a lot of blood, and now Challis was standing in the sitting-room doorway of a small house that smelt metallically of that blood tinged with burnt cordite and something more ingrained, as though the place housed animals. Even now, after years on the job, a murder scene still had the power to distress him. He tucked in his tie-this wouldn't be the first time he'd vomited over it-and walked in.
Two bodies. The woman was jammed between a sofa and a coffee table, her face and shoulders sprawled over a magazine open on the table, her rump on the outer edge of the sofa, her knees on the carpet. She'd taken a blast to the back of the head. Blood, bone and brain matter had fanned out ahead of her across the coffee table and beyond that to the floor.
As for the man, he was in an armchair opposite the woman, the twin barrels of a shotgun propped under his chin. He'd apparently reached down with his right hand and used his thumb to trigger the shot. Most of his head was missing.
'You'd have to be dedicated to do that,' Sutton said.
Challis ignored him. A kind of secret, humming satisfaction had settled in him. This was a double murder and the only rules that applied now were: assume nothing, trust no one, check everything.
He guided Sutton wordlessly out of the house, pausing to tell the uniformed constable at the front gate, 'I want this place sealed off. Authorised personnel only, and they must be wearing crime-scene gear.'
He meant white sterile overalls, overshoes, gloves and hoods. There were spare sets in the CIB Falcon and he and Sutton dressed hurriedly before returning to the sitting room.
First Challis circled the bodies at a distance, occasionally crouching, occasionally gauging sightlines. Now that this was a crime scene, a perimeter would be established, especially in regard to the media and the ranges of their lenses and microphones, and the culprit's entry and exit routes would have to be determined, for they would be secondary crime scenes. Meanwhile the room would be sketched, videotaped and photographed by crime-scene technicians, and the pathologist would make a preliminary investigation into the apparent cause and time of death, and whether any of the observable injuries were ante- or post-mortem. And contaminants to the crime scene would have to be identified: suspects, the weather, relatives of the victims, animals (there was that smell again), and any person there officially-himself, other cops, ambulance officers, the pathologist. But now Challis was doing his job, mapping and absorbing the scene.
Then he crouched and felt the man's pockets. There was a set of keys in the left pocket. He compared the man's hands without touching them. The right hand bore fewer day-today cuts, grazes and calluses than the left, and was marginally smaller.
He stood and said, 'I want the room and bodies checked for prints and the hands bagged.'
'Boss?' Scobie frowned.
'Maybe they scratched the killer. Maybe the killer touched them.'
'But it's a murder-suicide. You heard the tape.'
'First,' Challis said, 'the husband is left-handed, not right-handed,' and he explained about the keys in the pocket, the comparable wear-and-tear on the hands themselves.
Scobie began to nod slowly, and then to focus on the room. Challis saw it happen, and waited.
Finally Scobie pointed. 'There's a bit of blood and grey matter on the guy's trouser cuffs. It's not his, the shot that killed him was fired upwards, so it must be from his wife. If he stood behind her and shot her in the back of the head before sitting down and shooting himself, how did his cuffs get sprayed by her blood? So someone else shot her while he was sitting there. He might even have been shot first. I doubt he'd just sit there and watch his wife get shot.'
You'd be surprised, thought Challis. Many a man facing death will happily let someone else get killed ahead of him.
But Challis didn't say any of this. 'We need a toxicology report,' he said, 'in case they were drugged first. But I'm betting they were bludgeoned first. With any luck the pathologist will find something, unless the shotgun blasts destroyed any evidence of that.'
He turned to gaze at the bodies. 'As for the shotgun, we need to know if it belonged here or was brought here.'
'How come no one heard anything?' Scobie asked pensively.
Challis shrugged. 'It's the end house, the neighbours are at work, there's that electronic gun thing going off in the vineyards every so often.'
Then the crime scene technicians arrived and went to work. Challis retreated to the doorway and watched for a while. They dusted the main surfaces for prints, occasionally shooting first with a Polaroid CU-5 fixed-focus camera before trying to retrieve prints that risked being destroyed when lifted. Challis didn't think they'd find prints from the killer. He-or she-surely wore gloves. And he doubted they'd find prints on the bodies, even if the killer hadn't worn gloves when he killed them. Latent prints on living flesh maintain their integrity for no more than ninety minutes. Prints on a corpse were determined by atmospheric conditions, the state of the skin and other prevailing factors.
Sutton murmured in his ear, 'So who made the emergency call? Was the husband forced to, maybe?'
Challis had played the tape before leaving the station. He tried to recall it now. Had the man's voice sounded fearful, as if he'd been forced to act against his will? Not really. Agitated. Faked agitation.
'The killer,' he said.
He eyed the telephone, and when it had been dusted for prints he walked across to it, picked up the receiver and pressed the redial key. He heard eight beeps and then a woman's voice: 'Waterloo Police Station, Constable-'
He hung up. There was a card Blu-tacked to the wall near the phone. Local emergency numbers. The killer had read the number from the card.
Anyone else in an agitated state would simply have dialled triple zero. He sighed and returned to the hallway. Where was the pathologist? He hea
rd Scobie Sutton clattering about in the kitchen. Just then Ellen Destry appeared from a room further along the hall.
'I've been searching the study,' she said.
'And?'
'His name's Mostyn Pearce. Wife's name is Karen. They have a kid of school age called Jessica-who could be at school, she's not here.'
Sutton heard that. He joined them, saying, 'My daughter goes to school with a Jessie Pearce.'
Ellen showed him a photograph in a pewter frame. 'Are these the parents?'
Scobie nodded. 'God, who's going to tell the kid?' 'There's a Rolodex in the study. Maybe the grandparents are listed.'
Challis was peering over her shoulder. 'Is that a ferret?' 'Yep. It's tied up in the back yard at the moment.' He saw a family portrait, against a hedge, a ferret in the grass at their feet. Challis concentrated on the man's face. No sunglasses. The man he'd seen walking a ferret in Rosebud had been wearing shades. It was probably the same man, though. Then Sutton was saying, 'Pearce worked at the detention centre. He gave everyone the creeps. Whenever he took his kid to school he'd bring the ferret with him. Walk it on a lead like it was a dog.'
Challis thought of Tessa Kane and her article and the laughter they'd shared. Pearce had been a figure of fun but hadn't deserved to die like this.
'So what do we know about the Pearces?' The common features of a crime like this were: victim, culprit, motive, evidence, weapon. They had the victims and the weapon-unless there was also a blunt instrument lying around somewhere. They had some limited evidence, but possibly no evidence at all that would help them identify the culprit. And they didn't have a motive.
'A very interesting scrapbook in the study,' Ellen said. They followed her. 'Study' was a convenient word for a room that contained one tiny, heavily lacquered bookcase, a desk with a computer and printer, a sewing machine in one corner, an exercise bike in another.
The scrapbook lay on its side in the bookcase. Ellen spread it open on the desk, and Challis found himself reading clippings of the Meddler's letters to the Progress, together with handwritten drafts of irate letters to shire councillors, the police, Vic Roads, the mayor, the Federal and State Members of Parliament, all meticulously dated and annotated. 'Pearce is the Meddler?'
'Looks like it.'
Challis groaned. 'A man who's offended dozens of people in the past two years.'
Ellen flipped forward through the scrapbook. 'Here's a letter he drafted yesterday.'
Challis read a line or so: 'On Easter Sunday I phoned in a report of poorly treated sheep on the property of Ian Munro-' He didn't read on, but gazed quizzically at Ellen.
She said, 'Munro's property is only a kilometre or so from here. I even saw Pearce walking past it the other day. Given that he likes to dob people in to the authorities, maybe he'd had a run-in with Munro in the past, and maybe Munro decided to get even with him.'
'Bit drastic,' Sutton said.
'Well, he is unhinged.'
'True.'
Challis stared past them, staring into space, thinking it through. Coincidences did happen in murder inquiries, and so did things that were hard to credit, but he knew enough always to search for the simple answer, the most likely answer, first.
Pearce had offended someone. Munro? Would Munro stage something as elaborate as this-or simply walk through the door, blasting away with his shotgun? That's if he would do something so over the top to begin with.
'Check it out,' he said. 'Meanwhile Munro crossed swords with bank managers, lawyers and shire officials. We'd better make a list and start warning them. I also need to know whether or not the Pearces owned a shotgun. It could be Munro's, of course-according to his wife, two shotguns and a rifle are missing.'
Then Pam Murphy was calling him on his mobile, saying that she had another murder for him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Pam Murphy stood in a house in Tyabb, numbly watching the pathologist. Inspector Challis and his crew had been and gone, Challis shaking his head and saying, 'Looks like our boy's been busy.' Apparently Challis, Scobie Sutton and Sergeant Destry had spent the morning at another shooting, a married couple shotgunned to death over near Upper Penzance, and now this one. The word was, Ian Munro was settling scores.
Challis had praised her for taking the time to check the old woman's story and finding the body. 'Good detective work,' he said.
She wasn't a detective, merely a uniformed constable, but she'd glowed to hear him say it. Now she was reminded of the everyday shit you see in police work. A shotgun shooting. Her first. Thank God the child hadn't seen it happen-and hadn't herself been shot.
John Tankard had collected Pam from outside the police station and driven her to the house. The real grandmother had arrived just as they were getting out of the car. Her name was Margaret Seigert and she'd tapped on the front door and the child, a very collected and precise little girl, had been clear about the fact that her daddy wouldn't wake up and there was a bit of blood on his pillow.
A bit of blood. While John Tankard, the child and the grandmother remained out in the corridor, Pam had gone in and seen the dead man, on his back in a queen-sized bed, doona up to his chin. Fortunately the child hadn't pulled back the doona and seen her father's chest: massive shotgun wound, the torso a pulpy mess, the mattress soaked in blood.
Then Tank had demanded a look, and she had taken his place in the corridor. When Tank came out again he appeared shocked, pale, sweaty, as though aware for the first time what a shotgun could do to you, aware that he'd been a very lucky man yesterday, outside Ian Munro's back door.
CIB were convinced that Munro had done this. According to a thick folder of correspondence found in a filing cabinet, the victim, David Seigert, had once represented Ian Munro in various legal and civil matters, including a court appearance on a charge of threatening behaviour in which Munro had been fined $875.
Seigert had a wife, but she taught at a university up in the city and often stayed away overnight. Pam had phoned her, the worst call she'd ever had to make, and the woman had returned immediately to this house in Tyabb and, with the grandmother in tow, had whisked the child away.
Shotgun killing. Only there was no shotgun at the scene.
According to Inspector Challis, the double shooting he'd just attended had also been a murder but staged to look like a murder-suicide and so the gun was there at the scene. The Seigert shooting was different, he told her. No gun and no shell casing.
Pam knew that even if he found the gun it wouldn't tell him much. Given that a shotgun fires pellets rather than a solid slug, and the inside of a shotgun barrel isn't rifled, it's more or less impossible to link the pellets from a victim to a particular gun-unless the shell casing is found at the scene, for it will bear characteristic imprints from the firing pin and the loading process. Sometimes a commercial wadding (paper or plastic) can help to trace a shell's manufacturer, but that kind of knowledge hardly puts you closer to the killer. Sometimes shotgun shooters make their own shells, but there was no way of knowing if that was the case with the Seigert shooting. There was no gun and no empty shell.
And now it was the pathologist's turn. Presumably she'd come straight from Challis's double murder. Freya Berg her name was, and she wore white coveralls, paper slip-ons over her shoes, a hairnet. She had a narrow, expressive face and long, quick fingers. Pam remembered her from an earlier case Challis had been involved in. A case in which Pam had also shown initiative and been praised by him.
It was interesting, watching the woman work. Tankard should be watching this, Pam thought. But Tankard was outside, ostensibly keeping nosy parkers away from the house but in reality trying to get his nerve back. 'What a way to die,' he'd said, more than once.
Dr Berg would be performing an autopsy later at the morgue, but right now she was examining the body, speaking into a micro-cassette recorder.
'The apparent cause of death is a massive wound to the chest, probably caused by a shotgun fired at close range. Materials found in the w
ound itself would suggest that the gun was pressed against the doona and fired through it.' She pushed the pause button and glanced at Pam. 'If that is the case, it might have been done to suppress the sound of the blast.'
Pam nodded. She watched as Dr Berg released the pause button, grabbed each foot and manipulated the ankles before lifting each leg and watching it bend at the knee. Laying each leg onto the sodden mattress again, she pressed down on the abdomen and appeared to watch the surface of the murdered man's skin.
'Room temperature is eighteen degrees Celsius, slightly cooler than the outside temperature of twenty-two degrees Celsius. There is still good movement in the extremities but the stomach is beginning to show signs of rigor mortis.'
Pam knew from her studies that the body cools at three degrees per hour at first. Later, the rate is one degree or less per hour. Rigor works from the head through the body to the extremities, so presumably Dr Berg would test the head last.
Sure enough, the pathologist hoisted herself onto the bed, manoeuvred herself until she was at the bedhead looking down the body, lifted the skull gently off the pillow and attempted to turn it. 'The head is pretty well locked,' she said.
Finally Dr Berg pressed the end of her ballpoint pen against the bottom side of the torso, repeating the action from near the armpit to the waist.
'There is no blanching, the blood appears to be fully clotted.'
She swung off the bed again and began to remove her latex gloves, saying, 'The deceased has been dead for between six and eight hours.'
Pam glanced at her watch. It was midday now. The child, and the victim, would have been sound asleep at four or six that morning, when Ian Munro came in blasting. She was nearly going to say dead to the world.
The pathologist was speaking to her.
'Constable?'
'Sorry, yes?'
'If you could tell Inspector Challis?'
