Chain of Evidence ic-4

by Garry Disher

  ‘Names?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that,’ said Sadler emphatically.

  It didn’t matter. Challis thought it was probably Joy and Bob O’Brien, who’d always had one or two greyhounds. He’d gone to school with them. They were the kind to struggle in school but be geniuses at cheating the taxman or anyone in authority. There were families like the O’Briens and the Finucanes all over the world, including his own neck of the woods back in Waterloo.

  He asked pleasantly, ‘May I see what’s on the camera?’

  Sadler glanced at his watch. ‘I’m sure the batteries are flat after all these years.’

  But Challis was already trying the buttons, without success. He tipped out the batteries, two rechargeable AAs. ‘Shall we try your camera?’

  He’d taken charge of the man, the room, and the situation. Sadler’s RSPCA camera sat on the windowsill. It also took AA batteries, which Challis transferred to Gavin’s camera.

  He scrolled through the photographs stored in the memory. Several showed bony but not starving pigs eating scraps in a cement trough. ‘Are these Paddy’s pigs?’

  Sadler looked. ‘Yes.’

  ‘How would you rate their condition?’

  ‘As I said, I made an inspection. I found the situation didn’t warrant prosecution or intervention. The pigs weren’t fat, but they hadn’t been mistreated.’

  Challis chose his words carefully. ‘Meg said that Gavin seemed a bit zealous in the weeks and months before his disappearance-his death.’

  Sadler stroked his jaw like a farmer faced with a knotty problem and not the words to express it. ‘I did have a couple of complaints.’

  ‘From whom?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  Challis let it go. ‘Did you have any run-ins with Gavin?’

  ‘I spoke to him about the complaints.’

  ‘How did he respond?’

  ‘Shouldn’t I be telling this to the South Australian police?’

  Challis said shamelessly, ‘It will help put Meg’s mind at rest to know these things.’

  Sadler looked angry, but answered the question. He said tensely, ‘He blew up at me on the phone.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Then he got tearful. Then he blew up at me again. I slammed the phone down. Then the next thing I know, he’s disappeared.’

  ‘The police spoke to you at the time?’

  ‘Yes. I told them his mood had been up and down a lot.’

  ‘The people who complained: did they make threats against him?’

  ‘No. He just said to send someone else next time.’

  Challis pounced. ‘He? It was a man who complained? One person?’

  Sadler looked hunted. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.’

  ‘I am the police.’

  ‘Even so, it’s not right.’

  That’s all Challis could get out of Sadler. Nixon and Stormare were pulling into town as he was pulling out. He saw them glance with their roving cops’ eyes at his old sports car, because it didn’t belong in the bush, and because it had Victorian plates, and finally because they recognised him. He accelerated sedately, watching his rear-view mirror, and saw them swing around in a U-turn on the long, dusty highway and race after him. A moment later they were on his tail, flashing and tooting. He pulled over onto the gravel verge and they pulled in behind him. A semi-trailer went by in a blast of aggrieved air. He got out. Stormare and Nixon got out. He perched his rump against his door. ‘Gentlemen.’

  ‘Inspector, you’re out of your jurisdiction here.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Don’t play dumb. You went to see Sadler.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ll stuff up our investigation if you keep talking to our witnesses,’ Nixon said. ‘Sir.’

  ‘I’m helping my sister.’

  ‘You’re putting ideas into the heads of our witnesses,’ Stormare said. ‘Surely you realise that.’

  Challis did realise. For all he knew, Stormare and Nixon were very good at their job and would find the killer. He wouldn’t like it if they trampled over one of his investigations. But he wasn’t going to lose face with them or make promises he didn’t intend to keep.

  ‘My brother-in-law was pretty unstable in the weeks and months leading up to his murder. Moody, hypercritical, even violent. Not only with my sister, but also with his work colleagues, and with the people he was investigating.’

  ‘We know that,’ said Stormare tiredly. He waited while another truck blasted past. ‘Don’t tell us our jobs, okay? Butt out. Sir.’

  ‘I’m going to see Paddy Finucane.’

  ‘Where do you think we’ve been?’ snarled Nixon. ‘There’s no need for you to see him.’

  ‘How did you hear about him?’

  ‘Your sister, sir, in fact.’

  Challis nodded. ‘What did Paddy say?’

  ‘Sir,’ Stormare said, ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to speak to our boss, who will speak to your boss, if you continue to interfere with our investigation.’

  Challis thought they would do so anyway. The complaint would take a while to find its way to McQuarrie. He rubbed grit from his eyes as a refrigerated van passed close to their cars, followed by a school bus, the kids waving madly, one kid baring his bum in the rear window. Challis glanced at his watch. Almost 4 pm.

  ‘Mr Finucane has made a statement,’ Nixon said.

  ‘Stay away from him. Sir,’ said Stormare.

  37

  Scobie Sutton was obliged to wait for three hours before the shooting board officers-a man and a woman, both youngish and expressionless-took him into an interview room. With a nod and a grunt, they sat him where suspects usually sat, so that he felt like a suspect and almost wanted to add his mark to the scuffs, scratches and graffiti on the tabletop.

  ‘You want to ask me about the shooting of Nick Jarrett?’ he said, trying to keep his voice unconcerned and accommodating.

  The male officer, an inspector named Yeo, gave him a humourless smile. ‘Correct.’

  ‘I didn’t see what happened.’

  ‘We know that,’ said the female officer, a sergeant named Pullen. ‘But you were on the scene soon afterwards, you collected evidence, and took that evidence to the lab.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She, like Yeo, smiled without warmth or humour. ‘We were contacted by the lab. Apparently there were irregularities in regard to the way you collected the evidence.’

  Scobie swallowed.

  ‘Are you protecting Senior Sergeant Kellock and Sergeant van Alphen, DC Sutton?’

  Scobie shook his head mutely.

  ‘We understand that there’s a certain culture in this police station,’ said Pullen.

  ‘Not sure what you mean,’ Scobie said, his voice betraying his nerves. He was quaking. He’d never been in trouble before. He’d never done anything to warrant trouble. An unwelcome thought came to him that this was punishment for his displeasure with his wife and the feelings he’d had for Grace Duyker yesterday. Could God act so quickly?

  ‘Oh, I think you do,’ said Pullen. ‘A masculinist culture, arrogant, protective. Kellock and van Alphen are running their own little fiefdom, correct? Men like you do their bidding, protect them, cover up for them. A culture that cuts corners, that likes to get a result, whether lawfully or not.’

  The whiplash words were somehow worse coming from a woman, and maybe that was the point. ‘You’ve got it wrong,’ Scobie whispered. He wanted his wife’s cuddly arms around him, protective, forgiving.

  ‘Or maybe it was tunnel vision,’ said Yeo. ‘You went in looking for what you expected to find rather than what was there. You all hated Nick Jarrett, after all. I mean, he was scum, killed the son of one of your civilian clerks.’

  ‘I followed procedure,’ said Scobie stiffly.

  ‘I followed procedure, sir,’ said Yeo.

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Don’t make me laugh. Rather than call in bloodstain and GSR experts you gathe
red evidence and then released the scene before the techs could do their job properly. We lack separate, isolated tests for gunshot residue on Jarrett, van Alphen and Kellock, for example. Too late now. Thanks to your bull-in-a-china-shop methods, we can’t construct a narrative of what happened.’

  ‘Narrative’ was a new buzzword. Scobie felt a rare anger, but tried to look baffled, an expression he’d seen on the faces of the consummate liars he’d interrogated over the years.

  Pullen leaned forward. ‘What did you think you were doing, bundling everything together? Didn’t your training tell you about cross contamination?’

  Before Scobie could reply, Yeo hammered another question home to him. ‘And you let the crime-scene cleaners come in the very same morning. Why did you do that?’

  ‘I didn’t know they’d been ordered to clean up,’ Scobie protested. ‘The others must have arranged it.’

  ‘We’ve seen the paperwork,’ said Yeo. ‘Your name is on the requisition: Detective Constable Scobie Sutton. Look.’

  He showed Scobie a faxed form. ‘That’s not my signature,’ Scobie said.

  He swallowed and looked inwards, down long roads of fear and shame brought on by men like van Alphen and Kellock, and their schoolboy equivalents before that. He wanted to admit that he’d been intimidated. But he could picture the scorn and contempt the admission would bring. And he didn’t really mourn Nick Jarrett, he realised suddenly. But van Alphen and Kellock were dangerous. They’d killed a man, after all. So he did what most people did and played dumb.

  ‘We don’t know who was doing what, or where,’ said Pullen. ‘We can’t verify the sequence of events.’

  ‘No narrative,’ Scobie muttered.

  ‘Are you being smart?’

  Yeo leaned forward. ‘Why the hell didn’t you photograph the scene, at least?’

  ‘No camera,’ Scobie muttered. ‘Budget constraints.’

  Maybe he could lay all of this at the feet of Superintendent McQuarrie.

  ‘Oh, that’s convenient.’

  A camera, Scobie realised, would have frozen Nick Jarrett in time, his position on the floor, his gloved hands, the knife before it was moved from one hand to the other. Yeo and Pullen had a point, that was for sure.

  ‘Those cuts on Kellock’s forearm,’ said Pullen. ‘What’s that about, do you know?’

  Scobie frowned uncomprehendingly.

  ‘You didn’t notice the neat grouping? Three shallow, parallel, non-life-threatening cuts?’

  ‘Defence wounds,’ Scobie said.

  ‘Defence,’ scoffed Yeo. ‘I’d say van Alphen and Kellock have their defence pretty well sewn up, wouldn’t you, DC Sutton?’

  ‘Sir?’

  Pullen leaned forward. ‘We need your on-scene notes, DC Sutton. Now, please.’

  Scobie swallowed and looked at the wall behind her and said, in creaking tones, ‘I lost my notebook.’

  ‘Lost? Oh, that’s a good one.’

  They kept him there until early evening. When he came out he saw Pam Murphy in the corridor. He tried to rally. ‘I thought you were away on an intensive?’

  She was young and bright and healthy and he couldn’t stand it. ‘Just finished the first week. They let us go home for the weekend.’

  ‘Well, good luck.’

  ‘Thanks, Scobie.’

  Pam knocked on van Alphen’s door. ‘Got a moment, Sarge?’

  He waved her in. He looked deeply fatigued.

  ‘Heard about Nick Jarrett, Sarge,’ she said carefully.

  He scowled. ‘This afternoon I was chewed on by a couple of shooting board dogs.’

  ‘Everything okay?’

  He shrugged. ‘They’ve got nothing. Take a seat. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Thought I could pick your brains, Sarge.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘Interview techniques.’

  ‘Interview techniques?’ said van Alphen, faintly mocking.

  Normally Ellen Destry would have been Pam’s first choice, but Ellen was snowed under, looked distracted, even miserable. Plus, Pam felt a little guilty because she was leaving the uniformed branch and moving on to plainclothes. She didn’t want van Alphen, her old uniformed sergeant, to think that she was a snob, had no more time for her old colleagues.

  ‘I have to write an essay,’ she said. ‘Worth twenty-five per cent of my marks.’

  ‘Essay? You should be out cracking heads.’

  Pam smiled at him across his tidy, gleaming desk and said, ‘Well, you’re a dinosaur, Sarge. Me, I’m up-and-coming. Three thousand words by Monday morning, so I’ll have to work all weekend. Questioning witnesses versus questioning suspects. What to ask, what not to ask. Establishing mood and rhythm. Using psychology and body language. Etcetera, etcetera.’

  Van Alphen stared at her in disbelief. His expression said that he relied on experience and instinct, techniques learned on the job, not in a classroom, and which didn’t have fancy names like ‘body language’.

  ‘Murph, you know how to interrogate people,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen you in action. You’re good at it. Just write what you know.’

  ‘What I know doesn’t add up to three thousand words, Sarge.’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t have gone to detective school, should you?’ he said, with a sharkish smile.

  ‘Oh, thanks a lot,’ Pam said, getting to her feet.

  He waved her down. ‘Take it easy, take it easy. I realise you have to get on in this game, you don’t want to be stuck behind a desk or the wheel of a patrol car.’

  She gave him a sympathetic smile. He must hate being desk-bound. ‘You’ll be cleared for duty soon, Sarge, don’t worry.’

  His lean, saturnine face relaxed into what passed for a warm smile. ‘As you say, Murph, I’m a dinosaur. Three thousand words! Jesus.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Pam, who was accustomed to writing terse arrest reports, in which narrative flow, tone and even grammatical sentences were a handicap.

  ‘You said psychology. It’s all psychology.’

  Pam wrote the word on her pad and looked at him expectantly.

  ‘You’re interviewing a suspect,’ said van Alphen. ‘You want him or her at a disadvantage.’

  Pam nodded. She knew that but had never labelled it before. It was instinct. ‘How do you achieve that, Sarge?’

  ‘Little things, and you let them accumulate. For example, use of their first name, not their surname, helps to undermine them. The use of silence-let it build until they’re desperate to fill it. Fire a series of answers to unasked questions at them, your tone frankly disbelieving: “So you say you don’t know how the knife got under your mattress?” for example.’

  Pam scribbled to keep up.

  ‘You used the term “body language”, Murph. Terrible expression, but I guess it explains what one does in an interview room. You let your face and body show contempt, doubt, ridicule, sometimes sympathy. You get in their faces, pat them gently on the wrist, exchange scoffing looks with your partner, slam your palm down hard on the table, stuff like that.’

  All things Pam had done. ‘Sarge,’ she said dutifully.

  ‘And you vary your approach, keep them unsettled. Kind, then cruel.’

  ‘Sarge.’

  In the corridor outside, and in the nearby offices, were the sounds of voices, laughter, footsteps, doors slamming-familiar sounds that Pam badly missed. She glanced at her watch. She’d spend thirty more minutes with the sarge, then drive home and relax in the bath. ‘But what about their body language, Sarge?’

  ‘What about it?’

  Pam flicked back to her lecture notes. ‘If they have their legs together, ankles crossed and hands in their laps they’re protecting their genitals-fending off trouble, in other words.’

  ‘If you say so,’ scoffed van Alphen, rocking back in his chair and slamming one booted foot and then the other onto the top of his desk, giving her a wry look.

  Pam grinned. ‘If they touch their nose and lips, it means they’re stresse
d. There are many capillaries in the nose and lips. Blood rushes there…’

  Van Alphen drew his slender hands down his narrow cheeks comically.

  ‘Arms folded across the chest is another protective gesture- protecting the heart, concealing powerful emotions,’ Pam said.

  ‘A little book learning is a fine thing, Murph,’ van Alphen said. He paused. ‘On the subject of psychology: you need to find out what they want.’

  ‘Their “dominant need”,’ Pam said brightly. ‘Respect, safety, flattery, sympathy. One should stimulate or exaggerate this need, then finally offer to gratify it in return for a confession or co-operation.’

  ‘So why the fuck are you asking me all this?’ growled van Alphen, not unkindly.

  ‘It’s questioning techniques, Sarge. I know the psychology: I just need to know how to frame questions.’

  ‘But it’s all psychology,’ insisted van Alphen. ‘For example, if a suspect’s tired, you fire hard questions at him.’

  ‘The wording, Sarge.’

  ‘Apart from who, what, where, when and why?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right, try to get at motive. Ask things like: “Can you think of any reason why someone would want to kill him?” or “Did they argue over money?” or “Was she involved with another man?” Obvious, surely.’

  ‘Sarge.’

  ‘Psychology,’ insisted van Alphen. ‘Just when they think an interview is over-you’re going out the door, in fact-you turn back and hit them with what’s really on your mind. Or you ask a series of absurd, grotesque or mild questions to throw them off balance, then hit them with the million-dollar question. Or you give them back their answers twisted slightly, to see what corrections they make.’

  Pam scribbled, her head down, commas of hair brushing her jaw.

  ‘You throw them a series of quick questions requiring short, simple answers, then suddenly lob a difficult one at them, a trick question. Or they answer, but you look at them quizzically until they qualify it to fill the silence. It’s answers that matter, not questions. The absences in answers, their tone, and the specifics that can be challenged or disproved or that contradict other specifics.’