Blood Moon ic-5

by Garry Disher

  ‘Sorry, who are we talking about?’

  Irritation from Murphy, very faint. ‘Caz Moon, Sarge. Manages the surf shop in High Street.’

  ‘Got you.’

  Ellen couldn’t afford to zone out. She gripped the steering wheel as if that might help her to concentrate. ‘You’re saying she got him back by doping him and leaving him naked on the beach with lipsticked balls?’ The image struck her properly then, and she laughed.

  Pam laughed.

  ‘Did he name her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you can’t prove any of this. You haven’t got enough to question her, let alone arrest her.’

  ‘Not her, Sarge, him. I want to put him away. That sexual assault last Saturday night-I’m betting it was down to him.’

  They sat quietly as the road unwound through farmland and then between an industrial park and a new housing estate on the outskirts of Frankston. Ellen slowed: a list of the park’s tenants listed ‘Delaney Demolition, Patrick Delaney, prop.’ A minute later they’d parked outside a nondescript building: prefabricated cement walls, aluminium windows, shrubs struggling to survive in sunbaked bark chip garden beds. There was a chain link fence behind the building, crammed with heavy trucks and dozers, dump bins, and individual piles of recyclable doors, window frames, bricks, baths, stoves, tiles, corrugated iron roofing sheets and fireplace surrounds.

  There was no receptionist, only Delaney peering over half-lens spectacles at a keyboard, poking a key, checking the monitor, and cursing. He looked up with relief. ‘What can I do you for, ladies?’

  He was solid, his rolled back sleeves revealing decades of sun damage and a glimpse of skin as white as ivory. He wore a check shirt and jeans, grey hair showing at his throat. His job was to break things, and he looked competent to do it, but he also looked genial and grandfatherly. The pages torn from calendars and stuck to the walls were of fishing boats and racing cars. Ellen showed her ID and introduced Pam Murphy.

  ‘Planning East’s infringement officer was murdered late on Wednesday afternoon. We believe you encountered her earlier that day.’

  ‘Whoa,’ said Delaney, putting up his hands. Then he frowned in concentration, casting his mind back. His face cleared. ‘That old joint down in Penzance Beach?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She arrived just as we were finishing. Spitting chips, but what could I do? I was hired to do a job. The permit to demolish was valid.’

  ‘Was she angry with you, specifically?’

  ‘I guess so. Because I was there, if you know what I mean. But like I told her, I was hired to do a job, it was a legitimate job, just as hers was a legitimate job. You’re saying she’s dead?’

  ‘Murdered.’

  ‘The same day I saw her?’

  ‘Yes, so I do have to ask you, Mr Delaney, did you see her again?’

  ‘Nup. We had another job to go to, fibro farmhouse near Baxter. My boys are there now.’

  Pam spoke. She said, ‘Fibro? So there’s asbestos in it?’

  Delaney regarded her calmly, a half smile creasing the edge of his mouth. ‘All legit. I have a permit to handle asbestos and my guys are all suited up in bio-hazard gear, all right?’

  Ellen recognised Pam’s tactic, but also recognised that it hadn’t got them anywhere. ‘Who hired you to demolish the house in Penzance Beach?’

  Delaney cocked his head at her. ‘The guy who bought the site.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Hugh Ebeling.’

  ‘How much notice did he give you?’

  ‘He rang me the night before.’

  ‘So a rush job.’

  ‘Yes. He tried calling several demolition firms, but no one could do the job there and then, there’s so much work on at the moment. Then he called me and got lucky. I had a spare crew and a spare few hours between jobs.’

  ‘Why the urgency, did he say?’

  Delaney shifted his massive form uncomfortably. ‘Said he had builders lined up to put in a cement slab before Christmas.’

  ‘You believed him?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘But?’

  Delaney coughed delicately. ‘But the planning lady, the one who got murdered, told me an application had been made to preserve the existing building. I swear I didn’t know that. As far as I knew, the guy had a permit to demolish and there was no preservation order.’

  Ellen nodded. ‘No one’s blaming you,’ she said.

  ‘It feels like it. I don’t want no one taking me to court.’

  ‘There was no preservation order,’ Ellen said. ‘There was an application, that’s all. You’re in the clear.’

  ‘Legally, in the clear,’ Pam butted in. ‘Not morally. That was a lovely old house.’

  ‘Pam,’ Ellen said.

  ‘He doesn’t even recognise me, Sarge,’ Pam said. She fronted up to him. ‘Do you, eh?’

  Delaney peered at her uncertainly. His face cleared. ‘You were there.’

  Ellen cut in. ‘Do you think the man who hired you knew that a protection order might be issued?’

  ‘Wouldn’t know,’ said Delaney. He looked uncomfortable again. ‘But the planning lady reckoned someone had tipped him off

  ‘She told you that?’

  ‘Yes. She was that mad about it.’

  ‘Did she say who?’

  Delaney shrugged. ‘None of my business. But it would have to be someone in the know, right?’

  ‘Someone in the planning department?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘I need to see the job order,’ Ellen said.

  Delaney fished it out of a tray on his desk. Ellen copied down Hugh Ebeling’s address and telephone numbers, and returned to the car with Pam Murphy. She didn’t say anything to Pam. What right did she have to rebuke her? Pam had justice and a high moral sense on her side. Pam wasn’t a sneak thief.

  Settling behind the wheel, Ellen called Challis with an update. ‘Next stop, Ebeling and his wife?’

  ‘Yes. Collect me at the station and we’ll drive up together. Tell Pam to check on Carl Vernon and the residents’ committee.’

  ‘Will do.’

  She started the engine and eased the lever into Drive. At that moment, Pam’s mobile phone rang. Ellen drove slowly back to the freeway, half listening in on the conversation. ‘You’re kidding,’ Pam was saying. ‘Uh huh…uh huh…But not the sexual assault? Damn… okay, thanks.’

  She pocketed the phone and settled a complicated gaze on Ellen. ‘That was the lab.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I’d asked them to run Josh Brownlee’s DNA, thinking I’d get him on sexual assault…’

  Ellen gave her a crooked grin, acknowledging the initiative. And?’

  ‘No luck. But-and I guess you’re going to like this-he did leave that mucus trace on Lachlan Roe’s elbow.’

  Ellen felt lighter, some of the badness leaking away. ‘Then let’s go and pick him up,’ she said, stopping the car to call Challis with the change of plan.

  ****

  36

  But at the Sea Breeze Apartments they were told that Josh Brownlee had checked out.

  ‘After breakfast,’ the manager said, desultorily watering a row of rosebushes at the rear of the building. He wore a wife-beater singlet, tight shorts and a beer gut.

  ‘Damn,’ said Ellen.

  ‘Paid through till Sunday, too,’ the manager said.

  Pam, feeling nasty, said, ‘If you’d care to give me the refund, I’ll be sure he gets it.’

  The manager backed away agitatedly, cigarette bobbing amid the bristles around his mouth. ‘Can’t do it. Regulations.’

  Ellen fixed him with the lenses of her dark glasses. ‘Did he say where he was going?’

  ‘Dunno. Home?’

  The motel building and grounds were better tended than the manager. It was quiet here at the rear, cool, leafy the air smelling of freshly watered garden beds. Seagulls called out, and on the foreshore road at the front of the building a pair of jogger
s chuffed by but, otherwise, this corner of the world was asleep. Ellen glanced at all the curtained windows: schoolies inside, unlikely to stir before noon.

  ‘I have his home address,’ Pam said as they returned to the car. Here on the street the sun was beating on glass and metal, softening the tarry road.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Oliver’s Hill.’

  They drove off in the hot car, Ellen steering along the foreshore and out onto the Frankston road while Pam searched the street directory. Although Oliver’s Hill was part of the depressed bayside suburb of Frankston, it was above it literally and sociologically, with big houses that looked out over the bay and down on the struggle below. There was no underemployment on Oliver’s Hill, no fast-food obesity or here-today-and-gone-tomorrow kinds of commerce.

  ‘Should we call first?’

  Ellen shook her head. ‘We don’t want him to run again. We also don’t want the parents thinking about a lawyer before we get there.’

  At Somerville she headed down Eramosa Road to the freeway and then up and over a spine of hills to the Nepean Highway, which skirted Oliver’s Hill. Pam directed her to an exit before the road began its plummet into the main part of Frankston. As Ellen wound through the hillside streets she found herself gazing keenly at the houses on either side. Where had it come from, this sudden interest in where and how other people lived?

  Their destination was a 1960s brick house on three levels to account for the steepness of the block. Nothing redeemed it apart from its size and the vast blue haze or the bay’s curving waters, which could be glimpsed between a pair of ghost gums. ‘I don’t see his car,’ Pam said as they got out.

  There was only a white Holden, parked in a carport attached to the upper level of the house. No sign of Josh’s little boulevard racer in the driveway or on the street. They stepped through a small gate and along a flagstone path to a solid wooden door with a small triangle of gold glass set in it. Ellen couldn’t work the place out. This was the main entrance, but did it lead to the main living areas? In any other house, this would be the back door. She rang the bell. A woman dressed in paint-flecked sleeveless overalls and a singlet top opened the door. She took one look at them and seemed to know. ‘Is this about Josh?’

  There was paint over her hands, fine dots of it on her face and in her hair. ‘Yes.’

  She sagged briefly against the door. ‘I’m Sue Brownlee. You’d better come in. My husband’s here.’

  She took them along a corridor of partly-open bedroom doors to a kind of landing arranged with sofas and a flat screen TV, then down a flight of steps to a sitting room, which Ellen guessed made up the middle level of the house. The air was dense and heavy with paint odours. The man standing there was dressed in a fine suit, crisp white shirt, a blue and gold tie. He looked as wretched and tense as his wife but came forward decisively and stuck out his hand. ‘Clive Brownlee. Sue called me at work. I just got here.’

  All four of them were posed on a nondescript carpet. Ellen looked inquiringly at the man’s wife, who said, ‘I asked Clive to come home because Josh burst in all upset and then went out again. I wasn’t expecting him till Sunday.’ She paused. ‘I was painting the laundry. It’s my day off.’

  ‘Did he say where he was going?’

  ‘He acted so upset,’ Sue Brownlee said.

  They were frozen there, the parents apparently unable or unwilling to think clearly. ‘Perhaps if we all had a cup of tea?’ said Ellen gently.

  Relieved, the Brownlees led Pam and Ellen to the kitchen, which was like an annexe to the middle floor of the house. They sat on stools on either side of a high bench. Clive Brownlee filled the kettle, his wife rummaged for cups. The kitchen, like the other parts of the house that Ellen had walked through, was faintly worn and out of date, and she chided herself for assuming that Josh Brownlee came from a background like Zara Selkirk’s. All they had in common was the Landseer School. Zara Selkirk came from real money, the kind that was offhand, almost unthinking, while the Brownlees, it seemed, spent most of theirs on school fees and the mortgage. Theirs was the anxious, struggling face of the middle-class.

  ‘Did Josh say what he was upset about?’ Pam said.

  Sue Brownlee’s hand went to her neck, her long, paint-flecked fingers stroking it. ‘I asked what was wrong and he grabbed my neck and shook me. He said: “No one’s paid enough.” He scared me.’

  ‘Did he say who hasn’t paid, or what they haven’t paid for?’

  The parents exchanged a glance. ‘He takes drugs,’ Clive Brownlee said finally. ‘They affect his mood. He imagines things. He can get quite violent sometimes.’

  His wife said tensely, ‘Please, what’s he done?’

  Ellen ignored the question. ‘Did your son stay here long before going out again? Did he unpack, for example, or repack?’

  ‘What’s he done?’

  Ellen said evenly, ‘We wish to question him in connection with an assault.’

  ‘Oh, God. Who?’

  ‘A man named Lachlan Roe. It’s been in the news, but does the name mean anything to you other than that?’

  The Brownlees stared at each other, making connections. ‘The Landseer chaplain.’

  ‘Yes,’ Pam said. ‘Josh was a Landseer student?’

  ‘He finished last year. A day kid, not a boarder. He caught the school bus at the end of the street.’

  Clive Brownlee passed around cups of tea. Ellen had no intention of drinking hers but was merely marking time. ‘What was Josh’s involvement with Mr Roe?’

  Something deep and desolate lies behind this, she thought, watching the Brownlees. And perhaps not recently, given that Josh no longer attended the school.

  The father choked the words out. ‘Our other son, Michael, was also at Landseer. He committed suicide halfway through last year.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Ellen said.

  ‘It hit Josh hard. He feels responsible, you know, the older brother.’

  ‘Is that when he started taking drugs?’ Pam asked gently.

  Brownlee’s hands were resting palm up, empty and vulnerable on the table. He leaned toward her. ‘It’s as if he feels he should have made a better job of looking after Mike.’

  Pam glanced at Ellen. They got to their feet. ‘Was the chaplain involved in some way?’

  The parents, raw and baffled, failed to reply.

  ‘Do you know where Josh might have gone when he left here?’

  The parents exchanged a look. ‘When he’s cross with us he goes to his Uncle Ray’s.’

  ‘And where’s that?’

  ‘Ray trains horses. He’s got a place in Skye.’

  Farmland, northeast of Frankston. ‘Perhaps you could call him,’ Ellen suggested.

  There was a kitchen phone, but Josh’s father left the room, knocking into a chair and the doorjamb as his body began to let him down. Soon they could hear his voice in another part of the house. There was an exclamation, then silence, and then he was in the doorway, looking shocked.

  ‘He was there, but he left. He’s got Ray’s shotgun.’

  Pam said authoritatively to Ellen, ‘Let me drive, Sarge.’

  ****

  37

  ‘It could be argued,’ said Challis carefully, as though he didn’t fully agree himself, ‘that you have a motive for murder.’

  That roused them out of their sleepy disdain, Hugh Ebeling, Mia Ebeling, their lawyer, Marcus Delarue.

  ‘Inspector,’ drawled Delarue. ‘Watch your mouth.’

  He wore a charcoal grey suit, white shirt, silvery blue tie and highly polished shoes. He was the kind of lawyer who always looks clean and precise, as though groomed by valets before every appointment. He was also bloodless-pale hair, pale skin. He wasn’t the kind of lawyer who sails in the Whitsundays and stands around a racetrack. But his eyes were lawyers’ eyes, sharp and focused.

  ‘You tell him, Marcus,’ Hugh Ebeling said.

  They were in the developer’s Italianate house in Brighton, Ebeli
ng choosing his home over his downtown Melbourne office for this meeting with Challis. Perhaps he’s afraid that tongues will wag, Challis thought. Perhaps he wants to impress or intimidate me. Fat chance: in Challis’s view, seafront Brighton was for drug lords seeking respectability and judges and business tycoons who were losing it. Their wives liked to shop. Their children, abandoned at exclusive boarding schools, rose to take their places.

  ‘Perhaps you could both start by telling me your movements on Wednesday afternoon and evening,’ Challis said.

  He looked at them; he didn’t look at the lawyer. Hugh Ebeling wore casual trousers and a polo shirt, a tall, boyish-looking man with the confidence of a bullying prefect. He’d be a man for sailing and watching the horses run. Mia Ebeling was a leggy blonde, the blondness a little desiccated now that she was in her early forties. She wore tailored jeans, a scoop-necked shirt and an air of regal outrage, as though Challis had neglected to use the tradesmen’s entrance.

  ‘My clients were here in the city,’ Delarue said.

  Challis ignored him. ‘Mr Ebeling?’

  ‘In my office. Arrived as usual at seven-thirty and left at six.’

  ‘Did you go straight home after work?’

  ‘No, I met a client for drinks at the Windsor.’

  ‘I’ll need to confirm that.’

  There was a huge walnut coffee table on the vast Afghan rug between Challis and the others. Delarue plucked a sheet of paper from his briefcase and slid it across the table to Challis. ‘Names and phone numbers.’

  Challis nodded his thanks and said, ‘Mrs Ebeling?’

  Bored now, she said, ‘I was with my personal trainer all morning.’

  Of course you were, thought Challis. He caught a gleam in Delarue’s eyes. The guy knows what I’m thinking, Challis thought, wanting to share a grin with him.

  ‘And then?’

  She said, in a kind of fury, ‘I had lunch with a friend-’ here Delarue slid another name and phone number to Challis ‘-and we spent the afternoon in this very room, preparing for a charity auction on Saturday.’

  Her husband leaned his gangly trunk forward, ropy tanned forearms on his knees. ‘And after that my wife took a taxi to my office and we had dinner at a restaurant in Flinders Lane.’