by Garry Disher
Smoke.
The phone rang.
‘Pam? Ellen Destry. I’ll collect you in five minutes.’
Tessa Kane was in Challis’s bed this time, and she couldn’t sleep and wanted to go home. Now she knew what it had been like for him, that first time, when he’d tried to slip away from her bed. She glanced at him. He was wide awake, too. They didn’t want to make love again. They disliked each other, just at that moment. They didn’t want to be together. They wanted daylight and to be alone. These were temporary feelings, and would pass, but right now they were crippling.
‘Go, if you want to.’
‘I think I might.’ She began to dress.
‘I’ll make you a cup of tea.’
‘Hal, it’s two o’clock in the morning.’
‘You’ve a thirty minute drive ahead of you.’
‘No tea, thanks. Thanks for the thought.’
As she dressed, he said, ‘No more letters from our man?’
She looked for an earring. ‘I’d tell you if there were.’
He nodded. ‘What about Julian Bastian? Has there been any pressure on you to drop the story?’
‘Pressure from whom?’
‘Lady Bastian. Her friends in high places.’
She paused to stare at him. ‘Like McQuarrie? Are you siding with him now?’
‘Christ no,’ he said. ‘I think the charges should be reinstated against the little prick.’
She laughed. ‘Can I quote you?’
First his mobile rang, then hers.
A fire.
Jolic swooned to see the flames. His skin tingled. He was breathless. A strange pleasurable electric heat started in his groin and spread upwards to his throat. He wanted badly to rut. Holding the hose on the CFA firetruck, Jolic was a vengeful rutting king.
John Tankard was on Myers Road, his patrol car parked crosswise, emergency lights flashing in the darkness. There was not much normal traffic at this time of night, but an increase in the ghouls and gawkers, attracted by the sirens, the Emergency Services helicopter, the evacuation warning for householders south of Myers Road. A Triumph came barrelling toward him. He waved his torch and held his gloved hand high to stop it, indicating Quarterhorse Lane, the detour that would take all traffic away from the fire. But it was bloody Challis. He had Tessa Kane with him.
‘Sorry, Inspector. Go on through.’
‘Thanks, constable.’
The editor leaned across Challis. ‘How bad is it, John?’
‘One house destroyed-that’s where it started. It spread quickly, jumped the road into the nature reserve.’ He looked up, into the red-glow sky. ‘This wind doesn’t help.’
‘Any casualties?’
‘Some horses had to be moved.’
‘Whose house got destroyed?’
Tankard looked to Challis for guidance. Challis said, ‘It’s all right. She has to know sometime, and so do I.’
‘We don’t know who lives there, sir. A woman by herself, according to the neighbours.’
‘Is she all right?’
‘No sign of her, sir.’
The wind seemed to shift then, and shift again. It was hot on their faces and heavy with smoke. Ash alighted on the back of Tankard’s glove. He brushed it away, smearing the white leather. Funny, he could hear the danger-the wind, the flames? — but he couldn’t see anything but a glow in the distance.
‘Sir, I don’t know how dangerous it is in there. We’re directing traffic along the lane here. That’s where the fire started, but it’s safe there now.’
Challis pulled the automatic stick into Drive. ‘We need to go in, John.’
Tankard thought: Don’t call me John, you prick.
A part of Ellen Destry felt betrayed by the sense of exhilaration and competence-edged-with-risk that the fire seemed to engender in everyone. They were all equals, men and women, cops and civilians. They worked well together. They faced the flames and beat them back. They communicated efficiently. There were no shirkers. The lights, the trucks, the dirty men and women in their yellow emergency gear, the roaring hot wind, the red coals and leaping flames. Once or twice gum trees exploded above their heads. She found herself helping Pam Murphy to pass out cups of tea, bind a couple of burnt hands, move vehicles and stock away from the path of the fire, fetch an old woman’s cat. A part of her could understand the sentimentality of newspaper accounts of community disasters, when firefighters, policemen, ambulance workers and ordinary civilians pulled together.
But another side of her recognised that it was also essentially a blokey bonding exercise. Men embraced men and the women were honorary mates.
Then she learned that she had detective work to do.
Challis left Tessa Kane at the community refuge, where one of her photographers and two of her journos were already interviewing people, then drove carefully along Quarterhorse Lane to the house where the fire had started. The air was smoky and hot. Smouldering fence posts marked a route between an untouched orchard on one side of the road and ashy black earth on the other. He passed beneath a burning tree. The odd thing was, as he was turning into the driveway of the destroyed house, he saw signs of an earlier fire: a scorched pine tree. He looked closer. A small, newish, metal mailbox on a length of iron pipe.
He drove in. Ellen Destry was already there, staring at what had once been a weatherboard farmhouse and was now a flattened patch of charred wood and twisted, blackened roofing iron. A chimney stood forlornly at one end of the ruin. It was apparent to Challis that the fire had started at the house. The wind had then carried sparks to the grassy hill beyond it, and a firefront had developed, sweeping south toward the roadside gums on Myers Road, leaping it and taking hold in the nature reserve. Well, there wasn’t much nature there any more, but the fire had been contained before it reached the dozen or so houses south of the reserve.
Suddenly Ellen was doubled over, coughing and spitting. ‘You okay?’
She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. ‘I’ve been breathing thick smoke for the past two hours.’
A length of roof crashed behind them. Kees van Alphen, kicking and tugging.
‘Leave it, Van. Wait for the fire inspector.’
‘A woman lived here, sir.’
‘If she was home, she didn’t survive this,’ Challis said.
Van Alphen was there when they found her body-or what remained of it. The ruin bewildered him. All of his senses were turned around. Only the blackened refrigerator and the stainless steel kitchen sink told him exactly where her body lay in relation to the rest of the house.
And the flames had got her. It wasn’t smoke inhalation. If it had been smoke inhalation he might have touched her, kissed her, even, for she’d have been recognisable, but he wasn’t saying goodbye to this fire-wracked, shrivelled twist of charred meat.
Nineteen
Daybreak, Wednesday, 3 January. Challis hadn’t been long at the burnt house before the fire inspector arrived and talked him through it.
‘It’s my belief the seat of the fire is here, at the kitchen stove. A hot, dry night, hot northerly wind outside, plenty of natural accelerants like cooking oil, cardboard food packets, wooden wall cabinets. Then weatherboard external walls, wooden roofing beams.’
He pointed. ‘See that? Open window, creating a draught.’
Challis said, ‘How do you know it’s the stove?’
‘Look.’
Challis looked. The stove top was as black and twisted as anything else in the ruin.
‘See that? That’s the remains of a saucepan, a chip fryer. That’s the seat of your fire.’
Challis went away wondering why the victim had been cooking on such a hot night, and why she’d been cooking so late at night.
Ellen Destry made it a point always to switch off when she was at work. Switch off the things that had happened earlier, at home, in the bedroom or around the kitchen table.
She rang the post office. The dead woman was called Clara Macris. Originally from
New Zealand, the postmaster thought, judging by the accent.
That’s as far as Ellen got. She could feel the badness creeping up on her: the abductions, the woman burning to death. She looked out of the incident room window and there was Rhys Hartnett, effortlessly lifting and measuring, whistling even, as he worked, while at home she had a husband who was getting fat because he drank and sat in a Traffic Division car all day, jealous because he sensed that she felt something for Rhys, who’d been around to the house three times now, measuring and planning, and resentful because she earned more than he did.
She’d said, as she’d headed out to her car after breakfast, ‘I’ll be late tonight. I’ll get myself something to eat.’
The kitchen door opened on to the carport. In the early days, Alan would have walked her to it and kissed her goodbye. Now he couldn’t even be bothered to look up at her. ‘Whatever.’
Morning light streamed into the kitchen, giving the room a falsely homely look. Larrayne was still in bed. Alan was reading the Herald Sun and forking eggs and bacon into his mouth. His moustache glistened. After each mouthful he patted it dry. Ellen stood in the doorway, watching for a moment, jingling her keys. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
He looked up. ‘What’s what supposed to mean?’
‘You said “whatever”. What do you mean by that?’
He shrugged, went back to his breakfast. ‘Doesn’t mean anything. You’ll be late tonight, you’ll get yourself something to eat, me and Larrayne will have to fare for ourselves again, so what’s new? The story of this marriage.’
She almost went back to the chair opposite his. ‘The story of every police marriage. We knew that when we started. Mature adults know how to work around that.’
He belched, a deliberate liquid sound of contempt. ‘Mature? What a joke.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You go around this house like you’re on heat, like you’re a teenager whose tits have been squeezed for the first time.’
‘Well, if someone’s squeezing them, it sure as hell isn’t you,’ she’d said, and she’d slammed out of the house.
Now she picked up the phone. A long shot, but she was calling the New Zealand police. It would be different if Alan had something concrete to be jealous about, but her lunch with Rhys Hartnett hadn’t developed into anything. Rhys himself had seemed-not evasive, exactly, but conscious of the proprieties of getting involved with a married woman, especially one who was a cop. The dial tone went on and on. As for Larrayne, her judgment of Rhys was brief and to the point. ‘He’s a creep, mum, and a sleazebag.’
‘Hal, I’m cutting at eleven,’ the pathologist said.
‘Beautifully put, Freya.’
‘You know me.’
‘Eleven o’clock. I’ll be there.’
The region’s autopsies were carried out in a small room attached to Peninsula General Hospital in Mornington. When Challis arrived, Freya Berg had a student with her in the autopsy room, a young woman. Challis stood back, a handkerchief smeared with Vicks under his nose, and observed.
White tiles, pipes, hoses, a constant trickle of water. The pathologist and her assistant wore green rubber aprons and overshoes, and goggles waiting around their necks to protect their eyes against the bone chips and blood thrown up by the electric saw. The table had a perforated, channelled stainless-steel top, pipes at each corner running down to drains in the industrial-grade linoleum floor. A hose dribbled water as Freya Berg cut into the body. Above her, dazzle-free lamps. Extractor fans hummed in the ceiling, ready to take away the stupefying odour of the stomach contents and internal organs.
Freya said:
‘Most fire victims die of smoke inhalation. Their bodies will be intact and recognisable, although some may reveal surface burns, particularly to the hands and face. In these instances the evidence is all there in the lungs. If there is little smoke residue in the lungs, then look for another obvious cause, such as failure of the heart. The most surprising subjects may succumb to heart failure under extreme stress. But this-this one’s, shall we say, been cooked.’
Together Freya and her assistant began to turn the body on the cutting table. Two patches of oily white colour in the blackness of the upper arm and the hip stopped them.
The assistant photographed the black flank of the body, and then Freya teased the fabric away with tweezers. ‘Ah. Cotton, I believe. A nightdress? T-shirt? She was lying on her side when the flames finally reached her.’
They completed turning the body over. Freya began to cut.
The student assistant grew agitated. ‘Epidural haemorrhage, Dr Berg,’ she said. ‘Bone fractures. Like she’s been beaten up.’
The pathologist smiled tolerantly. ‘Looks like it, doesn’t it? But don’t jump to conclusions. Haemorrhaging and bone fractures are one result of extreme heat.’
Challis stepped forward, still holding the Vicks under his nose. ‘So you’re saying she simply burnt to death.’
‘Preliminary finding only, Hal. I haven’t finished yet.’
‘I have,’ Challis said, and he pushed through the door to where the air was breathable.
Boyd had come to her in the early hours of the morning, smelling of soot and sweat and smoke, with a kind of snarling hunger for her body. ‘We fucked like rabbits.’ It was a phrase from twenty years ago, when she was a student, and each new affair started like that, hot and greedy, so you barely paused for breath. She hadn’t thought she’d ever find that level of intensity again.
But now it was lunchtime and she had clients to see. Boyd lay sprawled on his stomach. He looked beautiful-if streaked with soot. A nice neat backside, nice legs and a tapering back, but God, the smell-stale sweat, smoke and cum and her own contribution. She’d had to scrub herself in the shower. He’d be gone when she got back tonight. She’d have to wash the sheets and pillowcases and air the house. She had a beautiful house, and the clash between it and what Boyd Jolic represented never failed to puzzle and excite her.
Pam Murphy found the Tank in the canteen. ‘I’ve just seen van Alphen. He wants us to doorknock Quarterhorse Lane. Seems no-one knows anything about the woman who got burnt last night.’
Tankard forked rice into his mouth and chewed consideringly. ‘But Van knows her.’
‘Does he?’
‘Yeah. He went round there a few times. Her mailbox got burnt. He knows her.’
‘There’s knowing and there’s knowing.’
‘Oh, very deep, Murph. You must come from a family of brains or something.’
‘Look, the fact that van Alphen saw her when her mailbox got burnt doesn’t mean he knows where she came from or who her family is. That’s what we have to find out.’
Tankard scraped up the dregs from his plate. ‘I’m sure you’re right.’
Pam drove. Beside her, Tankard was racked with yawns.
‘I was directing traffic last night. Didn’t even go home. Showered and changed at the station. God I’m buggered.’
And I’m not, Pam thought. I worked through the night too, but that doesn’t count. ‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘Was it accidental?’
Tankard shrugged. ‘Couldn’t say. They reckon it started in the kitchen.’
A short time later, as they turned into Quarterhorse Lane, Pam leaned forward to stare and said, ‘What’s going on?’
At least a dozen cars were parked along the fenceline on both sides of Quarterhorse Lane, restricting traffic to one narrow strip of corrugated, potholed dirt.
‘Gawkers,’ said Tankard contemptuously. ‘Ghouls.’
As they approached the ruin, they saw people with cameras. Twice, at least, Pam thought, their van was photographed as it passed along the avenue of cars and turned into the driveway of the burnt house. Tankard wound down his window and shouted, ‘Haven’t you people got anything better to do?’
‘It’s a free country.’
Pam wound down her window. ‘Move along please, or you’ll be arrested for obstr
uction.’
‘Police harassment.’
‘Yeah, I love you too,’ Pam muttered, following the driveway between small scorched cypress bushes. ‘God, they’re in here, too.’
Two women were aiming their cameras at a CFA volunteer, who was wearing his full fire-fighting kit. He was grinning, his overalls a streak of vivid yellow against the charred beams and blackened roofing iron.
A man wearing fireproof boots, grey trousers, a white shirt and a hardhat stepped out of the ruin. He was carrying a clipboard. ‘It’s like the Bourke Street Mall here.’ He cast a contemptuous look at the CFA volunteer. ‘Bloody cowboys.’
Pam read the ID clipped to the man’s belt. He was a fire brigade inspector. ‘We’ll clear everyone away, sir.’
‘Thanks. I actually caught someone nicking souvenirs earlier. This woman, could be your old granny, nicking ceramic dolls from out of the ashes.’
‘Sir, did you find anything to tell us who the victim was? Any papers, deed box, wall safe, anything at all?’
‘Not a thing,’ the fire inspector said.
Going home from work on his trailbike, bumping down Quarterhorse Lane at two o’clock in the arvo for a quick gawk at the house that got burnt, gave Danny an idea. All those cars, all those people with nothing better to do, people he knew… Well, if they were here, looking at the burnt house, they weren’t home in their own houses, now, were they?
‘Was that young Danny Holsinger?’
‘It was.’
‘Up to no good.’
