Whispering Death

by Garry Disher

  ‘What, like BO?’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘I didn’t smell anything, but he got all sweaty, you know, as he was…’

  They nodded.

  ‘Wait. Bad breath.’

  Since starting in the job, Challis had come to believe that rottenness of character often manifested itself physically. He doubted there was any science to support the notion, but believed it all the same. ‘From alcohol, drugs, bad teeth?’

  Holst shook her head miserably. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. You’re doing brilliantly. This won’t take much longer. I’m sure you want to see your parents.’

  Holst tossed in distress. ‘This will ruin them, my dad.’

  ‘I’m sure it won’t,’ said Pam.

  ‘What would you know?’

  Pam patted the skinny forearm. ‘You’re doing so well, Chloe. Let’s get all the details out of the way so you can rest. After the man overpowered you, I assume he took you to his car and—’

  ‘You assume wrong. He told me to drive.’

  Challis shifted from the wall. ‘His car, or yours?’

  ‘Mine.’

  ‘He left his car there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Challis hadn’t been told this. He’d assumed—and so had the others, apparently—that Holst had been abducted and raped in the culprit’s car. He smiled, held up a finger and said, ‘Murph?’

  ‘Boss.’

  ‘Give me a moment.’

  Challis stepped into the corridor, flipped open his phone and called John Tankard, who was with Scobie Sutton and a forensics team, searching the bushland clearing where Chloe Holst had first been seen. ‘Anything?’

  ‘We found the clearing, big rock in the centre, blood and tissue,’ Tankard said.

  ‘Got another job for you,’ Challis said, telling him about the cars. ‘Our guy probably dumped her, then drove back and swapped cars again, but can you get over there and check? If her car’s there, have it trucked to the lab.’

  ‘Will do,’ Tankard said. He paused. ‘This is not going to follow me, is it?’

  ‘No John, you’re in the clear. The man who took her claimed to be police. She was just reacting to your uniform.’

  ‘Thanks, boss.’

  Challis returned to the room. Nothing had changed: the space was sterile despite the air of distress, Pam Murphy was sitting in the chair beside the bed, holding Holst’s hand.

  ‘Sorry, Chloe, please go on,’ he said. ‘He told you to drive. Do you remember where?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was dark.’

  Pam asked, ‘Are you from the Peninsula?’

  Chloe Holst shook her head. ‘Not really. Moved down here with my mum and dad last year. Safety Beach. I don’t know the Western Port side very well.’

  ‘Did he take you to a beach, a park, a house? What can you remember?’

  ‘Just along some dirt roads. Kind of farm smells.’

  ‘Was he alone? You didn’t meet up with anyone else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he phone anyone?’

  ‘He hardly talked at all. Kind of grunted what he wanted me to do. Except he got really angry when I started crying, like he hated it, told me to shut up and punched me in the side of the head.’

  ‘Edgy? Unstable?’

  ‘Like he was on drugs,’ Chloe Holst said, then shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she wailed, ‘how would I know?’

  Pam clasped her hand, waiting, and asked gently: ‘He made you take your clothes off?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Burnt, thought Challis, dumped. Unless he was a souvenir hunter. ‘Where did he rape you?’

  ‘Where do you think? My mouth, my vagina, my—’

  ‘I mean, in the car? On the ground?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘What did you do or say?’

  ‘I begged him at first, then when I tried to bite him he hit me really hard. It really, really hurt.’

  Pam said gently, ‘I was called to an incident earlier this afternoon, someone reported seeing a body in a clearing a couple of kilometres from where we rescued you.’

  ‘We were on this dirt road. He told me to get out and I saw these trees and I just ran,’ Holst said. ‘It was dark and I fell over a stump or something and hit my head.’

  Pam clasped Chloe’s forearm. There was a school of thought that you shouldn’t get close to a victim, shouldn’t try to share the burden, because you couldn’t. Pam worked best when she didn’t take that notion too far. ‘We’ve tested for fluids. If he’s in the data base we’ll—’

  ‘He used a condom.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘This guy’s like really organised. You know what he did when he was finished? Washed me all over with this wet cloth, then combed my hair and pubes, then ran this kind of sticky roller thing all over me. Like some kind of super CSI freak or something.’

  A part of Hal Challis calculated the odds of finding any forensic evidence. Another began to measure the mind of the man responsible. ‘How did he carry all these items?’

  ‘Backpack.’

  ‘Colour? Brand?’

  She shrugged. ‘A daypack. Really organised.’

  ‘Have you been aware of any unwanted attention lately?’ Challis asked. ‘At work, or where you live? Anyone following you, accosting you in the supermarket, that kind of thing? Phone hang-ups, heavy breathing, stuff left on your doorstep?’

  A miserable head shake. ‘No.’

  ‘Boyfriend trouble?’

  She stared at her hands. ‘Don’t have a boyfriend.’

  ‘Any unwanted advances? Friend or work colleague who won’t take no for an answer?’

  ‘Nothing like that.’

  Pam squeezed her forearm again, then turned to Challis with a question on her face. Challis stepped away from the wall. ‘Chloe, we’ll leave you in peace now. You’ve been a great help, very observant.’

  She was weeping. ‘For what good it’ll do. I don’t know what he looks like, and the way he cleaned up afterwards…’

  Pam Murphy stood, gave the forearm a last pat. ‘There’s always something a guy like this overlooks. We’ll get him.’

  That’s how Challis and Murphy were going to leave it, rote parting words, said thousands of times over the years by thousands of police officers. But Chloe Holst said, ‘Do you think it was my fault?’

  Pam sat again, clasped the limp hand, and said feelingly, ‘Never in a million years, Chloe. Don’t ever let yourself think that. It was his fault entirely.’

  The young woman looked away as if she didn’t believe it. ‘He said I made it easy for him, if I’d been more security conscious it wouldn’t have happened.’

  7

  And so Challis was not feeling receptive to the newspaper reporter who ambushed him in the hospital car park.

  ‘I can’t comment on that.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Inspector. If I write that a senior officer refused to confirm or deny that the suspect in an alleged abduction and rape is a policeman, everyone’s going to know it’s a cop.’

  ‘Not an alleged abduction and rape,’ snarled Challis. ‘The real deal.’

  The reporter had given his name as Jack Porteous, of the News-Pictorial. A small weekly newspaper—local Waterloo, Mornington, Cranbourne and Frankston editions—owned by a national media outfit. Challis had never spoken to the man before. All he wanted to do was get in his car—parked beside Pam Murphy’s Subaru—and return to the police station. He’d already made a mental checklist: request assistance from the sex crimes unit at police headquarters; obtain a list of local offenders, another of stolen police uniforms and ID; ask for preliminary forensics from the nature reserve and the victim herself; find the rapist’s car…

  ‘Okay,’ Porteous said, ‘I’ll drop the “alleged”. Can you at least tell me anything about the victim? The state of her injuries, her mental state, her—’

&n
bsp; ‘You’re not serious,’ Challis said.

  In the act of unlocking the Triumph, he turned to reassess the man.

  Jack Porteous was about sixty, with a grizzled face, limp grey hair, a tight little drinker’s belly, deep parenthetical lines on either side of a truculent mouth. A time-worn man, dignified by his clothing: pressed trousers, crisp shirt, fashionable jacket, glossy black shoes. An old hand, Challis thought. If Porteous had been pensioned off or sought a sea-change after years of toil at one of the big dailies, he was unlikely to be satisfied with covering the Under 15s netball final. He tried a more diplomatic tack.

  ‘All I can say is, a young woman was brutally abducted and sexually assaulted. We’ve only just come on board. We have no clear suspect at this stage. Meanwhile, the investigation will be rigorous, without fear or favour.’

  ‘So, it was a cop.’

  ‘If you’re relying on hospital porters and ambulance officers for your information, you might want to rethink your methods.’

  Porteous held up a warding-off palm. ‘Whoa. That’s why I’m asking you.’

  Challis unlocked his car, strapped himself in, lowered the window. ‘We’ll issue a statement when we know more.’

  The reporter shrugged, defeated. ‘Suit yourself.’

  Challis ground the starter. The engine turned sluggishly. He tried again.

  ‘Sounds like your battery’s on the way out.’

  Challis wasn’t interested in the reporter’s diagnosis. He wanted Porteous to leave. He wanted Pam Murphy to materialise: Murph would have a set of jumper leads in her car.

  He sat there.

  Porteous wasn’t finished. ‘I’d have thought, inspector level, you’d be provided with an official car and your own driver.’

  It was not said to bait Challis, but it was a last straw. Challis got out, leaned his rump on the Triumph.

  ‘I’m going to take your remark seriously.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Porteous, wary but game for anything.

  ‘You wonder why I’m using my old bomb for police work? I’ll tell you. We’re under-resourced. You look at my unit, CIU: there’s only one serviceable unmarked car available to us at present, and if we didn’t use our own cars a lot of the time we’d never get to a crime scene at all. It’s just as bad for uniformed police. Some nights there’s only one marked patrol car or divisional van on the road. Lack of vehicles and manpower. Police resources are pathetic, no matter what kind of spin the government or force hierarchy put on it.’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘So far this month I’ve spent over eighty dollars of my own money on police gear—camera batteries, paper for the photocopier, you name it.’

  Porteous was scribbling, Challis too electric to care.

  ‘Waterloo has the lowest ratio of police per population in Victoria, so if you’re burgled or assaulted, you’d better come and talk to us about it—because we haven’t the manpower or resources to come to you. Proactive policing is a thing of the past. Front-line hours have fallen by eighteen per cent; violent crimes have risen by nearly fifty. There’s a population explosion on the Peninsula, for Christ’s sake, complicated by the financial crisis, and they want to strip us of money and manpower?’

  ‘There’s talk of part-time hours for certain police stations,’ said Porteous.

  Challis knew he was being prompted, and gave a sharkish grin. ‘The cutting edge of police work. It’s ten o’clock at night, you’re hurt, frightened, running for your life, too poor to own a mobile phone, there’s no public phone, and outside the darkened doors of the police station is a button to press that plays a recorded message to dial triple zero.’ He had a head of steam up now.

  ‘Sick leave is at an all-time high, morale is at an all-time low, too many of us are on stress leave. Our computer systems are from the last century. We don’t fight or investigate crime, we file paperwork.’

  ‘Makes it hard.’

  ‘Meanwhile, every March, the state government spends fifty million to stage a car race that no one watches.’

  They stared at each other. ‘I don’t know what it’s like in the newspaper game,’ Challis said, ‘but I can see police officers of the future signing on as sub-contractors, providing their own handguns, cuffs, vehicles and radios, responsible for their own superannuation, health plans and holiday pay. Words like “mission statement” will be used a lot.’

  ‘And crime?’

  ‘Crime prospers,’ Challis said.

  He got his car started and returned to the CIU office on the first floor of the police station, wondering what he’d just done.

  Headlines next Tuesday, irate calls from Superintendent McQuarrie, disciplinary action?

  Or would Porteous count the rape as the juicier story?

  He reached for the phone. The head of sex crimes said, ‘We’re pretty stretched, Inspector. I can give you one officer, Monday morning.’

  Challis had to be content with that. The Peninsula would have its own sex crimes unit when Ellen returned from her study tour, and in the meantime CIU would have to muddle along. He entered the open plan CIU office and left a note on Scobie Sutton’s desk, asking him to compile lists of local sex offenders, and police who’d reported the loss or theft of their ID or uniforms.

  He returned to his office, swivelled in his chair. The clutter was comforting around him: files and folders on the floor and cabinets, and his shelves leaning this way and that with bound regulations, trial transcripts, a book called Written on the Skin by Liz Porter, and a greasy repair manual for the Triumph.

  He tried to picture the rapist cop. It wasn’t unknown for policemen to ‘rescue’ intoxicated women from pubs and parties and rape them in their homes, or coerce sexual favours in return for tearing up a speeding ticket. But abduction?

  He grimaced: blame it on the job? Staff shortages, doubling up of duties, no public appreciation, and finally someone cracked?

  That reminded him: Murph had said she’d e-mailed him a list of her vehicle expenses. He nudged his computer mouse. The monitor blinked into life, showing several new e-mails. Most he deleted, but printed Pam’s and one from Force Command, advising all districts to be on the lookout for a holdup man. Caucasian, aged in his forties, suspected of robbing banks and credit unions along a coastal stretch of south-eastern New South Wales and now believed to be operating across the border in north-eastern Victoria, and, more recently, Gippsland.

  He swung in his chair, looked at his watch. Murphy should be back from the hospital soon. He pondered her a little. She seemed off her game lately, a little vague and flat, given to brief, strange gestures, a kind of stiffening and staring into space.

  But she was turning into a good detective. Unlike Sutton. Scobie was too credulous to be a good detective, without capacity to understand wickedness. He could read bank records and CCTV footage, but not people.

  A voice leaning against his doorjamb said, ‘Miles away, boss.’

  Challis swung his feet off the desk, his chair protesting. ‘Always thinking, Murph, you know that.’

  ‘My mentor,’ Pam Murphy said drily.

  ‘How’s Chloe?’

  ‘Her parents are with her, and they’ve brought in a counsellor.’

  Challis nodded. ‘Check this out.’ He handed her the bank-robber e-mail and watched her face as she read it.

  ‘Are we worried, boss?’

  ‘Us? The Waterloo CIU?’

  ‘Well, when you put it like that…’

  Challis gave her a tired smile. ‘Meanwhile we’d better warn the local banks, so if you could take a wander down the street…’ ‘Sure.’

  ‘Then we’ll take a drive out to the Chicory Kiln.’

  8

  Grace had taken her time driving to Waterloo. Lunch first, at a bistro in the bayside suburb of St Kilda. Some window-shopping and then a stroll along the beach, letting the sun seep into her bones. Bright sunlight today, feathered by scudding clouds, a brisk wind that had her wrapping her arms around her breasts.

/>   And so it was mid-afternoon before she was on the road again, glimpsing choppy waters whenever she glanced along the little side streets that laddered the Nepean Highway. Reaching Frankston, she turned left at a beer barn and made her way south-east in stages to the outskirts of Baxter and down into Somerville.

  This was a semi-rural world of boutique horticulture, native and indigenous plant nurseries, New Age healers and tradesmen who preferred life on a couple of hectares to life in a town. Vigorous spring grasses and fruit trees, flowering wattle and scabby pines. Dams, post-and-rail fences and horse yards. Signs advertising eggs, horse manure and garage sales. Delivery vans, family station wagons, a Gribbles pathology car, farm dogs braced on the trays of Holden utes. Grace drove sedately. She’d never been booked for any offence in all of her years of driving, and didn’t want to come to the attention of the unmarked highway patrol car—a high-speed blue Holden—that she’d seen lurking around this part of the Peninsula during the past year.

  Rather than head down through Tyabb she took Eramosa Road to the Waterloo road, the long way around but this was habit and instinct, too. She didn’t see the unmarked pursuit car but along a stretch of farmland she did see a police car parked inside an elaborate new gateway, a beefy-looking uniformed cop and a scarecrow in plain clothes standing in contemplation of the words I’M COMPENSATING FOR A SMALL DICK that were spray painted across the face of a concreted column. Grace slowed the car and gawked, as anyone would, and pulled away again.

  As she neared Waterloo, the landscape grew a little untidier: lower incomes, some light industry, gorse and blackberry jungles on vacant lots, a couple of abandoned businesses. Waterloo’s Cheapest Cars, nylon flags snapping on a line that stretched from an unpainted shed to a power pole. But, closer in, the town was more prosperous, boasting five banks.

  One bank in particular. Grace had come to Waterloo for her safe-deposit box. She had other banks and bank accounts throughout the country, escape funds of a few thousand dollars in each, but only one safe-deposit box. She knew there was usually no call for rural banks to supply these boxes. Local businesses were small, individuals’ tastes modest. The idea of spending $50,000 on a necklace, let alone wearing it to the Football Club Annual Ball, was absurd. If a farmer here, or a shopkeeper there, did own a $100,000 bearer bond or a handful of Krugerrands, it was considered a canny investment and stored in a city bank or a lawyer’s office safe.