Whispering Death

by Garry Disher

  She couldn’t see it, frankly. Pam Murphy was honest, open. Perhaps too trusting, but she was good at examining herself. She didn’t feel a scrap of guilt or shame or childish daring. She didn’t feel unmoored. No momentous shifting inside her head. She’d just had a few nights of great sex and companionship, that’s all. No big deal. And no false promises.

  Jeannie re-entered the room, shaking water from her hands, a glint of mischief as she came bounding in and dived across the bed, her flesh flexing nicely here and there. They had the rest of the day together and they had maybe a handful of other times before the case was closed and she went back to her architect in the city.

  Pam blinked, zoning out a little as a brain zap passed through her, but it was almost like a familiar companion and all she wanted to think about was kissing and touching. So they made love, and then they cuddled, and then Jeannie Schiff had to go and spoil it a little.

  ‘It’s okay, you know.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘I know you’re not gay. I can always tell when someone isn’t. It’s okay just to have a bit of fun, you know.’

  Well, screw you. Pam sat up and gave her lover a slap on the butt. ‘Stay as long as you like. But I’m going for a walk on the beach.’

  A few kilometres to the east, Scobie Sutton was faintly irritable. ‘Well, what’s it entail?’

  Roslyn Sutton stuck her jaw out, bottom lip pouting. ‘You don’t want me to do it.’

  ‘I didn’t say that. It sounds like a big commitment, that’s all.’

  His daughter put her little fists to her breasts beseechingly. ‘It would be so much fun.’

  Sutton was setting the table for lunch—cheese, tomatoes, bread, butter, olives, lettuce, tahini, sliced beef from last night’s roast—and Roslyn was hovering with a handful of knives and forks. His grumpiness increasing, he slammed a plate onto the place mat in front of his wife, no response in her mute, helpless face. Beth should have been spending the day out, as she did every Sunday, but this time her mother and sister were coming here.

  He took a deep breath, looked at Roslyn and said, ‘I can see it would be fun, but there are things to consider. How many performances?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Two weekends in November.’

  ‘How late are the rehearsals?’

  ‘Sundays between one and five, and Fridays between seven and ten.’

  Scobie knew he’d capitulate. It wasn’t as if his daughter wasn’t a terrific singer and dancer.

  ‘What about netball?’ he asked glumly.

  ‘I won’t do it this term.’

  ‘What about your homework?’

  That bottom lip again. ‘I’ll fit it in. Plenty of kids do this every year, Dad.’

  ‘It’s a lot of driving around for me. What if I’m working a big case—like now?’

  ‘You never let me do anything!’

  Sutton made a mental list: lifesaving, netball, sleepovers, birthday parties, dancing classes…‘Ros, within reason, I have never denied you anything.’

  There had been a time when he’d have said ‘We have never denied you anything.’ A time when the burden had been shared. He snatched the knives and forks from Roslyn’s sulky hands and dropped them in place around the table. The running around would leave him ragged with tiredness. Resentment would grow corrosively. Right at that moment, he hated his wife.

  ‘Please, Dad.’

  Scobie drew in a breath. And just at that point a quiet voice said, ‘Let her do it if she wants.’

  Father and daughter stopped what they were doing.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘I can drive you around, I don’t mind,’ Beth Sutton said. She glanced at Scobie, a little steel in it. ‘No need to stare at me like that.’

  *

  Challis was trying to unwind. Uncertainty was an ever-present condition of his life and he was beginning to hate it. He wanted Ellen Destry close, he wanted to be able to speak his mind in public and generate debate, not opprobrium. He wanted simple pleasures, in fact, like seeing his house in full daylight occasionally. The place was always draped in long morning shadows when he left for work and a humped shape in starlight when he got back. And so he spent the first part of that Sunday morning with a newspaper, toast and coffee at his kitchen window, watching shadows wind back from his yard. 8 a.m. 9 a.m. 10. Sunlight of great clarity, silently foraging ducks, a great beckoning stillness. He pulled on his old Rockports and walked up the hill, passing the orchard, the stockbroker’s weekender cottage, the farm dogs that saw him as a new threat each time he approached their boundary. Then down the laneway beyond the brow of the hill.

  A second coffee on his return, and then the sunlight beckoned again. He needed to be out in it, mowing, weeding.

  Then it was mid-afternoon and he decided to wash his car, which wore a patina of dust once more. He fetched the keys and got in, intending to drive around to the garden hose in the back yard.

  Nothing. Not even enough juice to turn the starter motor over.

  Challis was trying again when a car turned in from the dirt road that ran past his house. He got out, poised and wary. He didn’t get many visitors—an occasional neighbour, lost tourist or someone looking to buy a hobby farm—and always, at the back of his mind, was the expectation that an enemy would come for him one day, someone he’d put away. Perhaps a posse of Ethical Standards officers, keen to stitch him up for embarrassing the government. He glanced around quickly. A shovel that he’d forgotten to put back in the garden shed; tree cover on the next property, a tangle of peppermint gums, bracken and pittosporums.

  A grey Mazda. It pulled up behind the Triumph and the driver and his female passenger got out, the driver lifting a hand to him. ‘Hal.’

  ‘Alan.’

  Challis didn’t relax, not fully. Ellen’s ex-husband was a big man. Relations between them had always been awkward.

  ‘Hope we’re not interrupting anything.’

  ‘Just pottering,’ Challis said.

  ‘I don’t think you’ve met Sue Wells, my significant other.’

  When Ellen had heard about the girlfriend she’d said sourly, ‘I bet she’s young, no brains, boobs out to here,’ but Challis saw a short, round, greying woman aged in her forties, wearing faded baggy jeans and a tired smile.

  He shook her hand. ‘We spoke on the phone. How’s Larrayne holding up?’

  ‘Sleeps a lot,’ Wells said. ‘A bit teary sometimes, other times angry, but basically she’s fine.’

  Alan Destry shifted on his solid feet. ‘That’s why we’re here, Hal. It was great what you did. I can’t thank you enough.’

  Challis rolled his shoulders, looking for an escape. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Just had afternoon tea in Flinders. Need to get back before the weekend traffic gets too busy.’

  Challis felt a fugitive regret for the leisure time that had been lost to him over the years, and envy for the early stages of love, when there is only promise, not heartache, in the air. He missed Ellen.

  As if reading his mind, Alan Destry said, ‘Heard from Ells?’

  ‘Most days.’

  ‘Good, good.’ Destry toed the ground uncomfortably, then glanced at Challis. ‘Read what you said in the paper.’

  Challis was silent, gave a short nod.

  ‘Took guts.’

  ‘Fat lot of good it’s done me, or the rank and file in general.’

  Destry had run out of steam. ‘Well, we won’t keep you.’

  ‘Actually,’ Challis said, ‘would you have a set of jumper leads in your car? Flat battery.’

  Alan Destry was more comfortable with dead batteries than live emotions. ‘Gis a look.’

  With Challis behind the wheel, ready to turn the key, Destry raised the bonnet.

  ‘Rats.’

  Challis got out. ‘Your leads won’t fit?’

  ‘No, rats. Furry animals with sharp teeth.’

  Challis peered in. Holes in the radiator hoses, expos
ed wiring, and rat droppings and flecks of chewed rubber and insulation scattered on and around the engine.

  He saw it as a sign. When the others had gone, he washed, polished and photographed his creaky old car, fired up the Internet, and posted it for sale.

  Finally it was evening and he could log on and talk to Ellen, who was in Glasgow. Her tiny image on the screen was a tonic as he outlined his day. ‘So in the end I went over and fetched your car.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Thought I’d buy an old MG this time.’

  ‘Like hell. Describe the view from your window,’ Ellen said. ‘Describe it exactly. I want to see it in my mind’s eye.’

  Challis told her about the play of failing light and deepening shadows on the stretch of lawn and trees between his house and the road, surprising himself. ‘After years of report writing, I didn’t think I could be so poetic.’

  ‘Oh I miss that, I miss you…’ ‘It’s only been a few days,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘How’s the sex crimes business where you are?’

  ‘Same crimes, same criminals,’ she said. ‘Probably more sex slavery and human trafficking. Same police culture.’

  Meaning that most police officers were male, and many believed at least partly that the victims of sexual assault brought it upon themselves in some way. The conversation drifted on to other things, Challis watching his liquidambar—what Ellen called his star tree— merge with the greater darkness all around it. A car crawled past at the end of his driveway, headlights probing the pines, bracken, blackberry canes and pittosporums lining the road. He knew it was a local car. Newcomers went faster, somehow failing to take into account that the road was narrow, the dirt and gravel surface treacherous, the bends blind.

  He said, ‘Thought I might do a bit more work to your house during the week, if I can find the time.’

  Fix the home invasion damage, in fact. There was an awkward silence, and Ellen said, ‘Look—’

  ‘Larrayne’s been staying there,’ he said, in an attempt to tease out what Ellen had or hadn’t been told.

  ‘So I understand. Look, Hal, you don’t have to fix my house up, though I am grateful, honestly.’

  ‘Honestly.’ One of those tricky words.

  31

  On Monday morning Jeannie Schiff tossed Pam Murphy the keys to the silver Holden and said, ‘You drive.’

  Great, a city trip in peak hour. One of these days, Murphy thought, we’ll have autopsy facilities here on the Peninsula.

  They were barely north of the town, stuck behind a Woodleigh school bus, when Schiff said, ‘We’re not going to have a problem today, are we?’

  Pam darted her a glance: she didn’t want to plough into the rear of the bus. ‘Problem?’

  ‘You and me. Sulks, the silent treatment.’

  Pam burned. Sure, she knew she was being a little guarded, but she wasn’t sulking. ‘No, Sarge.’

  ‘There’s no need to use my rank, not when we’re alone. We have been intimate, after all.’ Heavy quotation marks around ‘intimate’. Pam said nothing. She felt nothing, really. Her feelings weren’t hurt, she wasn’t in love, she didn’t feel betrayed…

  Felt a little used, though. Maybe. She had gone into this with her eyes open, after all.

  And so what if Jeannie hadn’t wanted to walk on the beach yesterday?

  The school bus slowed, pulled onto the verge, where a couple of teenagers slouched, waiting, bags at their feet. They climbed onto the bus as if dazed, and Pam took the opportunity to spurt past. Now she was behind a line of cars. She glanced at the dash clock: 8 a.m. The autopsy was slated for 10.

  Then she felt Jeannie Schiff’s pretty right hand on her leg.

  Challis drove Ellen Destry’s Corolla to work and found Scobie Sutton waiting in his office, looking tense in a funereal suit coat and pants, the jacket flapping around him.

  ‘Scobie.’

  ‘Morning, boss.’

  Challis waited. Sutton said, ‘I was wondering if you’ve seen this.’

  A press release from police headquarters. Challis liked to kid that he had a special gift: he could tell if any printed or electronic document was worth reading merely by scanning the title, subtitle and first line. E-mails had a short life in his in-box. The contents of his pigeonhole had been transformed into a million egg cartons. ‘New crime scene unit,’ he said. ‘What about it?’

  ‘You suggested I should shift sideways.’

  Challis paused. He shrugged off his jacket, pegged it and sat behind his desk. ‘Sit,’ he said, staring through the window as Sutton folded his bones again. ‘You’d need training.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The role of the new unit was to collect crime scene information in the first instance—fingerprints, fibres, DNA, photographs and video recordings—and pass it on to the relevant division for analysis. The results would then be passed to CIU detectives, like Challis and his team, for action. Challis had mixed feelings about the new system. It would free CIU and uniformed police to concentrate on targeted operations, bringing increased speed and efficiency. But he liked standing in the middle of a crime scene, feeling his way into the who, what and why.

  ‘You’ll work out of Frankston.’

  ‘I don’t mind. It’s only a twenty minute drive for me.’

  Challis made a decision. The work—collecting evidence for someone else to analyse—would suit Scobie. Less need for intuitive leaps. Less call for speculating about the needs, moods, impulses and motives that drove other human beings.

  ‘I can put in a good word if you like.’

  Sutton blinked as if to say, Whoa, not so fast, then ventured to say, ‘If you could, boss, that would be great.’

  Challis stood, grabbed his jacket again. ‘No problem. Meanwhile we need another word with Delia Rice’s parents. Something’s not quite right about the timeline.’

  Schiff squeezed Pam’s leg in a way that was chummy yet undershot with desire. ‘It was good, you and me. But not…’

  ‘I know,’ Pam said very distinctly, hands fixed on the steering wheel. ‘Not going anywhere. I know that. I wanted to have some fun, that’s all, same as you.’

  As if she’d not heard a word, Schiff said, ‘I could sense a kind of reserve in you, as if you liked it okay but it wasn’t really your thing. I think, deep down, you prefer men.’

  I prefer to do without the bullshit, Pam thought.

  A final squeeze and Schiff removed her hand. ‘No regrets, okay? Put it down to experience.’

  Fine. Pam could insist until the cows came home that she didn’t have regrets, wouldn’t have them, but Schiff had a kind of worldly, older-woman thing going. She wasn’t listening.

  Well, I do have one regret, Pam thought. I regret that Sergeant Jeannie Schiff is as big an arsehole as some of the men I’ve encountered. Live and learn.

  ‘Where was he going with Delia Rice’s body?’ she said. ‘He’d have known he couldn’t dump her in the reserve, so he must have been looking for another location. Wonder how well he knows the Peninsula?’

  ‘What?’ said Schiff, busy on the keypad of her phone. ‘Look, save it for a briefing.’

  Delia Rice’s parents lived in a low, pale-brick 1970s house set on three hectares of muddy yard near the Moorooduc primary school. Bill Rice was an all-purpose landscaping and excavation contractor, so the yard was crammed with tip trucks, bobcats, backhoes, excavators and dozers. Challis and Sutton were shown into a dark, chilly sitting room and, moments later, learned that a crucial piece of their briefing information was incorrect.

  ‘Let’s get this straight, Mr Rice,’ Challis said. ‘You didn’t drive her to the Frankston station?’

  ‘No. Like I said, I was going to take her there, but in the end I had a dentist’s appointment.’

  Challis kept his voice mild and even. ‘So she didn’t catch a train, didn’t go to the city?’

  ‘She did, but from Somerville,’ Rice said, as if explaining to a dummy. ‘Where my
dentist is.’

  Challis nodded in understanding. Somerville was on a small branch line that served the south-eastern Peninsula towns: city-bound passengers changed at Frankston.

  ‘I had a 3.30 appointment,’ Bill Rice explained, ‘and the plan was Delia would sit in the waiting room till I was finished, only the dentist was running late, so she said she’d catch the Somerville train.’

  He was ravaged with grief, eyes raw, wispy hair limp and uncombed, grey stubble on his cheeks, jaw and neck. Erin Rice said nothing but sat beside her husband, holding one of his huge, sausage-fingered hands in her plump lap. She was combed and tidy, but more stunned than her husband.

  Challis thought through the cock-up. Between the Rices’ initial missing persons’ statement and the homicide investigation, a key first impression had gone unchecked. Bill Rice had told someone what the intended plan was, and by the time it reached Challis’s team it had become fact.

  ‘You don’t know for certain that she caught any train?’ he said gently.

  In a small voice, Rice said, ‘I assumed she did. I mean, what else did she do?’

  Dr Berg began the autopsy at ten o’clock, Murphy and Schiff watching from the raised viewing bay, Berg’s voice crackling from the wall-mounted speakers as she worked. The autopsy suite was large, square and brightly lit by skylights and neon tubes. The floor and two walls were of small, gleaming tiles, with banks of refrigerated stainless steel drawers set into the other walls. The pathologist worked at one of the long, broad zinc tables, the surface cleansed by a constant stream of cold water that ran from the slightly elevated top end to a chrome drainage pipe at the bottom.

  ‘Rigor begins in the face and jaw,’ she said, as if talking to students or thinking aloud, ‘followed by the upper limbs and finally the hips and legs.’ She glanced up at the figures watching her. ‘Unfortunately rigor and lividity occur at unpredictable rates. This poor woman died violently, meaning adrenaline, which is an accelerating factor. She was kept in a sealed environment for some hours, the boot of a car. The temperature within would have been fairly stable but gradually increasing if the car was in direct sunlight for any length of time. Meanwhile, the body was protected from insect activity, weather extremes and other variables.’