by Garry Disher
Oh God. Ellen said gently, ‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr O’Brien, of course you’re right, but there’s no easy way to break this kind of news, and we need to act swiftly. Do you know why Mrs McQuarrie was in Penzance North this morning?’
‘No idea.’
‘Was she seeing a client? I understand that she was a psychologist, a counsellor.’
‘She was. Are you suggesting one of her clients murdered her?’
‘I don’t know. Do you think that might have happened?’
‘You’d better come into my office,’ O’Brien said.
He took them upstairs to a vast, oppressive corner room. God help the poor soul who seeks solace here, thought Ellen. ‘We need to see Mrs McQuarrie’s files,’ she said.
O’Brien was on firm ground now; resistant ground. ‘Janine appointed me to look after her records in the event of anything happening to her. It’s standard practice,’ he said, to forestall any objections that the police might like to make.
‘May we see those records? We need to identify anyone who has a volatile background and rule out everyone else.’
‘A fishing expedition? Request denied. You’ll need a warrant, and even then you’ll need a good reason, and we’ll challenge it.’
Ellen sighed. She knew that a magistrate would grant a subpoena without hassle, for this was a murder inquiry, but only if the police could present a compelling case for the murderer being one of the dead woman’s clients rather than anyone else. ‘All right, then perhaps you can tell me the sorts of people Mrs McQuarrie counselled.’
O’Brien breathed out heavily. ‘Children-bedwetting kids and troubled teenagers. People grieving the death of a loved one. Women finding the strength to leave unhappy marriages. All kinds of ordinary afflictions, and none that might give rise to the impulse to murder, I wouldn’t have thought.’
Ellen agreed privately. According to Challis’s descriptions of the circumstances, Janine McQuarrie’s murder had been a carefully arranged contract killing, not the product of impulsive or skewed reasoning. Her mind drifted. Women finding the strength to leave unhappy marriages, she thought. Is that what I need?
Scobie Sutton broke in. ‘We’ll need to see her desk calendar, and talk to everyone in the clinic, before the press do.’
O’Brien rolled his eyes. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
He showed them to the conference room and for the next hour they interviewed the staff: O’Brien, three other therapists, the office manager and the receptionist, all of whom had solid alibis for earlier than morning. The office manager, a vigorous, no-nonsense woman named Iris, was the most helpful, but her information merely bore out in clearer terms what everyone was saying: that Janine McQuarrie had been a real piece of work, not only considered a poor therapist but also reviled. A woman whose bitter personality had permeated the building, she had minions, not friends. She was manipulative, a gossip, and would spread rumours against those whom she believed had wronged her. At staff meetings she liked to chuckle over her clients’ sad secrets and off-the-wall phobias. She wasn’t motivated to help, Iris said, but to bring down people and institutions, and she was obsessed with money: accumulating it, not spending it.
Scobie Sutton stirred, as if money, or all of this dirt being spread about Janine McQuarrie, was distasteful to him. ‘Was she a gambler?’
‘Not her,’ Iris said. ‘Gambling is a sign of weakness, quote unquote.’
‘Any irregularities in the firm’s bookkeeping?’
Iris bristled. ‘I keep the books.’
Scobie back-pedalled. ‘I mean, did she have access to the books? Was she keeping income back from the firm? Anything like that?’
‘Not that I’m aware of…’
‘Her clients,’ said Ellen. ‘Were any of them unstable enough to murder her? Did she offend any of them?’
‘She whisked them in and out, or met them elsewhere, so I wouldn’t know,’ Iris said.
‘What about her private life? Anyone in the background? Friends? Enemies?’
‘Look,’ said Iris. ‘We pitied her more than anything. We avoided her. She was most probably lonely, but everything about her said “back off”. I wonder how on earth she found herself a husband and mothered a child, frankly.’
‘Do you know who she was seeing this morning?’ Ellen had examined Janine McQuarrie’s desk calendar, and the day’s entry was typically cryptic: Penzance North 9.30.
‘No.’
That was all they could get. Ellen called Challis’s mobile number. ‘We’re on our way back to Waterloo.’
‘Good. I want a quick briefing before we talk to the super’s granddaughter.’
‘Be there in twenty minutes,’ said Ellen.
****
9
Scobie drove, with Ellen sitting tensely in the passenger seat, her hands braced on the dash, her foot on a phantom brake pedal. Sutton’s driving style was full of fits and starts, swivel necking, and hand gestures as he talked, punctuated with occasional swigs from a bottle of mineral water.
‘You know the Cobb family?’ Scobie said. ‘From one of the estates?’
‘One of the kids took a marijuana plant to school for show-and-tell,’ gasped Ellen.
‘Correct.’
‘What about them?’
‘My wife’s had dealings with them.’
Ellen knew that Scobie would get to the point eventually. She’d met Beth Sutton a few times, at police picnics and Christmas parties. A plain, good, churchgoing woman who worked for Community Health and was given to helping the unfortunates of the Peninsula. Nothing wrong with that, except that people involved in good works often seemed to wear an air of piety and satisfaction, which often grated on Ellen. She waited, said ‘Really?’ to prompt Scobie.
‘When I was in court this morning I let slip that I was married to Beth. Now Natalie’s going to be suspicious of her.’
‘Scobie, suspicion of the police is inbred on those housing estates.’
‘I know, but it needn’t be. Beth keeps her work and mine completely separate.’
They lapsed into silence. The road was wide and flat now and Ellen relaxed fractionally. Her mind drifted. There was a possibility that one of Janine McQuarrie’s clients was the killer, but getting access to her records was going to be a headache. At the same time, all of the circumstances of the murder indicated a degree of planning and professionalism, as if the killers had been hired.
The woman’s finances would have to be examined minutely. Did everything come back to money? Ellen wondered, thinking about her husband’s own futile rants centred on money. They were struggling, despite their combined salaries-one of their cars was for the scrap heap, and their daughter’s rent and university tuition fees were crippling-but Alan’s resentment sometimes took strange turnings. Only last night he’d said, with a sidelong glance, ‘Don’t you think it’s interesting that it’s always plainclothed police who go up on theft or corruption charges?’
Plainclothed police like her, he meant. ‘Your point being?’
‘They bring decent police into disrepute.’
Guys like him, he meant. Rarely was the Ethical Standards department of the police force obliged to investigate the guys who worked in the Traffic and Accident Investigation squads.
Alan was full of undercurrents. It was very possible that he was depressed. But, more than anything, Ellen was scared that he’d found her out. Now and then over the years she’d pocketed money at crime-scenes, $50 here, $500 there. Probably no more than $2000 in all, over a ten-year period, and she’d even put one haul, of $500, into a church poor box. But the pathology was there in her and she was afraid. It had started with chewing gum at the corner shop when she was eight years old and although she’d more or less stopped, the impulse hadn’t. Maybe she needed a psychologist. Maybe she needed to make an appointment with Dominic O’Brien.
God, what would Challis think of her if he ever found out? She felt sick at heart at the thought. Her palms were damp. She dried
them on her thighs, letting Scobie Sutton wander all over the road and talk and talk.
****
They arrived to find that Challis had brought in two DCs from Mornington and, with their help, set up the first-floor conference room as an incident room: extra computers, phones, fax machines, whiteboards, photocopiers and scanners, and a TV set. But, more than anything as far as Ellen was concerned, he’d brewed coffee and placed a box of pastries in the centre of the conference table. She sipped and nibbled as he introduced the Mornington detectives and outlined the case, reading from his laptop.
Finally he turned to her. ‘Ellen?’
She brushed flakes of pastry from her lapels and summarised the results of the Bayside Counselling interviews. ‘We need to look at those files,’ Challis said. ‘Meanwhile, I carried out a Google search on the husband. He’s a well-known hard case in the finance world, good at firing and downsizing, so no doubt he’s got some enemies. When Ellen and I have finished talking to his daughter we’ll head up to the city and check him out.’
Scobie Sutton had eschewed the pastries and was fastidiously peeling and slicing an apple. ‘Will the daughter make a good witness, boss?’
Challis shrugged. ‘We won’t know until we talk to her, but she did tell the first officers at the scene that the killers came in an old car, white with a yellow door. That will be your job,’ he said to one of the Mornington DCs. ‘I’ve put in a request for lists of cars stolen, abandoned and burnt, so keep updating it and check with Traffic for cars caught speeding, the usual thing.’
‘Sir.’
‘The car could have come in from outside,’ Scobie said, ‘or they were dumb enough to use their own car.’
‘Or Georgia was quite wrong about the car. Either way, we’ll release details to the media,’ Challis said. ‘Someone might recognise the description.’
They looked doubtful. Cars with mismatched doors, boot lids, bonnets and panels were common in a country where the poor were getting poorer.
Challis glanced at the other Mornington detective. ‘Go back to Lofty Ridge Road and talk to any of the neighbours who weren’t at home this morning. Find out who delivers the mail and the newspapers, supermarket orders, the usual.’
‘Boss.’
‘Scobie, I want you to check Robert McQuarrie’s flight movements and find out what you can about Mrs Humphreys and whoever else might have lived at that address. When she’s recovered from her hip operation, interview her. We need to establish if she knows Janine McQuarrie or if she herself has any enemies.’
‘Boss.’
‘Ellen, the superintendent awaits.’
‘Whoopee-do,’ said Ellen, immediately regretting it, for surely the super was grieving.
****
10
They signed out an unmarked Falcon from the motor pool and drove to Mornington in intermittent sunshine that was hard and bright on the wetness all around. Above them a high, scudding wind blew scraps of cloud across the sky. Normally they chatted when they were together, settling quickly into comfortable patterns with each other, but Ellen was withdrawn, a heavy presence in the passenger seat. ‘Anything wrong?’ said Challis.
‘Nup.’
He wondered if it was her husband again, remembering the man’s brusqueness on the phone that morning. Ellen was loyal and private by nature, but had revealed enough over the years to indicate that the marriage was under strain. Challis had never liked Alan Destry. The man was chronically surly, and so tightly wound that he might one day do something violent. We’re a fine pair, he thought, me morose about my wife this morning, Ellen about her husband now.
‘Everything okay at home?’
‘Peachy,’ said Ellen, her eyes fixed on the road.
Time to change the subject. ‘So this Dominic O’Brien character is going to be obstructive?’
Ellen seemed to bristle at the wheel. ‘What happens when an immovable object meets an irresistible force?’
He grinned. He’d always liked looking at her, a woman full of coiled energy and every muscle expressive, her beautiful eyes now taking on their familiar tuck of suspicion and anticipation. She was ready for business.
‘Uh oh,’ she said presently. ‘We’ve got company.’
They’d reached a hilly street behind the Esplanade in Mornington. No fog on this side of the Peninsula, but a rainsquall had come in across Port Phillip Bay, causing movement in a huddle of reporters and camera crews camped on a nearby nature strip. ‘Be friendly,’ Challis said.
Shouted questions reached them through the windows of the car, but Ellen didn’t stop, easing the CIU Falcon off the street, onto a gravelled driveway and past dense shrubbery and slender gum trees, to park nose-up to a railway sleeper barrier. They got out, locked the car and Challis followed Ellen down the steps to the front door, careful on the slicks of moss.
McQuarrie greeted them, holding his granddaughter’s hand. She’d been crying, but glanced up at them solemnly, as if shy but also aware that she was at the centre of something momentous. She wore jeans, a pink long-sleeved top, pink socks, pink clips holding back unruly blonde hair. Her grandfather looked faintly lost, a slightly built senior policeman who’d seen the underside only from behind a desk. He didn’t make introductions but stood back, saying, ‘Come in, come in,’ before glancing at their feet. ‘Would you mind…’
There were shoes and gumboots heaped on both sides of the door. Challis and Ellen slipped off their shoes, curling their toes on the cold concrete of the verandah, waiting for McQuarrie to stop dithering on the doorstep.
Finally they were in a hallway, pale green carpet expensively thick beneath their feet, a phone off the hook on an antique hallstand. McQuarrie led them to a sitting room: a red leather sofa and armchairs, massive antique sideboards, two small Turkish rugs. A huge window looked out onto a barbecue pit, a brick courtyard, a rose arbour and shrubs in bulky terracotta pots. McQuarrie’s wife Barbara-often called Mrs Super-stood beside an open fire, as neatly put together as her husband but snootier, more readily offended. Challis tried a commiserative nod and smile and got a scowl in return. He introduced Ellen, who earned only a flickering glance.
‘Have you found out who did this?’
McQuarrie said hastily, ‘It’s too soon, dear. Hal is here for information.’
Barbara McQuarrie came forward a few centimetres, the strain apparent in her face. ‘I don’t want you upsetting Georgia.’
‘Some tea, love, we could all do with a cup of tea.’
‘I’ll help you,’ Ellen said, expertly shepherding McQuarrie’s wife out of the room, piling on admiring comments about the decor, the house, the landscaping. Challis and McQuarrie watched them go, Challis appreciating her tact and her instincts.
McQuarrie said, ‘Hal, this is Georgia. Georgia, this is Inspector Challis.’
Challis put out his hand and the child shook with him gravely, her palm moist, her bones like a tiny bird’s inside his grip. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘Pleased to meet you.’
Challis didn’t know what McQuarrie had said to his granddaughter. He’d hoped to be briefed before meeting and questioning her. Did Georgia know that her mother was dead? If so, what did she, a six-year-old, understand that to mean? ‘Perhaps we should all sit down,’ he said.
‘Grampa, can I have a hot chocolate?’
‘Of course you can. Run and ask Nana.’
Relieved, Challis watched her leave the room, and then turned to McQuarrie. ‘Sir, are you okay with this, my questioning her?’
‘I am. My wife’s not.’
‘Does Georgia know her mother’s dead?’
Some of McQuarrie’s brisk superintendent’s manner had come back. ‘Yes. Died and gone to heaven.’
‘She’s remarkably poised.’
‘She’s incredible. She’s finished her crying for now. Even so, we’ll see that she gets proper counselling.’ He paused. ‘If your questioning upsets her I’m putting a halt to it, Hal.’
�
�Sir.’
McQuarrie was the only super in Challis’s experience who expected to be called ‘sir’ by the more senior of his officers. Most preferred ‘boss’ or even first names and affectionate nicknames. McQuarrie insisted on ‘sir’ and Challis believed that it was a measure of the man’s insecurity-compounded today by the fact that he was grieving.
There was the distant ping of a microwave oven, and moments later Georgia appeared with a mug of hot chocolate, a frothy moustache on her upper Up. Ellen Destry came in behind her with a teapot and sugar bowl on a tray, Barbara McQuarrie with plain Ikea mugs and shortbread biscuits in a bowl, her disapproval obvious. She wanted Challis and his sergeant out of her house.
When they were settled-Georgia perched on her grandfather’s knees-Challis glanced at Ellen, who leaned forward and said, ‘Georgia, we want to catch the bad men who hurt your mother.’
Georgia, small and tawny, shrank into McQuarrie’s lap, hot chocolate splashing on his tie. ‘I want my dad. Where’s Daddy?’
‘He’s on his way, sweetheart,’ McQuarrie said, rocking her. ‘His plane’s already landed.’
‘What if they shoot him, too?’
‘Hush, hush,’ McQuarrie said, out of his depth.
‘We’re stopping this right now,’ his wife said.
Challis signalled to Ellen and they got to their feet, but Georgia seemed panicked by this. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To catch the bad men,’ Ellen said.
‘Where?’
‘We’ll look for them everywhere.’
Challis was wondering if Ellen’s answer would add to Georgia’s fears, make her housebound, when Georgia said, ‘But you don’t know what they look like.’
Barbara McQuarrie said, ‘It’s all right, Georgia. Let the man and the lady go off and do their job.’
‘I know what they look like,’ Georgia insisted, recovered now. She climbed out of her grandfather’s lap and left the room, returning moments later with several drawings. She aligned the edges awkwardly, shoving them at Challis. ‘Here.’
