by Garry Disher
‘They’re not orgies.’
‘Okay, group-sex gangbangs. Tell me more about them.’
‘You’re deliberately goading us, deliberately cheapening everything,’ said Laura.
‘We’re not doing anything wrong, anything illegal,’ said Anton. ‘No drugs, no coercion, no underage girls, no sexually transmitted diseases, just healthy safe sex for consenting adults.’
‘Multiple sex acts between desperate adults,’ Ellen snarled.
‘They’re hot desperate. Tell her, Anton.’
‘Couples,’ Anton said, ‘who already have sexual partners and want to explore and extend the possibilities.’
‘Sounds like desperation and fear to me,’ Ellen said. ‘You knew Janine McQuarrie was taking these photographs, didn’t you?’
‘No. Absolutely not.’
‘You encouraged it.’
‘No way.’
‘You commissioned it,’ Challis cut in. ‘You’re running a nice little blackmail racket and Janine was your partner. You sent these photographs to four of your potential victims to soften them up before making demands for money.’
‘Don’t be stupid. Why would we do that? Our parties, as you like to call them, would soon grind to a halt.’
‘Power. Money. Revenge.’
‘Not interested. We’re decent people, not criminals.’
Into the silence that followed, Anton said meekly, ‘Do we need a lawyer?’
Ellen pointed to a pale, grainy, globular backside. ‘Here’s one.’
He flushed angrily. ‘Are you going to shut us down?’
‘Shut you down?’ said Ellen in amazement. ‘Who do you think we are?’
****
34
That was the early hours of Thursday. A raw wind had risen by the time Challis and Ellen returned to CIU, and there was a message for Challis to telephone his elderly next-door neighbour. ‘A huge gum tree’s come down across your driveway, Hal. It’s sticking out into the road. I tried to cut it up but can’t start my chainsaw.’
‘Try the shire,’ Challis said, shrugging out of his coat.
‘I did. There are trees and branches down everywhere and they can’t promise they’ll get around to it today.’
Challis cursed. Ten o’clock. He was obliged to attend the Navy inquest at eleven. ‘I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.’
He dragged on his coat again, grabbed his laptop and inquest notes, and stopped at Ellen’s desk. ‘I’ll be out for two or three hours. I want you to call on Janine’s sister. I doubt if Janine was the confiding type, but I’m pretty sure Meg intuited something about her recent activities.’
Ellen sat back in her chair, tapping a pen against her teeth. ‘Everything in this case is a trace of a ghost of a faint chance of a possibility.’
He was relieved to see her smile. ‘Eloquently put.’
Challis drove to his home along roads festooned with twigs, branches and long scraps of bark. By the time he’d cursed his chainsaw into life and sliced the tree up and rolled the segments of trunk out of the way, and showered and dressed again, he was late for the inquest.
The ruling was as expected: the Navy armourer had shot dead the Fiddlers Creek Hotel bouncer, and then committed suicide. He’d been drinking heavily in the main bar, but was also under the influence of a cocktail of drugs bought from a Navy cadet, and this, compounded by his sense of grievance at being ejected from the hotel, had disturbed the balance of his mind.
But the coroner went further. Reading from Challis’s own report, he noted that the armourer had used a Browning automatic handgun from the armoury, and recommended that an investigation be held into how it had been removed despite electronic surveillance measures and bi-weekly spot checks on the inventory, and whether or not other weapons had been removed, and if so, who had them.
The proceedings continued briskly and by early afternoon Challis was stepping out into a ragged wind, fits of sunlight and obscuring cloud masses. He hurried to his car, checked his mobile, and saw that Superintendent McQuarrie had called him. Twice.
‘Challis, sir.’
‘Finally. Was your mobile switched off, Inspector?’
‘Coroner’s inquest, sir, that Navy shooting.’
‘And?’
‘Murder suicide.’
Into the pause that followed, the superintendent said tightly, ‘I understand you went to see my son again.’
‘Sir.’
‘May I ask why?’
‘Loose ends,’ Challis said. Surely Robert hadn’t told his father about last night’s visit. The sister-in-law? No-most probably one of McQuarrie’s spies, he decided.
‘Such as?’
Challis debated with himself. Could he reasonably expect to keep the super from learning about the photographs? Either way, he was in a bind: damned if he told the super, damned if he didn’t. ‘It was partly a courtesy call, sir, and we went over old ground to see if he could remember anything further about his wife.’
‘Old ground? What about new ground, Inspector?’
As if to suggest that Challis hadn’t been thorough the first time around and liked to spend his days upsetting important and influential people.
‘In the absence of leads we have to check phone records again,’ said Challis, ‘read correspondence, look for holes and inconsistencies in witness statements, as well as talk to new witnesses who might come forward.’ Jesus.
McQuarrie was silent. Then he said, ‘I thought we agreed this was a case of the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
You agreed it, Challis thought. ‘It’s important to keep an open mind, sir.’
‘Dig deeper into this witness protection woman.’
‘Sir.’
There was another silence, and then McQuarrie seemed to tiptoe through his words: ‘Is there anything about Janine that I should know, Hal? A secret lover? Was she skimming funds from the clinic? Blackmailing her clients?’
Is McQuarrie simply waiting to be told the worst? wondered Challis, or does he know something that we don’t? ‘Whatever it is, we’ll find it,’ Challis said. You had to say things like that to your boss and a fearful public. He meant it, but he was saying it to shut McQuarrie up. Anxious to get going, he finished the conversation and returned to his office in CIU and a backlog of paperwork that owed plenty to the superintendent’s cost-cutting measures. The budget destroys resources, Challis thought, the paperwork destroys time, and the jargon destroys reason.
Fed up, he went in search of Ellen. ‘Did Meg tell you anything?’
‘Yes and no. They weren’t close, but she did feel that Janine had seemed happier than usual in recent weeks.’
Challis drew his hands tiredly down his cheeks. ‘An affair? Someone in the swingers scene?’
Ellen shrugged. ‘There’s nothing to indicate a lover in her e-mails, phone records or ordinary mail. She didn’t confide in anyone. If there is a lover, she’s covered her tracks well. Do you want me to keep looking?’
He shook his head absently, returned to his office and attacked his in-tray again. At one point he reached for his laptop. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t in his car. Then he remembered: he’d left it on his kitchen table. He’d gone home, changed into overalls, cut up the fallen tree, raced off to the inquest. Challis always paid attention to his instincts, and this one was a creeping sensation that told him not to waste a minute of time.
He ran downstairs to the carpark, climbed into the loan car and headed out of town. At the second roundabout he turned northwest, glancing briefly at Waterloo Mowers, where the lights were a dull yellow through a gauze of water droplets and a man in a japara was despondently assessing the ranks of lawn mowers parked on the grass outside. His tyres hissed and other cars tossed dirty scraps of water over his windscreen.
Soon he was driving between a dismal housing estate and a couple of waterlogged horse paddocks, and then was in undulating country, where costly lifestyle houses had scant views over Westernport Bay. Otherwise the houses here wer
e older, faintly rundown fibro, weatherboard and brick-veneer farm dwellings amid rusty sheds, untidy pine trees, orchards and dams. It was turning out to be a wet winter, even this early in the season, and the dams were full, the clay backroads greasy, the roadside ditches running furiously, the floods washing drifts of grit and gravel from adjoining dirt roads across the sealed roads.
That’s how Challis knew his own road, the dirty yellow-brown smear across the bitumen surface. He turned off, splashing through muddy potholes and hearing the heater fan cut out with a death rattle. He came to his driveway and turned in, passing the sawn logs and dead agapanthus stalks, and headed up towards the house, which looked damp, empty, almost forlorn, but familiar in all of its manifestations, and a true home, a haven through the years up until now.
And that’s when he saw the marks in the lawn. Dark brown mud gouges stark against the green. His first thought was: They got bogged. His second and third were: Who? and How did they get out? His fourth, when he found the splintered back door, was: Did they take the laptop?
****
35
Challis made himself a coffee while he waited, careful how he touched things, even using his elbow to work the door of the fridge, and hooking out the milk container with the back of his thumb. As for the coffee pot, coffee jar and his ‘old cops never die’ mug, he’d yet to meet a burglar who paused to brew coffee. He didn’t for a moment think the crime-scene techs would lift any prints other than his own-and some old ones of Tessa Kane’s-but he knew the procedure, the irony being that, since he was a cop, his place would be given more than a cursory examination.
It was too cold to sit on his sundeck, and no sun anyway, only the grey light of a winter’s afternoon, and so he set the central heating to high, sat at his kitchen table and made lists for his insurance company and CIU. Damage: jemmied back door, a broken fruit bowl (Italian, hand painted, a gift from Tessa), cracked CD covers. After a moment, he added the twin gouges in his lawn. Stolen: a jar of coins, approx. value $15; digital camera, $499; DVD player, $250; portable TV, $399; answering machine, $70; cordless phone, $79; laptop, $2500; laptop case, $60. He walked through the house again, returned to the kitchen and added: Rockport walking shoes (new), $299; Swiss Army knife (ten years old, no longer have receipt); Walkman (broken); leather belt, $45. A third walk through yielded him the bedside clock, $25, and assorted jewellery (property of late wife), value approximately $2000.
Angela had wanted to take some of the rings and earrings into prison with her, but he told her they’d be the target of the other prisoners, and so, therefore, would she. ‘They’ll tear them off you,’ he’d said, ‘or they’ll resent you. Everything will be here waiting for you when you get out.’ And she’d said, ‘But will you be waiting for me?’ and he’d had no answer to that. As for the jewellery, he’d bought most of it-a watch, a white gold necklace, emerald earrings. The engagement ring had been his grandmother’s, mercifully dead before she knew that Angela had tried to kill him.
He heard a car beyond his kitchen window and spotted Ellen arriving. The next stage would be routine: she’d assess the situation and then call for crime-scene technicians. He waited: there was a knock, and then she was standing in the kitchen doorway, concern on her face. ‘You poor thing,’ she said, making to cross the floor to where he stood by the window. He wanted her to, and wanted to cross to her, but things held them back.
She glanced about the kitchen, and then peered through the door into his sitting room. ‘When you said damage, I was expecting to see a real mess,’ she said.
He was puzzled. ‘Minor damage,’ he said, ‘about what you’d expect in a burglary.’
‘So it is a simple burglary?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘But you asked for me especially. I thought-’
‘What?’
In a rush she said, ‘I thought it might have been personal: you know, someone who had it in for you and wanted to cause major damage.’
He frowned, shook his head. ‘Well, there’s always someone, but no, this is a simple burglary, more or less.’ He saw relief on her face then, as she shrugged out of her coat and swung it over the back of a chair. He said carefully, ‘Did you think it was Alan?’
She flushed. ‘Alan? No. Well, he can be jealous.’
Challis decided to let it go, but she seemed to fill the room and his senses, and oddly to make him feel less violated by the burglary. He pulled out a chair for himself and motioned for her to sit.
When she was settled she took out her notebook and headed an empty page with the date, time and location. But then, apparently in no hurry, she pushed the notebook aside. ‘I’d really like one of your coffees.’
With relief he busied himself at the sink and cupboards. At times he passed quite close to her. Then he poured, set biscuits on a plate and sat with her again.
‘So, Hal, burgled.’
‘Uh-huh.’
He gave her a rundown on the damage and what had been stolen. ‘Plaster casts of the tyre tracks on my lawn might help.’
‘Will do,’ she said.
He reached for her hand without thinking about it. ‘There’s a reason why I asked for you.’
She raised her eyebrows, but didn’t withdraw her hand, which felt taut, bony but warm in his. Suddenly self-conscious, he jerked back. Was his neediness too apparent? Was he the subject of smirks and raised eyebrows among the female officers and civilians in the Waterloo police station? He saw himself as a clumsy man.
‘This has to be low profile,’ he said. ‘I’m in trouble.’
He saw that he’d discomposed her. To cure it she reached for her notebook, all business now. ‘In what way?’
He told her about his laptop.
‘Oh dear.’
‘I know.’
She stared at him through the steam from her mug. ‘No password protection at all?’
He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t figure out how to set it up.’
‘Dinosaur,’ she said. ‘Have you told anyone else?’
‘My insurance company.’
‘You didn’t tell them what was on the laptop?’
‘No.’
‘You’ll have to tell the super.’
Challis pushed his coffee away as if it were sour. ‘How can I? He doesn’t know about the photos.’
‘But you’ve got case notes stored on it as well.’
‘Yes.’
‘He won’t be pleased.’
‘He’s already pissed off with me. This will reinforce it.’
Ellen sighed. It was a sigh that said she commiserated with Challis, that she wasn’t so different from him, that she’d stuffed up on occasion, too.
‘Damage limitation. He’ll want damage limitation.’
Challis nodded, and they were both silent for a time, picturing McQuarrie, the man’s prim mouth, Rotary and golfing cronies, and air of satisfaction.
‘Will you tell him, or will I?’
Challis was startled. ‘I will, of course.’
‘Into the breach.’
He nodded.
‘How do I play it at the station?’ she asked.
‘Straightforward burglary, for now. Don’t mention that the laptop contained sensitive material until I’ve squared it away with the super.’
‘But if he wants it in my report, I’ll have to-’
‘Amend it. Don’t worry, I’ll cover your back.’
After a pause, Challis went on: ‘Any other break-ins reported in the area today?’
She shook her head. ‘There was one in Penzance Beach yesterday. An empty holiday house, but the next-door neighbour spotted a broken window.’
‘One burglary among many.’
She glanced at him a little coldly. ‘You’ll get the full crime-scene treatment, Hal, don’t worry.’
‘Thanks.’ He knew that simple burglaries generally didn’t attract a concerted level of investigation. ‘Have you any ideas? Does this fit a pattern?’
She shrugged.
‘There are always break-ins, Hal, you know that. Town and rural.’
Challis nodded bleakly. ‘I know.’
‘Look at what was stolen. Small items, easily shifted and stored. We don’t even know if it’s the same gang or individual. A pattern only becomes apparent when specialist goods are taken and we can track where they end up.’ She finished her coffee. ‘Better make a start.’
They went from room to room, Challis indicating the location of each of the stolen possessions, Ellen taking notes for the crime-scene techs who would dust for prints.
Perhaps it was a combination of sensations, images and memories, and the conjunction of the homely with the erotic-a bedroom, the half light, a beautiful woman watching and listening, the particular arrangement of the bones and tendons at her throat and neck, his own months of deprivation-but Challis found himself reaching for Ellen. She reached for him. Out of their clumsy collision came a long kiss and then they parted sufficiently to look each other in the eye, slightly awed.
‘I want you,’ Ellen said simply.
‘Me too.’
‘You want yourself?’
It was the kind of dumb thing you said when the ground was slippery. Challis found the bare skin at her waist and spine, and they continued to stare at each other. ‘Your hands are cold,’ Ellen said, her skin seeming to crawl at his touch and absorb him at the same time. He leaned towards her again, and that’s when a car growled over the gravel outside his window and Ellen said, ‘Crime-scene techs.’
With a ragged sigh Challis said, ‘You called them out before you came here?’
‘Biggest mistake of my life.’
He planted a hungering, regretful kiss and looked at his watch. ‘I’d better get it over and done with.’
‘The super?’
‘With any luck,’ Challis said, ‘I’ll interrupt his golf.’
****
36
A bummer, Andy thought, getting bogged this morning.
And avoidable, too, if he’d twigged earlier that the day was going to turn out badly. First, Nat had been out of her skull. She’d turned up on time, thanks to a rare good-parenting impulse on the part of her mother, and was even dressed in her school uniform and carrying a packed lunch, but she’d turned up stoned.
