Snapshot ic-3

by Garry Disher

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said McQuarrie harshly, just helping with enquiries.’

  ‘Can anyone vouch for your presence this evening?’

  ‘My sister-in-law.’

  ‘Who is very protective of you and your daughter.’

  ‘I’m free to leave, yes? I’m not under arrest?’

  ‘Well,’ drawled Challis.

  ‘That’s what I thought. I decline to answer any more questions until my lawyer is present.’

  ‘Tessa Kane had obtained photographs of you at a sex party- copies of photographs taken by your wife, in fact. You feared that she would publish them and so had her shot dead this evening.’

  Robert McQuarrie was sitting well back from the table, as if to avoid dirt and germs, but now he leaned forward with a flicker of interest, almost of hope and relief. But was Tessa Kane’s murder news to him, or had he ordered the hit and here was the confirmation he needed? ‘Shot? Tessa Kane?’

  ‘Was it the same team, Robert?’

  ‘What same team?’

  ‘As shot your wife.’

  McQuarrie folded his arms. He wore suit trousers, a white business shirt, a waistcoat and an overcoat. He looked crisp enough to begin a full day’s work, unlike Challis and Sutton, who were ending one, and showed it in their stubbled chins, bleary eyes and rumpled clothing.

  ‘My lawyer, Inspector. You know the drill.’

  ****

  And so Challis didn’t get to see Ellen Destry until mid-morning on Tuesday, by which time he felt ragged from grief and lack of sleep. Reporters had laid siege to the entrance to the little hospital in Waterloo, baying because one of their own had been shot dead in a mangrove swamp just one week after the shooting death of another prominent local identity. Challis elbowed through the pack, ignoring their shouted questions and speculations, growling ‘No comment.’

  He encountered Mrs Humphreys in the hot air of the corridor. She’d come in for physiotherapy, she told him. ‘If you like, I’ll boot that rabble out of the way when it’s time for you to leave.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan to me,’ Challis said, trying to return her grin. ‘Any news from your god-daughter?’

  ‘Not a word.’

  Challis went on. He found Ellen in bed, her back against heaped pillows, entertaining her husband and daughter. Or not entertaining, it seemed to Challis, for they seemed to have run out of things to say to each other. He shook Alan Destry’s hand after an awkward moment, then nodded hello to Larrayne, whom he hadn’t seen for eighteen months. She’d outgrown her adolescent surliness and plumpness, and although she’d never be a beauty like Ellen-she had her father’s bulky jaw and solid upper body-was nevertheless pretty and poised, and right now watchful and protective. She held a plastic water bottle in one hand and had a memory stick hanging from a strap around her neck, as though she’d come straight from her computer desk. She wore jeans and a heavy jacket over a brief top, her belly button winking at him as she uncoiled warily from the chair beside her mother’s bed, so that Challis was obliged to go around the bed to peck Ellen on the cheek, the husband and the daughter watching him closely.

  ‘Ow,’ Ellen said, wincing, yet also smiling up at him, one hand going to her neck, which wore a heavy plaster. She looked haggard, embarrassed about looking haggard, and concerned for him.

  ‘I don’t want to tire you, Ells,’ he said. ‘Just seeing how you are.’

  ‘I’m fine. Have you caught him yet?’

  ‘ ’Fraid not.’

  He saw in her face then that she was struggling to convey many difficult messages. ‘Hal, I’m so sorry.’

  Alan Destry intervened. ‘Come on, pal, give her a break. She’s not up to being interrogated.’

  Challis nodded slowly, knowing when he was beaten. ‘Take care, Ellen. Take a few days off…’

  Ellen stirred, fury animating her weakly. ‘I’m fine,’ she insisted, looking from her husband to her daughter and back again. ‘I need a couple of minutes with Hal, CIU business, okay? Go and get yourselves a cup of tea or something.’

  ‘Mu-um,’ said Larrayne.

  ‘No way,’ said Alan.

  Challis waited, guessing that Ellen would win. When they were alone, he said gently, ‘Can you tell me why you were there last night?’

  She glanced away and said, ‘I was following up on a recent burglary in the next street, looking for links to your burglary, and happened to be passing.’

  Challis knew that she was lying. He let it pass, for he wasn’t innocent either. They were drawn to each other and it was illicit and still playing itself out, even if it led nowhere. ‘Lucky thing that you were,’ he said.

  Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Why? I didn’t save her. All I did was get myself shot as well.’

  ‘It could have been worse.’

  She touched the graze on her neck as if to say that it was nothing. ‘I couldn’t see a thing. I had to feel my way in the dark. I shot at him, but presumably I missed.’

  ‘We didn’t find anything.’

  ‘Apart from Tessa.’

  ‘Apart from Tessa,’ Challis repeated.

  There was a pause. Ellen said gently, ‘Hal, don’t blame yourself’

  ‘Who says I am?’ he demanded, more forcefully than he’d intended.

  Ellen looked away, then back at him. ‘What about Lowry and McQuarrie?’

  ‘Lawyered up. Alibis.’

  She sank back. ‘I couldn’t see anything, but I don’t think it was one of them.’

  ‘Get some rest.’

  ‘Alan brought me today’s Progress,’ Ellen said. ‘Tessa’s take on Janine was pretty accurate.’

  Challis nodded. He’d read it over breakfast, and heard Tessa’s voice in his head, her special qualities of fierceness and irony coming through clearly. He blinked his eyes.

  Ellen affected not to notice. ‘Is there a link between the two murders?’

  ‘Get some rest.’

  ‘I’m coming in tomorrow.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘I’m coming in,’ Ellen said, ‘and stop pitying yourself

  Challis almost snapped at her, but went out to the carpark, avoiding the cameras and microphones. Behind the wheel of his car, he told himself to breathe deeply, evenly. There was no avoiding it: he was self-pitying. Then he remembered something that Tessa had once said about him, that he tended to feel guilt where it wasn’t warranted or necessary, that guilt in many circumstances was a wasted, a crippling, emotion. That was the truth. She’d given him gifts of wisdom and he’d been too self-involved to see it.

  ****

  52

  At four o’clock that Tuesday afternoon, Vyner wrote, Men are continents, men are islands, but I am a rocky shoal beneath the surface.

  He’d just collected $500 from a woman in Glen Iris, the mother of an Army signaller who’d stepped on a mine on the Iraqi side of the border with Kuwait. Yep, a hero, great guy, single-handedly saved Vyner’s life on one occasion, but too modest to claim the credit. The mother’s eyes glistened, Vyner’s glistened. It was very moving, and while it lasted, Vyner believed every word of it.

  It was getting hard to remember who he was, though. The personal, private, real Vyner was the Navy guy who’d refused the anthrax injection and been discharged for that and a few other minor matters, and later spent a couple of years in prison here and there. The pretend Vyner was the Army mate of some poor prick who’d died on foreign soil. The emerging Vyner was a hitman for hire-and a part-time conman.

  That’s when another text message came in on his mobile phone. No congratulations for a job well done in wasting Tessa Kane last night, only an angry query, wanting to know why descriptions of Nathan Gent and the car had been released to the media. Xplain or no fee, the SMS concluded.

  Christ. Vyner hadn’t read the paper closely this morning, but now he did. The front page was full of last night’s shooting, so he flicked through, and there it was on page 5, an accurate description of the car and a pretty accurate photofit imag
e of Nathan Gent. His mouth dry, he sent back an SMS: Gent ded car torchd.

  Who saw us? he wondered. There’s no description of me, so does that mean I wasn’t seen clearly, or do the cops have a description and this is some kind of trick?

  He did a line of coke to chill out. He’d have to get himself another gun. He was fresh out of Browning pistols after last night.

  ****

  That same afternoon, Scobie Sutton received a call from the lab. There were several usable prints on the bottles, cans and cellophane he’d collected from Andy Asche’s rubbish bin, and they matched one print not on the Toyota van itself but on the stolen goods recovered from it. That was good enough for Scobie.

  ‘You ever have a kid called Andy Asche in your home?’ he asked Challis.

  ‘No,’ said Challis, looking sad and distracted.

  ‘Then he’s definitely one of our burglars. He also owns cutting edge computer gear.’

  Challis rubbed his face. ‘You think he copied my files and printed out the photos? Get a warrant for his computer and bring him in for questioning.’

  Scobie shifted uncomfortably. ‘I think he’s done a runner.’

  ‘Look for him then,’ said Challis curtly.

  ‘Boss,’ Scobie said.

  In his experience, you didn’t often catch crooks through detection and investigation but through chance or luck. Cops aren’t necessarily smart, he believed, but the bad guys are often dumb. You catch them red-handed, or they give themselves up, remain at the scene, punch a loved one who informs on them, find themselves arrested for a different crime, or draw attention to themselves by breaking the speed limit with a body in the boot, for example.

  But now and then you got to detect, and Scobie went looking for Andy Asche on flight manifests. Assuming that Andy would not be flying under his real name, it was a process of elimination. First he rejected women’s and unlikely names like Aziz, Hernandez and Nguyen. Then he rejected reservations made some time ago (Andy had left in a hurry, leaving his wheels behind), return reservations, credit card purchases, Frequent Flyer purchases, and special requests (Scobie doubted that Andy was a vegetarian, and in too much of a hurry to request a special meal even if he was). Scobie also couldn’t see Andy trying to leave the country-unless he had a false passport, and that didn’t seem likely-or flying to a small regional airport. Andy would seek out a big place, a place where he could lose himself. Finally, Scobie concentrated on tickets booked and used recently.

  He could feel the panic in Andy Asche. Maybe I’m a good cop some of the time, he thought, or good in some ways. And maybe that’s sufficient.

  ****

  Andy was on the beach, working on his tan, blending in, another dropout or backpacker amongst thousands of them on the Gold Coast, where the sun never set. Except how many beach bums his age went on-line at the local library to read the Melbourne newspapers?

  And how many had twelve thousand bucks in their pockets? Twelve grand, his total savings. He could maybe string that out for almost a year, but kiss goodbye to his dream of buying a BMW sports car.

  The way everything had conspired against him. First, that cop, Scobie Sutton, asking if he was Natalie’s boyfriend, telling him she was missing. Missing? Andy seriously doubted that-old Nat was off somewhere getting coked out of her brain-but it unnerved him to have the cops sniffing around. Then, a day after sending out the blackmail demands, he’d been reading an old copy of the Progress in the shire canteen and there, on the front page, had been a photograph of a guy in one of the photos he’d found on the laptop. Robert McQuarrie. A cop’s son. A senior cop’s son. And, according to the story, grieving husband of a woman who’d been shot dead.

  So anyone sending this guy a blackmail demand is going to find himself a murder suspect, right?

  Time for the lad to make himself scarce.

  It had been a low-speed rather than a high-speed escape. Andy had gone straight to High Street and cleaned out his savings account, all twelve thousand. He’d debated going home, but what if they were watching his pad? He stood on the footpath, trying to do a casual scan of High Street. Trouble was, everyone had looked like an undercover cop on stakeout.

  So he hadn’t gone home. Instead, he went to the travel agent and bought a $99 Virgin Blue one-way flight to the Gold Coast. That was the high-speed part. Getting to the airport was strictly low-speed. He’d walked to the station, waited an hour for a Frankston train, got to Frankston, walked through the shops to the Nepean Highway, waited ninety minutes for the airport mini-bus, ridden the bus for another ninety minutes, then waited another two hours for his flight to leave. Wandered around the airport shops while he waited, almost bought a change of clothes, then told himself not to be stupid, nothing’s cheap at the airport. He’d go to a jeans and T-shirt place on the Gold Coast and get kitted out there.

  He’d stay a week on the Gold Coast, and then head to somewhere north of Cairns. He could keep drifting north. It didn’t cost much to sleep on the beach.

  ****

  53

  Ellen appeared in the incident room just after lunch on Wednesday, a plaster on her neck, moving stiffly, all of her loose-limbed grace vanished, fatigue lines and pallor marking her face. But she was cheerful and itching to work-and itching to know how Challis was. She couldn’t read him; he put her with Scobie Sutton, checking the public’s responses to Joe Ovens’s descriptions of the Commodore and the driver. Before very long she was sighing. It was soon clear that-as usually happened when photofits and vehicle descriptions were released by the media-the investigation had moved from a position of no help from the public to too much.

  ‘Here’s a good one,’ she said, reading from a message slip. ‘To quote: “Hypnosis takes the subject into another dimension, and so anything Mr Ovens saw relates to a different time and place.”‘

  Scobie grunted. Like her, he’d divided the message slips that had come in since Monday evening into two piles: ‘immediate attention’ and ‘maybe’. All would be checked, however: even the crazy and the greedy tell the truth sometimes. ‘Half of these want to know if there’s a reward,’ he said.

  ‘And the other half want to do the dirty on their husbands, brothers or ex-boyfriends,’ Ellen said. She paused. ‘Here’s another, female caller, wouldn’t give her name: “The man in the picture is a well-known al Qaeda operative. He is wearing white face paint to disguise his dark skin.’” She caught Scobie’s eye, hoping for a chortle, but Scobie merely looked sad, as if he wanted to help all the crazy, lonely people in the world. She wished she were doing this with Challis. With Challis you could have a giggle. She put the woman’s message slip on the maybe pile, muttering, ‘Your TV is talking to you again, love.’

  She glanced across the room to Challis’s partitioned office. The door was ajar; he was going through a list of numberplate combinations and matching them to 1980s Holdens. He looked drawn.

  She kept sorting, then stopped. ‘Ah,’ she murmured.

  Scobie looked up. ‘Another sad creature?’

  She ignored him, went straight to Challis, knocking and pulling the spare chair up to his desk. He was on the phone, saying, ‘I deny that. She was good at her job,’ and hanging up. ‘The super,’ he said.

  Ellen understood. ‘He read Tessa’s profile of Janine.’

  Challis nodded tiredly. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Something promising. A call early this morning from a mechanic in Safety Beach. Until about six months ago he used to service a 1983 Commodore, off-white in colour, one pale yellow door. In fact, he sourced the door for the owner from a wrecked car.’

  ‘Owner’s name?’

  ‘Nora Gent, an address in Safety Beach,’ Ellen said.

  She watched Challis scan a list, and was relieved to see his mood lighten. ‘Here it is, Nora Gent, registered owner of a 1983 Holden Commodore, QQP-359.’ He paused. ‘Registration has lapsed. It was due for renewal four months ago.’

  ‘She sold it? Dumped it? It was stolen?’

  ‘
Who knows? But we have to talk to her.’ He reached for the telephone directory and leafed through it, muttering, ‘Gent, Gent, Gent. Not listed.’

  ‘She moved away? Got married and changed her name?’

  ‘Useless to speculate,’ Challis said. ‘I’ll take Scobie and have a word with her.’

  ‘No,’ Ellen said.

  ‘No?’

  ‘Take me.’

  ‘Your neck…’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  He shrugged. ‘Grab your coat.’

  Challis drove, headlights on, heading towards the other side of the Peninsula. It was mid afternoon on a day that would struggle to reach 13 degrees. Another sea fret, the fog mostly burnt away but hanging in dismal patches here and there over the highway and in the hollows of sodden paddocks. Ellen hunched deeper into her coat, wishing Challis would say something. The recent past seemed to fill the space between his seat and hers like an intrusive backseat passenger. It was made up of guilt, embarrassment and desire that she knew was reciprocated but could not-and should not-play itself out.

  I have to grow up, she told herself. I’m married. I have responsibilities. And workplace romances are tawdry and clichйd.

  No, this one wouldn’t have been, she amended a moment later. This one would have been special. Wrong, but special.

  Not feeling very much better about the situation, she coughed and said, ‘Hal, I’m sorry about Tessa.’

  He nodded. ‘You did your best. I’m sorry you got shot.’

  She wondered how to put it. ‘You must feel bad.’

  ‘Of course I do. No one deserves to die like that. She was leaving the job, you know.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Ellen,’ he said, ‘to put it plainly, I was fond of her, I’ll miss her, but there was no future for us.’

  And none for us, Ellen told herself.

  Twenty minutes later, they were in Safety Beach. Here the wind blew cruelly off the bay, and the mechanic took them into his office, wiping his hands with an oily rag. Greasy thumbprints everywhere, on invoice books, work sheets, the Progress, out-of-date calendars, spare-parts brochures. Ellen was careful not to sit, but she didn’t mind the grime or the odours of oil, grease and petrol. There was something solid and dependable about the mechanic and his garage.