by Garry Disher
'Yes, but to what extent, and with what?'
He hesitated fatally.
She pressed her advantage. 'Barely a scratch?'
He shrugged.
'Not a full-blooded attempt, so to speak. Not a proper deep slice down the length of the wrist.'
He sighed. 'No.'
'A cry for help, maybe?'
Challis snarled, 'Something like that.'
Tessa's voice softened. 'It's time you gave her up, Hal.'
Challis crossed the room to the whisky bottle. 'It's not as easy as that.'
'Of course it is. Your wife pulls the strings and you jerk into action. She says "jump" and you say "how high?".'
'She didn't call me the second time, her parents did. So why don't you just shut the fuck up?'
The 'fuck' didn't sound quite right. It struck a false note, sounded forced rather than genuine. But he saw the hurt it caused, and then Tessa was turning away from him, staring at the dark shadows in the corners of the room, solitary and chafing. Her voice when it came was low and hollow. 'I was so looking forward to our walk. Mostly perfect weather, perfect company. Well, we all know about that, don't we?'
Challis said nothing. He sipped his scotch miserably and stared down the years to a time and a place that wouldn't let him go. He'd been one of four CIB detectives in a town in the old goldfields country north of Melbourne. His wife, restless and easily bored, had taken up with one of his colleagues. The colleague had become infatuated with her and lured Challis to a deserted place and tried to kill him. Now the colleague was shuffling around a prison yard with a bullet-shattered femur and Challis's wife was serving eight years for being an accessory to attempted murder.
She would phone him from time to time and say she was sorry, then say she wasn't sorry and would gladly do it again. She needed him, she hated him. He was too good for her, he was a shit. Most of the time she was full of longing for him and what he'd represented and the times they'd had before it all went wrong. Challis didn't want her back and no longer loved her, but he did feel responsible, as though he should have been a better man or at least the kind of man she wouldn't want her lover to kill. As Tessa Kane kept saying, it was time he shook her off. Time he divorced her, in fact.
'I suppose her parents were there?'
'Yes.'
In fact, Challis liked his wife's parents. They were bewildered, apologetic, as tortured with notions of responsibility as he was, and sorry to think that their daughter could do such a thing to so nice a man.
Tessa snorted. Challis read it not as contempt but obscure pain and envy, as though she felt she had no claim on him at all. He put down his scotch. 'Tess—'
'Something unusual happened on my hike. Do you want to hear about it?' She looked at him, brightly blinking her moist eyes.
Relief flooded through him. 'Of course.'
'I was walking along an empty stretch of beach near Flinders this afternoon. There was a lot of seaweed and kelp on the beach, strong winds, waves, you know how windy it was today.'
Challis nodded. Had she seen him? No.
'Anyway, I'm trudging along when a four-wheel-drive appears, roaring straight at me across the sand.'
Challis's nerve endings tingled. 'Go on.'
'White Toyota traytop ute, to be exact. Two men inside. The driver starts shouting at me. What am I doing there? Who else is with me? Have I found some boxes on the beach? Maybe I've hidden them? He was quite aggressive. Then he just sped off further down the beach. I was too surprised to take down the number.'
'Shipment of drugs,' Challis said flatly.
'I'd say so.'
Challis worked homicide, not drugs, but the trade in drugs often leads to homicide, so naturally he was interested. 'There was a gale last night,' he said.
She nodded. 'Either the stuff was tied to a buoy and got dislodged, or it was thrown or washed overboard from some ship or yacht.'
'Or the shipment was ripped off.'
'That too. Or it's entirely innocent. But it didn't feel right, you know?'
Things not feeling right is a common instinct in the police and the press, Challis thought. 'What did they look like?'
Tessa shrugged. 'I only saw the driver clearly. Generic Peninsula male, late thirties, beanie, shades, footie jumper, needed a shave. I can't be more specific than that.'
'Even so, it's worth reporting. Our collators can feed it into the system.'
She saluted. 'Yes, sir.'
A silence opened between them. It was clear to Challis now that they were not going to make love and he'd been deluded to think that a reunion after what he'd done to her— as she saw it—could have been passionate. If he reached out and touched her now she'd flinch and say, it's not as easy as that, Hal.
She seemed to read his confusion and unhappiness and got to her feet. 'I'd better go.'
She almost walked out on him coldly but at the last moment stopped and briefly touched his cheek.
She'd left her scotch unfinished.
CHAPTER FIVE
At one am, with Dwayne Venn questioned and remanded and most of the paperwork done, Ellen packed up and drove home to Penzance Beach, still dressed in her baggy stakeout cargo pants and cotton windcheater. The Destry family home was a fibro holiday house on stilts in a hollow between the beachfront and hilly farmland. Penzance Beach was a fifteen-minute drive but a world away from Waterloo, with its depressed estates and idle light industry. In summer, Penzance Beach crawled with the four-wheel-drives and German saloon cars of the well-heeled Melbourne families whose fairytale cottages and architect-designed bunkers would one day replace the fibro shacks of families like the Destrys.
Melbourne was just over an hour's drive away so Penzance Beach crawled with outsiders at Easter too. She slowed the car and looked for somewhere to park. The street was full of cars of the holidaying families and the kids attending Larrayne's party. She drove down two adjacent streets before finding a gap large enough to fit her Magna, and walked back. Good: the party was winding up. There were shouts goodbye as kids tumbled out of her front door and away.
She went inside to find a stony-faced husband and teary daughter. 'What's wrong?'
A dirty look from Alan said she'd been out having fun while he'd been stuck at home trying to maintain order with thirty teenagers. She ignored him, placed her hands on Larrayne's face. 'Sweetie?'
Larrayne had lost weight in the past year. She'd been plump and awkwardly shaped before, as though her torso and arms had lengthened but not her legs or neck. Now she was perfectly proportioned: tall, willowy and, when the puffiness and skin blemishes faded from her cheeks in the next year or so, likely to be a stunner. Larrayne raised her damp, blotchy face. 'Someone brought vodka and ecstasy, Mum,' she said, baffled and offended.
Ellen folded her daughter close against her and glanced inquiringly at her husband.
He took offence. 'Lay off. Don't blame me. What was I supposed to do? I'm just one person, not a squad of security guards.'
A straggle of teenagers edged past them in the hallway, eyeing them apprehensively, all of the cheer gone out of their goodbyes. Then the Destrys were alone in the house, the front door sealing them from the night, the last car accelerating through the slumbering streets.
'I'm really sorry,' Ellen said. 'I tried to get home early but we were on a stakeout and made an arrest and it all took a while.'
She lifted a hand from her daughter's shoulderblades and reached for her husband's arm. 'Alan, sweetheart…'
Some of the tension left him. He wore jeans and a T-shirt and looked deeply fatigued, rubbing both hands along his bulky jaw. 'One of the kids must have chucked booze and pills over the back fence. It took me a while to realise that half of the kids were stoned and others were coming and going from the back yard all night.' He laughed bitterly. 'I thought they were after fresh air.'
'Do we know who it was?'
Larrayne disengaged herself from Ellen and shook her head miserably. 'I told everyone no alcohol or drugs.
Everyone knows you're both in the police. How could they do this to me?'
'We'd better search the yard,' Ellen said.
If she could find the remains of the stash, maybe she could get some useful prints and track them back to the supplier. It was the supplier she wanted, not the kid. If she arrested the kid, then her daughter's name would be mud. Fetching a torch from the wall hook beside the back door, she stepped out onto the deck that overlooked the yard, and began to poke the torchlight into the shadows beneath her.
Plenty of bottles and cans. Someone's windcheater. Crumpled cigarette packets.
And, half concealed by shrubbery, a pair of slender legs in jeans and trainers.
Beside her Alan said, 'God almighty,' and clattered down the steps then across the blighted lawn.
Ellen followed. Behind her Larrayne wailed, 'That's Skip.'
Skip Lister. Larrayne had brought him home for a meal a couple of times. A slender, edgy but pleasant kid, anxious to please without being fawning, a student at the Frankston campus of Monash University, drove an old Holden fitted with surfboard racks. He lived in an exclusive part of the Peninsula, just off Five Furlong Road in Upper Penzance. Ellen glanced up into the night, past the dark mass that was sloping farmland on the outskirts of Penzance Beach, to Upper Penzance, as if she might see the lights of the Lister house.
Too late, too dark, too far away.
Larrayne pushed past her, knelt beside Alan and reached her hand to Skip's face, then recoiled as vomit spurted over her hand.
'Yuck,' she said. 'Gross.'
'Roll him onto his side,' Ellen said calmly.
Her husband snapped, 'I know, I know, I work Traffic, remember? I know what to do.'
He rolled the boy over, cleared the vomit from the slack mouth, and checked for breathing.
Skip would have choked to death on his own vomit if we hadn't found him, Ellen thought.
Suddenly she was furious. She wouldn't mind betting that Skip Lister's parents had no idea where their son was or what he was up to. The police saw it all the time and were usually the ones to pick up the pieces: brawls, convenience-store hold-ups, cars wrapped around trees resulting in injury and death.
The parents never knew. Most were shocked to find out what their kids had been doing. Some didn't give a damn.
Stewing, Ellen went inside, looked up the number for Carl Lister in Upper Penzance and dialled. It was one-thirty in the morning but the phone was snatched up at the first ring. 'Yo.'
Yo yourself, Ellen thought. 'Mr Lister?'
The tone changed, as though this wasn't the call that Carl Lister had been expecting. 'Yep.'
'Ellen Destry speaking.'
Silence, then, 'Sorry, do I know you?'
A hint of an accent in Lister's voice. South African, that was it. 'Your son attended my daughter's birthday party tonight.'
'Uh-huh.'
'Well, he's lying in our back yard in a pool of vomit.'
A suggestion of matey laughter. 'Little bugger.'
Ellen clenched her jaw. 'Mr Lister? I said, your son's lying here—'
'Look, give him a coffee, put him in his car, send him home. I'll sort him out when he gets here.'
'I can't do that. He's been drinking.'
'Well, obviously, it was a party, wasn't it?'
'Mr Lister, he could crash his car and kill himself. Worse, he could kill or injure someone else.'
Irritation showed in Carl Lister's voice. 'I don't know what I'm supposed to do about it.'
'You're his father, aren't you?'
'He's old enough to look after himself. Old enough to clean up after himself.'
'He's barely nineteen.'
'So? When I was eighteen I—'
'Mr Lister, please come and collect your son.'
'Can't he sleep it off there? Drive himself home in the morning?'
'I don't run a hotel.'
'Christ, look, it's not convenient right now.'
Ellen went icy. She disliked playing the cop card, but sometimes it was necessary and it usually got results.
'I know what we can do,' she said. 'I'll ring the Waterloo police station and say to the duty officer, "It's Detective Sergeant Destry speaking. Send a van to my house, I've got a prisoner for the station lockup".'
In the silence that followed, she said, 'How would that do, Mr Lister? You can drive to the station in the morning and fetch your son. That way only a couple of constables—who would be on patrol duty anyway—will be inconvenienced.'
Carl Lister snarled, 'Give us your address. I'll leave right away.'
Ellen smiled and there was no warmth in it.
CHAPTER SIX
Mid-afternoon on Easter Sunday. Mostyn Pearce fed Blur, his ferret, then went for a walk. He walked for an hour a day obsessively, counting cars, counting gates and potholes, and his walk always took in Five Furlong Road. You had Ian Munro's paddocks on the left, sloping down to Penzance Beach, and higher up on the right, along a ridge that commanded million-dollar views of the sea, you had Upper Penzance, an enclave of twenty or thirty houses on two- and three-acre blocks, ranging in price from $400 000 to $750 000. Trucked-in palm trees and other exotics, dirt roads, a general sense of shutting out the rat race.
Shutting out Mostyn Pearce in his dingy new housing-estate bungalow at the bottom of the hill, in other words.
What irritated Pearce—and he'd written to the editor of the Progress about it—was the air of privilege, like there were rules for the residents of Upper Penzance and different rules for people like him. It was stupid. They resisted mains water, insisting that every householder use tank water. They didn't want made roads, only leafy dirt lanes. They even kept taking down the roadsign to discourage daytrippers.
As Pearce had pointed out in one of his letters to the Progress: 'What if there's a house or bushfire in Upper Penzance? The access roads are choked with trees, the tracks are potholed, there's very little available water, let alone water pressure'.
The editor had printed that one. She didn't take everything he sent her, like his defence of the detention centre and the need to isolate the queue jumpers, but given that he sent her several letters a week and the newspaper came out only once a week, there was always something for her to use. She'd started calling him the Meddler about six months ago. At first he'd been offended—it sounded derisive—but now he liked it. And after every Meddler column there was always plenty of supportive mail for her letters-to-the-editor column.
Not a peep from the residents of Upper Penzance after his bushfire letter, but.
He always had something to write about. Like on Thursday last week he'd been passing one of the houses on Five Furlong Road and seen that they'd fastened an American-style letter box to the front gate, complete with a little red metal flag on the side. He'd been seized with fury. He wanted to sit the guy down and slap him about the face and demand to know why, since this wasn't America, he'd erected an American letter box? And what, pray tell, is the little red flag supposed to indicate? he wanted to say. Is the postie supposed to put it up whenever he pops mail into your box? If this were America you'd put it up to indicate that you had letters for him to collect—but this isn't America, arsehole. Even if the postie could give a shit one way or the other, what makes you think he's got the time or energy or inclination to shift the stupid lever?
The arm was up again today. Pearce clicked it down.
He walked on, coming to Ian Munro's fenceline and the metal sign that read 'Any person caught stealing firewood off this property will be prosecuted', the word 'prosecuted' spraypainted out and substituted by the word 'shot'.
And that's when he saw the sheep. Distressed sheep, a dozen of them, hollow-ribbed, spines bowed in exhaustion, heads drooping. Baked dirt under their feet. No water in the trough, only a greenish sludge at the bottom. A car went by him on the road, a woman driving, and he turned to face her, indicating the sorry spectacle of the sheep with a gesture of his right hand, inviting her to share his outrage.
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br /> But the car headed obliviously on up the road toward Upper Penzance, so Mostyn Pearce went home and fired off an anonymous call to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Then he glanced at his watch. Whoops. Three-thirty in the afternoon, and he started work at four. Time he was gone. He set the VCR to tape tonight's 'International Most Wanted', a true-crime program on one of the pay TV channels, kissed his wife and daughter, and left for work.
As she passed the oddball looking over a fence at some tired sheep, Ellen Destry slowed the car to scrutinise him more closely. Pinched, unhappy face, dainty Michael Jackson nose, scalp shaved within an inch of its life and full of pale, defenceless ridges. But harmless, and so she continued along Five Furlong Road and into Upper Penzance. She was bone-tired after last night, the business with Skip Lister and his father, the cleaning up this morning. And it wasn't finished. There was a leather jacket on the seat beside her. It belonged to Skip Lister and she'd found it stowed behind a sofa cushion just before lunch. It had taken all morning to make the house presentable again. The odour of cigarette smoke lingered in the curtains and upholstery. Puddles of vomit waited for her in unlikely places. The carpet was sodden with spilt beer and spirits—but not red wine, thank God. Cigarette burns on the mantelpiece. Someone's knickers—none too clean either— under a deckchair on the side verandah. A couple of condoms underneath the ti-trees at the back.
Alan was working from eight until four today, otherwise she might have done her block and shouted, 'Didn't you keep an eye on them at all last night?'
She glanced at her watch. Four in the afternoon. He'd be driving home about now. She sighed: she simply felt too fatigued and dispirited to contemplate a row with him later. Besides, in a sense he wouldn't be there but shut inside the dining room to study for another shot at the sergeants' exam. Meanwhile sex had become an infrequent and complicated transaction. Their lives sometimes collided in angry knots but mainly withered in isolation.
She drove on. She could simply have telephoned the Listers and told Skip to call around for his jacket, but she wanted to see where he lived.
