by Garry Disher
'I hope you cautioned him, Constable.'
'Hello?' Danny said. 'I'm here, in the room with you all.'
'Danny, you just let me do the talking.'
And that's where it stalled. Danny was charged and bailed, and left without revealing anything. Pam was even obliged, by Marion Nunn, to return the backpack to Danny.
Mid-afternoon. Challis took the call, staring out of the Displan room windows at the carpark. 'A body, you say?'
'Dead. She's a woman.'
'Where?'
'Devil Bend Reservoir. Near the edge. There's a track to it.'
He glanced automatically at the wall map. Not so far from where he lived, a Peninsula Water catchment reservoir. 'Your name, sir?'
Audible breathing, as though in heavy concentration. Challis was convinced that a second person was there with the caller.
'I don't want to get involved.'
'For our paperwork, sir.' Sir. The caller was a kid, sounded no more than fifteen.
'You're gunna trace this, right? Well, I'm getting off the line before you dob me in.'
Six
Challis watched from the perimeter, his shadow long now that the sun was low in the west. Inside the crime-scene tape they were taking photographs of the body, and of footprints and tyre tracks. Plaster casts after that, then a sweep with a metal detector to see if anything—a ring, a weapon, a man's neck chain, a wristwatch—had been trampled beneath the mud and the muddy grasses and reeds. Meanwhile, behind Challis, and supervised by Ellen Destry, a line search of ten constables and cadets had finished tracing the tyre tracks between the body, which was at the reservoir's edge, and the gravelled surface of the Peninsula Water access track, and now were tracing footprints, two pairs, that headed west from the body toward a belt of scraggly gums. Farmland after that. Not so far away, no more than four kilometres, was Challis's house.
Challis looked across the reservoir. What a godawful place to die. Blackberry thickets, bracken, stiff, wiry grass, small, dark, knobbled trees, defeated-looking gums, a stink of primeval gases. There were waterbirds, but they were mostly silent, and rather than seeming cool and alive, the body of water sat still and heavy under a layer of algae, and Challis felt oppressed by the humidity. The mosquitos were out. One landed on his wrist. He slapped it, saw a smear of blood.
Freya Berg, the pathologist, stood and waved to him. 'Hal, you might as well come in now.'
Challis climbed over the tape and approached the body. He should have thought to pack rubber overshoes. He felt water seep into one sock.
First he tried to read the signs. The body itself could wait. 'One vehicle, quite marked tread pattern, two people on foot. Wearing gumboots?'
'Looks like it, sir,' the forensic officer said.
Challis followed the footprints with his eyes. 'They came around the reservoir, saw the body, walked around it once or twice, then headed out that way.' He pointed toward the distant gums and farmland.
'You want my job, sir?' the officer said.
Challis grinned. 'You tell me the rest.'
'No other tracks. I'd say our victim was thrown out of the rear of the vehicle. See how he's reversed in and gone out again?'
'He didn't step out of the vehicle, on to the ground?'
'No other tracks, sir, only those two.'
'A car? A van?'
'Probably something with a rear-opening door, like a station wagon or a hatchback, if it was a car, but the tyre tracks indicate a heavier vehicle than that. Minivan? Four-wheel drive? Something with inside access to the rear compartment.'
'Or a ute, and he swings over into the tray from the driver's door ledge.'
'A possibility, sir.'
Challis turned to the body. It lay on a patch of mud at the water's edge. He wondered about the absence of grass. People regularly stood there, he decided. Birdwatchers, Peninsula Water engineers, kids skipping stones across the sluggish water, blackberry pickers later on in the new year. People fishing. Anyone at all, really.
The body had been face down. Now it lay on its back. The pathologist had bagged both hands; she'd examine them later for skin samples, traces of fabric, anything that might point to the killer. She'd also take swabs of the mouth, the vagina and the anus for evidence of saliva, sperm or acid phosphatase, the cardinal signs of sexual assault. If it's the same killer, Challis thought, she'll find signs of latex condom lubricant and not much else. The legs, from the bare, bruised pubis area to the Nike runners, looked grey and mottled. The upper body was clothed in a T-shirt, torn at the neck. Challis peered. Bite marks. There were also early signs of decomposition. The face was contradictory—swollen as a result of strangulation, yet curiously slack. Even so, it was clearly Jane Gideon.
Where was the lower clothing?
'Find a skirt, pants, underpants, anything like that?'
'No, boss.'
Just like Kymbly Abbott.
Ellen Destry joined them. 'We're running out of daylight, boss.'
'I know, but we're almost wrapped up here. Just make sure the wider scene is sealed off tonight so we can resume the search in the morning.'
'Will do.' She nodded at the body. 'Raped, Freya?'
Freya Berg said, 'Looks like it, but you know I can't say till I've had a proper look at her.'
'What can you say?'
'She was abducted at midnight on the seventeenth, right? I'd say she was killed and then dumped here soon after that. Over forty-eight hours ago, in the hot sun for a lot of that time, so there's some decomposition. The cause of death was strangulation, but she's also had a blow to the head.'
Unlike Kymbly Abbott, Challis thought. Then again, Kymbly Abbott had been drunk and half doped and therefore malleable. Jane Gideon had been fit and healthy and wide awake. Either she struggled or the killer thought she might, and so he'd struck her. 'What kind of blow? The old blunt instrument?'
'There's blunt and there's blunt, Hal. This one had a rounded edge.'
'Like a rock, or narrower than that?'
'Narrower. More defined. A metal bar of some kind, or a lump of wood.'
He brooded. A tool handle. A tyre iron. 'It didn't happen here in the mud. Anything you can tell me about where it might have happened?'
'That depends on what your forensic people find on her. Meanwhile I'll need a closer look at her on the table before I can say anything definite.'
Challis nodded gloomily. Jane Gideon could have been raped and strangled inside the killer's vehicle, or taken somewhere. Either way, it would have been somewhere away from the highway, for Jane Gideon had made a phone call and the killer would have been expecting someone to come for her.
'He wanted her to be found,' Challis said, 'just like he wanted Kymbly Abbott to be found.'
That was all he knew. That, and to expect another body.
Tessa Kane was at the jetty, waiting for Challis. Six o'clock, her shadow long on the water, the day winding down. She'd bought two rockling fillets for dinner that night, and while she waited she watched the fishmonger toss the day's fishheads and entrails to the gulls and the pelicans. She gasped and said, 'My God, a seal.'
The fishmonger pointed across Westernport Bay to the Nobbies, the seal colony at the western end of Phillip Island. 'He been coming in for a feed last four, five days, missus. He pretty old, I think. See the scars? Can't look after himself so good no more.'
She watched in awe. The seal thrashed in the water. Whole fish torsos disappeared. The wind was up. Sail rigging pinged against the masts of the yachts moored in the marina. She breathed the air. It was laden with sea salt and mangrove swamp, that living stew of muddied roots, cloudy water, swamp gas and crawling sea life.
'Good to be alive?'
It was Challis. She rested her palm briefly against his chest. 'You said you had something for me?'
Challis told her about the body and its discovery. He confirmed that it was Jane Gideon and detailed the comparisons with Kymbly Abbott's murder.
She scribbled in her notebook
, sensing his calm eyes upon her. 'Just don't arrest anyone before midnight, okay? Or I'll miss tomorrow's issue.'
'Tess, what do you intend to do about the letter?'
'We'll see.'
'I think it would be a mistake to publish it.'
She shrugged. 'What else can you tell me? I need colour, Hal. I need the broad picture.'
'The broad picture's clear enough. There's a killer out there and women would be mad to go out alone at night. They shouldn't drive alone, they shouldn't hitchhike.'
'I can quote you on that?'
'Yep.'
'It might shut him down.'
'That's the general idea.'
'Meaning you won't have anything to work on except what you've got already.'
'Tess, I can't believe you said that. You want more abductions, bodies dumped at the side of the road?'
'No, of course not. I was trying to see it from a police point of view.'
'Don't try to double guess us,' Challis said.
'I'll be reaching for links between the victims.'
'Reach away.'
She closed her notebook. 'You've never liked what I do. You like me but not what I do. That's what this hostility is about.'
As though it were an ongoing thing between them. In fact, Challis scarcely thought about Tessa Kane from one day to the next. But when he did, and when he saw her, something always shifted a little inside him, and it wasn't always unpleasant.
'I'll keep you posted.'
'I'm not finished,' she said. 'There's community concern about two of the uniformed police, John Tankard and Kees van Alphen.'
'Nothing to do with me. Ask Senior Sergeant Kellock or Superintendent McQuarrie.'
'McQuarrie. Now there's a fund of straight information. Is it true Ethical Standards might be called in?'
'McQuarrie.'
'Bugger McQuarrie,' she said.
'No thanks,' Challis said. He rubbed his face tiredly. 'Tess, do me a favour? Jane Gideon's parents still haven't been told. They've still to identify the body. Please wait a couple of days before you speak to them.'
'What do you take me for?'
They both looked up at the sound of an aero engine. She saw the lowering sun flash on the fuselage. Challis shaded his eyes. 'Desoutter II, three seater high-wing monoplane,' he said automatically. 'Found in a playground in Tasmania four years ago.'
'Is that a fact.'
He grinned shyly, as if caught out in something. I helped to restore it.'
Her gaze settled on him.
When Ellen got back to the station car park, she checked that her initials, and those of the forensic technician, were etched into the plaster tyre and footprint casts, and was unloading them from the rear of the forensic van when Rhys Hartnett said, behind her, 'Sergeant Destry?'
She pulled bin liners over the casts hastily and turned around to face him. He was standing there, the setting sun behind him, coiling electrical flex between elbow and hand. It was an automatic but neatly articulated process, and it got under her skin. There was something about men who worked with their hands. She seemed to float on her toes. 'Call me Ellen.'
He bobbed his neat head shyly. 'Call me Rhys. Look, I could come to inspect your house on Saturday, if you like.'
'Are you sure? That's only two days before Christmas.'
'I'm sure. I'm working right through, apart from Christmas Day and New Year's Day. I take my summer break in February, when the schools go back.'
'Wise man,' Ellen said. 'How about late morning, around twelve?'
'Fine.'
Danny Holsinger waited until seven-thirty in the evening before going to the police station. The chick who'd arrested him said she was on duty until eight, and he didn't want to talk to anyone else about Boyd Jolic. She was nice. But first he had a pizza, extra thick, in Pizza Hut, sitting in the window where he could watch the cops come and go on the other side of the roundabout. He felt jumpy. After that Nunn bitch had taken him home earlier, calling him a moron, he'd gone straight around to Megan's place and given her the backpack. Sort of getting rid of evidence, even though the backpack hadn't been lifted from the old lady's house but from a house he'd robbed last week. 'Happy birthday, Meeg,' he'd said. 'Sorry it's so late,' and she'd smelt the leather and gone all soppy over him and they'd had a quick one on her bed, so that was all right.
But then he'd gone home again and Boyd Jolic had rung, reminding him that his help was expected on a break-and-enter soon. 'I don't want you forgetting, Danny, or pissing off on me.' Danny's position now was, he needed help of his own.
He gathered himself, walked across the road, reached the door and chickened out. Boyd Jolic had a longer reach than the law did. Even if the law put Jolic away, he had mates who knew where Danny lived.
SEVEN
The next morning, Challis read the Progress while Scobie Sutton drove. Tessa Kane had splashed the killer's letter all over the front page. Soon the metropolitan dailies would pick up the story, and meanwhile McQuarrie had left messages, asking for an explanation. All this on top of a bad night for Challis, the image of Jane Gideon's parents staying with him through the long hours. Better to spend the morning away from the station. 'She says to me, "Eat your munch, Daddy. Sit up prop-ly and eat your munch."'
Challis worked a smile onto his face. '"Munch." I like that.'
'But where did she get it from, boss? Not me and Beth. Childcare, that's where.'
'I expect you're right.'
'I mean, they're like a sponge, that age. Absorb everything.' Scobie fell gloomy. 'The good and the bad.'
'I suppose it's up to the parents to provide most of the good and counteract the bad,' Challis said, for something to say, but wondering if he believed it. Look at his own wife. Fine, upright family background, and look what happens. She falls in lust—her explanation. 'Hal, I fell in lust, I couldn't help it, I had to have him and he had to have me.' Sure, but you didn't have to kill me to achieve it.
'Which way, boss?'
Challis blinked. 'Quite a way yet. Up near where I live.'
'How long you been there now?'
'A few years. You've got a place in Mornington, right?'
Sutton nodded. 'But thinking of moving. With all the new housing, you know, house-and-land packages, cheap deals, newlyweds and welfare cheats and what have you living in each other's pockets, the place is changing. No way I'll send my kid to the local primary schools. You don't know of any Montessori schools?'
'Sorry, no.'
'I forgot, you didn't have kids,' Sutton said, then fell silent, embarrassed.
He's heard the stories, Challis thought. 'How's your daughter coping with creche? Still kicking up a fuss in the mornings?'
Sutton shrugged. 'So-so. But tomorrow's the last day for the year, and they're having a party at the Centre, so she's looking forward to that.'
The days were sweeping by. Tomorrow was the twenty-second. Christmas day was Monday. Challis squirmed in his seat. He wasn't ready.
He spotted the turn off. 'Next left, then follow the road for about two k's.'
Sutton took them on to a badly corrugated dirt road, then over a one-lane wooden bridge. 'Sheepwash Creek,' he read aloud. 'God, the names.'
Challis was fond of the old names. They were a map of the Peninsula in the nineteenth century. Blacks Camp Road. Tarpot Corner. He said, 'They washed sheep here in the old days, to prepare them for shearing.'
'No kidding,' Sutton said absently, and Challis knew that the man was thinking of his daughter again. It was as if having a child destroyed your sense of time's continuum. Time was reduced to the present and nothing else.
'Somewhere along here,' he said. 'Look for the name Saltmarsh on a mailbox or fence railing.'
They drove for a further kilometre before they found it, a mailbox hand-lettered with the words M. Saltmarsh. They turned in and saw a small red-brick veneer house with a tiled roof. Behind it sat a modern barn, the doors open, revealing a tractor, a battered Land Cruiser, coils of rop
e, bike parts, wooden pallets, machinery tools and dusty crates crammed with one-day useful bits and pieces—chain links, cogs, pulley wheels, radiator hoses and clamps. A rusted truck chassis sat in long grass next to the barn. Hens pecked in the dust beneath a row of peppercorns. The apples in the adjacent orchard were still small and green. A dog barked, and beat its tail in the oily dirt, but failed to get up for them.
'She's a bit on the tired side,' Sutton said, meaning the farm and whoever farmed it.
'The Saltmarshs are old Peninsula,' Challis explained. 'Been here for generations, scratching a living out of a few acres of old apple trees. Two brothers and their families, on adjoining farms. Both brothers have other jobs to get by. Ken here works part time for the steel fabricator in Waterloo. Mike next door drives a school bus.'
'Poor white trash.'
Challis thought of the two teenage boys, Saltmarsh cousins, whom he'd seen walking along with their fishing rods the previous morning. How far was that image from the poor South of American film and literature? He finally said, 'No, not poor white trash. Poor, but steady, and decent.'
Maureen Saltmarsh came to the door. She was large, sun-dried and floury, smelling of the kitchen and the morning's early heat. She wasn't inclined to suspect them of anything, but smiled and said immediately, 'Me husband's not home. Did in the big end on his truck.' The smile disappeared. 'You're that inspector.'
'Hal Challis, Mrs Saltmarsh. And this is Detective Constable Sutton. We want to talk to your oldest boy, and his cousin.'
'Brett and Luke? Why, what they done?'
'I just need to talk to them. I'm more than happy for you to be present.'
She was losing a little of her control. Her hand went to her throat. 'They're in watching TV. You know, school holidays.'
'Bring them into the kitchen, would you, please? There's nothing to worry about. They're not suspects in anything. We're not going to arrest them, only question them about something.'
She ushered Challis and Sutton into the kitchen, cleaned breakfast dishes from the table and asked them to sit. While she was out of the room, Challis took stock: 1970s burnt-orange wall tiles above the benches, a clashing brown and green vinyl linoleum floor, chrome and vinyl chairs, a laminex and chrome table, a small television set, tuned to a chat show, the sound turned down, dishes in the sink, a vast bowl of dough next to a floury rolling pin and greased scone tray.
