by Garry Disher
The chink in the armour was Clara.
'You don't need the stuff any more. You need to get straightened out.'
'What are you, my father? My brother? Both of them fucked me, so what's the difference?'
He found himself snapping, 'Grow up.'
'Oh, that's a good one. Look who's talking.'
He struck her, a quick hard cheek slap that rocked back her head and shocked her. She was livid. 'Just for that, I'm dobbing you in.'
She'd said it before, as if it were a hold she had over him. 'Yeah, sure.'
'You're piss weak. No wonder your wife walked out.'
They were snapping off the insults now. Van Alphen felt pressure building inside his skull. 'I could kill you,' he said.
'You wouldn't have the guts.'
Boyd Jolic was grabbing some shut-eye when the phone rang. He stumbled through to the kitchen and snatched it up, but the ringing continued and he stared blearily at the handset before he located the source.
His mobile was on the table, next to a greasy plate, a stripped-down Holley carburettor and an oily rag. All of his old practised motions seemed to desert him as he fumbled to find the right button. 'Yeah?'
'I need to see you.'
'Oh, it's you,' he muttered.
'And lovely to hear your voice, too, Boyd. Just what a girl needs after a hard day.'
A long time since you were a girl, Jolic thought, as he scratched his stomach, his back. He began to contort, his fingers searching under his T-shirt, reaching high, between the shoulderblades. 'When do you want to see me?'
'Now. Tonight. Whenever.'
The itch relieved, he looked across the room at a Country Fire Authority poster on the wall above his sofa: WILDFIRES: WILL YOU SURVIVE? 'Can't tonight,' he said.
'Why, have you had a better offer?'
'Unfinished business,' Jolic said, but told her later in the week, and cut her off.
He liked to keep her eager.
It was four o'clock in the afternoon. He might as well stay up, now that he was up. Work out a plan of action, given that he'd be on his own tonight, that little prick Danny wimping out on him.
Tessa Kane was out all day, and didn't open her office mail until five o'clock. There was only one item. She knew at once who it was from: the same block capitals, the same kind of envelope.
She weighed the envelope down with a stapler while she opened the flap with a letter opener. Then, pinching the envelope by one corner, she teased the letter out with the blade, and found that she was thinking of Challis. She was doing this for Challis, keeping her prints off.
The letter read:
Hit a brick wall, have you? Put me in the too hard basket?
Big mistake, fuckers.
Am I resting—or am I feeling the itch again?
That's what you should be asking yourselfs. People don't care about burglars or the spoilt rich. They want to know if it's safe for their daughters to go out alone.
Tessa laughed. She'd put his nose out of joint. He wanted to be back on page one.
She lifted the phone.
Damn. Challis had left, according to the receptionist. Wouldn't be in again until the morning. She looked up his home number, made to dial, and hovered.
The phone was ringing when Challis got in that evening.
'Hal.'
'Hello, Ange,' he said.
He looked at his watch. Seven. Surely they should all be in their cells by now?
'Hal, I had to hear your voice.'
'How are you, Ange?'
'Don't be like that.'
'Like what?'
'Standoffish. Shutting me out.'
'Look, Ange, I'm tired, I've only just this minute stepped in the door. I'm talking on the hall phone, briefcase in one hand. Let me take this call in the kitchen, okay?'
'You're always just walking in the door.'
'Ange—'
'I wish I could see your place. I keep trying to visualise it. I—'
Challis went to the kitchen. He tried to spin out the fixing of a drink and a sandwich, but she was still there when he lifted the handset from the cradle above the cutting bench.
'I'm back.'
'It hasn't been a good day for me.'
'I didn't expect to hear from you at this hour, Ange.'
His wife replied brightly, like a child just home from school: 'I'm in the play! We've been rehearsing this evening.'
She told him about it. He thought about his killer on the Old Peninsula Highway, and he thought about Tessa Kane. He'd hoped it might be her, when he'd heard the phone, ringing to repair the damage.
Or was that up to him?
Either way, he wanted to hear her low growl in his ear.
Clara had driven to Frankston after van Alphen left her, where she scored a small amount of coke from an islander kid who called her 'sister'. The quantity was small but the price was high, and he'd offered her a better deal on heroin, said it was pure and there was plenty of it around, but she told him she wasn't touching that stuff. Then two cops on bicycle patrol, looking like jet-streamed insects, had come pedalling down the mall, and the islander kid had scarpered and she'd turned on her heel and ducked into the closest shop. It had NEW YEAR SPECIALS! pasted across the window and sold computers. She'd never been in a computer shop in her life before. She said, 'Just browsing,' and when she looked at the equipment and the vividly coloured boxes on the shelves, she felt scared, ignorant, ignored, left behind in life, and couldn't wait to get out of there. She went straight to her car and did three lines of coke, and felt so high she didn't want to risk driving home but took a taxi instead. The good thing about Witness Protection, there was a little money there from time to time if she ever needed it.
So now she had a pleasant buzz on, but it would wear off pretty soon. She knew she'd want to score again, but she could hardly go back to Frankston at this hour of the night, one-thirty in the morning. Besides, she'd left her car there.
Then the background sounds of the night seemed to alter in her consciousness and one of them clarified as a tyre crush on gravel outside of her window. She was just formulating an adage from her old days, 'Never get involved with a copper,' when glass smashed somewhere at the rear of the house.
EIGHTEEN
It was a night of hot northerlies, hotter where they passed over the flaming roof timbers. Sparks streamed from the burning house, and some alighted here and there in long grass that had not been slashed despite a request from the shire inspectors. The small fierce firefronts became one, consuming the grass, and then treetops caught, and one eucalyptus after another exploded in the nature reserve between the burning house and the orchard, which bordered the winery on the northern boundary fence and a horse stud at the rear. The orchardist heard his dogs before he was fully awake and able to separate the smell of the smoke from his dreams and the fact that his dogs were agitated. In the stables beyond his eastern boundary fence, horses were panicking, waking the stud manager and his wife. They stepped outside and saw the firefront, rolling as hungrily as a tidal wave upon a sleeping coastline. Evacuate. Evacuate.
It was too hot to sleep. And too noisy. Penzance Beach had swelled by the hundreds, it seemed—families who'd come to their beach shacks for four weeks, people camping, people looking for parties to crash. Pam found herself thinking of Ginger. If she had the nerve, if he lived just down the street instead of farther around the coast, she'd sneak down and tap on his bedroom window. She stood on the decking of her rented house, sniffing the wind.
Smoke.
The phone rang.
'Pam? Ellen Destry. I'll collect you in five minutes.'
Tessa Kane was in Challis's bed this time, and she couldn't sleep and wanted to go home. Now she knew what it had been like for him, that first time, when he'd tried to slip away from her bed. She glanced at him. He was wide awake, too. They didn't want to make love again. They disliked each other, just at that moment. They didn't want to be together. They wanted daylight and to be alone. The
se were temporary feelings, and would pass, but right now they were crippling.
'Go, if you want to.'
'I think I might.' She began to dress.
'I'll make you a cup of tea.'
'Hal, it's two o'clock in the morning.'
'You've a thirty minute drive ahead of you.'
'No tea, thanks. Thanks for the thought.'
As she dressed, he said, 'No more letters from our man?'
She looked for an earring. 'I'd tell you if there were.'
He nodded. 'What about Julian Bastian? Has there been any pressure on you to drop the story?' 'Pressure from whom?'
'Lady Bastian. Her friends in high places.'
She paused to stare at him. 'Like McQuarrie? Are you siding with him now?'
'Christ no,' he said. 'I think the charges should be reinstated against the little prick.'
She laughed. 'Can I quote you?'
First his mobile rang, then hers.
A fire.
Jolic swooned to see the flames. His skin tingled. He was breathless. A strange pleasurable electric heat started in his groin and spread upwards to his throat. He wanted badly to rut. Holding the hose on the CFA firetruck, Jolic was a vengeful rutting king.
John Tankard was on Myers Road, his patrol car parked crosswise, emergency lights flashing in the darkness. There was not much normal traffic at this time of night, but an increase in the ghouls and gawkers, attracted by the sirens, the Emergency Services helicopter, the evacuation warning for householders south of Myers Road. A Triumph came barrelling toward him. He waved his torch and held his gloved hand high to stop it, indicating Quarterhorse Lane, the detour that would take all traffic away from the fire. But it was bloody Challis. He had Tessa Kane with him.
'Sorry, Inspector. Go on through.'
'Thanks, constable.'
The editor leaned across Challis. 'How bad is it, John?'
'One house destroyed—that's where it started. It spread quickly, jumped the road into the nature reserve.' He looked up, into the red-glow sky. 'This wind doesn't help.'
'Any casualties?'
'Some horses had to be moved.'
'Whose house got destroyed?'
Tankard looked to Challis for guidance. Challis said, 'It's all right. She has to know sometime, and so do I.'
'We don't know who lives there, sir. A woman by herself, according to the neighbours.'
'Is she all right?'
'No sign of her, sir.'
The wind seemed to shift then, and shift again. It was hot on their faces and heavy with smoke. Ash alighted on the back of Tankard's glove. He brushed it away, smearing the white leather. Funny, he could hear the danger—the wind, the flames?—but he couldn't see anything but a glow in the distance.
'Sir, I don't know how dangerous it is in there. We're directing traffic along the lane here. That's where the fire started, but it's safe there now.'
Challis pulled the automatic stick into Drive. 'We need to go in, John.'
Tankard thought: Don't call me John, you prick.
A part of Ellen Destry felt betrayed by the sense of exhilaration and competence-edged-with-risk that the fire seemed to engender in everyone. They were all equals, men and women, cops and civilians. They worked well together. They faced the flames and beat them back. They communicated efficiently. There were no shirkers. The lights, the trucks, the dirty men and women in their yellow emergency gear, the roaring hot wind, the red coals and leaping flames. Once or twice gum trees exploded above their heads. She found herself helping Pam Murphy to pass out cups of tea, bind a couple of burnt hands, move vehicles and stock away from the path of the fire, fetch an old woman's cat. A part of her could understand the sentimentality of newspaper accounts of community disasters, when firefighters, policemen, ambulance workers and ordinary civilians pulled together.
But another side of her recognised that it was also essentially a blokey bonding exercise. Men embraced men and the women were honorary mates.
Then she learned that she had detective work to do.
Challis left Tessa Kane at the community refuge, where one of her photographers and two of her journos were already interviewing people, then drove carefully along Quarterhorse Lane to the house where the fire had started. The air was smoky and hot. Smouldering fence posts marked a route between an untouched orchard on one side of the road and ashy black earth on the other. He passed beneath a burning tree. The odd thing was, as he was turning into the driveway of the destroyed house, he saw signs of an earlier fire: a scorched pine tree. He looked closer. A small, newish, metal mailbox on a length of iron pipe.
He drove in. Ellen Destry was already there, staring at what had once been a weatherboard farmhouse and was now a flattened patch of charred wood and twisted, blackened roofing iron. A chimney stood forlornly at one end of the ruin. It was apparent to Challis that the fire had started at the house. The wind had then carried sparks to the grassy hill beyond it, and a firefront had developed, sweeping south toward the roadside gums on Myers Road, leaping it and taking hold in the nature reserve. Well, there wasn't much nature there any more, but the fire had been contained before it reached the dozen or so houses south of the reserve.
Suddenly Ellen was doubled over, coughing and spitting. 'You okay?'
She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. 'I've been breathing thick smoke for the past two hours.'
A length of roof crashed behind them. Kees van Alphen, kicking and tugging.
'Leave it, Van. Wait for the fire inspector.'
'A woman lived here, sir.'
'If she was home, she didn't survive this,' Challis said.
Van Alphen was there when they found her body—or what remained of it. The ruin bewildered him. All of his senses were turned around. Only the blackened refrigerator and the stainless steel kitchen sink told him exactly where her body lay in relation to the rest of the house.
And the flames had got her. It wasn't smoke inhalation. If it had been smoke inhalation he might have touched her, kissed her, even, for she'd have been recognisable, but he wasn't saying goodbye to this fire-wracked, shrivelled twist of charred meat.
NINETEEN
Daybreak, Wednesday, 3 January. Challis hadn't been long at the burnt house before the fire inspector arrived and talked him through it.
'It's my belief the seat of the fire is here, at the kitchen stove. A hot, dry night, hot northerly wind outside, plenty of natural accelerants like cooking oil, cardboard food packets, wooden wall cabinets. Then weatherboard external walls, wooden roofing beams.'
He pointed. 'See that? Open window, creating a draught.'
Challis said, 'How do you know it's the stove?'
'Look.'
Challis looked. The stove top was as black and twisted as anything else in the ruin.
'See that? That's the remains of a saucepan, a chip fryer. That's the seat of your fire.'
Challis went away wondering why the victim had been cooking on such a hot night, and why she'd been cooking so late at night.
Ellen Destry made it a point always to switch off when she was at work. Switch off the things that had happened earlier, at home, in the bedroom or around the kitchen table.
She rang the post office. The dead woman was called Clara Macris. Originally from New Zealand, the postmaster thought, judging by the accent.
That's as far as Ellen got. She could feel the badness creeping up on her: the abductions, the woman burning to death. She looked out of the incident room window and there was Rhys Hartnett, effortlessly lifting and measuring, whistling even, as he worked, while at home she had a husband who was getting fat because he drank and sat in a Traffic Division car all day, jealous because he sensed that she felt something for Rhys, who'd been around to the house three times now, measuring and planning, and resentful because she earned more than he did.
She'd said, as she'd headed out to her car after breakfast, 'I'll be late tonight. I'll get myself something to eat.'
The kitc
hen door opened on to the carport. In the early days, Alan would have walked her to it and kissed her goodbye. Now he couldn't even be bothered to look up at her. 'Whatever.'
Morning light streamed into the kitchen, giving the room a falsely homely look. Larrayne was still in bed. Alan was reading the Herald Sun and forking eggs and bacon into his mouth. His moustache glistened. After each mouthful he patted it dry. Ellen stood in the doorway, watching for a moment, jingling her keys. 'What's that supposed to mean?'
He looked up. 'What's what supposed to mean?'
'You said "whatever". What do you mean by that?'
He shrugged, went back to his breakfast. 'Doesn't mean anything. You'll be late tonight, you'll get yourself something to eat, me and Larrayne will have to fare for ourselves again, so what's new? The story of this marriage.'
She almost went back to the chair opposite his. 'The story of every police marriage. We knew that when we started. Mature adults know how to work around that.'
He belched, a deliberate liquid sound of contempt. 'Mature? What a joke.'
'What's that supposed to mean?'
'You go around this house like you're on heat, like you're a teenager whose tits have been squeezed for the first time.'
'Well, if someone's squeezing them, it sure as hell isn't you,' she'd said, and she'd slammed out of the house.
Now she picked up the phone. A long shot, but she was calling the New Zealand police. It would be different if Alan had something concrete to be jealous about, but her lunch with Rhys Hartnett hadn't developed into anything. Rhys himself had seemed—not evasive, exactly, but conscious of the proprieties of getting involved with a married woman, especially one who was a cop. The dial tone went on and on. As for Larrayne, her judgment of Rhys was brief and to the point. 'He's a creep, mum, and a sleazebag.'
'Hal, I'm cutting at eleven,' the pathologist said.
'Beautifully put, Freya.'
'You know me.'
'Eleven o'clock. I'll be there.'
The region's autopsies were carried out in a small room attached to Peninsula General Hospital in Mornington. When Challis arrived, Freya Berg had a student with her in the autopsy room, a young woman. Challis stood back, a handkerchief smeared with Vicks under his nose, and observed.
