by Garry Disher
Sutton nodded. They'd already talked to the firemen.
'So, where does that leave me?' van Alphen said, challenging them.
Challis said, 'Senior Sergeant Kellock wants you suspended.'
'I bet he does, the prick.'
'But we're not going to suspend you,' Challis went on. 'However, I don't want you on outside duties while we continue our investigation. I don't want you talking to anyone. I want you indoors, making a list of anyone you've helped put away, or anyone with a grudge against you for anything at all.'
Van Alphen sneered. 'Feels like a kind of suspension to me.'
'And you feel like a not-quite-so-straight copper to me,' Challis snarled. 'That's all. You can go.'
Challis bounced at a clip down the stairs. He sounded almost breezy.
'How's your daughter, Scobie?'
Sutton hurried to draw alongside him. Was Challis really interested, or going through the motions? 'A handful now that she's home all day long.'
'Will you send her back to the childcare place when it reopens?'
'Probably. See how it goes.'
'Good.'
Maybe Challis had wanted kids, before things blew up on him. They reached the ground floor and Sutton changed the subject. 'Boss, you don't think Van killed her, do you?'
Challis pushed through the rear door into the car park. The heat hit them. I doubt it. But he was more than just a concerned copper to her. That's why I want to have a talk to Stella Riggs. She seems to be the only independent witness.'
I don't know what else she can tell you, boss. Wasted trip.'
'Scobie, I'm not questioning your interview with her. I just want to be on firmer ground before we start digging any deeper into van Alphen.'
Scobie snorted. 'She won't thank you.'
'Won't she?'
'She's a stuck-up bitch.'
'Then I'll have to unstick her. Any luck with the gypsies?'
'None.'
'They could be in New South Wales by now.'
They had reached the Commodore. Pam Murphy, lounging on the grass beneath the line of gums that separated the police station from the courthouse, brushed leaves from her uniform and hurried toward them. Challis leaned on the roof of the car. 'What about Ledwich? Still think there's something iffy about him?'
'Boss, we've checked him pretty thoroughly. His alibis aren't crash hot, but we can't prove that he wasn't at work each of the times we're interested in. The Pajero business is a fizzer. The registration had elapsed and he'd lost his licence, yet was still driving around in it, and was scared the police and the insurance company would find out, that's how I read it.'
'You think that's why he was so edgy? Trying to avoid discovery?'
Sutton shrugged. 'It's one explanation.'
They drove out of the car park. 'Back to Quarterhorse Lane, Constable,' Challis said.
Stella Riggs showed them into a broad, gleaming room with polished floorboards, a vast open fireplace, several roomy leather armchairs and twin matching sofas, an antique drinks cabinet, and windows that offered a view across vineyards and orchards to Westernport Bay in the hazy distance. Around to the right, the ground was scorched bare.
'As I told your man here, Inspector, I didn't know the woman.'
Sutton bridled. She wasn't British, but sounded it, in voice and attitude. Before he could respond, Challis said, 'Yet you knew something of her movements.'
'All I knew, Inspector Challis, was that she was often visited by a policeman in a police car. On two occasions I actually saw him. I gave your fellow a description.' She turned to Sutton. 'I trust you passed my information on. It wouldn't surprise me if—'
Challis said, 'You never visited her?'
'No.'
'Never saw anyone else visit her?'
'No.'
'Never saw any person or vehicle in Quarterhorse Lane that shouldn't have been there?'
'No. Or rather—'
'Yes?'
'I was once followed by someone.'
'Go on.'
'You must know about it. It's been in the papers.'
Sutton frowned. What was the stupid cow on about? 'What, Mrs Riggs?'
She turned to him, her back rigid, her nose tipped back as though to avoid catching his scent. 'Road rage, of course.'
'Road rage,' Challis said.
'This fellow thought that I'd cut him off, and he followed me all the way home.'
'But what did that have to do with Miss Macris?'
'Obviously I didn't want the fellow to know where I lived.'
Scobie still didn't get it. 'So?'
But Challis did. He stared with distaste at Stella Riggs. 'You didn't drive to your own house, you drove to Clara Macris's house.'
'Yes.'
'You thought if there was going to be trouble later, then it would be she who copped it.'
'I must protest. It wasn't nearly so calculated as that. I—'
'Many road rage incidents involve quite considerable violence. Clara Macris may be dead because of you.'
For the first time, Stella Riggs's composure began to break. 'I didn't think—'
'No, you didn't.'
She shrieked, 'I turned into her driveway hoping the policeman would be there, or if he wasn't then he could be fetched to help me.'
Challis closed his eyes. He opened them again and said gently, 'Then what happened?'
'The man following me drove past the front gate, then turned around and drove away again, so I left.'
'You didn't see or speak to Miss Macris?'
'No.'
'What did he look like, this man?'
'Two men.'
'Two men. Would you recognise them if you saw them again?'
'The driver had short hair and wore a singlet, that's all I can tell you. He looked like a labourer. The other fellow was smaller.'
'And the vehicle?'
'It was a Mitsubishi Pajero.'
Challis sat back. 'A Pajero.'
She sounded almost proud. 'My late husband drove one for many years. That's how I know.'
Sutton said, 'What colour?'
'Maroon, from memory.'
'What more can you tell us about it?'
Stella Riggs got up and crossed the room to the mantelpiece above the fireplace. I jotted down the registration. Yes, here it is.'
On their way out, Sutton said, 'She killed her, didn't she?'
'As good as,' Challis said.
When Pam Murphy knocked on Challis's door, half an hour later, she was tentative, wondering if he'd be distracted and dismissive.
'Sir, I heard you talking in the car. You think whoever was driving the Pajero might have come back and killed Clara Macris.'
The inspector switched his attention fully on to her. 'It's possible. Do you have something?'
She told him about the litter that she'd bagged where the Pajero had been torched.
'You did this off your own bat?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Bottles, cans, and what else? Cigarette packets?'
'Yes, sir.'
'You didn't handle them?'
'Picked them up with my pen, sir.'
'Where are they now? Evidence locker?'
Pam squirmed. 'My own locker, sir.'
'Damn.'
'Sir?'
Challis looked up at her, faintly irritable. 'We require a clear chain of physical evidence if we're to use it in court. Anything you find at the scene of a crime must be logged in officially and immediately. If the chain is broken, the evidence, in effect, is tainted, even if it hasn't been touched by anyone else.'
'Sorry, sir.'
'What were you thinking?'
'Well, sir, I wasn't supposed to be at the scene and I felt a bit stupid, Tank—Constable Tankard, sir—slagging off at me for wasting my time. And it was near the end of the shift and we had a lot on our plate . . .'
Challis gestured. 'It's all right, Constable. At least we can see if we've got any prints worth using. If we're lucky, they'
ll match prints already on record. If they do, then it's a matter of leaning hard or finding other evidence we can use in court.'
'Yes, sir.'
'So, get it all over to the lab. I'll tell them to give it priority.'
'Thank you, sir.'
'How old was the stuff you picked up? Had it been there for long?'
'I left the really old stuff, sir.'
Tessa Kane waited at the front desk for almost an hour before Challis appeared. She saw his face shut down the moment he recognised her. He looked tired. Pushing the hair away from his forehead distractedly, he said, 'I'll see if I can find us an empty office.'
'It's all right. I'm just dropping this off.'
She handed him a letter and then an envelope, in separate freezer bags. 'It was in the box this morning. I tried to contact you earlier, but you were busy.'
He said, without looking at her, 'That's right.'
They were both looking at the letter in his hands. 'Our man sounds resentful,' Challis said.
Tessa leaned against him fleetingly. 'He wants to be on the front page again.'
After a while, Challis said, 'Thanks, Tess,' and made to go.
'Hal, can't we start again?'
Later, as Challis bumped along the narrow track to his front gate, Tessa Kane hard behind him in her Saab, he was forced to brake to avoid a massive structure ahead of him, one edge protruding a little into his path, the other filling the side gate to his neighbour's vineyard. It was a superphosphate bin, chalky white in the evening light, sitting high on metal struts. Another country lane stranger to add to his list: top-dressing contractor. He'd already thought of a further two since leaving Waterloo. Horse trainer. Red Cross collector.
He stopped thinking about it. It was all academic, anyway. They had to find who wanted Clara Macris dead, not who had a reason to be in Quarterhorse Lane.
Challis parked and opened the front door. His eyes glanced automatically at the light on his answering machine. One message. He pushed the play button, heard his wife's voice, low and choked and hectic, and immediately switched it off.
Tessa Kane entered the house behind him, carrying shopping bags. She'd bought fresh fish, a salad mix, a lemon, potatoes to make into chips. It was seven, the skyline pink as the sun settled. They cut the potatoes into chips, oiled them in a pan and placed them in the oven. They had little to say to each other and Challis wondered if he was making a mistake, even as he thought that it was nice, doing this, making a meal with an attractive woman and taking drinks out on to the decking while it cooked. He lit a citronella candle to drive away the mosquitoes and touched his glass to hers. In the half light, she looked not so hard-edged or apt to be secretive. The phone rang. Challis groaned. He knew people who could blithely ignore the phone, and people who were desperate to answer it. If he lived a normal life and wasn't a policeman, he'd be one of the former, he often thought. 'Excuse me.'
It was Scobie Sutton. 'Boss, turn to "Crime Beat", Channel 9.'
Challis's kitchen opened on to the sitting room and the little television set he kept in the corner. He found the remote control, turned the set on and returned to the phone. 'Okay.'
'Watch.'
There was an outside shot, a modest house in Dromana, then the parents of Kymbly Abbott were seated on a velour sofa that had seen better days. They were raw-looking, anxious, the victims of a poor education and a poorer diet. They seemed to sense the skin-deep sympathy and staged sentiments of the interviewer, a young woman with cropped hair, a short black dress and plum-coloured lips.
Even so, Challis thought, as the interview progressed, they're getting a kick out of being on television, and that's almost, almost, overriding their grief. He heard the interviewer say:
'You'd like the police to do more.'
Kymbly Abbott's father intended to do all of the talking. 'Yeah.'
'You think they should be doing what you and the parents of Jane Gideon are doing?'
'Yep.'
'Handing out photographs and talking to people.'
'Yep.'
'Are Mr and Mrs Gideon helping you?'
'We got the idea off them.'
'You think handing out your daughter's photograph will help jog someone's memory?'
'Yep.'
Then Kymbly Abbott's mother leaned forward and made the only original observation that Challis had heard so far:
'Like, the whole time, all youse reporters have done is concentrate on us—' she poked herself in the chest '—our feelings, instead of getting people to try and remember if they saw Kymbly.'
As Challis watched, the screen filled with a close-up of a leaflet, Kymbly Abbott in full colour, the words Did you see who took our Kymbly? across the top, a description and a phone number at the bottom.
The phone to his ear, Challis said, I wish they hadn't done that.'
'Boss, when they flash on that leaflet again, check out the description and the photo.'
Challis watched. Another close-up, and a voice-over, describing Kymbly Abbott the night she was abducted and murdered.
'Scobie, I'm missing something here.'
'The backpack, boss. They bloody forgot to tell us she had a backpack with her when she went missing.'
TWENTY-TWO
Saturday, 8.15 a.m., Challis standing before the whiteboard saying: 'Right, it's going to be another scorcher today, so the sooner we're not cooped up together in this place, the better.'
He leaned both hands on the back of a chair. 'Two pieces of much needed luck. One, Pam Murphy, a young uniformed constable, had the foresight to bag a few bottles and cans at the scene of the torching of Lance Ledwich's Pajero in Chicory Kiln Road.'
He indicated the location on the wall map and swung around again. 'As you know, we believe the vehicle was stolen by the two men responsible for that ag burg near the racecourse. Their original getaway vehicle had stalled, and they legged it to a nearby housing estate, where they found the Pajero. According to the prints recovered from the bottles and cans, and assuming that the same men are responsible for the ag burg, and stealing and then burning the Pajero, then we're looking at Boyd Jolic, Danny Holsinger and Craig Oliver, all from Waterloo and all known to the police.'
A voice: 'I thought you said two men, boss.'
Challis nodded. 'We believe that one of the three drove out to Chicory Kiln Road to fetch the other two. A call was made on Lance Ledwich's car phone to The Refinery Hotel that same night. A barmaid has since confirmed that Craig Oliver took a call and left the bar soon afterwards. Now, it's nice to think we've got a lead on that ag burg, but we've also had a second piece of luck, a witness who can place that same Pajero in Quarterhorse Lane.'
He went on to explain Stella Riggs's road rage incident, and how her evasive tactic may have led to the murder of Clara Macris. 'Jesus Christ,' someone said. Others shook their heads.
'We've sent three teams out to arrest Jolic, Holsinger and Oliver,' Challis went on. He looked at his watch. 'They should be returning soon.'
'So Van's off the hook, boss?'
Challis gazed at the room of officers. After a while he said, 'I've heard the rumours—van Alphen was screwing Clara Macris, they had a falling out, he killed her. You all know that we questioned Sergeant van Alphen.'
He paused. He seemed pleasant, offhand, obliging, then suddenly snapped forward, both palms on the desk in front of him. 'Clara Macris was murdered. You are investigating a murder. You are police officers. That job, and your role, come before fear or favour. If a copper is implicated in a crime, however vaguely—or falsely, through someone else's agency— then we investigate that copper until we're satisfied one way or the other.'
He straightened. 'Have you all got that?'
They coughed, shuffled, murmured, wouldn't look at him or looked sourly at him.
'If it will put your minds at rest, Sergeant van Alphen is not high on my list.
'Now, another development. Some of you may have seen 'Crime Beat' on the box last night. The parents of Ky
mbly Abbott were on, doing a Gideon—in other words, they've been hanging around street corners near the start of the Old Peninsula Highway, handing out photos of their daughter.'
'But she's dead, boss.'
Challis frowned. 'Don't you think they want her killer caught? Poor sods, they hope someone may have seen her getting picked up. The point is, both the photograph and the description that they give for their daughter mention an expensive black leather backpack. I wish we'd known this before. Someone may have found the backpack near where the body was found, for example, and either kept it quiet or not realised its significance. Or maybe the killer still has it. We don't know.'
He waved a leaflet at them. 'I called on the Abbotts last night and obtained a few copies of these, so you can see for yourselves what the backpack looks like. Meanwhile Scobie wants to add something.'
Scobie Sutton stood uncomfortably and said, 'Before Christmas a gypsy woman came to me with some clairvoyant mumbo jumbo about where Jane Gideon's body could be found. Later I went to question her in relation to a series of thefts. As you know from an earlier briefing, I saw three men at her camp, and a couple of four-wheel drives. The thing is, I also saw a leather backpack. They'd all shot through when I went back to arrest her on the theft charges, and I put out a description, but the backpack makes it imperative that we find them.' He sat down, red in the face.
Challis stood. 'I agree. They must be found.'
As Ellen Destry left the room and walked down the corridor to the stairs, Challis caught up to her and murmured, 'Are you okay?'
'Fine, Hal.'
'You look ragged. Everything all right at home?'
He was someone you could confide in. His own pain made him a reliable listener. She wanted to tell him how she'd taken the safe route in her personal life, putting her husband first; about the ache she felt, driving into the car park and not seeing Rhys Hartnett at work at the courthouse next door. But time would heal that, so they could all get fucked, and all she said to Challis was, 'Boss, you look a bit ragged yourself.'
'I don't doubt it. Okay, I want your help in the interview room. I've sent Scobie back to the caravan park to see if the backpack's still there and to follow up on those gypsies.'
