by Garry Disher
So powerful that they drove her to stow the photograph of Alan into her bottom drawer and then begin to prowl the dark streets in her car.
* * * *
Whats wrong? said Tessa Kane, buttering her dinner roll. I thought you wanted to thank me for bringing you Joe Ovens. Instead, youre as thankful as a wet week.
Challis had wanted to thank Tessa with this dinner, had wanted to set the universe right a little. But that was before his talk with McQuarrie this afternoon. He toyed with his food, wondering how to begin. They were in a Mornington bistro, one of the few open on a chilly Monday evening in winter. A scattering of other diners, a vaguely Mediterranean decor and menu. Tessa looked fatigued: the pressure of getting copy ready for tomorrows edition. To Challis, all of the kitchen sounds were jarring, the soft lighting too sombre, the room offering no refuge from McQuarries news or even the sleety wind and the blackness beyond the windows.
Youre holding out on something, he said.
She went very still. I am?
According to McQuarrie, Challis said, youre in possession of certain photographs.
Robert told you?
His father.
Ah. And he sent you to warn me off.
This is not about him, its about your professional relationship with me in particular and my hard-working officers in general.
She looked at him with her head on one side. Hal, listen to yourself. Then she narrowed her eyes. Robert was sent copies, too, wasnt he? A blackmail demand?
Challis wasnt about to confirm or deny. I need to see the copies you were sent. We need to check them, and the envelope, for prints. Was there also a letter?
Yes. But whoever sent it wouldnt have left prints.
Even so, Challis said.
You think it was the killer? I thought it might be a cop.
No.
Tessa sighed. Ill make copies for you.
What did the letter say?
It referred to the article on sex parties, and said that for a fee of $5000 Id learn who the men in the photos were and the circumstances in which the photos were found. The others received blackmail demands, right? The guys trying to make as much money from the photos as possible.
Normally I dont care what you print, Challis said, but if you publish those photos, or even allude to them, youll jeopardise the investigation.
Tessa toyed with the food on her plate. Was Janine McQuarrie into the sex party scene?
You know I cant tell you that.
The familys not going to like what Ive written about her in tomorrows edition.
Like what?
Janine was a poor therapist, she rubbed people up the wrong way, she enjoyed challenging men and accusing them of being abusive, and she kept inadequate records. In other words, she might have had enemies.
Challis gave her a rueful shrug. That about covers it.
I need a big story, she said, before I finish.
What about Mead and the detention centre?
She shook her head and twirled her fork in a tangle of tagliatelle. That fizzled out. She paused. He warned me off, you know, because I went to see his wife.
Challis gave her a crooked smile. I met Lottie at a function once. She didnt strike me as the communicative type.
Correct.
Look, Tess, will you publish the photos, or mention them?
She scowled. I might, when its all over.
Challis wanted to help her. But he couldnt point her in the direction of anyone yet, not even Anton and Laura Wavell, not while they, and their party guests, were potentially implicated in Janine McQuarries murder. If Tessa talked to them now, theyd very likely clam up to her and the police, speak only through a lawyer, and feel betrayed. And so he murmured something that meant nothing and within thirty minutes he was driving her back to Waterloo, the heater of the Triumph not working and the windscreen fogging up, obliging him to turn on the air-conditioning to clear it, obliging Tessa to burrow herself into her coat and her scarf and her gloves and scarcely trust herself to speak to him. What is it with the heaters in old British cars, she said when they reached the kerb outside her house.
Said lightly, to mask her pain and let him off the hook, he supposed. He decided to take the question literally. They need time to warm up.
Some never do, she said pointedly, getting out.
He watched her cross the footpath and approach her front door, bulky in her overcoat, her hair trapped in black folds by the turned-up collar. He knew that on the other side of the door shed shed the coat and transform herself into someone slender and purposeful, but right now she looked cold, tired and burdened. He didnt watch her go in but sped off, the exhaust of his car booming down the street.
* * * *
No shooting, this time, according to orders. This one had to look like an accident. So Vyner was going for a drowning in the mangrove swamp at the rear of the targets house. A pity: a shooting is quick and relatively clean. By the same token, if he shot her hed have to get himself another pistol, and his Navy source was no good to him any more.
He had his third and last Browning with him, though, just in case.
8.45. 9.00. At 9.20 Tessa Kane appeared under the light outside the entrance to the restaurant, coat on, collar up, shoulders hunched, waiting for the boyfriend. Hello, trouble in paradise? The body language was spelling out tension. Vyner watched them walk to the boyfriends junky car, and five minutes later he was following them back to Waterloo.
Yep, trouble in paradise. Instead of spending the night, the boyfriend dropped her off outside her house and drove away. The target let herself into her house, and Vyner was right there behind her.
Behind her neat behind.
* * * *
49
The darkness was fully settled, an evening full of mist and hazy shapes, the crisp air laden with the stew of odours from the mangroves. Tessa, unlocking her front door, was thinking only about Hal Challis and why she should accede to his request not to pursue Robert McQuarrie and the sex party angle. She removed the key, stepped into her front hallway, and something punched her hard in the back, propelling her onto her knees. She heard the door slam. Someone straddled her; he smelt of the chilly blackness outside and of sweaty agitation. His fingers were twisted cruelly in her hair, jerking her head back. Then the tip of something long and metallic, creepily warm from his body, was grinding under the hinge of her jaw.
A gun, she realised, fitted with a silencer.
Not a sound, bitch, okay?
She choked her assent.
He kept pulling on her hair, stepping back, pulling her upright, the object on the end of the gun barrel travelling down her spine now, probing between her buttocks. You want this? Ill give it to you, you give me any grief, okay, bitch?
The words were banal, but the heat behind them, and the mans turmoil and disorder, the rankness of his body, made her limp.
Stand up.
She tried to straighten her back, strengthen her knees. She said what she assumed everyone said: Please dont hurt me.
Shut up!
What do you want?
He probed deeper with the gun. What did I just say? Shut up.
She complied.
His free hand snaked around to her stomach and indifferently explored her breasts and groin. It was a gloved hand. It parodied foreplay and she felt herself floating free, observing things from a great distance. She turned her head, glimpsing a dark coat, a dark woollen cap and narrow features, but his thick black leather fingers pinched a tuft of her pubic hair and pulled hard. Eyes front.
She averted her gaze, looked down her cold, unlit hallway.
Move.
Where?
Shut up. Back door.
He followed hard on her heels, one hand clasping the hair at the back of her head, the other pressing the gun against her coccyx, propelling her through to the back door.
Open it.
She tried to sort and assess her impressions of him. Wiry build, thin face, dark clothing, abou
t her height, a harsh voice full of strain. Shed never identify him outside of this particular conjunction of time, place and circumstances.
Then they were through the back door and crossing her sodden lawn to the gate at the rear of the garden. Her mind raced. He was going to kill her out on the mudflats and dump her in a drainage channel. There were stagnant pools out there, covered in scum. Shed never be found and the fish and birds would strip her to the bone.
Which one hired you? Lowry or Robert McQuarrie?
Shut up.
He shoved and she stumbled. He jerked back hard, her hair coming out in his hand. Grass and bracken trailed wetly over her shoes and pants. Behind her he cursed softly.
Who are you?
Shut up.
She turned her head slightly. Up and down the fence line were the back walls of her neighbours, lights here and there: laundries, kitchens, porches, loos. She could hear Extreme Makeover at full volume.
Is it something I published?
This time he slammed the gun against her temple and the pain was blinding. She began to cry. Hed destroyed her nerve and she had to cry.
Stop snivelling.
Now theyd met the serpentine path through the wetland: the raised gravel bed, the little treated pine bridges, the boardwalk itself. Tessa knew that Challis liked to walk here; shed never seen the appeal of it. Then, curiously, someone was calling her name. Not Challis, but someone close to him.
* * * *
50
Ellen parked two blocks away and cut through a side street that she recognised from a burglary shed attended a month earlier. She stopped in the next street, her stomach fluttering with nerves, fluttering so badly that she thought shed need to squat behind a bush and relieve herself. The air was still and very dark. She couldnt see Challiss car anywhere: maybe they hadnt returned yet, or maybe theyd gone to his house. She burned with jealousy and shame.
She crossed to Tessa Kanes house and heard voices, but there were no lights on inside, and so she went down the side of the house, feeling a little shabby about her motives now, ready to creep away again if she found proof that Challis and Kane had rekindled their affair.
There was a rainwater tank at the rear of her house and she barked her shins on the tap. She hobbled around in circles, silently screaming, and knew from the dampness that shed broken the skin and blood had formed. She rounded the corner, limping and distracted, in time to hear the rattle of Kanes gate and then see her, a bulky shape in the light spilling across the back gardens of the neighbouring houses. For some reason, Kane was hurrying towards the mangroves.
Something was wrong. Kanes shadow split into two figures, then reformed, and Ellen read urgency in it. Then she heard a squawk, abruptly abbreviated.
Was the other figure Challis? Surely they werent headed into the mangroves to have sex?
The figures were hurrying now, full of noise and panic, and so Ellen was able to track them. Hal? Tessa? she called. Is that you?
The figures paused, there was a flash and she heard a faint spitting sound. Something tugged at her coat sleeve. Shed been shot at. The coat was a burden suddenly. She shrugged it off, took out her gun, and stepped onto the spongy path edge, among the reeds and mangroves that would silence her footsteps and swallow her shape in the night. For good measure the gunman fired twice more and Ellen uttered a brief Oh of pain. Her neck. A couple of centimetres to the left and shed be choking on her own blood now. She fumbled for her handkerchief. Her hands shook. She tried to find her mobile and scarcely knew if shed lost or forgotten it or if shock was closing her down.
Then Tessa Kane cried Help me! and the man with her cursed, as if shed torn free of his grasp.
Ellen cried Run!but had she cried it? There was another muted shot and she ducked, her movements very slow now. She tried to straighten and go after the gunman but collapsed slowly onto the muddy ground where the shallow tidal water rose and spread in a primeval stink around her. She began to pat it like a child in a bath, looking for her gun and her phone.
There was the killer coming for her. Ellen tipped her head back to fix the mans shape but the night was full of hazy shapes. She lifted her hand to say stop or to beg for help and discovered that her .38 was still there. It bucked once, numbing her fingers.
* * * *
51
Challis had barely reached home when he got the call. Shocked and numb, he returned to Waterloo, examined the body on the boardwalk, barely choking back his feelings, then acted hard and fast. By midnight he and Scobie Sutton had Raymond Lowry and Robert McQuarrie in separate interview rooms. They were sleepy, bewildered, affronted, and hadnt thought yet to ask for their lawyers, but that would change.
Lowry first.
Where were you between the hours of nine and ten this evening?
Lowry yawned and blinked. At home.
Can anyone vouch for that?
Lowry gave another yawn, huge and jaw-creaking. Had a pizza delivered.
When?
Dunno. Some time.
Any phone calls in or out? Visitors? Trips to the bottle shop?
Lowry, unshaven and smelling strongly of alcohol, shook his head. Must of fallen asleep watching TV.
Scobie Sutton asked a Scobie Sutton question: You were drinking?
Yes.
Heavily?
I reckon. Look, whats this about? I feel buggered, I need to get to bed.
Tessa Kane questioned you after we released you on Friday, said Challis tightly.
That bitch. Whats she saying about me now?
Challis tensed in the depressing and claustrophobic conditions of an interview room in the dead of night. Images of Tessa s slack body and face, streaked with tidal scum and blood, surfaced in his mind, and he struggled to keep his voice even. Youve been threatening her for some time now.
Lowrys glance flickered. Dont know what you mean.
I think you do. Phone calls, hate mail, rocks through her windows, slashed tyres.
Not me, no way.
Scobie leaned across the table and its scratched initials, gouges and coffee rings, its calligraphy of despair. Youve had a grudge against Ms Kane for some time now.
Everyone hates that bitch.
Dont call her a bitch, Challis said in a dangerous voice. He felt close to losing it.
Scobie shot him a warning look and opened a file. Late last year Ms Kane ran a couple of articles about an outfit called Fathers First. Are you a member, Mr Lowry?
So what if I am? Im allowed.
Challis chimed in heatedly. Your wife sees a family therapist about the state of your marriagethe violent state of it, to be preciseand soon leaves you, taking the children with her. She gains sole custody of them. You join Fathers First, a motley crew of wife-beaters, given to threatening Family Court judges. Tessa Kane runs an article about you, implying that youre pathetic. Later she hears that youve made threats against Janine McQuarrie, and asks you about that.
He leaned back, arms wide as if to display the obvious. Two strong women challenge you, and both wind up murdered.
Lowry froze, his eyes darting, and he managed to swallow and squeak, Both murdered? The newspaper bitch, too?
Dont call her that, snarled Challis. She was shot dead this evening and we need to know how youre involved.
He still felt numb. Tessa hadnt deserved to die like that, hadnt deserved to die at all, and most of all hadnt deserved to die when things were unfinished and strained between them. He felt that hed let her down-just as hed let his wife down. Hed failed to look after them and theyd died.
I was home all evening, spluttered Lowry. Plus, I might have hated her but I didnt want her dead. I mean, Christ.
And one of my detectives was wounded, Ray, Challis said. You know how we protect our own. We can get vengeful.
Lowry shoved out his hands. Test me for gunshot residue or whatever it is you do, if you dont believe me.
The thing is, you were at home, but what about your mates?
I want a lawy
er, Lowry said.
* * * *
Their run at Robert McQuarrie barely got started.
I put Georgia to bed at eight, read to her for a while, then went to my study, which is where I was when your heavy-footed colleagues arrested me.