by Garry Disher
‘Don’t I know it. But let’s go back to the Landseer connection first. Ells, could you go through it again?’
Ellen took a deep breath. ‘A Year 11 kid called Zara Selkirk was Lachlan Roe’s only appointment yesterday. When I learned that she wasn’t at school today I went around to her house. Her stepsister, Chelsea, answered the door. She was alone: father in London on business, Zara and stepmother in town.’ Ellen paused and looked at her colleagues with a bright, empty grin. ‘Apparently Chelsea is often alone. We’re talking about serious wealth and non-serious parenting here.’
Challis nodded. In his twenty years of police work he’d seen that the very wealthy were just as likely to overlook their kids as the very poor. At least the poor had reasons. He’d noticed something arid in the neglectful rich, even as they believed they had a creative side because they attended opera openings, a spiritual side because they were fond of their children, and an emotional side because they were always infuriated by someone or something. ‘You’ll need to confirm that Zara and her mother were up in the city last night.’
Ellen looked at him levelly and said, ‘Of course.’
Challis winced again. ‘Go on.’
‘It’s a long shot, but they might have wanted harm to come to the chaplain. Apparently Zara and two of her friends developed a hatred for the school librarian, Merle Richardson, and thought they’d try a little cyber bullying. They set up a fake Facebook site for Mrs Richardson in which she outlines her sexual fantasies and supplies a phone number and e-mail address. The poor woman had a breakdown.’
‘The kids were found out?’ Pam asked.
Ellen nodded. ‘But not reported to police. They weren’t even expelled or suspended.’
Challis wasn’t surprised. The school wouldn’t have wanted the publicity—and nor would the victim—and although cyber bullying was rife in schools and other institutions, the regulations and legal actions and penalties lagged far behind.
‘Apparently young Zara is pretty bright,’ Ellen continued, ‘and did a couple of Year 12 exams this year. When it seemed that the school might take action against her, the mother charged down to the school and threatened to sue if Zara’s exam performance suffered.’
‘And they backed down,’ Pam said.
‘In a heartbeat. To hell with the reputation and mental and physical health of a member of staff—a wealthy parent always comes first. Bastards.’
They all felt the disgust, but Challis had to move on. ‘How does the chaplain fit into all this?’
‘It was decided that Zara would apologise to Mrs Richardson and he’d be the mediator.’
‘All three were present?’
Ellen shook her head. ‘Mrs Richardson took legal advice and didn’t attend.’
‘Good for her,’ Challis said. He paused. ‘But that raises the question: did she harm Roe? I can’t see any of these people having a strong enough motive.’
‘True,’ Ellen said, draining her gin-and-tonic. ‘The headmaster would make a better target.’
Challis nodded. ‘See if he’ll talk to you. Murph, your turn.’
‘Nothing to report, boss. I’ve been showing Roe’s photo to the schoolies, but no one recognises him. I’ll keep doing it tonight.’ Then she gazed at Challis and said pointedly, ‘Has Scobie come up with anything?’
Challis gave her a wry look. She was wondering why Sutton wasn’t at the briefing. ‘I’ve taken him off the case.’
He outlined his reasons, backed up by the printouts of the e-mail and Dirk Roe’s blog, which lay on the table between them.
‘Let’s see,’ said Ellen.
She pored over the material. He liked the way her brow knotted when she concentrated, liked the shapeliness of her hands. His gaze swung to Pam Murphy’s hands: stubbier, more squared off. He said, ‘I questioned Dirk at the hospital this afternoon. He said he’d removed the blog from the Web.’
Ellen shook her head wearily. ‘What is it about blogs? Why do people do it?’
Pam said, ‘You old timers, you don’t understand.’
‘I understand they add to the meanness in the world,’ Ellen said. ‘They give inadequate people like Dirk Roe a chance to indulge their worst and weakest instincts. A thought pops into their heads and they think it’s valid simply because they had it. Furthermore, blogs are free and don’t require face-to-face contact with a fellow human being.’
Finding Pam staring at her, head on one side, Ellen went on hotly, ‘If you knew what those Landseer girls did to that poor woman...’
Pam nodded. ‘Fair enough, Sarge.’
Ellen cocked her head at Challis. ‘Could Dirk have hurt his brother?’
‘Not directly. His alibi checks out.’
‘Paid someone to do it?’
‘Anything’s possible,’ Challis said.
He told them about his afternoon, digging into the backgrounds of Lachlan and Dirk Roe. ‘Raised in a fundamentalist church, a strict upbringing, spare the rod and spoil the child, plenty of guilt and repression, a familiar story.’
‘Maybe,’ said Ellen, ‘but how did this one play out in particular?’
Challis told them about a conversation he’d had with an aunt. ‘She was a member of the same church, married to the younger brother of Lachlan and Dirk’s father. After she’d had a couple of kids she started to question things—and was kicked out. They won’t even let her see her kids.’ He held up his hands as if to forestall objections. ‘True, she has an axe to grind, but one of the things that bothered her was the behaviour of Lachlan and Dirk, especially when they played with her children, who were younger. It was unhealthy, she said. Wrestling games, fondling and touching. She called them strange and repressed.’
They all absorbed that. Pam began to sift through the printouts of the Roe Report. ‘Look at all these user-names: how are we going to track them all? Do we have to track them all, boss?’
‘If necessary.’
‘I thought CIU would be more glamorous, somehow.’
‘What do you call this?’ said Challis expansively.
‘I call it pressure from above,’ Pam said. ‘Sir.’
Challis gave a mock glower. ‘One good thing about pressure: I asked Hindmarsh to pressure the lab for a quick DNA result on that mucus on Lachlan Roe’s sleeve.’
* * * *
15
‘I treasure this,’ Ellen Destry said later, in the gentle twilight.
They’d driven home from the pub and now they were on foot, halfway up the hill behind the house.
‘Walking with me?’
‘Walking.’ She snuggled against Challis briefly. ‘And walking with you.’
If she didn’t walk every day she felt sluggish, muscle-locked, unfit. She quite liked these evening walks, loved walking with Hal, but unspoken was the fact that she missed her dawn walks on Penzance Beach. Now her dawns were spent having sex or making love or whatever you wanted to call it. Which was fine—enjoy it while it lasts.
She pumped her arms and lengthened her stride. This wasn’t the beach, it wasn’t dawn, but had its compensations. It was a pretty corner of the world, a patchwork of vines, orchards and grazing paddocks stitched together with gravel roads lined with fences and trees. The birds were busy feeding their young. The air smelt fresh: one of the farmers had been slashing the spring grasses.
Then she recoiled. ‘What’s that awful smell?’
Sharp, basic, sinus-burning. She tracked it to a tangle of bracken between the side of the road and a cattle ramp. ‘Shells?’ she asked, peering into the gloom, one hand over her nose and mouth.
‘Abalone,’ said Challis, joining her.
The pile was half a metre high, grey and ghostly in the half-light, each ribbed and unlovely shell the size of a saucer. ‘Some guy dumps them along here every year,’ Challis said. ‘One day I’ll nab him.’
‘A poacher?’
‘Probably.’
‘Huh,’ Ellen said, storing away another piece of useless information. ‘
This doesn’t happen in Penzance Beach.’
He squeezed her and laughed. ‘It’s pretty wild out here on the frontier.’
They looked up. A helicopter was slicing across a corner of the darkening sky. It was some distance away but the sound was unmistakeably that of a police Dauphin, more turbo whine than eggbeater chop. They glanced at each other. There were a couple of notorious black spots on the Peninsula, blind intersections where motorists had lost their lives. The locals liked to speculate what the cut-off point was before VicRoads improved safety by installing a roundabout or chopping down a few trees: ten lives? Twenty?
‘Hal?’
‘Yes, oh gorgeous one.’
She took his hand in hers. ‘What are you going to do about your plane?’
He was restoring a vintage aeroplane. Correction: he had been, but now it sat gathering dust in a hangar on a little local airfield. Ellen was oddly bothered by that. She had no interest in the plane but the idea of Challis with an interest apart from police work—apart from her, for that matter—was important. She thought back to life with her husband. Alan had several obsessions—the fact that she’d been promoted to sergeant, the electricity bill, their daughter’s boyfriends— but he’d had no interests. Had that been her fault? Was it her fault that Hal Challis no longer fiddled with his old wreck of an aeroplane?
‘I honestly don’t know,’ he said.
She squeezed then released his hand.
‘I wish I had more time,’ he said.
‘Do I take up your spare time?’
‘I like spending it with you.’
She bit her lip. ‘Hal, I can’t be everything to you, or for you.’
‘Of course not. I know that.’
‘And you can’t be everything to me.’
‘Is this going somewhere?’
They walked in the deepening shadows, down the final slope toward his house. Their house. Ellen’s head was whirling with a whole stack of issues, apparently unrelated but joined in complex ways.
‘Hal, do you sometimes find it hard working together with me?’
‘Yes.’
He said it promptly. That was good. ‘In what way?’ she asked.
‘I keep wanting to touch you. There you are, sitting at your computer, and I want to rip your clothes off
She did and didn’t want to hear that. She moved half a pace away from him and folded her arms.
But he wasn’t thick, or stubborn, and said at once, ‘I hate having to give orders to you, so I try to make it sound like a suggestion. I’m always conscious of not sounding critical, or questioning your judgment, but sometimes I find myself needing to do that. But if I do, will you take it the wrong way? And what do Scobie and Pam think? Do they feel I give you preferential treatment? But you are a sergeant.’
It came out in a heartfelt rush. Ellen linked arms with him again. ‘Something needs to change. But not yet.’
She sensed that he wanted to say more about working with her, but the moment passed. Instead he said, ‘Do you like living with me?’
‘Yes,’ she said firmly, not feeling a hundred per cent firm.
Hal said nothing but they continued companionably to the driveway entrance and up to the house. They’d bought a stir-fry mix from the butcher: all they had to do was toss it in a spitting wok and cook some rice. They would eat in tonight. They would eat together. They’d had a walk. This was a good evening and, in their line of work, good evenings were rare.
* * * *
At their house outside Waterloo, Ludmilla Wishart was playing the piano. She played frequently, and expertly, and Adrian hated it. Her eyes, mind and body when she played were not there with him but far away, possibly in a better place—according to her—and he hated that.
He stopped her slender fingers on the keys and said, ‘I’m hungry’ She gasped and came back to earth. Hurried to the kitchen to make things better.
* * * *
Scobie Sutton went home miserably from the Chillout Zone. Rather than accompany him, Beth had climbed onto her bicycle, saying she’d sit with Lachlan Roe until he regained consciousness. ‘He needs me.’
‘Beth, it could be days, weeks.’
‘He needs me.’
‘So do we, love. And he has his brother.’
‘That so-and-so!’
He’d tried his hardest but she wouldn’t listen. Scobie felt aggrieved, stuck between two uncomfortable forces: his boss and his wife. Neither one wanted or needed him, it seemed, yet they both held sway over him. He was betting that Challis would never remove Ellen Destry from a case. The benefits of sleeping with the boss. I’m still useful, aren’t I? he demanded. I could be tracking down witnesses, tracing, interviewing, eliminating. Instead of which you want me investigating the theft of a ride-on mower.
He boiled inside. When he got home at six-thirty there was Roslyn, a small, wan figure in the dark kitchen, her school atlas open at the mess that was the Indonesian islands. With a scrape of her chair she was on her feet and hugging him fiercely, weeping so copiously that her tears soaked his shirt. ‘Sweetheart,’ he said, overwhelmed.
She hugged him tighter, released him, returned to her homework. He tried to help her as he cooked chops for dinner, but the Roe brothers had taken root in his mind and he wanted to harm them in some way. He examined that notion, surprised that he didn’t feel any guilt.
* * * *
Caz Moon knew where the anger had come from today, the courage, but she’d been a little in awe of herself even so. She hadn’t always been angry and brave. For months after the rape she’d been, in her own words, a mumbling mess, contained on the outside, contained enough to manage the surf shop, but distraught on the inside. She couldn’t believe some of the feelings she’d had: defilement, yeah, but guilt, too, for letting it happen. As if she’d had a choice!
To make it worse, her memories had been hazy at first, no clarity or definition, so she wasn’t sure what had happened. But slowly she pieced it together and even more slowly she’d picked herself up off the ground.
And now, as the evening light eased toward full darkness, Caz Moon couldn’t believe her luck. Here was Josh Brownlee again, queuing to get into Retro, the club behind the RSL hall, hitting on the youngest sister of someone she’d gone to school with, what was her name, Hayley, Hayley with a bare midriff, heavily kohled eyes, nipples like pebbles in the cool air, a skirt less than a whisker past her groin, chewing gum and enjoying Josh’s pickup bullshit.
‘Josh! Joshy!’ cried Caz. ‘Raped anyone yet? He’s a rapist,’ she informed Hayley, Hayley’s mates and everyone else in earshot.
Josh lunged at her, she dodged away laughing, and that cop lady was there again, saying, ‘Everything okay here?’
‘Fine!’ said Caz in her sparkling voice.
The cop glanced at Josh, then at Caz and murmured, ‘Do you want to report a crime?’
‘Me? No!’
‘Caz,’ said the cop flatly. ‘I just heard you accuse that boy of rape.’
‘Me? I was just kidding.’
The cop stared at her, not in the least bit satisfied. Finally she shoved a photo under Caz’s nose. ‘Have you seen this man?’
‘Not me,’ Caz said, striding off in her conquering-the-world way.
When Pam looked, the boy had disappeared.
* * * *
16
That was Tuesday. Wednesday was Ludmilla Wishart’s thirtieth birthday and the first caller was her friend, Carmen Gandolfo, who sang Happy Birthday down the line as Ludmilla was about to eat her muesli. Ludmilla blinked back a couple of tears: Carmen was good for her, large in body and spirit, a real tonic. Plus it mattered that even though she knew what Adrian was like, Carmen had called her at home, not work.
They exchanged a few pleasantries, Carmen apparently slurping coffee or tea. ‘I’ll call in at your office later with a little something.’
‘Size doesn’t matter,’ Ludmilla said, ‘so long as it’s expensive.’
‘On my salary?�
�� demanded Carmen. Another slurp. ‘So, what have you got planned for tonight?’
Ludmilla said in a guilty rush, ‘Adrian’s taking me out to dinner.’
‘Darl,’ Carmen drawled, putting a lot of doubt and disapproval into the word.
With a whine that she hated, Ludmilla replied, ‘I can’t leave him, you know that. I’m scared he’ll hurt himself if I do.’