by Garry Disher
Pam nodded and said, ‘Dropped into the victim’s drink in a bar or club or at a party. She feels woozy, a “concerned” male friend takes her home, rapes her when she passes out, and she wakes up the next day feeling sore and confused and can’t remember anything.’
‘Your point?’
‘Has it ever happened to you, Caz? Or a friend of yours?’
Caz shook her head as she briskly wiped a phone handset. ‘This is Waterloo. I don’t think GHB and roofies have reached past the suburbs yet.’
‘Very droll,’ Pam said. She paused. ‘If you could get your hands on that sort of gear, would you go so far as to use it on anyone?’
‘I’m not into girls,’ Caz said. ‘I know it’s chic in some circles, but I’m not into that. No offence.’
Pam wasn’t a lesbian. Caz was stirring. She wasn’t doing it out of spite or bigotry, but she was being combative, and Pam had to wonder why. ‘Did I say girl? You might want to give it to a boy. A particular boy.’
Caz stopped what she was doing and gazed into space as though she found the prospect intellectually absorbing. ‘But wouldn’t the drug cause “erectile dysfunction”?’ she asked, hooking her fingers around the term. ‘And wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of the exercise?’
Pam grinned. ‘Depends on the purpose.’
Caz didn’t grin but gave the ghost of a smile. ‘I guess so.’
‘Like, you might want to strip off all his clothes, lipstick his genitals and leave him out in the open for all to see.’
‘Interesting. What would you call that—making a statement?’
‘I’d call it revenge,’ Pam said.
‘Really,’ said Caz evenly. She began to bundle the day’s takings together, according to denomination. She filled out a deposit slip and packed everything into a canvas sack with ANZ Bank logoed on it.
‘Night safe?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘There are thieves about, Caz. I hope you take precautions.’
‘Precautions? Like birth control or the morning-after pill in case I’m doped and raped?’
It was said with the tiniest increase in heat. ‘Please tell me what happened to you,’ Pam said.
‘Nothing happened.’
‘Was it last year? Last weekend? A girl was sexually assaulted in the early hours of Sunday morning.’
Caz sighed. ‘These things happen when people congregate and booze and drugs are involved.’
‘Was it Josh Brownlee?’
‘Who?’
‘The boy you called out to last night.’
‘Is that his name?’
‘Cut the crap. I heard you. I heard you say, “Raped anyone lately, Josh?”‘
‘Me? You probably misheard. The music was pretty loud.’
‘Caz, was it Josh Brownlee who drugged and raped you?’
‘Me? Of course not.’
Caz had barely faltered. Pam wondered how long the girl would be able to keep it up—wondered how long she would be able to keep it up, for that matter. ‘The more people who come forward, the better our chances of gaining a conviction.’
‘Has Josh been a naughty boy?’
‘Cut it out, Caz. Help me, please?’
‘What’s it like, being a copper?’
Pam blinked. Caz seemed genuinely interested. ‘There are moments of boredom, there are disappointments, but there’s also exhilaration and satisfaction when you get it right.’
‘Exactly,’ said Caz elliptically. She said, ‘What’s it like for women in the police?’
‘Getting better.’
‘I’ve seen you with those two uniformed guys, the fat one and the good-looking one. What’s that like?’
‘We’re just colleagues, pitching in together.’
‘I doubt it,’ Caz said promptly. She paused. ‘They both like you.’
It came out of nowhere and Pam blushed. ‘Getting back to—’
‘Steer clear of both of them,’ Caz said.
Pam scowled. ‘I’m afraid I’m not here to—’
But her mobile phone rang and Challis said, ‘Where are you?’
Pam walked out of the shop to take the call and heard Caz lock the door behind her and knew she couldn’t do a thing about it. ‘Just down the street from the station.’
‘Briefing room, ten minutes.’
‘But sir...’
‘Briefing room. Murder takes priority.’
* * * *
31
Ellen Destry should have been at the end-of-day briefing, but she was breaking into Adrian Wishart’s house. A familiar roaring set up in her ears. It had nothing to do with the noises she made, for she was whisper quiet, but with the heightened flow of her blood. With excitement, apprehension and a sense of entitlement, in other words.
Now she stood perfectly still in Adrian Wishart’s sitting room until her blood eased and she could hear the external world again.
Nothing.
She was alone.
No sirens, next-door voices or unexpected occupants to undo her.
She flexed her hands in their latex gloves and began to move. This was not the first time she’d broken into someone’s house and it wouldn’t be the last. It was part of her secret life. It was also part of her detecting life. She didn’t know if other police officers did it or not. Some surely did, but did not admit it. Perhaps Challis did it, too, but if he were like her he’d never admit it.
Ellen moved swiftly through the house, checking for unwelcome surprises or obstacles, mapping the layout of each room and locating the escape routes. Then she went through again, identifying areas of interest for a more concentrated sweep. She didn’t know what she expected to discover about Adrian Wishart, only that she’d formed a loathing for him and expected to find something that proved his role in the murder of his wife—a phone number, photographs or other evidence of a lover or a hired killer. The house had been formally searched already, but only to learn if there were hidden aspects of Ludmilla’s life. Her computer had been removed. Correspondence. Financial papers. The warrant hadn’t extended to the husband, not without hard evidence.
She felt alive when she made these covert forays into other people’s private worlds. The sense of elation was never far away. She was powerful at these times. Victorious. She had a hold over Adrian Wishart today and he didn’t know it.
Not that she’d be able to use anything she discovered, or not in any formal or legal sense. The search was illegal and anything she found would be ruled inadmissible by a judge. But she might find something that guided the direction of the investigation.
As she moved from room to room, Ellen tried to see the furnishings and decorations as if she were Ludmilla Wishart making a home, a nest, and failed. It wasn’t a failure of the imagination; rather, it seemed to Ellen as if Ludmilla had played only a small role in designing and decorating the house. It was as if she’d been negated or sidelined by her husband. Ellen didn’t believe that women were necessarily fussy and decorative, and men harsh and utilitarian, but she was convinced that Adrian Wishart was responsible for the almost mathematical precision with which the rooms, furniture and paintings had been arranged, and she itched to soften the effect. If she lived here she’d be afraid to bump a chair out of alignment, smudge a glass surface, leave a crumb behind or shed a cotton thread. Order and control ruled this house. Unchallengeable principles governed it.
Ellen began her fine-detail search in the bathroom. First she took digital photographs of the contents of the cabinets, then examined labels and shook bottles and tubes, before replacing everything exactly where it had been, according to the images stored in her camera. Ludmilla had been prescribed a birth-control pill, Adrian an anti-inflammatory.
She repeated her search technique in the other rooms, hunting through all the obvious places: hollow cavities behind skirting boards, under the cistern lid in the en-suite bathroom, behind paintings, inside freezer and pantry containers. No drugs, and only a little alcohol. No pornography, no sex aids, no secret stas
h of love letters.
Then, tucked under bills, junk mail and what were probably unopened birthday cards in a bowl on a hallstand, Ellen found an envelope containing $250 in cash. With it was an invoice in the sum of $250 made out to Ludmilla Wishart by Grant’s Gardening, the words ‘cash payment appreciated’ at the bottom. Ellen pocketed the envelope and its contents without thinking and moved on to Adrian Wishart’s studio, the only room she’d not yet searched.
She checked the time: 5 p.m. She’d be late to Hal’s briefing, and Wishart might be back at any time. She’d seen him leave, confirming Scobie’s report that the uncle was expecting him, but what if Wishart changed his mind about the drive to the city? She picked over the files, desk diary and drawers desultorily, made a quick search of the man’s laptop, and rummaged through the scraps in his wastepaper bin. On the surface, his life was clinical and hardhearted. She needed to find where that would tip over into committing murder.
A car passed by the house. Ellen darted to the window and saw a taxi winding its way along the street and out of sight. As a reflex, she grabbed the curtain edge and heard the rings rattle on the rod above her head. She looked up. A hollow metal rod, with decorative knobs on each end. Quite a thick rod. Roomy. She remembered her favourite lover’s-revenge story about breaking into the cheating boyfriend’s home and stuffing his curtain rod with rotting fish. Taken him days, weeks, to isolate the source of the awful smell.
Ellen dragged a chair over. One of the decorative ends was dusty. She unscrewed the clean one and there, nestling inside it, was a USB memory stick.
* * * *
32
Early evening in the briefing room, Challis, Sutton, Murphy and the Mornington detectives, Smith and Jones, arranged around the long table, a table now as comfortably part of their lives as their kitchen tables and just as battered. Challis thought how useful CIU’s table could be to the forensic lecturers at the police academy, its surfaces imprinted with DNA traces, prints, stains and ballpoint pen impressions.
‘Where’s Ellen?’
‘Don’t know, boss.’
Challis unfolded from the wall. The evening was mild, the air heated by the west-facing glass, and so he’d provided bottles of juice and mineral water, potato crisps and salted peanuts. ‘First things first,’ he said, tossing back a peanut and perusing a fax from the lab. ‘The mucus found on Lachlan Roe’s sleeve came from the attacker, not Roe. They’ve extracted DNA, but it doesn’t match anyone in the system.’
No one responded. It was a familiar disappointment. Even Pam Murphy seemed to gesture philosophically without actually shrugging her shoulders. Smith and Jones looked bored; it wasn’t their case.
‘But Roe goes on the back burner,’ Challis continued. ‘Our priority is finding who murdered Ludmilla Wishart. Here’s what we know about her last movements.’
Just then, Ellen entered, fast and lithe in her long cotton skirt and sleeveless top but somehow not cool and collected. She’d hurried to the briefing from somewhere, and that had flustered her, but Challis saw other disturbances in her mood and demeanour, too. Regret, perhaps. A hint of waspishness or even guilt. In the four or five seconds it took for her to enter, apologise and claim a chair, Challis cast his mind back over his day, wondering if by action or omission he’d pissed her off in some way. He gave her a full-wattage smile that she tried and failed to return.
‘We were outlining Ludmilla Wishart’s movements yesterday,’ he told her, before turning to the whiteboard, which had ceased over the years to be truly white. Pointing with a ruler he said:
‘Lunch from twelve-thirty to two o’clock with a female friend. Then rather than return to the office she drove to three separate properties. These movements have since been confirmed—the last because her body was found at the scene and according to the pathologist she was killed where we found her, not killed elsewhere and transported there.’
He paused. ‘We have to consider the fact that her murder was work related. She started as a planner for the shire, then a year ago became Planning East’s infringements officer, a job that took her all over the place, looking into complaints and non-compliance with planning restrictions, issuing notices and bans, checking on court- or tribunal-ordered restoration and regeneration work.’
‘A job that pissed people off,’ said Smith. Like Jones, he’d settled into a faintly untidy middle age, as if waiting for retirement and unwilling to over-achieve, or even achieve.
‘Yes.’
‘Enough to kill her, though?’ said Jones.
‘People have killed for a lot less,’ Ellen said. She looked calmer now, focused on the proceedings.
‘True.’
Ellen turned to Challis. ‘What did you learn about the Shoreham site?’
Challis explained that the wealthy Premier’s even wealthier cousin owned it. ‘Name of Jamie Furneaux, but he’s been overseas for four months, so he’s more or less out of the frame.’
‘Overseas. That’s handy.’
‘He was being hounded by the press for chopping down trees without a permit. They were blocking his sea views, needless to say. He made huge bonfires of the timber, and that involved the local fire brigade—to whom he made a generous “donation”. All in all, the press had a field day. He was fined $20,000 and ordered to replant the whole area with indigenous trees and grasses. We think the victim was there to check that he’d carried out the work.’
‘Had he?’ said Sutton.
‘Yes.’
Challis had been resting his hands on the back of a chair. Now he straightened. ‘These places and times are her broad movements for the afternoon. We need to know which routes she took, where she might have stopped, who she might have encountered or visited between appointments. Scobie?’
Scobie Sutton was an arrangement of skinny bones inside his old suit. He rarely looked happy; today he looked to be at his wits’ end with life. He stirred and said, ‘I checked her mobile phone records. She made no calls yesterday.’
‘None?’
‘Several from her office phone yesterday morning,’ Sutton amended. ‘It should be mentioned that her mobile phone was not on or near her body or her car, and it’s not in her office or in her home.’
‘Handbag and wallet are also missing,’ Challis said. ‘If the phone’s switched on, maybe the service provider can locate it?’
‘There should also be an MP3 player,’ said Ellen. ‘A birthday present from her friend at lunch yesterday.’
‘Assuming this isn’t a mugging but staged as one, the killer will have dumped everything somewhere,’ Sutton said. ‘Meanwhile her credit card use shows one purchase yesterday afternoon at three-forty: she bought forty-seven litres of unleaded petrol at the Caltex on the way in to Waterloo.’
‘If they have CCTV,’ Challis said, ‘check to see who else was there at the same time—buying petrol, using the shop, lurking.’
‘You think she was followed?’
‘It’s possible.’
‘Her husband followed her on Tuesday, according to one witness,’ Ellen said. ‘And according to her best friend, he’d call or e-mail her several times a day, hang around outside, visit her office.’
‘Did he have reason to?’ asked Smith.
‘Do you mean, did he suspect she was having an affair? There’s no indication she was. Her husband’s a pathetic loser, that’s all. A stalker.’
Sutton cut in: ‘But the husband’s alibi is sound. He was with his uncle. The guy confirms it.’
Challis tapped the whiteboard again. ‘Next we come to this man, Carl Vernon. Vernon heads a residents’ action group in Penzance Beach. When the group got wind that an old house in the area was about to be bulldozed and a new one erected in its place, they contacted Ludmilla Wishart.’ With an uneasy glance at Ellen, he went on: ‘Ludmilla’s husband said he feared she was having an affair with Vernon.’
‘So he did have a reason to follow her,’ said Smith.
‘Vernon denies it,’ Challis said, ‘and I
tend to believe him. In fact, he said that when he was meeting with Ludmilla on Tuesday afternoon, the husband showed up.’
‘It confirms what Ludmilla’s friend told me,’ Ellen said. ‘Adrian Wishart always seemed to know exactly where and when his wife had been during the day.’
Challis nodded. ‘We have another angle via Carl Vernon and Carmen Gandolfo. Apparently Ludmilla suspected that someone in Planning East is on the take, receiving payment in exchange for sensitive information that gives an unfair advantage to people who want to avoid or evade planning restrictions.’
He turned to Smith and Jones. ‘What did you guys find out about Groot and the other planners?’