by Garry Disher
Jones had half-moon glasses suspended on the tip of his nose. He read from a foolscap pad, holding it at arm’s length: ‘No one has a criminal record or known criminal associates. A couple of speeding fines. Groot blew over .05 on the Frankston Freeway a couple of years ago, but no other traffic infringements.’
‘Financial history?’ said Challis.
‘That’s where it gets a little more interesting. The planners aren’t highly paid and all of them have hefty mortgages, but so do I and most of the people I know. But Groot and his wife have had extensive work done on their house: swimming pool, landscaping, sundeck...’
Challis mused on it for a while. It seemed to him that there was a lot of money around, despite talk of recession. Sure, people were suffering, but the middle class seemed to be doing extraordinarily well. They didn’t buy dull, sensible, locally-made cars any more but exotic European models, and they changed cars every year or two. Challis’s father had held on to his car for twenty years, but people of Challis’s generation didn’t do that. They bought flash cars, owned holiday houses and sent their kids to private schools. The money had to come from somewhere. Mostly loans, he suspected. Mostly honestly, in other words. It was money that could be traced.
‘Dig a little deeper,’ he told Smith and Jones. ‘See who paid for the work on his house.’
‘Boss,’ they said.
Scobie Sutton cleared his throat. ‘Anything on her laptop?’
Challis searched through the faxes, reports and e-mail printouts that were the bane of his existence. Finding the one he wanted, he said, ‘The laptop is fairly new, according to the technicians. There’s very little on it apart from drafts of her reports.’
He turned to Pam Murphy. ‘Murph, you met Carl Vernon yesterday morning.’
She’d been slumped in her chair, alert but apparently bored, playing with a plastic cup. Now she went pink and sat upright, as if aware that he knew she’d made her unauthorised LED search as a result of talking to Vernon. Clearing her throat, she summarised how she’d met Vernon during the demolition of the house known as Somerland, and said fervently, ‘It was heartbreaking to watch. People were angry, in tears. That’s when I heard whispers that a corrupt shire employee had tipped off the owner of the property so he could demolish it before it a protection order could be granted.’
Ellen had been doodling in her notebook. She said, ‘There are three ways of looking at that. One, Ludmilla herself was corrupt, and the property owner killed her to protect himself. Two, Ludmilla was about to reveal the identity of the corrupt employee—and it has to be pointed out that this person might not be a Planning East employee or even a shire employee—and he or she stopped her. Three, Ludmilla approached the demolition guy or the developer, saying she intended to take action against them—’
‘—and it got her killed,’ Challis said.
* * * *
33
At the conclusion of the briefing, Ellen scurried away, saying she had a headache. Challis followed her out, wanting to commiserate, wanting to find out what lay behind it, but she brushed him off, saying, ‘Don’t fuss, I’ll be okay,’ so he shrugged and let it go. He’d learn what the matter was eventually. Or he wouldn’t.
He worked for an hour after the briefing, trying to clear the backlog of forms and correspondence. Then the phone rang and Ollie Hindmarsh said, sounding like shovelled gravel, ‘You lousy cow.’
Challis considered his reply. ‘Who’s this?’
‘Don’t get smart. I’ve had reporters after me all day.’
Challis wasn’t in the mood. ‘Yeah?’
‘That little prick and his blog,’ Hindmarsh said. ‘Thanks to you, the whole world knows.’
Challis burned slowly and surely. ‘Are you saying I leaked it to the press?’
‘I am.
The words dripped from Challis: ‘I’m not interested in you or your hurt feelings. I’m only interested in whether or not Dirk Roe attacked his brother or said or did something that encouraged someone else to do it. If you can’t control your staff, that’s not my concern.’
Hindmarsh’s voice shifted, growing phlegmy and strident. ‘He took the blog off-line two days ago, as soon as he realised the police knew about it! So how come the media are quoting extracts at me?’
‘It was a blog, Mr Hindmarsh. It’s probably still floating around out there in cyberspace for all to see.’
‘Do your job, inspector. You can’t even catch the person who beat up a harmless man of the cloth, and now I see you’ve got a murder to investigate. God knows how you’re going to manage that.’
The evening traffic was muted outside Challis’s window and the corridors were almost silent. A line of cars idled along the McDonald’s drive-through lane, headlights burning, toxins rising. Challis said, ‘Let me reiterate: your harmless man of the cloth contributed racist observations to his brother’s blog. He likes to call himself an “elect vessel”, meaning he believes he has the ear of God. He thinks that modern technology is bad—except in that it may be used to influence an election—not that he ever votes. A woman’s role is to cook, clean and reproduce. And at your behest, he was appointed chaplain of Landseer School, where he didn’t counsel troubled adolescents but told them to get down on their knees and pray.’
Hindmarsh said nothing and the night deepened until finally there was a click in Challis’s ear.
Time to go home.
* * * *
Something had happened to Ellen Destry that afternoon. She’d been hurrying to the briefing, conscious that she’d spent too long in Adrian Wishart’s house, when her good opinion of herself began to fracture.
It had nothing to do with breaking into a scumbag’s house and picking over his secret life, for that was exciting, even desirable. Pocketing the money had been exciting, too. It was something she did, something she’d done from time to time over the years.
But always, always, the thieving would come back to haunt her afterwards. It would eat at her. It never went away. And it had kicked in on the way to the briefing. She’d tried telling herself that she didn’t have a psychological problem, and it was okay to steal from scumbags, and even that ordinary rules didn’t apply to her. She tried telling herself that Adrian Wishart was the kind of guy to keep the gardener’s hard-earned money and say he knew nothing about it. She imagined some big guy corning around and roughing Adrian up.
Then she thought: What if the gardener is too tactful to ask for his money? She thought: It’s not my money. She thought: I need help.
She might have made it to the briefing on time, but just as the police station came into view, she’d turned around and driven back to the house where Ludmilla Wishart had lived, feeling sick at heart. She tried telling herself that she had good professional reasons for returning the envelope of cash—if Adrian Wishart suspected that someone had been sneaking around in his house he might get rid of crucial evidence, or even accuse the police of theft—but she couldn’t sustain it. Quite simply, a part of her was bad. It needed fixing. She wanted to be loved, desired, admired. She knew that if Hal ever learned about this side of her, she’d die.
But she’d left it too late to return the gardener’s $250. Adrian Wishart’s little red Citroen was parked in the driveway. She turned around, raced back to Waterloo, arrived late at the briefing.
Knowing she couldn’t face Challis afterwards, she’d driven straight home, poured herself a stiff drink and climbed into a bath brimming with hot water and fragrant salts.
Now, as the evening light drew in, she was still in the bath, occasionally letting out the tepid water and adding hot, her skin wrinkling like a prune.
Not that it worked to cure her. She still felt estranged from her old self, the competent, dignified self. It wasn’t that she’d broken into Wishart’s house—he was as guilty as sin; she’d do it again in a heartbeat—but that she wanted or needed to pocket the money she’d found there. She was no better than she’d ever been. This was no way to lead her life.<
br />
Hal would be home soon. She pulled the plug, dried herself with a thick clean towel, opened the wardrobe to grab her dressing gown. It was a small wardrobe, stuff crammed onto a shelf above the clothes rail and on the floor, and when she hauled out her dressing gown the tails of it dislodged the lid on one of Hal’s shoeboxes. She crouched to replace it.
She paused. He’d scrawled ‘Bushfire Keepsakes’ on a label pasted to the lid. She should put it back. Instead, she pulled the gown around her and sat on the floor and sifted through the contents. Passport. Bank and insurance statements. His will, inside an envelope. A bundle of letters. Ellen glanced at the sender: his wife, the address of the prison where she’d killed herself. Feeling ratshit, she sorted through the photographs. A studio shot of his wife. Hal and wife on their wedding day. Holiday snaps. His late parents. His sister. His niece. Two graduation photographs.
And, finally, photographs of herself: at that Christmas party last year, a candid shot at her desk, shaking hands with the super, receiving an award from the assistant commissioner. Ellen wept a little as she visualised her lover deciding what he held dear, what he wanted to remember, what he’d save if a bushfire threatened to burn his house down.
‘As for me,’ she muttered, ‘even my dressing gown is stolen.’
Her resistance was so low that Telstra could call now and she’d sign up for the most expensive phone plan they offered.
Ellen replaced the shoebox and headed for the sitting room, seeking distractions. She didn’t want to call anyone. She couldn’t be bothered with music. She switched on the TV idly and flicked through the channels, and there was Ollie Hindmarsh, feigning outrage, greasily explaining to a battery of microphones that he’d sacked Dirk Roe as soon as he’d been informed about the fellow’s blog.
‘Yeah, right,’ said Ellen. Talking back to the TV always made her feel better.
‘Furthermore,’ said Hindmarsh, ‘Dirk Roe was merely my electoral office manager, essentially a clerical role, not an aide or advisor.’
But did Hindmarsh endorse Roe’s views?
Of course not, don’t be absurd.
Ellen, her depression forgotten temporarily, sensed an implication in the denial. Hindmarsh seemed to be saying, in his bluff, strong-chinned way, that he scarcely knew what a blog was, that to a true Australian like himself—male, older generation, ex-armed services—a blog was somehow unsavoury and effeminate.
‘But the Roe Report endorses you,’ a reporter pointed out.
‘I’m not responsible for anything Mr Roe says or does.’
‘You employed him.’
‘And I sacked him,’ Hindmarsh said. ‘Look, I have a sizeable staff. It’s a responsible job. Mr Roe was merely a paper pusher in my electoral office, which is scarcely the seat of power. I spend most of my time in the city, as you well know.’
‘Arsehole,’ said Ellen. Like most Liberal Party supporters and politicians, Hindmarsh was the kind of man who’d endorse white supremacists, anti-Semites and crackpot fundamentalists if the sum effect were just one more vote won than lost.
Buoyed a little, she called her daughter’s mobile phone.
‘Just seeing how you are.’
‘Fine, Mum,’ Larrayne said.
She sounded bright and happy and there were no background noises of the kind that might make a mother tense up—no partying flatmates, pub music or barrelling traffic. ‘What are you up to?’
‘Nothing much.’
Larrayne had always been like this, even as a little kid at school. Ellen would discover weeks later, usually by chance, that her daughter had been appointed captain of the netball team, chosen to recite a poem at assembly or awarded a distinction for a maths test. Larrayne’s world was subterranean. She offered glimpses into it only rarely.
‘How’s work?’
‘Fine.’
Her university exams over for the year, Larrayne was working in a bookshop called Paydirt, a dingy warren of crime paperbacks beneath street level in the heart of downtown Melbourne, within spitting distance of the town hall, the cathedral and the shopping arcades. It was entirely possible that she’d got the job by telling the proprietor her mother was a cop.
‘Want to come down for the weekend?’
‘Have to work. Sorry.’
Larrayne didn’t altogether approve of Ellen’s living with Challis. She didn’t approve of her father having a girlfriend, either. The separation and divorce were still raw, she wanted a return to how things had been, even though she herself had left home and lived in the city now. She’d thaw eventually. Maybe.
‘You at home?’
‘Yes.’
With or without a guy? There were things that Ellen wanted to ask and know, but then Hal’s old car came creeping up the driveway, headlights dipping and levelling as he negotiated the potholes.
‘Speak to you soon,’ Ellen said.
* * * *
Josh was watching the adult channel, $15.95 worth of fake moans and silicon tits, alone for the first time this Schoolies Week and too scared to go out. He jacked off desultorily and thought about his miserable day.
Miserable because he’d accomplished nothing, despite his fine intentions. He was going to report that female cop to the cops who investigate other cops, what were they called, Internal Affairs, Ethical Standards? Hell, he was the victim here. But then he had second thoughts. Cops protected each other, right? You only had to read the paper. Plus, if that bitch explained how she’d found him—naked, his balls painted with red lipstick—he’d be a laughing stock.
And so he’d spent the day doing nothing.
At that moment he spotted a rectangular white shape at the corner of his eye. At first he didn’t want to turn his head and look. Images and great surges of strange energy came to him sometimes, and he feared this was one of those times. Then he did look and saw that somebody had slipped an envelope under his motel room door. Feeling a kind of creeping dread, he opened it.
A poorly lit photo of him on the sand, naked, balls all red.
* * * *
At the start of the evening news, Scobie Sutton opened to a knock on his front door.
‘May I help you?’
The man standing under the porch light shot out his hand. ‘Hello, you must be Beth’s husband, Scobie, correct?’
Scobie’s good manners were automatic. He shook the proffered hand. ‘May I help you?’
‘I’m Pastor Jeffreys of the First Ascensionists Church.’
He was also Pete Jeffreys and he owned the local HomeWare franchise. He sold mattresses, rugs, linoleum and cheap sweatshop furniture. You saw his fleshy, trying-too-hard face everywhere: the local paper, a hoarding outside his shop, flyers in your letterbox several times a year. He was always announcing clearance sales.
Scobie got a creepy feeling, as if forces were aligned against him. He opened his mouth but the shopkeeper got in first:
‘If I could just have a quick word with Beth. Won’t take a moment.’
‘I don’t think...’
With what might have been genuine emotion, Jeffreys said, ‘Your wife was very close to Mr Roe. What happened to him hit her hard. She needs support in this trying time. We’re devoted to her, as she is to us. I know she’d like to see me.’
‘She’s lying down,’ said Scobie truthfully, wondering why he hadn’t said she was out, or wouldn’t want to see the man.
Jeffreys watched him keenly for a moment, then nodded. ‘Tell her I called, will you?’
‘Yes,’ said Scobie, wondering why he’d said that, too.
* * * *
So much for the new ruling that police officers should never patrol solo after dark: five Waterloo constables, including Andy Cree, were off work with some gastric bug, so Tank was on his lonesome in a divisional van, prowling the little towns and back roads around Waterloo.
One domestic, one pub brawl, one road rage incident. He wouldn’t get off work until midnight, then he was expected to go on duty again tomorrow morning, 8 a
.m. to 4 p.m. The timetabling at Waterloo was completely fucked up as far as he was concerned.
At 10 p.m. the dispatcher directed him to the Penzance Beach area, reports of a drag race. The culprits were long gone. Tank turned the car around, heading back, and just happened to drive past Pam Murphy’s house on his way out. There was a candle flickering behind a curtain in a side window.
Which probably explained Andrew Cree’s Mazda coupe parked in her driveway.
* * * *
34
Friday morning.
Challis checked the overnight incident log as soon as he arrived at work, and buried in Thursday night’s litany of burglaries, car theft and assault were two items of immediate interest to him: Ludmilla Wishart’s handbag had been handed in at the front desk, and there’d been a break-in at Planning East.