by Garry Disher
‘Pick up the cartridges.’
‘Why? I never touched them. The cops will pin it on whoever’s prints are on them.’
Pym opened his mouth to speak, reconsidered. ‘Fair enough. Robbery gone wrong.’
‘If you say so,’ said Lovelock doubtfully, not seeing anything of value in the place.
‘Pull out a few drawers, make a mess, grab small stuff.’
While Lovelock was doing that, Pym checked the desk phone, a handkerchief masking his fingers. The last number called was not the police but a mobile, a couple of hours earlier.
He knelt at the body, searched the pockets. A Swiss Army knife, a battered wallet containing cards and a five dollar note, which he took.
Lovelock returned, carrying an iPad, an old Nokia, a Ziploc bag of marijuana. ‘Look what I found in the freezer,’ he said, waving the weed.
‘Good for you,’ snapped Pym. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’
‘You’re a bundle of laughs.’
‘What, you think we should throw a party? We’ve just killed two men. We’re a long way from home.’
Rolling his eyes, Lovelock followed Pym out of the house. Past the dogs, which seemed to cower this time, reading the men accurately, and down the driveway to the Mercedes.
Pym sniffed the air. ‘Smoke.’
He turned full circle but the pines towered thickly, offering only a washed-out patch of noonday sky. What did he know about fires? Didn’t want to be caught among pine trees, though.
Same as before, Lovelock drove, Pym rode shotgun, and Owen Valentine’s toilet-brush dog lay curled asleep on the back seat. They passed the dust-warning sign and Lovelock accelerated again, but his heart wasn’t in it this time.
A SERIES OF LEFT AND RIGHT turns, then they were east of the reservoir, approaching a sealed road. A police car was parked at the intersection, lights flashing, and the skyline over near the town they’d stayed in last night was thick with smoke, a nasty boiling heap of it.
Lovelock braked. ‘He’s seen us.’
Pym floated a hand from his lap and wrapped his fingers around Lovelock’s meaty forearm, reassuring. What he always did when Lovelock lost it. ‘Calm down. He’s not after us.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Ask yourself what he’s doing there, okay? It’s the fire. He’s warning traffic.’
‘If you say so.’
‘I say so. Just drive up normally, wind your window down, see what he says. If you U-turn now, he will remember us, especially if it turns out the fire was deliberately lit.’
Lovelock swallowed, his heavy features beaded with sweat, but accelerated slowly towards the intersection. The policeman, a young uniformed constable in wraparound sunglasses, turned to watch them. At the last moment an irritated expression crossed his face, as if to say here was another moron too stupid to be out on the roads. He gestured at Lovelock: turn left, away from the fire.
Lovelock saluted, complied. ‘Didn’t even bother to talk to us,’ he said, glancing at the rear-view mirror.
Then: ‘Fuck, he’s on his radio.’
‘Settle down. He’s been told to keep tabs on the traffic, that’s all,’ Pym said, craning his head around to peer back along the road. He couldn’t see anything now, the road full of bends, the roadside trees.
‘What if he calls in the plates?’
‘Ah. Trouble.’
‘So keep fucking watching,’ said Lovelock tensely.
A half-minute, a minute, and the road behind them remained clear. ‘Nothing,’ Pym said.
‘But what about ahead of us, did you think about that?’
‘You’re being paranoid.’
‘There’s a good reason for that,’ Lovelock said, his hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel. He swung into the nearest side road. ‘Soon as it’s safe, I’m switching the plates again.’
‘And ditch the fucking rifle,’ Pym said.
‘Yeah, yeah.’
Pym glanced around uneasily. The road—a narrow gravelled track through lightly timbered farmland—was heading in the right direction to meet the highway to Gippsland, but there were kilometres to go before that and now the smoke was a wall ahead of them.
His voice a tense squeak, he said, ‘We need to go back.’
He’d seen a lick of flame in the smoke, sparks streaming on the wind. And the smoke was closing in suddenly. Not kilometres away after all. The treetops were thrashing, twigs and branches and a twist of roofing iron flying past the windscreen.
‘Fuck.’
Embers were thick around them, touching off new fires, and now Pym was afraid. He clutched Lovelock’s forearm for reassurance. ‘Mate…’
Lovelock slowed the car. Brought it to a stop, gauging the width of the road. Too narrow for an easy turn, Pym could see that at a glance, and the ditches on either side were a mystery. Deep? Would they get stuck? He couldn’t tell.
The engine stalled. Lovelock ground the starter motor as the heat smacked into them. Paint blistering, you never saw anything like it, felt heat like it or heard anything like the snarling fury. It came in hard. You couldn’t speak, do anything.
2
THAT WAS FRIDAY.
People talked about the fire and the burnt-out car all weekend, and on Monday morning it was still uppermost in Hal Challis’s mind as he showered, a bucket at his feet.
The first rule of rural or regional policing being Don’t live where your ‘clients’ live, the CIU inspector resided in an old farmhouse on a dirt road several kilometres inland of the Waterloo police station. The fruitcakes, wingnuts and homicidal maniacs could still find him if they tried hard enough, but that would require effort, and even if they applied effort, most of them would lose their nerve out where the streetlights ended.
So, a rural address—but right now rural meant tinder-dry grass and highly inflammable pines and eucalypts. There’d been no rain for months. Dams were dry, rainwater tanks emptying fast. No mains water where Challis lived, so his showers were brief and he bucketed the sudsy run-off onto his roses. Not his pot plants: Ellen Destry, staying the night with him recently, had caught him pouring shower water onto the potted lavender she’d given him, and gone mildly ballistic. ‘You want to kill it?’ she demanded, her hands on her hips. ‘Put it on the roses, nothing will kill them.’
Challis had nodded, agreeable. When it came to relationships, he was a cultivator—otherwise he’d be no good at catching killers and thieves—but he was no cultivator of trees, shrubs or seedlings. His mode, other than slashing and burning, was mostly absentminded neglect.
Challis towelled off, fretting. Last night he’d ordered a tanker-load of water for the underground house tank. But should he use it to fight a fire, if it came to that? More to the point, could he? He hadn’t started his portable pump, a petrol Honda, since last summer. He tried to remember the steps involved. Fasten the hoses, prime the pump, switch on petrol flow, apply the choke, pull the starter rope…Or should he cut and run if a bushfire threatened? Grab wallet, keys, phone, photos and documents and head for the beach?
He didn’t want to perish in flames like the two men caught on a dirt road near Waterloo last Friday. No ID yet, and stolen plates.
He shaved, the towel around his middle. It was 7:05 a.m. The water tanker was due at 7:30.
Twenty minutes later, dressed in chinos and a thin linen jacket over an untucked short-sleeved shirt, coffee and muesli under his belt, he heard a belching stutter down on the road, a truck decelerating, and stepped outside to guide the driver. Another hot, wind-storming day, and with his hooked face, his hair and jacket wings flying, Challis looked as if he’d summoned the wind and would ride it to the finish. He sniffed it. No smoke. Just dust, and now diesel fumes, as the water carrier ground up his driveway.
Challis signalled, pointed, beckoned; finally held up his hand in the universal STOP gesture. The driver got out. They shook hands.
‘That her?’ the driver said, glancing at the concrete lid of the undergrou
nd tank a few metres from Challis’s back wall.
‘Yep.’
The driver unrolled a heavy-duty black hose fitted with a bulky metal nozzle and dragged it to the tank, levered off the metre-square concrete lid, and fed the hose into the tank. Then he returned to the truck, got the water flowing, and the two men chatted about this and that. Friday’s bushfire, the heat, the dryness; the water guy saying he’d been run off his feet.
BY EIGHT O’CLOCK CHALLIS had paid the man and was heading for the fire zone. He poked about for an hour on the perimeter. By Australian standards it had been a small fire—grassland, fences, trees and one hayshed—but fierce. Two men dead and a new Waterloo housing estate in the path of the flames. Heading along the dirt road where the men had died, he found smouldering gum trees monitored by a mop-up crew of firefighters, a crime-scene technician supervising the loading of the burnt-out Mercedes onto a flat-bed truck. Challis said a brief hello, turned around, headed back to Coolart Road.
Looking east from the road’s low hilltops, he could see irregular black patches amid the dead and dying grasses, together with charred stands of trees, and, in the far distance, blackness to the very edge of Waterloo. He tried and failed to imagine what the dead men had hoped to achieve by heading towards the flames. Then again, a fire is a confusing mess of smoke and noise. Perhaps they didn’t know where the flames were until it was too late.
Before heading for the town, he turned back and made for the Westernport Incident Control Centre at the Moorooduc fire station. Here the incident controller showed him a set of Google Earth images on a large flat screen. ‘Started here.’ North-west of Waterloo. ‘Spread quickly in this direction.’ Moving south-east. Challis tried to make sense of the paler strips across the blackness. ‘What road’s this, and this?’
The man named them.
‘What time Friday?’
‘About eleven in the morning.’
‘No reports of incinerators, chainsaws, mowers…?’
‘None.’
‘Your thoughts?’
‘Cigarette,’ the incident controller said.
CHALLIS HEADED FOR WATERLOO, knowing they’d never find the culprit. An unplanned act by an ordinary civilian? It wasn’t like going after a criminal. The standard method—trace, interview and eliminate—wouldn’t work here. And as for the intuitive side of investigation, how do you think your way into the mind of an otherwise blameless man or woman who would fling a lit cigarette out of a car window on a hot, windy day? No way of sniffing out this person’s desires or fears; no blurring of the line between hunter and hunted. No infiltrating the underground community of cigarette butt-flickers, looking for the embittered, the jealous, the weak or treacherous.
The fire wasn’t his headache anyway. The epidemic of ice crimes was, and firefighters mopping up yesterday had found an abandoned drug lab on the Belair Close estate.
BELAIR CLOSE WAS A first-home-buyers dream estate, according to the billboards, but right now it was no more than a handful of bare slabs knitted together by culs-de-sac and short, doubling-back streets. Not a straight line in sight. One house—the drug lab—had been completed to lockup stage, three others were wooden frames and the rest was a dustbowl. The prevailing colours were brown, grey and black: the broken soil, the concrete slabs, the new roads and the burnt grass around the margins. There were odd yellow highlights in the abandoned earthmoving equipment.
Challis steered towards the drug lab. It was small, cheaply modern, but fire and smoke damaged now, and tucked away in the back corner of the desolate building site, metres from the edge of the fire. Police cars, a crime-scene van and, where Belair Close abutted another estate, a staggered line of trainee constables deployed to keep out gawkers from the other estates.
When Challis had taken up the post of Inspector, Westernport Region Crime Investigation Unit a few years ago, all of this area had been farmland. The old Peninsula towns of Rosebud, Mornington and Waterloo had doubled in size since then, which according to the politicians indicated a healthy economy. The police and the various social services knew this progress had also brought social distress and criminality, as funding for schools, public transport, police staffing levels and welfare services lagged behind.
Challis parked, got out, signed the attendance log maintained by John Tankard, a senior constable at Waterloo. ‘Pam Murphy here?’
‘Somewhere.’
‘Who from the crime-scene unit?’
‘Scobie Sutton, a couple of others.’
Challis nodded his thanks and approached the house, pausing as two men and a woman dressed in hazard suits and breathing apparatus carted out scorched and melted lab gear—beakers, glass and rubber tubing. He watched them place the material on the ground away from the house. They went back inside, the men returning with smoke-stained bottled chemicals and a few five-litre drums, the woman with two trays of kitty litter, used by speed and ice cooks to absorb chemical fumes. One of the men, tall, gaunt, looked like Scobie Sutton.
Then Pam Murphy was grinning at him. ‘Boss.’
‘What have we got?’
A good detective, Pam. Sharp, agile, trim; perspiring now in her protective suit. Swiping the back of her wrist across her forehead, she said, ‘When you say “What have we got?” I’m never too sure if you mean it or you’ve watched too much CSI. Or it’s an ironic commentary on the clichéd situations in which you so often find yourself.’
‘Or all three,’ Challis said.
‘And if you—a highly decorated and greatly esteemed senior detective—don’t know the answer, where does that leave a lowly detective like me?’
‘Detecting, I hope.’
They stood together watching the forensic team come and go from the house. The front, side and rear doors had been opened to ventilate the building. Challis could smell the fumes. Couldn’t really see in: the cooks had draped heavy blackout curtains over all the windows.
‘Do we know how long it was in operation?’
‘Not long. The builder says they got the house to lockup two weeks ago.’
Challis stared at the place morosely. A hydroponic marijuana operation might stay put for weeks or even months, but ice manufacturers tended to cook for no more than three or four days before moving on. He hated ice. It was cheap, easy to get, easy to make. A dirty drug, and probably behind a rash of local crimes. Some apparently planned—drive-by shootings, the firebombing of houses and cars. Many random, unpredictable—road-rage attacks, unprovoked stabbings, paranoid meltdowns, an upsurge in domestic assaults…
On any evening of the week, the Waterloo police station lockup housed men, women and teenagers coming off an ice high, screaming, head-banging, kicking the walls.
‘Who found it?’
‘An emergency services volunteer, first, except he didn’t know it was a lab.’ Murphy pointed. ‘He was over on the Seaview Estate, doing the evacuation door-knock, saw a van outside this place, came over and got bashed by a couple of men who then took off.’
Challis tensed. ‘The men caught in the fire?’
Except they’d been heading towards Waterloo, not away…
Murphy shook her head. ‘They were in a car, right? The emergency services guy is positive it was a van here.’
‘Plate number?’
‘He didn’t get it.’
‘Descriptions?’
Murphy checked her notes. ‘One young and scruffy, the other heavier looking. Tatts, muscles. He didn’t get a good look.’
‘Students?’ Bikie gangs were known to use kids who had a bit of chemistry and lab knowledge.
‘Possibly,’ Murphy said. ‘Anyway, he filed it at the back of his mind and kept going door-to-door. Then when the fire threatened the back veranda here, a couple of fire trucks doused the place. No one checked again until yesterday, when the guy remembered and reported it. One of the uniforms came around for a closer look.’
She paused. ‘The thing is, there’s evidence a child spent time here. We found clothes—pink
and yellow T-shirts and shorts and underpants.’
‘The volunteer didn’t see her?’
Murphy shook her head. ‘She could have been in the van already. The fire had reached the back fence so they might have been getting ready to leave.’
A sudden wind flurry came from the burnt fringe of woodland, carrying soot. Unnoticed by Challis, a particle eddied, dipped, alighted on his earlobe. Pam Murphy reached out, a tissue very white in her sun-browned hand, and swiped it away.
‘Ash,’ she explained, showing him the evidence.
An intimate gesture. Signifying, in this case, nothing. If pinned down, Challis might say he found Pam Murphy attractive, but in general he admired the look of the runner, the gymnast, the effortless tennis player—women like Pam. Like Ellen Destry. In any case, she’d already forgotten cleaning the soot from his ear and was watching the house, almost quivering with unexpressed or thwarted tension. He knew she hated the standing-around aspect of police work. She was on the hunt. She was always on the hunt.
He stared gloomily across the desolate tract of house slabs, scaffolding, dusty earthmoving equipment to the abutting Seaview Estate, which had been occupied for fifteen years. The residents, kept back by the line of trainee constables, were watching the police operation from footpaths, driveways, front yards and back fences. They’d been evacuated on Friday, but now they were safe at home again, watching a new drama. There were one or two dealers on the estate, a handful of users, but mostly struggling families lived there in threadbare, generally law-abiding decency. A vicious crime family had once controlled the estate but was in tatters now, its members dead or in jail, or fucking up some other township.
One of the crime-scene technicians emerged from the house. A scarecrow figure, he dragged off his breathing gear and headed straight for them, the hazard suit baggy on his bony frame.
‘Inspector. Pam,’ he said. Acknowledging them both.
‘Scobie.’
Until a year ago, Scobie Sutton had been a CIU detective. Sensitive, a chronic worrier, too straight to handle the lies, evasions, ambiguities and unfairness of normal policing, he was better suited to gathering and interpreting evidence. He held up a couple of evidence bags. Pills of various shapes, colours and sizes in one, whitish granules in the other.