by Garry Disher
She parked on a hydrant, hoping she wouldn’t get booked. Owing to the lack of off-street parking, small European and Japanese cars crowded both kerbs. These days, in this place, it was difficult to tell if the Audis and the Subarus belonged to student renters or yuppie owners, but there was no mistaking her daughter’s 1991 Toyota Camry. It was a first car, a student car, through and through.
Ellen banged the iron knocker on the front door. After a long delay, Larrayne answered, and Ellen picked up conflicting clues. Her daughter looked flustered, her pinned-up hair escaping in wisps, her T-shirt wrinkled, but she also looked studious in the elegant reading glasses she’d been prescribed a year earlier.
Mother and daughter kissed and hugged briefly. ‘I won’t stay long,’ Ellen said again.
‘Okay.’
The faзade of the house, unchanged since the colonial era and preserved by council regulations, gave way to a short hallway of closed bedroom doors and then a large, airy living room. Typically, some interior walls had been knocked down and skylights, a mezzanine floor and a rear sundeck put in. The furniture was a mismatched collection of op-shop armchairs, Ikea stools and bright, cheap floor coverings and cushions. A kid of about twenty leapt from one of the armchairs. He was skinny, with earrings and chopped-about hair. ‘Hi, Mrs Destry. I’m Travis.’
The boyfriend? A new tenant? Ellen glanced at Larrayne, who said expressionlessly, ‘Tea? Coffee?’
‘Coffee.’
Ellen stayed for thirty painful minutes. Her daughter was unresponsive; the boy overcompensated with chatter. Finally Ellen glanced at her watch and said, ‘I have to get back.’
Larrayne leapt to her feet and took her to the front door. ‘Thanks for coming, Mum.’
Ellen said brightly, ‘Is Travis your boyfriend?’
‘So what if he is?’
‘Just wondering, sweetheart. How are your studies?’
‘All right.’
‘If you need peace and quiet in the lead up to the exams, come and spend a few days with me.’
‘You must be joking, me in lover boy’s house,’ Larrayne said, and Ellen saw that nothing had changed. It might have been bearable if Hal Challis were her lover boy.
She felt heat rising inside her and turned away before she said something she’d later regret. Twenty minutes later, as she headed southeast on the freeway toward Waterloo, her mind was still stewing. If criminals can be granted the benefit of the concept of reasonable doubt, why couldn’t she? Instead, her daughter and her husband had examined the ‘evidence’ against her-she’d walked out on her marriage, she’d always worked closely with Hal Challis, she was now living in his house-and found her guilty of adultery.
I wish, she thought.
I think I wish.
The freeway was choked with traffic, moving at a walking pace down a broad channel between seas of tiled roofs, home to middle
Australia. The routes in and out of Melbourne had never coped and never would, not when the satellite areas like the Peninsula offered cheap, high-density housing but no jobs.
Beside her a siren whooped, highway patrol, festooned with antennas and decals, motioning at her mobile phone. She showed them her badge through the window. They shrugged and shot away down the shoulder of the freeway, looking for other mugs who were driving while talking on a mobile phone.
It was inevitable that thinking about her own daughter-and love, protection and responsibility-would lead Ellen to thinking about Katie Blasko. A ten-year-old, missing for-she glanced at her watch- twenty-four hours now. Was Katie at a friend’s house? Getting off the bus in Sydney, where she’d be swallowed up in the fleshpots of Kings Cross? Twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours of heaven or hell.
Her phone rang. It was a text message from a Supreme Court clerk.
Jarrett acquitted.
All she wanted to do was call Hal Challis. She had him on speed-dial. But he had a family crisis to contend with. It wouldn’t be fair. She had to do this alone.
5
Detective Inspector Hal Challis was one thousand kilometres away, in the far mid-north of South Australia, crossing a barrier of stony hills on a hazardous switchback road at a point known as Isolation Pass. Drivers had been killed on the Pass. Challis knew to take it cautiously that Friday afternoon, climbing the upward slope in his rattly old Triumph, braking for the downward.
Before long he caught sight of Mawson’s Bluff, his glimpses of the little settlement interrupted by guardrails, then rock face, one alternating with the other. Complicated feelings settled in him. The Bluff was a drowsy wheat and wool town on a treeless plain, a place where they knew the cost of everything but the value of nothing. It was named for Governor Mawson’s son, who, in 1841, had set out from Adelaide to survey the range of hills that now sheltered the town and the merino stud properties, but failed to return, and was found a year later with a spear pinched between the bones of his ribcage. Challis had been taught that at the Bluff’s little primary school. He hadn’t been taught that it marked the beginning of a doomed Aboriginal resistance to rifles, horses and sheep. No one in Mawson’s Bluff wanted to know that. He was only going home because his sister had called him.
Home. He still called it that. He visited from time to time but hadn’t lived there for twenty years.
The road levelled out and he accelerated. Before long he could read MAWSON’S BLUFF painted on the roof of the pub, a landmark for the buyers who flew in from the sheep stations of New South Wales for the merino stud ram sales. And there was the cemetery, a dusty patch of gum trees and gravestones on a rise beyond the stockyards. Challis swallowed. He’d attended a funeral there last year, and if things followed their course, he’d soon be attending another.
He slowed at the outskirts of the town. An old sensation went through him, of emptiness and isolation. He’d felt it as a child, Broken Hill lying far to the east, Adelaide far to the south, and nothing between them. He shook off the feeling and looked for changes. Nothing had changed. The houses were the same, low, slumbering, walled in local stone, protected from the sun by broad verandahs, gum trees and golden cypress hedges. TV antennas fifteen metres high. The Methodist church in a square of red dirt, where the ants were always busy. The returned servicemen’s hall where he and Meg had dumped empty bottles for the annual Legacy drive. The stone school with the steep, faded red corrugated iron roof. The old women watering their geraniums and staring as he passed. The cars with their coatings of powdered dirt. Not mud. This was a dry spring, of a dry year, of a dry decade. Nothing had changed.
But he’d spoken too soon. He spotted changes in the little main street. There was a cafй now, a craft shop, and a place selling collectibles. Every faзade had been renovated in late colonial styles. Then Challis saw a sign on a picket fence, and understood: Mawson’s Bluff Community Preservation and Historical Society.
But the grassy plains still stretched on forever, the droughty bluffs loomed over the town and the sky was a cloudless dome above.
Challis had slowed to no more than a walking pace. The town was airless and still. No one moved. Curtains were drawn. Presently a farmer emerged from the post office, nodded hello as if Challis had never left the town, and drove away in one of the battered white utilities that populate the outback. Challis recognised him as Paddy Finucane, from an extensive clan that lurked on forgotten back roads, married into similar struggling share-farming families and drove trucks for the local council. There had been dozens of Finucanes in the convent school and the football team when Challis was a boy. There always had been and always would be. Some, he remembered, had been done for stealing sheep, diesel fuel, chainsaws or anything else that hadn’t been locked away in a shed. Paddy was one of them.
He came to the northern outskirts of the town and turned down a rutted track toward a more recently built house. Young wives of the prosperous 1960s had eschewed the cool old stone houses of the midnorth of South Australia and insisted on triple-fronted brick veneer houses with tile roofs-houses indi
stinguishable from those in the new suburbs and satellite towns of the major cities. Challis’s own mother had got her dream home. Challis’s father had been happy to oblige her: the love was there, and the money. In those first few years, Murray Challis had been the only lawyer in a one hundred-kilometre radius, drawing up wills, contracts and occasional divorce settlements for everyone from the mail contractor to the local gentry. Now, forty years later, the house he’d built for his wife still hadn’t accommodated itself naturally with the landscape. Like the old stone buildings of the region it came complete with an avenue of pines, a garden of roses and shrubs, rainwater tanks and a kelpie beating his tail in the dust, but it didn’t quite belong. Nor had the Challises, quite, and at the age of twenty Hal Challis had left for the police academy. Perhaps it was wanting to belong that made him apply for a posting back ‘home’ when he graduated. Certainly that had been a mistake. You can never go back. A couple of years later he’d left the state, and now was an inspector in the Victoria Police.
Challis braked at the head of the driveway, angling his car into the shade of the pepper trees. He got out, stretched his aching back and looked north over the struggling wheat flats that merged, in the far distance, with arid country, semi-desert, a land of pebbly dust, washaways, mallee scrub and hidden gullies. Men had died out there. They called it ‘doing a perish’, and many in the district believed that that’s what had happened to Challis’s brother-in-law, five years ago now. Gavin Hurst’s car had been found abandoned out there. No body. He’d been the district’s RSPCA inspector, a difficult man. Challis had never liked Hurst, but his sister had married him, had loved him, so what can you do?
‘The conquering hero returns.’
Challis wheeled around with an answering grin. Meg, two years his junior, was smiling tiredly at him from the verandah. A moment later she was embracing him, a round, comfortable shape. ‘Driving the same old bomb, I see,’ she said fondly, beating the flat of her hand against the chrome surround of his windscreen.
‘Hey, don’t mark my pride and joy.’
She snorted, throwing her arms around him again. ‘It’s so good to see you. You’re a sight for sore eyes.’
When she released him he saw that her eyes were, in fact, sore looking. ‘How is he?’
‘Sweetie,’ Meg told him gently, ‘he’s dying.’
Well, she’d told him that on the phone earlier in the week, and so he’d hastily arranged a month’s leave. What she meant now was, how else did Challis expect their father to be? It was faintly reproving, and Challis couldn’t blame her. Their mother had died a year ago, and their father had immediately declined. Meg, who lived on the other side of the Bluff, near the tennis courts, had been the one to nurse both of them. Their mother would have been undemanding, but Challis guessed that their father, an exacting man even in good health, was making hard work of dying. There rose between Challis and his sister a knot of unresolved feelings: Challis had escaped, Meg hadn’t. ‘I’m sorry.’
She brightened. ‘You’re here now’
Challis had asked for a month, but McQuarrie, his boss, a superintendent in regional command headquarters, had clearly thought that excessive. As if he wants my father to hurry up and die, Challis had thought at the time. ‘I have several weeks of accrued leave owing to me, sir,’ he’d said. ‘And Sergeant Destry is perfectly capable of holding the fort until I get back.’
McQuarrie, a small man who disapproved of many things, said, ‘Your father, did you say?’
‘He’s dying, sir.’
‘Very well.’
The super, who knew more about meeting procedures than catching bad guys, would give Ellen a hard time, but Challis couldn’t do anything about that now. Besides, Ellen knew how to look after herself.
He followed Meg along the path to the verandah steps. ‘Where’s Eve? She inside with Dad?’
Meg shook her head. ‘Studying. Always studying.’
Challis’s niece was in Year 12. He’d last seen her a year ago, at his mother’s funeral: tall, lovely, and absolutely desolate. He hated to think of Eve in pain. First her father, then her grandmother, and now her grandfather.
‘You’ll see her eventually,’ Meg said.
Challis stepped into the house behind her, into rooms unchanged from when he’d been a boy, into sluggish air laden with the odours of a dying man. For a brief mad instant, he looked for his mother to come bustling from the kitchen, ready to wrap him in loving smiles and hugs. The grief hit him like a punch to the heart: he stopped, swayed, breathed in and out.
‘Hal?’
Challis swallowed. ‘Nothing, sis, I’m okay.’ He paused. ‘Mum.’
Meg looked fleetingly unimpressed. This wasn’t a competition, but she’d been closer to their mother than Challis had, and she’d had to cope with their father’s decline. Then, relenting, she gently touched his arm and called, ‘Dad! Look who’s here.’
She’d set the old man up in a brightly upholstered cane chair in the screened-in back porch. Here the sun penetrated for the greater part of the day. It was a cheerful room, furnished with other cane chairs, a pair of glass-topped tables on cane legs, flowery curtains pulled back on the windows. White walls, a couple of vaguely Turkish rugs on the terracotta tiled floor. Challis took these things in first, a way of delaying the inevitable. Then, his heart hammering, he said, ‘Hello, Dad.’
His father stirred feebly, a bony hand fluttering out from under the tartan rug that enclosed him. Pathetic white ankles above carpet slippers. A food-stained blue dressing gown with shiny lapels revealed his sunken chest and throat. His face was sharp and fleshless, his hair a few wispy white tufts. Finally, the eyes that had always had the power to unnerve Challis. They were unchanged.
‘My boy,’ the old man said.
Overcome, Challis crossed the short distance, knelt, and hugged his father. A hand beat feebly on his back. ‘That’s enough, that’s enough, I’m not dead yet.’
Challis stood back, blinking. His father wasn’t easily comforted. He was too powerful for that. ‘Sorry to see you like this, Dad.’
His father gave him a ghastly smile. ‘It happens to all of us.’
Challis returned the smile.
‘I’ll make tea,’ Meg said, and presently began to bang around in the kitchen. Domesticity settled over the house. Challis and his father talked. Challis even held a papery old hand for a while, until his father gently removed it. They had never been ones to embrace. They had never kissed.
‘So, what are the bad guys up to in your neck of the woods?’
Challis went very still, calculating madly. Was this the lead up to a confrontation? His father had always said, ‘You’ve got a good brain. Why the hell did you go into the police?’ Challis thought he understood: Murray Challis had been born in the 1920s and seen his family suffer during the Great Depression. The Second World War had been his way out. He’d met educated men in the Air Force. Education was the key. It didn’t matter that his son had completed a bachelor degree at night school in recent years: it was the fact that his son hadn’t done anything with it but remained in the police force. ‘Your average criminal is stupid,’ was the refrain. ‘He brings you down to his level. He certainly doesn’t elevate you.’
‘Yes, but putting him in jail, and getting justice for the victim, elevates me,’ Challis would reply.
He could feel his asthma starting up. He found himself telling his father about a lawyer he’d arrested a month earlier. The man had a cocaine habit. He’d stolen two million dollars from clients who’d invested their life savings with him. ‘Picked him up boarding a plane to Bangkok,’ said Challis challengingly.
His father patted his wrist. ‘I’m a family solicitor, son, not a lawyer.’
Meg came in with a tray: blueberry muffins, teapot, mugs, milk and sugar. They ate, and presently the old man fell asleep. Challis and Meg chattered. Their father awoke and said, ‘How long are you staying, son?’
Challis didn’t know what to say. Unti
l you die? He coughed. ‘They’ve given me a month off, Dad.’
So please don’t die after that time?
Meg rescued him. ‘Be glad he’s here, Dad.’
Their father winked. ‘She thinks I’m dying.’
Challis barked an uncomfortable laugh.
Then the old man entered one of the mood swings that had always kept Challis and Meg on their toes. ‘Which way did you come?’ he demanded.
‘Dad,’ said Meg warningly.
Challis didn’t visit very often, making the two-day car journey from his home on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria to Mawson’s Bluff only once every two or three years, generally at Christmas time. He would break the drive in Adelaide or, if he’d set out late, in Keith or Bordertown. There had been only two exceptions to that in the past decade: when his mother had died last spring, and when Meg’s husband had disappeared on a winter’s day five years earlier. On both occasions, Challis had flown to Adelaide and driven up in a hire car the same day.
He considered lying now. It was his father’s fierce contention that Challis should always skirt Adelaide and detour via the Barossa Valley, which was beautiful wine-growing country settled by German immigrants in the 1800s. The old man’s mother, Lottie Heinrich, had been born there. But Challis couldn’t lie to him, and began to describe his route: through Adelaide, up into the wheat and sheep country of the mid-north, and eventually to Mawson’s Bluff, in marginal country near the Flinders Ranges.