by Garry Disher
He was relieved when Meg arrived, as arranged, to cook dinner. ‘You don’t have to do this, you know,’ he told her.
She was already clattering about in the kitchen. ‘I know.’
‘Eve couldn’t come?’
‘Give the girl a break. It’s Saturday night. She’s going out with some of her friends.’
Challis helped. Soon a stir-fry of onions, garlic, ginger, soy sauce and strips of chicken was hissing and crackling in a wok. ‘I didn’t know Mum had a wok.’
‘There are a lot of things you didn’t know about Mum.’
‘Ouch.’
Meg looked mortified and touched his forearm. ‘I didn’t mean to sound so harsh.’
‘Probably deserved,’ Challis said. Meg had carried the burden of the last couple of years. She’d been closer to their parents in all respects, yet the family dynamics had always demonstrated, very faintly, the sense that he was the favoured one, the first-born.
Challis glanced guiltily through the archway at his father, who was slumbering in one of the sitting room armchairs. He’d rarely given much thought to the South Australian compartment of his life: his mother, when she was alive, his father, Meg and Eve, their individual heartaches and vulnerabilities. Partly distance, and partly that he was a bad son? Certainly self-absorption wasn’t a factor, for he rarely considered his own heartaches and vulnerabilities but lived inside the crimes and criminals he dealt with. Now, here, he had things to face up to.
‘I didn’t tell you why I came through Adelaide.’
Meg was busy at the wok, but cast him an inquiring glance.
‘Do you remember Max Andrewartha?’
‘The sergeant here when you were a probationer?’
‘Yes. Well, he’s head of the missing persons unit now.’
‘Oh, Hal.’
‘I read their file on Gavin.’
Meg seemed distressed. ‘Why would you do that?’
Could he tell her that a sense of responsibility was growing inside him, threatening to swamp him?
‘Hal?’
‘Sorry, miles away.’
‘Forget about Gavin. That’s what I’m trying to do.’
‘The case is still open. Nothing can change that.’
Meg breathed out exasperatedly. ‘Did you learn anything new?’
‘No. I thought I’d ask around while I’m here.’
‘Please don’t.’
‘Low key, sis, low key.’
She gave him a shove. ‘Out of the kitchen. You’re in my way.’
Challis went through to his father, woke him gently, and read to him from Mr Midshipman Hornblower. When Meg called, ‘It’s on the table,’ he helped the old man through to the dining room. Three plates steamed on the table, one of them minuscule and plain, chicken without soy sauce, cut into tiny pieces, adorned with a spoonful of rice and what looked like overcooked carrots and peas. Dad’s dodgy digestion, Challis thought.
‘Wine, I think,’ he said, and went to his bedroom, returning with a bottle he’d packed before leaving Waterloo.
‘You read my mind, son.’
‘Dad,’ warned Meg.
The old man ignored her, waggling his glass at Challis, who poured a tiny measure.
‘Jesus Christ, son. A bit more wrist action.’
‘You shouldn’t have alcohol, Dad,’ Meg said, tucking a napkin into the old man’s collar.
‘Too late.’
Challis said ‘Cheers’ and they toasted each other and began to eat and talk, their conversation punctuated by peaceful silences. Early evening, the sun settling, darkening the room but not removing its essential warmth. Now and then the old man tore a knuckle of bread from the white slice on his side plate and masticated slowly. The wine, and the presence of his children, rallied him in contestable ways. Challis found it exhausting, and was relieved when his father fell asleep.
Meg smiled. The light was soft all around them and encouraged release and harmony. They murmured into the night, sipping the wine. Meg examined the bottle. ‘This is good. Elan. Never heard of it.’
‘A small winery just up the road from where I live,’ Challis said.
‘I guess it doesn’t really matter if Dad has a glass now and then. You know…’
‘Yep.’
Their father continued to sleep, diminished by age and illness.
‘What are Eve’s friends like?’
‘Nice.’
This led by degrees to a discussion of their own late teens: the heartaches, rituals, mating and courting indiscretions, and, above all, the waiting.
‘Weeks would go by and nobody would ask me out.’
Challis laughed. ‘Weeks would go by when I didn’t have the nerve to ask anyone out.’
Meg said slyly, ‘Except Lisa Acres. You didn’t have to wait long for her.’
Challis shifted ruefully in his chair. ‘No one did.’
He was being unfair. Lisa Acres-Acres’ because the first thing she asked you was how many acres you owned-hadn’t really been free with her affections. But she was the daughter of the local publican and had ambitions to settle down with a rich man. Challis hadn’t been rich, so she must have seen something else in him. It had been heady fun while it lasted and had broken his heart.
‘Do you ever see her?’ he asked.
‘Oh, she’s around. Still stunning to look at, in a brittle kind of way. The husband’s an alcoholic. She virtually runs the place. They’d go bankrupt if it wasn’t for her.’
She’d married a man named Rex Joyce, who came from old money in the district. Rex had been sent away to boarding school, Prince Alfred College in Adelaide, at the age of five. He’d suddenly reappeared one day, in a red Jaguar given to him by his father when he turned eighteen. Rex, that car, and the acres that came with them, had offered Lisa more than Challis ever could.
‘Any kids?’
Meg shook her head. ‘Some unkind people say she didn’t want to ruin her figure, others that she’s been too busy keeping the property intact. A lot of farms have gone under in the past few years.’
Meg toyed with her knife, turning it to catch the light. ‘Are you seeing anyone, Hal?’
Was he? At once he was visualising Ellen Destry, the way her fair hair would swing as she walked, her intensity when she was working, her sly humour, above all her beauty. She wasn’t straightforwardly beautiful. You had to know her for a while to see it. She’d once said her looks were ‘average’, ‘girl next door’, but they were more complicated and alluring than that.
He wanted her, but was he seeing her? ‘Not really.’
Meg sighed. ‘Nor am I.’ She paused. ‘The kids go out as groups of friends these days, rather than as couples, like we did. It’s healthier, I think.’
‘Do you think Eve’s, you know…’
Meg cocked her head. ‘Sexually active? I don’t know about active. We’ve talked about it. She’s not a virgin. She knows she can have a boy stay overnight if she really cares about him and he’s nice to her.’
‘Not like our day.’
Meg shook her head vehemently. ‘God, no.’
They glanced at their father again; how terrifying he’d seemed when they were young. He’d wanted Challis to go out into the world rather than marry a local girl-which he’d said would lead to stunted opportunities, bawling babies and debt. On the other hand, he hadn’t wanted Meg to leave, or get an education, but marry locally and raise a family. She’d mostly obliged, marrying Gavin Hurst and producing a daughter with him.
Challis brooded down the years. He remembered the country-dances of his youth, often in far-flung town halls or football clubrooms. It hadn’t been unusual for him to drive his father’s Falcon station wagon two hundred kilometres on a Saturday night, Lisa Acres at his elbow, her hand on his thigh. He’d take her home, pull into the shadows behind her father’s pub, but not get further than that before the light went on above the back door and she’d say in a rush, ‘Dad’s awake, I’d better go in.’ It went beyond
birth control: it was desire control.
He could see now that it wouldn’t have worked with her anyway. He had a history of choosing the wrong woman. In fact, Angie, the woman he’d married, had conspired with her lover-a police colleague of Challis’s-to murder him. She’d gone to jail for that. She’d killed herself there.
As if reading his mind, Meg said, ‘We both made mistakes, didn’t we?’
They glanced at their father again, wondering if he was to blame, not wanting to believe that they might shoulder some of it, or that many marriages simply ran their course and ended.
‘Gavin has stopped messing with your head?’ Challis asked.
Meg nodded. ‘Nothing in the past couple of years.’
‘Where do you think he is?’
She shrugged. ‘Sydney?’
‘Why would he want to hurt you like that?’
It was a rhetorical question. Meg shrugged again, then leaned forward, dropping her voice. ‘You won’t tell Dad about the letters?’
He shook his head. He’d promised years ago that he wouldn’t. Their father being such a difficult person, one simply knew not to tell him everything. But now Challis was curious about Meg’s motives. ‘Is there a reason why you told Mum but not him?’
‘You know what he’s like. He wanted me to stick around and marry and have kids, but didn’t want me to marry Gavin. It gave him a sense of satisfaction to believe Gavin had committed suicide. Confirmed what he thought of Gavin. But if he’d known Gavin was still alive, and taunting me, I’d never have heard the end of it.’
Challis gave a hollow laugh of recognition. They were silent for a while. Meg said, ‘Rob Minchin is still sweet on me, you know.’
Rob Minchin was the local doctor, and one of Challis’s boyhood friends. ‘And?’
‘And nothing. He calls in to check on Dad, and that’s about it.’
‘I remember he was pretty jealous of Gavin.’
‘Rob in the grip of passion,’ said Meg, shaking her head.
They stared at the tabletop, too settled to move. Their father snored gently. Soon they would put him to bed, Meg would go home, and Challis would toss sleeplessly on his childhood mattress.
14
Bucketing rains came through overnight, preceded by thunder and lightning that seemed to mutter around the fringes of the horizon, then approach and encircle the house where Ellen Destry slept, and retreat again. Dawn broke still and balmy, the skies clear, as though nothing had happened. Spring in southeastern Australia, Ellen thought, glancing out of Challis’s bedroom window. The bedside clock was flashing, indicating that the power had gone off during the night. She glanced at her watch-6 am-and went around the house, resetting the digital clocks on the microwave, the oven, the DVD player. Then, pulling on a tracksuit and old pair of Reeboks, she set out for her morning walk.
And immediately returned. Rainwater had come storming down the dirt road and roadside ditches outside Challis’s front gate, carrying pine needles, bark, gravel and sand, which had formed a plug in the concrete stormwater pipe that ran under his gateway. The ditch had overflowed, scoring a ragged channel across the entrance. She should do something about it before the channel got too deep.
Hal had told her the grass would need mowing regularly. He hadn’t told her what a storm could do.
In his garden shed she found a fork, a five-metre length of stiff, black poly agricultural pipe, and a long-handled shovel. She hoisted them over one shoulder and returned to the front gate. There were signs of the overnight storm all about her: twigs, branches, ribbons of bark and birds’ nests littered the road; water-laden foliage bent to the ground; the air seemed to zing with promise.
Ellen forked and poked at the blocked pipe, shovelled and prodded. Suddenly, with a great, gurgling rush, the stopper of matted leaves and mud washed free and drain water flowed unchecked toward the…
Toward the sea? Ellen realised that she knew very little about life out here on the back roads.
Finally she walked. She passed a little apple orchard, the trees heavy with blossom despite the storm. Onion weed, limp and yellowing at the end of its short life, lay densely on both sides of the road, and choking the fences was chest-high grass, going to seed. Sometimes her feet slipped treacherously where the dusty road had turned to mud. The blackberry bushes were sending out wicked new canes and the bracken was flourishing. Now and then she passed through air currents that didn’t smell clean and new but heavy with the odours of rotting vegetation and stale mud revitalised by the rain. Everything;-the sounds, the smells, the textures-served to remind her of Katie Blasko, abandoned, buried, merging with the soil.
She walked slowly up the hill, stunned to see huge cylinders of hay in one of the paddocks, freshly mown and wrapped in pale green polythene. When had that happened? She rarely saw or heard vehicles, and yet here was evidence of the world going on without her.
Without warning she heard a sharp snap and felt a stunning pain in her scalp. Her heart jumped and she cried out in terror. Only a magpie, she realised soon afterwards, swooping her because it had a nest nearby-but she’d hated and feared magpies ever since a long-ago spring day when she’d been pecked and harried across a football field as she’d taken a short cut home from school on her bicycle. Magpies sang like angels but were the devil.
Windmilling her arms wildly about her head, and trying to make eye contact with her tormentor, Ellen trotted home. She missed her morning walks on Penzance Beach with Pam Murphy, where the world was reduced to the sand, the sea, the sky and a few gulls. Out here on the back roads there was too much nature. All around her ducks sat like knuckly growths on the bare branches of dead gums, and other birds were busy, calling out, making nests, protecting their young, and in the paddocks ibis were feeding. A strip of bark fell on her, scratching her neck. Challis’s ducklings were down to six, she noticed, as she entered his yard, and she wanted to cry.
At nine that same Sunday morning, Scobie Sutton was at the little Waterloo hospital. He was entitled to a day at home with his wife and daughter, a quiet time, church and Sunday School, a spot of gardening after lunch, but the station was short staffed. He’d be working the Katie Blasko case later-and it was a ‘case’ in Scobie’s mind: his own daughter was Katie’s age, and if she went missing for even thirty minutes he’d be calling it a case-but right now he was the only CIU detective available to interview the victim of an aggravated burglary.
‘How are you feeling, Mr Clode?’
‘I’ll live,’ Neville Clode said.
Extensive bruising to the head and torso, a cut lip, cracked ribs. Clode was swaddled in bandages and lying very still in the bland, pastelly room. The place was overheated and so he’d thrown off the covers, revealing skinny legs and the ugliest feet that Scobie had ever seen: yellowed nails and a blotchy birthmark. No flowers, fruit or books. I’m possibly his first visitor, Scobie thought. ‘You took quite a beating last night.’
The voice came in a strained whisper, ‘Yes.’
‘Did you recognise the men who attacked you?’
‘No.’
‘Do you know if they took anything?’
‘Cash,’ whispered Clode.
‘Cash. Do you know how much?’
‘Six…seven hundred dollars.’
Scobie whistled. It was a lot. It would also grow when Clode submitted his insurance claim. ‘Do you always have that much cash on you?’
‘Won it at the horses yesterday. Emu Plains.’
It was the spring racing carnival everywhere, metropolitan racetracks and regional, including Emu Plains on Coolart Road, just a few kilometres from Waterloo. No security cameras, though. ‘Do you think you were followed home from the track?’
‘Could have been.’
‘Were you alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘And nothing else was stolen?’
‘No.’
Clode hadn’t once made eye contact but stared past Scobie at the TV set bolted high on the wall, so high it was a
wonder hospitals didn’t get sued for encouraging neck strain in their patients. Scobie dragged the visitor’s chair around; Clode slid his eyes to the beige door. Scobie said gently, ‘Are you telling me everything, Mr Clode? Was this personal? Did you owe money to anyone? Is there anyone who would want to hurt you?’
Scobie had visited the crime scene before coming to the hospital. Clode lived in a brick house along a secluded lane opposite the Seaview Park estate. Like its neighbours, it was comfortably large and barely visible from the road, a low, sprawling structure about ten years old, the kind of place where well-heeled tradesmen, teachers and shop owners might live, on largish blocks, screened by vigorous young gum trees, wattles and other native plants. Residents like Clode were several steps up from the battlers of Seaview Park estate, and several steps down from the doctors and real estate agents who lived in another nearby enclave, Waterloo Hill, which overlooked the town and the Bay. Clode himself was some kind of New Age healer, according to a sign on a post outside his house.
Letting a forensic tech dust and scrape, Scobie had done a walk-through of the house. It was evident that a woman had once lived there-a woman slightly haunted by life or by Clode, judging by the face she revealed to the world in the only photograph Scobie found, a small, forgotten portrait in a dusty cream frame, the woman unsmiling in the front garden of the house, Clode with his arm around her. No signs of her in the bathroom cabinet, bedside cupboard or wardrobe. The rooms themselves were sterile, a mix of mainly worn and some new items of furniture, in careful taste, neither cheap nor costly, with here and there an ornamental vase or forgettable framed print. A couple of fat paperbacks, several New Age magazines, some CDs of whale and waterfall music. It was the house of an empty man. The only oddity was a small room taken up with a spa bath, bright wall tiles and cuddly floating toys.