by Garry Disher
They gave their empty smiles and said nothing. They all returned to the sitting room, where Wurfel sat awkwardly on a stiff-backed chair and Meg and her father shared a sofa, holding hands. Meg looked washed out. The old man looked mulish. ‘Dad,’ she said warningly.
He shook her off. ‘So it’s not suicide.’
‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Stormare said indifferently.
The old man smarted at his tone. ‘Gavin made enemies. He wasn’t himself at the end.’
‘Is that so?’
‘He rubbed several farmers up the wrong way. He came down hard on anyone who wasn’t treating his sheep or horses or dogs right.’
‘Mrs Hurst, do you own a gun?’
Meg’s hand flew to her heart. ‘No. Of course not.’
‘Surely your husband owned one, to shoot dangerous animals, put sick and injured ones out of their misery.’
She frowned. ‘Now that you mention it, he did. A little.22 rifle.’
‘It was found in his car,’ muttered the old man.
‘It was?’ said Meg. ‘What happened to it?’
‘I handed it in to be destroyed.’
‘You didn’t tell me that.’
Challis was watching Nixon and Stormare, who were in turn watching the exchange. His sister and his father were asking some of the questions they wanted to ask and getting the answers they wanted to hear. Stormare turned to Wurfel. ‘Dig up the paperwork.’
‘Sure.’
‘Do you have a bullet,’ asked Challis, ‘or fragments?’
Stormare ignored him. ‘Are there any other firearms in the family?’
‘No,’ snarled the old man, ‘but this is a farming area. Rifles and shotguns all over the place.’ ’
‘We’ll be sure to look into it,’ Nixon said, giving a smart clap of his hands as if to say, Time you went home now.
‘You treat my daughter with the respect she deserves. All these years she thought he was alive.’
‘Dad,’ said Meg.
‘Find the person who sent her those letters and you’ll find your killer.’
The Adelaide detectives went very still. Challis watched their minds working even as they gave nothing away.
‘Letters?’ said Nixon.
Wurfel coughed. ‘I was going to tell you. It’s in the Misper file.’
‘Dad,’ said Meg, ‘how did you know? Did Mum tell you?’
He gestured impatiently. ‘Doesn’t matter. Tell them.’
Meg turned to Nixon and Stormare. ‘I thought it was Gavin, mocking me, trying to hurt me. Magazine subscriptions, memberships, credit card applications. I thought it was Gavin.’ She swallowed. ‘Even a subscription to Playboy. That was the hardest to take. We hadn’t exactly been intimate for some time.’
The old man rocked a little and closed his eyes.
‘Did you keep any of them?’ said Stormare.
‘No.’
Both detectives turned to Challis with the kinds of clever, assessing smiles that he’d given over the years. ‘I don’t suppose you saw any of this mail?’
‘No. But look at her. Look at the hurt.’
They sighed. ‘Perhaps you could come to the station and make a statement, Mrs Hurst. Tomorrow morning, nine sharp.’
Meg glanced anxiously at Challis. ‘Can my brother come with me?’
‘No.’
Challis’s father made some phone calls when the police had left. A lawyer friend from a nearby town agreed to accompany Meg the next morning. The family’s dentist confirmed that he’d been asked for Gavin’s dental X-rays. The effort exhausted the old man, and soon he was slumped in his chair, apparently asleep. By now it was 10 pm.
Meg glanced at Challis, the tension tight in her face. ‘First Dad to contend with, now this.’
‘You’ve got nothing to worry about.’
‘I didn’t kill him.’
‘I know you didn’t. I mean, why would you?’
It was a rhetorical question, but Meg looked away and Challis felt his heart thump. ‘Meg?’
‘He was going to divorce me.’
‘And?’
‘He was going to rewrite his will, leaving everything to the RSPCA and sell this house.’
Challis knew that people had murdered for less compelling reasons. ‘Sounds weak to me, sis.’
‘But they’ll investigate and think that’s why I killed him. I mean, not that I did kill him.’
Challis placed his arm around her. ‘Come and sit down and tell me about it.’
They talked for an hour, murmurs punctuated by their father’s snores and heart-stopping silences when he didn’t seem to breathe at all. As Meg told it, Gavin had been subject to violent mood swings for almost two years. Sometimes he was manically happy, but was more often depressed and angry. The mistreatment of animals distressed him deeply, he accused Meg of being unfaithful to him, he became protective and narrow as Eve’s body matured after puberty, and he often threatened suicide. ‘Threatening to divorce me, sell the house and cut us out of the will was typical of what he was like at the time he disappeared. I mean, was killed.’
‘So you had no reason to suspect anything else?’
‘Naturally I thought he must have committed suicide, especially when they found his car abandoned out east, but then I started to get that weird mail and thought he’d staged his disappearance and wanted to taunt me. He’d run away because he couldn’t cope, but still wanted me to suffer.’
‘Tell the police that.’
‘I will’
‘When was the last bit of strange mail?’
‘Two, three years ago. I hired a private detective. He didn’t get anywhere.’
‘Why didn’t you ask me for help?’
‘You’re so far away, and so busy.’
Challis felt mortified. He tried to swallow it. ‘Tell the police that, too. Show them receipts.’
‘Okay. But who sent me the mail? Why would they do that?’
Challis shrugged. ‘The killer, I suppose, trying to throw everyone off track.’
Paying attention to his doubts and suspicions, even uncomfortable ones, had always been Challis’s main tool in detective work. He couldn’t ignore the possibility that Meg, or the old man, or both of them acting in concert, had shot Gavin. The mysterious mail had been a useful bit of misdirection. The rifle that had been handed in for official destruction had been the murder weapon. The desire to find out what had happened to Gavin was fierce in him now.
‘Fancy Dad knowing,’ Meg said. ‘Mum must have told him before she died.’ She laughed, brief and rancorous. ‘Not that it changed anything. Dad’s always been good at holding conflicting beliefs simultaneously. Or his mind’s going.’
Challis patted her back, rocked her against him briefly. ‘Where were you the day he disappeared, assuming he died the same day?’
‘Here.’
‘Can anyone vouch for that?’
‘God, I don’t know, it was so long ago.’
He held her hand. They were not a demonstrative family, but holding her hand felt right to both of them. ‘Meg, I saw the file they have on Gavin at the local station.’
Something closed down in her face. ‘Did you?’
‘Gavin used to hit you.’
She looked at him steadily. ‘Only a couple of times. At the end. But I didn’t kill him.’
He nodded. ‘Did he hit Eve?’
‘If Gavin had hit Eve I would have left him, no mistake.’
‘Anyone else? Dad, for instance?’
‘The whole world would have known about it if he’d hit Dad. As for anyone else, I can’t say.’
‘But he offended lots of people.’
‘God, yes, even before he started going off the rails he was always taking people to court. Paddy Finucane, for example-Gavin brought several prosecutions for cruelty to animals against him.’
They gazed at each other. Challis told her to tell that to the police, too.
She sighed raggedly. ‘I have to t
ell Eve. I want her here with me.’
‘Shall I stay?’
Meg looked at him sadly. ‘Thanks, but you’d better take Dad home.’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he told her, and together they helped their father into the car.
Later he called Ellen Destry. ‘Only me.’
‘Twice in one evening,’ she said, sounding pleased. He told her about the body.
‘Oh, Hal, I’m so sorry.’
‘A couple of homicide guys from Adelaide are sniffing around.’
Ellen was silent. She knew whom they’d be sniffing around. ‘Hal,’ she said warningly, ‘you’re not going to…’
‘Of course not. Not my jurisdiction.’
‘Yeah, right, as Larrayne would say.’
‘But I was missing a good murder,’ Challis said.
Come tomorrow morning, he intended to go in hard, tracing Gavin Hurst’s last days and sworn enemies.
34
Friday was the morning for the District Nurse and the shire council’s Home Helper, and that gave Challis three hours to himself. First he drove across town to wish Meg luck with the police interview. There was a Channel 7 news van parked in the street outside the house, and a couple of newspaper reporters leaning against Meg’s fence, smoking, exchanging war stories. They’d come three hundred kilometres north for this story; it involved murder, grisly remains, concealment and buried secrets. Challis, who had perfected reporter brush-off techniques over the years, passed through as if he didn’t see them.
Eve answered the door, her face tight and unhappy. He hadn’t seen her since Wednesday, and made sure that the door was firmly shut before he hugged her.
‘They keep knocking and ringing. I hate it. They’re ghouls.’
‘They’ll go away eventually.’
‘Dr Minchin was here earlier.’ Eve looked at Challis as though recalling a bad taste. ‘He took a mouth swab, can you believe it?’
Challis hugged her again. ‘DNA, sweetheart, to help them identify the body.’
‘I felt like a criminal.’
‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of.’
She heaved a sigh. ‘Today’s going to drag on forever.’
It occurred to Challis that Eve would be alone here while Meg was questioned. ‘Want to come around with me this morning?’
‘Where?’
He gazed at her steadily. ‘Out east.’
She twigged at once. ‘Where Dad’s car was found?’
‘Yes.’
She didn’t ask why. It was as if she knew. He found Meg in the kitchen and said goodbye and good luck.
‘Thanks.’
She looked tired and bewildered. She’d assumed that Gavin Hurst had been alive all these years, and had grown to hate him because he’d been taunting her. Now this.
‘Call me when the police have finished interviewing you.’
‘Unless I’m in jail.’
‘I’ll break you out.’
‘My hero. Pity you’re my brother.’
‘Call me,’ he said again.
‘I will,’ she promised.
‘On my mobile.’
‘Okay.’
There was a transmitting tower in Mawson’s Bluff. In fact, Challis got better mobile phone reception in the wilds of South Australia than he did on the Peninsula. He kissed Meg and then hurried Eve into his car and drove east on a road that had been subject to potholes and bone-jarring corrugations back when he was a teenager driving to outlying sheep stations to pick up a girl and take her to a dance. It was a fine sealed road now, and passed through a rain shadow, leaving the grassy plains of the Bluff behind and rapidly entering stony saltbush and bluebush country-the change so dramatic that God might have thrown a switch when your eyes were blinking. If you kept going you’d reach the vast northeast of the state, a virtually unpopulated region of stone ruins, deep gorges, dry salt lakes and landmarks that named the fate of European settlement: Mount Hopeless, Termination Hill, Dry Well Track, Blood Creek Bore.
But Gavin’s RSPCA station wagon had been found only twenty kilometres east of the Bluff-twenty-one kilometres east of the cemetery. Dry country, sure. Country you could walk out into, never to be found, if you had your heart set on it. A country of hidden gullies and undiscovered rocky caves decorated with ancient Aboriginal carvings and paintings. But country that was still close to town. A daily Trailblazer bus went along that road, before turning southeast to the River Murray towns. Salesmen went along it, livestock agents, local farmers, tourists in cars and buses. Gavin could have abandoned his car and hitched a ride with a stranger, you’d reason, if you believed he’d wanted to stage his disappearance. Or he’d walked out into the dry country to die, you’d reason, if you believed that he’d wanted to commit suicide.
Two reasonable hypotheses, both widely held in the town.
Eve knew where the car had been found, and directed him to pull over fifty metres past the twenty-kilometre post. ‘You’re getting a feeling, Uncle Hal?’
She said it slightly teasingly. In fact, he often did feel his way into the atmospherics of a place, and the skin and bones of a victim or a culprit. There was nothing supernatural about it. It was merely one man’s imagination-albeit an imagination honed by dozens of murder investigations over the years.
‘Something like that,’ he said.
A warm wind blew, raising a willy-willy on the dusty plain. Two wedge-tail eagles soared above, and bleached, horned rams’ skulls gleamed in the reddish dirt nearby. They stood there for some time, thinking, talking, reminiscing. It was not a lonely spot. Several cars and a dirty Land Rover passed by, their drivers raising a hand in greeting.
Eve said, ‘I hate to think of him being shot out here.’
‘It might not have been here.’
He could see her mind working. ‘He was shot somewhere else and they dumped his car here?’
‘Yes.’
‘That would need at least two people, one to drive Dad’s car here, the other to collect the driver.’
‘It’s one scenario.’
Challis pictured Paddy Finucane with his sad-looking wife. He pictured Meg with the old man. Just then his mobile phone rang.
‘Hal?’
Meg’s tone was bright but he froze inside. ‘Everything okay?’
It was as if all of the cares of her life had evaporated. ‘Everything’s fine. The lawyer was terrific. He made them promise they’d look at everyone Gavin brought prosecutions against.’
Challis was less enthusiastic. ‘But you’re not off the hook?’
‘Well surely-’
‘So long as you’re not behind bars, sis,’ he said hastily.
She was disconcerted. ‘I’d better go.’
‘Bye,’ Challis said to the empty air.
‘That was Mum?’
‘She’s back home.’
‘I should be with her.’
Challis nodded and they drove back to Mawson’s Bluff. He ran Eve through the gauntlet outside her house and then drove to the hospital, where he was directed to the cafeteria, an airy, clattering room in the east wing. Minchin sat at a window table, staring out at the scrubby trees that separated the town from one of the adjacent farms. He’d pushed a partly consumed plate of lettuce, spinach, fetta, olives and bamboo shoots to one side and was dreaming over a mug of black coffee.
‘Not fond of grass?’
The doctor gave him a tired smile. ‘Trying to lose weight.’
‘And bound to succeed if you don’t actually eat.’
‘Yeah, yeah. You’re here about Gavin?’
‘Is he still in the morgue?’
Minchin shook his head. ‘The lab.’
Meaning the forensic science lab in Adelaide, three hundred kilometres south. Challis was disappointed: he’d wanted to view the body. ‘But you did the preliminary examination?’
‘I pronounced death,’ said his friend.
‘Very funny.’
‘Well and truly deceased.’
‘Gunshot to the head?’
‘Gunshot to the back of the head.’
‘Shotgun? Handgun? Rifle?’
‘A single entry wound, single exit wound with massive damage, so not a shotgun. And probably not a low calibre handgun or rifle.’
‘Gavin apparently travelled around with a.22 rifle. You’re saying it couldn’t have been the murder weapon?’
‘Very doubtful.’
‘Any fragments?’
‘Hal, I don’t have the resources to determine things like that. Contact the lab.’
‘I will. But you did match his teeth to his dental records?’
‘Yes, and there were a couple of broken ribs, old knitted fractures.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Gavin was kicked by a horse about ten years ago. I patched him up. Still have the X-rays.’
‘In that case you needn’t have taken a DNA swab from Eve.’
‘Just covering bases, Hal, you know that.’
Challis scowled and they brooded together, two men who’d once been close and had complicated ties to the dead man.
‘So he couldn’t have shot himself,’ Challis said after a while, ‘and he couldn’t have buried himself
‘But someone could have shot him by accident and panicked.’
‘You’re doing my job for me.’
‘But is it your job, Hal?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Those Adelaide detectives.’
‘What about them?’
‘They asked me about you.’
‘What did you tell them?’
‘Nothing to tell.’
‘Did they ask you where you were? And if you own a rifle?’
Minchin opened his mouth, shocked and appalled, then swiftly angry. ‘Fuck you.’
‘Rob, sit down, I’m only asking questions that you’ll be asked sometime or other, by the police or the coroner.’
‘Just because I went out with Meg a few times twenty years ago.’
There was more to it than that, Challis thought. ‘Yes.’
‘Yours is a pretty shitty job, you know that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know where I was when Gavin disappeared? In the UK.’
‘The UK?’
‘Medical conference. On providing distance health care.’