Chain of Evidence ic-4

by Garry Disher

‘Sarge,’ said Pam, still scribbling.

  ‘You force suspects and witnesses alike to separate what they think they know from what is actually true, you help them through uncertainties and attack their certainties.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘And always, always, you ask earlier questions again, worded differently.’

  ‘Sarge,’ said Pam, wondering if she had enough for three thousand words. She thought she might look up old case notes and reproduce interview transcripts, generally pad out her essay in the time-honoured way of all students everywhere.

  ‘Always get their story first,’ van Alphen said. ‘Get them to commit to it. Then you take it apart, detail-by-detail. You’ll find that most people can lie convincingly some or even a lot of the time, but only the good liars remember exactly what they said.’

  ‘He doesn’t work here any more,’ said the manager of Prestige Autos late that Friday afternoon. ‘I sacked him.’

  John Tankard stood there with his mouth open, feeling powerless. He hadn’t felt this bad since that time he’d shot a deranged farmer. He’d gone on stress leave for it, then returned to work and thrown himself into the job, together with coaching a junior football team, and these things had been pretty successful in staving off depression, but it was his new car that he’d been counting on most to make himself feel better.

  ‘The guy ripped me off,’ he said hotly, ‘while employed by you.’

  The manager, a portly older guy with furry eyebrows, made a what-can-I-do? gesture. Plastic pennants snapped in the breeze. A salesman in a sissy-looking suit was putting the hard word to a young guy who was critically but longingly circling a Subaru WRX-drug dealers’ car, thought Tank sourly-while his girlfriend looked on in boredom. A bus belched past. And so life was going on unchanged around John Tankard but he himself was breaking inside. Over a car, but still.

  ‘I was sold the car on your premises. I bought it in good faith. You’re obliged by law to provide a warranty.’

  The manager was unmoved. ‘The salesman who sold you that car was doing so off the books. The car was never possessed by this business. I’m a victim here, too. This is bad for my reputation.’

  Tank was incredulous. ‘I have to feel sorry for you?’

  ‘Look, son, I have no legal obligation to give you your money back.’

  ‘I’m not your son. Anyway, this does involve you because your finance company financed the deal.’

  ‘Again, that was done without my authority. As I understand it, your contract is with them. I think you’ll find it’s legally binding. It has nothing to do with me.’

  ‘I’m out thousands and thousands of dollars,’ Tank said, wiping away tears.

  ‘Sell the car. You’ll get most of your money back. You might even make a profit.’

  ‘I can’t. It’s been black-flagged in all states and territories. I can’t register the fucking thing anywhere.’

  ‘All right,’ the manager said slowly, ‘spend a few thousand to get it in compliance.’

  ‘Where am I going to get that kind of money?’ asked Tank rhetorically.

  ‘I could structure a loan for you,’ said the manager smoothly

  ‘Prick.’

  ‘There’s no need for that.’

  ‘Thousands of dollars,’ John Tankard said, his mind shooting in all directions. Had anyone been cheated like he’d been cheated…? Refuse payments to the finance company…Put a bullet through his brain…

  That night ‘Evening Update’ floated the idea that a person of interest to the police in the Katie Blasko case had possibly been active for years in Victoria and interstate. It was a good story, kept the level of moral panic raging in the community, and worth a thousand bucks to John Tankard.

  But it was more than the money. Tank considered it important to keep people in the loop. Keep them vigilant against the creeps. Protect little kids like his sister. He kept telling himself that.

  Scobie came home feeling so hurt and aggrieved that he was curt to his wife. ‘Is this the man?’ he demanded, showing her Duyker’s mugshots.

  ‘Yes,’ said Beth defensively.

  They were in their sitting room, Beth putting aside one of their daughter’s T-shirts, in the act of cutting out the label inside the collar, which Roslyn said was itching her.

  ‘You paid him money for photographs.’

  Beth looked mortified. The house needed airing. She sometimes shut herself in for hours, trying to keep busy. Scobie often found her gazing into space, or in tears. ‘I need to find a job, Scobe,’ she’d say.

  ‘By cheque or cash?’ he went on furiously. He didn’t like himself for it. It’s the pressure, he told himself. The police shooting board inquiry. His feelings for Grace Duyker. He was confused and lonely and unhappy.

  Beth was close to tears, and that made it worse. ‘Cash,’ she said.

  ‘Damn.’

  ‘I can show you the receipt.’

  She left the room and came back with a receipt torn from a receipt book that had probably been purchased in a stationery store for $2. Scrawled blue ballpoint writing. Maybe the lab could lift Duyker’s prints from it, but so what?

  ‘Beth, listen carefully, did you ever leave Ros alone with him?’

  Beth went very still and turned an appalled face to him. ‘Is this more than fraud? Do you suspect him of, you know, you’re working on the Katie Blasko abduction and you…’

  He touched her wrist to stop the panic. ‘Settle down, for God’s sake.’

  ‘You have to believe I would never knowingly put our daughter at risk like that. He never touched her.’

  ‘Did he look at her in a certain way?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘He was a bit creepy. Smiled a lot,’ Beth said.

  Scobie patted her forearm absently. He prowled around the house and garden, muttering, clenching his fist. He went to the back fence and pulled out his mobile phone. ‘Grace? Scobie Sutton here.’

  She sounded pleased to hear from him, and that gave him an absurd little lift, the kind he’d not felt for years and years and one of the first things to go in a marriage. ‘I wondered if I could pop round tomorrow,’ he said. ‘A few more questions.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  That same night, Kees van Alphen went on a prowl of the beaches. He knew them all, the nude beaches, small and tucked away, known only to nudists and a few pathetic peeping toms, the gay beaches, one near the Navy base, another near the huge bayside estate-now carved into a few exclusive house blocks-of an airline magnate. He knew all of the hangouts of the Peninsula’s druggies, street kids, prostitutes, gays and rent boys. He knew that a place could be one thing by day and quite another by night.

  He waited until almost midnight, and then he started to make contact. Matches flared in the darkness, briefly lighting hollow cheeks. The susurrations of the sea, the moon glow on it. A drift of marijuana smoke. Feet squeaking on the sand. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked and far away a siren sounded down a long, empty road.

  Fifty bucks for a blowjob.

  Van Alphen said he could be interested.

  Five hundred for the whole night. Or a threesome could be arranged.

  He moved on. They were very young, some of them. Barely twelve, and looking younger-older, if you looked at the experiences behind their eyes.

  Then he found Billy DaCosta.

  38

  ‘But you had a history with him, Paddy,’ said Challis on Saturday morning. ‘Gavin had it in for you.’

  ‘Like I told them city coppers, I never fucking seen Hurst that day.’

  They were standing in Paddy’s dusty yard, which was a vast area of soil erosion stained here and there by motor oil, paint and animal droppings. Around it were rusting truck bodies, ploughshares, harrows and car batteries, standing in collars of tall dry grass, and several corrugated iron sheds: doorless sheds for Paddy’s tractor, plough, truck and hay bales, a set of low-slung pig pens, a fenced dog run and a hen
house. Challis had set all of the animals into a frenzy when he drove his aged Triumph into the yard.

  ‘He was due to come here,’ Challis said. ‘There was a report against you.’

  Paddy spat on the ground. ‘I tell ya, Hal, the bugger was never here.’

  Challis had gone to high school with Paddy and other Finucanes. Paddy and his siblings and cousins liked to steal from lockers, sell exam questions, run sweeps for the Melbourne Cup horse races, and taunt the young teachers. It was mostly good-natured. They were also excellent athletes, although lazy. Their fathers and uncles all had convictions for drunkenness or receiving stolen goods and were often away for short stretches.

  None of that had mattered at the time. But then Challis had gone away to the police academy, returning to the Bluff as a uniformed constable, young, pimply and barely shaving. Within days he’d found himself obliged to arrest the very same Finucanes he’d gone to school with. They wouldn’t struggle, argue or appeal to his better nature-they knew they’d been caught fair and square-but they would look at him in a certain way, partly mocking, partly disappointed. It was as if they-the whole district, in fact-thought he’d let the side down. Soon Challis was turning a blind eye. His sergeant, Max Andrewartha, told him to rethink his options. ‘You’re too soft,’ he said. Pretty soon, Challis had resigned and moved to Victoria, where no one knew him. He joined the Victoria Police, eventually becoming a detective, and now was an inspector, living near the sea, not right out here in the never-never. He lived in a landscape where the rain fell and all was green.

  But back here in the Bluff he was still the guy who’d gone to school with some of the locals and been a failed town policeman many years ago. He was called Hal. He wasn’t some stranger.

  ‘Hal?’ Paddy said, breaking into his reverie.

  Challis blinked. Paddy’s face was seamed from years in the sun. He was slight, wiry, canny. He was a clean-looking man in filthy work clothes. Challis had no doubt that the clothes were laundered repeatedly by Paddy’s poor, timid wife, but the oil, grease and paint were permanently melded to the cotton weave.

  ‘Paddy, I won’t bullshit you, they’re sniffing around Meg.’

  Paddy nodded. ‘The divorce thing.’

  Challis blinked. He shouldn’t have been surprised. The Finucanes knew everything about everybody. ‘Meg thought that Gavin had run off on her.’

  Again Paddy nodded. ‘Them letters she got.’

  ‘She told the police that Gavin had made plenty of enemies those last few months.’

  ‘Enemies like me, you mean? Mate, he was a prick from the moment he come into the district.’ Paddy swept one scrawny arm over the infinite earth. ‘No people skills, that’s for fucking sure.’ He grinned.

  Challis grinned back. Gavin had always seemed an up-tight, lay-down-the-law type to him, too, on the few occasions they’d met over the years, usually at Christmas time. No one in the family had quite known what Meg had seen in him, but she’d seemed happy enough with the guy.

  ‘Tell me about some of the run-ins you had with him.’

  Paddy cocked his head. ‘You sound like them Homicide blokes, you know that?’

  ‘Well, Paddy, that’s my job, too.’

  ‘But not here it isn’t.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Mate, you know me; you know where I come from. We cut corners, you know that, but we’re not mean or vicious.’

  Challis said, with mock solemnity, ‘I have it on very good authority that you rubbed sawdust in his face.’

  Paddy roared, then wiped his twinkling eyes, quite worn out. ‘That I did, that I did. The cant reckoned sawdust wasn’t a fit bed for dogs; it was smelly and bred fleas and disease. I picked up a handful and said, go on, smell it. Well, he didn’t, of course, so I rubbed it in his face and shoved it down his neck. A mistake, yeah, I can see that, but it felt fucking good at the time.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘The usual. Was I washing the shit out of the pig runs regular? Why was I keeping the sheep in an unsheltered paddock? Was I keeping water up to them? Stuff like that.’

  ‘People reported you? Your neighbours?’

  ‘Maybe, I don’t know. All I know is, the prick liked to turn up unannounced and walk around like Lord Muck with his clipboard.’

  Challis pictured it and grinned at Paddy. Paddy scuffed the dirt with the toe of his boot.

  ‘When’s the funeral?’

  ‘Monday.’

  Paddy nodded, looked off into the distance. ‘I’m no killer, Hal.’

  Challis didn’t think he was. But if Gavin hadn’t been at Paddy’s the day he disappeared, who had taken the photographs? Who had made the anonymous report?

  ‘Sadler came to see you a few days later?’

  ‘Yep. Told me your brother-in-law left him a shitload of work to follow up on. I gotta say, he was a more reasonable bloke to deal with.’

  ‘He didn’t find anything wrong here?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Did he take photographs of your animals?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Could he have, when you were out?’

  Paddy shrugged but could see where Challis was going with this. ‘You think Sadler killed him? Who knows? Old Gav must have been a bastard to work with. Complaints flowing in left, right and centre.’

  With a half smile, Challis said nothing.

  ‘When them Adelaide blokes finished with me yesterday, I got the feeling they were going to see Sadler.’

  Challis said nothing.

  ‘They didn’t believe me when I said Gavin Hurst wasn’t here.’

  ‘Didn’t they?’

  Paddy Finucane said, ‘Fuck off, Hal. Look, you going to help us out?’

  ‘What can I do, Paddy?’

  ‘Talk to the bastards.’

  Challis guessed that Sadler would have shown the photographs from Gavin’s digital camera to Nixon and Stormare, meaning the Adelaide detectives would have even less reason to believe Paddy’s story. With a series of minor gestures that might have meant anything at all, he left Paddy’s farm and drove home to see to his father’s needs, the shadows disappearing from the dusty paddocks and the sun high overhead.

  That afternoon, as his father slept, Challis sat in the backyard sun with the Saturday papers, his address book and mobile phone. He’d taken the house phone off the hook, and made it clear to the reporters who knocked on the door from time to time that he had nothing to say. But they knew he was a detective inspector from Victoria. There seemed to be a story in that.

  He finished the Advertiser and the Australian and then called Max Andrewartha. ‘I suppose you’ve heard?’

  ‘Mate, it’s the story of the week-or the day, at least.’

  ‘There’s nothing in that file, is there?’ said Challis, knowing his voice carried frustration and anxiety. ‘Nothing I missed? Nothing we missed?’

  Andrewartha was silent for a moment. ‘Mate, I should tell you a guy from Homicide called me yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Nixon? Stormare?’

  ‘Nixon.’

  ‘And?’

  Another silence, the quality of it making Challis apprehensive. ‘He asked me a lot of questions about the case, but he mainly seemed interested in you, and in me.’

  ‘You? You weren’t here when it happened.’

  ‘I know that. But they see us as mates.’

  Challis said flatly, ‘They want you to steer clear of me for the time being.’

  ‘That’s about it. Sorry.’

  ‘Well, given that I’m family, I am a suspect.’

  He’d been one thousand kilometres away at the time, investigating the murder of a man found in the sand dunes near a lonely Peninsula beach.

  ‘Family first,’ Andrewartha said.

  ‘Family First is a fundamentalist Christian political party, Max.’

  ‘I rest my case.’

  Challis smiled slightly, enjoying the sunshine. ‘I was going to ask a favour.’

  ‘I’
m fresh out of favours, Hal,’ said Andrewartha warningly.

  ‘Have you got someone I can call in the forensic lab, that’s all.’

  ‘Sorry, pal.’

  As if to mark the end of something, a querulous voice called to Challis then, and he returned to the dark rooms of his father’s house.

  39

  Ellen Destry’s Saturday had started with a one-hour walk, the morning air almost sickeningly scented from the springtime blossom and grasses, with the result that she returned with red-rimmed nostrils and itchy eyes. A shower cooled her hot face, and she ate breakfast outside, in the low sun. No sign of the ducks, but the open slope of land beyond Challis’s boundary fence was dotted with ibis and a couple of herons. She barely registered them. She and Scobie Sutton would begin shadowing Peter Duyker today. Van Alphen and Tankard were owed time off, and didn’t intend to start helping until Monday.

  She cleared away her cup and bowl, and drove to Duyker’s house. She soon established that he was there, but he didn’t stir until mid morning, when he drove to the netball courts in Mornington and watched girls playing netball. Scobie relieved her at 2 pm, thirty minutes later than he’d said he’d be. She relieved him at 6 pm, by which time Duyker had returned home. She watched until midnight; Duyker went out once, walking to his local pub and staying until 11 pm. She followed him home and saw his light go off at 11.45.

  Scobie had first watch on Sunday. She relieved him at 1.30, when he reported that Duyker had gone out once, late morning, to buy bread, milk and the Sunday newspapers. She waited until 3 pm before Duyker appeared. She tailed him to a couple of popular beaches, where he watched children dig sandcastles and play with kites. He went home at 6 pm. Scobie rang her three hours later to say that Duyker was apparently watching television. She told him to wrap it up for the day.

  She had extra hands to help her from Monday, and a long week unfolded. At the beginning and end of every day, she held a briefing, always starting with the words, ‘So, what’s our guy been up to?’