by Garry Disher
Challis nodded, jotting the details in his notebook.
The lawyer said precisely, ‘In other words, inspector, my clients were not down on the Mornington Peninsula at the time of the murder.’
Yeah, but they could have hired somebody, Challis wanted to say, knowing that Delarue wanted him to say it. He glanced at the husband and said, ‘Who tipped you off?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Inspector, please.’
‘You had a demolition permit for a house called Somerland in Penzance Beach, but-’
‘A perfectly valid permit!’
‘-but the National Trust, the local residents and Mrs-’
‘Morons,’ muttered Ebeling. ‘Anti-progress, the lot of them.’
‘Pathetic little people with pathetic little lives,’ said Mia.
Their lawyer was looking on in interest. Challis said, ‘These same pathetic little people were pursuing an emergency application for heritage protection from the State Government. You knew that. You knew you had to act fast. Apparently you were lucky to find a demolition firm that could do the job on short notice.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘You were tipped off by someone,’ Challis said. ‘You had a day at most in which to act.’
‘Bullshit,’ Ebeling said, glancing irritably at his lawyer.
‘The National Trust classified the house on Tuesday,’ Challis said, ‘and it was flattened in just a few minutes on Wednesday.’
Delarue said, ‘Let us be clear on this. Mr and Mrs Ebeling had a valid permit to demolish the existing structure?’
‘Yes.’
‘And there was no overriding order in place stopping them from doing that? No interim heritage amendment from the planning minister?’
‘No.’
‘Then my clients acted lawfully.’
The clients beamed at Challis. It chilled him a little, the shared emptiness. He decided to needle them. ‘They acted unethically,’ he said. ‘They don’t care about preserving the heritage of Penzance Beach, or forging good relations with the people who live there. They’re not even interested in replacing the house they demolished with a building that might sit harmoniously with the surroundings. All they want is to erect a monstrosity that stands as a monument to their egos.’
The outrage was almost comical. Ebeling’s jaw dropped and he said, ‘Marcus, do we have to listen to this?’ and his wife said, ‘Awful little man,’ spitting the words out.
There was tiny gleam of enjoyment in Delarue’s eyes, but he said, ‘You’re editorialising, Inspector. Tut tut.’
Challis shook his head. ‘The fact is, Mrs Wishart was an impediment to your clients in three ways. One, she was trying to stop the demolition from going ahead. Two, she knew the identity of the shire employee who was bribed by your clients-’
‘Bullshit,’ shouted Ebeling, his veneer slipping, a man who’d turn nasty when crossed.
‘-and three, as a kind of fallback position in case the existing house was demolished, she’d implemented delays to the planning process for the house your clients wish to erect on the site,’ continued Challis. He referred to his notes: ‘A five-bedroom house on three levels, with extensive decking and a reflection pool. Like I said, a monument.’
‘You want to think about your tone, you miserable little pen-pusher,’ said Mia Ebeling. ‘I intend to lodge an official complaint.’
‘That’s your prerogative,’ said Challis.
They all sat and looked at each other. Challis realised that the Ebelings and their lawyer didn’t think his accusation required an answer. He decided to keep pushing. ‘Owing to Mrs Wishart’s actions, you’re not allowed to start building until you meet with the objectors and settle your differences with them. You might find yourselves returning to the Development Assessments Committee for months, even years. You must have been very angry with her.’
‘Meddlesome bitch,’ said Mia Ebeling.
‘Mia, please,’ the lawyer said.
‘Well she was.’
Call him old fashioned, but Challis tended to believe that women were by nature warm, nurturing and conciliatory. If mean, vicious and sly, it was to cope in a mans world. But Mia Ebeling was probably mean, vicious and sly all on her own. ‘So, good riddance?’ he suggested.
‘My clients have solid alibis,’ said the lawyer hastily. ‘They are very distressed about the death of Mrs Wishart, but were not in any way involved and will vigorously challenge any further attempts to implicate them in this awful crime.’
‘Well put,’ said Challis.
****
38
Then Challis drove from the Ebelings’ house in bayside Brighton to the centre of the city, where he prowled around for thirty minutes before finding a public carpark with a vacancy. Five minutes later he was in the foyer of the state’s planning appeals tribunal, where the marble, the steel, the glass and the attitudes were cool, verging on cold-like the judge’s aide standing before him.
‘The judge is overseas,’ she said.
‘When will he be back?’
The aide was about twenty-five, dressed in a slimline black dress, stockings and heels. A recent law graduate, guessed Challis. She gazed at him unblinkingly over the rim of chic half-lenses. ‘Justice Marlowe is giving a paper at a conference in San Francisco.’
‘When will he be back?’ said Challis again.
She cocked an eyebrow faintly as if to say that while police officers were as much on the side of law and order as lawyers and judges, their job was grubbier, and it showed in their manner and breeding. ‘He’s staying on for a couple of weeks.’
‘Skiing at Aspen?’ said Challis idly, but saw to his surprise that he’d scored a hit. The aide flushed and said, ‘May I ask what this is about?’
He outlined the matter swiftly: the Ebelings, the demolition of Somerland, the development of the site and how it involved Ludmilla Wishart.
The aide swallowed. Challis intuited that behind the severe grooming she was young and insecure and probably adored the judge. Raising doubts about the judge’s bias wasn’t going to get him very far, so he said, ‘As I’m sure you’re aware, a group of Penzance Beach residents-old-timers and preservationists and historical society people-have lodged an objection to the development.’
‘I cannot comment on cases before they’ve been heard. Not even then.’
‘I was wondering, did the victim correspond with the judge at all? Have the Ebelings?’
‘Justice Marlowe will be back in a fortnight,’ the aide said, turning on her gleaming high heels.
‘An off-the-record confirmation is all-’
‘Put it in writing,’ she said over her shoulder, heading for the lifts with a scrape of fabric and a trim clatter.
****
Challis headed out of the city again, taking the Monash Freeway and striking heavy traffic. Melbourne was a city that preferred motor vehicles and roads to trains and trams, even though the road system didn’t work because there were too many cars because the public transport system didn’t work because…
He exited at Blackburn Road and wound his way behind Monash University to the Westall Extension, which bypassed Springvale and put him on the Frankston Freeway. It wasn’t much of a freeway: road works had limited the speed to 80 km/h for years now.
After Frankston he headed across to Somerville and a house on several hectares of cleared land abutting French’s Reserve. The owners had cleared the land without first lodging an application. According to Ludmilla Wishart’s files, Planning East had threatened to take the owner and the clearing contractor to the magistrates’ court, where they’d be liable for fines of up to $120,000 and a requirement to undertake replacement planting.
He pulled to the side of the road and re-read the file. The air outside his open window was mild, full of cut-grass odours and something heavier, marshier. That made sense: the nearby paddocks had been slashed for hay, and French’s Reserve was, according to a report in the file written by a Melbour
ne University ecologist who’d studied it for ten years, ‘a regionally significant wetland’. Challis read on: ‘Any clearing of the land adjacent to the reserve will have a detrimental impact on a rare orchid, “Astral ladies’ tresses”, and on the growling grass frogs, the southern toadlets, the swamp skinks, the dwarf galaxias and the southern brown bandicoots.’
Challis glanced out at the denuded land, which lay torn and sunbaked between his car and the Reserve. He thought that $120,000 plus an appearance in court and other reparations was a pretty fair motive for murdering the person who’d brought it all upon you. Then he saw the For Sale sign, and when he drove in to the farmhouse, he saw that it had been cleared of all furniture and all desire for a future there.
He made a note of the real estate agent’s phone number, and headed further southeast to Bittern, where a husband and wife named Read had removed indigenous trees from a house block in a residential zone without a permit. When warned by Ludmilla Wishart to cease, they went on to remove understorey vegetation. They were fined $16,000 in the magistrates’ court in Waterloo, and from the dock had hurled abuse at Wishart.
He found the Reads on their property, directing as two teenage boys planted trees and grasses on the area that had been illegally cleared. The Reads were elderly and grossly overweight, Tom Read wheezing in a wheelchair and Bev Read in a walking frame.
‘We paid the fine,’ said the husband, gasping the words out.
His wife was smoking. ‘We’re putting in new trees and that.’
‘So leave us alone.’
Challis said firmly, ‘After sentencing, you were heard shouting “You’ll get yours, bitch” at Mrs Wishart.’
‘I been drinking,’ wheezed Tom Read.
‘He was that upset,’ his wife said, the cigarette bobbing in her mouth, grey smoke wreathing her grey face and hair.
They were unlikely murderers. They’d probably cheated, thieved and lied for all of their lives, but they weren’t killers. They were the kind to sulk and blame others when they got caught, not get violent.
Challis’s last call was to the environment protection manager for the eastern zone. ‘I’ve just been to French’s Reserve,’ he said.
Jessie Heinz looked like a Girl Guide leader: tanned, energetic, comfortable in a khaki shirt and shorts, probably never owned a dress in her life. ‘That one’s a nightmare,’ she said. ‘The owners put the place on the market a month ago and skipped to Queensland.’
‘Do you know if they threatened Mrs Wishart in any way?’
‘They threatened me. Set their dogs on me.’
‘But Mrs Wishart?’
‘Her role in this one was behind the scenes,’ Heinz said. She paused. ‘They’d have a greater motive to murder me. I made an issue out of the threat to the ecology of the reserve. They couldn’t seem to get it into their heads that it was serious. They kept saying, “We can clear our own land if we want to” and “What ecology?” and “The reserve’s on the other side of the farm and a breeding ground for mosquitoes.” They called me a tree-hugger.’
It was said with a grin and Challis grinned back. ‘Are there any other sensitive ecological issues that you and Mrs Wishart were investigating? We’re aware of the tree clearing at the property where her body was found,’ he said, ‘but what else was she working on? Particularly issues that hadn’t made it as far as a written report.’
‘Trees,’ said Heinz. ‘It’s always trees.’ She crossed her office to a wall map. ‘About a hundred trees have been vandalised along this part of the bay in the past year.’ She indicated the coastline between Waterloo and Flinders. ‘It’s the same on the other side of the Peninsula. People drill holes in the trees and fill them with poison. The trees die, we have to cut them down. Or they skip the poisoning and come along after dark with a chainsaw.’
‘People with homes overlooking the sea?’
‘And property developers. There’s been a flurry of apartment developments all along both coastlines in the past decade.’
Heinz paused and grinned again. ‘We’ve had to get quite creative. Sure, we plant five trees for every one killed, but we’ve also been wrapping the poisoned trees in bright orange plastic, and we’re seeking council approval to erect view-blocking screens like they have along the Surf and Bass coasts.’ She paused again. ‘Ludmilla’s ideas.’
‘That would have made her very unpopular.’
‘But who would have known it was her?’ Heinz demanded.
Deciding that he could trust her, Challis said, ‘Tell me about Mr Groot.’
She looked at him steadily. ‘Pro-development.’
‘For example?’
‘He doesn’t appreciate the village atmosphere of the coastal towns. Twice now he’s approved the commercial development of a general store, one dating back to the 1920s, another to 1935. Sweet little buildings, kind of the village hub. Sure, they needed some tender loving care, but he was allowing Melbourne developers to put up six-storey shop and apartment blocks in their place. The other planners hate his guts, but he always knows the fine print and can be pretty insistent and persuasive.’
‘A slash-and-burn kind of guy.’
‘An over-development kind of guy.’
****
39
There was no point in mobilising an armed response team to protect Caz Moon. By the time a team had geared up, found its way from the city to this corner of rural Victoria and been briefed, Josh Brownlee would be long gone.
And so, as Pam raced them down and across the Peninsula to Waterloo, Ellen put contingency plans into motion. First she ordered a chopper from Frankston and then ordered the police station at Waterloo to send a couple of cars down High Street to HangTen.
‘Our person of interest is driving a red Impreza and should be considered armed and dangerous. Received?’
‘Sarge.’
‘If you can, evacuate the nearby shops and divert traffic at each end of the block.’
‘Sarge.’
Then she called HangTen, Caz Moon grasping the situation swiftly, not asking Ellen to repeat who she was or her connection to Pam Murphy.
‘I’m using the cordless phone,’ she told Ellen, sounding breathless. ‘I’m at the back door now, locking it…done. I’m moving to the front door…done. Are you sure he has a gun?’
‘Highly likely. Are you alone?’
‘No customers. Chloe’s with me, the other sales assistant.’ There was a pause. ‘Are you sure he’s coming after me?’
‘Pretty sure.’
‘If we stay here in plain view, he could shoot through the glass.’
‘Yes.’
‘If we leave the shop, he could ambush us.’
‘Yes.’
Ellen had a sense of wheels turning, and asked, ‘Is there a secure room you can hide in? A storeroom, maybe?’
‘Storeroom. It has a steel door and no windows.’
‘Hide there now,’ Ellen said.
Something then, a sixth sense, a shift in the quality of the connection, an intake of breath, told Ellen that they were too late. ‘Caz?’ she said, trying not to convey the panic she felt. Paddocks sped past her window, trees, a dam, a horse with a couple of birds upon its back. They were still several kilometres short of the town. Traffic was sparse. ‘Caz?’
Caz’s voice came then, sounding steady enough. ‘He’s here. Outside, two wheels up on the footpath. Nearly hit someone. He’s getting out. Yep, a gun.’
‘Caz, for God’s sake, take Chloe and run to the storeroom.’
Ellen heard scrapes, breathlessness and whimpering, as though the two women were duck waddling to the rear of the shop behind the only available cover, glass-topped counters and racks of clothing. ‘Are you nearly there?’
‘Nearly. He just rattled the door.’
‘Are the lights on or off?’
‘Off. First thing I did.’
‘So he might think you’ve closed the shop and gone home?’
‘No. I didn’t have time to whe
el the sales racks in from the footpath.’
‘Please, Caz, hide in the storeroom.’
More sounds and then Caz said, ‘He’s pounding on the window and yelling.’
‘Caz-’
‘I know, I know, hide.’
A radio transmission cut in. It was John Tankard. ‘Suspect sighted. I can confirm that he’s armed. A shottie. He looks agitated.’
‘John,’ said Ellen, as Pam Murphy floored the throttle and expertly flicked past a delivery van, never once glancing at her passenger, ‘be very careful. Did you evacuate the area?’
‘Didn’t have time, but people started evacuating themselves when they saw the gun.’
‘No shooting, John, not if there are people about. Not unless it’s absolutely necessary. We’ll try to talk him into surrendering. Received?’
‘Sarge.’
‘Are you alone?’
‘Andy Cree’s with me. We’ve got a second car at the roundabout.’
Ellen put a face to the name: the good-looking rookie, Pam Murphy possibly sweet on him. ‘Impress on Constable Cree and the others, no shooting. I don’t want any headlines.’
‘Sarge.’
‘What’s our person of interest doing?’
‘Pounding on the window of the surf shop.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Other side of the street, waving people to get out of the way.’
‘Get them well out of the way.’
‘Sarge.’
‘Check his car-any other head on board?’
‘He’s alone, Sarge.’
Switching back to her mobile phone, Ellen said, ‘You there, Caz?’
The reception was scratchy suddenly, the young shopkeeper’s voice fading in and out. ‘In…locked…’
She’s in the storeroom and the walls and steel door are interfering with the reception, Ellen guessed. Then John Tankard cut in again: ‘He’s spotted us.’