by Garry Disher
Challis gazed levelly at each of them, turned his attention to
Wishart, and said, ‘We’ve just come from a long talk with your Uncle Terry.’
The hesitation was no longer than a millisecond, but it was there. ‘So?’
‘Fought in Vietnam…’
Wishart eyed him. ‘So?’
‘He must have seen some pretty terrible things.’
The lawyer leaned forward. ‘Inspector Challis, I hope you’re not about to suggest that Terry Wishart isn’t a reliable or a credible alibi witness for my client, owing to his war experiences. He’s telling the truth.’
‘Truth,’ said Ellen. She looked tired, wilting in the stifling air, but still tense and focused. ‘I don’t think we’ve heard much truth from the Wishart boys. And they are boys.’
The lawyer ignored her, addressed Challis. ‘Terry Wishart was formally interviewed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Re-interviewed.’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘There are some anomalies,’ Challis said.
A nerve twitched at the corner of Adrian’s left eye. His veins stood out. He was tightly wound but otherwise inclined to be impatient and contemptuous. ‘What anomalies?’
‘We need to go back several years,’ Challis said.
Wishart blanched, but Hoyt frowned, looking for a trap. ‘Are you suggesting a family tiff? A falling out?’
‘No.’
The lawyer stared intently at her client. ‘Adrian, is your uncle competitive with you? Jealous? Envious?’
Ellen could see where this was going. Before Wishart could open his mouth to reply, she cut in: ‘Ade,’ she said, with a big, blokey smile, elbows on the table, ‘remember all those photos on Terry’s wall? His Army mates, excursions to the War Memorial, stuff like that?’
‘What about it?’
‘He served in Vietnam, didn’t he?’
‘Where’s this going?’
‘Your parents ever talk about that time, Terry going off to war?’
‘No, not really.’
‘No stories of waving him off, greeting him on his return?’
‘No.’
‘And what about Terry? Any tall tales from the trenches?’
‘It was pretty hush-hush, his Army work,’ Wishart said desperately. ‘He can’t talk about it.’
‘I wonder why.’
Faint alarm showed in the lawyer’s eyes, as though she sensed hidden shoals ahead. ‘Getting back to the matter at hand-’
Challis ignored her. ‘What your uncle can’t talk about,’ he said, ‘is the fact that he didn’t serve in Vietnam.’
Wishart’s mouth was dry. ‘Rubbish. He-’
‘He wasn’t even a soldier. He made it all up.’
‘He’s a sad, pathetic little man,’ said Ellen. ‘With emphasis on the words “sad”, “pathetic” and “little”.’ She paused. ‘A bit like you, really.’
Wishart glanced wildly at his lawyer, who’d thrown down her pen tiredly and apparently lost some of the will that had got her out of bed that morning. She examined a spot on the lapel of her blouse, ignoring him.
‘Your Uncle Terry has a desperate need to be loved and admired,’ said Challis, with a kind of gentleness that only a fool would underestimate, and Wishart was no fool.
‘A need to belong,’ Ellen said.
Still Wishart wouldn’t fold. ‘He has medals…’
‘Oh, cut the crap, Ade. He bought them on eBay, and you know it.’
‘I need time to be alone with my client,’ Hoyt said.
Challis continued to watch Wishart. ‘You knew the shame of being found out would kill him. You were counting on it.’
‘Of course, we haven’t told anyone his secret,’ Ellen said.
‘We’re not cruel.’
‘But he has agreed to stop the charade and tell the truth.’
‘The thing he fears more than anything is his mates finding out.’
‘He’d do anything to avoid that.’
‘All right!’ said Wishart, slamming his hand onto the table between them. His head slumped. ‘So he lied for me. So what.’
‘Emotional blackmail,’ Ellen said. ‘Families, eh?’
‘I want time with my client,’ Hoyt said.
Wishart turned to her. ‘Forget it, I need to say what happened.’
Hoyt made a broad gesture with her arms as if to say it was his funeral. Wishart nodded at her, turned to Challis and Ellen and said, ‘I admit I followed my wife.’
‘On Wednesday afternoon?’
‘Yes.’
‘In whose car?’
‘Terrys.’
‘Because yours is too conspicuous?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why did you follow her?’
Wishart bowed his head. ‘The tracking device had showed her regularly going to Bluff Road in Penzance Beach. Sometimes twice a day. I couldn’t stand it any longer, I had to know, so on Tuesday I followed her in my car. I’ve never done that before, I swear.’
‘And?’
Wishart said woodenly, ‘And I saw Mill with that fellow from the residents’ committee. I thought they were having an affair. But they spotted me, so on Wednesday I followed her in Terry’s car.’
‘And what did you see?’
‘Nothing. I mean, nothing suspicious. All they did was look at the site where that old house was.’ Wishart twisted his mouth. ‘I now accept they weren’t having an affair.’
‘Did anyone see you? Did your wife or Mr Vernon see you?’
‘No. I was careful about that.’
‘And then?’
‘I thought I’d attract attention if I waited too long in the vicinity, so I drove back to the city.’
‘You didn’t follow your wife to the murder site?’
‘On my honour, no.’
‘You weren’t in the habit of following her but you were in the habit of tracking her movements with the GPS device?’
‘Yes.’
Challis folded his arms, sat back comfortably and said, ‘I put it to you that you followed your wife to the house near Shoreham and murdered her.’
‘No!’
‘What, then? Are you saying she was murdered by someone else?’
‘Yes!’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. I’d tell you if I knew.’
‘What time did you leave the area?’
Wishart frowned, making a production of it. ‘Between four-thirty and five, I guess.’
Challis supposed that it could be true. A good defence barrister would add some definition to the hazy outline and make it seem probable. We need hard evidence, he thought.
‘Why didn’t you tell us this before? Didn’t you want us to find your wife’s killer? You know how crucial the early stages of an investigation are.’
‘I was ashamed,’ said Wishart with a burst of feeling. He turned to Ellen, eyes damp, and seemed to shrink before her. ‘You said I was pathetic. Well, it’s true, I am.’
‘How awful for you,’ said Ellen.
****
48
All Pam Murphy had wanted to do that Saturday was spend it in bed with Andy Cree, but tomorrow was the end of Schoolies Week and she was expected to be around until then. So, late morning, she kissed Andy goodbye, drove to Waterloo and tackled the paperwork on Josh Brownlee for the Director of Public Prosecutions. Josh had been remanded in the lockup and would appear before a magistrate on Monday. He might not get bail, owing to the serious nature of the attack on Lachlan Roe. Or maybe his parents would fork out for a good lawyer, one who’d air the damage that Roe had caused. She almost felt sorry for Josh, but recalled that the little shit was also a rapist-probably a rapist-and for that she hoped they’d throw away the key.
The only cure for her sour mood was to think about Andy, his body and smile and the way he made her feel. She glowed, a tingling low in her abdomen.
The hours wore on. The paperwork mounted. Eventually s
he grew aware of sniggering in the corridor outside CIU. What the hell was going on? There were fewer people around, as usual on a Saturday, but all morning she’d sensed an unmistakeable undercurrent of cloaked conversations and sudden, red-faced silences. And now the sniggering.
She looked up, catching Smith and Jones staring at her from across the office.
****
John Tankard had spent the last few hours watching Pam Murphy’s rented house in Penzance Beach. He saw Murph leave for work, but Andy Cree had remained, the shit.
What made it worse, he was starving. He’d also been obliged to take a slash against a ti-tree, hoping the people in the fibro holiday shack behind him weren’t watching. That would be great, a patrol car comes out from Waterloo and says, ‘What the fuck are you doing, Tank? We got a report of some guy waving his donger around.’
Then, at noon, Cree emerged, to stand beside his car yawning, scratching his balls, hair a sex-tossed mess. Tank got ready, hand hovering at the ignition key, but Cree went back inside again. An hour passed before Cree drove away, Tank following him through the blind dirt lanes of Penzance Beach and out across farmland to Frankston-Flinders Road, and all the way to Somerville.
Cree lived in a block of flats behind the supermarket. There was some heat in the air now, forecast top of 34 degrees today, one of those very still days, cicadas buzzing crazily, the world a little heat-stunned and waiting for a thunderstorm.
‘Oi,’ Tank said.
Cree had his key in the lock. He saw Tank coming up the path and grew tense, casting his gaze behind and to either side of Tank. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’
Tank had printed out the Web photos of Lachlan Roe. ‘You took these shots. You posted them on the Internet.’
Cree glanced at them, then up at Tank, searching Tank’s face. ‘Mate,’ he said mildly, ‘what are you on about?’
‘You took these,’ Tank said, experiencing a flicker of doubt.
‘Now, why would I do that?’
‘Used your mobile phone.’
‘I’m going inside, John.’
‘If you fuck with Pam, I’ll-’
‘So that’s it,’ said Cree, turning the key in his lock. ‘Not amused, okay?’
Then he was inside, beginning to close the door. ‘I don’t know what your beef is, Tank. Your problem, not mine. As for those photos, check with the crime scene techs before you go accusing me.’
****
Dirk Roe was at his brother’s bedside, talking and talking, willing his voice into Lachlan’s ear and consciousness. ‘Pictures of you all over the Web. I couldn’t believe it. It’s not right.’
He peered at the slack face. ‘Can you hear me? It’s me-Dirk.’
He lost interest and gazed at the pale walls, a kind of beige, not a colour you could name. One of the nurses came in and he watched her covertly, tight uniform, the seams of her underwear showing through. Dirk began to hum madly before he caught himself. He swallowed. More than anything he was trying to stave off utter ruination, for he had nothing left. Sacked and bereaved and no one left in his life to love him. ‘Irreparable brain damage,’ the doctor had said. But the doctor was a foreigner, what did he know?
‘I can talk to my brother, right?’ Dirk had demanded. ‘He’ll be able to hear me? It’ll bring him back?’
‘No,’ the doctor said. ‘I’m sorry.’
Dirk leaned over Lachlan and said, ‘Someone’s got to pay.’
****
49
After delivering his daughter to a church hall behind the shops in Somerville, where her ballet, jazz and tap teachers had set up stow-away tables groaning with cupcakes, doughnuts and lime cordial for the end-of-term party, Scobie Sutton did the shopping, determined not to be rushed just because Challis and Destry wanted it that way. And so it was lunchtime before he arrived at work that Saturday.
He began by examining tapes and speed camera photographs from four locations: Planning East’s carpark, the traffic lights in Tyabb, the Caltex service station in Waterloo and a stretch of Frankston-Flinders Road between Penzance Beach and Flinders. Mapping Ludmilla Wishart’s movements had so far involved a mixture of guesswork, her desk diary entries and tiny amounts of actual evidence. If only Wishart had planted his tracking device on his wife on Wednesday: all Scobie had to go on so far was a single credit card transaction-at 3.42 on Wednesday afternoon, Ludmilla Wishart had purchased 47 litres of unleaded petrol from the Caltex service station. The timing and location indicated that she’d been on her way to meet Carl Vernon in Penzance Beach; according to Vernon, she’d been on time.
Backtracking through her diary, Scobie guessed that she’d been coming from Tyabb, where she’d investigated an unauthorised bed-and-breakfast development. She’d stopped for petrol, made her way to see Carl Vernon, where she stayed for about thirty minutes, then driven to the big house on the headland near Shoreham, where she’d been murdered.
With a ham and gherkin sandwich under his belt, washed down by dense black tea, Scobie began fast-forwarding through the videotapes from the Caltex service station. The quality was poor and the camera had been badly angled. It was also possible that the time and date notations were inaccurate, so he started running the tape at the normal speed well before 3.42, the time at which Wishart’s credit card had registered the petrol purchase.
He spotted Ludmilla at 3.37, her silver Golf edging cautiously into the top segment of the screen and stopping at pump 5, the pump obscuring the woman and her car a little. He saw her head emerge, saw her arm take down the nozzle and disappear with it. Then the arm reappeared and he saw her pass through another quadrant of the screen, presumably to pay for the petrol. She re-emerged, got into the Golf, drove away.
But given that the camera had been poorly installed or knocked out of alignment at some point, only the two pumps closest to the road were visible. They formed the foreground of the image. The greater part of the screen was focused on the stretch of main road in and out of Waterloo, showing clearly the access ramp into the service station, a bus stop and an Australia Post box.
And a late 1980s Mercedes. Twenty seconds after Ludmilla Wishart’s Golf appeared at the pumps via the access ramp, a Mercedes sedan had pulled to the side of the road and idled there, a faint puff of exhaust smoke showing. Twenty seconds after Wishart drove out again, it followed.
Scobie put his head in his hands and closed his eyes, thinking hard. He’d seen that car before. He wasn’t a petrol head or a car nut, and an older-style Mercedes isn’t a car you’d normally remember, but his brother-in-law had offered to sell him one earlier in the year. He was trading up to a new car but had been offered only $1,000 as a trade-in price when the car was worth at least $7,000. ‘Diesel,’ he told Scobie, ‘low mileage, full service history.’ Scobie had been mildly tempted, but he didn’t have $7,000 to spare and Beth had insisted that if they were going to buy another car, it needed to have airbags. In the end, Scobie’s brother-in-law had sold the Mercedes for $5,000 on eBay, and Scobie had been kicking himself ever since.
So who owned this one and where had he seen one like it recently? If he hadn’t been so miserable in the head about his wife, he’d have been paying more attention to the life around him.
Then he remembered: the break-in at the planning office. The Mercedes had been parked at the rear. The only staff member in attendance at the time was the chief planner, Groot.
He replayed the tape. The Mercedes outside the service station was in profile, so he couldn’t get the plate number. The windows were heavily tinted. No side window stickers, no fox tails hanging from the radio antenna. But there was a towbar, and one hubcap was missing.
He ejected the tape and walked through to the incident room and the photo arrays on the whiteboard: Ludmilla Wishart, Adrian Wishart, Ludmilla’s car, the broader crime scene, the clump of mud that had formed and dried inside a wheel arch before falling out near the crime scene.
He went to one of the plastic tubs on the long table, knowing t
here’d be more photos of the mud. He found them, together with a preliminary report from the laboratory. Wading through terms like ‘locus’, ‘diatoms’, ‘vegetable matter’ and ‘moisture gradient’ he understood that the mud had originated near a marsh or a wetland.
And probably from a local marsh or wetland, Scobie thought, telling himself that mud collected inside a wheel arch from further afield would have shaken loose long before the driver reached the Peninsula-or more specifically, the murder scene. He bundled the photos together and called Challis.
Challis listened, said, ‘I’m at the hospital. Coming back now.’
While he waited, Scobie phoned his house, a kind of trepidation settling in him. He half wanted Beth not to be home. It would confirm one of his greatest fears, that she’d run off with the Ascensionists. He could see his wife in some remote compound, wearing a drab and shapeless cotton dress, her hair to her shoulders and tied in a scarf, chanting ecstatically and doing a cold man’s bidding.
But she answered in the dull tones that had become her habit and to his questions and nervy patter she gave monosyllabic replies that were, if anything, worse than all of his imaginings.
****
50
The call from Scobie Sutton came as a relief. Challis, in the canteen, said, ‘I’ll be right up,’ and pocketed his phone.
The canteen was a depressing place on Saturdays and Sundays, understaffed, the food stale. He looked despairingly at yesterday’s congealed lasagne and Irish stew and settled for a ham-and-salad roll, biting into it as he trudged up to CIU. The bread was crusty on the outside, almost wet on the inside.
He found Sutton in his office, the detective standing four-square before the desk when another officer would have taken a seat to wait. ‘Sit,’ Challis said.
Instead of doing that, Sutton laid out a number of photographs. ‘I think I know who our killer is.’
Intrigued, Challis stood beside him, looking down at the array. Close-ups of the mud deposit, taken from various angles; a Golf at the pumps of a service station; a detail of the same scene, only enlarged to reveal an older-style Mercedes sedan parked on the road outside the service station.