by Garry Disher
Ellen Destry parked the white Commodore off the gravel drive. The ambulance and the fire trucks and most of the police cars had come and gone. It was up to CIB now, and the fire inspectors, and the forensic crew dusting the Fairmont for traces of the burglars.
According to the farrier, the owners of the property had been called back early from holidaying in Bali. The stud manager had been worried about the condition of a pair of three-year-old mares, potential champions, particularly given that a January heatwave was expected.
The wife: severe concussion. The husband: groggy, but able to say that two men were involved, which was backed up by the farrier. Basically, they were looking for a small skinny guy and a tall, athletic guy.
Ellen wandered through the house. An odour of wet ash and dampened carpets, scorch marks on the walls and ceilings, some quite major fire damage in the front room, a sitting room, which had been torched first. ‘Check it out,’ Challis had said. ‘We haven’t got the resources for a major investigation. Bring in the arson squad if it looks big.’
Big meant over two hundred grand’s worth of damage, and this wasn’t two hundred grand’s worth. But it was messy. Arson, aggravated burglary, theft of a motor vehicle-two motor vehicles, if the Pajero reported stolen over in the housing estate was involved, and Scobie Sutton and Pam Murphy had been sent to investigate that. Ellen pulled on latex gloves and began to go through the house room by room.
She was standing in the study, doing what Challis often suggested, thinking her way into the case, when she saw a heat-buckled cashbox in the charred remains of the desk. She poked at the lid with a ballpoint pen. Five hundred dollars, in a paper band from the Commonwealth Bank, and it fitted as slim as a wallet into the inside pocket of her jacket.
At the same time, but some distance away, a horn sounded behind Stella Riggs again, but she refused to slow down, accelerate or pull over. Really, Coolart Road was the worst road on the Peninsula for incidents of bad driving: cutting in, overtaking on blind stretches, tailgating, speeding, impertinence and just plain anger. And a worse class of driver in respects other than manners. They were rougher to look at. They drove wrecks. And the number of times she’d had to brake for the oncoming garbage truck as it veered across in front of her, collecting the rubbish from both sides of the road. Why couldn’t it simply go up one side of Coolart and back down the other? Because those men wanted to work the shortest day possible for the same wage, that’s why. Rough, blue-singleted, jeering men.
She glanced again in the rear-view mirror. That idiot was still trying to pass, sitting just metres from her rear bumper, and she was going a hundred! What if she had to brake suddenly? The fellow was a fool. Look at him, darting out, seeing that it wasn’t clear, darting back again.
She began to organise her thoughts, to write a report in her head, if ever one was needed. The incident had begun where Coolart Road crosses the Waterloo Road. She’d been driving home in her Mercedes, turning left into Coolart, and a Mitsubishi Pajero had approached the intersection at the same time, from the direction of Waterloo. The time had been two o’clock in the afternoon. She had the right of way, and had begun her turn when she noticed that the Pajero was also turning, no indicators on, threatening to cut her off. On snap consideration, she had accelerated, so as to complete the turn first. She had the right of way, after all, not the other fellow, and that needed to be demonstrated clearly to him. Besides, there were other cars behind her. It would have caused unnecessary alarm if she’d braked suddenly. So, she sailed through, completing her turn with inches to spare.
The look on that man’s face!
Description. More of an impression, really, for the side glass was tinted. He looked lean and tough, with close-cropped hair and the suggestion of tattoos. Aged in his late twenties? The other fellow, the passenger, well, he looked to be full of alarm. He was much smaller in build, with quite long fair hair. Also in his twenties. Neither man looked to be particularly intelligent. Blue collar, she’d say.
Odd that they should be driving a Pajero rather than a more common sort of car.
Anyhow, after the incident at the corner they had tailgated her Mercedes as if they wanted to run her off the road. She could see a fist shaking at her. Horn blaring. Right down the length of Coolart Road. At Chicory Kiln Road she turned right, and-and this was something she’d not tell the police, if she ever reported the incident-extended her arm out of the side window and stuck her index finger into the air as she turned, making sure they saw her do it.
And now…?
Stella swallows. The Pajero has overshot the corner, but now it’s backing up and turning into Chicory Kiln Road and coming up hard behind her. She can’t drive any faster, for Chicory Kiln Road is in a terrible state of repair, soft and treacherous at the edges, badly corrugated in the middle. And dusty! She has no hope of shaking the men off-all they have to do is follow her dust.
Which they do, as she turns into Quarterhorse Lane.
Snap decision. If they follow her to her door, they might attack her.
She remembers that before Christmas there’d been a bit of drama at the other end of the lane, near where it meets the Old Peninsula Highway. Clara, that was her name. Someone had set fire to her mailbox. Since then Clara had been having pretty frequent visits from a policeman-almost daily.
Boyfriend?
So Stella doesn’t drive the Mercedes home. She turns right, noting the charred mailbox, into Clara’s driveway, hoping, as she follows the curving gravel, that the police car is there.
It isn’t.
Behind her, the Pajero brakes, but doesn’t turn in. It waits, dark and malevolent looking, its engine ticking over. Then it reverses into the driveway before accelerating away again, back the way it had come.
Her breathing is ragged now. Her hands are trembling. But then a curtain twitches at a front window of the house, so she drives the Mercedes out of that driveway as hard as she can, up the road to her own house before those men come back and spot where she’s gone.
Tomorrow she’s flying to Sydney for a few days, friends on the North Shore, and, frankly, tomorrow can’t come soon enough.
The numberplate? A vanity plate, LANCEL, whatever that meant.
Pam Murphy had her notebook open. ‘You didn’t see them steal it?’
‘No, I’m telling you,’ the woman said, ‘I just stepped inside for a minute to wash the dirt off the chamois.’
‘That’s when you heard the engine start?’
‘Yes. Thought at first it was the people next door.’
They were standing in the hallway of a house in Seaview Estate, Scobie Sutton just behind Pam, letting her ask the questions. She took it as a vote of confidence. Meanwhile the Pajero’s owner, Vicki Mudge, was in a curious state, angry because her vehicle had been stolen from under her nose, but with an edginess under that, as if she didn’t want the police involved at all.
‘We’ll talk to your neighbours in a minute,’ Pam said. ‘Meanwhile, I’ll need some details about the vehicle itself. Mitsubishi Pajero,’ she said, scribbling in her notebook. ‘Colour?’
‘Maroon.’
‘Year?’
‘Er, not sure.’
‘All right. Petrol? Diesel?’
‘Petrol. I think.’
‘Registration number?’
Here the woman’s face seemed to close down. Pam couldn’t read outrage or anxiety or any other useful emotion in it.
‘Look, if it turns up, it turns up. Probably kids out for a joyride. If it gets damaged, insurance will cover it.’
‘We still need the registration number, Mrs Mudge.’
Vicki Mudge folded her arms and stared at the carpet and said woodenly, ‘Personalised plate. Lancel.’
Pam asked for the spelling. Then suspicion hardened in her. She was suddenly very alert. ‘Mrs Mudge, are you employed at the moment?’
‘What are you getting at? What’s that got to do with the price of eggs?’
‘I have to ask you th
is: did you arrange to have the Pajero stolen?’
The woman snarled, ‘By Jesus, you’ve got a nerve.’
Sutton cleared his throat. ‘Who else lives here, Mrs Mudge?’
‘My husband. He’s in Thailand on business.’
‘You do want your vehicle back again, I take it?’ Pam said.
Vicki Mudge shot a look past her ear. ‘Yeah, sure, it’s insured.’
There’s something there, Pam thought. A suggestion that she’d be uncomfortable if the Pajero turned up.
When van Alphen found Clara she was trembling, sitting in curtained gloom, a kitchen knife in her hands. No incense this time.
‘Clara?’
‘I’ve been trying to reach you all day!’
‘We had a suspicious fire.’
‘They were here!’
‘Who were?’
‘The people who want me dead.’
He crossed to her, thinking that he couldn’t keep up with her and she was bad news, but he was in too deep to let her go. She bewildered him. She’d be lucid, calm and funny, her head firmly on her shoulders, then a little sultry and uninhibited when it was time for sex, then strangely hyper and funny but also easy in her head whenever she’d done a line of coke-and then she could be like this, freaked out and making no sense. He couldn’t avoid thinking that she’d never been a casual user in the past, but an addict, and it had fried her brain, only she was good at hiding the fact. And now she was on the stuff again, courtesy of him, and the madness was showing.
He thought all of these things even as he hugged her tight and stroked her temples and wanted her so badly that he slipped his hands under her T-shirt, to where her flesh was hot and pliant.
She erupted, shoving, screaming at him. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? They were here!’
‘Clara, who were?’
‘I told you, the people who want me dead.’
‘Who wants you dead?’
‘People from my past. It doesn’t matter. The thing is, I need protection.’
‘What did they look like?’
‘I didn’t see them.’
‘Then how-’
‘I saw their car.’
‘Where?’
‘It came right into my driveway, sat there, then went away again.’
‘Ah,’ van Alphen said. Maybe she wasn’t losing her marbles. ‘Can you describe it?’
‘It was a white Mercedes.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I had one like it once, in the good old, bad old days.’
See? Sharp and self-mocking again.
‘Okay, white Mercedes. Did you-’
‘I had the impression,’ Clara said, concentrating, ‘that there was another car out on the road, a big dark one. It slowed as it went past the gate, but by then I was paying more attention to the white one in the driveway.’
‘Did you get the registration?’
‘Forgot. I was too scared.’
‘That’s okay, most people forget.’
‘What will you do?’
‘Stay the night, for a start.’
She hugged her upper arms, sat rocking, her knees together. ‘I’m really strung out, Van.’
‘I’ll give you a massage.’
She rounded on him, shouting, ‘I don’t want a fucking massage. I need you to get me some more blow.’
‘Clara, lay off that stuff. You’ve had a shitload since I met you.’
She was scornful, looking him up and down. ‘You want me, right? My cunt?’
‘Clara, I-’
‘If you want me you’re going to have to pay for it, like any punter. Do I owe you special privileges? I don’t think so.’
He was dismayed to find himself so hurt and so floundering. ‘I thought-’
‘You thought this was special? Uh, uh. I’m special. You want me, lover boy, you pay for me. What’s wrong? Shocked, are we? Thought I was a little angel, did you?’
‘I looked after you.’
‘Then fucking continue looking after me. Get me some more stuff, or fork out a hundred bucks a time to see me naked.’
She lifted her T-shirt, waggled her torso briefly, covered herself again. Something fractured a little further in van Alphen then. That life boiled down to supply and demand, rather than values, was the position he’d reached after a working life doing this shitty job.
Saturday night, about eleven o’clock, and Challis was alone in the incident room, logging on to the database to see what the analysts had found. He was looking for a similar pattern of abductions and rape-murders in other parts of the country, with cross-references to mini-vans, four-wheel drives and other rear-compartment vehicles.
When the call came, a Mitsubishi Pajero found abandoned and torched at the side of a dirt road near the Old Peninsula Highway, his first thought was: Maybe our man’s panicking, getting rid of evidence.
But within an hour he’d established that the Pajero had been stolen earlier in the day, probably by two men fleeing from an aggravated burglary, and, disappointed, he logged off and left the building.
He got home just as one day drifted into the next and it was New Year’s Eve.
Sixteen
Sutton was in the Displan room telephoning Vicki Mudge with the news that her Pajero had been found. ‘Unfortunately it’s been destroyed. Abandoned and then burnt.’
A strange gasp in the woman’s voice-almost of relief, Sutton thought-covered immediately by a cough: ‘Burnt? Oh dear.’
‘You might like to inform your insurance company. Meanwhile we’ll be investigating this pretty thoroughly. We think the men who stole your Pajero yesterday were responsible for a pretty vicious aggravated burglary earlier.’
And that’s how he learned that Vicki Mudge was not the owner of the Pajero but the sister of the owner. The owner’s name was Lance Ledwich and he lived on the other side of the Seaview Estate. Cosy, Sutton thought.
When Challis came in, he said, ‘Boss, we need to take another look at Ledwich.’
‘Convince me.’
‘He lied to us. He owns a Mitsubishi Pajero, only he kept it at his sister’s house, not all that far from where he lives.’
‘Why didn’t your DMV check turn it up?’
‘Registration had lapsed, boss.’
‘Go on.’
‘It’s the Pajero stolen after that ag burg yesterday. The one that was torched last night.’
‘You think he arranged to have it destroyed?’
‘It’s possible, but I think it was just bad luck.’
‘Good luck for us, perhaps, except that as evidence it’s worthless now that it’s been destroyed. What about the sister?’
‘Name’s Vicki Mudge.’
‘She known to us?’
‘Her husband is, Paddy, sexual assault.’
Challis went very still and alert suddenly. ‘They’re working together.’
Sutton shook his head. ‘Paddy’s been in Thailand since late November.’
‘Check it out.’
‘I will,’ Sutton said. ‘The thing is, boss, yesterday when I questioned Vicki Mudge she seemed pretty edgy, and just now, when I said the Pajero had been burnt, she sounded relieved, then edgy again when I said there’d be a thorough investigation. That’s when she came clean about who owned the Pajero.’
‘She knows something’s up, and she’s protecting her own skin.’
‘Could be.’
‘All right, talk to Ledwich again.’
‘I’d like to take that new female constable with me.’
‘Why?’
‘She’s cluey.’
‘Fine,’ Challis said.
Pam Murphy’s shift didn’t start until midday, but Detective Constable Sutton came looking for her in the canteen and said, ‘You’re coming with me. I’ve talked to your boss.’
She drove, Sutton talked.
‘Everything’s dragons and monsters at the moment. Maybe she’s picking up vibes. When the wife heard about Trina Unger, she s
aid, “The man’s a monster,” and Ros said, “Where’s the monster? Is there a dragon, too?”‘
‘Really?’
‘Plus it’s become a battle of wills. She plays the wife and I off against each other, refuses to go to bed, kicks up a stink when it’s bathtime, won’t eat what’s put in front of her.’
‘Sounds typical,’ Pam said.
‘Typical, sure,’ Scobie Sutton said, ‘but until you’ve encountered it yourself you don’t realise what strong wills they’ve got. I mean, my daughter, three years old, could teach a tribe of Hell’s Angels how not to back down in the face of authority.’
Pam fingered her jaw. It hurt. She’d been struck by her board in the surf during the morning’s lesson with Ginger and ever since then she’d been exploring the bruise with her fingers, aggravating it, but unable to leave it alone. ‘Sir, where are we going?’
‘No need to call me “sir”. “Scobie” will do. Inspector Challis wants us to have a word with a man called Lance Ledwich.’
‘Why me, sir?’
‘I watched you yesterday. Your instincts told you there was something off about Vicki Mudge. Well, she’s Ledwich’s sister, and had been looking after the Pajero for him.’
Pam mused on that. ‘Is Ledwich a suspect in the highway killings?’
‘He was, then he wasn’t, and now he is again.’
‘How come?’
‘One, he’s on the sex offenders list. Two, his alibis are weak. Three, thanks to our burglars we now know that he owns a four-wheel drive-or did, until they torched it for him.’
‘Pity about that. Now you can’t check it for forensic evidence.’
‘I told Challis you were on the ball.’
Pam rolled her jaw a little. ‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Something wrong with your mouth? Toothache? Take it from me, don’t leave it and hope it’ll go away. See a dentist straight away. I had a bad toothache once, I was in court all week, couldn’t do a thing about it except stuff myself with painkillers. When I was finally called to give evidence, the defence walked all over me. Couldn’t think straight.’