Whispering Death

by Garry Disher

  And this Sunday, alone with his daughter at last, Scobie mopped up the maple syrup with the remains of his Sunday morning pancake and said, ‘Thought we’d go to the zoo today, see the new baby elephant.’

  Roslyn was thirteen and her face sometimes—often?—fell into the disobliging lines of young adolescence, but right at that moment she was a little girl. Her eyes lit up. ‘Yay!’

  She was a light in his murky world. Sutton knew that he wasn’t like Challis or Murphy, could never be like them. Yeah, they probably found some crimes upsetting, but they’d long stopped revealing it, and he was certain that many police officers didn’t get upset with any of it. Never had, never would. Their attitude was simple: some humans are scum, and it’s our job to put them away, not save, understand or heal them. Not bleed as the victims have bled. A victim was a statistic, that’s all. But Sutton, arresting a Mornington man for inserting a beer bottle and a pool cue into an elderly woman’s vagina last week, had wept. Would he be better off not coming face to face with murderers and rapists, thugs and bullies? He’d spent Friday afternoon and most of yesterday with the crime-scene officers, conducting a line search of the reserve and signing for and transporting the evidence to the forensics lab. He’d enjoyed that. But he was a front line detective, and working the Chloe Holst case was bound to sink him further into the mire.

  Driving his daughter around was the cure he needed, and half an hour later they were heading towards the city, Scobie steering his sensible Volvo up through Somerville and Baxter. But you can’t control everything. Before he could do a thing about it, they were alongside a gateway freshly defaced with the words, AN ERECTION TO MATCH MY IMAGE OF MY DICK.

  Too late, he said, ‘Don’t look,’ and his daughter said, ‘Da-a-ad’ as if she’d grown up quite suddenly when he wasn’t paying attention and left him behind.

  *

  Challis had spend the night in Ellen’s house so that he could get an early start on his list of odd jobs.

  Stained the deck first. This time on Friday he’d been sitting out here with Ellen, feeling a kick of desire.

  Painted the laundry.

  Aching muscles stopped him at lunchtime. He stepped outside to stretch the kinks in his back, saw the garden hose lying there, and decided to wash the dust off his car. The Triumph’s soft top was cracked, the rear Perspex milky, and Challis realised halfway through that he’d find water on the floor and seats when he got behind the wheel.

  He stood for a while, his gaze roving from the droplets on his car to the glassy bay. He liked standing here, in the mild sun. He didn’t want to leave. There was a ship on the water, sharp and motionless as if snipped from tin.

  He went inside, showered, changed and locked Ellen’s doors and windows. Just as he was climbing into his car, he heard the shudder of poorly tuned suspension behind him, the crush of tyres. He got out. A tired, sun-faded green Hyundai was nosing into the driveway, something about it seeming to express indignation with his presence, his car’s presence, even before he recognised the driver. Eventually the little car spurted close to the front steps, leaving him barely enough room to back out.

  The driver got out and scowled. ‘Mum didn’t say you’d be here.’

  ‘How are you, Larrayne?’

  He’d never quite warmed to Ellen’s daughter, perhaps because he seemed always to put her in a bad temper. He didn’t know if she hated him, resented him, wanted her mother to have no private life or wanted her parents back together again. The last was unlikely to happen.

  The passengers were piling out of the Hyundai: a young man from the front seat—Larrayne’s boyfriend?—and a young couple from the rear. All four looked bleary, the men unshaven and the women streaked and bruised with mascara and lipstick. The men wore stained jeans and tight shirts over T-shirts, the buttoning hit-and-miss, and the women wore crumpled, tugged-about little dresses over holed tights. As they stood, stretched, yawned and looked around at the house, the view, Challis caught an eddy of alcohol, cigarettes and dope.

  ‘Long night?’

  ‘Any of your business?’

  The boyfriend touched Larrayne’s forearm as if to calm her. He was a tall, skinny, sweetly smiling boy, probably good for Larrayne and probably doomed. ‘Semester break,’ he told Challis.

  Challis nodded.

  ‘We were hoping,’ Larrayne Destry said, ‘to spend a few days here.’

  Meaning what did Challis think he was doing there, and did he intend to stick around all week, and, generally, what gave him the fucking right?

  Challis gave her a high-wattage smile for the pleasure of it and said, ‘I’ll be out of your hair in just a moment.’

  ‘Are you living here now or something?’

  Challis shook his head, still with the smile. ‘Just doing some odd jobs around the place. Be careful of wet paint.’

  Larrayne frowned over his words as if looking for lies and loopholes. Finding none, she wheeled around and opened the boot of the car. Without the scowl, she was simply a twenty-one-year-old student, ordinary in a fair-haired, fine-boned, Ellen-Destry’s-daughter kind of way.

  Challis stuck one of his cards under her windscreen wiper. ‘If you need anything.’

  ‘We won’t.’

  Sunday was not a day of rest for Grace. She’d spent the afternoon at an Internet café in Geelong, downloading a few megabytes of Google Earth onto a flash drive. Inconvenient, but untraceable. Now, late afternoon, she was at home in Breamlea, examining the maps on her own laptop. By dusk she knew the exact location of a house in South Australia’s Clare Valley owned by a man named Simon Lascar, knew it in relation to his neighbours and the town itself, knew her best escape routes.

  As for knowing about Lascar and his house, she thanked her collection of clippings from Home Digest, Home Beautiful, Décor and similar magazines. In her view, these publications existed to allow people with more money than sense to tell the world about how much money they had in the house they’d built, bought or refurbished—in full colour, over several pages, including close-ups of small, pricey belongings.

  What Home Digest didn’t say—but various websites did—was that Mr Simon Lascar had built his Clare Valley monstrosity on the site of a colonial-era cottage of historical importance, using two million dollars embezzled from pensioners’ savings. The magazine did say that he was an eclectic collector of Australiana: an Adelaide gold pound worth $300,000; a 1930 penny—unfortunately not one of the six proof pennies still in existence but one of the two thousand that had found their way into circulation—worth $25,000; a 1620 Dutch rijksdaalder worth $1500 from the wreck of the Batavia; a third watermark, two shilling stamp (a kangaroo superimposed upon a map of Australia) worth $4000; a first edition of J. J. Keneally’s 1929 The Inner History of the Kelly Gang, worth $2000; a two shilling note issued for use in the Hay internment camp during the Second World War, worth $5000; and a $30,000 Holey Dollar struck from a 1794 Spanish dollar.

  And his wife liked to collect silver. Sterling, not plate: flatware, teaspoons, demitasse spoons, toddy ladles, fish servers, sugar bowls, napkin rings and candlesticks. Grace was betting there’d be some crap too—mass-produced plate, or pieces with no maker’s mark—but she knew how to separate it from the good stuff. In the past two years, since escaping from Galt, she’d spent hours on the Internet and in libraries, studying makers’ marks, vintages, hallmarks and other distinguishing features of antique sterling silver.

  Some of Grace’s magazine clippings went back months, even years. Some she might never act on; a clipping was rarely enough, in itself, to give her all the information she needed. As for the Lascar story, she’d clipped it out two years ago, and was only moving now because she’d spotted another Lascar story: according to the latest Who Weekly, the Lascars were in Honolulu for the marriage of their daughter to a minor American actor, and would be away for three weeks.

  As afternoon faded that Sunday, Grace walked along the beach at Breamlea and planned the hit on Lascar. She was alone, an
d the waters raced towards her flank and the wind howled hard against her back. She reversed direction. Now the wind was gritty, stinging her face and hands. The seabirds fought it, wheeling like paper scraps. She altered course to avoid a dead seal, then veered inland, up and down a canyon in the dunes, finally emerging near the general store at the entrance to the caravan park before walking back along the road towards her house. Drive to South Australia on Wednesday, she thought, hire a car in Murray Bridge on Thursday, clean out the Lascars that night, return to Victoria early Friday morning. Fence some of the gear to Steve Finch around lunchtime, stow the best in her safe-deposit box in Waterloo that same afternoon.

  And, as she walked, Ian Galt’s harsh voice scraped across her mind: ‘Always know that you can walk away from a job, even if you’ve invested a lot of time and money in setting it up.’

  Rules, rules…

  17

  Eight a.m. Monday, Challis checking his pigeonhole for mail. A shift was going off duty, another coming on, so the main corridor was hectic, uniformed and plainclothed police and civilian staff shouldering in and out of doors, balancing files, equipment belts, canteen tea and coffee. Since Friday he’d received several memos and a handful of flyers, most of which he tossed into the recycle bin before heading upstairs. An officer from the sex crimes squad was due, but she was coming down from the city and Challis had no idea when she’d arrive.

  As always, he brewed coffee in the tea room, making enough for Scobie Sutton and Pam Murphy, who were not in yet. After that he sat, thinking, in his corner office.

  The Triumph had been difficult to start that morning, and the idea of selling had grown firmer in his mind. There was bound to be a Triumph nut somewhere in Australia, willing to fork out for an elderly TR4—but the car was probably worth very little, and if, like the Niekirks, he wasn’t allowed to sell his plane, he’d never be able to afford a new car.

  Challis sipped his coffee and swivelled in his chair, using his feet on the open bottom drawer of his desk as leverage. The outer offices were quiet. He checked his watch, idled a while, then jerked forward and typed ‘Trading Post’ into Google, waited five years for the site to load, and made an Australia-wide search of TR4 prices.

  Christ. One car in the whole country, fully restored, low mileage on a new motor, new everything, asking price $35,000. Surely his old bomb would fetch at least twenty?

  He continued to idle, listening to voices and footsteps. Pam Murphy arrived, stuck her head around his door, grinned and chatted. They never ran their tongues for long. She disappeared into the tea room, and then Sutton was knocking, saying, ‘Someone from sex crimes at the front desk.’

  ‘Thanks. You and Murph wait in the briefing room.’

  Challis headed downstairs, pausing for a moment to gauge the visitor on the other side of the glass before he stepped through to the foyer. He saw a young woman with long black hair and stylish black-rimmed glasses, dressed in a cotton jacket over tight jeans and a T-shirt. She also wore the fatigue of long hours, but that vanished when Challis was buzzed through. She seemed to spark with energy, sticking out her hand, giving her name as Jeannie Schiff, sergeant. And she stared at Challis, a sizing-up.

  ‘Thanks for coming down,’ Challis said. ‘As I said on the phone, our sexual offences team isn’t in place yet, so we could do with some help.’

  ‘Well, yeah,’ drawled Schiff. ‘Abduction and rape? A bit different from some sad bloke waving his penis at schoolgirls.’

  Her voice was raspy, low, not unpleasant, but sharp underneath. Challis shrugged mentally and said, ‘My team’s upstairs.’

  She followed him. He paused outside the briefing room. ‘Tea? Coffee? Proper coffee.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have green tea?’

  Challis wouldn’t have had green tea before Pam Murphy joined CIU. Now the teabag jar was crammed with exotic brews. ‘No problem.’

  The tea made, he introduced her to Sutton and Murphy and stepped back to prop up one of the side walls. The morning sun striped the long briefing room table. On the other side of the window he could see the treetops that marked the rear of the car park.

  Schiff took command of the room, standing at the head of the table. All that had been tense, uncertain or vigilant about her had disappeared, replaced by an air of calm authority, a routine determination. She’d been through this before and knew how it would play out.

  ‘We’ll work this on several fronts,’ she announced, without preamble. ‘Witnesses, if any, local sex offenders, forensics, victimology.’

  The morning sun was coming in hard behind her. She was a hazy shape, and, seeing his officers wince and shade their eyes, Challis stepped behind her and released the venetian blind. It fell with a clatter.

  Schiff ignored him. He leaned his shoulder against the wall again.

  ‘I’m due in court this afternoon,’ Schiff said, glancing at her watch, ‘so this will be a racing visit, to get you started. I’ll be back tomorrow and then I can give you until the end of the week, okay?’ She didn’t pause to find out. ‘Right. Three main areas to action. First, do we have a list of local sex offenders? We need to start knocking on doors tomorrow.’

  She cast an interrogative look at Challis, who said, ‘Constable Murphy will do that.’

  Schiff flashed Pam a smile. ‘Next, the cop angle bothers me. Why would a police member announce himself? Did he hope to intimidate? Well, it did intimidate, but did he think Ms Holst would be too scared to tell police that she’d been raped by a police officer? I need someone to run a nationwide search of similar cases, cross-referenced against police who have been arrested, charged, jailed or suspected of sex offences, and against police officers whose ID or uniforms have been stolen recently.’

  Scobie Sutton raised his hand. ‘I’ll do that.’

  ‘Good, thank you. Next, Ms Holst herself. Her movements last Thursday night, workmates, family, friends, old and current and wannabe boyfriends…I want to know who she is, in other words. Look at Facebook and Twitter to see if anyone had it in for her. Any altercations at work, pissed-off workmates and customers.’

  Challis uncoiled from the wall. ‘Constable Murphy and I have been working on that.’

  Schiff gave a vivid smile. ‘Terrific. Maybe we’ll get a result sooner than expected. Meanwhile, forensics. Early days yet, I imagine.’

  Scobie Sutton stirred. ‘Preliminary results are in. Plenty of fibres and prints in and on the victim’s car, but no way of knowing whose.’

  ‘No hits in Crimtrac?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Anything at the scene?’

  ‘Ice-cream wrappers, plastic bags, Coke bottles, the usual.’

  ‘Anything on the victim?’

  Here Sutton squirmed. ‘He cleaned her up, unfortunately. He used a condom, popular brand, according to the spermicide.’

  He coughed to clear his throat. His words had conjured images that Sutton, who had been a detective for twelve years, couldn’t cope with.

  ‘Thank you, constable. I wonder about the cleaning up he did. A policeman? Someone who watches CSI on TV?’

  They didn’t have an answer for her.

  Pam Murphy seemed about to add to the discussion, but slumped in her seat again. The morning was deepening outside the police station.

  18

  Elsewhere in the building, John Tankard was changing into his uniform and facing down smirks. The guys had heard what happened last Friday, the naked chick appearing out of the bushes and screaming at the sight of him. Thank Christ it had been cleared up quickly. He hadn’t abducted and raped anyone. But, as he gave each of his mates the finger, he couldn’t help wondering: Did you do it? Or you?

  Then, to cap off this brilliant start to the day, he was told to report to the Traffic Management Unit. ‘They want you for an RBT.’

  A random breath test campaign. ‘Jesus, Sarge, not again.’

  Tankard was an old hand in the ranks of uniformed constables at Waterloo. Mostly, he roamed around in the di
visional van, answering calls. Throwing drunks out of bars, arresting a wife who’d stuck a knife in her husband or vice versa, handing out on-the-spot fines for jaywalking.

  But now and then he was seconded to Traffic. The TMU was always engaged in some blitz against motorists: drink driving, unregistered vehicles, speeding, failure to wear a seatbelt…A unit of ten officers, but there was always someone in court, on holiday or down with the flu, so guys like Tank took up the slack.

  ‘Your local knowledge and sparkling personality, Tank.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks, Sarge.’

  John Tankard was pink and sweaty. Short hairs sprouted from the fleshy rolls above his collar, his heavy damp limbs pushed at the seams of his uniform. He didn’t welcome too much action on the job, yet his chief impression of his last RBT, earlier in the year, was of incredible boredom. Even shifting location every few hours had only amounted to a few minutes of activity. Mostly an RBT consisted of standing around in the sun or the rain with your finger up your bum, hoping some idiot would try to dodge the breathalyser or pick a fight.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Right away.’

  Tank hauled out leathers, cap and yellow jacket from the storage locker, balanced his sunglasses on the visor of the cap, and joined the others in the Traffic briefing room on the ground floor. The window caught the morning sun and flashed from the windscreens creeping along the McDonald’s drive-through on the other side of High Street. Big mistake, spotting Macca’s: now he felt hungry. He moved his gaze to the kerb outside the police station where the Unit’s patrol cars and motorbikes stood in full, snarling livery, waiting to terrorise the good citizens of the Peninsula.

  Weariness took the place of hunger and he dragged his eyes away. He glanced around at the other officers: all men, all young, all petrol heads. They loved the storm-trooper gear, the cars and bikes, as Tank himself once had. But he was thirty now and he felt old here, in this room, with these guys.