Whispering Death

by Garry Disher

  ‘A big, fat zero.’ said Jeannie Schiff when it was all over. ‘So how about a drink?’

  At the end of his working day, Challis poured himself a scotch. He looked out at the closing-in light of evening and talked to Ellen Destry on Skype.

  ‘He wants me in his office next Friday. I should consider representation.’

  ‘He didn’t phone you, just sent a text?’

  ‘It was curt, even for a text. As if he didn’t trust himself to speak.’

  ‘To sack you?’

  ‘He probably can’t do that,’ Challis said, ‘but he can make life uncomfortable.’

  They were silent. Challis reached out a hand to the webcam as if to touch Ellen’s face. ‘You’ve been gone four days already.’

  ‘What, you’re saying the time drags when I’m around?’

  Challis held up a finger. ‘Let me rephrase that.’

  20

  Wednesday started with a briefing in CIU, croissants piled on a plate at the centre of the long table. Scudding clouds today, and without a morning sun beating through the windows, the walls and carpet were grey and sombre. Begging for colour, finding it in Jeannie Schiff’s vivid lipstick and glossy black hair.

  And Pam Murphy’s earrings. That was unusual. Challis peered, realised he was looking at a trickle of tiny feathers in finely spun silver set with chips of turquoise.

  She caught him looking and went pink. ‘Dream catchers, boss. Navaho.’

  ‘Oh.’ He had no idea what dream catchers were. He only knew she was looking happy, a spark in her eyes. Meanwhile Schiff was simultaneously checking her mobile and watching him with a lazy-lidded half smile. So she’s read the story about me, too, he thought. And there were other undercurrents; they had nothing to do with him.

  ‘Our duties for today,’ he said, leaning one shoulder against a wall. ‘Sergeant Schiff?’

  ‘Pam—Constable Murphy—and I will continue with the register. Admittedly, we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel now. Knickersniffers and teenage boys who slept with an underage girlfriend.’

  She stopped to stare at him and he realised it was his turn to speak. He smiled, the smile there and gone again, unpeeled from the wall, and leaned over the table to break off a corner of almond croissant, dusting the powdered sugar from his fingers. ‘Constable Sutton and I will keep going on the stolen uniform and ID reports.’

  Schiff turned her gaze onto Sutton, and Scobie’s twig-like fingers agitated his set of manila folders as if he’d become unglued a little.

  First up for Challis and Sutton was a Waterloo officer named Jeff Greener. Five minutes to eight and he was in the canteen, about to go on duty. They took him through to an empty room on the ground floor.

  ‘Am I in trouble?’ Greener asked, looking untroubled.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Challis, some steel in his voice. ‘You reported your uniform stolen last month?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘ID, too?’

  ‘Just the uniform.’

  ‘Circumstances?’

  Greener gazed at Challis. He was an older man, a senior constable with receding hair and deep creases beside his mouth. He’d been a copper for a long time and was not impressed by a senior officer’s impatience. A man with a nerveless quality, oddly appealing.

  He glanced away from Challis, taking in Sutton and Sutton’s collection of files. ‘You have my report, sir,’ he said calmly. ‘My house was burgled. Three of my neighbours were burgled, then half a dozen in Balnarring one hour later. A regular crime spree.’

  Challis decided to drop the harshness. He leaned back, twisted his body around, lay one arm across the back of his chair. ‘Do you know who it was?’

  Greener smiled crookedly. ‘We rounded up and bashed the usual suspects, but you know how it is, the smart ones don’t hang onto stolen gear, they shift it straight away. My guess, they shoved my uniform into an incinerator soon as they realised what they’d lifted. Or they sold it to someone who’ll use it to hijack a payroll.’

  Or go hunting for rape victims, thought Challis.

  As they broke from the table, Greener said, ‘Sir, for what it’s worth, I think you spoke the truth and I think you’ve got guts.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Challis murmured, oddly touched.

  ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’

  Meanwhile Pam, with Schiff in the passenger seat, was driving the sex crimes Holden to the outskirts of Waterloo, where a collection of cheap housing known as the Seaview Estate nestled in a vast, shallow depression in the landscape. The place evoked complicated feelings of dread and sympathy in her. She knew that the Seaview struggled. The city of Melbourne was seventy-five minutes north-west by road, or one hour by train from Frankston, and some of the estate’s working residents made that journey every day. Others worked in Dandenong factories and businesses, or more locally in Waterloo and elsewhere on the Peninsula, awaiting the next round of job cuts.

  But living beside them on the estate were the underemployed, the unemployed, the elderly poor, struggling single parents and housing commission, welfare and mental health clients. Uneducated and unhealthy, left stranded by the IT revolution. Most were law abiding, but a handful were responsible for some of the nasty, and plenty of the mundane, crime in Waterloo, a permanent heartache for social services and a headache for the police. And they were largely invisible to the people who treated the Peninsula as a playground: Melbourne’s retirees, sea-change professionals, cocaine footballers and casino executives.

  Out of nowhere, Jeannie Schiff said, ‘Does he like you?’

  ‘What? Who?’

  ‘Challis.’

  Pam said quickly, ‘I hope so, but not in the way you mean. He’s got someone.’

  ‘Have you got someone?’

  ‘We’re here,’ Pam deflected the question and slowed to enter the estate’s little streets. The houses were cramped, almost forlorn, but orderly. Most of the lives here were orderly: only a handful of the bland facades concealed the kinds of misery and sour ambition that warranted the attention of the police.

  Bernard Fahey’s house was mildewed red brick, the houses on either side yellow brick. His lawns were parched, clumps of dry grass dotted with outbreaks of bare soil, as if animals scratched there for worms, buried bones or a place in the sun. The front door showed years of kicks and slams and the scratches of powerful claws, but today it was ajar, and Schiff nodded towards the figure materialising there. ‘Pam,’ she said warningly.

  ‘I see him,’ Murphy said. ‘The man himself.’

  They got out. Fahey, dressed in greasy overalls, wiping his hands on an oily rag, spat at the ground as they approached. He had the pinched face of a fifty-year smoker and was small and wiry, a useful trait for a mechanic. Or for a man who liked to crawl through windows or into roof cavities, kidding himself he was a burglar when really he was a rapist who targeted women who lived alone.

  Giving him a grin guaranteed to rile, Pam said, ‘Hello, Bernie. Don’t tell me you’re servicing the Harley on the sitting-room carpet again?’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Now, now, let’s not get off on the wrong foot.’

  ‘Fuck off’s what I say to Jehovah’s Witnesses and cops.’

  ‘Just a quick word, Mr Fahey,’ said Jeannie Schiff.

  ‘Who’s the girlfriend?’ said Fahey, ignoring her.

  ‘That would be Sergeant Schiff of the sex crimes unit,’ Pam said, ‘and she’d like a quick word, all right?’

  ‘See this?’ said Fahey.

  He lifted a leg of his baggy overalls, revealing a plaster cast. His eyes gleeful, yet aggrieved, he said, ‘Come off me bike six weeks ago. Can’t drive, can’t work, can’t hardly walk.’

  Pam gave her grin again. ‘Can’t hardly walk between the sofa and the fridge?’

  ‘Not funny. So whatever it is you fucken think I did, I didn’t.’

  Pam ran a flat stare over the cast, the scribblings of friends and family. ‘To Grampa get well soon
Jemma XXX’ and ‘Another good man bites the dust’ and ‘You never washed this leg anyway’.

  Another dead end.

  Challis and Sutton’s next stop was the Mornington police station. Allocated a small room behind the front office, they interviewed a sergeant named Paul Henry, whose wallet and warrant card had been stolen from a gym locker while he was lifting weights one evening after work. Other lockers had also been broken into. There were security cameras but none in the change rooms or locker area.

  ‘That was nine months ago, sir,’ Henry said.

  His look of curious sympathy told Challis that here was another reader of the local rag. ‘Ever get your wallet and ID back?’

  Henry looked exhausted, a man who lived on coffee and long hours. ‘No, sir.’

  He yawned and added: ‘Nor my uniform.’

  Challis glanced sharply at Scobie Sutton, then back at Henry. ‘I thought only your wallet was stolen. Did we know about the uniform?’

  Henry shrugged. ‘I reported it.’

  ‘It was also in your locker?’ asked Challis, aware that Scobie Sutton was fumbling through his files.

  Henry shook his head with a weary kind of disgust. ‘I had a dry-cleaning docket in the wallet. For my uniform. The pricks collected it.’

  ‘Cameras?’

  ‘At the dry-cleaners? No.’

  Next stop, Flinders. Pam Murphy briefed Jeannie Schiff as they drove. Wired on speed one afternoon six years ago, Ron Varley had stopped for two fifteen-year-old girls who were hitchhiking home from the Between the Bays music festival. When they refused to get into his car, he got out, grabbed both by the wrist and manhandled them onto his back seat. One shot across to the other door and escaped, convinced that her friend was with her.

  She wasn’t.

  Varley’s wife opened the door, took one look at Murphy and Schiff and said, ‘What’s he done now?’

  ‘May we speak to him, Mrs Varley?’

  ‘If you don’t mind driving all the way to Ararat.’

  Pam sighed. ‘The jail?’

  ‘Locked up six months ago. Don’t you people talk to each other?’

  ‘Clearly not enough,’ muttered Schiff and the two women trudged back to their car. Seated, they glanced at each other, Pam a little nervous, expecting a reprimand, but Schiff grinned. Leaning in from the passenger seat, she placed two warm fingers on the back of Pam’s hand and said, ‘Anything that can go wrong, as they say.’

  Pam had heard it before. ‘I know, I know, Murphy’s Law.’

  Then to Mount Martha and the home of Carl Saker. After perfecting the art of taking photographs under women’s skirts, Saker had moved on to fondling schoolgirls on the Frankston train, and, finally, raping sexworkers.

  According to his mother—and a quick phone call confirmed it— Saker had been in the psych unit of the Frankston Hospital since last Tuesday.

  Steven Brough of Rosebud had raped an eighty-five-year-old woman in a nursing home in 1998. On his release, he’d gone to live with his parents. Six weeks later, he’d committed suicide.

  ‘So much for up-to-date records,’ Pam said.

  Schiff grinned. ‘We need to redefine your law, Murphy. Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong.’

  By now it was mid-afternoon. They interviewed three more men before evening. All had solid alibis.

  Meanwhile Challis had frittered away his afternoon in Mornington, first checking that Sergeant Henry had reported the theft of his uniform from the dry-cleaner, then questioning the dry-cleaner and the gym staff. Sutton trailed him mutely, cowed by his cold vehemence and focus, knowing he’d stuffed up.

  On their way back to CIU, they were obliged to stop at freeway roadworks. A great scar had been carved across farmland on either side of the road. Makeshift security fences enclosed concrete drainage pipes, heaped soil and heavy earthmoving equipment. Sutton said, ‘I wonder if Frankston will die when the bypass is running.’

  Challis ignored him and took out his phone. ‘Anything?’

  ‘Nothing, boss,’ said Murphy. Challis could hear voices, a hint of music, in the background. The pub? He could do with a drink. ‘Maybe our rapist’s not a local. We’re only a little over an hour from the city.’

  ‘Could be.’

  Then Challis noticed that the cars ahead of him were moving, and Scobie Sutton was humming in agitation and checking his watch. ‘Sorry, Murph, got to go.’

  He pocketed the phone, put the car into gear and moved on with the traffic. ‘You all right?’

  ‘I need to collect Ros from a friend’s house.’

  ‘Where does the friend live?’

  ‘I told her between five and six and it’s already five past six.’

  Conversations with Sutton were often like this. ‘Scobie, where does the friend live?’

  ‘Somerville.’

  ‘We’re almost in Somerville.’

  ‘That’s what reminded me.’

  ‘Well, give me the address.’

  Sutton looked shocked. ‘Sir, we can’t, this is a CIU car, we’re on duty.’

  ‘Give me the address, for God’s sake.’

  Sutton complied, subsiding into his seat, giving directions to a section of new housing opposite the shopping centre. Challis drove grimly, not trusting himself to speak, and when the feeling passed he said, with some heat: ‘Scobie, you might find life easier if you had another line of work.’

  ‘Like what?’ Sutton cried. ‘I’m forty-three years old, still only a constable, police work’s all I know. What else can I do?’

  ‘You could move sideways.’

  ‘Sideways?’ Sutton said. But he was thinking now, and said again, ‘Sideways…’

  Murphy finished speaking to Challis and had put the phone away just as Schiff reached across the table to touch the dream catcher earrings. ‘The colours suit you, the silver and the turquoise against your neck.’

  Pam knew she was blushing. She touched the earrings self-consciously. ‘Normally I wear studs. Just felt like a change.’

  There were subtexts to that statement: I felt like looking attractive; I felt like looking attractive because you are so attractive; I felt like looking attractive for you. Pam looked down at her hands.

  They were in the Hermitage, a converted Edwardian house on the Esplanade in Mornington, with views across the waters of the bay to the sun as it flattened itself on the horizon, the vast yellow glow broken here and there by the blockish shapes of container ships steaming out to the Heads. A veranda, a lounge with club chairs, a bistro that specialised in salads and seafood. Soft lighting and barely audible music. The clientele was about right, too. No yuppies to speak of, no one from the bowls club down the road, no blue singlets or pay-day apprentices.

  ‘Nice,’ Jeannie had said, on first stepping through the door.

  And she’d added, eyes hooded, smiling unreadably, ‘A special place to bring people.’

  A place to bring special people, did she mean? Pam was saved by Challis’s phone call.

  Now the waiter was there, depositing their drinks. ‘Cocktails, my treat,’ Jeannie had said, and Pam admired the tall, frosted glass, thinking it would be okay to get a little drunk tonight. Her hands looked lovely in the dim light, she thought, the fingers shapely on the glass. Beautiful, actually. But of course what she was doing, she knew, was avoiding the powerful pull of Jeannie Schiff’s gaze from the other side of the table.

  ‘Pam.’

  She looked up into a lazy, complicit smile and a pair of blue eyes darkening with the dying light.

  21

  Thursday morning, Grace woke up in the South Australian town of Murray Bridge.

  She’d arrived Wednesday afternoon, driving the Golf, and paid for four nights’ accommodation in an on-site caravan. Now, showered and dressed, she walked to the main street and rented a white Camry. Three hours later she was in the Clare Valley wine country north of Adelaide, where small, humped hills concealed wineries and tiny historic towns. Vines lay over the hill folds
and along the valley floor, presided over by old stone houses with sun-faded corrugated iron roofs and verandas.

  The farms gave way to suburban blocks as she entered the town of Clare. Here there were more stone dwellings but a greater number of bland brick veneer houses dating from the 1970s. A Shell station, an irrigation outfitter, a stone hall, a stone church, a K-Mart, some cafés, and everyday shops, pedestrian crossings, a handful of banks. For a largish town, there wasn’t much of a main street, but when Grace explored some of the side and parallel streets she found hardware barns, supermarkets, a medical clinic, a high school, a municipal pool, and a mostly-dry creek set with barbecues and benches under massive, silvery gums.

  After making a couple of passes through the town, Grace took out her Google Earth maps and made her way along a snaking dirt road that took her above the valley, into a knot of pretty hills, with tall gums, secluded farmhouses and wineries on winding side tracks. And the eyesore built by Simon Lascar.

  There were no indications that the Lascars had returned from attending their daughter’s wedding in Honolulu. The gates were locked, the curtains drawn. Winding down her window, Grace scoped the house and grounds with binoculars. Drifts of leaves on the driveway and garden paths. The lawn needed mowing.

  She was tracking across the windows and walls when three cars appeared, two heading for the wineries or farms farther along the road, an electrician’s van approaching from the other direction, raising dust. Grace needed time to finish her inspection but knew that someone might remember a woman parked on the side of the road in a white Camry, a Hertz sticker on the rear window. That’s when she noticed a ‘For Sale’ sign on the property opposite the target house: five acres, with a main house, a self-catering cottage licensed for bed-and-breakfast use, sheds, fencing, tall, pale gums and a muddy dam.

  Forty minutes later, she was riding around in the passenger seat of a bulky black BMW, with a real estate agent named Brent, who was saying regretfully, ‘The recession’s hit everyone hard.’