by Garry Disher
The voice emerged like a mouse from a hole. ‘Are you the guy in charge of the murder of Janine McQuarrie? The one on the news?’
Challis leaned forward, listening hard to the voice, the background noise and everything in between. It was hard to pinpoint the age. Slurred, which meant he’d been drinking or was stoned. Suspicious and wary: owing to the situation, or because he’d had dealings with the police before? No extraneous traffic or other sounds.
He said carefully, ‘Do you have something to tell the police?’
It was important to stay low-key: no hectoring, pushing or leading. It was also necessary to establish if the caller was a hoaxer or a sad character after a bit of attention.
In a rush the man said, ‘What if something happened you didn’t think was going to happen?’
Challis said gently, ‘We’re not in the business of blaming people for things they didn’t do.’
‘I didn’t think he’d go this far.’
‘Is this person a friend of yours? Are you afraid of him? We can offer protection.’
There was silence and the seconds ticked away and then the caller said, as if betrayed, ‘I bet you’re tracing this,’ and hung up.
‘Well?’ Challis said, glancing around at the others.
‘He wasn’t on long enough for a trace,’ Scobie said.
‘What was your impression of him?’
‘Genuine, boss.’
‘Ellen?’
‘Genuine.’
Challis said, ‘Right, we need it to go out on the evening news and in the papers tomorrow. Reporters are already swarming over this, so we won’t need to persuade them. The usual thing: Police are anxious to speak again to the anonymous caller who phoned with information regarding the murder of Janine McQuarrie. Who knows, it might shake something loose.’
****
19
In Challis’s experience, very few criminals returned to the scene of the crime-not unless they were stupid, retrieving incriminating evidence, or actively seeking capture and punishment. But police officers often did, and on his way home that Tuesday evening, Challis called in at 283 Lofty Ridge Road, and stood for a while in the waning light.
The lowering sky was dripping and close around him. The crime-scene tape thrummed in the wind and the sounds of engines and tyres on the road above him were disembodied and distorted. His old Triumph ticked as the motor cooled. It had been a bugger to start, drawing amused glances in the carpark at Waterloo, but he’d booked it in for a service and tune tomorrow.
He shook that off and began to think himself into the minds and bodies of this morning’s victims and killers. This was a natural condition: Challis did it automatically at every murder scene. In that way he was able to understood the impulse and the circumstances. Very little surprised him-which is not to say that he condoned or forgave, necessarily.
But this time his skin crept. All of his senses were resonating with another shooting, in another place, with other culprits and victims.
He’d been younger then, a detective sergeant based in a large town on the endless wheat plains in the west of the state. He was married, and had thought that he was happily married, but what he didn’t know was that his wife was deeply unhappy. She started sleeping with one of his colleagues, a married senior constable. Their affair grew in hothouse circumstances and turned obsessive. In their minds, the only way out was to shoot Challis dead, so they lured him to a lonely place and ambushed him under a moonless evening sky. But Challis’s senses had begun to tell him that something was wrong, and he half turned to fish out his service.38, an action that saved his life. The bullet plucked at his sleeve, putting a hole through his jacket and ploughing through the flesh of his upper arm. Alerted now, he’d circled around, shot his wife’s lover in the shoulder and disarmed the man. He was currently serving twelve years. Angela Challis got ten years, but imprisonment had thrown her off course, and she’d killed herself in the prison infirmary last year.
Challis knew that he’d not have liked Janine McQuarrie if he’d met her, but had she been set up, too? Had her spouse wanted her out of the way? Ellen and Scobie had uncovered evidence that she’d been a poor therapist and a pain to work with: perhaps her bad judgment calls, contempt and secrecy were symptoms of a deep unhappiness, brought on by marriage to Robert McQuarrie and scrutiny by his awful family.
He stood there, knowing that he was missing something and hoping the scene would tell him what it was. He saw, in his mind’s eye, the driver and the shooter. Why had the shooter needed a driver? Had they worked together before? From Georgia McQuarrie’s account of the killing, the two men had not brought equal degrees of professionalism to the job. He could see her dialling 000, and made a mental note to check the records for Janine’s car phone. Speaking of which, how had the killer got his instructions?-assuming that he’d been hired and didn’t have a personal stake in the outcome.
This led Challis by degrees to the anonymous caller. Was he the driver? An acquaintance who’d supplied the gun or the car? Someone who’d hired others to throw a scare into Janine, only to see it all go wrong?
His bones were aching, the chilly dampness creeping into his core. He stamped his feet and began to move, pacing across the driveway to a muddy path along one side of the house. He peered up and saw smears of khaki-coloured mould, for the sun never, penetrated here, and he envisioned Joy Humphreys’s life of solitude, poverty and neglect.
He circled the house, wondering if love or desire, and their perverted forms, had had any role in the murder of Janine McQuarrie. Had she been an obstacle to love or desire, or inspired them? Challis thought of the women in loveless marriages: many endured, some walked out and a handful looked for drastic solutions.
As did husbands.
He tried to think of Janine McQuarrie’s husband then, but Ellen Destry’s took form in his mind’s eye. The guy; was paranoid, obsessive, authoritarian. He was wound so tight, and harboured so many grievances, that he’d snap one day, and maybe harm her.
It caught Challis like a blow then, an unbidden image of Ellen at the wheel of the CIU Falcon this afternoon, her fine jaw uptilted determinedly, and his wanting to touch her. He examined that desire, in his orderly way. It was more than friendship and less than knight-in-shining-armour. It was desire, plain and simple-and it probably wouldn’t do.
He rounded the final corner, and came again to the parking circle where Janine had tried to dodge her killer. Visualising that was enough to make an ordinary person’s skin crawl and pulse race, but the McQuarrie men, son and father, had been strangely unmoved. Challis didn’t think they were numbed, but, if they were not involved in the killing, what were they hiding?
The light had faded to a mess of shadows in the little hollow. He returned to his car. He was still sitting there, cold and depressed, five futile minutes later. And because he’d flattened the battery, he couldn’t even listen to the news.
****
Vyner, on the other hand, had been listening to the news all day. He liked being the lead item; an added bonus to learn that he’d topped the daughter-in-law of a senior cop. ‘No leads,’ the updates said, ‘no leads.’
He’d hotfooted it back to his flat in the city after the shooting, glad to be free of dirt roads, cows and Nathan Gent, and now, reassured that the cops were running around in circles, he was working at his other job.
‘Sammy was a hero,’ he said, perched on the edge of a sofa in a Templestowe sitting room. He paused. ‘You don’t mind if I call him that? We all knew him as Sammy.’
Mrs Plowman, Sammy’s mother, smiled damply. ‘Everyone called him Sammy. I was the only one who ever called him Sam-or Samuel when I was cross with him about something.’
The tears flowed again, to think she’d ever been cross with her son, his life cut short guarding an oil pipeline in the Iraqi desert.
Vyner reached out, gently took her grieving hands and kneaded life and hope into them. ‘Sammy always looked on the bright side of life. In a w
ay, he held the unit together. If any of the younger blokes looked like chucking it in, Sammy was there for them. The Army lost a hero, Mrs Plowman.’
Mrs Plowman wiped her eyes. ‘I try to picture his face sometimes and I can’t, and that scares me. But you bring him to life for me.’
Vyner went very still. He didn’t want to go too far. He wanted her to walk down memory lane but not so far that she’d be deflected from him, his needs.
The house was an architectural nightmare, amid other architectural nightmares. Architectural nightmares worth three-quarters of a million dollars, mind you, and no doubt full of vulgar, newly rich and idle women, but Mrs Plowman herself was a homely sort, grieving for the death of her only child, Lance Corporal Samuel Plowman. The husband grieved by working longer and longer hours in an office building, or attending interstate conferences, leaving Mrs Plowman alone with her memories-which Vyner had teased out with a few tears of his own, a bit of hand-holding on the four-thousand-dollar sofa in front of the bay window, and his trawl through the internet and various newspaper records last month.
‘He was incredibly brave, Mrs Plowman. Not a risk taker, just a guy who kept his head. He got me out of a scrape once. I was pinned down by a sniper, and Sammy crawled across open ground and got me out. I’d lost my nerve. Paralysed. Your son saved my life.’
She looked up at him, hungry for word pictures. ‘They didn’t mention that in his record.’
Vyner waved dismissively. ‘Typical Sammy. As far as he was concerned, he was just doing his job, that’s all. I wanted to put his name forward for a commendation, maybe even a medal, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “Mate, I didn’t think twice,” he told me. “You and the other guys, you’re my family when I’m away.”‘
Mrs Plowman’s hand was warm, damp and sad in Vyner’s grasp. ‘What hurts me is last time he was home on leave he had words with his father. They ended up not speaking, and now my husband is just quietly falling apart about that.’
Careful, Vyner told himself. The last thing he wanted was for the silly cow to bring her husband into this. It was harder selling consolatory stories to husbands and fathers than to wives and mothers. He patted her plump wrist. ‘Sammy thought the world of his dad-of both of you, in fact. He spoke about you all the time. He looked up to you. I never heard him say a negative thing about either of you.’
Mrs Plowman’s face was suffused with a dampish joy. ‘You’ve brought me a great deal of happiness these past few days.’
‘I’m glad.’
‘I can’t believe the Army,’ she said. ‘It’s disgraceful.’
‘They can’t afford any negative publicity,’ Vyner said. ‘Sure, Sammy died a hero, but they didn’t want to make too big a thing of it. Seventy per cent of the population thinks Australia should never have sent peacekeeping troops to Iraq.’
As quoted in yesterday’s Herald Sun. But Mrs Plowman said sternly, ‘I don’t mean that. I mean it’s disgraceful the way the Army treated you, Richard.’
For a millisecond then, Trevor Vyner wondered who Richard was. He reached for a biscuit-not some generic supermarket crap but Italian biscotti. Earl Grey tea, too, which he loathed, but it went with the lifestyle in this moneyed corner of the north-eastern suburbs.
‘That’s the way it goes,’ he said.
He’d been dishonourably discharged from the Army for striking an officer-or so Mrs Plowman believed. Not only that, but the officer was a bully, and had been having a go at Sammy, Sammy who’d been sticking up for one of the younger guys, whom the officer had been picking on. Sammy, the selfless hero; Sammy, a protective older brother to the new recruit; Sammy, alive there in that Templestowe sitting room.
‘Not everyone can take the pressure,’ Vyner said. ‘The heat was indescribable, dust storms, Arab fanatics taking pot shots at you all the time, no wonder some guys lost the plot. But Sammy was always there for us. Until one day this total-’ he almost said ‘arsehole’, then did say it’-arsehole of a lieutenant tears strips off him for comforting a guy who’d crawled into a foxhole in tears. Well, it was totally unfair, so I punched him out.’
Mrs Plowman shook her head. And they discharged you? It’s disgraceful, it really is.’
Vyner sighed. ‘I feel good about myself in the sense that I know I did the right thing, even if it was an act of violence, but now I’ve got a black mark against my name and something like that follows you around, makes it hard to get a job, hard to get references…’
Mrs Plowman said firmly, ‘Stay there,’ and left the room. Vyner allowed himself a small grin, then strained to hear the start of the seven o’clock news on the old bag’s TV set, which was quietly murmuring in a little nook on the other side of an archway in the open-plan room. He caught the words ‘anonymous caller’ and ‘police are anxious to speak to’ and his skin went cold. At the same time, his mobile phone rang. He had a text message, but before he could read it, Mrs Plowman returned with her purse, flushing, determined to do the right thing by a friend of her son, a friend who’d been tossed onto the scrap heap by an uncaring system to the tune-Vyner tried to count the notes in her little fist-of around $500.
Well, a guy had to eat. He was still due the remaining $10,000 for this morning’s hit, but it wasn’t like he got paid to top someone every week-or even every year-so meanwhile you took what you could get. Five minutes later, he was in his car, reading his SMS. It said simply: elimin8 anon callr.
It had to be Gent, the fuckup.
Vyner reached into the glove box for his notebook. A latex glove spilled out, a box of matches, a spare brakelight bulb, and finally his chewed Bic pen.
‘I am the jagged tooth of a lone crag,’ he wrote.
He thought some more.
‘I am the doom maker.’
Too bad that he had to return to the Peninsula. Too bad that he wouldn’t be paid for this hit.
****
Challis received two calls while he waited for a breakdown truck to cart his car away from Lofty Ridge Road and a taxi to take him home.
Tessa Kane got in first. ‘How come I have to hear it on the seven o’clock news, Hal?’
‘Honestly, it slipped my mind,’ he said truthfully.
He was pleased to hear a friendly voice in the darkness, but the conversation went wrong in subtle and obscure ways. ‘Exactly what did this person tell you?’ Tessa demanded.
‘Very little.’
‘A man or a woman?’
‘Is this off the record?’
‘In the last few months you haven’t thought highly enough of me to tell me anything on the record. It seems that I call you, you never call me.’
Challis felt a twist of futility and anger. A part of him wanted to appease her, a part of him wanted to help her, and a smaller part of him wanted to see her again. He tried to get comfortable in the cramped space of the Triumph. ‘He said, quote, “I didn’t think he’d go that far.’”
Tessa absorbed that. ‘What else?’
‘Nothing.’
He waited. But Tessa could outwait him any day of the week. ‘He asked if I was in charge of the case. I said yes. Then he got spooked and cut the call.’
Tessa said nothing.
‘He got agitated and asked if I’d put a trace on the call. I had, and I’d taped it. But the trace failed.’
‘Caller ID?’
‘I rang the number, finally someone answered. It was a coin phone in a supermarket.’
‘Which one?’
‘Look, Tess, I can’t say any more.’
He heard-and in his mind’s eye, saw-her bristle, but the explosion didn’t come. ‘All right,’ she said, and cut the call.
Challis sighed, and at once the phone rang again. ‘Challis,’ he said.
‘McQuarrie here.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The superintendent was clipped. ‘Why wasn’t I told?’
‘Sir?’
‘This anonymous tipoff.’
‘Sir, I-’
‘I have to hear
about it on the evening news.’
‘It wasn’t a tipoff as such. A man called. He seemed rattled, as though a shooting hadn’t been part of the plan this morning, but hung up before I could question him.’
‘Didn’t it occur to you that by plastering it all over the news you’ve scared the shooter off, not to mention that he might start killing his accomplices to shut them up?’
Challis said evenly, ‘It’s a calculated risk.’
‘Be it on your head, Inspector, be it on your head. Anything else?’
‘Not at present.’
‘Well, keep digging.’
‘Sir,’ Challis said, but the line was dead.
Then he made a call of his own.
****
20
Ellen cooked lasagne for dinner, knowing that it would please her husband. She recognised the impulse, one familiar to social workers, counsellors and the police from endless domestic violence situations, in which women-and sometimes men-strove futilely to please their spouses, patch up squabbles, mend cracks, keep the peace-until it all blew up again.
She hated herself for it.
But did you just throw away twenty years of marriage without trying? She knew the pressure that Alan was under. The man she’d married-big, bluff, competent and cheerful-had gradually been ground down by disappointments. He felt left behind by his colleagues and his wife, and hadn’t the strategies to adjust to or rise above the situation.
He’d been an only child, that was part of the problem. Because his parents had indulged him, and he’d never disappointed their modest expectations, or encountered significant setbacks or challenges early in life, he’d coasted uncomplicatedly through school and later the police academy. Life to him was easy, predictable and not all that serious. But then had come the regular, mundane but testing responsibilities of full-time work, marriage, fatherhood and a mortgage. The world wasn’t small any more, but big, and full of ambitious, talented and hardworking men and women. He was ill-prepared and only moderately talented. He didn’t take to drink, drugs or sleeping around to make himself better; instead, he developed biting suspicions and grievances, which he kept barely contained. He fumed, his brow permanently dark. He hated the world and, Ellen suspected, hated himself.