Challis and Destry left in separate cars, knowing the job would scatter them as the day progressed. Ellen’s new Corolla was bright blue but streaked with dust and mud like all of the locals’ cars. Challis followed in his unreliable Triumph. It had held its secrets firmly for years, but now they were all coming out: rust patches at the bottoms of the doors and in the footwells, oil leaks, corrosion, a broken speedo cable, a slipping clutch, a whining differential. And the shockers were shot: he hit a pothole in his driveway and felt the jarring through the steering wheel.
He glanced across at his house as he left the driveway. It was a pretty building, in the Californian-bungalow style, dating from the Second World War. It sat naturally in the landscape on three acres of grass, fruit trees and vague scrub, the only neighbours an orchardist and a vigneron. He liked the seclusion; seclusion was his natural state. But did it bother Ellen? Until her separation and divorce from Alan Destry she’d lived at Penzance Beach, in a small suburban house right next door to similar houses, amid people who mowed their lawns, cooked on backyard barbecues, knocked on the door to ask for a cup of sugar, sometimes played music too loudly.
Perhaps he should be asking: would the seclusion bother her, over time? They’d only been together for three weeks. He’d asked her to house-sit while he took leave to be with his dying father, and within a couple of hours of his return they were lovers. It had surprised them both-kind of. She’d muttered something about finding her own place, but only half-heartedly, and he urged her to stay.
He tried to sort out his reasons now. Of course, attraction played the greatest part, desire, affection, even though he hadn’t spelt out any of this to her. They were not good at endearments. There were no ‘I love you’s’ yet. It seemed they both thought endearments and declarations were currency too easily squandered.
And he couldn’t discount the fact that he’d returned to the Peninsula from his father’s funeral feeling vulnerable and a little unhinged. He wasn’t sleeping, the job promised continued human misery and droning days. The death of his father was raw in him. Back when his mother had died he’d thought about her every few minutes at first, then every few weeks, and every few months, fading into occasional happy memories, but then when his father began to die the grief was rekindled. Double grief. Now, when least expected and often when least wanted, he’d hear his parents’ voices, see their faces and remember the past with frightening clarity.
Challis had never been a man to need a crutch, but Ellen Destry was a balm to him, in addition to everything else.
On the other hand, they worked closely together. Too closely, on problems too complicated, for love to work as well? Never mind that some police bureaucrat was bound to wave a regulation in their faces sooner or later. Challis reached the end of the dirt road and pulled over. He’d replaced the old cassette player with a CD unit and was in the mood for Chris Smither. ‘Drive You Home Again’ blaring, he turned onto the sealed road toward Waterloo. Soon he was passing an aspirant French chalet and a Tuscanesque villa, new houses that didn’t sit naturally in the landscape but had claimed the high ground from the ever-shrinking farmland. It sometimes seemed that he’d blink and a new mansion would have gone up overnight.
The towns of the Peninsula were also changing, their original dimensions swelled by new housing estates which attracted young families shackled to debt on house-and-land packages they couldn’t afford. The social divide between them and the cashed-up retirees and sea-change professionals was growing; the schools, hospitals, welfare agencies and police were overburdened.
He came to the intersection with Coolart Road and stopped for an approaching school bus. The mock colonial paling fence on his right contained a herd-mob? fleece?-of alpacas. Ten years ago there hadn’t been any alpacas on the Peninsula. Now they were everywhere, looking like toys, made-up creatures. Then the bus was past, ‘The Landseer School’ scrolled across its big rump. Challis sighed: one of the most exclusive schools in the country, fees close to twenty thousand a year, a place he’d normally have nothing to do with-and now he’d have to send in one of his officers to see if it was linked to the assault on its chaplain.
Following the road past vines and more alpacas he came to the garden centres, plumbing suppliers and timber yards on the outskirts of Waterloo. One of the biggest towns on the Peninsula, Waterloo had been down-at-heel at one time but was undergoing a renaissance: a K-Mart, new housing, a delicatessen that offered imported delicacies, the old fleapit second-hand shops bulldozed to make way for small arcades with smoky glass. It was all bringing some pride back into the place.
He skirted the southern flank of the town, coming to Trevally Street, a long street that ran parallel to the shoreline, residential on one side, parkland, the municipal swimming pool, skateboard ramps, coin barbecues, walking paths and a yacht club on the other. Apart from a crammed collection of brightly coloured nylon tents on a vacant lot beside the tennis courts, it was all familiar to Challis.
Those tents. The first had appeared on Friday afternoon, dozens more on the weekend, erected by eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds who’d come to Waterloo intent on celebrating the end of their Year 12 exams. Schoolies Week. The main schoolie playground continued to be Queensland’s Gold Coast, followed in popularity by the Victorian towns of Lorne and Sorrento, but cost, distance, overcrowding and parental nervousness had led some kids to seek out low-rent alternatives, like Waterloo. Last year a hundred of them had discovered the town, which had reeled a little. This year many more were expected and the locals were better prepared. The motels and boarding houses were offering special rates, vacant land had been opened up for camping, and there was a greater police and volunteer presence to cope with the drunkenness, overdoses, assaults and tears.
It hadn’t been enough to stop Saturday’s sexual assault, however. The victim, an eighteen-year-old from one of the girls’ schools in the city, hadn’t known her attacker, hadn’t seen him, in the dunes late at night, hadn’t been able to identify him in any way. All they had was a spill of semen on her T-shirt and shorts. What was the betting there’d be no DNA match to anyone in the system?
Challis slowed the car, spotting Scobie Sutton’s Volvo station wagon parked outside the Villanova Gardens apartments. The Volvo was twenty years old but still pristine, a car that had never broken the speed limit-which didn’t mean that it was ever driven well, for Scobie Sutton was a well-known lousy driver. There was also a police car and a black Astra soft-top.
The Villanova Gardens was named after an Italian sailor who’d jumped ship a hundred years earlier, when Waterloo was a huddle of fishermen’s makeshift tents and cabins. Challis parked, got out and glanced both ways along the street, spotting Pam Murphy and a uniformed constable knocking on doors. Few street lights in this part of town, he noticed. He eyed the apartments. They were double-storeyed, in a row of ten, each with a small, incorporated garage, hedges for privacy, and an upper-level balcony that he guessed gave a view across the yacht basin and Western Port Bay to the distant smoke stacks of the refinery on the other side. Uninspiring, but you could honestly call it a view.
He approached number 6, fishing ID out of his suit coat and showing it to Andy Cree, the constable who’d been stationed to keep a log of all those authorised to enter or leave the building. Cree was a new recruit to the station, young, athletic, engaging, always wearing the easy air of a kidder. Challis preferred that to shyness, ineptitude or flunkeyism, but Cree was in a lazy mood today, in no hurry as he logged the details. Keeping it light but firm, Challis said, ‘I’ve got all day, Andy.’
Cree flushed. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Who’s here? Who’s been and gone?’
Cree checked the log. ‘Ambulance guys have taken the victim to hospital. Constable Murphy’s doing a doorknock along the street with Constable Tankard. The crime scene technicians aren’t here yet. DC Sutton from CIU, and the victim’s brother, name of-’
Challis said, ‘The brother? What’s he doing here? This is a crime scene.’
Cree’s face flickered, then cleared. ‘He said he wanted to take toiletries and pyjamas to the hospital. Constable Sutton gave the okay, sir.’
Challis made to go in, then paused. ‘Where was the victim found?’
There was a low hedge running beside the footpath. Cree pointed over it to the small patch of lawn between the street and the front door. ‘Lying right there, sir.’
There were also hedges on either side of the yard. Given the hedges, the sparse street lighting and the darkness of night, it was possible to see why Roe hadn’t been spotted by his neighbours or passers-by until daybreak.
‘And there’s blood on that rock,’ Cree said, pointing to a hefty stone lying on the concrete pathway leading to the door. It was painted white and had been removed from the border around a bed of roses. Nodding his thanks, Challis walked up the short, narrow path to the open front door and into a hallway that led to a cramped living and dining area with a kitchen through an archway, and beyond that a door that probably led to the laundry and a bathroom. Minimalist but expensive fittings and furniture, he noticed quickly, before glancing up the plain staircase to the upper level, where the bedrooms would be. And where voices were raised.
Challis pulled hard on the banister to propel himself up the stairs. He tracked the voices to a small office at the rear, where Scobie Sutton stood by helplessly as a man dressed in jeans and a polo shirt wrapped a power cable around a laptop computer that had been on the desk under a window. Sutton looked up. ‘Sorry, boss…’
The detective had the bony narrowness and angularity of an undertaker, an impression reinforced by his dark suit and glum air. He gestured feebly as if to grab the laptop. Meanwhile the other man dodged him and turned to Challis. ‘Who the hell are you?’
Challis told him coldly.
‘Well, my name is Dirk Roe and for your information my brother was almost beaten to death last night. Or this morning.’
Challis glanced at Roe’s hands: they were well kept and unmarked. He shifted his gaze to the man’s face, which wore the sour look of someone who’d once been admired and was waiting for it to happen again. Roe was no more than twenty-five, with a round, faintly stupid schoolboy face, reinforced by spiky hair, black jeans, a pale yellow polo shirt and running shoes, which were two fat slabs of vividly-coloured rubber. There was a soul patch above his pudgy chin, rings in both ears.
Challis stepped into the room, saying, ‘I can sympathise, Mr Roe, but I must ask you to leave. This is a crime scene, and our crime scene officers haven’t processed it yet.’
‘But Lachie was bashed outside, on his front lawn.’
‘His attacker might have been inside the house before the assault.’
‘My brother doesn’t know people like that.’
‘People like what?’
‘Violent people. Criminals,’ Dirk Roe said. He tucked the laptop under his arm and made to edge past Challis.
‘Sir,’ Challis said, ‘I must ask you to leave the laptop behind.’
A flicker of something passed across the young man’s face. ‘But Lachie might need it. He could be in hospital for days.’
Challis shook his head. ‘Impossible, I’m afraid. The computer could hold information that would help identify your brother’s attacker.’ He paused. ‘Did you meddle with it in any way?’
Dirk Roe wouldn’t meet his gaze. ‘Me? No. Why?’
‘Either way, the computer stays.’
‘I don’t think you know who I am,’ Roe said.
Challis was immediately weary of this game. ‘So, who are you?’
Roe drew himself up. ‘I manage Ollie Hindmarsh’s electoral office-and you know what he thinks of the police.’
Ollie Hindmarsh was Leader of the Opposition in the state parliament and his electoral office was a short distance away, around the corner in High Street. Hindmarsh was a law-and-order tyrant and his way of attacking the Government was to accuse the police force of corruption, cronyism and being run by union thugs. Most cops loathed the man.
Challis smiled emptily. ‘You manage his electoral office?’
‘Yep.’
‘Meaning you answer the phone and lick envelopes.’
‘Listen here, you. I-’
‘Sir, I must ask you to wait outside. Scobie?’
Sutton had been wearing an expression of faint alarm, as if aware of undercurrents that he couldn’t identify. A man with a decent narrowness of range, he went to church regularly, was loyal to his wife, and had almost no insights into human nature. He wasn’t a bad cop. He was dogged. But he wasn’t quite a good cop, either. He shuffled forward apologetically and, after a tussle, removed the computer from under Roe’s arm and took him by the elbow. ‘Sorry, Dirk.’
Challis frowned. Did the two men know each other? He filed it away and they all walked downstairs, reaching the living area just as the forensics officers appeared in their disposable overalls and overshoes. ‘Great,’ said one, ‘a contaminated crime scene.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Challis. ‘Your main area of focus is the lawn outside the front door.’
‘And the bloodied stone on the pathway. What about inside?’
‘Dust for prints, check for blood and fibres, the usual.’
Dirk Roe swayed and stumbled a little, as though finally registering the fact that violence had been used against his brother. Scobie escorted him outside, saying, ‘Don’t stay here Dirk, head across to the hospital. Are you okay to drive?’
‘I think so.’
Why hadn’t Roe gone straight to the hospital? Challis wondered. He joined Sutton on the footpath and together they watched Roe drive away in the black Astra. Challis said, ‘Scobie, you and Pam finish up here. I’ll check on the victim. Briefing at noon.’
‘Boss.’
Challis paused. Andy Cree had abandoned his station to chat with Pam Murphy, half a block away. He was a head taller than Pam, languid and suave, and Challis heard her break into laughter. Then she spotted him, flashed him an embarrassed smile, and turned to continue her doorknocking. Cree wandered back, saying, ‘Sorry, sir.’
‘Constable.’
Challis turned to Sutton. ‘Check if there’s any CCTV coverage from local businesses.’
‘Boss,’ Sutton said.