‘So you had no reason to suspect anything else?’
‘Naturally I thought he must have committed suicide, especially when they found his car abandoned out east, but then I started to get that weird mail and thought he’d staged his disappearance and wanted to taunt me. He’d run away because he couldn’t cope, but still wanted me to suffer.’
‘Tell the police that.’
‘I will’
‘When was the last bit of strange mail?’
‘Two, three years ago. I hired a private detective. He didn’t get anywhere.’
‘Why didn’t you ask me for help?’
‘You’re so far away, and so busy.’
Challis felt mortified. He tried to swallow it. ‘Tell the police that, too. Show them receipts.’
‘Okay. But who sent me the mail? Why would they do that?’
Challis shrugged. ‘The killer, I suppose, trying to throw everyone off track.’
Paying attention to his doubts and suspicions, even uncomfortable ones, had always been Challis’s main tool in detective work. He couldn’t ignore the possibility that Meg, or the old man, or both of them acting in concert, had shot Gavin. The mysterious mail had been a useful bit of misdirection. The rifle that had been handed in for official destruction had been the murder weapon. The desire to find out what had happened to Gavin was fierce in him now.
‘Fancy Dad knowing,’ Meg said. ‘Mum must have told him before she died.’ She laughed, brief and rancorous. ‘Not that it changed anything. Dad’s always been good at holding conflicting beliefs simultaneously. Or his mind’s going.’
Challis patted her back, rocked her against him briefly. ‘Where were you the day he disappeared, assuming he died the same day?’
‘Here.’
‘Can anyone vouch for that?’
‘God, I don’t know, it was so long ago.’
He held her hand. They were not a demonstrative family, but holding her hand felt right to both of them. ‘Meg, I saw the file they have on Gavin at the local station.’
Something closed down in her face. ‘Did you?’
‘Gavin used to hit you.’
She looked at him steadily. ‘Only a couple of times. At the end. But I didn’t kill him.’
He nodded. ‘Did he hit Eve?’
‘If Gavin had hit Eve I would have left him, no mistake.’
‘Anyone else? Dad, for instance?’
‘The whole world would have known about it if he’d hit Dad. As for anyone else, I can’t say.’
‘But he offended lots of people.’
‘God, yes, even before he started going off the rails he was always taking people to court. Paddy Finucane, for example-Gavin brought several prosecutions for cruelty to animals against him.’
They gazed at each other. Challis told her to tell that to the police, too.
She sighed raggedly. ‘I have to tell Eve. I want her here with me.’
‘Shall I stay?’
Meg looked at him sadly. ‘Thanks, but you’d better take Dad home.’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he told her, and together they helped their father into the car.
Later he called Ellen Destry. ‘Only me.’
‘Twice in one evening,’ she said, sounding pleased. He told her about the body.
‘Oh, Hal, I’m so sorry.’
‘A couple of homicide guys from Adelaide are sniffing around.’
Ellen was silent. She knew whom they’d be sniffing around. ‘Hal,’ she said warningly, ‘you’re not going to…’
‘Of course not. Not my jurisdiction.’
‘Yeah, right, as Larrayne would say.’
‘But I was missing a good murder,’ Challis said.
Come tomorrow morning, he intended to go in hard, tracing Gavin Hurst’s last days and sworn enemies.
34
Friday was the morning for the District Nurse and the shire council’s Home Helper, and that gave Challis three hours to himself. First he drove across town to wish Meg luck with the police interview. There was a Channel 7 news van parked in the street outside the house, and a couple of newspaper reporters leaning against Meg’s fence, smoking, exchanging war stories. They’d come three hundred kilometres north for this story; it involved murder, grisly remains, concealment and buried secrets. Challis, who had perfected reporter brush-off techniques over the years, passed through as if he didn’t see them.
Eve answered the door, her face tight and unhappy. He hadn’t seen her since Wednesday, and made sure that the door was firmly shut before he hugged her.
‘They keep knocking and ringing. I hate it. They’re ghouls.’
‘They’ll go away eventually.’
‘Dr Minchin was here earlier.’ Eve looked at Challis as though recalling a bad taste. ‘He took a mouth swab, can you believe it?’
Challis hugged her again. ‘DNA, sweetheart, to help them identify the body.’
‘I felt like a criminal.’
‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of.’
She heaved a sigh. ‘Today’s going to drag on forever.’
It occurred to Challis that Eve would be alone here while Meg was questioned. ‘Want to come around with me this morning?’
‘Where?’
He gazed at her steadily. ‘Out east.’
She twigged at once. ‘Where Dad’s car was found?’
‘Yes.’
She didn’t ask why. It was as if she knew. He found Meg in the kitchen and said goodbye and good luck.
‘Thanks.’
She looked tired and bewildered. She’d assumed that Gavin Hurst had been alive all these years, and had grown to hate him because he’d been taunting her. Now this.
‘Call me when the police have finished interviewing you.’
‘Unless I’m in jail.’
‘I’ll break you out.’
‘My hero. Pity you’re my brother.’
‘Call me,’ he said again.
‘I will,’ she promised.
‘On my mobile.’
‘Okay.’
There was a transmitting tower in Mawson’s Bluff. In fact, Challis got better mobile phone reception in the wilds of South Australia than he did on the Peninsula. He kissed Meg and then hurried Eve into his car and drove east on a road that had been subject to potholes and bone-jarring corrugations back when he was a teenager driving to outlying sheep stations to pick up a girl and take her to a dance. It was a fine sealed road now, and passed through a rain shadow, leaving the grassy plains of the Bluff behind and rapidly entering stony saltbush and bluebush country-the change so dramatic that God might have thrown a switch when your eyes were blinking. If you kept going you’d reach the vast northeast of the state, a virtually unpopulated region of stone ruins, deep gorges, dry salt lakes and landmarks that named the fate of European settlement: Mount Hopeless, Termination Hill, Dry Well Track, Blood Creek Bore.
But Gavin’s RSPCA station wagon had been found only twenty kilometres east of the Bluff-twenty-one kilometres east of the cemetery. Dry country, sure. Country you could walk out into, never to be found, if you had your heart set on it. A country of hidden gullies and undiscovered rocky caves decorated with ancient Aboriginal carvings and paintings. But country that was still close to town. A daily Trailblazer bus went along that road, before turning southeast to the River Murray towns. Salesmen went along it, livestock agents, local farmers, tourists in cars and buses. Gavin could have abandoned his car and hitched a ride with a stranger, you’d reason, if you believed he’d wanted to stage his disappearance. Or he’d walked out into the dry country to die, you’d reason, if you believed that he’d wanted to commit suicide.
Two reasonable hypotheses, both widely held in the town.
Eve knew where the car had been found, and directed him to pull over fifty metres past the twenty-kilometre post. ‘You’re getting a feeling, Uncle Hal?’
She said it slightly teasingly. In fact, he often did feel his way into the atmospherics of a place, and the skin and bones of a victim or a culprit. There was nothing supernatural about it. It was merely one man’s imagination-albeit an imagination honed by dozens of murder investigations over the years.