Donna shrugged. Ellen thought she understood: she’d struck it before. People like Donna were intimidated by educated, quietly spoken professionals. They’d rather struggle than admit to pain and helplessness.
‘Donna,’ she said slowly, ‘the other day I saw a brochure on your fridge. Rising Stars Agency.’
Donna went alert, a little indignant. ‘Hey, yeah, now you’re here I want to lodge a complaint.’
‘You paid for photos that you didn’t get?’
‘How’d you know that?’
Ellen explained. Donna was appalled. ‘But how come Katie didn’t recognise him?’
‘He wore a disguise. He drugged her.’
Donna began to punish herself. ‘It’s all my fault, isn’t it?’
Ellen stayed for an hour, trying and failing to comfort Donna, and left needing reassurance of her own. She pulled to the side of the road and took out her mobile phone.
‘Hi, sweetie.’
Percussive music, punctuated by raucous shrieks, and her daughter’s voice saying, ‘Mum? I can hardly hear you.’
Ellen checked her watch. Late afternoon. ‘Where are you?’
‘A pub.’
Ellen almost said, acting on her immediate instinct, ‘Shouldn’t you be studying?’ Instead she said, ‘Everything okay?’
‘What?’
‘Is everything okay with you?’
‘Fine. Why?’
‘Just checking.’
‘Look, Mum, today we had our last lecture before exams, okay?’
Ellen pictured the pub at the end of the airwaves that joined her to her daughter’s mobile phone. Was Travis there? Would they party on later? Go clubbing? Head-numbing music, drug-and-alcohol-dazed faces, swirling lights, slender young things crammed together, some of them predators and some of them prey. ‘Don’t leave your drink untouched.’
‘You think I’d let some creep spike my drink? Mum, get real.’
‘You can’t be too careful,’ Ellen said, feeling like someone’s old churchgoing granny.
‘Have to go, Mum, love you, bye.’
‘Bye,’ Ellen said but the connection was dead.
36
The RSPCA inspectorate headquarters for the mid-north was in a town eighty kilometres to the south of Mawson’s Bluff. Leaving Meg to sit with their father that Friday afternoon, Challis drove up and over Isolation Pass for the second time in a week, and an hour later was talking to the regional director, a slow-moving, slow-speaking man in his fifties named Sadler. ‘Thanks for seeing me.’
‘No problem.’
‘Busy?’ Challis asked, nodding at the paperwork on the man’s desk.
Sadler leaned back in his chair, arms folded across his belly. ‘Cruelty to animals never stops, and we never rest, but nor does the paperwork,’ he said, with a faint air of self-mockery. He frowned, serious now. ‘Two detectives are coming to see me later. Has Gavin’s body really been found?’
‘That hasn’t been confirmed, but it’s pretty definite. RSPCA uniform and badge, wallet, watch, all identified as his.’
Sadler cocked his head. ‘What’s your concern in this? You say you’re with the Victoria Police?’
‘Meg Hurst is my sister. Gavin was my brother-in-law.’
‘But it’s not your case,’ said Sadler carefully.
‘I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes,’ Challis said. He felt stiff and sore from the drive: the Triumph’s springs and seats no longer gave much support or security. ‘You can refuse to talk to me. As you said, two detectives from the South Australia police will be coming to talk to you. But my sister and father are naturally very upset. Meg thought Gavin had run out on her, our father thought he’d committed suicide.’
‘But it’s murder?’
‘Yes.’
‘You think it was related to his job?’
‘I don’t know. What do you think?’
In reply, Sadler left his chair and crouched at a low-slung cupboard under his office window. He grunted with the effort of retrieving a large archive box and hauling it back to his desk. ‘Gavin’s stuff, just in case he turned up again.’
He removed several folders, black-covered notebooks, a clipboard, pens in a rubber band and a digital camera. ‘Some of this was found in his car and returned to us by your sister. But I can’t let you take anything away with you.’
‘Of course not,’ said Challis. He flipped through the pad on the clipboard. The bottom pages were blank, the top covered in handwriting that varied from the neat to the dramatic and emphatic, dark and deeply scored on the page, as if mirroring Gavin Hurst’s disturbed moods. He scanned it: he saw ‘Finucane’ written several times and underlined, and the words ‘evidence of classic long term starvation, with some pigs in poor condition and several in a ribby condition’.
He glanced up. ‘He was inspecting Paddy Finucane’s place on the day he disappeared?’
‘Apparently.’
‘How does it work? Did someone report Paddy, or did Gavin target him for surprise inspections?’
‘An anonymous call, according to the log. Someone saw that his pigs were in a distressed state, no food or water.’
‘Man or woman?’
‘I seem to recall that it was a woman,’ said Sadler. ‘Listen, is this going to take long? Are those Adelaide detectives going to come in here and find me talking to you? I like your sister, I want to help, but-’
‘Just a few more quick questions,’ said Challis smoothly. ‘So you relayed this anonymous report to Gavin?’
‘Well, it is in his district.’
‘Did another inspector follow it up when Gavin went missing?’
‘I did, about four days later.’
‘And?’
‘Mr Finucane’s pigs looked fine to me.’
‘How were you received by Paddy?’
Sadler looked uncomfortable. ‘I really don’t think-’
Challis didn’t pursue it. He knew that the Finucanes had short fuses. If Gavin was also on a short fuse the day he inspected the pigs, anything could have happened.
‘What’s Meg going to do now?’ Sadler asked.
Challis widened his eyes, trying to see Sadler as a future brother-in-law. Somehow he couldn’t see Meg, let alone Eve, going for it. ‘What else was Gavin working on?’
Sadler drew his hands down his face tiredly. He was in his chair again, swivelling. ‘Typical stuff, the sorts of things we all encounter. For example, he was trying to trace the owner of some emaciated cows found wandering on the road. He was investigating the trapping and sale of tiger snakes. He’d prosecuted a husband and wife for live-baiting their greyhounds, and again for the state of their dog runs.’
‘Names?’
‘I can’t tell you that,’ said Sadler emphatically.
It didn’t matter. Challis thought it was probably Joy and Bob O’Brien, who’d always had one or two greyhounds. He’d gone to school with them. They were the kind to struggle in school but be geniuses at cheating the taxman or anyone in authority. There were families like the O’Briens and the Finucanes all over the world, including his own neck of the woods back in Waterloo.
He asked pleasantly, ‘May I see what’s on the camera?’
Sadler glanced at his watch. ‘I’m sure the batteries are flat after all these years.’
But Challis was already trying the buttons, without success. He tipped out the batteries, two rechargeable AAs. ‘Shall we try your camera?’
He’d taken charge of the man, the room, and the situation. Sadler’s RSPCA camera sat on the windowsill. It also took AA batteries, which Challis transferred to Gavin’s camera.
He scrolled through the photographs stored in the memory. Several showed bony but not starving pigs eating scraps in a cement trough. ‘Are these Paddy’s pigs?’
Sadler looked. ‘Yes.’
‘How would you rate their condition?’
‘As I said, I made an inspection. I found the situation didn’t warrant prosecution or intervention. The pigs weren’t fat, but they hadn’t been mistreated.’
Challis chose his words carefully. ‘Meg said that Gavin seemed a bit zealous in the weeks and months before his disappearance-his death.’
Sadler stroked his jaw like a farmer faced with a knotty problem and not the words to express it. ‘I did have a couple of complaints.’