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 way, 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.