They all continued to speculate, and Challis watched and listened, occasionally prodding, occasionally demurring. Night had closed in outside the windows, the black wet streets giving back ribbons of red and yellow from headlights and brakelights, and hissing as tyres passed back and forth in the hour leading to dinner and evening TV in warm rooms. He thought of his cold house and shivered.
‘We need to find out who held this particular party,’ he said finally, ‘and where and how often, and whether or not they have guest lists. Above all, we need to identify these other three men and ask if anyone has attempted to blackmail them.’
‘What do you mean, “anyone”?’ said Scobie.
‘Maybe Janine had an accomplice.’
They slumped at the thought, but continued to brood over the photographs and motives. ‘Assuming someone was blackmailed,’ Scobie said, ‘he’ll still be around. The killers he hired might not be, but he will.’
‘That’s assuming that he-or she-hired the killers,’ said Challis. ‘Even so, we need to show Georgia head shots of the three men other than her father to see if she recognises the driver or the shooter.’ He cocked his head to stare at the photographs.
Ellen was watching Challis. ‘But first we talk to Robert.’
Challis nodded gloomily. ‘Tonight.’
‘Sooner you than me,’ Scobie said. The case was a potential career breaker and they all knew it.
Challis ignored him. ‘With any luck, Robert knows who the other three are, and we’ll hit them first thing tomorrow morning.’
Everyone was tired, a tiredness encouraged by the revelations, the sluggish heated air and the deepening darkness. Ellen yawned, setting off yawns in the others. After a while they stretched, stirred, tidied their folders and pulled on their coats. Challis thanked them and began to take down the photographs. ‘Again, keep this to yourselves. These people might be pathetic and guilty of bad taste but they haven’t broken any laws that I know of. We’ll presume the sex was consensual and no one was under age. Janine McQuarrie’s murder might have nothing to do with these people or the fact that she took their photographs. She might have been titillating herself, or herself and Robert. In other words, we don’t want a situation where the rich and powerful suddenly find themselves on the internet or splashed all over the front page.’
‘Boss,’ they murmured, filing out good-naturedly.
30
At eight o’clock that Wednesday evening, almost thirty-six hours after Janine McQuarrie’s murder, Challis and Ellen parked the unmarked Falcon in the street, said ‘No comment’ to a handful of reporters, and walked up the driveway of an Edwardian house set on a ridge above a rocky cove in Mount Eliza. The house was angled to allow million-dollar views down to Sorrento from one bank of windows and across the Bay to the irregular towers of the city from another, but right now the sea was black, the coastal towns a belt of twinkling lights, the distant city a yellow glow that swallowed the stars.
Meg answered, smiling tiredly in greeting and showing them through to a sitting room with drawn curtains and a heaped log fire burning briskly. ‘Make yourselves comfortable,’ she said. ‘Robert’s in his study. I’ll let him know you’re here.’
She was back a moment later. ‘He won’t be long.’
She chatted, Challis listening with half an ear, wondering why
Robert McQuarrie was taking so long. Phoning his father to complain?
Or was it a typical and unconscious exercise of power to make them wait? An insult, maybe? This room needs colours and clutter to soften it, he decided, glancing around. It was a vast, starkly white room with plenty of chrome, glass and polished wood everywhere in hard angles.
‘You don’t need to talk to Georgia, do you?’ Meg asked anxiously. ‘It took me ages to get her to sleep.’
Challis shook his head. ‘No.’
Then Robert McQuarrie came in like a man burdened with fools, still wearing suit trousers, black shoes and a loosened tie over a pale blue cotton business shirt. Here was the busy tycoon who never rests, not even at home, not even when his wife has just been murdered. ‘I hope you’re here with good news,’ he said.
Challis glanced at Meg, who got the message, and hurried out wordlessly, casting them a shy, relieved smile. A moment later they heard a television in another room, the theme music to the American cop show where the main guy always muttered, ‘Keep me posted’.
‘Well?’
‘Mr McQuarrie, this is a photograph of you having sex with a woman who is not your wife,’ Challis said.
McQuarrie took the photograph, screwed his eyes shut and rocked on his feet. When his voice came it was hoarse and full of strain. ‘This isn’t what you think.’
‘Oh?’Ellen demanded.’ And what do we think?’
‘That I’m some kind of, you know…’
He couldn’t finish and they waited for other reactions. Finally Challis fed him the photographs. ‘The dozen or so photographs we’ve obtained seem to concentrate on four men. Here are the other three.’
‘I have to sit down.’
‘Would you like a drink?’
McQuarrie eyed a glass cabinet, dithered, and poured himself a scotch. ‘Does my father have to know about this?’
Challis and Ellen said nothing.
McQuarrie perched stiffly on the edge of an armchair. ‘Please. It would destroy him, destroy my mother.’
Challis shrugged and McQuarrie got encouragement from it. ‘You got these from the Kane woman,’ he said poisonously.
‘Oh?’ said Challis. ‘Why do you say that?’
McQuarrie curled his upper lip. ‘I’m not stupid. She published that article, and hey presto, these photos appear. Your relationship with her is common knowledge. You doing her dirty work, or is she doing yours?’
His demeanour seemed to say that Tessa was scum and so therefore was Challis, for consorting with her. Challis tensed, wanting to wipe the man’s expression off his face.
McQuarrie saw something in him and paled a little, and swallowed heavily from his glass of scotch. It revived him. ‘Tessa Kane’s on the way out, you know. She’s finished. She has no idea of community feeling and should never have been put in charge of a local newspaper.’
The bluster can mean two things, Challis thought: that Robert McQuarrie honestly thinks Tessa took the photos and they’re unrelated to the murder of his wife, or he’s a guilty man attempting to misdirect us.
‘Can you tell me where the photos were taken?’
McQuarrie shifted uncomfortably. ‘I don’t think I should. It doesn’t matter where. But I will be having words with them. Opening themselves to a journalist is one thing, allowing photographs to be taken is quite another.’
‘Sir,’ said Ellen with barely concealed contempt, ‘the longer you hold out on us the more likely it is that these photos are passed around and find their way onto the net, to the media and to your parents. At present it’s strictly need-to-know and involves only a handful of trusted officers. I can’t promise it will stay like that.’
‘You can’t bully me,’ McQuarrie said. He moistened his mouth.
Challis said evenly, ‘I want you to tell us-immediately-who these other men are and where these photos were taken.’
‘They have a right to privacy…consenting adults…gladly sue you and the Kane woman…’ Robert McQuarrie muttered, jumping from thought to thought as his gaze jumped from object to object in the room.
‘It’s not illegal,’ he went on. ‘We weren’t doing anything wrong.’
Ellen studied him. ‘Doesn’t it bother you to know that someone you trusted has been taking candid photographs of you having sex with strangers?’
‘Trusted? Tessa Kane? That’s a laugh.’