‘Not Tessa Kane. We obtained these from someone rather closer to you than that.’
McQuarrie’s face grew desolate for a moment as he looked down an empty, unpromising road. ‘Who?’
‘We think you know.’
‘I don’t, I swear I don’t.’
‘We think you do.’
‘Shouldn’t you be looking for whoever killed my wife instead of hassling me about my private life?’
‘Mr McQuarrie,’ Ellen said pitilessly, ‘what do you think we’re doing, showing you these photographs, asking these questions, if not investigating the murder of your wife?’
A pause while he took this in. ‘A coincidence,’ he said.
‘Is it?’
‘You can’t honestly believe she was shot because she took part in some harmless…’ He’d scattered the photographs across a coffee table but now grabbed and scrutinised them. ‘These don’t even show Janine.’
‘Think about it, sir.’
‘I don’t know,’ he wailed. ‘Maybe someone’s wife or girlfriend arranged to have her shot out of jealousy, but what’s that got to do with these photos?’
‘Or maybe her own husband got jealous and arranged to have her shot.’
‘No! That didn’t happen.’
‘Then what did happen?’ Challis said, putting plenty of whiplash into it; he was tired of Robert McQuarrie.
In a distant room the television continued to murmur and the wind blew around the house, ‘Look, I don’t know anything about these photos. I didn’t see anyone with a camera, and Janine’s not even in-’ He froze, and Ellen saw the shock as he realised. ‘Oh God,’ he muttered.
‘Exactly, Robert,’ Challis said, the familiarity offending the superintendent’s son, ‘these photographs were found stored on your wife’s mobile phone, the phone you were so anxious for me to return to you.’
McQuarrie looked stricken. ‘I didn’t know that! How could I have known that? Dad simply told me to make sure I got all of Janine’s things back!’
’Did he?’
Ellen cut in. ‘Did Janine enjoy the sex parties, Rob?’
McQuarrie gave her a look full of hate but said nothing.
‘She didn’t, did she?’
McQuarrie swallowed and looked about the room. ‘She didn’t really enjoy that side of our marriage.’
‘So you thought you’d kickstart her erotic life?’
‘You’re demeaning her, you’re demeaning me.’
‘Or was it that you could have sex with as many women as you liked without feeling guilty, because it was all open and your wife was having sex with other men?’
‘I don’t expect you to understand. When you’re highly sexed you-’
‘Anyone less highly sexed than you I have yet to meet,’ Ellen snarled. ‘With these photographs, Janine had a hold over you. You’d be ruined if they were made public. A laughing-stock. A disappointment to your parents, especially your law-and-order father. Janine showed them to you, told you to be faithful or she’d ruin you, but misjudged you badly and she lost her life as a result.’
‘I was in Sydney!’
‘So who did you hire, Rob?’ Ellen demanded.
Challis eyed her warily. She was tense with anger, disgust and disappointment. Their closeness of early in the day was quite gone. She wasn’t a prude, but hated the dishonesty and sly tawdriness of the sex parties, the photographs and the actions of husbands like Robert McQuarrie. He wondered if she were thinking of deceit, illicit love and empty marriages.
Meanwhile McQuarrie was outraged. ‘Do you think I know people like that, hired killers, hitmen, or whatever they’re called?’
A fair question, Challis thought. He didn’t answer it. Then McQuarrie followed it with another fair question. ‘Besides, how do you arrange something like this in just a few hours?’
Ellen pounced.’ Meaning?’
McQuarrie saw the trap he was in and tried to backpedal. ‘I mean, the killers obviously needed time to learn her movements, where she lived, where she worked, that kind of thing.’
‘Robert, you said “a few hours”. Janine showed you the photographs, didn’t she? And you made a few phone calls and-’
‘No!’ He gave them a hunted look and shrank in his chair. ‘She didn’t show them to me. They arrived in the post.’
‘The post?’
‘In a plain envelope. I assumed Tessa Kane or someone at her office had sent them.’
‘When was this?’
‘Monday.’
‘Was there anything in the envelope besides the photos?’
‘No.’
‘No blackmail demand?’
‘No.’
‘Did you keep the envelope and the photos?’
‘Yes. I hid them. I wanted to hold onto them in case there was a blackmail attempt.’
‘Wise man,’ Challis said, his tone disbelieving.
‘If I’d known Janine had taken the photos and sent them to me I would have tried to talk to her about it, I swear.’
They watched him.
‘Have you talked to the other three men?’ Ellen demanded.
‘No.’
‘But you know them?’
‘Yes.’
And he gave them the names of a surgeon, an accountant and a funds manager.
‘I don’t want you alerting these characters,’ Challis warned.
‘Of course not,’ Robert McQuarrie said, relieved now to think that Challis was letting him off the hook, if only for a while.
31
Tessa Kane worked late, stewing about the tone of her interview with Ellen Destry. Interview? Interrogation was more like it. Destry had been clearly hostile. Now it was after ten o’clock and she was locking up for the night, and had just returned the keys to her bag when a voice growled, ‘Stay out of my private life.’
She jumped, convinced that her stalker had waited for her. He was escalating, making personal contact and not relying on hate mail and stones through windows any more. Swallowing, she forced herself to turn around. ‘Mr Mead,’ she said, oddly relieved.
It was short-lived.
‘You called on my wife unannounced.’
He wore a heavy overcoat, his shoes gleamed, and drops of misty rain dotted his face, granting him a look of powerful emotions held barely in check. He took a step towards her, passing out of the range of the nearby streetlight. She glanced past him, seeking helpful passersby or escape routes, but the entrance to the Progress building was at the side, not the front, and screened by bushes. There was no comfort from the steady stream of traffic on the main road, and at that moment no pedestrians on the footpath.
‘I’m not going to attack you, stupid cow,’ Mead said. ‘But I’m warning you to stay away from my wife.’
‘I merely-’
‘Well, don’t, okay?’
There was a spasm of something in his face, not anger but doubt. Tessa felt her courage returning. ‘Another perspective, that’s all I want.’
‘Ask me, if you’re so keen to know.’
‘I have asked you. I get nothing useful.’
Now Mead was his old self again. His lip curled. ‘I don’t do special favours. The information I give you is the same as the information I give the Melbourne and national media.’
‘It’s public relations bullshit, that’s what it is. I write my own stories, not a rehash of some press release. You still haven’t answered my specific allegations regarding falsified staffing levels and falsified reports being filed by your section heads. There are lots of irregularities that I intend to follow up on.’
‘Go your hardest.’
‘And what do you intend to do about the self-mutilations?’
Charlie Mead showed her his sharp teeth as he turned and walked away. ‘My officers have all been offered trauma counselling.’
That was enough for Tessa. When she got home she fired up her laptop, a glass of red at her elbow, and began to trawl through the internet for what it could tell her about Charlie Mead.
Vyner had driven back to Melbourne after burying Gent and stowing the shovel and his outer clothing in builders’ skips on the Nepean Highway. He showered, caught a movie, ate pasta at a sidewalk cafe on Southbank, and now was watching the late news on TV. Thank Christ there’d been no further developments, no more clues found or anonymous callers to cause him a headache. He switched off and peered out at the night through a gap in the curtains he kept permanently drawn. Tenth floor, but he didn’t have one of the river and cityscape views, just views of wet streets and buildings reflecting light like panels of glass or ice. He shivered. No one was out there, but he could feel the world closing in a little. He got out his journal and wrote: Sing out the names of the lost ages. Uncover the warrior codes of the universe.