There was another silence, and then McQuarrie seemed to tiptoe through his words: ‘Is there anything about Janine that I should know, Hal? A secret lover? Was she skimming funds from the clinic? Blackmailing her clients?’
Is McQuarrie simply waiting to be told the worst? wondered Challis, or does he know something that we don’t? ‘Whatever it is, we’ll find it,’ Challis said. You had to say things like that to your boss and a fearful public. He meant it, but he was saying it to shut McQuarrie up. Anxious to get going, he finished the conversation and returned to his office in CIU and a backlog of paperwork that owed plenty to the superintendent’s cost-cutting measures. The budget destroys resources, Challis thought, the paperwork destroys time, and the jargon destroys reason.
Fed up, he went in search of Ellen. ‘Did Meg tell you anything?’
‘Yes and no. They weren’t close, but she did feel that Janine had seemed happier than usual in recent weeks.’
Challis drew his hands tiredly down his cheeks. ‘An affair? Someone in the swingers scene?’
Ellen shrugged. ‘There’s nothing to indicate a lover in her e-mails, phone records or ordinary mail. She didn’t confide in anyone. If there is a lover, she’s covered her tracks well. Do you want me to keep looking?’
He shook his head absently, returned to his office and attacked his in-tray again. At one point he reached for his laptop. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t in his car. Then he remembered: he’d left it on his kitchen table. He’d gone home, changed into overalls, cut up the fallen tree, raced off to the inquest. Challis always paid attention to his instincts, and this one was a creeping sensation that told him not to waste a minute of time.
He ran downstairs to the carpark, climbed into the loan car and headed out of town. At the second roundabout he turned northwest, glancing briefly at Waterloo Mowers, where the lights were a dull yellow through a gauze of water droplets and a man in a japara was despondently assessing the ranks of lawn mowers parked on the grass outside. His tyres hissed and other cars tossed dirty scraps of water over his windscreen.
Soon he was driving between a dismal housing estate and a couple of waterlogged horse paddocks, and then was in undulating country, where costly lifestyle houses had scant views over Westernport Bay. Otherwise the houses here were older, faintly rundown fibro, weatherboard and brick-veneer farm dwellings amid rusty sheds, untidy pine trees, orchards and dams. It was turning out to be a wet winter, even this early in the season, and the dams were full, the clay backroads greasy, the roadside ditches running furiously, the floods washing drifts of grit and gravel from adjoining dirt roads across the sealed roads.
That’s how Challis knew his own road, the dirty yellow-brown smear across the bitumen surface. He turned off, splashing through muddy potholes and hearing the heater fan cut out with a death rattle. He came to his driveway and turned in, passing the sawn logs and dead agapanthus stalks, and headed up towards the house, which looked damp, empty, almost forlorn, but familiar in all of its manifestations, and a true home, a haven through the years up until now.
And that’s when he saw the marks in the lawn. Dark brown mud gouges stark against the green. His first thought was: They got bogged. His second and third were: Who? and How did they get out? His fourth, when he found the splintered back door, was: Did they take the laptop?
35
Challis made himself a coffee while he waited, careful how he touched things, even using his elbow to work the door of the fridge, and hooking out the milk container with the back of his thumb. As for the coffee pot, coffee jar and his ‘old cops never die’ mug, he’d yet to meet a burglar who paused to brew coffee. He didn’t for a moment think the crime-scene techs would lift any prints other than his own-and some old ones of Tessa Kane’s-but he knew the procedure, the irony being that, since he was a cop, his place would be given more than a cursory examination.
It was too cold to sit on his sundeck, and no sun anyway, only the grey light of a winter’s afternoon, and so he set the central heating to high, sat at his kitchen table and made lists for his insurance company and CIU. Damage: jemmied back door, a broken fruit bowl (Italian, hand painted, a gift from Tessa), cracked CD covers. After a moment, he added the twin gouges in his lawn. Stolen: a jar of coins, approx. value $15; digital camera, $499; DVD player, $250; portable TV, $399; answering machine, $70; cordless phone, $79; laptop, $2500; laptop case, $60. He walked through the house again, returned to the kitchen and added: Rockport walking shoes (new), $299; Swiss Army knife (ten years old, no longer have receipt); Walkman (broken); leather belt, $45. A third walk through yielded him the bedside clock, $25, and assorted jewellery (property of late wife), value approximately $2000.
Angela had wanted to take some of the rings and earrings into prison with her, but he told her they’d be the target of the other prisoners, and so, therefore, would she. ‘They’ll tear them off you,’ he’d said, ‘or they’ll resent you. Everything will be here waiting for you when you get out.’ And she’d said, ‘But will you be waiting for me?’ and he’d had no answer to that. As for the jewellery, he’d bought most of it-a watch, a white gold necklace, emerald earrings. The engagement ring had been his grandmother’s, mercifully dead before she knew that Angela had tried to kill him.
He heard a car beyond his kitchen window and spotted Ellen arriving. The next stage would be routine: she’d assess the situation and then call for crime-scene technicians. He waited: there was a knock, and then she was standing in the kitchen doorway, concern on her face. ‘You poor thing,’ she said, making to cross the floor to where he stood by the window. He wanted her to, and wanted to cross to her, but things held them back.
She glanced about the kitchen, and then peered through the door into his sitting room. ‘When you said damage, I was expecting to see a real mess,’ she said.
He was puzzled. ‘Minor damage,’ he said, ‘about what you’d expect in a burglary.’
‘So it is a simple burglary?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘But you asked for me especially. I thought-’
‘What?’
In a rush she said, ‘I thought it might have been personaclass="underline" you know, someone who had it in for you and wanted to cause major damage.’
He frowned, shook his head. ‘Well, there’s always someone, but no, this is a simple burglary, more or less.’ He saw relief on her face then, as she shrugged out of her coat and swung it over the back of a chair. He said carefully, ‘Did you think it was Alan?’
She flushed. ‘Alan? No. Well, he can be jealous.’
Challis decided to let it go, but she seemed to fill the room and his senses, and oddly to make him feel less violated by the burglary. He pulled out a chair for himself and motioned for her to sit.
When she was settled she took out her notebook and headed an empty page with the date, time and location. But then, apparently in no hurry, she pushed the notebook aside. ‘I’d really like one of your coffees.’
With relief he busied himself at the sink and cupboards. At times he passed quite close to her. Then he poured, set biscuits on a plate and sat with her again.
‘So, Hal, burgled.’
‘Uh-huh.’
He gave her a rundown on the damage and what had been stolen. ‘Plaster casts of the tyre tracks on my lawn might help.’
‘Will do,’ she said.
He reached for her hand without thinking about it. ‘There’s a reason why I asked for you.’
She raised her eyebrows, but didn’t withdraw her hand, which felt taut, bony but warm in his. Suddenly self-conscious, he jerked back. Was his neediness too apparent? Was he the subject of smirks and raised eyebrows among the female officers and civilians in the Waterloo police station? He saw himself as a clumsy man.
‘This has to be low profile,’ he said. ‘I’m in trouble.’
He saw that he’d discomposed her. To cure it she reached for her notebook, all business now. ‘In what way?’