Soon he reached a stretch of open land beside a mangrove belt, and finally the tyre distributors, petrol stations and used-car yards that marked the outskirts of Waterloo. New, cheap houses, packed tightly together, crouched miserably in the fog. There was high unemployment on the new estates; empty shops in High Street; problems for the social workers. Yet on a low hill overlooking the town was a gated estate of million-dollar houses with views over Westernport Bay.
Waterloo was the largest town on this side of the Peninsula, hemmed in between farmland along one flank and mangrove swamps and the Bay on the other. Three supermarkets, four banks, a secondary college and a couple of state and Catholic primary schools, some light industry, a fuel refinery across from the yacht club, a library, a public swimming pool, a handful of pubs, four $2 shops, several empty shopfronts. A struggling town to be sure, but growing, and less than an hour and a quarter from Melbourne.
Challis slowed for a roundabout, and then headed down High Street to the shore, where he passed the swimming centre and the yacht club on his way to the boardwalk, which wound through the mangrove flats. Here he parked, got out and walked for an hour, his footsteps muted and hollow on the treated pine boards. Beneath him the tidal waters ran, and once or twice there was a rush of air and a hurried warning bell as a cyclist flashed past him, too fast for such a narrow pathway in such struggling grey light.
Seven-thirty. He stopped to watch a black swan and thought about his dead wife. She’d never understood his need to wake early and walk, or his need to walk alone. Maybe the rot had set in because of that essential difference between them. His solitary walks focused him: he solved problems then, plotted strategies, drafted reports, did his best loving and hating. Other people-like his wife-wanted to chat or drink in their surroundings when they walked, but Challis walked to think, get his blood moving and look inwards for answers.
Strange the way he kept referring to her in his mind. Strange the way she continued to be the person to whom he presented arguments and information, as if she still mattered more than anyone else, as if he still hoped to shine in her eyes, as if she hadn’t tried to kill him and her own death hadn’t interrupted everything.
Seven forty-five. He swung away from the swan, returned to his car and drove back to High Street. Here the early birds in the bakery, the cafe and the newsagency were opening their doors, sweeping the footpath, seeding their cash registers. He entered Cafe Laconic, bought takeaway coffee and a croissant, and consumed them in his car, watching and waiting.
At five minutes to eight, Lowry appeared, walking from the carpark behind the strip of shops. The man wore jeans, a parka and a woollen cap, a tall, thick-bodied guy who liked to show a lot of teeth when he talked. Challis watched him fish for keys and open the door to his shop. Both the windows and the door were plastered with advertisements for mobile phones and phone plans. Waterloo Mobile World the shop was called.
Challis gave Lowry a couple of minutes and then entered, setting off a buzzer. ‘We don’t open until…’ Lowry began, then something stopped him, some stillness and focus in Challis. ‘What do you want?’
‘Another talk, Mr Lowry,’ Challis said.
Raymond Lowry showed indignation and bafflement with his mouth and shoulders. ‘What about?’
‘The inquest’s on Thursday,’ Challis said. ‘I’m finalising my report to the coroner.’
‘Let me get the door,’ Lowry said resignedly. He locked it, then gestured for Challis to follow him into a cramped back room, where he immediately sat at a desk and began to make notes in a ledger. It was airless in the little room. A fan heater blew scorching air at Challis’s ankles. Eventually Lowry looked up. ‘Sorry about that. There’s a lot of paperwork in this job.’
Challis glanced around at the grey steel shelves loaded with boxes of mobile phones and phone accessories. ‘Business doing all right?’
‘Can’t complain.’
‘Better than life in the Navy?’
Lowry shrugged.
The Navy base was a few kilometres away. Lowry had served there for a while, met a local girl and eventually quit. ‘You can’t raise kids in that kind of environment,’ he said, ‘getting posted all over the place. And I make a decent living at this.’
Lowry, the solid businessman and decent family man. Challis didn’t reply but waited, an old trick. ‘Look,’ said Lowry with a disarming grin, baring his large, glorious teeth, ‘what more can I tell you? I barely knew the guy.’
On a Saturday night in May, an armourer from the Navy base, high on a cocktail of alcohol and drugs, had been ejected from the Fiddlers Creek pub. Two hours later he’d returned unnoticed with a pistol from the armoury and shot dead a bouncer, then returned to the base. Later still, he’d killed himself with the same pistol. The fallout was far-reaching: eighteen cadets had been dismissed after testing positive to drugs, and the operation of the armoury was under investigation. According to a preliminary check, some of the pistols were missing, older stock that was being phased out. Challis badly wanted to know where those guns were.
‘Barely knew him? That’s not what I heard,’ he lied. ‘I heard you were pretty pally with him. Were you his contact on the outside? He falsified the paperwork to cover the theft of several guns, and you fenced them for him?’
‘No way. Not guns.’
Meaning that yeah, he’d been caught handling stolen property last year, but no way would he handle stolen handguns. ‘Then who did handle the guns for him?’
Lowry opened his arms wide. ‘How the hell would I know?’
‘How’s the wife?’ said Challis.
Lowry faltered at the direction change. He had close-cropped hair and now he floated a hand above the spikes as if to gather his thoughts. ‘We’re separated.’
Challis knew that from Lowry’s file. Mrs Lowry had taken out an intervention order on her husband last year, and later left him and been given custody of their children. Lowry had joined an outfit called Fathers First and made a nuisance of himself. ‘Sorry to hear that.’
Lowry flushed. ‘Look, am I under arrest? Are you going to charge me or what?’
Challis smiled without much humour. ‘We’ll see,’ he said, and returned to his car, hoping it would start and not let him down with Lowry watching from his shop window.
The police station was on two levels; offices, cells, canteen and interview rooms on the ground floor, and conference rooms, the Crime Investigation Unit and a small gym on the first floor. Challis entered by the back door and headed for his pigeonhole in the corridor behind the front desk. He reached in, took out a sheaf of memos and leafed through them.
Most he shoved into the overflowing bin nearby, but paused in futile wrath over one from Superintendent McQuarrie, addressed to all senior officers: The Assistant Commissioner will be asking some tough questions this year, and you will be expected to deliver balanced budgets. The budget situation is taking over as the main management challenge for the region, and so every order, every item of expenditure, will be reviewed with a critical eye.
Challis had lived through budget constraints before. The usual result was that paper expenditure skyrocketed, to deliver the ever-increasing flood of memos, while the money for torch batteries, interpreters, pens, cleaning materials or calls on mobile phones dried up. More seriously, any squad could be charged for using the services of another squad, access to telephone records of victims and suspects had been reduced, and there was only minimal funding for phone taps. Crime fighting by committee, that was Challis’s view.
He turned and made for the stairs that led to the first floor. ‘Hal,’ said a voice before he reached them.