Pam saw it, too. A woman on horseback, the speeding van, the narrowness of the tree-lined road. The woman pulled back on the reins, trying to coax her horse onto a grassy gap between the trees, but the horse was spooked by the eruption of speed and noisy exhaust behind it. The Toyota clipped horse and rider and fishtailed, brake lights flaring too late, and shot between trees and through a wire fence. It could not sustain the high speed, the terrain or the shift in direction, and a hundred metres in from the fence it began to roll, then flipped onto its roof. Pam stopped, but whether for the horse, the rider or to give chase to the driver, now climbing from the overturned van, she couldn’t say.
38
Still feeling a tug in the pit of her belly, Ellen watched Challis drive away. She wished she could accompany him, help him face the super, but knew that was impossible. She shook herself and went to greet the crime-scene technicians.
For the next hour she supervised their search for prints, and then directed them to the tyre marks in Challis’s front lawn, watching them spray a fixing solution onto the muddy impressions first, before pouring the plaster.
‘I need to know if these match tracks found at other local burglaries,’ she said.
‘We’re on it, Sarge.’
She’d only just got back to the incident room when her mobile rang.
‘Sarge? It’s Pam Murphy.’
‘Hi. What’s up?’
Something about a crashed Toyota van, full of expensive gear, the driver legging it into a belt of trees. ‘I remembered that you and Scobie Sutton had been working on a series of burglaries.’
Did you indeed, Ellen thought. In anyone else the explanation would have seemed fawning, but Pam Murphy had a good memory and the habit of making connections. She’d make a good detective.
‘Are you sure the gear is stolen?’
‘Well, the driver did a runner, and there’s too much stuff: TV, DVD, digital cameras, jewellery, laptop.’
Ellen tingled. ‘You’re searching for the driver?’
‘Yes, Sarge.’
‘Stay there, I’m on my way.’
She collected Scobie Sutton and an unmarked car and set out for a corner of the map she’d never visited before. The Peninsula was endlessly variable, and here was the Devilbend Reservoir and remote houses set back from a winding dirt road.
‘It’s not as if she’s new,’ said Scobie Sutton as she drove.
Ellen guessed that he was talking about his goddamn daughter again. She’d heard about every cut, bruise, bowel movement, bad dream and spelling-test result. Roslyn Sutton was endlessly fascinating to her father. For Ellen, Challis and anyone else who worked with the man, the daughter had long become background noise. Ellen tried to pay attention. Today it was the child’s dancing classes. Irish traditional? Ellen tried to remember. Riverdance stuff? Scottish jigs and reels? Something like that.
‘She’s as good as any of the other kids, but year after year the medals and honour certificates go to those girls whose mothers help out with the costumes and makeup. It’s not fair, and she knows it’s not. She tries to be grown-up about it, but it hurts her, you can tell. She’d like some acknowledgment, just once.’
‘It’s important,’ Ellen said, thinking of her own daughter, nineteen now, sharing a house with other university students.
‘I mean, Beth and I are too busy to help out with costumes and stuff. Why should Ros be penalised for that?’
‘Exactly.’
A sudden roar and a helicopter flashed above them, low and straight.
‘Just follow the chopper,’ Scobie muttered.
Five minutes later they were at a scene of carnage. Ellen swallowed, feeling sick at heart. Blood, litres of it, had pooled dark as spilt oil across the road. A vet was administering a lethal injection to an injured horse, and a dead woman in full horse-riding jodhpurs, helmet and boots was being loaded into an ambulance. A wire fence had been torn open and deep tyre gouges scored the muddy surface of a paddock of grass and scattered apple trees, the remnants of an old orchard. Several police cars were parked on the verge, roof lights flashing. And there was the helicopter, hovering above an overgrown stand of trees at the far end of the paddock; closer to, one hundred metres inside the ruined fence, was an overturned van.
And there was her husband, questioning John Tankard, who was agitated and shaking his head. Pam Murphy stood watching them, biting her bottom lip.
Leaving Scobie to catch up on the details with Alan and Tankard, Ellen pulled on rubber boots and approached Pam, touching the younger woman’s forearm reassuringly. ‘Don’t worry about my husband. The accident squad has to get involved. But it was a clean chase, right?’
‘Yes, Sarge.’
‘Good, then there’s nothing to worry about. Has he talked to you yet?’
‘No.’
‘You’ll be fine. Now, show me.’
They waded through wet bracken, Ellen glancing across the paddock, which sloped gently up to the stand of trees. Dead gums predominated, dry skeletal arms reaching above shorter, denser pittosporums and wattles. ‘What’s that place?’ she said, pointing.
‘Myers Reserve, Sarge.’
The air was damp, laden with the odours of nature disturbed in the process of decaying. They walked on.
‘Sarge, mind your feet.’
They leapt over a small creek, murky water glinting beneath reeds, and came to the overturned Toyota. The rear doors had fallen open and Ellen peered inside. There, just as Pam had listed them, were several items that, on first impressions, matched items listed as stolen from Challis this morning and the Penzance Beach property yesterday. She went around to the front of the van and crouched at the broken windscreen. Laptop. She drew on latex gloves, reached in, and hooked it out.
‘Sarge?’
Challis’s Toshiba, complete with his initials scratched on the lid.
‘Bingo.’
‘Sarge?’
This was delicate. She needed to secure the laptop and return it to Challis; she didn’t need every cop on the Peninsula to know that his laptop, containing sensitive information, had been stolen. At the same time, she didn’t want to lie to Pam Murphy, or get her into trouble.
‘Pam, I’m giving you a receipt for this, okay? If there are any questions, refer them to me.’
‘Sarge, CIU’s in charge now anyway, you can do what you like.’
Ellen nodded. ‘This laptop was stolen this morning. It contains sensitive material.’ She hoped Pam hadn’t seen the initials, or twigged that they belonged to Challis.
‘Sure, Sarge, whatever you say.’
‘Good. Meanwhile we need the crime-scene people to dust the van for prints and make casts of the tyre tracks.’
‘Sarge.’
Just then a couple of brightly festooned highway patrol cars came screaming in, one of them skidding as it braked. ‘Only about thirty minutes behind everyone else,’ Pam muttered.
‘I’ll need details,’ Ellen said, as they returned to the road.
Pam described the incident at the Coolstores, the chase itself- ‘Strictly by the book, Sarge’-and then the Toyota clipping the horse and veering out of control through the fence.
‘Rolled and landed on its roof. Nothing we could do. Tank stopped to help the woman on the horse, I tried running after the driver, but he disappeared into the reserve.’
‘How long ago?’
‘Almost an hour. It took a while for everyone to get here.’
Ellen looked up. ‘So that chopper is probably wasting its time.’
She drew away, saying, ‘I need to make a call, be with you in a couple of minutes, okay?’
‘Sarge.’
Ellen flipped open her mobile and speed-dialled Challis.
Challis was at regional HQ in Frankston, tight and jittery in McQuarrie’s top floor corner office, when the call came. He fumbled for his mobile, murmuring, ‘Sorry, sir, I’d better take this.’
McQuarrie didn’t glance up but continued to employ an age-old boss’s tactic of frowning over documents with a pen and ignoring him.