Now, with Larrayne living in the city, Ellen felt a sense of loss. Larrayne seemed to lurk in the corners of the house, the corners of Ellen’s gaze. Ellen’s widowed mother had suffered the same thing: ‘I keep catching glimpses of your dad,’ she’d say. ‘Not his ghost, I don’t mean that. The particular way he held the newspaper or walked through a door or put the dishes away.’ Well, Ellen kept glimpsing Larrayne here and there, and even missed those quirks of Larrayne’s that had driven her nuts at the time, like the way she would never stay put when cleaning her teeth but wander out of the bathroom and up and down the hall and in and out of rooms, electric toothbrush buzzing in the corner of her mouth.
Ellen picked at her food, seeing the dead horse and rider, the overturned van. Was Larrayne very vulnerable now?-away from home for the first time; drugs everywhere; evening lectures and a long walk home across a shadowy campus and down dark streets; getting attached to an axe murderer disguised as Mr Right; or even getting her heart broken, which was bound to happen sooner or later.
And so she phoned, several times. No answer. Larrayne, and her housemates, were out.
For the evening? The whole night?
Where?
Doing what?
With whom?
The old who, what, where, when and why of police work.
And all the while she was trying to tell herself that she would leave her husband on her own terms and not because Challis existed.
40
Challis spent most of Friday morning in CIU. It was proving to be difficult to get fast or accurate information from Witsec or the New South Wales prison service. Meanwhile, according to the findings of the DCs on loan from Mornington, Hayden Coulter was guilty of no more than massaging the books of his clients. Nothing solid tied him-or any of the other men in the photographs-to Janine McQuarrie’s murder. Several people, including a racehorse owner, a trainer and a groom, alibied Coulter; various secretaries, receptionists and work colleagues alibied the other men. Finally, the investigation had not turned up a secret lover for Janine, and Challis could only suppose that she’d seemed happy to Meg because she’d thought of a way to stick it to her husband. The anonymous caller hadn’t called back.
He checked with Scobie Sutton, who was manipulating the images stored on Janine’s mobile phone into simple head-and-shoulders shots of Coulter, the surgeon and the funds manager, and which Challis would later show to Georgia McQuarrie. Scobie was hunched in front of his monitor, his whole body revealing distaste for the task, as though he feared he’d be soiled. Not for the first time, Challis wondered if the man was too sensitive and moralistic for the job. He said nothing and returned to his cubicle, wondering how Ellen was doing. She was out, following up on forensic evidence found at the murder and accident scenes, and talking to anyone who might have met or seen Christina Traynor.
Challis poured another mug of coffee and turned on his radio for the 10 a.m. news. First up was another young Australian arrested for attempting to smuggle heroin out of Indonesia, followed by an account of yesterday’s inquest, in which a Navy public relations officer, responding to a question regarding cadets and drug abuse, said that the Navy’s position was one of ‘zero tolerance’. Challis’s mind drifted. What would his parents make of the story? He often found himself measuring the world against them. He was the late-in-life child of a father who’d been a World War II RAAF navigator and a mother who’d been an Army nurse. Not much drug use back then, he didn’t suppose, apart from alcohol and tobacco-and a bit of cocaine and heroin amongst inner-city bohemians. The two world wars had also established a simple set of values: Australians were defined as brave, practical, resourceful, egalitarian, clean-living and loyal to their mates. Conservative governments and the popular press continued to hold that view, but Challis thought that things had changed. Bravery, loyalty, egalitarianism, patriotism and a fine young mind in a fine young body were media images trotted out to suit sixty-five-year-old politicians, sports commentators and shock-jock talkback radio hosts who kept one eye on their ratings and another on their sponsors’ kickbacks. Outmoded, irrelevant concepts that bore little relation to the real world. Drugs belonged now; the old Australia didn’t. Drugs had made crime more prevalent, vicious and unpredictable, too, making Challis’s job harder, but no one wanted to know about that.
When the walls seemed to close in on him he returned to the open space of the incident room with the McQuarrie file and sat and stared at a wall map of the area. The killers could have driven to Mrs Humphreys’s house from anywhere on the Peninsula-or further afield.
Feeling Georgia’s sombre gaze on him then, he took out her sketches and arranged them side by side, trying to think his way into her skin: her vantage point, what she’d seen, what she couldn’t have seen, what she might have invented. Her representations of the crime-scene seemed to be truthful if rudimentary. She’d not shown the shooter as a monster but a man with dark glasses, a coat, and a thin face. The driver had a round face and a shaven head, and she’d shown his arm hanging lazily out of the driver’s side window.
Challis stared at that arm. Georgia’s sense of perspective was skewed but her pen strokes were generally clean and precise, which didn’t explain the lumpy appearance of the hand. He picked up the phone.
By late morning he was knocking on Robert McQuarrie’s door in Mount Eliza. McQuarrie himself answered, demanding, with a red face, ‘What do you want?’
Challis had assumed the man would be at work. ‘I need a quick word with Georgia. I cleared it with Meg.’
‘Well, she should have cleared it with me. My daughter’s grieving, you know.’
‘I must talk to her, Robert.’
Again the guy flinched at the use of his first name, and glared at Challis. ‘You think I did it, don’t you.’
It was a statement, not a question. ‘Did you?’
‘Absolutely not.’
Challis regarded him. ‘Then you have nothing to worry about.’
With a kind of sob, Robert McQuarrie said, ‘You showed my father the photos, you bastard.’
‘It couldn’t be avoided.’
‘You’re a shit, you know that? Am I going to see myself in the Progress? Have you been flashing copies around?’
‘Dad?’
It was Georgia, peering around at Challis from behind her father’s legs. She wore a pink tracksuit and her hair had been freshly washed. Challis put his hands on his knees. ‘Hi there.’
‘Have you come to see me?’
‘I have indeed.’
‘I’m in the kitchen.’
McQuarrie, his face suffused with anger, stood back to let Challis enter. Challis followed Georgia to the kitchen, where she promptly sat at the table, a hot milk drink and half a honey pikelet on a plate at her elbow. Meg stood beside her, glancing nervously past Challis to the hallway. Challis turned his head: Robert McQuarrie stood there, and the moment extended, full of tension. Then McQuarrie turned irritably and stalked away down the hall.
Challis swung his gaze back to Meg and grinned. She returned it meekly and began to fill the kettle at the sink.
Georgia, munching the rest of her pikelet, said, ‘I think I might go back to school next week. Do you think that’s a good idea?’
Challis glanced at Meg helplessly, then smiled at Georgia. ‘I think that sounds like a very good idea. Do you miss your friends?’
‘Uh-huh,’ Georgia said.
‘Are you up to answering a few more questions for me?’