Challis wasn’t about to confirm or deny. ‘I need to see the copies you were sent. We need to check them, and the envelope, for prints. Was there also a letter?’
‘Yes. But whoever sent it wouldn’t have left prints.’
‘Even so,’ Challis said.
‘You think it was the killer? I thought it might be a cop.’
‘No.’
Tessa sighed. ‘I’ll make copies for you.’
‘What did the letter say?’
‘It referred to the article on sex parties, and said that for a fee of $5000 I’d learn who the men in the photos were and the circumstances in which the photos were found. The others received blackmail demands, right? The guy’s trying to make as much money from the photos as possible.’
‘Normally I don’t care what you print,’ Challis said, ‘but if you publish those photos, or even allude to them, you’ll jeopardise the investigation.’
Tessa toyed with the food on her plate. ‘Was Janine McQuarrie into the sex party scene?’
‘You know I can’t tell you that.’
‘The family’s not going to like what I’ve written about her in tomorrow’s edition.’
‘Like what?’
‘Janine was a poor therapist, she rubbed people up the wrong way, she enjoyed challenging men and accusing them of being abusive, and she kept inadequate records. In other words, she might have had enemies.’
Challis gave her a rueful shrug. ‘That about covers it.’
‘I need a big story,’ she said, ‘before I finish.’
‘What about Mead and the detention centre?’
She shook her head and twirled her fork in a tangle of tagliatelle. ‘That fizzled out.’ She paused. ‘He warned me off, you know, because I went to see his wife.’
Challis gave her a crooked smile. ‘I met Lottie at a function once. She didn’t strike me as the communicative type.’
‘Correct.’
‘Look, Tess, will you publish the photos, or mention them?’
She scowled. ‘I might, when it’s all over.’
Challis wanted to help her. But he couldn’t point her in the direction of anyone yet, not even Anton and Laura Wavell, not while they, and their party guests, were potentially implicated in Janine McQuarries murder. If Tessa talked to them now, they’d very likely clam up to her and the police, speak only through a lawyer, and feel betrayed. And so he murmured something that meant nothing and within thirty minutes he was driving her back to Waterloo, the heater of the Triumph not working and the windscreen fogging up, obliging him to turn on the air-conditioning to clear it, obliging Tessa to burrow herself into her coat and her scarf and her gloves and scarcely trust herself to speak to him. ‘What is it with the heaters in old British cars,’ she said when they reached the kerb outside her house.
Said lightly, to mask her pain and let him off the hook, he supposed. He decided to take the question literally. ‘They need time to warm up.’
‘Some never do,’ she said pointedly, getting out.
He watched her cross the footpath and approach her front door, bulky in her overcoat, her hair trapped in black folds by the turned-up collar. He knew that on the other side of the door she’d shed the coat and transform herself into someone slender and purposeful, but right now she looked cold, tired and burdened. He didn’t watch her go in but sped off, the exhaust of his car booming down the street.
No shooting, this time, according to orders. This one had to look like an accident. So Vyner was going for a drowning in the mangrove swamp at the rear of the target’s house. A pity: a shooting is quick and relatively clean. By the same token, if he shot her he’d have to get himself another pistol, and his Navy source was no good to him any more.
He had his third and last Browning with him, though, just in case.
8.45. 9.00. At 9.20 Tessa Kane appeared under the light outside the entrance to the restaurant, coat on, collar up, shoulders hunched, waiting for the boyfriend. Hello, trouble in paradise? The body language was spelling out tension. Vyner watched them walk to the boyfriend’s junky car, and five minutes later he was following them back to Waterloo.
Yep, trouble in paradise. Instead of spending the night, the boyfriend dropped her off outside her house and drove away. The target let herself into her house, and Vyner was right there behind her.
Behind her neat behind.
49
The darkness was fully settled, an evening full of mist and hazy shapes, the crisp air laden with the stew of odours from the mangroves. Tessa, unlocking her front door, was thinking only about Hal Challis and why she should accede to his request not to pursue Robert McQuarrie and the sex party angle. She removed the key, stepped into her front hallway, and something punched her hard in the back, propelling her onto her knees. She heard the door slam. Someone straddled her; he smelt of the chilly blackness outside and of sweaty agitation. His fingers were twisted cruelly in her hair, jerking her head back. Then the tip of something long and metallic, creepily warm from his body, was grinding under the hinge of her jaw.
A gun, she realised, fitted with a silencer.
‘Not a sound, bitch, okay?’
She choked her assent.
He kept pulling on her hair, stepping back, pulling her upright, the object on the end of the gun barrel travelling down her spine now, probing between her buttocks. ‘You want this? I’ll give it to you, you give me any grief, okay, bitch?’
The words were banal, but the heat behind them, and the man’s turmoil and disorder, the rankness of his body, made her limp.
‘Stand up.’
She tried to straighten her back, strengthen her knees. She said what she assumed everyone said: ‘Please don’t hurt me.’
‘Shut up!’
‘What do you want?’
He probed deeper with the gun. ‘What did I just say? Shut up.’
She complied.
His free hand snaked around to her stomach and indifferently explored her breasts and groin. It was a gloved hand. It parodied foreplay and she felt herself floating free, observing things from a great distance. She turned her head, glimpsing a dark coat, a dark woollen cap and narrow features, but his thick black leather fingers pinched a tuft of her pubic hair and pulled hard. ‘Eyes front.’
She averted her gaze, looked down her cold, unlit hallway.
‘Move.’
‘Where?’
‘Shut up. Back door.’
He followed hard on her heels, one hand clasping the hair at the back of her head, the other pressing the gun against her coccyx, propelling her through to the back door.
‘Open it.’
She tried to sort and assess her impressions of him. Wiry build, thin face, dark clothing, about her height, a harsh voice full of strain. She’d never identify him outside of this particular conjunction of time, place and circumstances.
Then they were through the back door and crossing her sodden lawn to the gate at the rear of the garden. Her mind raced. He was going to kill her out on the mudflats and dump her in a drainage channel. There were stagnant pools out there, covered in scum. She’d never be found and the fish and birds would strip her to the bone.
‘Which one hired you? Lowry or Robert McQuarrie?’
‘Shut up.’
He shoved and she stumbled. He jerked back hard, her hair coming out in his hand. Grass and bracken trailed wetly over her shoes and pants. Behind her he cursed softly.
‘Who are you?’
‘Shut up.’
She turned her head slightly. Up and down the fence line were the back walls of her neighbours, lights here and there: laundries, kitchens, porches, loos. She could hear ‘Extreme Makeover’ at full volume.
‘Is it something I published?’
This time he slammed the gun against her temple and the pain was blinding. She began to cry. He’d destroyed her nerve and she had to cry.
‘Stop snivelling.’
Now they’d met the serpentine path through the wetland: the raised gravel bed, the little treated pine bridges, the boardwalk itself. Tessa knew that Challis liked to walk here; she’d never seen the appeal of it. Then, curiously, someone was calling her name. Not Challis, but someone close to him.