50
Ellen parked two blocks away and cut through a side street that she recognised from a burglary she’d attended a month earlier. She stopped in the next street, her stomach fluttering with nerves, fluttering so badly that she thought she’d need to squat behind a bush and relieve herself. The air was still and very dark. She couldn’t see Challis’s car anywhere: maybe they hadn’t returned yet, or maybe they’d gone to his house. She burned with jealousy and shame.
She crossed to Tessa Kane’s house and heard voices, but there were no lights on inside, and so she went down the side of the house, feeling a little shabby about her motives now, ready to creep away again if she found proof that Challis and Kane had rekindled their affair.
There was a rainwater tank at the rear of her house and she barked her shins on the tap. She hobbled around in circles, silently screaming, and knew from the dampness that she’d broken the skin and blood had formed. She rounded the corner, limping and distracted, in time to hear the rattle of Kane’s gate and then see her, a bulky shape in the light spilling across the back gardens of the neighbouring houses. For some reason, Kane was hurrying towards the mangroves.
Something was wrong. Kane’s shadow split into two figures, then reformed, and Ellen read urgency in it. Then she heard a squawk, abruptly abbreviated.
Was the other figure Challis? Surely they weren’t headed into the mangroves to have sex?
The figures were hurrying now, full of noise and panic, and so Ellen was able to track them. ‘Hal? Tessa?’ she called. ‘Is that you?’
The figures paused, there was a flash and she heard a faint spitting sound. Something tugged at her coat sleeve. She’d been shot at. The coat was a burden suddenly. She shrugged it off, took out her gun, and stepped onto the spongy path edge, among the reeds and mangroves that would silence her footsteps and swallow her shape in the night. For good measure the gunman fired twice more and Ellen uttered a brief ‘Oh’ of pain. Her neck. A couple of centimetres to the left and she’d be choking on her own blood now. She fumbled for her handkerchief. Her hands shook. She tried to find her mobile and scarcely knew if she’d lost or forgotten it or if shock was closing her down.
Then Tessa Kane cried ‘Help me!’ and the man with her cursed, as if she’d torn free of his grasp.
Ellen cried ‘Run!’-but had she cried it? There was another muted shot and she ducked, her movements very slow now. She tried to straighten and go after the gunman but collapsed slowly onto the muddy ground where the shallow tidal water rose and spread in a primeval stink around her. She began to pat it like a child in a bath, looking for her gun and her phone.
There was the killer coming for her. Ellen tipped her head back to fix the man’s shape but the night was full of hazy shapes. She lifted her hand to say stop or to beg for help and discovered that her.38 was still there. It bucked once, numbing her fingers.
51
Challis had barely reached home when he got the call. Shocked and numb, he returned to Waterloo, examined the body on the boardwalk, barely choking back his feelings, then acted hard and fast. By midnight he and Scobie Sutton had Raymond Lowry and Robert McQuarrie in separate interview rooms. They were sleepy, bewildered, affronted, and hadn’t thought yet to ask for their lawyers, but that would change.
Lowry first.
‘Where were you between the hours of nine and ten this evening?’
Lowry yawned and blinked. ‘At home.’
‘Can anyone vouch for that?’
Lowry gave another yawn, huge and jaw-creaking. ‘Had a pizza delivered.’
‘When?’
‘Dunno. Some time.’
‘Any phone calls in or out? Visitors? Trips to the bottle shop?’
Lowry, unshaven and smelling strongly of alcohol, shook his head. ‘Must of fallen asleep watching TV.’
Scobie Sutton asked a Scobie Sutton question: ‘You were drinking?’
‘Yes.’
‘Heavily?’
‘I reckon. Look, what’s this about? I feel buggered, I need to get to bed.’
‘Tessa Kane questioned you after we released you on Friday,’ said Challis tightly.
‘That bitch. What’s she saying about me now?’
Challis tensed in the depressing and claustrophobic conditions of an interview room in the dead of night. Images of Tessa s slack body and face, streaked with tidal scum and blood, surfaced in his mind, and he struggled to keep his voice even. ‘You’ve been threatening her for some time now.’
Lowry’s glance flickered. ‘Don’t know what you mean.’
‘I think you do. Phone calls, hate mail, rocks through her windows, slashed tyres.’
‘Not me, no way.’
Scobie leaned across the table and its scratched initials, gouges and coffee rings, its calligraphy of despair. ‘You’ve had a grudge against Ms Kane for some time now.’
‘Everyone hates that bitch.’
‘Don’t call her a bitch,’ Challis said in a dangerous voice. He felt close to losing it.
Scobie shot him a warning look and opened a file. ‘Late last year Ms Kane ran a couple of articles about an outfit called Fathers First. Are you a member, Mr Lowry?’
‘So what if I am? I’m allowed.’
Challis chimed in heatedly. ‘Your wife sees a family therapist about the state of your marriage-the violent state of it, to be precise-and soon leaves you, taking the children with her. She gains sole custody of them. You join Fathers First, a motley crew of wife-beaters, given to threatening Family Court judges. Tessa Kane runs an article about you, implying that you’re pathetic. Later she hears that you’ve made threats against Janine McQuarrie, and asks you about that.’
He leaned back, arms wide as if to display the obvious. ‘Two strong women challenge you, and both wind up murdered.’
Lowry froze, his eyes darting, and he managed to swallow and squeak, ‘Both murdered? The newspaper bitch, too?’
‘Don’t call her that,’ snarled Challis. ‘She was shot dead this evening and we need to know how you’re involved.’
He still felt numb. Tessa hadn’t deserved to die like that, hadn’t deserved to die at all, and most of all hadn’t deserved to die when things were unfinished and strained between them. He felt that he’d let her down-just as he’d let his wife down. He’d failed to look after them and they’d died.
‘I was home all evening,’ spluttered Lowry. ‘Plus, I might have hated her but I didn’t want her dead. I mean, Christ.’
‘And one of my detectives was wounded, Ray,’ Challis said. ‘You know how we protect our own. We can get vengeful.’
Lowry shoved out his hands. ‘Test me for gunshot residue or whatever it is you do, if you don’t believe me.’
‘The thing is, you were at home, but what about your mates?’
‘I want a lawyer,’ Lowry said.
Their run at Robert McQuarrie barely got started.
‘I put Georgia to bed at eight, read to her for a while, then went to my study, which is where I was when your heavy-footed colleagues arrested me.’
‘You’re not under arrest, Robert.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said McQuarrie harshly, just helping with enquiries.’
‘Can anyone vouch for your presence this evening?’
‘My sister-in-law.’
‘Who is very protective of you and your daughter.’
‘I’m free to leave, yes? I’m not under arrest?’
‘Well,’ drawled Challis.
‘That’s what I thought. I decline to answer any more questions until my lawyer is present.’
‘Tessa Kane had obtained photographs of you at a sex party- copies of photographs taken by your wife, in fact. You feared that she would publish them and so had her shot dead this evening.’
Robert McQuarrie was sitting well back from the table, as if to avoid dirt and germs, but now he leaned forward with a flicker of interest, almost of hope and relief. But was Tessa Kane’s murder news to him, or had he ordered the hit and here was the confirmation he needed? ‘Shot? Tessa Kane?’