He reached Waterloo’s little hospital and parked beside a line of golden cypresses. The interior colours were pastelly pinks and greys, the air scented with lemon, the rooms and corridors flooded with natural light. Even so it was a cheerless place.
‘Mrs Humphreys?’ the receptionist said. ‘She’s being operated on this morning. No visitors until much later today.’
Challis returned to his car and called Ellen Destry. It was her morning off, but he needed officers to work the Bayside Counselling angle as soon as possible.
5
Detective Sergeant Ellen Destry had begun her half-day off with a walk on Penzance Beach with Pam Murphy, a senior constable who lived nearby and was also based at Waterloo. The fog had been dense and clammy around them, the foghorns distant and muffled as Pam had told Ellen about a local conservation group called the Bushrats that she’d recently joined. ‘We spend one Sunday morning a month clearing cape weed and pittosporum from roadsides and nature reserves,’ she said. ‘It’s fun, educational, the Shire helps out with tools and sprays, there’s even a newsletter. And we finish with a slap-up lunch.’
‘Sounds good,’ said Ellen neutrally.
On the surface, there were more differences than similarities between the two women. Where Ellen was forty, married and content to limit her exercise to a daily walk, Pam was twelve years younger, single and outdoorsy, an athlete. But Pam was tired of wearing a uniform and working as a patrol cop. She had shown investigative skills and initiative on a couple of important cases, so Ellen had taken the younger woman under her wing with a view to grooming her for plainclothes work. They were not exactly friends-the differences got in the way-but enjoyed walking and talking together when their schedules allowed it.
‘The next working bee’s in four weeks’ time,’ Pam said. ‘We’re clearing pittosporum in the north-west corner of Myers Reserve, if you’d like to come.’
‘Not my cup of tea,’ Ellen said. ‘Sorry.’
She was not as bad as Hal Challis, who’d once advised her, ‘Never join anything,’ but couldn’t comprehend people like Scobie Sutton and his wife, who joined everything from the school council to the pool of Meals on Wheels volunteers, or Pam, who belonged to four sporting clubs and was involving herself in the community. If pressed to join a club, Ellen would have said she was too busy, but in truth she’d never been asked and it had never occurred to her to join anything. As for the community, she kept it at a healthy remove.
They walked on, Ellen changing the subject. ‘How’s your new job?’
Pam shook her head ruefully. ‘It’s a bullshit gig, Sarge.’
It was an initiative of Senior Sergeant Kellock, and involved the Road Traffic Authority, Victoria Police and a few businesses with vague automotive connections. Pam and her partner were to tool around in a dinky little sports car for several weeks, rewarding courteous drivers with showbags that contained goods worth $150: a Melways street directory, a book of touring maps covering the entire continent, a BP fuel voucher, five McDonald’s coupons, a free wheel balance and alignment from Tyrepower, and a bumper sticker that read ‘Drive Safely and Live’.
‘Tell yourself it’s character building.’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Pam.
At the end of their walk, Ellen said, ‘Coffee?’
Pam looked briefly stricken, then rallied. ‘No thanks, Sarge,’ she said gracefully. ‘Stuff to do before my shift starts, you know.’
Ellen nodded, thinking: She doesn’t want to encounter Alan. Ellen’s husband liked to refer to Pam as ‘That pushy little uniform from down the road’ his contempt for her thinly veiled on the few occasions they’d met. He didn’t like his wife mentoring the younger woman.
They parted at the store and Ellen walked home. Home was a fibro-cement beach house on stilts. On the plus side it was two minutes’ walk from the beach and ten minutes’ drive from her CIU office in Waterloo, but it was also uninsulated and difficult to heat and keep warm. The mornings were the worst, and the late afternoons. She hated waking up in, or coming home to a cold house. And Ellen felt the cold, always had. Finally, she had no one to talk to, except her husband, Alan, and he was no comfort. Things had been better when their daughter had lived at home, but Larrayne was studying up in the city now.
Ellen entered the kitchen and found her husband at the kitchen table, in uniform, eating breakfast, wound hard with frustration and grievances. ‘Have you seen the power bill?’
She hadn’t. She’d dumped it unopened and forgotten in the little cane bowl beside the phone at the end of the kitchen bench, where all the bills and junk mail ended up. She poured muesli and soymilk into a bowl. ‘How much is it for?’
‘Only almost double what it was for the same period last year,’ Alan said.
He actually grabbed a fistful of bills and credit card statements and shook them at her. ‘With just the two of us living here I thought our costs would decrease,’ he said.
He was a solid man, close to being fleshy from all those hours spent sitting in a patrol car. He’d been transferred to the Accident Investigation Squad recently, but for many years before that had worked Traffic. He always tanned up a little over summer, looked healthier, but in winter his gingery fairness went a shade too pale, an unhealthy paleness. Not for the first time, Ellen wondered why she stayed with him, for theirs had long been a loveless marriage. And what did he get out of it? The sex was perfunctory, they didn’t nourish one another and they always bickered. It would be easy for them to separate, now that Larrayne no longer lived at home or depended on them.
But it would destroy him if she left. He’d be helpless and hopeless. That was no reason for staying with him, but it made the first step towards leaving him difficult.
He narrowed his pouchy eyes as she sat opposite him with her muesli and a mug of coffee. ‘Have you ever left the heater switched on during the day?’
She had, two or three or maybe a dozen times this winter. ‘No,’ she said emphatically.
‘Liar.’ Then he was doubtful. ‘Maybe it’s the meter, giving a false reading.’
‘It has been a cold winter so far,’ she said, and, as if to reinforce the observation, the foghorns boomed from Westernport Bay.
‘So?’
‘I think we should install central heating.’
‘We’ve been through this.’
We? There’s no ‘we’, Ellen thought. And if I’m serious about leaving him, why am I thinking about installing central heating? Is it because I’m assuming I’ll get the house? Whoa, she thought, you’re getting ahead of yourself.
‘Another thing,’ Alan said, ‘sometimes you sit there with the heater on and a window open. How stupid is that? It’s like trying to heat not only the room but also the rest of Australia.’
‘Central heating.’
‘No.’
A stupid, futile, demeaning squabble, symptomatic of her husband’s simple but dangerous failings and grievances, which boiled down to two things: he’d failed his sergeant’s exam, and his wife had been fast-tracked because she was a woman.
The phone rang and Alan sprang for it, listened, said curtly. ‘She’s got a morning off, sorry,’ and banged the handset down.
‘Who was it?’
‘Challis.’
‘Jesus, Alan.’
Ellen picked up the phone and dialled Challis’s mobile. ‘Hal, I’m sorry-’
He cut her off, telling her that the super’s daughter-in-law had been murdered and outlining the circumstances. ‘I’ll set up an incident room and brief everyone at lunchtime. Meanwhile I need you to sniff around Bayside Counselling: get a feel for Janine McQuarrie and the people she worked with, see if her diary or calendar tell you anything about her movements today.’
‘I’ll take Scobie with me.’
‘If he’s finished in court.’