They both looked up at the sound of an aero engine. She saw the lowering sun flash on the fuselage. Challis shaded his eyes. ‘Desoutter II, three seater high-wing monoplane,’ he said automatically. ‘Found in a playground in Tasmania four years ago.’
‘Is that a fact.’
He grinned shyly, as if caught out in something. ‘I helped to restore it.’
Her gaze settled on him.
When Ellen got back to the station car park, she checked that her initials, and those of the forensic technician, were etched into the plaster tyre and footprint casts, and was unloading them from the rear of the forensic van when Rhys Hartnett said, behind her, ‘Sergeant Destry?’
She pulled bin liners over the casts hastily and turned around to face him. He was standing there, the setting sun behind him, coiling electrical flex between elbow and hand. It was an automatic but neatly articulated process, and it got under her skin. There was something about men who worked with their hands. She seemed to float on her toes. ‘Call me Ellen.’
He bobbed his neat head shyly. ‘Call me Rhys. Look, I could come to inspect your house on Saturday, if you like.’
‘Are you sure? That’s only two days before Christmas.’
‘I’m sure. I’m working right through, apart from Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. I take my summer break in February, when the schools go back.’
‘Wise man,’ Ellen said. ‘How about late morning, around twelve?’
‘Fine.’
Danny Holsinger waited until seven-thirty in the evening before going to the police station. The chick who’d arrested him said she was on duty until eight, and he didn’t want to talk to anyone else about Boyd Jolic. She was nice. But first he had a pizza, extra thick, in Pizza Hut, sitting in the window where he could watch the cops come and go on the other side of the roundabout. He felt jumpy. After that Nunn bitch had taken him home earlier, calling him a moron, he’d gone straight around to Megan’s place and given her the backpack. Sort of getting rid of evidence, even though the backpack hadn’t been lifted from the old lady’s house but from a house he’d robbed last week. ‘Happy birthday, Meeg,’ he’d said.
‘Sorry it’s so late,’ and she’d smelt the leather and gone all soppy over him and they’d had a quick one on her bed, so that was all right.
But then he’d gone home again and Boyd Jolic had rung, reminding him that his help was expected on a break-and-enter soon. ‘I don’t want you forgetting, Danny, or pissing off on me.’ Danny’s position now was, he needed help of his own.
He gathered himself, walked across the road, reached the door and chickened out. Boyd Jolic had a longer reach than the law did. Even if the law put Jolic away, he had mates who knew where Danny lived.
Seven
The next morning, Challis read the Progress while Scobie Sutton drove. Tessa Kane had splashed the killer’s letter all over the front page. Soon the metropolitan dailies would pick up the story, and meanwhile McQuarrie had left messages, asking for an explanation. All this on top of a bad night for Challis, the image of Jane Gideon’s parents staying with him through the long hours. Better to spend the morning away from the station. ‘She says to me, “Eat your munch, Daddy. Sit up prop-ly and eat your munch.”‘
Challis worked a smile onto his face. ‘“Munch.” I like that.’
‘But where did she get it from, boss? Not me and Beth. Childcare, that’s where.’
‘I expect you’re right.’
‘I mean, they’re like a sponge, that age. Absorb everything.’ Scobie fell gloomy. ‘The good and the bad.’
‘I suppose it’s up to the parents to provide most of the good and counteract the bad,’ Challis said, for something to say, but wondering if he believed it. Look at his own wife. Fine, upright family background, and look what happens. She falls in lust-her explanation. ‘Hal, I fell in lust, I couldn’t help it, I had to have him and he had to have me.’ Sure, but you didn’t have to kill me to achieve it.
‘Which way, boss?’
Challis blinked. ‘Quite a way yet. Up near where I live.’
‘How long you been there now?’
‘A few years. You’ve got a place in Mornington, right?’
Sutton nodded. ‘But thinking of moving. With all the new housing, you know, house-and-land packages, cheap deals, newlyweds and welfare cheats and what have you living in each other’s pockets, the place is changing. No way I’ll send my kid to the local primary schools. You don’t know of any Montessori schools?’
‘Sorry, no.’
‘I forgot, you didn’t have kids,’ Sutton said, then fell silent, embarrassed.
He’s heard the stories, Challis thought. ‘How’s your daughter coping with crиche? Still kicking up a fuss in the mornings?’
Sutton shrugged. ‘So-so. But tomorrow’s the last day for the year, and they’re having a party at the Centre, so she’s looking forward to that.’
The days were sweeping by. Tomorrow was the twenty-second. Christmas day was Monday. Challis squirmed in his seat. He wasn’t ready.
He spotted the turn off. ‘Next left, then follow the road for about two k’s.’
Sutton took them on to a badly corrugated dirt road, then over a one-lane wooden bridge. ‘Sheepwash Creek,’ he read aloud. ‘God, the names.’
Challis was fond of the old names. They were a map of the Peninsula in the nineteenth century. Blacks Camp Road. Tarpot Corner. He said, ‘They washed sheep here in the old days, to prepare them for shearing.’
‘No kidding,’ Sutton said absently, and Challis knew that the man was thinking of his daughter again. It was as if having a child destroyed your sense of time’s continuum. Time was reduced to the present and nothing else.
‘Somewhere along here,’ he said. ‘Look for the name Saltmarsh on a mailbox or fence railing.’
They drove for a further kilometre before they found it, a mailbox hand-lettered with the words M. Saltmarsh. They turned in and saw a small red-brick veneer house with a tiled roof. Behind it sat a modern barn, the doors open, revealing a tractor, a battered Land Cruiser, coils of rope, bike parts, wooden pallets, machinery tools and dusty crates crammed with one-day useful bits and pieces-chain links, cogs, pulley wheels, radiator hoses and clamps. A rusted truck chassis sat in long grass next to the barn. Hens pecked in the dust beneath a row of peppercorns. The apples in the adjacent orchard were still small and green. A dog barked, and beat its tail in the oily dirt, but failed to get up for them.
‘She’s a bit on the tired side,’ Sutton said, meaning the farm and whoever farmed it.
‘The Saltmarshs are old Peninsula,’ Challis explained. ‘Been here for generations, scratching a living out of a few acres of old apple trees. Two brothers and their families, on adjoining farms. Both brothers have other jobs to get by. Ken here works part time for the steel fabricator in Waterloo. Mike next door drives a school bus.’
‘Poor white trash.’
Challis thought of the two teenage boys, Saltmarsh cousins, whom he’d seen walking along with their fishing rods the previous morning. How far was that image from the poor South of American film and literature? He finally said, ‘No, not poor white trash. Poor, but steady, and decent.’
Maureen Saltmarsh came to the door. She was large, sun-dried and floury, smelling of the kitchen and the morning’s early heat. She wasn’t inclined to suspect them of anything, but smiled and said immediately, ‘Me husband’s not home. Did in the big end on his truck.’ The smile disappeared. ‘You’re that inspector.’
‘Hal Challis, Mrs Saltmarsh. And this is Detective Constable Sutton. We want to talk to your oldest boy, and his cousin.’
‘Brett and Luke? Why, what they done?’
‘I just need to talk to them. I’m more than happy for you to be present.’
She was losing a little of her control. Her hand went to her throat. ‘They’re in watching TV. You know, school holidays.’