He shook his head. He’d promised years ago that he wouldn’t. Their father being such a difficult person, one simply knew not to tell him everything. But now Challis was curious about Meg’s motives. ‘Is there a reason why you told Mum but not him?’
‘You know what he’s like. He wanted me to stick around and marry and have kids, but didn’t want me to marry Gavin. It gave him a sense of satisfaction to believe Gavin had committed suicide. Confirmed what he thought of Gavin. But if he’d known Gavin was still alive, and taunting me, I’d never have heard the end of it.’
Challis gave a hollow laugh of recognition. They were silent for a while. Meg said, ‘Rob Minchin is still sweet on me, you know.’
Rob Minchin was the local doctor, and one of Challis’s boyhood friends. ‘And?’
‘And nothing. He calls in to check on Dad, and that’s about it.’
‘I remember he was pretty jealous of Gavin.’
‘Rob in the grip of passion,’ said Meg, shaking her head.
They stared at the tabletop, too settled to move. Their father snored gently. Soon they would put him to bed, Meg would go home, and Challis would toss sleeplessly on his childhood mattress.
14
Bucketing rains came through overnight, preceded by thunder and lightning that seemed to mutter around the fringes of the horizon, then approach and encircle the house where Ellen Destry slept, and retreat again. Dawn broke still and balmy, the skies clear, as though nothing had happened. Spring in southeastern Australia, Ellen thought, glancing out of Challis’s bedroom window. The bedside clock was flashing, indicating that the power had gone off during the night. She glanced at her watch-6 am-and went around the house, resetting the digital clocks on the microwave, the oven, the DVD player. Then, pulling on a tracksuit and old pair of Reeboks, she set out for her morning walk.
And immediately returned. Rainwater had come storming down the dirt road and roadside ditches outside Challis’s front gate, carrying pine needles, bark, gravel and sand, which had formed a plug in the concrete stormwater pipe that ran under his gateway. The ditch had overflowed, scoring a ragged channel across the entrance. She should do something about it before the channel got too deep.
Hal had told her the grass would need mowing regularly. He hadn’t told her what a storm could do.
In his garden shed she found a fork, a five-metre length of stiff, black poly agricultural pipe, and a long-handled shovel. She hoisted them over one shoulder and returned to the front gate. There were signs of the overnight storm all about her: twigs, branches, ribbons of bark and birds’ nests littered the road; water-laden foliage bent to the ground; the air seemed to zing with promise.
Ellen forked and poked at the blocked pipe, shovelled and prodded. Suddenly, with a great, gurgling rush, the stopper of matted leaves and mud washed free and drain water flowed unchecked toward the…
Toward the sea? Ellen realised that she knew very little about life out here on the back roads.
Finally she walked. She passed a little apple orchard, the trees heavy with blossom despite the storm. Onion weed, limp and yellowing at the end of its short life, lay densely on both sides of the road, and choking the fences was chest-high grass, going to seed. Sometimes her feet slipped treacherously where the dusty road had turned to mud. The blackberry bushes were sending out wicked new canes and the bracken was flourishing. Now and then she passed through air currents that didn’t smell clean and new but heavy with the odours of rotting vegetation and stale mud revitalised by the rain. Everything;-the sounds, the smells, the textures-served to remind her of Katie Blasko, abandoned, buried, merging with the soil.
She walked slowly up the hill, stunned to see huge cylinders of hay in one of the paddocks, freshly mown and wrapped in pale green polythene. When had that happened? She rarely saw or heard vehicles, and yet here was evidence of the world going on without her.
Without warning she heard a sharp snap and felt a stunning pain in her scalp. Her heart jumped and she cried out in terror. Only a magpie, she realised soon afterwards, swooping her because it had a nest nearby-but she’d hated and feared magpies ever since a long-ago spring day when she’d been pecked and harried across a football field as she’d taken a short cut home from school on her bicycle. Magpies sang like angels but were the devil.
Windmilling her arms wildly about her head, and trying to make eye contact with her tormentor, Ellen trotted home. She missed her morning walks on Penzance Beach with Pam Murphy, where the world was reduced to the sand, the sea, the sky and a few gulls. Out here on the back roads there was too much nature. All around her ducks sat like knuckly growths on the bare branches of dead gums, and other birds were busy, calling out, making nests, protecting their young, and in the paddocks ibis were feeding. A strip of bark fell on her, scratching her neck. Challis’s ducklings were down to six, she noticed, as she entered his yard, and she wanted to cry.
At nine that same Sunday morning, Scobie Sutton was at the little Waterloo hospital. He was entitled to a day at home with his wife and daughter, a quiet time, church and Sunday School, a spot of gardening after lunch, but the station was short staffed. He’d be working the Katie Blasko case later-and it was a ‘case’ in Scobie’s mind: his own daughter was Katie’s age, and if she went missing for even thirty minutes he’d be calling it a case-but right now he was the only CIU detective available to interview the victim of an aggravated burglary.
‘How are you feeling, Mr Clode?’
‘I’ll live,’ Neville Clode said.
Extensive bruising to the head and torso, a cut lip, cracked ribs. Clode was swaddled in bandages and lying very still in the bland, pastelly room. The place was overheated and so he’d thrown off the covers, revealing skinny legs and the ugliest feet that Scobie had ever seen: yellowed nails and a blotchy birthmark. No flowers, fruit or books. I’m possibly his first visitor, Scobie thought. ‘You took quite a beating last night.’
The voice came in a strained whisper, ‘Yes.’
‘Did you recognise the men who attacked you?’
‘No.’
‘Do you know if they took anything?’
‘Cash,’ whispered Clode.
‘Cash. Do you know how much?’
‘Six…seven hundred dollars.’
Scobie whistled. It was a lot. It would also grow when Clode submitted his insurance claim. ‘Do you always have that much cash on you?’
‘Won it at the horses yesterday. Emu Plains.’
It was the spring racing carnival everywhere, metropolitan racetracks and regional, including Emu Plains on Coolart Road, just a few kilometres from Waterloo. No security cameras, though. ‘Do you think you were followed home from the track?’
‘Could have been.’
‘Were you alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘And nothing else was stolen?’
‘No.’
Clode hadn’t once made eye contact but stared past Scobie at the TV set bolted high on the wall, so high it was a wonder hospitals didn’t get sued for encouraging neck strain in their patients. Scobie dragged the visitor’s chair around; Clode slid his eyes to the beige door. Scobie said gently, ‘Are you telling me everything, Mr Clode? Was this personal? Did you owe money to anyone? Is there anyone who would want to hurt you?’
Scobie had visited the crime scene before coming to the hospital. Clode lived in a brick house along a secluded lane opposite the Seaview Park estate. Like its neighbours, it was comfortably large and barely visible from the road, a low, sprawling structure about ten years old, the kind of place where well-heeled tradesmen, teachers and shop owners might live, on largish blocks, screened by vigorous young gum trees, wattles and other native plants. Residents like Clode were several steps up from the battlers of Seaview Park estate, and several steps down from the doctors and real estate agents who lived in another nearby enclave, Waterloo Hill, which overlooked the town and the Bay. Clode himself was some kind of New Age healer, according to a sign on a post outside his house.