‘Then we’ll sell the house and you can have my share.’
‘No, Hal. Equal shares.’
‘I had a word with the real estate agent. It’s worth about $175,000, but he said potential buyers are thin on the ground. People are leaving the district, not flocking into it.’
‘We might have better luck finding tenants,’ Meg said. ‘The married housing on the sheep stations around here is pretty basic.’
Challis remembered Meg’s words when Lisa Joyce came to see him late afternoon. He ushered her through to the kitchen, saying, ‘You and Rex don’t want to buy this place for your stud manager, do you?’
Lisa gazed around her. He began to see how shabby everything was. ‘Not right now, Hal,’ she said, smiling kindly as though he’d made a brave joke. ‘I was really sorry to hear about your dad. He was a lovely guy.’
Challis doubted that Lisa had spent more than five minutes with Murray Challis in her life, but he appreciated the compliment. ‘Thanks.’
She said, with a hint of stronger feelings, ‘I suppose you’ll go back to Victoria pretty soon.’
How to answer that? He was feeling the little disturbances he’d always felt when he was around her. ‘There’s a lot to do,’ he said lamely.
Her fingers lingered on his wrist as she went out. It was affection, commiseration and the gesture of a woman who had an unconscious excess of sexual energy.
He was bucked up to hear Ellen Destry’s voice that evening, the kindness and affection flowing from her, but shocked to hear that Kees van Alphen had been shot dead. ‘I should come back,’ he said.
‘You can’t, Hal. Bury your father.’
‘But-’
‘You’re better off out of it. It’s become a feeding frenzy for the media. McQuarrie keeps popping up in front of the cameras. And any minute now, we’re going to have a team from Melbourne down here, crawling all over us. Stay away, Hal-not that I don’t wish you were here.’
‘I wish I was there, too.’
The pause was awkward. It rang with implications.
49
On Wednesday morning Pete Duyker was released on police bail. Ellen had charged him with fraud, knowing nothing else would stick. She didn’t like it, and, with Scobie Sutton, stood outside the police station, watching Sam Lock usher Duyker into his car. Lock gave them a complicated smile. Complicated, Ellen thought, because the lawyer side of him had not seen more serious charges laid against his client, and the father-of-young-children side of him was afraid that he was aiding a paedophile.
Meanwhile, van Alphen’s will-o-the-wisp evidence had been thoroughly discredited. She sighed and turned away, overwhelmed. She wanted to find van Alphen’s killer, she wanted to put Duyker away, and she wanted to console Hal Chains.
Scobie Sutton was saying something, one hand shading his eyes against the sun. Masses of rain yesterday, masses of sunshine today. She forced herself to concentrate, and heard him say, ‘Everything’s clean, including his computer.’
‘Maybe he wasn’t involved in the abduction,’ Ellen replied, ‘or someone else borrowed his van, but I bet he was at the house, I bet he made videos or took photos.’
Scobie nodded. They stood there glumly, the spring air mild and scented, imagining how the case would have played out if Katie hadn’t been found but killed by Duyker and her body disposed of.
‘Back to work,’ Ellen said, and they re-entered the station. ‘Talk to the vice squad and missing persons. We might be able to match faces in recent kiddie porn with those of children who have gone missing or been abducted or found murdered in recent years. We might also find visual clues that help identify the men involved, men like Clode and Duyker.’
‘But they’d sell that stuff to Asia, Europe or the States.’
‘It’s global, Scobie.’
They passed the Victim Suite. The door was open, the room empty. ‘Think we’ll see Billy again?’
Ellen shook her head. ‘He’s long gone. He’s either on the other side of the continent, running scared, or he’s been paid off, or he’s dead.’
‘Has he got a record?’
Ellen had searched the databases. ‘No.’
They continued on to CIU. ‘Have the shooting board officers finished with you, Scobie?’
He gave her a hunted look. ‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘It will go on my record, failure to follow correct procedure.’
‘What will their report say? They can’t do anything about van Alphen now, but will take action against Kellock?’
Scobie said irritably, ‘I don’t know, Ellen, all right? I’m not privy to their findings.’
‘Scobie, I don’t want any messing up of forensics in regard to the Blasko investigation.’
‘You don’t have to talk to me like that,’ Scobie said chokingly, and he stalked off. When she reached CIU, he was muttering covertly on the telephone.
She’d scarcely made a start on the paperwork cluttering her desk when Superintendent McQuarrie called. ‘I hear you let our cop killer go.’
This aroused conflicting emotions in Ellen. She twirled in her chair, the phone held to her ear. McQuarrie was too neat and precise a man to use the term ‘cop killer’. He was trying out the phrase, trying to sound tough or ingratiate himself. Also, his tone was accusatory. Did he ever praise? Would he ever praise her? Had he ever praised Hal Challis? Finally, the man had spies and cronies everywhere. She couldn’t blame Kellock: it was his job to keep his superiors abreast of things. Still, McQuarrie’s tone was reminding her yet again that the police force was made up of many wheels. Her own was small and barely revolved, it seemed to her. It didn’t exist within, or intersect with, the wheels that mattered.
‘Sir, we didn’t have enough evidence to hold Mr Jarrett.’
‘Gunshot residue?’
‘None.’
‘Then someone from his appalling family carried it out.’
‘They all have alibis, sir.’
‘Good ones?’
‘Yes, sir.’
She was tired of calling him ‘sir’.
‘Jarrett could have washed off the GSR. How’s his alibi?’
‘Solid, sir. We have a witness who heard a shot at eleven o’clock last night and…’
‘This fine, upstanding person didn’t think to report it?’
‘Sir, it’s the estate. At the time Sergeant van Alphen was shot, Laurie Jarrett’s daughter was being examined by a doctor and a nurse in Casualty at the Waterloo hospital. Laurie was with her the whole time. It checks out.’
‘Convenient. What about Jarrett’s wife, the kid’s mother?’
‘She’s in a drug rehab clinic in Perth, heroin addiction, court ordered after she was arrested for burglary and shoplifting offences.’
‘Divorced? Separated?’
‘Never married. She left home when Alysha was born.’
‘Making Laurie a heroic single dad,’ snarled McQuarrie. ‘It makes me sick.’
She suspected he meant the loose family arrangements you found these days. She felt like reminding him that his own family wasn’t squeaky clean, that his own son had taken part in suburban sex parties-then reflected sourly that sex parties were probably seen as an acceptable aberration of the upper classes, whereas children born out of wedlock to addicts was seen as a condemnatory characteristic of the lower classes.
She cast her mind back to her interrogation with Laurie Jarrett. Deciding against a lawyer, he’d opened up finally, seeming almost genial. For the first time, Ellen glimpsed what it was like for him. He was an old-style crim, who didn’t use or condone drugs. He stole to make money, an income, not to feed a drug habit, unlike his sons, cousins, nephews, de facto…He was loyal to his family, bailed them out, but sometimes that love must have been sorely tested.
‘He still could have ordered the hit,’ McQuarrie was saying now.
‘Ordered the hit’ was another expression that sat oddly in the super. ‘We’ll keep checking, sir.’