Challis cocked his head at her.
'Dwayne Venn,' she said. 'He's vicious enough.'
'Explain.'
'Venn and the Tully sisters apparently dumped some rubbish at the side of Five Furlong Road, up near the estate where the Pearces lived. Someone-presumably Pearce- found the rubbish, sorted through it and discovered a letter addressed to Dwayne Venn and Donna Tully. The shire was notified, they investigated, and Venn was fined for dumping rubbish. He threatened to kill the shire officer who served the notice on him.'
'But how would Venn have known it was Pearce?' Sutton asked. 'For that matter, how would Ian Munro have known that Pearce dobbed him in to the RSPCA?'
Challis smiled broadly at him. 'Exactly. Maybe he didn't know. Maybe Pearce rubbed someone else up the wrong way.'
They sat moodily for a while. Ellen said, 'And there's the matter of Janet Casement.'
Challis put his hands up, as if to tell her to back off. 'Let's put that on the back burner for the moment.'
'She's been warned that Munro's on the loose?' Scobie asked.
'Yes. We've warned everyone we can think of. Now, updating the Floater. Scobie, you took a call from a jeweller for me?'
Sutton glanced at his notebook. 'The Rolex was serviced by a firm called Timepiece, on Collins Street, up in the city.'
Challis nodded. 'I'll pay them a visit sometime.'
'One other thing, boss. The anchor that weighed down the body's gone missing from the property room.'
Someone had light fingers, or someone had been careless. 'Terrific,' Challis said. 'You know the drill-put the word out at trash-and-treasure markets, second-hand dealers…'
'Boss.'
Later that morning, Challis went to see Seigert's widow. She was red-eyed, her grief raw. Ostensibly he was there to ask her some gentle questions, but he learnt nothing new and hadn't expected to; visiting and comforting the bereaved was the other side of a murder investigation. Waves of misery and anger can spread from a single act of homicide and swamp a family and its friends. Challis represented order. Where things were falling apart for the bereaved, he was competent, professional, focused, and familiar with a bewildering system. Sometimes his relationships with bereaved families and individuals lasted years. His was a shoulder to cry on; he was a link to the beloved victim; he represented the investigation itself and so offered hope and justice. He'd provide his phone number and find himself talking calmly, patiently, at the darkest hours of the night, and visiting from time to time, and taking people who'd almost lost heart into the squad room and showing them the desks, the computers, the photo arrays- the sense of justice at work. It often meant a lot and the flow was two-way, for as the bereaved felt valued and encouraged, so did he.
Afterwards he returned to Waterloo and read interview statements. Privately, he was certain that Munro had shot Seigert and a person or persons unknown had shot the Meddler and his wife. That was as far as he'd got when a civilian clerk came around with a message slip and a fax that caused him to mutter, 'Blast from the past.'
'Sorry?' the clerk said.
He smiled at her. 'Nothing. Thinking aloud, that's all.'
She went out. The fax was from the Home Office in London. The HOLMES computer had failed to find any link between the Flinders Floater and anyone known to the authorities in Great Britain.
The message slip was from Tessa Kane. She was writing about the murders for the next edition of the paper and wanted to interview him. She could come to him or he to her, or they could meet on neutral ground, whatever would suit him best.
Challis called her. 'Meet me here.'
'Here' was a small conference room next to the front desk. The double-glazed window looked over a gum tree with scaly bark, and they were seated at a solid metal table, sipping coffee, not bothering with the chipped plate of stale biscuits.
'Fire away,' Challis said.
Tessa pounded her small fists on the table and said, 'Hal.'
'What?' he said-though he knew. She'd put the Easter walk fiasco behind her, wanted warmth between them again, and here he was being clipped, professional.
'Chill out,' she said.
He gazed at her, not wanting to be unkind but finding that the old configuration of Tessa Kane was gone. There had been a time-it seemed like years ago-when she'd step unbidden into his mind and he'd feel himself stir, wanting her badly. He'd picture her naked and replay their lovemaking. Now she was sitting opposite him like a vaguely familiar stranger and he didn't want her.
Why? Because he could never have her while his mad wife continued to step between them? Because Kitty Casement now filled his head?
'Sorry,' he said, bringing warmth into his voice and face and in fact feeling real warmth for Tessa. He saw her respond, a flash of gratitude and longing. Was it that easy? Was he fickle? Did his affections and desires mean anything, or had they been warped by what his wife had done to him?
He reached out and rested his hand over hers. She flexed her knuckles and he might have been sheltering a warm small creature there.
'I haven't seen you for days,' she said. It was a way of telling him that he needn't have gone cool and distant on her, that she'd been mad at him for a while but it had blown over, just as it always blew over with her, and he should have known that about her, or at least given her the benefit of the doubt.
Challis nodded, squeezing her fingers hard and wanting her again.
'A bit of decorum, Inspector,' Tessa said, reading his eyes and wryly pulling away from him.
Then the questions: who found the bodies in both cases? Were there any similarities between them? Differences? Did the police have a suspect? Were the shootings linked in any way to the manhunt for Ian Munro? How was that going, incidentally? Was Munro still believed to be hiding out in the Westernport area? Did Challis place any credence in the fact that Munro had been sighted as far afield as Geelong, Sydney and the Gold Coast?
More often than not Challis gave her his half-smile and head-shake, saying, 'You know I can't divulge that kind of information.'
And the more she questioned him the more she stopped being Tessa Kane, his sometime bedmate, and his mind drifted again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
It was always the same with a door-to-door inquiry. Half the time there was no one home and you had to follow it up later. The other half of the time the occupant would come to the door showing wariness, guilt, anxiety-some reflection of whatever was uppermost in their minds or lives at that time. Never innocence or warmth.
Of course, no one had ever seen or knew anything. But once they realised that the knock on the door didn't relate to them, they'd be all helpful and start filling the air with a stream of useless information. Or if they didn't like the cops you'd see it in their faces, an expression that said you were on your own and good riddance.
With this in mind that Thursday, Pam Murphy door-knocked up and down the streets adjacent to the home of the lawyer Seigert, asking if anyone knew anything about his murder. But no one knew anything and after a while it became automatic, the doorknock, the handful of questions, the polite goodbye and the short walk to the next house, and her thoughts returned to what was uppermost in her mind.
Money. Or rather, how taking out a loan for thirty thousand dollars hadn't given her the liquidity she'd sought or been promised. 'This will free you up,' Carl Lister had said when he'd co-signed the contract and given her his oily smile, except she'd forgotten about the quarterly bills-phone, electricity, gas-and the on-road costs for the Subaru, and then there was rent to pay every fortnight, and she'd done a stupid thing and booked a holiday in Bali for when she got time off in September. Throwing money around like she had stacks of it.
Now she saw clearly that the thirty thousand wasn't hers- or rather, not hers to keep. It was borrowed. It had to be paid back. And not paid back just when she felt like it but weekly, in instalments. She should have chosen monthly. And now there was no money. It was all accounted for. And this week's instalment was due but her salary was not due. Not till next week.