She might stay the night. She might not.
She waved a flimsy piece of paper at him. 'This is the proof-sheet of next Tuesday's column.'
He crossed in front of the fire, let his fingers brush against hers as he took the proof-sheet, retreated to his armchair again. She wrote a weekly column for the Progress. This time she'd tackled wankers.
Appreciating the wanker and his art, and distinguishing the wanker proper from the wanker accidental, is best undertaken with a close, like-minded friend. Just the other day one such friend and I were shopping in Rosebud and encountered a man walking a ferret on a lead. Our reaction was immediate and simultaneous. We turned to each other and murmured, 'Wanker.'
But wanking is a fluid notion, so to speak. Once upon a time a man with a big bunch of keys hanging from his belt was a wanker. Now only certain tradesmen and misguided old queers clip keys to their belts.
Challis grinned. He'd been the 'like-minded friend' that day. 'Nice one,' he said, attempting to be like-minded again.
Tessa scowled at once, her face sharpening. She straightened her back, folded her arms and looked fully at him. 'How was the little wife?'
'Don't be like that,' Challis said, immediately feeling sulky and small.
'Like what?'
He turned his face to the flames in the grate.
Tessa continued: 'Big emergency, was it? Is she in intensive care by any faint chance?'
Challis flushed angrily. 'If you must know, she had cut herself.'
'Yes, but to what extent, and with what?'
He hesitated fatally.
She pressed her advantage. 'Barely a scratch?'
He shrugged.
'Not a full-blooded attempt, so to speak. Not a proper deep slice down the length of the wrist.'
He sighed. 'No.'
'A cry for help, maybe?'
Challis snarled, 'Something like that.'
Tessa's voice softened. 'It's time you gave her up, Hal.'
Challis crossed the room to the whisky bottle. 'It's not as easy as that.'
'Of course it is. Your wife pulls the strings and you jerk into action. She says "jump" and you say "how high?".'
'She didn't call me the second time, her parents did. So why don't you just shut the fuck up?'
The 'fuck' didn't sound quite right. It struck a false note, sounded forced rather than genuine. But he saw the hurt it caused, and then Tessa was turning away from him, staring at the dark shadows in the corners of the room, solitary and chafing. Her voice when it came was low and hollow. 'I was so looking forward to our walk. Mostly perfect weather, perfect company. Well, we all know about that, don't we?'
Challis said nothing. He sipped his scotch miserably and stared down the years to a time and a place that wouldn't let him go. He'd been one of four CIB detectives in a town in the old goldfields country north of Melbourne. His wife, restless and easily bored, had taken up with one of his colleagues. The colleague had become infatuated with her and lured Challis to a deserted place and tried to kill him. Now the colleague was shuffling around a prison yard with a bullet-shattered femur and Challis's wife was serving eight years for being an accessory to attempted murder.
She would phone him from time to time and say she was sorry, then say she wasn't sorry and would gladly do it again. She needed him, she hated him. He was too good for her, he was a shit. Most of the time she was full of longing for him and what he'd represented and the times they'd had before it all went wrong. Challis didn't want her back and no longer loved her, but he did feel responsible, as though he should have been a better man or at least the kind of man she wouldn't want her lover to kill. As Tessa Kane kept saying, it was time he shook her off. Time he divorced her, in fact.
'I suppose her parents were there?'
'Yes.'
In fact, Challis liked his wife's parents. They were bewildered, apologetic, as tortured with notions of responsibility as he was, and sorry to think that their daughter could do such a thing to so nice a man.
Tessa snorted. Challis read it not as contempt but obscure pain and envy, as though she felt she had no claim on him at all. He put down his scotch. 'Tess-'
'Something unusual happened on my hike. Do you want to hear about it?' She looked at him, brightly blinking her moist eyes.
Relief flooded through him. 'Of course.'
'I was walking along an empty stretch of beach near Flinders this afternoon. There was a lot of seaweed and kelp on the beach, strong winds, waves, you know how windy it was today.'
Challis nodded. Had she seen him? No.
'Anyway, I'm trudging along when a four-wheel-drive appears, roaring straight at me across the sand.'
Challis's nerve endings tingled. 'Go on.'
'White Toyota traytop ute, to be exact. Two men inside. The driver starts shouting at me. What am I doing there? Who else is with me? Have I found some boxes on the beach? Maybe I've hidden them? He was quite aggressive. Then he just sped off further down the beach. I was too surprised to take down the number.'
'Shipment of drugs,' Challis said flatly.
'I'd say so.'
Challis worked homicide, not drugs, but the trade in drugs often leads to homicide, so naturally he was interested. 'There was a gale last night,' he said.
She nodded. 'Either the stuff was tied to a buoy and got dislodged, or it was thrown or washed overboard from some ship or yacht.'
'Or the shipment was ripped off.'
'That too. Or it's entirely innocent. But it didn't feel right, you know?'
Things not feeling right is a common instinct in the police and the press, Challis thought. 'What did they look like?'
Tessa shrugged. 'I only saw the driver clearly. Generic Peninsula male, late thirties, beanie, shades, footie jumper, needed a shave. I can't be more specific than that.'
'Even so, it's worth reporting. Our collators can feed it into the system.'
She saluted. 'Yes, sir.'
A silence opened between them. It was clear to Challis now that they were not going to make love and he'd been deluded to think that a reunion after what he'd done to her- as she saw it-could have been passionate. If he reached out and touched her now she'd flinch and say, it's not as easy as that, Hal.
She seemed to read his confusion and unhappiness and got to her feet. 'I'd better go.'
She almost walked out on him coldly but at the last moment stopped and briefly touched his cheek.
She'd left her scotch unfinished.
CHAPTER FIVE
At one am, with Dwayne Venn questioned and remanded and most of the paperwork done, Ellen packed up and drove home to Penzance Beach, still dressed in her baggy stakeout cargo pants and cotton windcheater. The Destry family home was a fibro holiday house on stilts in a hollow between the beachfront and hilly farmland. Penzance Beach was a fifteen-minute drive but a world away from Waterloo, with its depressed estates and idle light industry. In summer, Penzance Beach crawled with the four-wheel-drives and German saloon cars of the well-heeled Melbourne families whose fairytale cottages and architect-designed bunkers would one day replace the fibro shacks of families like the Destrys.
Melbourne was just over an hour's drive away so Penzance Beach crawled with outsiders at Easter too. She slowed the car and looked for somewhere to park. The street was full of cars of the holidaying families and the kids attending Larrayne's party. She drove down two adjacent streets before finding a gap large enough to fit her Magna, and walked back. Good: the party was winding up. There were shouts goodbye as kids tumbled out of her front door and away.
She went inside to find a stony-faced husband and teary daughter. 'What's wrong?'
A dirty look from Alan said she'd been out having fun while he'd been stuck at home trying to maintain order with thirty teenagers. She ignored him, placed her hands on Larrayne's face. 'Sweetie?'