'Oh, I quite understand,' Challis said. 'He's trying desperately to save his neck. But that doesn't change the fact that we have your client's prints and his victim's prints on a boat he denies owning.'
'The correct term is yacht, not boat,' said Casement automatically.
'Terribly sorry. But as I said-'
'And there's an innocent explanation,' Casement said. 'I expect Trev's prints have been there for ages, from back when we went sailing on weekends, before he flew to London.'
'So who killed him and why a death at sea?'
'Why not ask Louise Cook about that? She wanted him dead, I heard her say so often enough when she came back to Australia without him. "I hate his guts," she'd say. "I'd happily shoot him." That's where you should be looking.'
Challis made a mental note to do just that, and said, 'The global positioning system puts you off Flinders at the time of the murder.'
'But that's not proof that my client was on the boat at the time or that he killed Trevor Hubble or that Hubble was on the yacht at the time. Other people may have taken the boat out.'
'Yacht,' Casement said.
'Why did you kill the Pearces? What did Pearce have on you?'
'My client has already denied-'
'Did Pearce discover your true identity? Did he see you kill Hubble? Was he sniffing around, asking uncomfortable questions?'
'Didn't know the chappie, sorry,' Casement said languidly.
'Why did you kill your wife?' Challis went on. 'Was she onto you? Did Pearce approach her separately, telling her who you were? Or did she already know and you had a falling out? Or was she bringing unwanted police attention to herself, so you felt threatened? Was it money? I understand there is some cash and property and an insurance policy for half a million dollars.'
'My client has already denied-'
Stalemate.
Casement was called a flight risk and placed on remand on the abduction and weapons charges, so he wasn't going anywhere, which gave Challis the space to breathe and think. What he thought about was constancy, and counting his blessings. His wife had not been constant in love but constant as a thorn in his side. Now he was free of her. Kitty Casement had been constant until she was murdered, constant but remote, and not free to love him.
Love. That was a dream because he'd been unhappy at the time.
Tessa Kane had shown herself willing to be a constant in his life, and he was free to love her now-unless he'd driven her away. He found himself wondering how he should tell her that his wife was dead. Would she say 'Too late'? Would she say 'Too convenient'? Would she wonder what other impediments he might bring to their relationship?
But he should count her as a blessing. Whether she counted him as one was another matter.
And so it was that the day after the funeral his unconscious mind prompted him and he said to Scobie Sutton: 'We were going to search the Meddler's house again, if you remember.'
It wasn't a sharpening of Challis's faculties, for he rode drowsily in the car and dreamed while Sutton talked.
'Aileen Munro took her kids out of the school.'
'Uh-huh.'
'Poor little beggars.'
'Yes.'
'How do you tell kids that young what happened? It's been hard enough explaining to my kid. Given rise to some heavy questions. "Dad, where do you go when you die?" kind of thing.'
Challis let Sutton talk, and trailed behind him into the Pearces' house. In the days since the murder something other than blood had thickened the air. Strangely, it was the smell that woke Challis. He tracked it down to a small bin under the sink, a lidless bin crammed with packaging, as though one of the Pearces' last acts had been to put away the shopping. The bad smell came from skin and fat trimmed from a chicken, he realised, as he carried the bin out into the back yard and tipped the contents into a wheelie bin.
That's when he saw the cellophane wrapping and an empty sheet of stick-on videocassette labels at the bottom of the bin, together with a cash register receipt dated two days before the murder, and these everyday things took him back into the house and the VCR and the video labelled 'International Most Wanted' still there in the machine, waiting to spell out the link between Casement and the Meddler.
No proof yet that Casement had shot Kitty, but first things first.