It was too hot to sleep. And too noisy. Penzance Beach had swelled by the hundreds, it seemed-families who’d come to their beach shacks for four weeks, people camping, people looking for parties to crash. Pam found herself thinking of Ginger. If she had the nerve, if he lived just down the street instead of farther around the coast, she’d sneak down and tapon his bedroom window. She stood on the decking of her rented house, sniffing the wind.
Smoke.
The phone rang.
‘Pam? Ellen Destry. I’ll collect you in five minutes.’
Tessa Kane was in Challis’s bed this time, and she couldn’t sleep and wanted to go home. Now she knew what it had been like for him, that first time, when he’d tried to slip away from her bed. She glanced at him. He was wide awake, too. They didn’t want to make love again. They disliked each other, just at that moment. They didn’t want to be together. They wanted daylight and to be alone. These were temporary feelings, and would pass, but right now they were crippling.
‘Go, if you want to.’
‘I think I might.’ She began to dress.
‘I’ll make you a cup of tea.’
‘Hal, it’s two o’clock in the morning.’
‘You’ve a thirty minute drive ahead of you.’
‘No tea, thanks. Thanks for the thought.’
As she dressed, he said, ‘No more letters from our man?’
She looked for an earring. ‘I’d tell you if there were.’
He nodded. ‘What about Julian Bastian? Has there been any pressure on you to drop the story?’
‘Pressure from whom?’
‘Lady Bastian. Her friends in high places.’
She paused to stare at him. ‘Like McQuarrie? Are you siding with him now?’
‘Christ no,’ he said. ‘I think the charges should be reinstated against the little prick.’
She laughed. ‘Can I quote you?’
First his mobile rang, then hers.
A fire.
Jolic swooned to see the flames. His skin tingled. He was breathless. A strange pleasurable electric heat started in his groin and spread upwards to his throat. He wanted badly to rut. Holding the hose on the CFA firetruck, Jolic was a vengeful rutting king.
John Tankard was on Myers Road, his patrol car parked crosswise, emergency lights flashing in the darkness. There was not much normal traffic at this time of night, but an increase in the ghouls and gawkers, attracted by the sirens, the Emergency Services helicopter, the evacuation warning for householders south of Myers Road. A Triumph came barrelling toward him. He waved his torch and held his gloved hand high to stop it, indicating Quarterhorse Lane, the detour that would take all traffic away from the fire. But it was bloody Challis. He had Tessa Kane with him.
‘Sorry, Inspector. Go on through.’
‘Thanks, constable.’
The editor leaned across Challis. ‘How bad is it, John?’
‘One house destroyed-that’s where it started. It spread quickly, jumped the road into the nature reserve.’ He looked up, into the red-glow sky. ‘This wind doesn’t help.’
‘Any casualties?’
‘Some horses had to be moved.’
‘Whose house got destroyed?’
Tankard looked to Challis for guidance. Challis said, ‘It’s all right. She has to know sometime, and so do I.’
‘We don’t know who lives there, sir. A woman by herself, according to the neighbours.’
‘Is she all right?’
‘No sign of her, sir.’
The wind seemed to shift then, and shift again. It was hot on their faces and heavy with smoke. Ash alighted on the back of Tankard’s glove. He brushed it away, smearing the white leather. Funny, he could hear the danger-the wind, the flames? — but he couldn’t see anything but a glow in the distance.
‘Sir, I don’t know how dangerous it is in there. We’re directing traffic along the lane here. That’s where the fire started, but it’s safe there now.’
Challis pulled the automatic stick into Drive. ‘We need to go in, John.’
Tankard thought: Don’t call me John, you prick.
A part of Ellen Destry felt betrayed by the sense of exhilaration and competence-edged-with-risk that the fire seemed to engender in everyone. They were all equals, men and women, cops and civilians. They worked well together. They faced the flames and beat them back. They communicated efficiently. There were no shirkers. The lights, the trucks, the dirty men and women in their yellow emergency gear, the roaring hot wind, the red coals and leaping flames. Once or twice gum trees exploded above their heads. She found herself helping Pam Murphy to pass out cups of tea, bind a couple of burnt hands, move vehicles and stock away from the path of the fire, fetch an old woman’s cat. A part of her could understand the sentimentality of newspaper accounts of community disasters, when firefighters, policemen, ambulance workers and ordinary civilians pulled together.
But another side of her recognised that it was also essentially a blokey bonding exercise. Men embraced men and the women were honorary mates.
Then she learned that she had detective work to do.
Challis left Tessa Kane at the community refuge, where one of her photographers and two of her journos were already interviewing people, then drove carefully along Quarterhorse Lane to the house where the fire had started. The air was smoky and hot. Smouldering fence posts marked a route between an untouched orchard on one side of the road and ashy black earth on the other. He passed beneath a burning tree. The odd thing was, as he was turning into the driveway of the destroyed house, he saw signs of an earlier fire: a scorched pine tree. He looked closer. A small, newish, metal mailbox on a length of iron pipe.
He drove in. Ellen Destry was already there, staring at what had once been a weatherboard farmhouse and was now a flattened patch of charred wood and twisted, blackened roofing iron. A chimney stood forlornly at one end of the ruin. It was apparent to Challis that the fire had started at the house. The wind had then carried sparks to the grassy hill beyond it, and a firefront had developed, sweeping south toward the roadside gums on Myers Road, leaping it and taking hold in the nature reserve. Well, there wasn’t much nature there any more, but the fire had been contained before it reached the dozen or so houses south of the reserve.
Suddenly Ellen was doubled over, coughing and spitting. ‘You okay?’
She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. ‘I’ve been breathing thick smoke for the past two hours.’
A length of roof crashed behind them. Kees van Alphen, kicking and tugging.
‘Leave it, Van. Wait for the fire inspector.’
‘A woman lived here, sir.’
‘If she was home, she didn’t survive this,’ Challis said.
Van Alphen was there when they found her body-or what remained of it. The ruin bewildered him. All of his senses were turned around. Only the blackened refrigerator and the stainless steel kitchen sink told him exactly where her body lay in relation to the rest of the house.
And the flames had got her. It wasn’t smoke inhalation. If it had been smoke inhalation he might have touched her, kissed her, even, for she’d have been recognisable, but he wasn’t saying goodbye to this fire-wracked, shrivelled twist of charred meat.
Nineteen
Daybreak, Wednesday, 3 January. Challis hadn’t been long at the burnt house before the fire inspector arrived and talked him through it.
‘It’s my belief the seat of the fire is here, at the kitchen stove. A hot, dry night, hot northerly wind outside, plenty of natural accelerants like cooking oil, cardboard food packets, wooden wall cabinets. Then weatherboard external walls, wooden roofing beams.’