‘Bottles, cans, and what else? Cigarette packets?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You didn’t handle them?’
‘Picked them up with my pen, sir.’
‘Where are they now? Evidence locker?’
Pam squirmed. ‘My own locker, sir.’
‘Damn.’
‘Sir?’
Challis looked up at her, faintly irritable. ‘We require a clear chain of physical evidence if we’re to use it in court. Anything you find at the scene of a crime must be logged in officially and immediately. If the chain is broken, the evidence, in effect, is tainted, even if it hasn’t been touched by anyone else.’
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘What were you thinking?’
‘Well, sir, I wasn’t supposed to be at the scene and I felt a bit stupid, Tank-Constable Tankard, sir-slagging off at me for wasting my time. And it was near the end of the shift and we had a lot on our plate…’
Challis gestured. ‘It’s all right, Constable. At least we can see if we’ve got any prints worth using. If we’re lucky, they’ll match prints already on record. If they do, then it’s a matter of leaning hard or finding other evidence we can use in court.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So, get it all over to the lab. I’ll tell them to give it priority.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘How old was the stuff you picked up? Had it been there for long?’
‘I left the really old stuff, sir.’
Tessa Kane waited at the front desk for almost an hour before Challis appeared. She saw his face shut down the moment he recognised her. He looked tired. Pushing the hair away from his forehead distractedly, he said, ‘I’ll see if I can find us an empty office.’
‘It’s all right. I’m just dropping this off.’
She handed him a letter and then an envelope, in separate freezer bags. ‘It was in the box this morning. I tried to contact you earlier, but you were busy.’
He said, without looking at her, ‘That’s right.’
They were both looking at the letter in his hands. ‘Our man sounds resentful,’ Challis said.
Tessa leaned against him fleetingly. ‘He wants to be on the front page again.’
After a while, Challis said, ‘Thanks, Tess,’ and made to go.
‘Hal, can’t we start again?’
Later, as Challis bumped along the narrow track to his front gate, Tessa Kane hard behind him in her Saab, he was forced to brake to avoid a massive structure ahead of him, one edge protruding a little into his path, the other filling the side gate to his neighbour’s vineyard. It was a superphosphate bin, chalky white in the evening light, sitting high on metal struts. Another country lane stranger to add to his list: top-dressing contractor. He’d already thought of a further two since leaving Waterloo. Horse trainer. Red Cross collector.
He stopped thinking about it. It was all academic, anyway. They had to find who wanted Clara Macris dead, not who had a reason to be in Quarterhorse Lane.
Challis parked and opened the front door. His eyes glanced automatically at the light on his answering machine. One message. He pushed the play button, heard his wife’s voice, low and choked and hectic, and immediately switched it off.
Tessa Kane entered the house behind him, carrying shopping bags. She’d bought fresh fish, a salad mix, a lemon, potatoes to make into chips. It was seven, the skyline pink as the sun settled. They cut the potatoes into chips, oiled them in a pan and placed them in the oven. They had little to say to each other and Challis wondered if he was making a mistake, even as he thought that it was nice, doing this, making a meal with an attractive woman and taking drinks out on to the decking while it cooked. He lit a citronella candle to drive away the mosquitoes and touched his glass to hers. In the half light, she looked not so hard-edged or apt to be secretive. The phone rang. Challis groaned. He knew people who could blithely ignore the phone, and people who were desperate to answer it. If he lived a normal life and wasn’t a policeman, he’d be one of the former, he often thought. ‘Excuse me.’
It was Scobie Sutton. ‘Boss, turn to “Crime Beat”, Channel 9.’
Challis’s kitchen opened on to the sitting room and the little television set he kept in the corner. He found the remote control, turned the set on and returned to the phone. ‘Okay.’
‘Watch.’
There was an outside shot, a modest house in Dromana, then the parents of Kymbly Abbott were seated on a velour sofa that had seen better days. They were raw-looking, anxious, the victims of a poor education and a poorer diet. They seemed to sense the skin-deep sympathy and staged sentiments of the interviewer, a young woman with cropped hair, a short black dress and plum-coloured lips.
Even so, Challis thought, as the interview progressed, they’re getting a kick out of being on television, and that’s almost, almost, overriding their grief. He heard the interviewer say:
‘You’d like the police to do more.’
Kymbly Abbott’s father intended to do all of the talking. ‘Yeah.’
‘You think they should be doing what you and the parents of Jane Gideon are doing?’
‘Yep.’
‘Handing out photographs and talking to people.’
‘Yep.’
‘Are Mr and Mrs Gideon helping you?’
‘We got the idea off them.’
‘You think handing out your daughter’s photograph will help jog someone’s memory?’
‘Yep.’
Then Kymbly Abbott’s mother leaned forward and made the only original observation that Challis had heard so far:
‘Like, the whole time, all youse reporters have done is concentrate on us-’ she poked herself in the chest ‘-our feelings, instead of getting people to try and remember if they saw Kymbly.’
As Challis watched, the screen filled with a close-up of a leaflet, Kymbly Abbott in full colour, the words Did you see who took our Kymbly? across the top, a description and a phone number at the bottom.
The phone to his ear, Challis said, ‘I wish they hadn’t done that.’
‘Boss, when they flash on that leaflet again, check out the description and the photo.’
Challis watched. Another close-up, and a voice-over, describing Kymbly Abbott the night she was abducted and murdered.
‘Scobie, I’m missing something here.’
‘The backpack, boss. They bloody forgot to tell us she had a backpack with her when she went missing.’
Twenty-two
Saturday, 8.15 a.m., Challis standing before the whiteboard saying: ‘Right, it’s going to be another scorcher today, so the sooner we’re not cooped up together in this place, the better.’
He leaned both hands on the back of a chair. ‘Two pieces of much needed luck. One, Pam Murphy, a young uniformed constable, had the foresight to bag a few bottles and cans at the scene of the torching of Lance Ledwich’s Pajero in Chicory Kiln Road.’
He indicated the location on the wall map and swung around again. ‘As you know, we believe the vehicle was stolen by the two men responsible for that ag burg near the racecourse. Their original getaway vehicle had stalled, and they legged it to a nearby housing estate, where they found the Pajero. According to the prints recovered from the bottles and cans, and assuming that the same men are responsible for the ag burg, and stealing and then burning the Pajero, then we’re looking at Boyd Jolic, Danny Holsinger and Craig Oliver, all from Waterloo and all known to the police.’
A voice: ‘I thought you said two men, boss.’
Challis nodded. ‘We believe that one of the three drove out to Chicory Kiln Road to fetch the other two. A call was made on Lance Ledwich’s car phone to The Refinery Hotel that same night. A barmaid has since confirmed that Craig Oliver took a call and left the bar soon afterwards. Now, it’s nice to think we’ve got a lead on that ag burg, but we’ve also had a second piece of luck, a witness who can place that same Pajero in Quarterhorse Lane.’
He went on to explain Stella Riggs’s road rage incident, and how her evasive tactic may have led to the murder of Clara Macris. ‘Jesus Christ,’ someone said. Others shook their heads.