The Jeep seemed to give an answering shake, so minute that she almost didn’t register it. She didn’t trust her senses. It could have been the plates of the earth shifting a little, far away, far beneath her, registering as a tiny shake here, in this driveway.
The constable returned, waving keys. ‘In a basket on the kitchen bench,’ he said proudly. He stopped, looked toward the reserve. ‘They’ve brought in the chopper.’
Ellen snatched the keys from him. She wasn’t interested in anything but getting the doors open.
The rear compartment, once so familiar to her, a small, friendly, masculine place that spoke of Rhys Hartnett’s clever hands and efficiency, now seemed to be composed of sharp metal corners and the coldness of metal. Shelves, brackets, tools, offcuts of aluminium, electrical flex, drawers, a large, padlocked cabinet along one side of the tray.
A muffled knock. Another hint of rocking.
They registered it together. The constable fumbled the keys out of the door and searched for the smaller keys on the ring. Ellen made to snatch the keys from him. They performed a small, foolish dance, a playground grabbing contest, before the constable relinquished the keys to her.
The cabinet door swung upwards. Larrayne lay cramped on her side and wrapped in a blanket of thin, high-density foam. Her wrists and ankles had been taped together. There was a strip of tape over her mouth. Her eyes were wide and afraid, and then they began to blink away the tears and she began to thrash her body, thrash it until they’d pulled her out and cut her free.
Challis felt his chest tighten. His mouth tasted sour and his breathing came in tight, strained shudders that barely sustained him. Asthma. He flashed on his childhood. The evenings had always been the worst time. He’d want to run and climb and charge about, anything to avoid bed, anything to fill up the minutes before he was called inside, anything to stay outside, and the attacks would come, so bad sometimes that his panicked parents had called for an ambulance. But that was childhood. He had a more recent memory, of a small town, his wife, the other constable, the affair between them burning unnoticed by him until the anonymous call that had lured him to a patch of trees along a moonless back road. The shots. He’d taken one in the arm, a sleeve-plucking flesh wound. He’d circled around and he’d shot the man who’d wanted him out of the way. Challis stopped now, one hand resting against the trunk of a tree. His breathing rattled and wheezed. So much for silence, he thought.
There were men on the way. ‘Fifteen minutes,’ according to the duty sergeant in Frankston. And a helicopter with a searchlight.
Hartnett had a lead of two minutes. He knew his way through the reserve, presumably. Challis hadn’t sent a car around to the bottom edge of the reserve. There were simply no roads to it. So, all four of them-himself, Sutton, the two constables-were floundering in the twilight, only two torches between them.
He thumbed his radio. ‘Anything?’
The replies came: ‘No, boss.’
‘Everyone keep still a minute, and listen.’
After a while he said, ‘Anything?’
‘No, boss.’
Then Challis heard it, the thud and chop of rotor blades. A voice crackled on his radio. ‘Inspector Challis?’
‘In the reserve. Can you see it?’
Silence, then, ‘Approaching you now.’
‘There are four of us,’ Challis said. ‘Two uniforms, two plainclothes. We’re wearing white shirts.’
‘How’s our target dressed?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Roger. We’ll flush him out, sweeping now.’
Suddenly light was probing the trees near Challis. It flicked like an angry finger, then began to make steady sweeps across the reserve as the helicopter moved slowly down its length.
In the mind-numbing din, Challis felt ill. He realised that he hadn’t eaten for many hours. He thought about following the light, then decided to head in the opposite direction. There were men enough to grab Hartnett if the spotlight flushed him out, but what if it had passed right over him and he was behind the sweep now, safe in the darkness, waiting until he could slip away.
Hartnett shouldn’t have moved, Challis told himself later. Hartnett should simply have waited. But he didn’t wait. He burst from a thicket, screaming unnervingly, swinging a knife. Challis felt the blade slice above his nipple. There was warm wetness at first, then the pain.
He feinted, dropping to one knee with a groan. Hartnett swung around. He was still screaming, fighting the air with the knife. The danger to Challis lay not in Hartnett’s skill and calculation but in that windmilling wild arm. Challis rolled on to his back, jackknifing his knees to his chest. To Hartnett, it must have signalled submission, for he ran forward, bending low, coming around on Challis’s left side, still screaming.
Challis waited. He waited for the upstroke, the moonglint on the knife that told him it was about to swing down and cut him open. Propping on his forearms, he swivelled his trunk around and shot out both feet.
He caught Hartnett’s knees. One smacked against the other and Challis heard the moist, muffled crack of a bone breaking. Hartnett screamed. His arms swung up and his back arched. He flopped to the ground and began to flounder. Challis felt terrible. He’d never seen so much agony in anyone and had never caused so much.
Twenty-Eight
He kept saying, “Your mother’s a bitch. Stupid copper bitch. Stupid copper bitch who goes back on her word.”‘
‘Hush, love, it’s all right.’
‘It was like it was personal.’
‘I think it was, this time.’
‘He told me I was always rude to him. Well, I was. I always thought he was a sleazebag. I told you I thought that. I couldn’t believe you brought him into the house.’
‘It’s all right, sweetie. It’s all right. You’re safe now.’
They were in the car. Sutton was driving, with Challis next to him. The ambulance crew had cleared and dressed Challis’s cut before taking Hartnett away. Larrayne Destry was in the back of the car, with her mother. She’d refused to be taken to hospital.
‘You don’t have to talk about it now.’
‘I want to.’
‘Okay, sweetie.’
‘You think he raped me, don’t you? Well he was going to, he said. Kept telling me all the things he was going to do to me. Told me this time was going to be different from the other times. This time he was going to draw it out for a few days.’
Challis heard the soft scrape of fabric against fabric. He didn’t turn around. They were not wearing their seatbelts but were huddled together, sniffing, sometimes crying, Ellen ceaselessly touching her daughter’s face.
‘He showed me all this stuff.’
‘What stuff?’
‘There was a watch, a ring, a hair clip. Little things.’
‘Souvenirs.’
‘Oh.’
A cloud passed across the moon. They seemed to be alone on the black road. Challis coughed, and said, over his shoulder, ‘Where did you see these things, Larrayne?’
He sensed that Larrayne was leaning toward him. ‘Where Mum found me, inside that cabinet thingy in his van.’
Challis nodded. ‘And he talked about the other women he’d abducted?’
‘Over and over. Boasting.’
Ellen said, ‘I can’t believe I let him see those tyre casts. He must have enjoyed himself, working next door to the police, watching them flounder. Probably couldn’t believe his luck.’
Challis nodded. It would have taken a certain kind of nerve and arrogance for Hartnett to stay on at the courthouse, working, watching.
As if reading his thoughts, Ellen said, ‘He was under our noses the whole time. I trusted him.’
It occurred to Challis then that his sergeant had something to hide. She was fighting unwelcome emotions and realisations. Her talkativeness-she was feeling relief, but did she also feel betrayed and embarrassed? It was as if something had happened to challenge her good judgment of herself. He remembered seeing her with Hartnett several times. How far had it gone?