On their way back to CIU, they were obliged to stop at freeway roadworks. A great scar had been carved across farmland on either side of the road. Makeshift security fences enclosed concrete drainage pipes, heaped soil and heavy earthmoving equipment. Sutton said, ‘I wonder if Frankston will die when the bypass is running.’
Challis ignored him and took out his phone. ‘Anything?’
‘Nothing, boss,’ said Murphy. Challis could hear voices, a hint of music, in the background. The pub? He could do with a drink. ‘Maybe our rapist’s not a local. We’re only a little over an hour from the city.’
‘Could be.’
Then Challis noticed that the cars ahead of him were moving, and Scobie Sutton was humming in agitation and checking his watch. ‘Sorry, Murph, got to go.’
He pocketed the phone, put the car into gear and moved on with the traffic. ‘You all right?’
‘I need to collect Ros from a friend’s house.’
‘Where does the friend live?’
‘I told her between five and six and it’s already five past six.’
Conversations with Sutton were often like this. ‘Scobie, where does the friend live?’
‘Somerville.’
‘We’re almost in Somerville.’
‘That’s what reminded me.’
‘Well, give me the address.’
Sutton looked shocked. ‘Sir, we can’t, this is a CIU car, we’re on duty.’
‘Give me the address, for God’s sake.’
Sutton complied, subsiding into his seat, giving directions to a section of new housing opposite the shopping centre. Challis drove grimly, not trusting himself to speak, and when the feeling passed he said, with some heat: ‘Scobie, you might find life easier if you had another line of work.’
‘Like what?’ Sutton cried. ‘I’m forty-three years old, still only a constable, police work’s all I know. What else can I do?’
‘You could move sideways.’
‘Sideways?’ Sutton said. But he was thinking now, and said again, ‘Sideways…’
Murphy finished speaking to Challis and had put the phone away just as Schiff reached across the table to touch the dream catcher earrings. ‘The colours suit you, the silver and the turquoise against your neck.’
Pam knew she was blushing. She touched the earrings self-consciously. ‘Normally I wear studs. Just felt like a change.’
There were subtexts to that statement: I felt like looking attractive; I felt like looking attractive because you are so attractive; I felt like looking attractive for you. Pam looked down at her hands.
They were in the Hermitage, a converted Edwardian house on the Esplanade in Mornington, with views across the waters of the bay to the sun as it flattened itself on the horizon, the vast yellow glow broken here and there by the blockish shapes of container ships steaming out to the Heads. A veranda, a lounge with club chairs, a bistro that specialised in salads and seafood. Soft lighting and barely audible music. The clientele was about right, too. No yuppies to speak of, no one from the bowls club down the road, no blue singlets or pay-day apprentices.
‘Nice,’ Jeannie had said, on first stepping through the door.
And she’d added, eyes hooded, smiling unreadably, ‘A special place to bring people.’
A place to bring special people, did she mean? Pam was saved by Challis’s phone call.
Now the waiter was there, depositing their drinks. ‘Cocktails, my treat,’ Jeannie had said, and Pam admired the tall, frosted glass, thinking it would be okay to get a little drunk tonight. Her hands looked lovely in the dim light, she thought, the fingers shapely on the glass. Beautiful, actually. But of course what she was doing, she knew, was avoiding the powerful pull of Jeannie Schiff’s gaze from the other side of the table.
‘Pam.’
She looked up into a lazy, complicit smile and a pair of blue eyes darkening with the dying light.
21
Thursday morning, Grace woke up in the South Australian town of Murray Bridge.
She’d arrived Wednesday afternoon, driving the Golf, and paid for four nights’ accommodation in an on-site caravan. Now, showered and dressed, she walked to the main street and rented a white Camry. Three hours later she was in the Clare Valley wine country north of Adelaide, where small, humped hills concealed wineries and tiny historic towns. Vines lay over the hill folds and along the valley floor, presided over by old stone houses with sun-faded corrugated iron roofs and verandas.
The farms gave way to suburban blocks as she entered the town of Clare. Here there were more stone dwellings but a greater number of bland brick veneer houses dating from the 1970s. A Shell station, an irrigation outfitter, a stone hall, a stone church, a K-Mart, some cafes, and everyday shops, pedestrian crossings, a handful of banks. For a largish town, there wasn’t much of a main street, but when Grace explored some of the side and parallel streets she found hardware barns, supermarkets, a medical clinic, a high school, a municipal pool, and a mostly-dry creek set with barbecues and benches under massive, silvery gums.
After making a couple of passes through the town, Grace took out her Google Earth maps and made her way along a snaking dirt road that took her above the valley, into a knot of pretty hills, with tall gums, secluded farmhouses and wineries on winding side tracks. And the eyesore built by Simon Lascar.
There were no indications that the Lascars had returned from attending their daughter’s wedding in Honolulu. The gates were locked, the curtains drawn. Winding down her window, Grace scoped the house and grounds with binoculars. Drifts of leaves on the driveway and garden paths. The lawn needed mowing.
She was tracking across the windows and walls when three cars appeared, two heading for the wineries or farms farther along the road, an electrician’s van approaching from the other direction, raising dust. Grace needed time to finish her inspection but knew that someone might remember a woman parked on the side of the road in a white Camry, a Hertz sticker on the rear window. That’s when she noticed a ‘For Sale’ sign on the property opposite the target house: five acres, with a main house, a self-catering cottage licensed for bed-and-breakfast use, sheds, fencing, tall, pale gums and a muddy dam.
Forty minutes later, she was riding around in the passenger seat of a bulky black BMW, with a real estate agent named Brent, who was saying regretfully, ‘The recession’s hit everyone hard.’
But not Brent. Brent owned four agencies in the mid-north of South Australia, and the BMW was worth over a hundred grand.
She guessed boy wonder also owned a matching sedan for the pretty wife, maybe a boat, a Ducati, jet skis, home theatre, swimming pool, a paddock for the horses. And he wasn’t yet forty. Good-looking, in that adolescent way of men who’ve never been obliged to struggle. He drove his BMW as if he wanted to run small Korean cars off the road. The aftershave was classy but overdone. Grace could scarcely breathe. The aircon ruffled the wispy hem of her skirt and drew his gaze from the road.
‘At least interest rates are down,’ Grace said.
He ignored her. In his Clare office, thirty minutes earlier, he’d been led to understand that she had money and wanted to buy a secluded rural property, one or two hectares. That had got his juices going: Brent had five such properties on his books.
Now, as they drove, she saw doubts creep in. He wasn’t a man skilled at hiding his thoughts. ‘A lot of city folk head up this way,’ he said carefully, ‘and after they’ve sunk their savings into wineries, bed-and-breakfast joints, alpacas, Christmas tree farms, lavender, roses, back road bistros, you name it, along comes the recession and they go belly-up.’ He paused. ‘Or they can’t afford to run two places, have to offload the country weekender.’