She nodded. ‘How do you sell an aeroplane?’
‘I thought maybe a broker. There’s a man called Warren Niekirk, deals in vintage planes.’
‘A local?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s handy.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’d better change.’
But she didn’t move. An explosive racket drove the birds from the trees and Challis glanced across at the neighbouring house. Two women lived there, gardeners at the maze on Arthurs Seat, each with a bikie boyfriend, and one of the boyfriends was firing up his Harley Davidson.
‘The music of the suburbs,’ Challis said. ‘Do they know you’re police?’
‘Don’t think so.’
His phone rang. He stared at it, sitting there on Ellen’s warped veranda table, and willed it to stop.
‘I hate your ring tone.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘It’s the same as that woman’s in Love, Actually.’
‘What woman?’
‘The one with the mad brother.’
Challis couldn’t remember the film or the ring tone. He wasn’t someone who had favourite films. Ellen was. On her reckoning, she’d seen Love, Actually a million times.
He pressed the talk button. ‘Challis.’
‘Boss, we’ve got a rape,’ Pam Murphy said.
And Ellen Destry, about to jet off and learn how to deal with rape cases, read his face and swung her graceful feet to the floor.
6
Mid-afternoon, a room in the Waterloo hospital, Pam Murphy briefly clasping Chloe Holst’s forearm. ‘Do you mind Inspector Challis being here, Chloe?’
Challis was propping up a wall, trying to be unobtrusive. He smiled but remained silent where he was. ‘I don’t mind,’ Holst said, her voice damp, cracking a little.
‘We spoke to your parents and the doctor, and they said if you’re up to it we could ask you a few questions. Meanwhile, no one’s going to carry out any more forensic indignities on you, okay? But we do need to ask you what happened.’
Chloe Holst collapsed against her pillows, stared at the ceiling, and said, in a rapid monotone: ‘I was on my way home when he flashed his lights at me from behind. Then he-’ ‘Could we go back a bit?’ Pam said, her voice low and warm in the chair beside the bed. ‘Home from where?’
‘The Chicory Kiln.’
‘Don’t know it.’
Challis murmured from the wall, ‘It’s a winery-bistro place on Myers Road.’
‘Okay.’
Challis said, ‘Had you been drinking? We have to ask these kinds of-’
The young woman in the bed tossed in anger, then winced. ‘Why doesn’t anyone listen? I work there. I hardly ever drink, and I don’t drink at work. I was simply going home.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Challis said. ‘By the time information gets to me sometimes it’s wrong or inadequate.’
‘I’ve told this story so many times.’
Once, thought Challis, to Pam-and a million times to yourself. And when the sex crimes squad gets involved, you’ll have to go through it all again. ‘When we have all the details we won’t need to bother you again,’ he said lamely.
Chloe Holst shot him a look from her right eye. The left looked pulpy and black, swollen shut, three stitches bisecting the eyebrow. Angry finger-bruising around the neck, bruises to the upper arms, and, hidden beneath the bedclothes, bruising to the thighs and tears to the vagina and anus. ‘What about in court?’ she asked, almost inaudibly.
Pam Murphy mustered a smile. ‘You didn’t see his face, so it may not come to that.’
Holst touched her hand to her split lip and grew teary. She was about to speak but sank again into the pillows heaped behind her.
The little room, like the corridor outside it, smelt of life and death and blood and cleansers and chemical intervention. Murphy knew the smell all right. She’d visited enough suspects and victims in emergency rooms over the years, been treated for cuts and bruises. She glanced around at Challis and then out of the window and saw nothing to guide her through this. Sergeant Destry would know what to do, but the sergeant was on her way to Europe.
She turned to Holst again. ‘What happened after he flashed his lights?’
‘It happened near the intersection with Balnarring Road, so I was slowing down anyway. I hate that corner.’
A high-speed blind corner, a fatal corner over the years, with no clear view of traffic belting down the hill until you were halfway across the intersection. ‘Me too,’ Pam said.
‘He flashed his lights at me from behind, then cut across in front of me as I was stopping. Then he got out and started waving ID at me.’
Challis said, in his low voice, ‘Can you describe the car?’
‘A newish white Falcon.’
‘Sure?’
‘My dad has one. I actually thought it was him for a moment.’
‘What time was this?’
‘About midnight.’
‘No other traffic?’
‘No.’
‘Go on.’
‘I thought maybe my rear lights weren’t working, or I’d hit something, you know. I thought something serious was wrong, so I wound down my window.’
Pam Murphy said, referring to her notes, ‘You told the ambulance officers that you were raped by someone wearing a ski mask. Was he wearing a ski mask when he stopped you?’
‘I know what you’re asking,’ the young woman said, with some wobbly heat. ‘How come I didn’t just drive off, right? But he wasn’t wearing the mask when he stopped me, plus it was dark, plus he had his hand up to his eyes like my headlights were blinding him. Plus he was wearing a police uniform and he shouted at me, sounding really urgent, said for my own safety I had to pull in under the trees.’
Pam pictured the small parking area on the south-east corner, abutting Buckley’s Reserve, a school-bus stop five mornings a week but otherwise used only by drivers taking a mobile phone call, blackberry pickers, road-repair gangs on a tea-break from patching potholes. She pictured it at night, full of tricky shapes and shadows. ‘Just to be clear, the man who abducted you wasn’t Constable Tankard, the policeman who frightened you earlier?’
Chloe Holst shook her head. ‘Too fat. It was…I just saw the uniform and freaked out.’
‘I understand. Then what happened?’
‘I was scared. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. I hadn’t been drinking or speeding, but I thought I must have done something wrong, or something bad had happened to my mum and dad or something. Anyway, I did what he asked and before I could get out or anything, he climbed into the back seat and put a knife to my neck. He pricked me with it, look.’
A small, scratched hand pulled down the neckline, the delicate jaw craned upwards, revealing flesh that looked shockingly naked to Challis just then. A short, clean nick.
‘After that I just about lost it.’
‘You didn’t see his face?’
‘He was behind me, and by then he had the mask on. Plus gloves, you know, latex ones.’
‘Let’s stay with him for a bit. He was wearing a police uniform?’
‘Yes.’
‘Jacket over a shirt and trousers, or just the shirt and trousers.’
‘Shirt and trousers.’
‘Short sleeves? Long?’
‘Long.’
Less chance of being scratched, Challis thought. ‘Footwear?’
Chloe frowned, looking from him to Pam Murphy to the ceiling. Then her face cleared. ‘Black lace-ups. He kicked me in the stomach later on.’
Plain black shoes with a featureless flat sole, thought Challis. ‘Uniform cap?’
‘Yes.’
‘What kind of voice did he have?’
Challis didn’t want to suggest that the rapist spoke with an accent. Some victims were conditioned to believe that only an outsider, a foreigner, could have hurt them so badly. ‘I’m assuming he did speak?’
‘Kind of a hoarse whisper. It was put on. I wouldn’t say he had an accent or anything.’
Pam Murphy asked: ‘Any smells that you could identify?’
‘What, like BO?’
‘Anything.’
‘I didn’t smell anything, but he got all sweaty, you know, as he was…’