Chain of Evidence

14

Bucketing rains came through overnight, preceded by thunder and lightning that seemed to mutter around the fringes of the horizon, then approach and encircle the house where Ellen Destry slept, and retreat again. Dawn broke still and balmy, the skies clear, as though nothing had happened. Spring in southeastern Australia, Ellen thought, glancing out of Challis’s bedroom window. The bedside clock was flashing, indicating that the power had gone off during the night. She glanced at her watch-6 am-and went around the house, resetting the digital clocks on the microwave, the oven, the DVD player. Then, pulling on a tracksuit and old pair of Reeboks, she set out for her morning walk.

And immediately returned. Rainwater had come storming down the dirt road and roadside ditches outside Challis’s front gate, carrying pine needles, bark, gravel and sand, which had formed a plug in the concrete stormwater pipe that ran under his gateway. The ditch had overflowed, scoring a ragged channel across the entrance. She should do something about it before the channel got too deep.

Hal had told her the grass would need mowing regularly. He hadn’t told her what a storm could do.

In his garden shed she found a fork, a five-metre length of stiff, black poly agricultural pipe, and a long-handled shovel. She hoisted them over one shoulder and returned to the front gate. There were signs of the overnight storm all about her: twigs, branches, ribbons of bark and birds’ nests littered the road; water-laden foliage bent to the ground; the air seemed to zing with promise.

Ellen forked and poked at the blocked pipe, shovelled and prodded. Suddenly, with a great, gurgling rush, the stopper of matted leaves and mud washed free and drain water flowed unchecked toward the…

Toward the sea? Ellen realised that she knew very little about life out here on the back roads.

Finally she walked. She passed a little apple orchard, the trees heavy with blossom despite the storm. Onion weed, limp and yellowing at the end of its short life, lay densely on both sides of the road, and choking the fences was chest-high grass, going to seed. Sometimes her feet slipped treacherously where the dusty road had turned to mud. The blackberry bushes were sending out wicked new canes and the bracken was flourishing. Now and then she passed through air currents that didn’t smell clean and new but heavy with the odours of rotting vegetation and stale mud revitalised by the rain. Everything;-the sounds, the smells, the textures-served to remind her of Katie Blasko, abandoned, buried, merging with the soil.

She walked slowly up the hill, stunned to see huge cylinders of hay in one of the paddocks, freshly mown and wrapped in pale green polythene. When had that happened? She rarely saw or heard vehicles, and yet here was evidence of the world going on without her.

Without warning she heard a sharp snap and felt a stunning pain in her scalp. Her heart jumped and she cried out in terror. Only a magpie, she realised soon afterwards, swooping her because it had a nest nearby-but she’d hated and feared magpies ever since a long-ago spring day when she’d been pecked and harried across a football field as she’d taken a short cut home from school on her bicycle. Magpies sang like angels but were the devil.

Windmilling her arms wildly about her head, and trying to make eye contact with her tormentor, Ellen trotted home. She missed her morning walks on Penzance Beach with Pam Murphy, where the world was reduced to the sand, the sea, the sky and a few gulls. Out here on the back roads there was too much nature. All around her ducks sat like knuckly growths on the bare branches of dead gums, and other birds were busy, calling out, making nests, protecting their young, and in the paddocks ibis were feeding. A strip of bark fell on her, scratching her neck. Challis’s ducklings were down to six, she noticed, as she entered his yard, and she wanted to cry.

At nine that same Sunday morning, Scobie Sutton was at the little Waterloo hospital. He was entitled to a day at home with his wife and daughter, a quiet time, church and Sunday School, a spot of gardening after lunch, but the station was short staffed. He’d be working the Katie Blasko case later-and it was a ‘case’ in Scobie’s mind: his own daughter was Katie’s age, and if she went missing for even thirty minutes he’d be calling it a case-but right now he was the only CIU detective available to interview the victim of an aggravated burglary.

‘How are you feeling, Mr Clode?’

‘I’ll live,’ Neville Clode said.

Extensive bruising to the head and torso, a cut lip, cracked ribs. Clode was swaddled in bandages and lying very still in the bland, pastelly room. The place was overheated and so he’d thrown off the covers, revealing skinny legs and the ugliest feet that Scobie had ever seen: yellowed nails and a blotchy birthmark. No flowers, fruit or books. I’m possibly his first visitor, Scobie thought. ‘You took quite a beating last night.’

The voice came in a strained whisper, ‘Yes.’

‘Did you recognise the men who attacked you?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know if they took anything?’

‘Cash,’ whispered Clode.

‘Cash. Do you know how much?’

‘Six…seven hundred dollars.’

Scobie whistled. It was a lot. It would also grow when Clode submitted his insurance claim. ‘Do you always have that much cash on you?’

‘Won it at the horses yesterday. Emu Plains.’

It was the spring racing carnival everywhere, metropolitan racetracks and regional, including Emu Plains on Coolart Road, just a few kilometres from Waterloo. No security cameras, though. ‘Do you think you were followed home from the track?’

‘Could have been.’

‘Were you alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘And nothing else was stolen?’

‘No.’

Clode hadn’t once made eye contact but stared past Scobie at the TV set bolted high on the wall, so high it was a wonder hospitals didn’t get sued for encouraging neck strain in their patients. Scobie dragged the visitor’s chair around; Clode slid his eyes to the beige door. Scobie said gently, ‘Are you telling me everything, Mr Clode? Was this personal? Did you owe money to anyone? Is there anyone who would want to hurt you?’

Scobie had visited the crime scene before coming to the hospital. Clode lived in a brick house along a secluded lane opposite the Seaview Park estate. Like its neighbours, it was comfortably large and barely visible from the road, a low, sprawling structure about ten years old, the kind of place where well-heeled tradesmen, teachers and shop owners might live, on largish blocks, screened by vigorous young gum trees, wattles and other native plants. Residents like Clode were several steps up from the battlers of Seaview Park estate, and several steps down from the doctors and real estate agents who lived in another nearby enclave, Waterloo Hill, which overlooked the town and the Bay. Clode himself was some kind of New Age healer, according to a sign on a post outside his house.

Letting a forensic tech dust and scrape, Scobie had done a walk-through of the house. It was evident that a woman had once lived there-a woman slightly haunted by life or by Clode, judging by the face she revealed to the world in the only photograph Scobie found, a small, forgotten portrait in a dusty cream frame, the woman unsmiling in the front garden of the house, Clode with his arm around her. No signs of her in the bathroom cabinet, bedside cupboard or wardrobe. The rooms themselves were sterile, a mix of mainly worn and some new items of furniture, in careful taste, neither cheap nor costly, with here and there an ornamental vase or forgettable framed print. A couple of fat paperbacks, several New Age magazines, some CDs of whale and waterfall music. It was the house of an empty man. The only oddity was a small room taken up with a spa bath, bright wall tiles and cuddly floating toys.

And the damage, of course-the overturned TV set, rucked floor mats, splintered chair and broken glass. And blood.

‘Did you injure any of your assailants, do you think?’ Scobie asked now. ‘There seemed to be a lot of blood in the sitting room.’

Clode put a hand to his cut lip and winced. ‘Don’t know.’

Scobie watched him for a while. ‘Are you telling me everything, Mr Clode?’

Signs of anal penetration, according to the doctor who’d examined Clode. No semen present. ‘Were you raped?’

Clode’s eyes leaked and he shook his head minutely. Scobie waited. Clode swallowed. ‘A bottle.’

There had been no bottles at the scene. ‘Before or after they beat you?’

‘It was part of the whole deal,’ Clode said.

‘You were also kicked?’

‘Yes.’

‘What were they wearing?’

‘Jeans. T-shirts.’

‘What about footwear?’

‘Runners.’

Scobie had scouted around the house: lawn right up to the verandah, so no shoe prints, and none in the blood. ‘You didn’t recognise them?’

‘Happened too quickly, plus I covered my face to protect it.’

‘When did it happen?’

‘About midnight.’

‘Yet you didn’t report it until six this morning?’

‘Unconscious.’

‘I don’t understand why they didn’t take anything else-your DVD player, for example.’

Scobie watched Clode. The man’s face was bruised and swollen, but evasiveness underlay it. ‘Don’t know.’

‘I think this was personal, Mr Clode.’

‘No. Never seen them before.’

‘Are you married?’

‘My wife died a couple of years ago. Cancer.’

‘ Grandchildren?’

‘Yes.’

That explained the spa bath and toys. ‘How old were these men?’

‘Don’t know. Youngish,’

‘You’re almost sixty?’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘What about their voices. Did you recognise anyone? Anything distinguishable, like an accent?’

‘They didn’t say much. Didn’t say anything.’

‘What about names, did they let any names slip out?’

‘Nup.’

‘Did they address you by name?’

‘No.’

‘Have you got any enemies, Mr Clode?’

‘No. I’m in pain.’

Pam Murphy, conditioned by years of police duty and triathlon training, was also up and about.

According to the surf report, Gunnamatta Beach was too big and turbulent today, Portsea had messy onshore waves, Flinders onshore waves to 1.5 metres, and Point Leo a fair, one-metre-high tide surf, so she settled on Point Leo. The surfing conditions were right. It was also her closest surf beach and she’d learnt to surf there.

It was uncanny the way certain memories and sense traces hit her the moment she drove past the kiosk and over the speed bumps. Sex, mainly, together with the taste of salt-human and marine-and the sounds of the seagulls, the offshore winds, the snap of wetsuits, kids waxing their boards. Desire flickered in her. The guy who’d taught her to surf had been scarcely seventeen years old, she in her mid twenties. A disciplinary offence, maybe even dismissal from the police force, if it had ever come out. But it hadn’t, and they’d both moved on and no hearts had been broken or psyches damaged. It had been a tonic to her, that summer. She’d never been desired quite like that before. She’d scarcely felt desire herself, or desirous. Her body had always been a beautiful, flexible instrument whenever she swam, ran or hit a ball around, but sexual desire had been its untapped dimension. A male colleague like John Tankard, commenting on her tits in the confines of a police car, was hardly going to awaken her.

She parked on a grassy verge beside a cluster of familiar roof-racked panel vans and small cars, pulled on her wetsuit, and trudged over the dunes with her surfboard, passing the clubrooms, a poster of Katie Blasko pinned to a noticeboard. The beach curved slowly to the west; a few solitary people walked their dogs; gulls wheeled above the sea; surfers-tiny patient dots-rose and fell, rose and fell, as small waves rolled uneventfully to the shore. Pam felt a surge of feeling for the lost summers of her life and for the end of her years in uniform.

Unless she blew it. ‘You have the right instincts,’ Ellen Destry would often tell her, ‘but becoming a detective also means writing essays and passing exams.’

Things that Pam had never been good at.