Chain of Evidence

20

Challis spent the day chatting with his father, reading aloud from Mr Midshipman Hornblower, and preparing simple meals. His childhood home seemed smaller than he’d remembered; stuffier, older, less well cared for. Since his mother’s death, his father had lost the will to be house-proud. Had nothing to live for, in fact. It was sad; it broke Challis’s heart. He wanted to make things better. He wanted to run away.

‘Cup of tea, Dad?’ he said at four o’clock, the afternoon sun angling into the back room, lighting the dust motes.

His father reached his right hand across his stomach and pulled his left into view. He examined his wristwatch for a while-as if time had now become a puzzle, where once it had ruled his life.

‘I’d like to eat at five, five-thirty.’

Challis said nothing. At five-twenty he’d microwave the chicken soup that Meg had left in the fridge, grill a lamb chop, boil half a carrot, and add a lettuce leaf and a slice of tomato. Would he himself eat at five-thirty? Yes, to be companionable. Besides, being a policeman had accustomed him to snatching dinner at all hours of the night and day. He was adaptable.

But the evening would be long. TV reception was poor this far north. A couple of his mother’s opera and ballet videos in the cabinet under the TV set, a short shelf of CDs: light classics, mostly, The Seekers, Welsh male choirs. He couldn’t go to the pub and leave his father alone. It was too soon to ask friends around-and what friends, anyway?

There was his laptop. Work on the discussion paper on regional policing that he still hadn’t written for Superintendent McQuarrie? Play solitaire? Somehow use the Web to find Gavin Hurst?

Actually, there was one thing he could do. He’d been restoring an old aeroplane before things had got so complicated in his life. It was gathering dust in a hangar on the little regional airport near Waterloo, and he knew, as one did know these things, that his not completing the restoration was symptomatic of a malaise, of a life that marked time, that waited when it should act. He’d feel better about himself if he went on-line and searched for missing parts-instrument-panel switches, for example.

The doorbell chimed, the sound bringing back vivid memories of his childhood, when friends had visited this house. The feeling strengthened as Challis made his way along the passageway to the front door, past his mother’s framed tapestries of English rural scenes, thatched cottages and haystacks, past the upended shell casing from the Second World War, now crammed with walking sticks and umbrellas.

And continued when he saw Rob Minchin on the doorstep.

‘Hal, old son.’

‘Rob.’

They shook hands, then embraced awkwardly. ‘How’s my patient?’

‘Cranky.’

‘Unchanged, in other words.’

Like Challis, Minchin had gone away, trained, and returned to the town. Unlike Challis, he’d stayed. He was the only doctor in the district, run ragged by surgery consultations, hospital rounds and house calls. He travelled huge distances, attending home births on remote farms, talking through the anxieties of lonely widows, taking the temperatures of sick children, pronouncing death when stockmen ran their mustering bikes into gullies and broke their necks. He was also the on-call pathologist for the region.

And Challis’s one-time friend. Time and distance had weakened the friendship, and fine distinctions in ambition and personality had become marked disparities, but, still, history always counts for something, and Challis and Minchin grinned at each other now.

‘Wish the circumstances were better,’ the doctor said.

Shorter than Challis, Minchin had grown solid over the years. He was fair-skinned and had always looked a little pink from sunburn or embarrassment. His hair was straight, reddish, limp and needed cutting. He’d been married, but his wife had run away with his partner in the little practice he’d inherited from his father.

‘It’s a waiting game,’ Challis murmured.

They went into the sitting room, where the old man was slumped in his chair. Minchin hurried to his side, but then a ripping snore stopped him.

Challis laughed. ‘Kept me awake last night.’

Minchin nodded. ‘Might as well let him sleep. I’m just checking in. No scares?’

He meant the series of minor strokes. Everyone was waiting for the big one. ‘No,’ said Challis. ‘Offer you a drink?’

‘Better make it coffee.’

‘If you can call it that,’ Challis said, leading the way to the kitchen.

When it was poured, Minchin asked, ‘How’s Meg holding up?’

The guy’s still in love with her, Challis thought. He saw how he could use that. ‘Not too bad, given all she’s had to deal with in the past few years.’

‘Yes.’

‘Gavin running out on her like that.’

‘Yeah,’ said Minchin flatly.

‘Rob,’ said Challis after a considering pause, ‘without breaching patient confidentiality, what sort of state was he in before he disappeared?’

‘You asked me that at the time.’

‘I didn’t take it in.’

Minchin leaned forward across the kitchen table, dropping his voice in case the old man was listening. ‘Gavin was veering from one extreme to the other. I prescribed medication to level him out, but I don’t know if he ever took it.’ He paused. ‘He hit Meg a couple of times, you know.’

Challis nodded sagely, but he hadn’t known. Just then, Minchin slapped at his solid thigh, leaned to one side and fetched a mobile phone from his side pocket. ‘Minchin. Yep. Yep. Oh, Christ, be right there.’

He pocketed his phone again and looked at Challis. ‘Do you know Ted Anderson?’

‘No.’

‘Wife died of cancer five years ago, leaving him with a baby to bring up. He’s gone off the Pass.’

‘Gone off the Pass’. Everyone knew what that meant. ‘Killed?’

Minchin nodded. ‘The kid’s okay, but trapped in the car.’

‘You’d better go, Rob.’

‘Tell your old man I’ll look in again when I can.’

‘Will do.’

Small-town tragedies, Challis thought, watching Minchin drive away. Next week it might be an ambulance officer coming upon his own wife in a burning car. Last year five teenagers had been killed when they failed to beat a train over a level crossing. When he was growing up, a bride-to-be from the next town was killed on her way to her wedding. As a young constable in Mawson’s Bluff, he’d attended when a jack-knifing semi-trailer had wiped out a family of five. There was never an end to it.

He was drawn back into the house by the ringing of the phone. ‘Hal?’

‘Ells,’ he said.

And she told him about Katie Blasko.