Chain of Evidence

34

Friday was the morning for the District Nurse and the shire council’s Home Helper, and that gave Challis three hours to himself. First he drove across town to wish Meg luck with the police interview. There was a Channel 7 news van parked in the street outside the house, and a couple of newspaper reporters leaning against Meg’s fence, smoking, exchanging war stories. They’d come three hundred kilometres north for this story; it involved murder, grisly remains, concealment and buried secrets. Challis, who had perfected reporter brush-off techniques over the years, passed through as if he didn’t see them.

Eve answered the door, her face tight and unhappy. He hadn’t seen her since Wednesday, and made sure that the door was firmly shut before he hugged her.

‘They keep knocking and ringing. I hate it. They’re ghouls.’

‘They’ll go away eventually.’

‘Dr Minchin was here earlier.’ Eve looked at Challis as though recalling a bad taste. ‘He took a mouth swab, can you believe it?’

Challis hugged her again. ‘DNA, sweetheart, to help them identify the body.’

‘I felt like a criminal.’

‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of.’

She heaved a sigh. ‘Today’s going to drag on forever.’

It occurred to Challis that Eve would be alone here while Meg was questioned. ‘Want to come around with me this morning?’

‘Where?’

He gazed at her steadily. ‘Out east.’

She twigged at once. ‘Where Dad’s car was found?’

‘Yes.’

She didn’t ask why. It was as if she knew. He found Meg in the kitchen and said goodbye and good luck.

‘Thanks.’

She looked tired and bewildered. She’d assumed that Gavin Hurst had been alive all these years, and had grown to hate him because he’d been taunting her. Now this.

‘Call me when the police have finished interviewing you.’

‘Unless I’m in jail.’

‘I’ll break you out.’

‘My hero. Pity you’re my brother.’

‘Call me,’ he said again.

‘I will,’ she promised.

‘On my mobile.’

‘Okay.’

There was a transmitting tower in Mawson’s Bluff. In fact, Challis got better mobile phone reception in the wilds of South Australia than he did on the Peninsula. He kissed Meg and then hurried Eve into his car and drove east on a road that had been subject to potholes and bone-jarring corrugations back when he was a teenager driving to outlying sheep stations to pick up a girl and take her to a dance. It was a fine sealed road now, and passed through a rain shadow, leaving the grassy plains of the Bluff behind and rapidly entering stony saltbush and bluebush country-the change so dramatic that God might have thrown a switch when your eyes were blinking. If you kept going you’d reach the vast northeast of the state, a virtually unpopulated region of stone ruins, deep gorges, dry salt lakes and landmarks that named the fate of European settlement: Mount Hopeless, Termination Hill, Dry Well Track, Blood Creek Bore.

But Gavin’s RSPCA station wagon had been found only twenty kilometres east of the Bluff-twenty-one kilometres east of the cemetery. Dry country, sure. Country you could walk out into, never to be found, if you had your heart set on it. A country of hidden gullies and undiscovered rocky caves decorated with ancient Aboriginal carvings and paintings. But country that was still close to town. A daily Trailblazer bus went along that road, before turning southeast to the River Murray towns. Salesmen went along it, livestock agents, local farmers, tourists in cars and buses. Gavin could have abandoned his car and hitched a ride with a stranger, you’d reason, if you believed he’d wanted to stage his disappearance. Or he’d walked out into the dry country to die, you’d reason, if you believed that he’d wanted to commit suicide.

Two reasonable hypotheses, both widely held in the town.

Eve knew where the car had been found, and directed him to pull over fifty metres past the twenty-kilometre post. ‘You’re getting a feeling, Uncle Hal?’

She said it slightly teasingly. In fact, he often did feel his way into the atmospherics of a place, and the skin and bones of a victim or a culprit. There was nothing supernatural about it. It was merely one man’s imagination-albeit an imagination honed by dozens of murder investigations over the years.

‘Something like that,’ he said.

A warm wind blew, raising a willy-willy on the dusty plain. Two wedge-tail eagles soared above, and bleached, horned rams’ skulls gleamed in the reddish dirt nearby. They stood there for some time, thinking, talking, reminiscing. It was not a lonely spot. Several cars and a dirty Land Rover passed by, their drivers raising a hand in greeting.

Eve said, ‘I hate to think of him being shot out here.’

‘It might not have been here.’

He could see her mind working. ‘He was shot somewhere else and they dumped his car here?’

‘Yes.’

‘That would need at least two people, one to drive Dad’s car here, the other to collect the driver.’

‘It’s one scenario.’

Challis pictured Paddy Finucane with his sad-looking wife. He pictured Meg with the old man. Just then his mobile phone rang.

‘Hal?’

Meg’s tone was bright but he froze inside. ‘Everything okay?’

It was as if all of the cares of her life had evaporated. ‘Everything’s fine. The lawyer was terrific. He made them promise they’d look at everyone Gavin brought prosecutions against.’

Challis was less enthusiastic. ‘But you’re not off the hook?’

‘Well surely-’

‘So long as you’re not behind bars, sis,’ he said hastily.

She was disconcerted. ‘I’d better go.’

‘Bye,’ Challis said to the empty air.

‘That was Mum?’

‘She’s back home.’

‘I should be with her.’

Challis nodded and they drove back to Mawson’s Bluff. He ran Eve through the gauntlet outside her house and then drove to the hospital, where he was directed to the cafeteria, an airy, clattering room in the east wing. Minchin sat at a window table, staring out at the scrubby trees that separated the town from one of the adjacent farms. He’d pushed a partly consumed plate of lettuce, spinach, fetta, olives and bamboo shoots to one side and was dreaming over a mug of black coffee.

‘Not fond of grass?’

The doctor gave him a tired smile. ‘Trying to lose weight.’

‘And bound to succeed if you don’t actually eat.’

‘Yeah, yeah. You’re here about Gavin?’

‘Is he still in the morgue?’

Minchin shook his head. ‘The lab.’

Meaning the forensic science lab in Adelaide, three hundred kilometres south. Challis was disappointed: he’d wanted to view the body. ‘But you did the preliminary examination?’

‘I pronounced death,’ said his friend.

‘Very funny.’

‘Well and truly deceased.’

‘Gunshot to the head?’

‘Gunshot to the back of the head.’

‘Shotgun? Handgun? Rifle?’

‘A single entry wound, single exit wound with massive damage, so not a shotgun. And probably not a low calibre handgun or rifle.’

‘Gavin apparently travelled around with a.22 rifle. You’re saying it couldn’t have been the murder weapon?’

‘Very doubtful.’

‘Any fragments?’

‘Hal, I don’t have the resources to determine things like that. Contact the lab.’

‘I will. But you did match his teeth to his dental records?’

‘Yes, and there were a couple of broken ribs, old knitted fractures.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Gavin was kicked by a horse about ten years ago. I patched him up. Still have the X-rays.’

‘In that case you needn’t have taken a DNA swab from Eve.’

‘Just covering bases, Hal, you know that.’

Challis scowled and they brooded together, two men who’d once been close and had complicated ties to the dead man.

‘So he couldn’t have shot himself,’ Challis said after a while, ‘and he couldn’t have buried himself

‘But someone could have shot him by accident and panicked.’

‘You’re doing my job for me.’

‘But is it your job, Hal?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Those Adelaide detectives.’

‘What about them?’

‘They asked me about you.’

‘What did you tell them?’

‘Nothing to tell.’

‘Did they ask you where you were? And if you own a rifle?’

Minchin opened his mouth, shocked and appalled, then swiftly angry. ‘Fuck you.’

‘Rob, sit down, I’m only asking questions that you’ll be asked sometime or other, by the police or the coroner.’

‘Just because I went out with Meg a few times twenty years ago.’

There was more to it than that, Challis thought. ‘Yes.’

‘Yours is a pretty shitty job, you know that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know where I was when Gavin disappeared? In the UK.’

‘The UK?’

‘Medical conference. On providing distance health care.’

‘In the UK?’

‘Some of those moors towns are several miles apart, Hal.’

Challis grinned. ‘True. So that lets you off the hook.’

Minchin was relaxing slowly. ‘I could have put out a contract, of course.’

‘Let me jot that down.’

They stared out at the drying landscape, some wildflowers here and there, aroused by a short-lived springtime rain before Challis had arrived in the district.

‘I have to do my rounds now.’

‘They questioned Meg this morning,’ Challis said.

‘Is she okay?’

‘Well, she’s not under arrest.’

‘Should I, you know, call on her?’

Challis weighed it up, even though he knew the answer. ‘Not yet.’

‘You know, Hal, not once did I make a move on Meg after Gavin disappeared.’

Challis gazed at his friend. Did Rob want forgiveness, understanding, absolution? Did he want permission to woo Meg now? Meg had once bawdily confessed to Challis that she hadn’t wanted Rob as the family doctor, taking pap smears, squeezing her breasts for lumps. And forget about him putting his hands on Eve. She didn’t mean that Rob was creepy, just a little inept, a little pathetic, as he’d tried to go beyond first base with her in the backseat of his car when they were growing up. There had always been a kind of gingery, soft-fleshed lack of appeal about Rob Minchin, poor sod. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t capable of murder. Challis said, ‘I think she’ll need plenty of time and space, Rob.’

‘Point taken.’