Chain of Evidence

5

Detective Inspector Hal Challis was one thousand kilometres away, in the far mid-north of South Australia, crossing a barrier of stony hills on a hazardous switchback road at a point known as Isolation Pass. Drivers had been killed on the Pass. Challis knew to take it cautiously that Friday afternoon, climbing the upward slope in his rattly old Triumph, braking for the downward.

Before long he caught sight of Mawson’s Bluff, his glimpses of the little settlement interrupted by guardrails, then rock face, one alternating with the other. Complicated feelings settled in him. The Bluff was a drowsy wheat and wool town on a treeless plain, a place where they knew the cost of everything but the value of nothing. It was named for Governor Mawson’s son, who, in 1841, had set out from Adelaide to survey the range of hills that now sheltered the town and the merino stud properties, but failed to return, and was found a year later with a spear pinched between the bones of his ribcage. Challis had been taught that at the Bluff’s little primary school. He hadn’t been taught that it marked the beginning of a doomed Aboriginal resistance to rifles, horses and sheep. No one in Mawson’s Bluff wanted to know that. He was only going home because his sister had called him.

Home. He still called it that. He visited from time to time but hadn’t lived there for twenty years.

The road levelled out and he accelerated. Before long he could read MAWSON’S BLUFF painted on the roof of the pub, a landmark for the buyers who flew in from the sheep stations of New South Wales for the merino stud ram sales. And there was the cemetery, a dusty patch of gum trees and gravestones on a rise beyond the stockyards. Challis swallowed. He’d attended a funeral there last year, and if things followed their course, he’d soon be attending another.

He slowed at the outskirts of the town. An old sensation went through him, of emptiness and isolation. He’d felt it as a child, Broken Hill lying far to the east, Adelaide far to the south, and nothing between them. He shook off the feeling and looked for changes. Nothing had changed. The houses were the same, low, slumbering, walled in local stone, protected from the sun by broad verandahs, gum trees and golden cypress hedges. TV antennas fifteen metres high. The Methodist church in a square of red dirt, where the ants were always busy. The returned servicemen’s hall where he and Meg had dumped empty bottles for the annual Legacy drive. The stone school with the steep, faded red corrugated iron roof. The old women watering their geraniums and staring as he passed. The cars with their coatings of powdered dirt. Not mud. This was a dry spring, of a dry year, of a dry decade. Nothing had changed.

But he’d spoken too soon. He spotted changes in the little main street. There was a cafй now, a craft shop, and a place selling collectibles. Every faзade had been renovated in late colonial styles. Then Challis saw a sign on a picket fence, and understood: Mawson’s Bluff Community Preservation and Historical Society.

But the grassy plains still stretched on forever, the droughty bluffs loomed over the town and the sky was a cloudless dome above.

Challis had slowed to no more than a walking pace. The town was airless and still. No one moved. Curtains were drawn. Presently a farmer emerged from the post office, nodded hello as if Challis had never left the town, and drove away in one of the battered white utilities that populate the outback. Challis recognised him as Paddy Finucane, from an extensive clan that lurked on forgotten back roads, married into similar struggling share-farming families and drove trucks for the local council. There had been dozens of Finucanes in the convent school and the football team when Challis was a boy. There always had been and always would be. Some, he remembered, had been done for stealing sheep, diesel fuel, chainsaws or anything else that hadn’t been locked away in a shed. Paddy was one of them.

He came to the northern outskirts of the town and turned down a rutted track toward a more recently built house. Young wives of the prosperous 1960s had eschewed the cool old stone houses of the midnorth of South Australia and insisted on triple-fronted brick veneer houses with tile roofs-houses indistinguishable from those in the new suburbs and satellite towns of the major cities. Challis’s own mother had got her dream home. Challis’s father had been happy to oblige her: the love was there, and the money. In those first few years, Murray Challis had been the only lawyer in a one hundred-kilometre radius, drawing up wills, contracts and occasional divorce settlements for everyone from the mail contractor to the local gentry. Now, forty years later, the house he’d built for his wife still hadn’t accommodated itself naturally with the landscape. Like the old stone buildings of the region it came complete with an avenue of pines, a garden of roses and shrubs, rainwater tanks and a kelpie beating his tail in the dust, but it didn’t quite belong. Nor had the Challises, quite, and at the age of twenty Hal Challis had left for the police academy. Perhaps it was wanting to belong that made him apply for a posting back ‘home’ when he graduated. Certainly that had been a mistake. You can never go back. A couple of years later he’d left the state, and now was an inspector in the Victoria Police.

Challis braked at the head of the driveway, angling his car into the shade of the pepper trees. He got out, stretched his aching back and looked north over the struggling wheat flats that merged, in the far distance, with arid country, semi-desert, a land of pebbly dust, washaways, mallee scrub and hidden gullies. Men had died out there. They called it ‘doing a perish’, and many in the district believed that that’s what had happened to Challis’s brother-in-law, five years ago now. Gavin Hurst’s car had been found abandoned out there. No body. He’d been the district’s RSPCA inspector, a difficult man. Challis had never liked Hurst, but his sister had married him, had loved him, so what can you do?

‘The conquering hero returns.’

Challis wheeled around with an answering grin. Meg, two years his junior, was smiling tiredly at him from the verandah. A moment later she was embracing him, a round, comfortable shape. ‘Driving the same old bomb, I see,’ she said fondly, beating the flat of her hand against the chrome surround of his windscreen.

‘Hey, don’t mark my pride and joy.’

She snorted, throwing her arms around him again. ‘It’s so good to see you. You’re a sight for sore eyes.’

When she released him he saw that her eyes were, in fact, sore looking. ‘How is he?’

‘Sweetie,’ Meg told him gently, ‘he’s dying.’

Well, she’d told him that on the phone earlier in the week, and so he’d hastily arranged a month’s leave. What she meant now was, how else did Challis expect their father to be? It was faintly reproving, and Challis couldn’t blame her. Their mother had died a year ago, and their father had immediately declined. Meg, who lived on the other side of the Bluff, near the tennis courts, had been the one to nurse both of them. Their mother would have been undemanding, but Challis guessed that their father, an exacting man even in good health, was making hard work of dying. There rose between Challis and his sister a knot of unresolved feelings: Challis had escaped, Meg hadn’t. ‘I’m sorry.’

She brightened. ‘You’re here now’

Challis had asked for a month, but McQuarrie, his boss, a superintendent in regional command headquarters, had clearly thought that excessive. As if he wants my father to hurry up and die, Challis had thought at the time. ‘I have several weeks of accrued leave owing to me, sir,’ he’d said. ‘And Sergeant Destry is perfectly capable of holding the fort until I get back.’

McQuarrie, a small man who disapproved of many things, said, ‘Your father, did you say?’

‘He’s dying, sir.’

‘Very well.’

The super, who knew more about meeting procedures than catching bad guys, would give Ellen a hard time, but Challis couldn’t do anything about that now. Besides, Ellen knew how to look after herself.

He followed Meg along the path to the verandah steps. ‘Where’s Eve? She inside with Dad?’

Meg shook her head. ‘Studying. Always studying.’

Challis’s niece was in Year 12. He’d last seen her a year ago, at his mother’s funeral: tall, lovely, and absolutely desolate. He hated to think of Eve in pain. First her father, then her grandmother, and now her grandfather.

‘You’ll see her eventually,’ Meg said.

Challis stepped into the house behind her, into rooms unchanged from when he’d been a boy, into sluggish air laden with the odours of a dying man. For a brief mad instant, he looked for his mother to come bustling from the kitchen, ready to wrap him in loving smiles and hugs. The grief hit him like a punch to the heart: he stopped, swayed, breathed in and out.

‘Hal?’

Challis swallowed. ‘Nothing, sis, I’m okay.’ He paused. ‘Mum.’

Meg looked fleetingly unimpressed. This wasn’t a competition, but she’d been closer to their mother than Challis had, and she’d had to cope with their father’s decline. Then, relenting, she gently touched his arm and called, ‘Dad! Look who’s here.’

She’d set the old man up in a brightly upholstered cane chair in the screened-in back porch. Here the sun penetrated for the greater part of the day. It was a cheerful room, furnished with other cane chairs, a pair of glass-topped tables on cane legs, flowery curtains pulled back on the windows. White walls, a couple of vaguely Turkish rugs on the terracotta tiled floor. Challis took these things in first, a way of delaying the inevitable. Then, his heart hammering, he said, ‘Hello, Dad.’

His father stirred feebly, a bony hand fluttering out from under the tartan rug that enclosed him. Pathetic white ankles above carpet slippers. A food-stained blue dressing gown with shiny lapels revealed his sunken chest and throat. His face was sharp and fleshless, his hair a few wispy white tufts. Finally, the eyes that had always had the power to unnerve Challis. They were unchanged.

‘My boy,’ the old man said.

Overcome, Challis crossed the short distance, knelt, and hugged his father. A hand beat feebly on his back. ‘That’s enough, that’s enough, I’m not dead yet.’

Challis stood back, blinking. His father wasn’t easily comforted. He was too powerful for that. ‘Sorry to see you like this, Dad.’

His father gave him a ghastly smile. ‘It happens to all of us.’

Challis returned the smile.

‘I’ll make tea,’ Meg said, and presently began to bang around in the kitchen. Domesticity settled over the house. Challis and his father talked. Challis even held a papery old hand for a while, until his father gently removed it. They had never been ones to embrace. They had never kissed.

‘So, what are the bad guys up to in your neck of the woods?’

Challis went very still, calculating madly. Was this the lead up to a confrontation? His father had always said, ‘You’ve got a good brain. Why the hell did you go into the police?’ Challis thought he understood: Murray Challis had been born in the 1920s and seen his family suffer during the Great Depression. The Second World War had been his way out. He’d met educated men in the Air Force. Education was the key. It didn’t matter that his son had completed a bachelor degree at night school in recent years: it was the fact that his son hadn’t done anything with it but remained in the police force. ‘Your average criminal is stupid,’ was the refrain. ‘He brings you down to his level. He certainly doesn’t elevate you.’

‘Yes, but putting him in jail, and getting justice for the victim, elevates me,’ Challis would reply.

He could feel his asthma starting up. He found himself telling his father about a lawyer he’d arrested a month earlier. The man had a cocaine habit. He’d stolen two million dollars from clients who’d invested their life savings with him. ‘Picked him up boarding a plane to Bangkok,’ said Challis challengingly.

His father patted his wrist. ‘I’m a family solicitor, son, not a lawyer.’

Meg came in with a tray: blueberry muffins, teapot, mugs, milk and sugar. They ate, and presently the old man fell asleep. Challis and Meg chattered. Their father awoke and said, ‘How long are you staying, son?’

Challis didn’t know what to say. Until you die? He coughed. ‘They’ve given me a month off, Dad.’

So please don’t die after that time?

Meg rescued him. ‘Be glad he’s here, Dad.’

Their father winked. ‘She thinks I’m dying.’

Challis barked an uncomfortable laugh.

Then the old man entered one of the mood swings that had always kept Challis and Meg on their toes. ‘Which way did you come?’ he demanded.

‘Dad,’ said Meg warningly.

Challis didn’t visit very often, making the two-day car journey from his home on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria to Mawson’s Bluff only once every two or three years, generally at Christmas time. He would break the drive in Adelaide or, if he’d set out late, in Keith or Bordertown. There had been only two exceptions to that in the past decade: when his mother had died last spring, and when Meg’s husband had disappeared on a winter’s day five years earlier. On both occasions, Challis had flown to Adelaide and driven up in a hire car the same day.

He considered lying now. It was his father’s fierce contention that Challis should always skirt Adelaide and detour via the Barossa Valley, which was beautiful wine-growing country settled by German immigrants in the 1800s. The old man’s mother, Lottie Heinrich, had been born there. But Challis couldn’t lie to him, and began to describe his route: through Adelaide, up into the wheat and sheep country of the mid-north, and eventually to Mawson’s Bluff, in marginal country near the Flinders Ranges.

His father began to shake his head. If he’d had a walking stick he’d have thumped it on the floor.

‘How often have I told you,’ he said, ‘avoid Adelaide, go through the Barossa. It saves time and petrol, and it’s safer.’

It was an old refrain, but it still had the power to churn Challis up inside. He had trouble breathing. He was having an asthma attack. He coughed and gasped, ‘Be back in a sec’

He collected his bag from the hallway and took it through to his old bedroom. The inhaler-rarely used these days-was in a plastic zip case together with his comb, razor, toothbrush and painkillers. He took a hit from the inhaler, eyes closed, holding it in for a few seconds before gently exhaling.

Miraculous.

What he couldn’t tell his father was that a feeling of wretchedness had settled in him as he’d driven the long kilometres ‘home’. He’d cut himself off from his family, not been there to help when misfortune had come to them. And so, resolving to do more, he’d stopped in Adelaide to consult the South Australia police file on Gavin Hurst’s disappearance. He couldn’t tell his father that he’d done that. The old man firmly believed that Gavin had simply left his car at the side of the road five years ago and walked out into the badlands to die. He’d loathed Gavin. Gavin was dead. Enough said. But Meg had evidence that Gavin was still alive, and Challis was determined to discover what had happened to him.