Chain of Evidence

55

Challis slept badly and at first light on Tuesday morning drove to the Joyce homestead and mounted the steps again.

It was a replay of yesterday evening, except that this time Lisa waited behind the screen door with the shotgun. She looked perky and rested, and said, ‘Hal, I swear I’ll shoot you if you try to touch me.’

He said gently, ‘Has Rex come back? Let me talk to him.’

‘He’s still away. Look, you scared me last night.’

‘Lisa, does Rex have a mobile phone with him?’

She frowned. ‘Yes.’

He took out his own phone. ‘What’s the number?’

She shrugged, told him, and he called. Reaching Rex’s voice-mail, he pocketed the phone again. ‘He’s not answering.’

‘So? Please go.’

‘He could be hurt, Lisa. Please stop the charade.’

She looked discomposed for the first time. Stared past him at the gentle dawn light on her spreading lawns and shady trees. Sparrows and starlings were busy, calling out, squabbling, nest building.

‘Lisa?’ said Challis gently. ‘Let’s go and look for him.’

She snapped into focus again and said briskly, ‘He did receive a call yesterday. He left the house soon afterwards in the Range Rover.’

Challis nodded. ‘What mood was he in?’

She searched for the word. ‘Upset. Rambling.’

‘Let’s try the shepherd’s hut.’

She seemed embarrassed. ‘Because it has significance to him?’

‘Something like that.’

She opened the screen door and stepped out, still holding the shotgun. She smelt of perfumed soap and shampoo, a clean, healthy woman who wore jeans and a sleeveless, crisply ironed cotton shirt that revealed toned, faintly tanned, delectable skin. Challis was repelled. He took the shotgun from her hands and rested it against the verandah. ‘Let’s leave this here, okay?’

‘Whatever.’ She pointed past him. ‘That won’t make it up the Bluff

Challis eyed the Triumph, which sat dented, sun-faded and low-slung on the gravelled driveway. ‘Oh.’

He felt uncertain. Lisa took charge. ‘There’s an old Jeep in one of the sheds.’

She fetched the keys. She drove.

Fifteen minutes later they were deep into the foothills and following sheep pads, the dusty erosions that scribble all over the outback, meandering along slopes, through long grass and around stony reefs. Lisa set the Jeep to four-wheel-drive, the old vehicle wallowing and pitching, climbing steadily toward high ground. Below them lay the town, several kilometres away. The sun flashed on distant windscreens, and crows and hawks wheeled above, sideslipping in the air currents.

Suddenly the Jeep powered over a hump in the ground and they were on a little plateau, startling half-a-dozen sheep. On the far side was the shepherd’s hut, in the foreground the glossy Range Rover, facing away from them. Lisa braked, peered over the steering wheel. ‘He’s sitting in the back seat.’ Suddenly she thumped the heel of her hand against the horn. ‘Rex!’ she shouted futilely.

To Challis there was something unnatural about the shape in the rear of the Range Rover, something wrong about the relationship of the head with the shoulders, the back of the seat and the window glass.

‘Is he asleep?’ asked Lisa.

‘Stay here, okay?’

‘I’m coming with you.’

‘Lisa,’ he said.

‘I’m coming with you.’

They approached, drawing adjacent to the rear of the Range Rover. Rex Joyce’s head lolled back; there was blood spatter on the glass beside his left ear but more on the ceiling lining above his head. Challis assessed the signs rapidly. Joyce had shot himself. The rifle was between his knees, the muzzle under his jaw. It made a certain kind of sense.

Meanwhile Lisa had gasped and moaned and doubled over, dry-retching. Challis reached out to touch her shoulder. ‘Don’t touch me!’

He snatched his hand back.

She straightened. ‘Sorry. Sorry, Hal. I’ll be all right in a minute. Phew.’ She swallowed, grimaced at the taste. ‘There’s water in the Jeep.’

Challis let her go. He finished making his visual inspection, then followed her. He could see her shape behind the open door of the Jeep, head tilted back as she drank from a plastic bottle.

Halfway there, he stopped. He spun around and strode back to the Range Rover. First he checked the driver’s seat. It sat well forward, as though the last person to drive the vehicle had been short. Rex Joyce was tall. Then he peered through the gap in the seats, noting the rifle between the victim’s legs: it was long-barrelled, a hunting rifle. Too long for Joyce’s arms? He couldn’t be sure about that, but he was sure there should be more blood on the seat back and ceiling.

He closed the driver’s door and opened the door beside the body.

He was sorely tempted to lean in and check for signs of lividity. If Rex had died sitting upright, his blood would have pooled and settled in his buttocks, the underside of his thighs and in his feet and the bottoms of his legs. Challis was betting he’d find lividity all along the body, indicating that Lisa’s husband had died somewhere else, then been laid flat and transported here.

Police work had made Hal Challis an infinitely sympathetic man. That didn’t mean he condoned, necessarily, just that he understood, and now he turned his patient, sorrowing gaze toward the Jeep and Lisa Joyce, even as a hole appeared in the window beside him, glass chips sprayed over his face and chest, and a slipstream plucked at the hairs on his head.