Snapshot

11

Robert McQuarrie came in looking pale but composed, frowning a little as the clamouring hands of his daughter pulled his suit askew. Then his mother rushed to him with a small, incoherent cry, which seemed to break his resolve. He blinked his eyes. Finally the superintendent was clapping an arm around him in a clumsy embrace.

Challis watched, unmoved. Robert McQuarrie seemed to notice him then over the shoulders of his parents. He had an open face, smooth and well tended, like his hands. A little button nose, inherited from his mother, gave him the appearance of a plain, over-sized schoolboy dressed in a costly suit.

He broke the embrace and approached with his hand out. ‘Robert McQuarrie,’ he said. ‘And you are?’

Challis made the introductions, McQuarrie scarcely glancing at Ellen.

‘I’ll be available later, but right now I need to comfort my daughter.’

‘I understand,’ Challis said. He glanced at Ellen, and by unspoken agreement they edged towards the door. The superintendent followed them into the hallway. ‘You’re going?’

Challis nodded. ‘I’m not sure that Georgia can help us any further at the moment. We may need to show her photographs of cars later, and mugshots.’

McQuarrie waved a hand as if to say, ‘Of course, of course.’

‘And we’ll need to speak to your son.’

McQuarrie looked at the floor, then up at Challis. ‘My son is devastated by this.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘I know you’re just doing your job. I’m a policeman myself, remember? I know you have to eliminate him from your inquiries. But go gently, all right? He’s exhausted, in shock, he’s just lost his wife. His daughter has just lost her mother.’

Challis nodded, waiting for McQuarrie to wind down.

‘And he couldn’t have shot Janine. He was in Sydney.’

Sooner or later, Challis thought, he’ll make the necessary leap: Did my son hire someone to shoot Janine?

‘I understand.’

‘Should be plenty of witnesses, too. He was guest speaker at a seminar.’ McQuarrie gave a ragged sigh. ‘Look, Hal, whatever resources you need, they’re yours. Extra manpower, overtime, anything at all. But for God’s sake keep the media out of this.’

‘We’ll have to tell them something.’

‘It’s an unholy alliance, sometimes, police and press. But this is my son and his wife and daughter we’re talking about, so no quiet words in the ear of that girlfriend of yours.’

Challis flushed angrily. Ellen saved him. ‘Sir, before we go, could you tell us a bit about your daughter-in-law?’

McQuarrie glanced at his watch, looked back over his shoulder to the sitting room and sounds of grief and bewilderment. ‘Can’t it wait?’

‘Just some basic background, sir, to get us started.’

‘Oh very well, come with me.’

He led them to a study, a cluttered, cheerless room at the rear of the house. There were framed diplomas and graduation photographs on the walls, golfclubs in one corner, a shelf of trophies, a ship in a bottle, very few books, golfing clothes tossed over a sombre leather armchair, computer, printer and fax machine on a leather-inlaid wooden desk. It seemed to Challis that McQuarrie had staked out this space as his own and his wife could go to hell.

‘Another cup of tea?’ McQuarrie said, not meaning it.

‘We’re fine, thank you, sir,’ Ellen said, glancing at Challis to see if he’d regained equilibrium.

‘Well, what do you need to know?’

Challis saw Ellen take out her notebook and move unobtrusively to one side. He’d ask, she’d record. ‘We’ll start with her personality, sir. What was she like?’

‘Lovely girl. Good family.’

‘She’s a psychologist?’

‘Has-had-her own clinic, in Mount Eliza,’ McQuarrie said. ‘A very bright girl.’

‘We’ve begun interviewing her staff and colleagues.’

‘Of course.’

‘Did she see clients at the clinic, or travel to see them?’

‘Both, I suppose. I don’t really know.’

‘And today?’

McQuarrie was impatient. ‘It was a curriculum day at Georgia’s school, which is another way of saying that her teachers gave themselves a day off, and when Janine couldn’t arrange childcare she had no option but to take Georgia with her.’

‘Was Janine going to the clinic afterwards, or visiting other clients?’

‘Hal, for God’s sake, this is basic police work. Talk to her secretary, check her calendar.’

‘Sir.’ Challis thought for a moment about his next question. There was no easy way to ask it. ‘Would you say that Robert and Janine were happily married?’

The super said, through compressed, bloodless lips, ‘See? That’s the kind of innuendo the media love. That Janine had a lover and so Robert shot her. Or that Robert had a lover and wanted Janine out of the way.’

‘We need to examine all scenarios,’ Challis said, hating the word but it was a useful one and by now deeply ingrained in the police lexicon.

‘To hell with that. I hope you’re not going to ask my son that same question.’

Challis tilted his chin a little. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to, sir.’

And you know it, too, was the unspoken part of his reply.

McQuarrie flushed. ‘Just remember who I am and who my son is and who you are, mister.’

‘Getting back to Janine,’ Ellen said hastily.

‘Lovely girl.’

Challis reflected that he wouldn’t get more than that from McQuarrie, who seemed incapable of discerning individual quirks in people. Janine came from a good family, was successful in business and had been chosen by his son, so no further scrutiny was required. She’d passed the only tests that mattered.

Poor woman. Had she struggled to be seen and heard by the family?

‘Did Janine ever mention particular clients who were threatening or abusive?’

Challis watched the superintendent absorb the implications. ‘No, but that’s a promising avenue, Hal, very promising. Follow it up.’

Challis nodded, despite his reservations. ‘Would Mrs McQuarrie have anything to add, do you think? Not now, perhaps tomorrow?’

‘You keep my wife out of this.’

‘Sir, I have no desire to upset anybody, but isn’t it possible that she knows things you don’t? You’re very busy, after all. Were they close?’

‘Janine was like a daughter to both of us.’

‘Yes, sir. How about her parents? Have they been told?’

‘They’re both dead, I’m afraid-killed in an accident some years ago. But there is a sister, Meg. Now, will that be all?’

‘Thank you sir,’ Ellen said.

They were halfway to the car when McQuarrie caught up with them, taking Challis by the arm and saying, ‘It’s time I spoke to the media.’

Challis exchanged glances with Ellen and they followed the superintendent up the driveway to the street and the reporters, who were standing with hunched shoulders against the driving wind. McQuarrie lifted a hand and said, ‘I wish to make a brief statement,’ and confirmed that his daughter-in-law had been shot dead at approximately 9.30 that morning. Challis and Ellen endured; cameras flashed at them. Meanwhile McQuarrie had apparently cast off his grief and strain; this was the McQuarrie who wore a costly suit and carried himself with a military man’s brisk snap and fearless gaze, like a British Army officer in a stiff-upper-lip film from the 1950s. He impressed the cameras, but it seemed to Challis that the man knew more about golf than crime, more about wealthy Rotarians than criminals or the police officers under his command. Tessa Kane arrived halfway through, earning a frown from McQuarrie, but he didn’t falter, talking at length, answering questions, and finally clapping a hand on Challis’s back, saying, ‘This is the man who will find my daughter-in-law’s murderer.’

The cameras and microphones turned questingly to Challis but he declined politely and returned to the car with Ellen. While she drove, heading across to the Nepean Highway, Challis sat slumped against the passenger door full of thoughts and with Georgia’s drawings clasped in his lap.

Ellen broke the silence. ‘I notice you didn’t tell the super we’re going to his son’s place of work.’

He stirred and grinned. ‘I didn’t, did I?’

‘First impressions of the son?’

‘Smooth, a charmer, in a private school kind of way.’

‘Professionally charming, not personally charming. Did you notice that he didn’t once look at or talk to me?’

‘I did.’

‘And it had nothing to do with rank. I’m a woman, ergo I don’t have a brain.’ She paused. ‘Be interesting to know what his relationship with Janine was like.’

‘Yes.’

After a pause she said, as if testing the waters, ‘Hal, what did you make of the super and his wife?’

Challis cocked his eyebrow at her. ‘Not exactly heartbroken.’

‘No.’

‘They praise Janine, but secretly didn’t like her, or thought her unworthy of their son.’

Ellen nodded. ‘That’s the impression I got.’

‘And if you’re asking should we consider the super, or even Mrs Super, a suspect, the answer’s yes.’

There, it was out in the open. With anyone other than Ellen, he’d have kept his suspicions to himself. He saw her nod. ‘And your reasons are…?’ she said.

‘Little things: lack of grief, being protective of his son and granddaughter, being faintly obstructive and wanting to guide the investigation. All explicable, but we can’t rule him out, or not entirely, and we can’t rule out the possibility that he suspects his son and is protecting him.’

‘Yes,’ said Ellen simply, confirming that she’d come to the same conclusions. ‘He can’t take over the investigation, can he?’

Challis shook his head. ‘Regulations won’t allow it.’

‘But he’ll meddle?’

‘Yes.’

Then a little Mazda sports car was beside them, tooting. Ellen tooted back and the Mazda shot away along the rain-slicked highway. Challis stirred. ‘Who was that?’

‘Pam Murphy and John Tankard.’

Challis frowned, then twigged. ‘Kellock’s safe driving campaign.’