Snapshot

30

At eight o’clock that Wednesday evening, almost thirty-six hours after Janine McQuarrie’s murder, Challis and Ellen parked the unmarked Falcon in the street, said ‘No comment’ to a handful of reporters, and walked up the driveway of an Edwardian house set on a ridge above a rocky cove in Mount Eliza. The house was angled to allow million-dollar views down to Sorrento from one bank of windows and across the Bay to the irregular towers of the city from another, but right now the sea was black, the coastal towns a belt of twinkling lights, the distant city a yellow glow that swallowed the stars.

Meg answered, smiling tiredly in greeting and showing them through to a sitting room with drawn curtains and a heaped log fire burning briskly. ‘Make yourselves comfortable,’ she said. ‘Robert’s in his study. I’ll let him know you’re here.’

She was back a moment later. ‘He won’t be long.’

She chatted, Challis listening with half an ear, wondering why

Robert McQuarrie was taking so long. Phoning his father to complain?

Or was it a typical and unconscious exercise of power to make them wait? An insult, maybe? This room needs colours and clutter to soften it, he decided, glancing around. It was a vast, starkly white room with plenty of chrome, glass and polished wood everywhere in hard angles.

‘You don’t need to talk to Georgia, do you?’ Meg asked anxiously. ‘It took me ages to get her to sleep.’

Challis shook his head. ‘No.’

Then Robert McQuarrie came in like a man burdened with fools, still wearing suit trousers, black shoes and a loosened tie over a pale blue cotton business shirt. Here was the busy tycoon who never rests, not even at home, not even when his wife has just been murdered. ‘I hope you’re here with good news,’ he said.

Challis glanced at Meg, who got the message, and hurried out wordlessly, casting them a shy, relieved smile. A moment later they heard a television in another room, the theme music to the American cop show where the main guy always muttered, ‘Keep me posted’.

‘Well?’

‘Mr McQuarrie, this is a photograph of you having sex with a woman who is not your wife,’ Challis said.

McQuarrie took the photograph, screwed his eyes shut and rocked on his feet. When his voice came it was hoarse and full of strain. ‘This isn’t what you think.’

‘Oh?’Ellen demanded.’ And what do we think?’

‘That I’m some kind of, you know…’

He couldn’t finish and they waited for other reactions. Finally Challis fed him the photographs. ‘The dozen or so photographs we’ve obtained seem to concentrate on four men. Here are the other three.’

‘I have to sit down.’

‘Would you like a drink?’

McQuarrie eyed a glass cabinet, dithered, and poured himself a scotch. ‘Does my father have to know about this?’

Challis and Ellen said nothing.

McQuarrie perched stiffly on the edge of an armchair. ‘Please. It would destroy him, destroy my mother.’

Challis shrugged and McQuarrie got encouragement from it. ‘You got these from the Kane woman,’ he said poisonously.

‘Oh?’ said Challis. ‘Why do you say that?’

McQuarrie curled his upper lip. ‘I’m not stupid. She published that article, and hey presto, these photos appear. Your relationship with her is common knowledge. You doing her dirty work, or is she doing yours?’

His demeanour seemed to say that Tessa was scum and so therefore was Challis, for consorting with her. Challis tensed, wanting to wipe the man’s expression off his face.

McQuarrie saw something in him and paled a little, and swallowed heavily from his glass of scotch. It revived him. ‘Tessa Kane’s on the way out, you know. She’s finished. She has no idea of community feeling and should never have been put in charge of a local newspaper.’

The bluster can mean two things, Challis thought: that Robert McQuarrie honestly thinks Tessa took the photos and they’re unrelated to the murder of his wife, or he’s a guilty man attempting to misdirect us.

‘Can you tell me where the photos were taken?’

McQuarrie shifted uncomfortably. ‘I don’t think I should. It doesn’t matter where. But I will be having words with them. Opening themselves to a journalist is one thing, allowing photographs to be taken is quite another.’

‘Sir,’ said Ellen with barely concealed contempt, ‘the longer you hold out on us the more likely it is that these photos are passed around and find their way onto the net, to the media and to your parents. At present it’s strictly need-to-know and involves only a handful of trusted officers. I can’t promise it will stay like that.’

‘You can’t bully me,’ McQuarrie said. He moistened his mouth.

Challis said evenly, ‘I want you to tell us-immediately-who these other men are and where these photos were taken.’

‘They have a right to privacy…consenting adults…gladly sue you and the Kane woman…’ Robert McQuarrie muttered, jumping from thought to thought as his gaze jumped from object to object in the room.

‘It’s not illegal,’ he went on. ‘We weren’t doing anything wrong.’

Ellen studied him. ‘Doesn’t it bother you to know that someone you trusted has been taking candid photographs of you having sex with strangers?’

‘Trusted? Tessa Kane? That’s a laugh.’

‘Not Tessa Kane. We obtained these from someone rather closer to you than that.’

McQuarrie’s face grew desolate for a moment as he looked down an empty, unpromising road. ‘Who?’

‘We think you know.’

‘I don’t, I swear I don’t.’

‘We think you do.’

‘Shouldn’t you be looking for whoever killed my wife instead of hassling me about my private life?’

‘Mr McQuarrie,’ Ellen said pitilessly, ‘what do you think we’re doing, showing you these photographs, asking these questions, if not investigating the murder of your wife?’

A pause while he took this in. ‘A coincidence,’ he said.

‘Is it?’

‘You can’t honestly believe she was shot because she took part in some harmless…’ He’d scattered the photographs across a coffee table but now grabbed and scrutinised them. ‘These don’t even show Janine.’

‘Think about it, sir.’

‘I don’t know,’ he wailed. ‘Maybe someone’s wife or girlfriend arranged to have her shot out of jealousy, but what’s that got to do with these photos?’

‘Or maybe her own husband got jealous and arranged to have her shot.’

‘No! That didn’t happen.’

‘Then what did happen?’ Challis said, putting plenty of whiplash into it; he was tired of Robert McQuarrie.

In a distant room the television continued to murmur and the wind blew around the house, ‘Look, I don’t know anything about these photos. I didn’t see anyone with a camera, and Janine’s not even in-’ He froze, and Ellen saw the shock as he realised. ‘Oh God,’ he muttered.

‘Exactly, Robert,’ Challis said, the familiarity offending the superintendent’s son, ‘these photographs were found stored on your wife’s mobile phone, the phone you were so anxious for me to return to you.’

McQuarrie looked stricken. ‘I didn’t know that! How could I have known that? Dad simply told me to make sure I got all of Janine’s things back!’

’Did he?’

Ellen cut in. ‘Did Janine enjoy the sex parties, Rob?’

McQuarrie gave her a look full of hate but said nothing.

‘She didn’t, did she?’

McQuarrie swallowed and looked about the room. ‘She didn’t really enjoy that side of our marriage.’

‘So you thought you’d kickstart her erotic life?’

‘You’re demeaning her, you’re demeaning me.’

‘Or was it that you could have sex with as many women as you liked without feeling guilty, because it was all open and your wife was having sex with other men?’

‘I don’t expect you to understand. When you’re highly sexed you-’

‘Anyone less highly sexed than you I have yet to meet,’ Ellen snarled. ‘With these photographs, Janine had a hold over you. You’d be ruined if they were made public. A laughing-stock. A disappointment to your parents, especially your law-and-order father. Janine showed them to you, told you to be faithful or she’d ruin you, but misjudged you badly and she lost her life as a result.’

‘I was in Sydney!’

‘So who did you hire, Rob?’ Ellen demanded.

Challis eyed her warily. She was tense with anger, disgust and disappointment. Their closeness of early in the day was quite gone. She wasn’t a prude, but hated the dishonesty and sly tawdriness of the sex parties, the photographs and the actions of husbands like Robert McQuarrie. He wondered if she were thinking of deceit, illicit love and empty marriages.

Meanwhile McQuarrie was outraged. ‘Do you think I know people like that, hired killers, hitmen, or whatever they’re called?’

A fair question, Challis thought. He didn’t answer it. Then McQuarrie followed it with another fair question. ‘Besides, how do you arrange something like this in just a few hours?’

Ellen pounced.’ Meaning?’

McQuarrie saw the trap he was in and tried to backpedal. ‘I mean, the killers obviously needed time to learn her movements, where she lived, where she worked, that kind of thing.’

‘Robert, you said “a few hours”. Janine showed you the photographs, didn’t she? And you made a few phone calls and-’

‘No!’ He gave them a hunted look and shrank in his chair. ‘She didn’t show them to me. They arrived in the post.’

‘The post?’

‘In a plain envelope. I assumed Tessa Kane or someone at her office had sent them.’

‘When was this?’

‘Monday.’

‘Was there anything in the envelope besides the photos?’

‘No.’

‘No blackmail demand?’

‘No.’

‘Did you keep the envelope and the photos?’

‘Yes. I hid them. I wanted to hold onto them in case there was a blackmail attempt.’

‘Wise man,’ Challis said, his tone disbelieving.

‘If I’d known Janine had taken the photos and sent them to me I would have tried to talk to her about it, I swear.’

They watched him.

‘Have you talked to the other three men?’ Ellen demanded.

‘No.’

‘But you know them?’

‘Yes.’

And he gave them the names of a surgeon, an accountant and a funds manager.

‘I don’t want you alerting these characters,’ Challis warned.

‘Of course not,’ Robert McQuarrie said, relieved now to think that Challis was letting him off the hook, if only for a while.