Snapshot

4

According to the DC who greeted Challis at the murder scene, the 000 switchboard had given the job to Rosebud police. Suspecting a prank, a kid playing around with her mother’s mobile phone, they had eventually sent two uniforms in a divisional van. The uniforms had taken one look at the scene, secured it and called in Rosebud detectives. Then the child, remarkably calm but smeared in her mother’s blood, had revealed that her grandfather was a policeman, an important policeman, Superintendent McQuarrie.

‘I mean,’ the Rosebud DC said, ‘we had to contact him.’

Challis nodded. He gave his name to the uniformed constable who was keeping the attendance log at the head of the driveway, and paused for a moment to take in the wider scene. Sealed road, with various police vehicles, including his own, parked on the grassy verges. There was also a hearse from the firm of undertakers on contract to the government to deliver suspicious-death cases to the lab. Gum trees, suffering from dieback, pittosporums, pine trees and bracken. A couple of distant letterboxes. And, closer to, a steep gravelled driveway leading down to a small weatherboard house, where a silver Volvo station wagon was parked with all of its doors open.

Various men and women were there, too, dressed in white or blue disposable body suits and overshoes and standing beside and under an inflatable forensic tent, which would protect the body and the immediate surroundings from wind or rain. A photographer was taking stills and video of the body, and of the body in relation to the car, the garden beds, the house and a small aluminium shed. The pathologist on duty, Freya Berg, knelt beside the body. Challis couldn’t see McQuarrie anywhere.

He started down the driveway, accompanied by the Rosebud detective, a man with an off-centre nose and a crumpled grey suit. ‘Where’s the super?’

‘Took the kid home with him.’

‘Damn,’ Challis said. A part of him knew that the child would need comforting; another part wanted to get her side of the story before she’d told it to too many others. McQuarrie was an experienced police officer, but he was also the kid’s grandfather, and bound to be protective, bound to want to question her, maybe even put notions in her head about what she remembered.

‘Sir?’ the Rosebud detective said.

Challis smiled at the man. He didn’t want him to think he rode roughshod over the sensibilities of grieving children. ‘I’d hoped to catch up with him, that’s all.’

‘He wants you to meet him at his place, late morning.’

Christ, Challis thought, looking at his watch. He needed to talk to McQuarrie’s granddaughter immediately, not later. He greeted some of the crime-scene technicians, then shouted a sharp ‘Oy.’ at a uniformed constable who’d popped a stick of chewing gum into his mouth and tossed the balled foil wrapper under a shrub. The Rosebud man hurried over, saying ‘You prick, what if we’d taken that into evidence? Pick it up.’

When he came back, Challis said, ‘Did the kid say anything?’

‘Her name’s Georgia,’ the Rosebud man said, a mild rebuke. ‘She said there were two men in an old white car with a yellow door. One of them shot her mother, the other one waited in the car.’

‘What were they doing here? Why wasn’t Georgia in school?’

The air was clammy, the sea fret that morning reaching well inland of the coast. The Rosebud detective tried to shrug deeper into his suit coat, his face pink and white with the cold, his balding scalp leaching body heat into the air. ‘It was curriculum day, meaning no classes, so she was spending the day with her mother. I couldn’t get much else out of her. Didn’t want to push it. In fact, she refused to talk to me until the uniform guys confirmed that I was a copper. Then McQuarrie showed up.’

I’d better take Ellen Destry with me to question her, Challis thought. ‘So she called 000 using her mother’s mobile?’

‘Yep. We found it in the car,’ the Rosebud man said.

‘Why didn’t her father pick her up?’

The Rosebud man checked his notes. ‘Name of Robert McQuarrie…lives with the victim and their daughter in Mount Eliza…in Sydney today on business. He’s flying home.’

‘So he wasn’t the shooter.’

‘He could have hired someone.’

‘Very true.’

The statistics say that nine in ten homicides-murder, manslaughter-are committed by someone known to the victim, and about five in ten are direct family members. That’s where Challis always started. He’d say to a man grieving for his murdered wife, ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ but also look long and hard at him, for whatever his face and eyes revealed there and then, and for what his hidden life-bank statements, letters, credit card receipts-might reveal in the longer term. On occasion he’d even said gently, to husbands, wives, lovers, friends, ‘Forgive me, but you are my first suspect. Until I can eliminate you from this inquiry, I cannot move forward.’

Challis looked at the little house. ‘Anyone home?’

‘No.’

‘Do we know who lives here?’

The other man checked his notes. ‘The uniforms came up with one name, Joy Humphreys.’

‘Did Georgia say why they’d driven here?’

‘No, only that she had no school today, and the childcare arrangements had fallen through, so she was spending the day with her mother.’

‘Do we know what the mother does?’

‘I found this in her wallet.’

A small embossed business card, with the name Janine McQuarrie in bold, followed by Bayside Counselling Services in cursive script, and the words ‘Mediation, reconciliation, parenting issues, stress management, self-esteem and assertiveness training, specialist counselling’.

‘Psychologist? She was visiting a client?’

‘No idea.’

‘Any other witnesses?’

‘We’ve sent uniforms door to door. So far no reports of witnesses.’

Challis examined the little house. It looked at once run down and old fashioned, as though an elderly person lived there and had relinquished hope and energy.

‘They could have been followed,’ he said, ‘or it’s a case of wrong person, wrong place. Maybe you can make a start on tracking down this Joy Humphreys.’

The Rosebud detective shook his head with an air of satisfaction. ‘No can do. The super said he’s handing it all over to you, and Waterloo. Told me to hang around until you got here.’ He paused. ‘Read that article in the Progress last week,’ he said, with a faint air of blokey interrogation.

Challis scowled. His involvement with the editor, Tessa Kane, was past history. They were back to being uneasy acquaintances, but ever since her article about sex parties in last week’s issue of the Progress, he’d had to endure smirks and nudges. It was as if people assumed he’d always attended orgies with her, and still did. He gazed levelly at the Rosebud DC and saw the guy swallow.

‘Well, good luck.’

Challis nodded a sour farewell. Just then Freya Berg announced that she was releasing the body, so he joined her. ‘What have we got?’

It was a joke between them. The dialogue on one of the American crime-scene programs they professed to hold with scorn seemed to consist solely of the lead investigator saying ‘What have we got?’ and ‘Keep me posted.’

Freya’s mouth was serene, her eyes permanently amused. ‘Well-nourished female, blah, blah, blah, shot once in the back, once in the back of the head, been dead less than two hours.’

The dead woman had been found sprawled face down on the ground, but Freya had turned the body over during the examination and now the woman lay slackly dead, her face stretched in anguish. Her trousered thighs and knees were damp, her cream-coloured top twisted at the waist, her unbuttoned jacket streaked with mud.

Challis glanced across to the crime-scene techs. Any shells?’

‘Nothing, Hal.’

He turned to Freya again. ‘Exit wounds?’

She shook her head. ‘Still inside her.’

‘When can you do the autopsy?’

‘Later today.’

‘Keep me posted,’ Challis said.

Returning to his car Challis checked his mobile. As expected, he’d had several calls from reporters, including Tessa Kane. He sighed, feeling beset. There was going to be intense media interest in this case. Meanwhile, Tessa would want an inside story. Challis felt he owed her that at least, but at the same time, she’d often been critical of the police. The Waterloo Progress was quite unlike other small-town weeklies-with their ninety per cent classified advertisements and ten per cent feel-good stories about local sporting heroes, the barking dog that saved a widow from a house fire, the mayor planting a tree-in that it regularly spoke out on local social justice issues, including the detention centre near Waterloo and poverty and distress on the newer estates. Not surprisingly, Tessa Kane was loathed by many, including Superintendent McQuarrie.

Challis tossed the matter around. He didn’t feel ready to speak to her yet. Maybe he lurked in her mind, never far from her consciousness, just as she often lurked in his, but the days when he’d immediately and automatically phoned her with details of a story were long past.

In the end he made two calls, one requesting updates on stolen, abandoned and burnt-out cars on the Peninsula, and the other to McQuarrie.

‘My granddaughter’s still very upset, Inspector,’ the super told him firmly. ‘I know you need to speak to her while things are fresh in her mind, but she needs a little time, okay? We’ll see how she feels at lunch time.’

‘Sir,’ Challis said.

Now to establish if there was a link between the victim and the woman who lived at number 283. He was reluctant to break into the house, so coaxed the Triumph into life and drove two hundred metres to the nearest neighbouring property, a long mudbrick house with a clerestory roof. Here a woman in overalls was pushing a wheelbarrow load of mulch around a garden at the rear. She had a smooth, youthful face and gave her name as Lisa Welch.

‘You’re the second policeman to come knocking this morning,’ she said warily, knuckling a strand of hair away from her face. ‘I know it’s something to do with next door, but he wouldn’t say what. Not that I saw or heard anything.’

‘I know it seems like a waste of manpower,’ Challis said, ‘but we need to contact the woman who lives there.’

‘Mrs Humphreys. Joy. But she’s in hospital at the moment.’

He stared at her intently. ‘Do you know why?’

‘Hip replacement. She’s in her late seventies.’

Challis tried to process this. Could an elderly woman be the intended target? Could a young woman be mistaken for an elderly one? ‘Which hospital?’

‘Waterloo.’

Well, that was convenient. ‘Does she live alone?’

‘I think her husband died a few years ago.’

Challis said patiently, ‘But since then-any long-term visitors, tenants, anyone like that?’

The woman shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t know, really. I’m new to the area and I don’t know all the comings and goings.’

Challis pocketed his pad and pen. ‘Thanks, you’ve been very helpful.’

He saw her swallow. She was holding herself tensely. ‘Can you tell me what happened? Was her house broken into?’

Challis hesitated. It was always possible that this woman was the intended target. If so, would she run when she learnt what had happened next door? Rather than make another trip out to question her, he said, ‘Ms Welch, there was a shooting. A woman is dead. Not Mrs Humphreys,’ he said, holding up his hand, ‘but a younger woman.’

‘Oh, God.’

‘Do you have any enemies?’

She shrank away from him. ‘Everyone has enemies. You really think they went to the wrong house?’

‘We have to check everything.’

‘What if they come back? I live alone here.’

‘Is there anyone you can stay with tonight or the next few nights?’

‘My parents live up in the city.’ She gave him an address and phone number in Highett.

He said gently, ‘I don’t think you’re in any danger. Whoever did this is long gone. But it would be wise for you to stay with your parents for the next couple of days until we sort this out.’

He agreed to wait while she packed a suitcase, locked up and drove away in her car. He noted the make, model and number, and then headed for Waterloo.

Unfortunately, his route took him past the local airfield. Inside one of the hangars was a Dragon Rapide, a 1930s biplane that he was supposed to be restoring, but some things had gone wrong for him and the old plane was still only seventy per cent complete. He’d lost all enthusiasm for carrying out the remaining tasks, such as hunting down the correct tyres. Besides, the hangar spooked him. He could feel Kitty there sometimes, at work on restoring her World War II Kittyhawk fighter. Of course, both plane and woman were long gone, but she’d been a companionable presence-almost a friend-until her husband had sneaked in one evening a year earlier and shot her dead while she worked. Challis had arrested the man but that had been the start of a shift in him, a loss of faith. His visits to the hangar had tailed off; meanwhile he’d recently received an invoice to renew his lease of the hangar space. Deciding that this was a good time to cut his losses and sell the Dragon, he’d fired off an e-mail to a Californian collector who’d expressed interest in buying it at the air show last March.

He reached Waterloo’s little hospital and parked beside a line of golden cypresses. The interior colours were pastelly pinks and greys, the air scented with lemon, the rooms and corridors flooded with natural light. Even so it was a cheerless place.

‘Mrs Humphreys?’ the receptionist said. ‘She’s being operated on this morning. No visitors until much later today.’

Challis returned to his car and called Ellen Destry. It was her morning off, but he needed officers to work the Bayside Counselling angle as soon as possible.