Snapshot

40

Challis spent most of Friday morning in CIU. It was proving to be difficult to get fast or accurate information from Witsec or the New South Wales prison service. Meanwhile, according to the findings of the DCs on loan from Mornington, Hayden Coulter was guilty of no more than massaging the books of his clients. Nothing solid tied him-or any of the other men in the photographs-to Janine McQuarrie’s murder. Several people, including a racehorse owner, a trainer and a groom, alibied Coulter; various secretaries, receptionists and work colleagues alibied the other men. Finally, the investigation had not turned up a secret lover for Janine, and Challis could only suppose that she’d seemed happy to Meg because she’d thought of a way to stick it to her husband. The anonymous caller hadn’t called back.

He checked with Scobie Sutton, who was manipulating the images stored on Janine’s mobile phone into simple head-and-shoulders shots of Coulter, the surgeon and the funds manager, and which Challis would later show to Georgia McQuarrie. Scobie was hunched in front of his monitor, his whole body revealing distaste for the task, as though he feared he’d be soiled. Not for the first time, Challis wondered if the man was too sensitive and moralistic for the job. He said nothing and returned to his cubicle, wondering how Ellen was doing. She was out, following up on forensic evidence found at the murder and accident scenes, and talking to anyone who might have met or seen Christina Traynor.

Challis poured another mug of coffee and turned on his radio for the 10 a.m. news. First up was another young Australian arrested for attempting to smuggle heroin out of Indonesia, followed by an account of yesterday’s inquest, in which a Navy public relations officer, responding to a question regarding cadets and drug abuse, said that the Navy’s position was one of ‘zero tolerance’. Challis’s mind drifted. What would his parents make of the story? He often found himself measuring the world against them. He was the late-in-life child of a father who’d been a World War II RAAF navigator and a mother who’d been an Army nurse. Not much drug use back then, he didn’t suppose, apart from alcohol and tobacco-and a bit of cocaine and heroin amongst inner-city bohemians. The two world wars had also established a simple set of values: Australians were defined as brave, practical, resourceful, egalitarian, clean-living and loyal to their mates. Conservative governments and the popular press continued to hold that view, but Challis thought that things had changed. Bravery, loyalty, egalitarianism, patriotism and a fine young mind in a fine young body were media images trotted out to suit sixty-five-year-old politicians, sports commentators and shock-jock talkback radio hosts who kept one eye on their ratings and another on their sponsors’ kickbacks. Outmoded, irrelevant concepts that bore little relation to the real world. Drugs belonged now; the old Australia didn’t. Drugs had made crime more prevalent, vicious and unpredictable, too, making Challis’s job harder, but no one wanted to know about that.

When the walls seemed to close in on him he returned to the open space of the incident room with the McQuarrie file and sat and stared at a wall map of the area. The killers could have driven to Mrs Humphreys’s house from anywhere on the Peninsula-or further afield.

Feeling Georgia’s sombre gaze on him then, he took out her sketches and arranged them side by side, trying to think his way into her skin: her vantage point, what she’d seen, what she couldn’t have seen, what she might have invented. Her representations of the crime-scene seemed to be truthful if rudimentary. She’d not shown the shooter as a monster but a man with dark glasses, a coat, and a thin face. The driver had a round face and a shaven head, and she’d shown his arm hanging lazily out of the driver’s side window.

Challis stared at that arm. Georgia’s sense of perspective was skewed but her pen strokes were generally clean and precise, which didn’t explain the lumpy appearance of the hand. He picked up the phone.

By late morning he was knocking on Robert McQuarrie’s door in Mount Eliza. McQuarrie himself answered, demanding, with a red face, ‘What do you want?’

Challis had assumed the man would be at work. ‘I need a quick word with Georgia. I cleared it with Meg.’

‘Well, she should have cleared it with me. My daughter’s grieving, you know.’

‘I must talk to her, Robert.’

Again the guy flinched at the use of his first name, and glared at Challis. ‘You think I did it, don’t you.’

It was a statement, not a question. ‘Did you?’

‘Absolutely not.’

Challis regarded him. ‘Then you have nothing to worry about.’

With a kind of sob, Robert McQuarrie said, ‘You showed my father the photos, you bastard.’

‘It couldn’t be avoided.’

‘You’re a shit, you know that? Am I going to see myself in the Progress? Have you been flashing copies around?’

‘Dad?’

It was Georgia, peering around at Challis from behind her father’s legs. She wore a pink tracksuit and her hair had been freshly washed. Challis put his hands on his knees. ‘Hi there.’

‘Have you come to see me?’

‘I have indeed.’

‘I’m in the kitchen.’

McQuarrie, his face suffused with anger, stood back to let Challis enter. Challis followed Georgia to the kitchen, where she promptly sat at the table, a hot milk drink and half a honey pikelet on a plate at her elbow. Meg stood beside her, glancing nervously past Challis to the hallway. Challis turned his head: Robert McQuarrie stood there, and the moment extended, full of tension. Then McQuarrie turned irritably and stalked away down the hall.

Challis swung his gaze back to Meg and grinned. She returned it meekly and began to fill the kettle at the sink.

Georgia, munching the rest of her pikelet, said, ‘I think I might go back to school next week. Do you think that’s a good idea?’

Challis glanced at Meg helplessly, then smiled at Georgia. ‘I think that sounds like a very good idea. Do you miss your friends?’

‘Uh-huh,’ Georgia said.

‘Are you up to answering a few more questions for me?’

‘Uh-huh. What do you want to know?’

Challis spread the photographs of Coulter and the other men across the table. Scobie had done a good job: there was nothing to indicate that the men had been photographed naked. ‘Do you recognise any of these men?’

She glanced from one to the other. ‘No.’

‘The man who shot your mother? The man driving the old car?’

She shook her head emphatically. ‘No.’

He collected the photographs and substituted her drawings. ‘Remember these?’

Georgia eyed him brightly, seriously. ‘That’s my name in the corner, see?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s my mum on the ground.’

Challis nodded. ‘I’m mainly interested in the driver of the car the bad men came in.’

‘I’ve got other pictures,’ she said.

‘Have you?’

She left the room, Challis and the aunt exchanging polite, sad smiles. Meg passed him a cup of instant coffee. The central heating cut in and Challis felt warm air gust over him from a wall vent. He sipped his coffee: it was terrible coffee, weak, stale, and nothing would ever put it right: sugar, milk, or an extra spoonful of granules.

Georgia returned with three drawings. The situation was potentially morbid and unhealthy, a small child reliving her mother’s murder through drawings and conversation, but Challis was reassured by the warmth and peacefulness of the kitchen, the fact that Meg wasn’t chiding Georgia or hovering anxiously, and Georgia’s own air of wisdom and maturity. ‘These are good drawings too,’ he said.

Two were essentially the same drawing, but the third showed the killer’s car in profile. Cream body, yellow driver’s door, just as she’d described it on the day of the murder.

Challis returned to the drawings that showed the driver, his arm hanging out of the window. It was a typical young tough’s driving pose. And there was that same lumpy hand on one of the new drawings, the outline smudged.

Challis was wary of asking leading questions, so he pointed and said, ‘I always had trouble drawing hands when I was a kid.’

Georgia frowned. Was Challis criticising her drawing skills, or merely admitting to his own? ‘First I did a proper hand, then remembered and rubbed out one of the fingers.’

‘Rubbed out?’

‘Does it hurt,’ Georgia said, ‘if you get a finger chopped off?’

Chalks went very still. ‘I expect it does,’ he said carefully. ‘Do you remember which finger?’

She held up her right hand and gazed at it critically. ‘This one,’ she said finally, pointing to her ring finger.

It was lunchtime when he got back to the office. Ellen and Scobie were there, their hard, tense, hopeful smiles telling him there’d been a development.