Snapshot

7

Tessa Kane had heard about the murder at 9.45 a.m., a call from an ambulance officer, one of her many contacts. She’d immediately rung Hal Challis, but he was apparently out of the station and not answering his mobile phone-or not to her, at any rate. Ellen Destry and Scobie Sutton weren’t available. And nobody else at the Waterloo police station would talk to her. She felt frantic for thirty minutes, then asked herself what the point was. She published a weekly paper: the dailies would have all the scoops on this story, and she’d have to be content with an overview in next Tuesday’s edition, when no doubt the case would be long closed.

And then, at 11 a.m., Challis returned her call, suggesting they meet for coffee. Five minutes later she was walking down High Street to Cafe Laconic, where she sat at a window table, looking out at the canopied, unoccupied footpath tables, a public phone booth and a plane tree. There had been a dense fog all morning, but it had lifted here on High Street, as if burnt off by human endeavour. Tessa drew her coat tighter around her shoulders and glanced at the corkboard on the adjacent wall: this week’s program at the drive-in cinema in Dromana, a couple of garage sales-she loved garage sales-a scattering of business cards and a federal election poster eighteen months out of date.

Then a waiter was standing there, looking appreciatively at her legs, stockinged today, slim and dark under a skirt. She normally wore jeans or trousers, but liked to dress up on Tuesdays, publication day.

‘What can I get you?’

She smiled. ‘Nothing just yet, thanks. I’m waiting for a friend.’

‘Fair enough,’ the waiter said, and went behind the counter again, a slab of jarrah fronted by corrugated iron. There was wood and iron everywhere, she noticed, her eyes alighting on the election poster again. Her vote had made no difference back then. She came from a family of Labor voters, but Labor had long ago sold out on the things that mattered to her: social justice issues and an independent foreign policy. Back when Labor first showed signs of decline, she’d voted Communist a few times, to register her protest, but Communism was a spent force. Now she voted Green, for the Greens actually held values and beliefs, unlike Labor. She’d probably call herself Red-Green, like the political movement in Germany, favouring both social justice reforms and green reforms. Unfortunately the Greens were widely seen as tree-huggers-and indeed there were plenty for whom that was as far as their beliefs extended. She’d never vote Liberal or Democrat, and would never again vote Labor, the party whose ex-prime ministers were now millionaires, its ex-senators and ministers into tax evasion and cozying up to the richest men in Australia.

She was sitting there getting quietly steamed up when the lean frame of Hal Challis passed by the window. Theirs was a complicated relationship. They’d been lovers for a while, things fading away rather than ending convincingly. Now she saw him at press conferences and at times like this, when they exchanged information.

Not that it mattered any more, but she wondered if he felt free of his wife yet. Angela Challis was dead, but that didn’t mean she was dead in Challis’s heart. It had been a huge story at the time, for Challis’s wife had started an affair with another policeman, the pair of them luring Challis to a lonely rendezvous on a back road one night, intending to kill him. The attempt had failed and Challis’s wife had been jailed for conspiracy to murder. But instead of divorcing her, washing his hands of her, Challis had felt obscurely responsible, as if he’d failed Angela, driven her to taking drastic action. He’d gradually stopped loving her-so he said-but for years had let her call and write to him from prison, let her talk out her guilt and regret. ‘Move on, Hal,’ people had said, and God knows Tessa herself had said it often enough, but he’d not moved on, and whenever she was with him he’d seemed disengaged, sad.

And then last year Angela Challis had killed herself in the prison infirmary. Tessa had taken heart. She’d not rushed Challis, not jumped for joy, but been patient, kind and commiserative. Where had that got her? Exactly nowhere. Challis had grown more disconnected, as though the guilt he felt had not disappeared but compounded itself. Eventually she’d stopped seeing him, stopped waiting, but for a long while the whole business had been a permanent ache inside her, composed of loss and emptiness.

She’d known that he was struggling. Back when they’d slept together Challis had too often scurried off home afterwards, or the next morning, as if he had to clear his head. He seemed to want her, then feel crowded, compounded by a desire not to hurt her or lead her on.

Anyway, that was Tessa’s two-dollar analysis. She thought all of these things in the time it took for him to spot her, smile, cross the room and kiss her cheek. He pulled out a chair and sat. Their knees banged together; they moved apart politely, almost automatically.

‘This is a privilege,’ she said, ‘morning coffee with you in a trendy cafe.’

‘As trendy as Waterloo gets, anyway.’

She studied his face. ‘You look tired.’

‘It’s a nasty one,’ he said, and told her all he knew. She made notes, trying not to be distracted when his sleeve rode up, revealing a bony wrist and a centimetre of crisp white shirt. Normally she hated white shirts, but Challis was suited to them, with his leanness, and the olive cast of his skin.

‘What happens next?’

‘We speak to the child.’

‘Could I speak to her?’

Challis said tiredly, ‘McQuarrie would never allow it. She’s too young, and he doesn’t like you.’

She smiled ruefully. McQuarrie had friends in Rotary, local businessmen who didn’t want a local newspaper that was left-wing and edited by a woman.

‘But you won’t keep me out of the loop, Hal?’

He shook his head.

‘Of course, you might solve it this afternoon,’ she muttered, ‘and this time next week it will be stale news and no good to me.’

He gave her a twisted grin. ‘So write another story like the one on well-mannered and well-run suburban orgies, where there’s no time imperative.’

‘Yeah, yeah, rub it in.’

‘People look at me oddly, kind of smirkingly,’ Challis said, ‘as if I’m still involved with you and we’re always having kinky sex.’

‘Poor you.’ She stared at him challengingly. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me what it was like?’

He shook his head. ‘Your article pretty much covered it. Apart from a mild titillation, it left me unmoved. And it’s hardly a police matter, not unless any of the players are underage.’

She sighed. ‘I’ve had so much crank mail, my head’s spinning. Distribution’s up, but advertising is down.’

‘Crank mail in addition to the other stuff?’

By ‘other stuff he meant a string of hate mail she’d been receiving for the past few months, along with anonymous phone calls and hang-ups, messages in soap smeared across her windscreen, and on one occasion a rock heaved through the glass panel of her front door. It all seemed to be the work of one man, who called her a bitch and said she’d get what was coming to her, one day soon. There hadn’t been much that the police could do about it.

‘It will all blow over eventually,’ she said.

‘What else are you working on?’

‘The detention centre.’

‘But isn’t it being phased out?’

Tessa shrugged. Very few asylum seekers were left in the Waterloo centre. Most of the detainees now incarcerated there had breached or overstayed their visas, and were quickly processed and repatriated. But Tessa, in her role as editor of the Progress, had been critical of the centre from the outset, in the face of massive local apathy, and wanted one last shot at Charlie Mead, the manager. ‘There are still abuses there, Hal.’

She paused. ‘It looks like I’ll be moving on.’

He looked at her quizzically. ‘Moving on?’

‘They’re pulling the plug on me. The sex-party story was the last straw.’

She explained. Challis knew some of the details. The Progress was owned by a wealthy man who had a social conscience and tolerated Tessa’s stance on most issues. What Challis didn’t know was the man also leaned towards the Christian right and was furious with her for attending the sex party and writing about it. ‘I’ve got three months of my contract left.’

Challis squeezed her hand and let it go. ‘You’ll be missed,’ he said.

‘I’ll be missed, or you’ll miss me? Which is it, Hal?’

‘Both.’

She sighed. ‘I thought about you the other day. I was out at the airfield doing a story and had a peek at your Dragon, hoping to find you working on the engine or something.’

Neither the plane nor its restoration had meant much to her, when she was seeing Challis, but they’d clearly meant something to him, and his obsession with such an arcane interest had been oddly appealing at the time.

‘I’m thinking of selling it.’

‘No! Why?’

‘I haven’t worked on it since Kitty was shot. It feels like bad luck.’

‘Hal, I’ve never heard you talk like that before.’

‘I’ll take up golf with McQuarrie instead,’ he said.

He grinned, but didn’t mean the grin and she didn’t return it.

Then he was on his feet and planting a kiss beside her ear. ‘I’d better get back,’ he said.

When he was gone, she stayed in Cafe Laconic for a while, checking messages on her mobile phone. Then, on a whim, she tried the detention centre again, and twenty seconds later, against all odds, was put through to Charlie Mead, who for months had been ‘unavailable’. ‘How did you get this number?’ he demanded.

She frowned. ‘Your secretary switched me through.’

‘She’s a temp, stupid cow. What can I do for you?’

‘Now that the centre is winding back its operations, I thought it would be a good time to run a survey article.’

‘The usual crap? Riots, self-mutilation, bullying guards?’

‘Well, you were never available to give me the other point of view, Mr Mead,’ Tessa said carefully.

‘Sure, why not, one-thirty this afternoon.’

Unbelievable. Tessa returned to her office, forgetting all about Challis.