Whispering Death

4

It was a patch of dank grasses and bracken no bigger than a backyard swimming pool, the undergrowth partly flattened near the centre where it abutted a stone reef. Pam remained standing on the rim of the clearing and glanced around. Clearly the body wasn’t dead but had got to its feet and wandered off. Or someone had retrieved it.

Or the story was bullshit. She turned mildly to Overton. ‘The light’s tricky. You’re sure you saw a body?’

‘I swear, lying by that rock,’ Overton said, hands on belligerent hips.

It was unfortunate, but Pam loathed her. The reaction had begun more or less on sight and was growing as they stood there. She didn’t try to fight or understand it. It happened to her once or twice a year, an instantaneous reaction to face, voice, body and manner, the whole package. She used to tell herself she must be a bad person, or perhaps was sensing inherent badness in someone, even that it was chemical. Now she accepted there was no logic to it.

And it didn’t necessarily mean Overton was lying. The dismay struck Pam as genuine. She glanced around the clearing again, reluctant to enter. ‘Perhaps if I could use your telescope thingy.’

‘Monocular,’ said Overton, lifting the strap over her head.

The device was warm from her body. Pam put it to her eye and the clearing swam and then the rock sharpened and filled her vision, the surface a pattern of fissures and lichen. There was staining, but if it was vegetable, animal or mineral, she couldn’t tell. She scoped out the surrounding dirt and grass and still nothing. If there was blood, and, more to the point, a blood trail between the clearing and the back road on the other side of the little reserve, then only Luminol spraying at night would map it. Without a body she wasn’t about to authorise that.

‘I need to hunt around for a while, so perhaps you could go back and keep Mrs McIntosh company?’

Overton scowled and retreated, stumping through the gloomy trees.

When she was gone, Murphy made a notebook sketch of the clearing and the rock. If a crime had been committed here, a stills photographer and a videographer would make a more accurate and permanent record. Then she circled the clearing, keeping to the far edge of it, looking for drag marks, blood, anything at all. It was pointless. She couldn’t tell. Overton had probably seen something, though.

The clearing lurched as she was hit by a wave of dizziness. Another one: the attacks had started a week earlier, and occurred a few times a day. Sudden movements seemed to cause them, but so did no movements at all. She lost a second of her life. It left her opening and closing her mouth and blinking her eyes for a few seconds. A side effect of coming off citalopram? Lisa, her GP, hadn’t warned her it might happen-had wanted her to go on to a higher dose, if anything, not stop.

Pam took her time walking back to the house, and followed the voices to the kitchen. A chilly place, the domain of an old woman who has little money and failing eyesight. Dust, crumbs, crusty forks, low wattage light bulbs, greasy smears across the table and benches. Jan Overton and Mrs McIntosh sitting amid it, waiting as tea steeped in a dented aluminium pot and biscuits staled on a chipped plate.

The old woman was astounded to see her. ‘Are you the meals-on-wheels?’

Pam smiled. ‘Police, Mrs McIntosh.’

‘Never. Where’s your whatchamacallit?’

‘My uniform? I left it home today.’

Jan Overton sniffed. The old woman worked her mouth. ‘I didn’t do anything.’

‘Of course not,’ Pam said. ‘I was wondering if you’d seen anyone wandering around in the trees behind your house.’

Mrs McIntosh stared wonderingly. ‘Who?’

Overton took a frail hand and stroked it. ‘ A young woman, perhaps? Or anyone at all?’

Distress showed in the old woman’s eyes. ‘Are you from the council?’

‘The council? No. You had a koala in your garden, remember?’

‘I use tank water,’ the old woman said, turning her attention to Pam Murphy. ‘I’m not on mains water. So you can put that in your pipe and smoke it.’

Pam had been told that her smile didn’t always reassure, but she tried it now, pulling up a chair. ‘It’s okay, we know you’re not wasting water. But you do have a lovely garden, must take a lot of upkeep. Does anyone help you with it, Mrs McIntosh? Granddaughter, niece?’

‘Where?’ Mrs McIntosh said, staring about.

Pam tried a new tack. ‘Perhaps you can help me, I’m not that familiar with this area. There’s a dirt road over there, beyond the trees, Waterloo’s in that direction, the council rubbish tip is over there…Do you have any close neighbours, Mrs McIntosh?’

‘Eric and I owned a thousand acres here, once upon a time. All gone now.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘I won’t sell. You can tell them that.’

‘Quite right,’ Pam said. ‘It’s lovely and quiet out here. You most probably know all your neighbours, what kinds of cars they drive?’

She bristled. ‘Where?’

‘Mrs McIntosh, did you hear or see anything suspicious last night or this morning? Someone in the trees, strange lights or sounds or cars?’

‘We had a little. 22 rifle. We gave it up in the amnesty.’

‘Very wise. What about your neighbours, do you think they might have seen or heard anything?’

The old woman was scarifying. ‘Them? All they’re good for is uprooting good apple trees and putting in grape vines. They live up in the city and I never see them.’

Overton was glaring at Pam now, so she eased out of the conversation and the house and sat in her car for a while. The next step was Missing Persons, local hospitals and, if that came to nothing, a background check on Jan Overton. Meanwhile, she’d take the long route back to Waterloo-skirt around the nature reserve and back along Waterloo-Dandenong Road.

Mrs McIntosh’s road deteriorated, after a few hundred metres, into powdery drifts and bone-shaking corrugations. Pam eased along, listening to pebbles ping inside the wheel arches. At the T-intersection she turned left, another chopped-about farmers’ road leading her around the far side of the reserve. Here she found a gate in a falling-down fence hung with fox pelts, and a bare patch of ground where anyone mad enough to stroll through the reserve could park. She got out and made a skirting examination of the dirt. A faint suggestion of tyre tracks-but why wouldn’t there be? No drag marks. No blood that she could see.

Maybe lovers had come here last night; something went wrong and the girl ran off. Or they had drunken sex in the clearing and she was left behind to sleep it off. Or nothing happened at all.

Pam returned to the Subaru and followed the track to the end, relieved to turn left onto bitumen for the fast run back to Waterloo. That’s when she saw the fancy gateway and there was her CIU colleague, Scobie Sutton, gloomily scribbling in his notebook. She pulled over, got out. ‘Scobie.’

Sutton was tall, morose and thin, his black suit gaping and flapping around his fleshless limbs. ‘Pam.’

‘Breaking the back of local crime, I see?’

Sutton seemed to think about taking the question seriously but then a smile transformed his face. ‘Something like that.’

‘Where’s your car?’

‘I came with John Tankard. He’s up at the house.’

‘You sent Tank to question a citizen?’

Scobie scowled. This time he’d failed to read her. ‘John’s all right,’ he said loyally.

They stood side by side and contemplated the gateway. One of its pillars dripped with the words: I’M COMPENSATING FOR A SMALL DICK. Pam grinned. The spraycan vigilante had been active for two months now, always targeting ostentatious driveway entrances, a recent fashion trend on the Peninsula, a sign of brash money. She ran her gaze over the cream-coloured pillars, the irregular fieldstone blocks, the curving, baronial wings rising from the dying spring grasses, the oiled hardwood gates. The house itself was out of sight, at the end of a long driveway that wound through trees to a hillside overlooking Western Port Bay.

The graffiti was a variation on the others she’d seen in the past few weeks: A CASHED-UP BOGAN LIVES HERE, and JUST BECAUSE I’M RICH DOESN’T MEAN I HAVE TASTE and, simply, WANKER. Pam thought the vigilante deserved a medal, but he-or she-had become a headache for CIU. A victim with money and clout had put the hard word on the local member of Parliament, who had put the hard word on Inspector Challis’s superintendent, who had put the hard word on Challis, who had tried to put the hard word on the rank-and-file. Pam had told him he must be joking if he thought these people were victims and if he thought police resources, already overstretched, should be wasted investigating a bit of graffiti.

So Challis handed the investigation to Scobie Sutton, who never complained.

Pam lingered a while, yarning with Scobie. He hadn’t seen anyone-certainly not a naked woman, he told her, blushing a little.

Then, almost immediately, they heard a voice, ‘Help me, please help me.’

Startled, they glanced across the road.

Jan Overton’s victim, thought Pam, beginning to move. Young, naked, filthy, she must have stumbled through bushland to get here.

Sutton followed her across. The woman was clasping the top fence wire with both hands, rocking and keening like an abandoned child. As though the notional obstruction of the fence was a kind of last straw.

‘It’s okay, it’s okay, you’re safe now,’ Pam crooned, helping her bend between the wires.

‘I was raped, someone raped me,’ the young woman said.

Scobie draped his suit coat around the thin shoulders and Pam noted the scratches automatically, the blood, the bruises, looking for drifts of dry semen. Then they were at the car. ‘Scobie, could you get my first-aid kit from the Subaru?’ She gave the woman a drink from a bottle of water.

‘My name is Pam, and that’s Scobie,’ she said. ‘We’re police officers.’

The woman stiffened as if she might bolt. ‘I’m Chloe,’ she whispered.

‘Do you know who did this to you, Chloe?’

At that moment, a police car came down the driveway from the house, the engine decelerating, tyres growling on the gravel as the car nosed through the gate posts. John Tankard got out, a man with a barrelly torso and vast thighs barely contained inside his constable’s uniform. ‘What’s up?’

The response was instantaneous. Bucking violently in Pam’s arms, Chloe screamed: ‘Keep him away from me, keep him away from me.’