Whispering Death

45

Only one person had responded to Challis’s advertisements, a man in Albury named Hopgood. He’d e-mailed Challis to expect him late on Sunday morning, and now it was 11.30 and Challis was reading the Sunday Age at his kitchen table, waiting for a knock on his door. Would long-service leave be like this, a lot of sitting around, waiting?

When the knock came, he found a grey haired man on the veranda, a restored Mk II Jaguar in the driveway-British Racing Green, wire wheels, a lovely car.

‘Coffee?’

‘Mate, I’m in a bit of a hurry.’

So Challis took him around to the rear of the house, and the first thing Hopgood said was an incredulous, ‘Twenty-five grand?’

‘There’s one in Canberra going for thirty -five grand,’ said Challis mildly.

‘Bud, I’ve seen that car. Overpriced, and in a lot better nick than this one.’

Challis glanced at the sky. Warmish, a slight threat of rain by nightfall, and when it came it would bucket down. Typical spring weather, in fact, and he wanted the sale to go through before it rained. It had to go through, didn’t it? The guy had driven a long distance to be here, and owned an outfit named Brands Hatch Classic Cars.

He gave Hopgood a quick once-over. About sixty, wiry, weather-beaten, inclined to be impatient and self-important. Challis saw a man who bullied his male employees, fondled the female, and over-charged his clients.

His mind drifted. It often occurred to him that criminality was closely bound up in motor vehicles. Transport, getaway, an expression of personality, a weapon, a tomb. A payoff. Cars could be tied to everything he’d ever investigated, yet were taken for granted. They deserved their own science.

‘Rust, bottom of both doors.’

Challis knew that. You could see it with the naked eye and he’d said as much in the ads.

‘Yes.’

Hopgood took a fridge magnet from his pocket and, with a no-flies-on-me air, tested every square inch of the car. It seemed to cringe under so much scrutiny: ‘Sorry, getting old, got a few flaws…’

Then the guy was poking around in the engine bay. ‘New hoses.’

And new spark plug leads, thought Challis, new coil leads, new everything that had been chewed by the rats. ‘Yes.’

After that, Hopgood took the car for a test run. He was gone for twenty minutes, and when he returned he stood in Challis’s driveway with his hands on his hips and fired a summary:

‘She’s burning oil, so she’ll need a new set of rings. Rides the bumps rough, so new suspension. I’ll need to replace the windscreen and offside turning light, both import items. Goodish tyres. Seat fabric’s okay but stretched. New soft top needed, get one of these made up in Sydney, bloke who does a lot of work for me.’

So, are you making me an offer? thought Challis. He glanced at his watch and said nothing. He’d told Hopgood that another buyer was coming, which was an outright lie.

‘Fifteen grand.’

‘Twenty-two fifty,’ Challis replied.

‘Come on, you must be joking. Sixteen.’

‘Twenty.’

‘Don’t arse me about. Look, I’ll give you eighteen.’

‘Sorry,’ said Challis with his heart in his mouth, ‘twenty.’

And after the restoration you’ll sell for thirty, thirty-five.

‘Eighteen. Take it or leave it.’

Challis sighed and said he’d take it. Hopgood fished a thousand dollars in hundreds from his wallet and promised the rest when he picked up the car. ‘I’ll come back with a flatbed truck this evening.’

‘Sure.’

And Hopgood left, the Jag purring down Challis’s driveway. Just before reaching the gate it braked suddenly for a sickly-green Hyundai which sped in from the road, saw Hopgood and swerved onto the grass. A moment later, the Jaguar slid unfussily out onto the road and Larrayne Destry jerked back onto the driveway and in erratic surges towards Challis.

She got out, looking jittery yet annoyed. ‘Who was that? He gave me this really strange look, kind of smug.’

‘He thought you’d come to buy my car,’ Challis said, explaining what had happened. ‘You should have come a few minutes earlier, he might have offered more money.’

Larrayne looked doubtfully at the Triumph. ‘If you say so.’

Challis laughed. ‘I’m glad to get rid of the thing, frankly.’ He toed the gravel with the tip of his shoe. ‘Everything all right?’

‘Fine.’

‘The boyfriend?’

‘Dumped. Kind of.’

Challis nodded. The boyfriend hadn’t seemed too bad; just an idiot. ‘Have you heard from your mother?’

‘She e-mails me like every day.’

Challis, too. A phone call, a text message or a Skype conversation every two or three days.

Larrayne Destry blurted, ‘I was wrong about you.’

Challis opened and closed his mouth warily.

‘I mean, I didn’t like what was happening with Mum and Dad and I took it out on you.’

He shrugged. ‘Oh, well.’

She said fiercely, as though she were a fierce small child, ‘You’re not my father.’

‘I know that.’ Challis didn’t even want to be her friend, really. Just civilised with her, that’s all.

‘Are you the real deal? As far as Mum is concerned?’

‘I’ll try to be.’

‘You’re supposed to reassure me.’

‘I’m supposed to be truthful,’ he told her. ‘Your mother and I, we’re getting to know each other. No pressure, a lot of kindness, a reasonable amount of companionship.’

Larrayne Destry chewed her bottom lip, looking for loopholes in what he’d said. After a while she shrugged. ‘Okay.’

Pam Murphy arrived at her parents’ house in Kew with a roast chicken, supermarket coleslaw and a head of broccoli-three minutes in the steamer for the broccoli. Make that five, she thought, thinking of their elderly teeth. If she were not so helpless in the kitchen she might have offered to cook everything from scratch, but this was easier, and she didn’t want to burden her mother. She didn’t want a fuss, that’s what it boiled down to. Or an unnecessary fuss. There was going to be some fuss, no matter what she did.

The fuss started the moment she walked in the back door, the mild astonishment that greeted her.

‘Weren’t you expecting me?’

When they realised that they had been, her father cocked his head at her. ‘You’re a bit later than usual.’

There was no usual time, her visits had become rare and sporadic, but she said, ‘Had to stop for petrol.’

Her father looked at her cunningly. ‘I suppose you know they always put the price up on Sundays. It’s best to fill up on Tuesdays.’

‘I’ll try to remember that.’

‘Car running well?’

‘Fine,’ she told him.

Since she’d got into trouble with the repayments a couple of years ago and borrowed the money from him, it was as if he owned the damn thing.

‘I hope you’re servicing it regularly, sweetheart. Every five thousand kilometres no matter what the book says.’

Pam said nothing, hoping a smile would suffice, and after a while her father harrumphed a little and they went through to the sitting room. Rain clouds were gathering above Melbourne but it was still warm outside and boiling inside. ‘Let me open a window. Or at least turn the heating down.’

That caused more fuss and she mentally smacked her forehead. They were old and they felt the cold.

She’d barely sat on the sofa to catch up, when her father said, ‘Let’s eat.’

Another mistake: the time was 1 p.m. and her parents always ate lunch at 12.30. ‘I’ll serve up,’ she told him. ‘Back in a minute.’

Pam glanced at the sideboard and mantelpiece as she left the room. Both surfaces were crammed with photographs of her brothers: graduating, receiving awards, basking in the love of their wives and children. As far as Pam knew, the one photograph marking her achievements, the police academy passing out parade, was collecting fly spots on the side table of the spare bedroom.

She found her mother in the kitchen, boiling the broccoli to death. Giving the frail shoulders a quick hug, she spooned the coleslaw into a shallow bowl and cut up the chicken, her mind drifting. Should she have poured her heart out to Challis over a drink after the Friday briefing, explained exactly what she’d meant by saying she’d done something stupid? He didn’t strike her as the kind of man to flounder in embarrassment if a woman friend said she’d slept with another woman. He was straight, but not that straight. So why her reticence? Because it was private, she told herself. Because he’s not my friend. Because I’ve always had to solve things myself.

And the reasons for that stem from my childhood in this house.

They were eating within fifteen minutes of her arrival. She’d bought a couple of Peninsula wines along, a Merricks Creek pinot and the Elan gamay, her father opening the pinot with a flourish. ‘Let’s save the gamay for summer.’

Then they told her all about her brothers, their wives and children, their university positions. They asked nothing about her life and work. She didn’t mind, not really, the story of her life. The boys, and her father, were the brains of the outfit. She was just a girl. Good athlete, topped her class at the police academy, promising young detective, etcetera, etcetera, but her parents didn’t begin to know how to talk to her about any of those things.

‘It would be nice if one of these days you brought someone with you,’ her mother said.

For a brief second, Pam imagined Jeannie Schiff in the fourth chair at the table.

The image didn’t hold.

Meanwhile Scobie and Beth Sutton had settled themselves onto stiff metal chairs with vinyl seats in the hall of their daughter’s school. Located in paddocks inland of Dromana, it offered views to the sea in one direction and vines and hills in the other. A longish bus ride for Roslyn, and Waterloo Secondary College was closer, but a policeman didn’t send his kids to school in the town he served in. Scobie didn’t want the psycho sons or daughters of someone he’d arrested taking it out on Roslyn, a kicking behind the toilet block, a shafting in a dim corner of the library.

He glanced at his wife. As usual, Beth was subdued, a bit foggy in the head, but seemed generally more engaged with the world and their daughter than she had been earlier in the year. Back then it would have been impossible to get her to accompany him to something like today’s school musicale.

He’d paid a gold coin for a copy of the program and searched it for Roslyn’s name. There it was, correctly spelt. He ran his gaze down the other names, noting that his daughter went to school with a Jarryd, a Jarrod, a Jared and a Jarrold. Oh, wait: and a Jhared.

First up was a Year 7 four-piece, who didn’t quite mangle the obligatory Smoke on the Water. There’s more talent in a high school than a primary, he decided. The afternoon progressed. A sweet alto solo of Danny Boy. A six-piece woodwind version of Scarborough Fair. And an incredibly funny extract from Tubular Bells, the final section where different instruments are introduced in turn, one overlaying the other, until the final, rousing explosion of the tubular bells-except that the boy who announced each instrument really camped it up, and the instruments didn’t quite match. ‘Glockenspiel,’ he said solemnly, but what you got was a piano accordion, and when he cried ‘Tubular bells!’ Roslyn came out shaking a wind chime.

Scobie thought his face would split from grinning.

The final act was an all-school orchestra and choir version of Bohemian Rhapsody, and what made the day perfect for Scobie Sutton was Beth giving him a sly nudge and asking:

‘In what way is a drum solo like a sneeze?’

Scobie eyed her carefully. She was making a joke? ‘Don’t know.’

‘You know it’s about to happen, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.’

He wanted to laugh and cry, wanted to celebrate the return of his wife, even as a tiny corner of his mind wondered if she’d entered some final stage that, like a sneeze, couldn’t be halted.