Challis - 04 - Chain of Evidence (4 page)

Okay.

The faade of the house, unchanged since
the colonial era and preserved by council regulations, gave way to a short
hallway of closed bedroom doors and then a large, airy living room. Typically,
some interior walls had been knocked down and skylights, a mezzanine floor and
a rear sundeck put in. The furniture was a mismatched collection of op-shop
armchairs, Ikea stools and bright, cheap floor coverings and cushions. A kid of
about twenty leapt from one of the armchairs. He was skinny, with earrings and
chopped-about hair. Hi, Mrs Destry. Im Travis.

The boyfriend? A new tenant? Ellen
glanced at Larrayne, who said expressionlessly, Tea? Coffee?

Coffee.

Ellen stayed for thirty painful
minutes. Her daughter was unresponsive; the boy overcompensated with chatter.
Finally Ellen glanced at her watch and said, I have to get back.

Larrayne leapt to her feet and took
her to the front door. Thanks for coming, Mum.

Ellen said brightly, Is Travis your
boyfriend?

So what if he is?

Just wondering, sweetheart. How are
your studies?

All right.

If you need peace and quiet in the
lead up to the exams, come and spend a few days with me.

You must be joking, me in lover boys
house, Larrayne said, and Ellen saw that nothing had changed. It might have
been bearable if Hal Challis
were
her lover boy.

She felt heat rising inside her and
turned away before she said something shed later regret. Twenty minutes later,
as she headed southeast on the freeway toward Waterloo, her mind was still
stewing. If criminals can be granted the benefit of the concept of reasonable
doubt, why couldnt she? Instead, her daughter and her husband had examined the
evidence against hershed walked out on her marriage, shed always worked
closely with Hal Challis, she was now living in his houseand found her guilty
of adultery.

I wish, she thought.

I
think
I wish.

The freeway was choked with traffic,
moving at a walking pace down a broad channel between seas of tiled roofs, home
to middle

24

Australia. The routes in and out of
Melbourne had never coped and never would, not when the satellite areas like
the Peninsula offered cheap, high-density housing but no jobs.

Beside her a siren whooped, highway
patrol, festooned with antennas and decals, motioning at her mobile phone. She
showed them her badge through the window. They shrugged and shot away down the
shoulder of the freeway, looking for other mugs who were driving while talking
on a mobile phone.

It was inevitable that thinking
about her own daughterand love, protection and responsibilitywould lead Ellen
to thinking about Katie Blasko. A ten-year-old, missing forshe glanced at her
watch twenty-four hours now. Was Katie at a friends house? Getting off the
bus in Sydney, where shed be swallowed up in the fleshpots of Kings Cross?
Twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours of heaven or hell.

Her phone rang. It was a text
message from a Supreme Court clerk.

Jarrett acquitted.

All she wanted to do was call Hal
Challis. She had him on speed-dial. But he had a family crisis to contend with.
It wouldnt be fair. She had to do this alone.

* * * *

25

Detective
Inspector Hal Challis was one thousand kilometres away, in the far mid-north of
South Australia, crossing a barrier of stony hills on a hazardous switchback
road at a point known as Isolation Pass. Drivers had been killed on the Pass.
Challis knew to take it cautiously that Friday afternoon, climbing the upward
slope in his rattly old Triumph, braking for the downward.

Before long he caught sight of
Mawsons Bluff, his glimpses of the little settlement interrupted by
guardrails, then rock face, one alternating with the other. Complicated
feelings settled in him. The Bluff was a drowsy wheat and wool town on a
treeless plain, a place where they knew the cost of everything but the value of
nothing. It was named for Governor Mawsons son, who, in 1841, had set out from
Adelaide to survey the range of hills that now sheltered the town and the
merino stud properties, but failed to return, and was found a year later with a
spear pinched between the bones of his ribcage. Challis had been taught that at
the Bluffs little primary school. He hadnt been taught that it marked the
beginning of a doomed Aboriginal resistance to rifles, horses and sheep. No one
in Mawsons Bluff wanted to know that. He was only going home because his
sister had called him.

Home.
He still called it that. He visited
from time to time but hadnt lived there for twenty years.

The road levelled out and he
accelerated. Before long he could read MAWSONS BLUFF painted on the roof of the
pub, a landmark for the buyers who flew in from the sheep stations of New South
Wales for the merino stud ram sales. And there was the cemetery, a dusty patch
of gum trees and gravestones on a rise beyond the stockyards. Challis
swallowed. Hed attended a funeral there last year, and if things followed
their course, hed soon be attending another.

He slowed at the outskirts of the
town. An old sensation went through him, of emptiness and isolation. Hed felt
it as a child, Broken Hill lying far to the east, Adelaide far to the south,
and nothing between them. He shook off the feeling and looked for changes.
Nothing had changed. The houses were the same, low, slumbering, walled in local
stone, protected from the sun by broad verandahs, gum trees and golden cypress
hedges. TV antennas fifteen metres high. The Methodist church in a square of
red dirt, where the ants were always busy. The returned servicemens hall where
he and Meg had dumped empty bottles for the annual Legacy drive. The stone
school with the steep, faded red corrugated iron roof. The old women watering
their geraniums and staring as he passed. The cars with their coatings of
powdered dirt. Not mud. This was a dry spring, of a dry year, of a dry decade.
Nothing had changed.

But hed spoken too soon. He spotted
changes in the little main street. There was a caf now, a craft shop, and a
place selling collectibles. Every faade had been renovated in late colonial
styles. Then Challis saw a sign on a picket fence, and understood: Mawsons
Bluff Community Preservation and Historical Society.

But the grassy plains still
stretched on forever, the droughty bluffs loomed over the town and the sky was
a cloudless dome above.

Challis had slowed to no more than a
walking pace. The town was airless and still. No one moved. Curtains were
drawn. Presently a farmer emerged from the post office, nodded hello as if
Challis had never left the town, and drove away in one of the battered white
utilities that populate the outback. Challis recognised him as Paddy Finucane,
from an extensive clan that lurked on forgotten back roads, married into
similar struggling share-farming families and drove trucks for the local
council. There had been dozens of Finucanes in the convent school and the
football team when Challis was a boy. There always had been and always would
be. Some, he remembered, had been done for stealing sheep, diesel fuel,
chainsaws or anything else that hadnt been locked away in a shed. Paddy was
one of them.

He came to the northern outskirts of
the town and turned down a rutted track toward a more recently built house.
Young wives of the prosperous 1960s had eschewed the cool old stone houses of
the midnorth of South Australia and insisted on triple-fronted brick veneer
houses with tile roofshouses indistinguishable from those in the new suburbs
and satellite towns of the major cities. Challiss own mother had got her dream
home. Challiss father had been happy to oblige her: the love was there, and
the money. In those first few years, Murray Challis had been the only lawyer in
a one hundred-kilometre radius, drawing up wills, contracts and occasional
divorce settlements for everyone from the mail contractor to the local gentry.
Now, forty years later, the house hed built for his wife still hadnt accommodated
itself naturally with the landscape. Like the old stone buildings of the region
it came complete with an avenue of pines, a garden of roses and shrubs,
rainwater tanks and a kelpie beating his tail in the dust, but it didnt quite
belong. Nor had the Challises, quite, and at the age of twenty Hal Challis had
left for the police academy. Perhaps it was wanting to belong that made him
apply for a posting back home when he graduated. Certainly that had been a
mistake. You can never go back. A couple of years later hed left the state,
and now was an inspector in the Victoria Police.

Challis braked at the head of the
driveway, angling his car into the shade of the pepper trees. He got out,
stretched his aching back and looked north over the struggling wheat flats that
merged, in the far distance, with arid country, semi-desert, a land of pebbly
dust, washaways, mallee scrub and hidden gullies. Men had died out there. They
called it doing a perish, and many in the district believed that thats what
had happened to Challiss brother-in-law, five years ago now. Gavin Hursts car
had been found abandoned out there. No body. Hed been the districts RSPCA
inspector, a difficult man. Challis had never liked Hurst, but his sister had
married him, had loved him, so what can you do?

The conquering hero returns.

Challis wheeled around with an
answering grin. Meg, two years his junior, was smiling tiredly at him from the
verandah. A moment later she was embracing him, a round, comfortable shape. Driving
the same old bomb, I see, she said fondly, beating the flat of her hand
against the chrome surround of his windscreen.

Hey, dont mark my pride and joy.

She snorted, throwing her arms
around him again. Its so good to see you. Youre a sight for sore eyes.

When she released him he saw that
her eyes were, in fact, sore looking. How is he?

Sweetie, Meg told him gently, hes
dying.

Well, shed told him that on the
phone earlier in the week, and so hed hastily arranged a months leave. What
she meant now was, how else did Challis
expect
their father to be? It
was faintly reproving, and Challis couldnt blame her. Their mother had died a
year ago, and their father had immediately declined. Meg, who lived on the
other side of the Bluff, near the tennis courts, had been the one to nurse both
of them. Their mother would have been undemanding, but Challis guessed that
their father, an exacting man even in good health, was making hard work of
dying. There rose between Challis and his sister a knot of unresolved feelings:
Challis had escaped, Meg hadnt. Im sorry.

She brightened. Youre here now

Challis had asked for a month, but
McQuarrie, his boss, a superintendent in regional command headquarters, had
clearly thought that excessive. As if he wants my father to hurry up and die,
Challis had thought at the time. I have several weeks of accrued leave owing
to me, sir, hed said. And Sergeant Destry is perfectly capable of holding
the fort until I get back.

McQuarrie, a small man who
disapproved of many things, said, Your father, did you say?

Hes dying, sir.

Very well.

The super, who knew more about
meeting procedures than catching bad guys, would give Ellen a hard time, but
Challis couldnt do anything about that now. Besides, Ellen knew how to look
after herself.

He followed Meg along the path to
the verandah steps. Wheres Eve? She inside with Dad?

Meg shook her head. Studying.
Always studying.

Challiss niece was in Year 12. Hed
last seen her a year ago, at his mothers funeral: tall, lovely, and absolutely
desolate. He hated to think of Eve in pain. First her father, then her
grandmother, and now her grandfather.

Youll see her eventually, Meg
said.

Challis stepped into the house
behind her, into rooms unchanged from when hed been a boy, into sluggish air
laden with the odours of a dying man. For a brief mad instant, he looked for
his mother to come bustling from the kitchen, ready to wrap him in loving
smiles and hugs. The grief hit him like a punch to the heart: he stopped,
swayed, breathed in and out.

Hal?

Challis swallowed. Nothing, sis, Im
okay. He paused. Mum.

Meg looked fleetingly unimpressed.
This wasnt a competition, but shed been closer to their mother than Challis
had, and shed had to cope with their fathers decline. Then, relenting, she
gently touched his arm and called, Dad! Look whos here.

Shed set the old man up in a
brightly upholstered cane chair in the screened-in back porch. Here the sun
penetrated for the greater part of the day. It was a cheerful room, furnished
with other cane chairs, a pair of glass-topped tables on cane legs, flowery
curtains pulled back on the windows. White walls, a couple of vaguely Turkish
rugs on the terracotta tiled floor. Challis took these things in first, a way
of delaying the inevitable. Then, his heart hammering, he said, Hello, Dad.

His father stirred feebly, a bony
hand fluttering out from under the tartan rug that enclosed him. Pathetic white
ankles above carpet slippers. A food-stained blue dressing gown with shiny
lapels revealed his sunken chest and throat. His face was sharp and fleshless,
his hair a few wispy white tufts. Finally, the eyes that had always had the
power to unnerve Challis. They were unchanged.