Challis - 05 - Blood Moon (31 page)

She switched off the TV, drained her
wine glass and, with her free hand, started fooling around again, making up for
lost time.

* * * *

John
Tankard was manning the front desk that evening, and he was clock watching. At
dead on eight oclock Im out of here, he told a couple of the uniformed guys,
who were hanging around, shooting the breeze. They were about to go on duty,
which mostly meant ensuring that the schoolies didnt drown in their own vomit.

You could come and ride with us,
Tank.

Yeah, right.

We know youre up for it, Tank.
When those schoolie chicks get on the piss theyre gasping for a screw.

Not the ones Tank had encountered
during the weekor not gasping to do it with
him,
anyway. I need some
shuteye, he said.

Mate, its Friday night.

Eventually Tank was alone. The night
looked smeared and half lit outside the glass entry doors. Shadows flickered
past; he heard a hotted-up car lay down some rubber at the roundabout; someone
whistled somewhere in the dim reaches of the building. He didnt think hed
ever felt as lonely as he did right now, and he knew that a lot of it had to do
with Andrew Cree and Pam Murphy. He flicked through
Police Life
tormentedly
and then a guy came barging in, young, with pudgy hands and face, cropped hair,
a soul patch under soft, moist lips. You looked at him and knew his voice would
have a whine running through it.

Help you, sir?

Then Tank recognised him. Dirk Roe. Help
you, Mr Roe?

Roe said, Check this out.

He was the kind of guy who owns the
latest electronic gizmo. He thrust a Blackberry at Tank, the screen showing
that it was logged on to the Internet.

Im going to do you cunts for this.

Tank, peered, wonderingnot for the
first timewhether or not he needed glasses. Eventually he realised that he was
looking at an image of Lachlan Roe, lying in a pool of blood.

Thats my brother, Dirk said. That
is a crime scene photo, splashed all over the Web.

Not by us, sir, said Tank stoutly.
Not by the police.

Bullshit! Who else could it be?

A pedestrian walking by...Tank
said, going on to list some other plausible but unlikely culprits, all the time
knowing
exactly
who.

* * * *

Bronte-Mae
McBride was like, so wasted. Shed gone to Point Leo with a gang of other
schoolies, partly because Waterloo was the pits, partly to try twilight
surfing. So theyd got there, theyd staggered over the dunes, losing half
their gear along the way, it felt like, but now all they wanted to do was chill
out, swig bourbon and coke from a can, snuggle under blankets, pass a joint
around. Bronte-Mae had to go home tomorrow. Her parents had lined up a summer
job for her, starting Sunday, helping out at Rebel Sport in Frankston. If her
Year 12 results were okay, shed start at RMIT next year, Occupational Health.
So this was her last night and she wanted it to be memorable, she wanted it to
mean something.

She found herself kissing that guy
Matt from Landseer. Given that she was perhaps the last eighteen-year-old
virgin in the history of humankind, and this was her last night, and he was so
nice and such a good kisser, and the moon was shining on the water, she shifted
her body so that his hand could slip inside her pants. It felt so good. Then
her hand was inside his pants and before she could properly explore what a cock
felt like, and mark this milestone, he was breathing funnily and her hand was
sticky. He gasped, Sorry! and she hugged him for all she was worth.

The others might or might not have
noticed. Either way, did she want an audience if this was going to go any
further? Lets find a quieter spot, she whispered.

So they headed along the beach
toward Shoreham, to a dark hollow, where he made love to her properly this
time, and it was magical, not clinical, despite the condom business, there
under the moon and stars.

Whats this? said Matt at one
point.

Matt, its a breast.

No, this.

A small cloth bag half hidden by
driftwood.

* * * *

43

Hal
Challis hadnt yet seen Ellen Destry in all of her phases. Their situation was
too new for that. The things he did know about her hed learned over the years
and they were constant: she was beautiful; she was an efficient and creative
work colleague; she was fearless, loyal, smart, quick and proud. And more
recently hed discovered the shifting contours of her bare skin, the little
cries she uttered, and the swiftly changing moods and expressions when she was
at her most intense and intimate: a kind of surrender, bawdiness, a delight in
taking charge, selflessness...

But when hed called her from his
car late that Friday afternoon to suggest they eat at the Thai restaurant in
Waterloo, she said no curtly, saying she had dinner under control, and when he
arrived home she barely inclined her cheek for a kiss but continued to hack at
chicken breasts and add them to a bowl of marinade. Hed scarcely seen her all
day. Hed missed her. But the tension was palpable. Whats wrong?

Nothing.

Tell me.

Instead she washed her hands and
began to slice cloves of garlic, and within seconds her thumb was bleeding and
she was shouting, Fuck.
Fuck,
fuck, fuck, fuck.

Wash it under the tap.

She scowled furiously but complied.

Whats wrong, Ellen?

Nothing. Then: I never know where
anything is in this place.

Hovering in the doorway, he decided
to take the reply at face value. What are you looking for?

She turned to him with a ragged
expression. What am I looking for?

Yes.

Whatever it was had nothing to do with
where he kept his garlic crusher. He waited. She examined her thumb and said, Forget
it. Sorry I snapped.

Did something happen today?

Hal, forget it, okay?

His heart said to cross the room and
wrap his arms around her. His head told him to wait. He left the kitchen and
found a bandaid in the medicine cabinet. While he pasted it over her thumb she
stood stiff and mute, then returned to her chopping board. He sighed
unconsciously, poured her a glass of Merricks Creek pinot and left it at her
elbow. She glanced at the wine, sniffled, said nothing, but some tiny
realignment of her body seemed to signal appreciation, and so Challis wandered
through to the sitting room and tried to think his way into his CD collection.
What would match her mood just then, her present needs? He settled on
Eric
Clapton Unplugged.

Anyhow,
he
needed it.

No protests from the kitchen.

He spread his Wishart case notes
over the coffee table and flipped through them half-heartedly. It was no good,
his mood was shot.

He wondered if she felt trapped.
They hadnt been together for long but shed had some months of freedom between
her divorce and setting up house with him. And she hadnt actually
chosen
to
set up house with him: shed been minding his place while he tended to his
dying father in South Australia last month, and had simply stayed on when he
returned.

An arrangement, an understanding,
sealed by one sudden, glorious fuck just one hour after hed pulled up in his
car.

But this was his house, not hers.
Shed not made her mark on it yet and maybe was hesitant to. Maybe she hated
the house but liked loved?him. Maybe if she hated the house, shed grow to
hate him.

Or the other way around. She knew
him now and didnt like what she knew, and couldnt wait to get out.

She was waiting for the right time
to tell him and it was driving her crazy.

Challis felt a kind of surliness
settle inside him. Hed always been too solitary to have much of a love life
and the two main relationships of his recent yearsrecent meaning the past ten
yearshad ended disastrously. First, the wife whod tried to kill him, then the
editor of Waterloos weekly newspaper, shot dead by a killer he was hunting.

So he must have been mad to fall in
love with Ellen Destry. Not only did he work with her, she was also under his
formal command. Did those kinds of relationships ever work? Were they as valid
as relationships that resulted from meeting someone by chance, like at a party?
Wasnt it true that couples who met through work later found that work was all
they had in common? Dont you need more than that? Did he and Ellen have more
than that?

A little bit of him fractured
inside. He took a swig of the wine in an effort to shake off the blues and
began flicking through the Wishart case notes, looking for anomalies, looking
for connections. His hammering heart eased, and after a while he realised that
hed left the autopsy report back at the office. He heaved a sigh. He should
have scanned everything and stored it on his laptop or portable hard drive but
he was a hands-on kind of cop. He needed to hold a file in his hand, not read a
screen. He didnt want to become one of those wankers who walks around wearing
a memory stick on a lanyard around his neck.

But Ellen always stored her files
electronically. Shed probably have the autopsy report on her memory sticknot
that she was a wanker. He cocked his head: judging by the sounds and smells,
shed fired up the wok and begun adding onions, garlic, ginger, the chicken and
strips of capsicum, so instead of bothering her he went searching for her work
gear. Sometimes she dumped everything in the hallway, sometimes the bedroom,
sometimes the floor of the walk-in robe. Mornings were occasionally a little
tense, Ellen storming up and down, demanding to know where her keys were. Or
her bag. Or her wallet, her memory stick, her sunglasses.

Maybe his life was too orderly for
her? She needed chaos?

He located her briefcase in the
hall, her bag in the bedroom. The briefcase merely yielded files. The bag was a
bag of many zips and compartments, and he found pens, mints, receipts, address
book, note book, tampons, tissues, business cards, lint and three memory
sticks.

For some reason he selected the
memory stick that was slightly different from the others. It was called a
TrackStick, and when he plugged it into his laptop, he found himself looking at
local maps and a record of coordinates, dates and times. In wonderment he
carried the laptop through to the kitchen, saying, Whats this weird stuff on
your memory stick?

Her gaze, at first faintly
impatient, grew alarmed, then mortified. To his astonishment, her body went
into an imploring or self-protective spasm, as if shed witnessed a shocking
accident, he were about to attack her, or her child had been torn from her
breast. She balled her fists, her face crumpled and she began to cry gustily,
shaking her head.

He was appalled and went to her
immediately, first placing the laptop on the table. Ells, sweetheart, whats
the matter, what is it? he said, folding her against him.

And she froze, her body resisting
him. Only her face surrendered, pressed into his chest, tears wetting his
shirt.

Ells?

She stepped back, raw with emotions,
turned jerkily to the wok and switched off the gas. Youre going to hate me.

Hate you? Why?

You dont know me.

Tell me whats wrong.

She gestured at the door through to
the sitting room. Can we turn that crap off first?

Crap? Thats Eric Clapton crap.

She didnt smile at the old joke. He
followed her through to the sitting room, where she snapped off the CD player.
The silence and her moodcool, almost coldfrightened Challis.

Please tell me.

She sat on the sofa. She said, No,
you sit over there.

So he sat opposite her, in the
armchair.

Ive got something to tell you and
it will change how you see me.

Challis wanted to say: Dont be so
dramatic. He reckoned that hed seen and learned everything about human nature,
and didnt figure hed be surprised by what she had to reveal. What mattered
was that Ellen thought it mattered. Okay.

I steal things.

He waited.

Ive always stolen things, ever
since I was a kid.

He nodded. He almost told her hed
been nabbed for lifting chewing gum from the corner store when he was eight
years old, but thought better of it.

I feel the urge when we search
peoples houses, she went on. Suspects, victims, it doesnt matter, if theres
cash lying about, trinkets, I feel the urge to take it.

Challis waited. What was he supposed
to say?
How much? How often?

I mean, said Ellen, I almost
never
steal; its been years, in fact. Ive been fighting it. The last time I did
it I put the money into a church charity box.

Okay.

Not
okay. The desire is there all the
time.

He nodded.