Challis - 04 - Chain of Evidence (15 page)

Still, he spent late afternoon in
the gym and went straight to the Chaos Bar without showering, a touch of
healthy, moist heat in his face, hair and neck. Did the women turn their heads
as he passed among them? Tank strode tall, that Monday afternoon at one minute
to six. Chicks gasping for it, left, right and centre, nurses, receptionists,
even a couple of young lawyers hed seen around the magistrates court.

To the table in the corner, where
Terri waited, a pretty face, yeah, but short, tubby, her butt overflowing the
chair. Before he could stop himself, the words popped into his head and
straight out of his mouth: Looks-wise, you havent been exactly honest with
me, have you?

She flushed. They stared at each
other. Suddenly she recoiled. Body odour-wise, you really stink.

She got up and left.

Well, shit.

He watched her go, his eyes drawn to
the street beyond the smoky glass, where his fire-engine-red Mazda was being
ticketed by a parking inspector.

Double shit.

His mobile rang. It was the producer
of Evening Update. I need all you can give me on Katie Blasko.

Ive already given you everything.

Where she was found, who by, was
she abused, the producer said.

Huh?

Tanks gaze went to the wide-screen
TV on the wall. Later you got music clipsKylie Minogues lovely arse, Beyonces
crotchbut right now it was the six oclock news, live feed coming in, Waterloo
in the background, a reporter in the foreground, the familiar shot of Katie
Blasko tucked into the top corner of the screen.

Alive? Dead? He strained to hear.

* * * *

19

Eddie
Tran had come a fair way in life. Hed eventually eased his way out of the
Vietnamese gang scene in Melbournethe co-ordinated shoplifting raids, the drug
dealing, justice and revenge enacted with machetesand married a nice girl
who, like him, was the offspring of parents whod spent time in a refugee camp
in Malaysia in the early 1980s and later been allowed to settle in Australia.
Eddie and his wife had lived on the Peninsula for five years now. Theyd run a
$2 shop for a while, but there were too many such shops, and now they were
partners in a bakery near the roundabout on High Street, Waterloo. They baked a
tray of Vietnamese buns occasionally, but mostly the locals wanted white bread,
doughnuts, scones, vanilla slice and apricot Danishes. And freshly made
sandwiches at lunchtime.

The women in Eddies life ran the
business, his wife and her mother and sister. There wasnt a lot for Eddie to
do, once hed completed the baking every morning. And so he worked for
CleanSwift, a contract cleaning business that called on Eddie and a couple of
other immigrants once or twice a week for the shit jobs.

Literally. For example, the shire
provided emergency and short-term housing for needy people: single-parent
families, alcoholics whod burnt down their own houses, teenagers whod been
kicked out of home, refugees from northern Africa, the hopeless, the luckless,
the disgraced and distressed. Eddie saw people and a way of life that most
Australians didnt see. He saw it because he wasnt an Australian, not in their
eyes. Hed been born here, but he wasnt Anglo-Celtic. The number of astonished
looks he got when he opened his mouth and out came a broad Aussie accent!

So it was usually Eddie and the
other guys, a Somali and an Iraqi, who were sent to clean up whenever one of
the shires emergency-housing properties fell vacant. They literally scrubbed
shit off the walls, sometimes. Eddie had studied Psychology at Swinburne for a
couple of years, before dropping out, and knew that smearing excrement on the
walls was a symptom of some kind of psychosis. The emergency houses provided by
the shire were very ordinary but maybe felt like prison walls to some poor
individuals. The number of times Eddie and the guys had torn up carpets and thrown
them out! Eddie, a fastidious man, and luckier than these poor souls,
nevertheless found it hard not to despise them. Spend five minutes a day
picking up after yourself, hed think, five minutes going from room to room
with a garbage bag, and you wouldnt have to live like pigs. Pizza boxes,
dozens of bottles and cans, unidentifiable smears and excretions, mouldy
hamburger buns, used tampons and condoms, syringes, the carcasses of
cockroaches, mice, rats and family pets, empty foil packets, scratched CDs,
overdue Blockbuster videos, bras and knickers, unpaired shoes and earrings,
toys, dust balls, skin magazines, hair clips, combs, cellophane wrappers like
the husks of strange creatures.

Sometimes it would take days to
clean a place. Then the painters would come in, the plasterers to fix holes in
the internal walls (fists? boots? heads?), the locksmith, the carpet layer.
Big, contemptuous guys, usually, who couldnt see why the shire would want to
prettify a house just so another lot of crazies, addicts, immigrants and
no-hopers could have somewhere nice to live. What was the point? Eddie
sympathised with this view, while trying not to think of the conditions that
his parents had lived in before they settled in the lucky country.

De Soto Lane lay at the forgotten
end of the little township of Warrawee, ten kilometres northeast of Penzance
Beach. Eddie and the guys parked the van outside number 24, a small
brick-veneer house set well back from the road among blackberry canes and
rusting cars lost in chest-high spring grasses. A timber yard sat on one side
of it, behind a high cyclone fence. Behind it was a market gardeners packing
shed. Opposite was a stand of tall pines, black cockatoos clinging to the top
branches and squawking softly as they cracked cones with their powerful beaks.
Amid the pine trees was a small brick house with drawn curtains. An old woman
was pottering about in her garden. Otherwise the lane was sparsely populated,
with the only other visible house a new but ugly McMansion, two storeys, red
tiles, four-car garage, lots of off-white pillars and columns, a vast
landscaped garden under construction. The market gardener lived there, Eddie
guessed, or would live there soon, for there were heaps of soil and bricks
lying around.

He shivered. Hed hate to live out
here. Hed seen from the street directory that there was a Cadillac Court, a
Mercedes Terrace, and a Buick Drive. Did they make De Soto cars any more? He
didnt think so. Hed asked the other guys, but they didnt know what the hell
he was talking about.

Eddie assessed number 24 rapidly
that Monday afternoon. 1960s vintage, with only a handful of small,
low-ceilinged rooms: living room, kitchen, laundry, bathroom, hallway and two
bedrooms. He knew this at a glance. Hed cleaned dozens like it. The lawn
needed mowing, he noticed, weeds thrived in the garden beds, scaly mould
patches covered the roof tiles. He sniffed experimentally as he approached the
front door. Often you could assess the size of the job within by the stench
factor.

Nothing discernible.

Eddie went in first.

No furniture, no crud lying about.
There was dust, sure, scuffs on the walls, but the place wasnt too bad. The
carpet would need a shampoo, but thats all. The smudges would come off the
walls okay. With any luck, they could be out of here by lunchtime tomorrow.
Eddie made these assessments as he walked from the front door to the sitting
room.

Then he heard a whimper and his skin
crept. The other guys went round-eyed and took a step back involuntarily.

Anyone there? Eddie called, being
the boss.

That whimper again. With a hammering
heart, Eddie approached the room that in most of these houses was the smaller
bedroom. He tried the door; it was locked. He rapped his knuckles. Anyone
home?

More whimpering. Eddie figured it
could be passed off as damage caused by the previous occupants if he forced the
door, so he went out to the van and returned with a crowbar and splintered the
door away from the jamb.

The stench was shocking. She was
naked and afraid and lying in her own wastes. She scrabbled away from him on a
mattress in a room decorated as a nursery, one wrist tethered to a hook in the
wall. Eddie was nominally a Catholic; he crossed himself. Little girl, little
girl, he cooed, the other guys coming in behind him then, hovering at his
elbow. Who knew the trials, heartaches and torture they had experienced and
witnessed in their own countries? Yet they rushed past him with distressed and
comforting cries and gathered her up.

* * * *

20

Challis
spent the day chatting with his father, reading aloud from
Mr Midshipman
Hornblower,
and preparing simple meals. His childhood home seemed smaller
than hed remembered; stuffier, older, less well cared for. Since his mothers
death, his father had lost the will to be house-proud. Had nothing to live for,
in fact. It was sad; it broke Challiss heart. He wanted to make things better.
He wanted to run away.

Cup of tea, Dad? he said at four oclock,
the afternoon sun angling into the back room, lighting the dust motes.

His father reached his right hand
across his stomach and pulled his left into view. He examined his wristwatch
for a whileas if time had now become a puzzle, where once it had ruled his
life.

Id like to eat at five,
five-thirty.

Challis said nothing. At five-twenty
hed microwave the chicken soup that Meg had left in the fridge, grill a lamb
chop, boil half a carrot, and add a lettuce leaf and a slice of tomato. Would
he himself eat at five-thirty? Yes, to be companionable. Besides, being a policeman
had accustomed him to snatching dinner at all hours of the night and day. He
was adaptable.

But the evening would be long. TV
reception was poor this far north. A couple of his mothers opera and ballet
videos in the cabinet under the TV set, a short shelf of CDs: light classics,
mostly, The Seekers, Welsh male choirs. He couldnt go to the pub and leave his
father alone. It was too soon to ask friends aroundand what friends, anyway?

There was his laptop. Work on the
discussion paper on regional policing that he still hadnt written for
Superintendent McQuarrie? Play solitaire? Somehow use the Web to find Gavin
Hurst?

Actually, there was one thing he
could do. Hed been restoring an old aeroplane before things had got so
complicated in his life. It was gathering dust in a hangar on the little
regional airport near Waterloo, and he knew, as one did know these things, that
his
not
completing the restoration was symptomatic of a malaise, of a
life that marked time, that waited when it should act. Hed feel better about
himself if he went on-line and searched for missing partsinstrument-panel
switches, for example.

The doorbell chimed, the sound
bringing back vivid memories of his childhood, when friends had visited this
house. The feeling strengthened as Challis made his way along the passageway to
the front door, past his mothers framed tapestries of English rural scenes,
thatched cottages and haystacks, past the upended shell casing from the Second
World War, now crammed with walking sticks and umbrellas.

And continued when he saw Rob
Minchin on the doorstep.

Hal, old son.

Rob.

They shook hands, then embraced
awkwardly. Hows my patient?

Cranky.

Unchanged, in other words.

Like Challis, Minchin had gone away,
trained, and returned to the town. Unlike Challis, hed stayed. He was the only
doctor in the district, run ragged by surgery consultations, hospital rounds
and house calls. He travelled huge distances, attending home births on remote
farms, talking through the anxieties of lonely widows, taking the temperatures
of sick children, pronouncing death when stockmen ran their mustering bikes
into gullies and broke their necks. He was also the on-call pathologist for the
region.

And Challiss one-time friend. Time
and distance had weakened the friendship, and fine distinctions in ambition and
personality had become marked disparities, but, still, history always counts
for something, and Challis and Minchin grinned at each other now.

Wish the circumstances were better,
the doctor said.

Shorter than Challis, Minchin had
grown solid over the years. He was fair-skinned and had always looked a little
pink from sunburn or embarrassment. His hair was straight, reddish, limp and
needed cutting. Hed been married, but his wife had run away with his partner
in the little practice hed inherited from his father.

Its a waiting game, Challis
murmured.

They went into the sitting room,
where the old man was slumped in his chair. Minchin hurried to his side, but
then a ripping snore stopped him.

Challis laughed. Kept me awake last
night.

Minchin nodded. Might as well let
him sleep. Im just checking in. No scares?

He meant the series of minor
strokes. Everyone was waiting for the big one. No, said Challis. Offer you a
drink?

Better make it coffee.

If you can call it that, Challis
said, leading the way to the kitchen.

When it was poured, Minchin asked, Hows
Meg holding up?

The guys still in love with her,
Challis thought. He saw how he could use that. Not too bad, given all shes
had to deal with in the past few years.