‘The whole world would have known about it if he’d hit Dad. As for anyone else, I can’t say.’
‘But he offended lots of people.’
‘God, yes, even before he started going off the rails he was always taking people to court. Paddy Finucane, for example-Gavin brought several prosecutions for cruelty to animals against him.’
They gazed at each other. Challis told her to tell that to the police, too.
She sighed raggedly. ‘I have to tell Eve. I want her here with me.’
‘Shall I stay?’
Meg looked at him sadly. ‘Thanks, but you’d better take Dad home.’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he told her, and together they helped their father into the car.
Later he called Ellen Destry. ‘Only me.’
‘Twice in one evening,’ she said, sounding pleased. He told her about the body.
‘Oh, Hal, I’m so sorry.’
‘A couple of homicide guys from Adelaide are sniffing around.’
Ellen was silent. She knew whom they’d be sniffing around. ‘Hal,’ she said warningly, ‘you’re not going to…’
‘Of course not. Not my jurisdiction.’
‘Yeah, right, as Larrayne would say.’
‘But I was missing a good murder,’ Challis said.
Come tomorrow morning, he intended to go in hard, tracing Gavin Hurst’s last days and sworn enemies.
34
Friday was the morning for the District Nurse and the shire council’s Home Helper, and that gave Challis three hours to himself. First he drove across town to wish Meg luck with the police interview. There was a Channel 7 news van parked in the street outside the house, and a couple of newspaper reporters leaning against Meg’s fence, smoking, exchanging war stories. They’d come three hundred kilometres north for this story; it involved murder, grisly remains, concealment and buried secrets. Challis, who had perfected reporter brush-off techniques over the years, passed through as if he didn’t see them.
Eve answered the door, her face tight and unhappy. He hadn’t seen her since Wednesday, and made sure that the door was firmly shut before he hugged her.
‘They keep knocking and ringing. I hate it. They’re ghouls.’
‘They’ll go away eventually.’
‘Dr Minchin was here earlier.’ Eve looked at Challis as though recalling a bad taste. ‘He took a mouth swab, can you believe it?’
Challis hugged her again. ‘DNA, sweetheart, to help them identify the body.’
‘I felt like a criminal.’
‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of.’
She heaved a sigh. ‘Today’s going to drag on forever.’
It occurred to Challis that Eve would be alone here while Meg was questioned. ‘Want to come around with me this morning?’
‘Where?’
He gazed at her steadily. ‘Out east.’
She twigged at once. ‘Where Dad’s car was found?’
‘Yes.’
She didn’t ask why. It was as if she knew. He found Meg in the kitchen and said goodbye and good luck.
‘Thanks.’
She looked tired and bewildered. She’d assumed that Gavin Hurst had been alive all these years, and had grown to hate him because he’d been taunting her. Now this.
‘Call me when the police have finished interviewing you.’
‘Unless I’m in jail.’
‘I’ll break you out.’
‘My hero. Pity you’re my brother.’
‘Call me,’ he said again.
‘I will,’ she promised.
‘On my mobile.’
‘Okay.’
There was a transmitting tower in Mawson’s Bluff. In fact, Challis got better mobile phone reception in the wilds of South Australia than he did on the Peninsula. He kissed Meg and then hurried Eve into his car and drove east on a road that had been subject to potholes and bone-jarring corrugations back when he was a teenager driving to outlying sheep stations to pick up a girl and take her to a dance. It was a fine sealed road now, and passed through a rain shadow, leaving the grassy plains of the Bluff behind and rapidly entering stony saltbush and bluebush country-the change so dramatic that God might have thrown a switch when your eyes were blinking. If you kept going you’d reach the vast northeast of the state, a virtually unpopulated region of stone ruins, deep gorges, dry salt lakes and landmarks that named the fate of European settlement: Mount Hopeless, Termination Hill, Dry Well Track, Blood Creek Bore.
But Gavin’s RSPCA station wagon had been found only twenty kilometres east of the Bluff-twenty-one kilometres east of the cemetery. Dry country, sure. Country you could walk out into, never to be found, if you had your heart set on it. A country of hidden gullies and undiscovered rocky caves decorated with ancient Aboriginal carvings and paintings. But country that was still close to town. A daily Trailblazer bus went along that road, before turning southeast to the River Murray towns. Salesmen went along it, livestock agents, local farmers, tourists in cars and buses. Gavin could have abandoned his car and hitched a ride with a stranger, you’d reason, if you believed he’d wanted to stage his disappearance. Or he’d walked out into the dry country to die, you’d reason, if you believed that he’d wanted to commit suicide.
Two reasonable hypotheses, both widely held in the town.
Eve knew where the car had been found, and directed him to pull over fifty metres past the twenty-kilometre post. ‘You’re getting a feeling, Uncle Hal?’
She said it slightly teasingly. In fact, he often did feel his way into the atmospherics of a place, and the skin and bones of a victim or a culprit. There was nothing supernatural about it. It was merely one man’s imagination- albeit an imagination honed by dozens of murder investigations over the years.
‘Something like that,’ he said.
A warm wind blew, raising a willy-willy on the dusty plain. Two wedge-tail eagles soared above, and bleached, horned rams’ skulls gleamed in the reddish dirt nearby. They stood there for some time, thinking, talking, reminiscing. It was not a lonely spot. Several cars and a dirty Land Rover passed by, their drivers raising a hand in greeting.
Eve said, ‘I hate to think of him being shot out here.’
‘It might not have been here.’
He could see her mind working. ‘He was shot somewhere else and they dumped his car here?’
‘Yes.’
‘That would need at least two people, one to drive Dad’s car here, the other to collect the driver.’
‘It’s one scenario.’
Challis pictured Paddy Finucane with his sad-looking wife. He pictured Meg with the old man. Just then his mobile phone rang.
‘Hal?’
Meg’s tone was bright but he froze inside. ‘Everything okay?’
It was as if all of the cares of her life had evaporated. ‘Everything’s fine. The lawyer was terrific. He made them promise they’d look at everyone Gavin brought prosecutions against.’
