shooting.’
‘When?’
‘After lunch. They’re already in the station.’
What am I, everyone’s mother? Ellen sighed and touched his upper arm reassuringly. ‘Just play it straight, Scobie, okay?’
Desperately needing to get away from the station, she slipped out through the rear doors and got into her car. Within a couple of minutes she was knocking on Donna Blasko’s door. ‘Just checking to see how you’re getting on,’ she said.
‘Pretty good, thanks,’ Donna said, showing Ellen through to the sitting room.
And she did look pretty good: somehow tidier, calmer, healthier. Even the house was neater. But Katie remained close by, almost glued to Donna’s hip and watching Ellen solemnly.
Ellen smiled. ‘How are you, Katie?’
‘She’s very strong, aren’t you, pet?’ said Donna, kissing the crown of her daughter’s head.
‘Donna, could we-’
‘Katie, love, I just need a few minutes with Sergeant Destry.’
‘Okay.’
They watched Katie leave the room. ‘We get the full treatment, you know,’ said Donna suddenly, still gazing after Katie. She swung her head to face Ellen again. ‘Whispers in the street, finger-pointing in the supermarket, people finding excuses to stop and say hello, when all they want is to grill Katie for the gory details.’
‘That’s terrible.’
‘I don’t know whether to put her in another school or not. I’m giving her another week at home, then I’ll decide.’
‘Have the counsellors helped?’
Donna shrugged. Ellen thought she understood: she’d struck it before. People like Donna were intimidated by educated, quietly spoken professionals. They’d rather struggle than admit to pain and helplessness.
‘Donna,’ she said slowly, ‘the other day I saw a brochure on your fridge. Rising Stars Agency.’
Donna went alert, a little indignant. ‘Hey, yeah, now you’re here I want to lodge a complaint.’
‘You paid for photos that you didn’t get?’
‘How’d you know that?’
Ellen explained. Donna was appalled. ‘But how come Katie didn’t recognise him?’
‘He wore a disguise. He drugged her.’
Donna began to punish herself. ‘It’s all my fault, isn’t it?’
Ellen stayed for an hour, trying and failing to comfort Donna, and left needing reassurance of her own. She pulled to the side of the road and took out her mobile phone.
‘Hi, sweetie.’
Percussive music, punctuated by raucous shrieks, and her daughter’s voice saying, ‘Mum? I can hardly hear you.’
Ellen checked her watch. Late afternoon. ‘Where are you?’
‘A pub.’
Ellen almost said, acting on her immediate instinct, ‘Shouldn’t you be studying?’ Instead she said, ‘Everything okay?’
‘What?’
‘Is everything okay with you?’
‘Fine. Why?’
‘Just checking.’
‘Look, Mum, today we had our last lecture before exams, okay?’
Ellen pictured the pub at the end of the airwaves that joined her to her daughter’s mobile phone. Was Travis there? Would they party on later? Go clubbing? Head-numbing music, drug-and-alcohol-dazed faces, swirling lights, slender young things crammed together, some of them predators and some of them prey. ‘Don’t leave your drink untouched.’
‘You think I’d let some creep spike my drink? Mum, get real.’
‘You can’t be too careful,’ Ellen said, feeling like someone’s old churchgoing granny.
‘Have to go, Mum, love you, bye.’
‘Bye,’ Ellen said but the connection was dead.
36
The RSPCA inspectorate headquarters for the mid-north was in a town eighty kilometres to the south of Mawson’s Bluff. Leaving Meg to sit with their father that Friday afternoon, Challis drove up and over Isolation Pass for the second time in a week, and an hour later was talking to the regional director, a slow-moving, slow-speaking man in his fifties named Sadler. ‘Thanks for seeing me.’
‘No problem.’
‘Busy?’ Challis asked, nodding at the paperwork on the man’s desk.
Sadler leaned back in his chair, arms folded across his belly. ‘Cruelty to animals never stops, and we never rest, but nor does the paperwork,’ he said, with a faint air of self-mockery. He frowned, serious now. ‘Two detectives are coming to see me later. Has Gavin’s body really been found?’
‘That hasn’t been confirmed, but it’s pretty definite. RSPCA uniform and badge, wallet, watch, all identified as his.’
Sadler cocked his head. ‘What’s your concern in this? You say you’re with the Victoria Police?’
‘Meg Hurst is my sister. Gavin was my brother-in-law.’
‘But it’s not your case,’ said Sadler carefully.
‘I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes,’ Challis said. He felt stiff and sore from the drive: the Triumph’s springs and seats no longer gave much support or security. ‘You can refuse to talk to me. As you said, two detectives from the South Australia police will be coming to talk to you. But my sister and father are naturally very upset. Meg thought Gavin had run out on her, our father thought he’d committed suicide.’
‘But it’s murder?’
‘Yes.’
‘You think it was related to his job?’
‘I don’t know. What do you think?’
In reply, Sadler left his chair and crouched at a low-slung cupboard under his office window. He grunted with the effort of retrieving a large archive box and hauling it back to his desk. ‘Gavin’s stuff, just in case he turned up again.’
He removed several folders, black-covered notebooks, a clipboard, pens in a rubber band and a digital camera. ‘Some of this was found in his car and returned to us by your sister. But I can’t let you take anything away with you.’
‘Of course not,’ said Challis. He flipped through the pad on the clipboard. The bottom pages were blank, the top covered in handwriting that varied from the neat to the dramatic and emphatic, dark and deeply scored on the page, as if mirroring Gavin Hurst’s disturbed moods. He scanned it: he saw ‘Finucane’ written several times and underlined, and the words ‘evidence of classic long term starvation, with some pigs in poor condition and several in a ribby condition’.
He glanced up. ‘He was inspecting Paddy Finucane’s place on the day he disappeared?’
‘Apparently.’
