‘Is he asleep?’ asked Lisa.
‘Stay here, okay?’
‘I’m coming with you.’
‘Lisa,’ he said.
‘I’m coming with you.’
They approached, drawing adjacent to the rear of the Range Rover. Rex Joyce’s head lolled back; there was blood spatter on the glass beside his left ear but more on the ceiling lining above his head. Challis assessed the signs rapidly. Joyce had shot himself. The rifle was between his knees, the muzzle under his jaw. It made a certain kind of sense.
Meanwhile Lisa had gasped and moaned and doubled over, dry-retching. Challis reached out to touch her shoulder. ‘Don’t touch me!’
He snatched his hand back.
She straightened. ‘Sorry. Sorry, Hal. I’ll be all right in a minute. Phew.’ She swallowed, grimaced at the taste. ‘There’s water in the Jeep.’
Challis let her go. He finished making his visual inspection, then followed her. He could see her shape behind the open door of the Jeep, head tilted back as she drank from a plastic bottle.
Halfway there, he stopped. He spun around and strode back to the Range Rover. First he checked the driver’s seat. It sat well forward, as though the last person to drive the vehicle had been short. Rex Joyce was tall. Then he peered through the gap in the seats, noting the rifle between the victim’s legs: it was long-barrelled, a hunting rifle. Too long for Joyce’s arms? He couldn’t be sure about that, but he was sure there should be more blood on the seat back and ceiling.
He closed the driver’s door and opened the door beside the body.
He was sorely tempted to lean in and check for signs of lividity. If Rex had died sitting upright, his blood would have pooled and settled in his buttocks, the underside of his thighs and in his feet and the bottoms of his legs. Challis was betting he’d find lividity all along the body, indicating that Lisa’s husband had died somewhere else, then been laid flat and transported here.
Police work had made Hal Challis an infinitely sympathetic man. That didn’t mean he condoned, necessarily, just that he understood, and now he turned his patient, sorrowing gaze toward the Jeep and Lisa Joyce, even as a hole appeared in the window beside him, glass chips sprayed over his face and chest, and a slipstream plucked at the hairs on his head.
56
While Challis was being shot at, Ellen Destry and Pam Murphy were attending Kees van Alphen’s funeral. They were surprised by the turnout: his wife, daughter and extended family, friends from Waterloo and other Peninsula police stations, McQuarrie and other top brass, and even a handful of snitches and hard men who’d remade their lives.
Back in the CIU incident room they worked the abduction of Katie Blasko and a backlog of minor crimes, using them as cover for more specific actions. Pam searched, without luck, for the missing files mentioned in Kees van Alphen’s notes, and checked, and confirmed, some of his other statements. Ellen drove to the forensic science lab with all of the soft drink cans from the Victim Suite refrigerator, stopping along the way to show photographs of Duyker, Clode and Kellock to Andrew Retallick. He neither confirmed nor denied that they’d abused him, but he did flinch and look distressed.
At lunchtime they met in the lounge of the Fiddler’s Creek pub, taking a corner table where they could not be heard. They ordered meals-fish and chips for Pam, chicken salad for Ellen-and compared notes. Mostly the two women were ignored, but drinkers from the Seaview Park estate were in the main bar, those with criminal records casting occasional glances at them through the archway, curling their lips to keep in training. There was a background cover of shouted conversations, jukebox music and punters at the slot machines.
‘We can’t go after Kellock yet,’ Ellen said.
‘Why not?’
Ellen drained her glass, mineral water with chunks of ice floating in it. ‘There’s no hard evidence. Let’s look at his lack of action back when Alysha Jarrett lodged her complaint: he comes across as insensitive, that’s all, not a paedo protecting other paedos. And is he the only one in the police? I don’t think so, do you? Is he the only one at the Waterloo station? That’s a harder question to answer. What if Sutton or McQuarrie are in on it?’
‘Scobie? God no.’
‘I agree, it doesn’t seem likely, but Scobie’s easily intimidated. He’s very trusting-he probably shouldn’t even be a copper. If we bring him in on this, he might inadvertently reveal the details to the wrong person.’
Their meals were delivered. When the waiter was gone, Pam said flatly, ‘I can believe it of McQuarrie.’
‘It doesn’t matter who, at this stage. The thing is, Kellock is untouchable for the moment. We can’t arrest him, can’t get a warrant for his house or car. We can’t seize his clothing. We can’t trust anyone else. It’s us, Pam.’
Pam brooded. She toyed with her food, popped a chip into her mouth and chewed it. Then she said determinedly, ‘We go after Clode and Duyker, and hope one of them turns on Kellock, and we try to find Billy DaCosta.’
‘The real and the fake.’
‘Yes.’
Ellen looked at the younger woman as if for the first time. Pam Murphy was no longer the uniformed constable who showed initiative but a fellow detective. For a while Ellen had been her mentor, coaxing her into plain-clothed work, letting her find her potential, but now they were colleagues. Not equals-if you counted age and rank-but a kind of friendship linked them. And Ellen badly needed friends now.
‘Everything all right, Sarge?’
‘Just thinking. I wish Hal was here.’
Pam said, a little sternly, ‘Well, Sarge, he’s not.’
57
Challis risked a peek. Lisa was shooting at him from behind the driver’s door of the Jeep. A semi-automatic rifle with a small clip. He guessed that it had been stowed behind or under the seats. There was a crack and a bullet punctured the tyre beside his foot. She fired again, the bullet punching through the open door. He ran around to the front of the big four-wheel-drive, glad of its bulk. His relief was short-lived: a bullet pinged off a nearby stone. He felt terribly exposed. Lisa Joyce would cripple him and then shoot him where he lay.
Then he heard her call his name.
‘What?’ he shouted.
‘I phoned Wurfel when I saw you arrive.’
She’ll present Wurfel with a self-defence story, he thought. He couldn’t see any point in negotiating, or waiting, and slithered on his belly and elbows toward the shepherd’s hut, using the Range Rover for cover. Lisa fired again, the bullet whining away and dust and stone chips flying.
Just then the sheep, made skittish by the cracks and echoes in the still air, broke away and charged toward the hut, passing close to Challis. He rolled to his feet and ran with them in all of their fear and exultation. Dust rose and pebbles flew and the sheep kicked and bucked. Lisa fired, a desultory shot that went nowhere.
Challis huddled behind a ruined wall. Lisa had the advantage in this engagement, while he had nothing but the hut and small deceptions in the sparsely grassed soil of the plateau. He glanced hurriedly about: only heaped stones and a length of wood, possibly a lintel or part of a window frame. He grabbed it like a club, alerting Lisa, who
