‘Let me guess, Neville Clode’s, and we can’t use it because you already have his victim sample.’
‘Not Clode’s,’ said Riggs, ‘but yes, it does match with a victim sample.’
‘Who?’
‘One of your officers. He was stabbed in the forearm in an altercation with a burglar.’
‘Senior Sergeant Kellock.’
‘Yes, for what it’s worth,’ said Riggs.
There were heavy footsteps in the corridor. Ellen froze. But it was only John Tankard. ‘Can I knock off now, Sarge? Got some car business to take care of.’
‘Of course, John.’
‘Thanks, Sarge.’
Tank walked around to Korean Salvage on the industrial estate, and there was his rebirthed Mazda. ‘She’ll pass scrutiny?’ he demanded, one sausagy hand thumping the gleaming roof.
Under the bluster he felt jumpy, uncertain. Something was going on at work and he didn’t know what it was. Maybe Destry was onto him. He wanted one constant in his life-his car.
‘Yep,’ said the proprietor of Korean Salvage, wiping his hands on a rag.
‘I mean the design and safety regulations. She’ll pass any test?’
‘Yep.’
The sun was streaming through the garage doors, lighting oil spills, car bodies and parts, chrome tools and Tank’s Mazda. On the outside, this was the car he’d fallen in love with, sleek and red, a real head-turner, but on the inside she was a different car. He saw no irony in the fact that he was pinning all of his hopes for fulfilment on an object of false provenance.
‘I don’t want to take her in for a roadworthy and have the guy say she’s iffy.’
‘Not going to happen.’
To be doubly sure, Tank vowed to take his car to a different roadworthy tester next time. He began to feel uncomfortable. Several ethnics were standing around in the shadows, mechanics, car strippers and thieves, watching him inscrutably, some holding wrenches. He played ‘Spot the Aussie’ and scored only two, himself and the boss. ‘Mate,’ he said, hurriedly, ‘I don’t know what you did and I don’t want to know, but I’m pumped, a very happy boy.’
The proprietor of Korean Salvage was not happy. He didn’t like it that a cop had something over him. Sure, he had something over the cop, but he preferred it when it had just been him, his mechanics and the Jarrett kids who stole cars for them.
‘The paperwork’s solid, okay?’ he said sourly. ‘VIN number, engine number, chassis number, it all belongs to a legit car. It all checks out.’
‘Cool,’ said Tank.
It wasn’t cool, but that was the price of doing business in this town, apparently. The proprietor of Korean Salvage watched the beefy young cop get behind the wheel of the Mazda and peel out of the shed. Burning a bit of oil. Maybe the engine was knackered. He took some comfort from that.
Ellen worked until late evening. She drove home under a scudding moon, the shadows tricky, especially when she came to the tree canopy over Challis’s rain-slicked road. But she’d driven this road at this time of the night ever since the Katie Blasko kidnapping, and was familiar with the bends, the contours, the gaps between the roadside trees- particularly the gap where a stock gate had been set in Challis’s front fence. The gate, never used now, dated from an earlier era, when the house had been part of a working farm. She liked to glance through the gap: Challis’s house was set on a gentle slope, and she found it reassuring to look up and see the floor lamps glowing behind the sitting-room curtains, lights that she’d left on that morning to welcome herself home.
This time she saw a shape slip past one of the windows.
Ellen did not vary her pace but continued along the road, up and over the hill, past the farm with the barking dogs, letting the sound of her car apparently dwindle into the distance. She drove for a kilometre, and then pulled into the driveway of a hobby farm. The owner, a Melbourne accountant, was never there during the week.
She went back to Challis’s on foot, avoiding the loose gravel of the road, which would announce her presence and fill her own ears with distracting sounds. Instead, she headed overland, trotting carefully through grassy paddocks, vaulting over the wire fences, until she came to the rear of the house. Behind her was another slope and another hobby farm, several hundred metres away and also empty tonight.
From here she was slightly elevated and could look down on the back of Challis’s house. His rear boundary was another wire fence. She paused for a while, listening. Her eyes were accustomed to the darkness now and she was alert for all sounds and movements. She waited for ten minutes before she saw Kellock. A brief, chancy beam of moonlight caught him, just as she was about to advance on the house. It was not so much his face as his stance, his bulky alertness, that she recognised. He watched and waited, and so did she, for a solid hour. He was patient, she was patient. She could smell him, she realised, an amalgam of aftershave and perspiration. Did he sense her? Her perfume, this morning’s scented shampoo and conditioner? He gave no sign of it. She was distracted by thoughts of Challis then. How would she characterise his smell? Clean, undisguised. There wasn’t much in the way of scented soaps in his bathroom. No old aftershave containers. Skulking like this in the nighttime and its shadows was arousing her.
Kellock broke first. One moment he was there and the next he was gone. Ellen shrank deeper into the grass and waited, just in case he was flanking her. She thought about the blood on Sasha’s collar. Of course it was Kellock’s, and of course he’d got it when Sasha bit him. But a defence lawyer would have a field day with that evidence. He’d cite the discredited lab work and Scobie Sutton’s balls-up at the scene of the Jarrett shooting, and propose another scenario: ‘My client is in charge of the Waterloo police station. Naturally he keeps abreast of all its functions and activities. He patted the dog when it was brought in to the station on its way to the lab. The dog bit him. There is nothing sinister in his blood being found on the collar.’
Ellen tensed. She heard a motorbike fire up in the distance. It revved once or twice, idled, and then howled away. She’d wondered how Kellock had got here, and now she knew. She slipped inside the house, gathered together a change of clothing and spent the night in the Sanctuary Motor Inn, up in the hills northeast of Melbourne, where she paid cash and used a false name.
59
She drove to work on Wednesday wondering if she’d be able to control her face. She’d had plenty of practice over the years, hiding her reactions and feelings from the men around her-hiding attraction and repulsion-but she’d never had to hide something as monumental as the information she held in her head.
She used the front door, feeling almost sick, expecting to encounter Kellock.
But Kellock wasn’t in his office. No one had seen him, and he hadn’t called in. What did that mean? Had the lab, apologetic, contacted him to say they’d found his DNA on the dog’s collar but it was all a mistake? Ellen had expressly told Riggs not to inform Kellock, but Kellock had cronies everywhere. All kinds of paperwork crossed his desk. Was he out there somewhere, getting rid of evidence? Were his mates covering their tracks?
And so she was predisposed to find significance in anything Scobie Sutton did. When she walked into the incident room and saw him hunched covertly over his desk phone, she was immediately suspicious. When he’d completed the call, she asked, ‘Everything okay, Scobie?’
He looked hunted, a little sulky, and went very red. ‘Just the wife.’
Then Pam arrived. She wore tan slacks and a white T-shirt under a crumpled cotton jacket. Her hair was pulled back severely from her face. She looked scrubbed, athletic, ready for action. They worked in silence and the morning passed, empty coffee cups accumulating. Ellen put Scobie to work watching videotapes from the closed- circuit security cameras; she and Pam read documents. Then, when Scobie and Pam went out to buy pastries for
