Challis - 03 - Snapshot (3 page)

Waterloo was the largest town on
this side of the Peninsula, hemmed in between farmland along one flank and
mangrove swamps and the Bay on the other. Three supermarkets, four banks, a
secondary college and a couple of state and Catholic primary schools, some
light industry, a fuel refinery across from the yacht club, a library, a public
swimming pool, a handful of pubs, four $2 shops, several empty shopfronts. A
struggling town to be sure, but growing, and less than an hour and a quarter
from Melbourne.

Challis slowed for a roundabout, and
then headed down High Street to the shore, where he passed the swimming centre
and the yacht club on his way to the boardwalk, which wound through the
mangrove flats. Here he parked, got out and walked for an hour, his footsteps
muted and hollow on the treated pine boards. Beneath him the tidal waters ran,
and once or twice there was a rush of air and a hurried warning bell as a
cyclist flashed past him, too fast for such a narrow pathway in such struggling
grey light.

Seven-thirty. He stopped to watch a
black swan and thought about his dead wife. Shed never understood his need to
wake early and walk, or his need to walk alone. Maybe the rot had set in
because of that essential difference between them. His solitary walks focused
him: he solved problems then, plotted strategies, drafted reports, did his best
loving and hating. Other peoplelike his wifewanted to chat or drink in their
surroundings when they walked, but Challis walked to think, get his blood
moving and look inwards for answers.

Strange the way he kept referring to
her in his mind. Strange the way she continued to be the person to whom he
presented arguments and information, as if she still mattered more than anyone
else, as if he still hoped to shine in her eyes, as if she hadnt tried to kill
him and her own death hadnt interrupted everything.

Seven forty-five. He swung away from
the swan, returned to his car and drove back to High Street. Here the early
birds in the bakery, the cafe and the newsagency were opening their doors,
sweeping the footpath, seeding their cash registers. He entered Cafe Laconic,
bought takeaway coffee and a croissant, and consumed them in his car, watching
and waiting.

At five minutes to eight, Lowry
appeared, walking from the carpark behind the strip of shops. The man wore
jeans, a parka and a woollen cap, a tall, thick-bodied guy who liked to show a
lot of teeth when he talked. Challis watched him fish for keys and open the
door to his shop. Both the windows and the door were plastered with
advertisements for mobile phones and phone plans. Waterloo Mobile World the
shop was called.

Challis gave Lowry a couple of
minutes and then entered, setting off a buzzer. We dont open until... Lowry
began, then something stopped him, some stillness and focus in Challis. What
do you want?

Another talk, Mr Lowry, Challis
said.

Raymond Lowry showed indignation and
bafflement with his mouth and shoulders. What about?

The inquests on Thursday, Challis
said. Im finalising my report to the coroner.

Let me get the door, Lowry said
resignedly. He locked it, then gestured for Challis to follow him into a cramped
back room, where he immediately sat at a desk and began to make notes in a
ledger. It was airless in the little room. A fan heater blew scorching air at
Challiss ankles. Eventually Lowry looked up. Sorry about that. Theres a lot
of paperwork in this job.

Challis glanced around at the grey
steel shelves loaded with boxes of mobile phones and phone accessories. Business
doing all right?

Cant complain.

Better than life in the Navy?

Lowry shrugged.

The Navy base was a few kilometres
away. Lowry had served there for a while, met a local girl and eventually quit.
You cant raise kids in that kind of environment, he said, getting posted
all over the place. And I make a decent living at this.

Lowry, the solid businessman and
decent family man. Challis didnt reply but waited, an old trick. Look, said
Lowry with a disarming grin, baring his large, glorious teeth, what more can I
tell you? I barely knew the guy.

On a Saturday night in May, an
armourer from the Navy base, high on a cocktail of alcohol and drugs, had been
ejected from the Fiddlers Creek pub. Two hours later hed returned unnoticed
with a pistol from the armoury and shot dead a bouncer, then returned to the
base. Later still, hed killed himself with the same pistol. The fallout was
far-reaching: eighteen cadets had been dismissed after testing positive to
drugs, and the operation of the armoury was under investigation. According to a
preliminary check, some of the pistols were missing, older stock that was being
phased out. Challis badly wanted to know where those guns were.

Barely knew him? Thats not what I
heard, he lied. I heard you were pretty pally with him. Were you his contact
on the outside? He falsified the paperwork to cover the theft of several guns,
and you fenced them for him?

No way. Not guns.

Meaning that yeah, hed been caught
handling stolen property last year, but no way would he handle stolen handguns.
Then who did handle the guns for him?

Lowry opened his arms wide. How the
hell would I know?

Hows the wife? said Challis.

Lowry faltered at the direction
change. He had close-cropped hair and now he floated a hand above the spikes as
if to gather his thoughts. Were separated.

Challis knew that from Lowrys file.
Mrs Lowry had taken out an intervention order on her husband last year, and
later left him and been given custody of their children. Lowry had joined an
outfit called Fathers First and made a nuisance of himself. Sorry to hear
that.

Lowry flushed. Look, am I under
arrest? Are you going to charge me or what?

Challis smiled without much humour. Well
see, he said, and returned to his car, hoping it would start and not let him
down with Lowry watching from his shop window.

* * * *

The
police station was on two levels; offices, cells, canteen and interview rooms
on the ground floor, and conference rooms, the Crime Investigation Unit and a
small gym on the first floor. Challis entered by the back door and headed for
his pigeonhole in the corridor behind the front desk. He reached in, took out a
sheaf of memos and leafed through them.

Most he shoved into the overflowing
bin nearby, but paused in futile wrath over one from Superintendent McQuarrie,
addressed to all senior officers:
The Assistant Commissioner will be asking
some tough questions this year, and you will be expected to deliver balanced
budgets. The budget situation is taking over as the main management challenge
for the region, and so every order, every item of expenditure, will be reviewed
with a critical eye.

Challis had lived through budget
constraints before. The usual result was that paper expenditure skyrocketed, to
deliver the ever-increasing flood of memos, while the money for torch
batteries, interpreters, pens, cleaning materials or calls on mobile phones dried
up. More seriously, any squad could be charged for using the services of
another squad, access to telephone records of victims and suspects had been
reduced, and there was only minimal funding for phone taps. Crime fighting by
committee, that was Challiss view.

He turned and made for the stairs
that led to the first floor. Hal, said a voice before he reached them.

He swung around. Senior Sergeant
Kellocka bull of a man, befitting his surname, and the uniformed officer in
charge of the stationwas beckoning him. Challis nodded a greeting and entered
Kellocks office. This came for you, Kellock said.

It was a parcel the size of a wine
carton wrapped in heavy brown paper. Complicated feelings ran through Challis
when he saw the senders names: his dead wifes parents. He was fond of them,
and they of him, but hed been trying to draw away from them. Thanks, he
muttered.

Mate, were not a postal service,
said Kellock.

Challis knew that the parcel would
have been delivered to the front desk. There was no reason, other than
nosiness, for Kellock to take charge of it. Profoundly irritated, Challis
carried the box upstairs to the first floor.

The Crime Investigation Unit was a
vast room of desks, filing cabinets, phones, wall maps and computers. Ellen
Destry, the CIU sergeant, was having a half-day off work; Scobie Sutton, one of
the DCs, was spending the morning in court. A third DC was taking a week-long
intensive course in the city, and the fourth was on holiday. It was going to be
quiet in CIU today.

Challiss own office was a
partitioned cubicle in one corner, offering a dismal view of the parking lot
behind the building. Here he dumped the box on the floor, switched on his
office computer and checked his e-mail. There was only one message, from
Superintendent McQuarrie, who wanted him to write a paper on regional policing.
Challis printed it out and tried to make sense of the guidelines, a low-level
fury burning in his head. Was there a clear distinction between a mission statement,
an aim and an objective? Words, meaningless words, thats what policing had
become.

Fed up, he brewed coffee and reached
behind him to the dusty radio on his shelf of law books, police regulations and
tattered manilla folders. With the 9 a.m. news murmuring in the background,
Challis fired up his laptop, got out his notes, and brooded over his report for
the coroner on the Navy shooting.

But really, he was putting off the
inevitable. Retrieving the parcel from the floor, he tore open the paper and
found a sealed cardboard box with a note taped to the lid.

Dearest Hal,

These things of Angles arrived here
a few days ago. Apparently theyd been in storage at the jail and overlooked.
We thought you should have them to do with as you wish. Take care, dear Hal. We
often think of you.

Love,

Bob and Marg

Challis opened the lid and looked at
the sad remnants of his wifes life: paperback novels, a brush and comb,
makeup, a pocket-size album of photographs, a wristwatch, the clothes shed
been wearing when arrested. He swallowed and wanted to cry. And then, as the
habits and imperatives of his days asserted themselves, he dumped the box and
all of its contents in the bin.

Too soon to know if it was a gesture
that meant anything.

He returned to his report. The phone
rang. It was Superintendent McQuarrie, but a broken McQuarrie, not the dapper
golfer and Chamber of Commerce toady.

* * * *

4

According
to the DC who greeted Challis at the murder scene, the 000 switchboard had
given the job to Rosebud police. Suspecting a prank, a kid playing around with
her mothers mobile phone, they had eventually sent two uniforms in a
divisional van. The uniforms had taken one look at the scene, secured it and
called in Rosebud detectives. Then the child, remarkably calm but smeared in
her mothers blood, had revealed that her grandfather was a policeman, an
important policeman, Superintendent McQuarrie.

I mean, the Rosebud DC said, we
had to contact him.

Challis nodded. He gave his name to
the uniformed constable who was keeping the attendance log at the head of the
driveway, and paused for a moment to take in the wider scene. Sealed road, with
various police vehicles, including his own, parked on the grassy verges. There
was also a hearse from the firm of undertakers on contract to the government to
deliver suspicious-death cases to the lab. Gum trees, suffering from dieback,
pittosporums, pine trees and bracken. A couple of distant letterboxes. And,
closer to, a steep gravelled driveway leading down to a small weatherboard
house, where a silver Volvo station wagon was parked with all of its doors
open.

Various men and women were there,
too, dressed in white or blue disposable body suits and overshoes and standing
beside and under an inflatable forensic tent, which would protect the body and
the immediate surroundings from wind or rain. A photographer was taking stills
and video of the body, and of the body in relation to the car, the garden beds,
the house and a small aluminium shed. The pathologist on duty, Freya Berg, knelt
beside the body. Challis couldnt see McQuarrie anywhere.

He started down the driveway,
accompanied by the Rosebud detective, a man with an off-centre nose and a
crumpled grey suit. Wheres the super?

Took the kid home with him.

Damn, Challis said. A part of him
knew that the child would need comforting; another part wanted to get her side
of the story before shed told it to too many others. McQuarrie was an
experienced police officer, but he was also the kids grandfather, and bound to
be protective, bound to want to question her, maybe even put notions in her
head about what she remembered.

Sir? the Rosebud detective said.

Challis smiled at the man. He didnt
want him to think he rode roughshod over the sensibilities of grieving
children. Id hoped to catch up with him, thats all.

He wants you to meet him at his
place, late morning.

Christ, Challis thought, looking at
his watch. He needed to talk to McQuarries granddaughter immediately, not
later. He greeted some of the crime-scene technicians, then shouted a sharp
Oy.
at a uniformed constable whod popped a stick of chewing gum into his mouth
and tossed the balled foil wrapper under a shrub. The Rosebud man hurried over,
saying You prick, what if wed taken that into evidence? Pick it up.