Garry Disher - Whispering Death

Maybe lovers had come here last night; something went wrong and the girl ran off. Or they had drunken sex in the clearing and she was left behind to sleep it off. Or nothing happened at all.

Pam returned to the Subaru and followed the track to the end, relieved to turn left onto bitumen for the fast run back to Waterloo. That’s when she saw the fancy gateway and there was her CIU colleague, Scobie Sutton, gloomily scribbling in his notebook. She pulled over, got out. ‘Scobie.’

Sutton was tall, morose and thin, his black suit gaping and flapping around his fleshless limbs. ‘Pam.’

‘Breaking the back of local crime, I see?’

Sutton seemed to think about taking the question seriously but then a smile transformed his face. ‘Something like that.’

‘Where’s your car?’

‘I came with John Tankard. He’s up at the house.’

‘You sent Tank to question a citizen?’

Scobie scowled. This time he’d failed to read her. ‘John’s all right,’ he said loyally.

They stood side by side and contemplated the gateway. One of its pillars dripped with the words: I’M COMPENSATING FOR A SMALL DICK. Pam grinned. The spraycan vigilante had been active for two months now, always targeting ostentatious driveway entrances, a recent fashion trend on the Peninsula, a sign of brash money. She ran her gaze over the cream-coloured pillars, the irregular fieldstone blocks, the curving, baronial wings rising from the dying spring grasses, the oiled hardwood gates. The house itself was out of sight, at the end of a long driveway that wound through trees to a hillside overlooking Western Port Bay.

The graffiti was a variation on the others she’d seen in the past few weeks: A CASHED-UP BOGAN LIVES HERE, and JUST BECAUSE I’M RICH DOESN’T MEAN I HAVE TASTE and, simply, WANKER. Pam thought the vigilante deserved a medal, but he-or she-had become a headache for CIU. A victim with money and clout had put the hard word on the local member of Parliament, who had put the hard word on Inspector Challis’s superintendent, who had put the hard word on Challis, who had tried to put the hard word on the rank-and-file. Pam had told him he must be joking if he thought these people were victims and if he thought police resources, already overstretched, should be wasted investigating a bit of graffiti.

So Challis handed the investigation to Scobie Sutton, who never complained.

Pam lingered a while, yarning with Scobie. He hadn’t seen anyone-certainly not a naked woman, he told her, blushing a little.

Then, almost immediately, they heard a voice, ‘Help me, please help me.’

Startled, they glanced across the road.

Jan Overton’s victim, thought Pam, beginning to move. Young, naked, filthy, she must have stumbled through bushland to get here.

Sutton followed her across. The woman was clasping the top fence wire with both hands, rocking and keening like an abandoned child. As though the notional obstruction of the fence was a kind of last straw.

‘It’s okay, it’s okay, you’re safe now,’ Pam crooned, helping her bend between the wires.

‘I was raped, someone raped me,’ the young woman said.

Scobie draped his suit coat around the thin shoulders and Pam noted the scratches automatically, the blood, the bruises, looking for drifts of dry semen. Then they were at the car. ‘Scobie, could you get my first-aid kit from the Subaru?’ She gave the woman a drink from a bottle of water.

‘My name is Pam, and that’s Scobie,’ she said. ‘We’re police officers.’

The woman stiffened as if she might bolt. ‘I’m Chloe,’ she whispered.

‘Do you know who did this to you, Chloe?’

At that moment, a police car came down the driveway from the house, the engine decelerating, tyres growling on the gravel as the car nosed through the gate posts. John Tankard got out, a man with a barrelly torso and vast thighs barely contained inside his constable’s uniform. ‘What’s up?’

The response was instantaneous. Bucking violently in Pam’s arms, Chloe screamed: ‘Keep him away from me, keep him away from me.’

Hal Challis was stroking Ellen Destry’s bare feet, thinking how shapely they were, and how much he was going to miss them over the next eight weeks.

Noon, an early lunch on the deck of her house before the taxi came to collect her. Five p.m. flight to London with a stopover in Singapore, so she needed to be at Melbourne Airport by three. Allowing ninety minutes for the taxi ride-covered by her study grant-she’d need to leave by 1.30. Plenty of time for lunch in the sun.

They’d already had the quickie.

Challis kneaded an instep absently. Ellen’s feet seemed light in his lap. He admired the fine down on her legs, the taut length of her calves. She was watching him with a drowsy smile, so he halted his gaze at the hem of her shorts and admired the view beyond her side veranda.

Ellen had bought this house in Dromana, on the southern slope of Arthurs Seat, two months ago. He could see why she liked living here. Small, shaded houses on narrow, sleepy streets, some sealed, others no more than potholed dirt tracks marked ‘no through road’. The bay visible between the houses and trees further down the slope. A village atmosphere, with shops at the bottom of the hill and the beach close by for her morning walk. And the freeway only a quick couple of blocks away.

But it wasn’t a place he could live in-not that either of them wanted that. But they did want each other, so it was all right. A modern arrangement, some nights spent together at his place or at hers, others spent apart.

‘You could fly to Europe with me,’ she said.

‘I could.’

No he couldn’t. Spend eight weeks as a tag-along boyfriend while she studied regional sex crimes policing in the UK, Ireland and parts of Germany, France and Holland? Ellen busy with her European colleagues during the day and writing up her notes at night, while he trudged over the hard flagstones of one cathedral after another?

It was only for two months. He had ongoing criminal investigations and junior detectives to oversee, and anyway he’d rather travel with Ellen when they both had time off.

‘But I know you won’t,’ she said.

He gave her a sweet, tired smile. They would talk often, as close to face-to-face as you could get with a webcam.

A seed pod dropped from one of her garden trees and bounced off the bonnet of his Triumph, which was parked in her driveway. Watching his gaze shift to it, Ellen said, ‘Why don’t you use my car for the duration?’

His TR4 was uncomfortable and frequently unreliable, and she said so now, again.

‘Or,’ she added, ‘surprise me while I’m away and buy yourself a new car.’

He’d already thought he might do that, in fact. ‘Am I someone who doesn’t surprise you?’

She jumped from her chair and onto his lap. ‘God, Hal, constant surprises, most of them welcome.’

‘I thought a BMW.’

‘Another surprise.’ She paused. ‘Though I’m not sure I could be with someone who drives a BMW.’

They kissed and the weather-rotted fabric of his deck chair began to tear under their weight. They stood and surveyed the damage. ‘I’ll fix it while you’re away. New canvas, upholstery tacks…’

Not only that: her lawn was no better than a patch of dirt and dry grass, the decking needed a couple of coats of stain, several windows were stuck, the TV antenna resembled a kite caught in a tree, and weeds grew in the gutters. He gazed at the outside walls: new paint job.

She gave him a complicated look. ‘I don’t want…You’ll have plenty…’ she said, trying to find her meaning.

He knew. She didn’t want him to be her knight in shiny armour, didn’t want to be beholden. By the same token, he didn’t want to throw himself into doing everything for her. It was complicated. The relationship was new, and they were still drawing lines in the sand, in an amiable kind of way.