Garry Disher - Whispering Death

As if to dispel any hint of tension, she came to him, wrapped him close so that he felt the beat of her heart. ‘I’m going to miss you.’

‘Me, too.’ He paused. ‘I could come to the airport.’

She shook her head under his chin. ‘Please don’t, I couldn’t bear it, all that hanging around. Besides, Larrayne will be there.’

Ellen’s daughter was at university now, but still a little hostile around Challis. ‘Okay.’

‘Sighs of relief all around.’

They fetched two kitchen chairs and Ellen lowered her feet back into his lap. ‘How will you spend the weekend?’ She sounded as if she needed to know he wouldn’t be miserable with her gone.

‘I thought I’d make tentative steps to sell the Dragon.’

‘Good.’

‘Really?’

In her practical way she said, ‘Look, I thought it was great you were restoring an old aeroplane. Totally un-cop like. But I can see your heart isn’t in it anymore.’

Challis was relieved. ‘My interest seemed to evaporate the moment I tightened the last screw.’

She nodded. ‘How do you sell an aeroplane?’

‘I thought maybe a broker. There’s a man called Warren Niekirk, deals in vintage planes.’

‘A local?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s handy.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’d better change.’

But she didn’t move. An explosive racket drove the birds from the trees and Challis glanced across at the neighbouring house. Two women lived there, gardeners at the maze on Arthurs Seat, each with a bikie boyfriend, and one of the boyfriends was firing up his Harley Davidson.

‘The music of the suburbs,’ Challis said. ‘Do they know you’re police?’

‘Don’t think so.’

His phone rang. He stared at it, sitting there on Ellen’s warped veranda table, and willed it to stop.

‘I hate your ring tone.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘It’s the same as that woman’s in Love, Actually.’

‘What woman?’

‘The one with the mad brother.’

Challis couldn’t remember the film or the ring tone. He wasn’t someone who had favourite films. Ellen was. On her reckoning, she’d seen Love, Actually a million times.

He pressed the talk button. ‘Challis.’

‘Boss, we’ve got a rape,’ Pam Murphy said.

And Ellen Destry, about to jet off and learn how to deal with rape cases, read his face and swung her graceful feet to the floor.

Mid-afternoon, a room in the Waterloo hospital, Pam Murphy briefly clasping Chloe Holst’s forearm. ‘Do you mind Inspector Challis being here, Chloe?’

Challis was propping up a wall, trying to be unobtrusive. He smiled but remained silent where he was. ‘I don’t mind,’ Holst said, her voice damp, cracking a little.

‘We spoke to your parents and the doctor, and they said if you’re up to it we could ask you a few questions. Meanwhile, no one’s going to carry out any more forensic indignities on you, okay? But we do need to ask you what happened.’

Chloe Holst collapsed against her pillows, stared at the ceiling, and said, in a rapid monotone: ‘I was on my way home when he flashed his lights at me from behind. Then he-’ ‘Could we go back a bit?’ Pam said, her voice low and warm in the chair beside the bed. ‘Home from where?’

‘The Chicory Kiln.’

‘Don’t know it.’

Challis murmured from the wall, ‘It’s a winery-bistro place on Myers Road.’

‘Okay.’

Challis said, ‘Had you been drinking? We have to ask these kinds of-’

The young woman in the bed tossed in anger, then winced. ‘Why doesn’t anyone listen? I work there. I hardly ever drink, and I don’t drink at work. I was simply going home.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Challis said. ‘By the time information gets to me sometimes it’s wrong or inadequate.’

‘I’ve told this story so many times.’

Once, thought Challis, to Pam-and a million times to yourself. And when the sex crimes squad gets involved, you’ll have to go through it all again. ‘When we have all the details we won’t need to bother you again,’ he said lamely.

Chloe Holst shot him a look from her right eye. The left looked pulpy and black, swollen shut, three stitches bisecting the eyebrow. Angry finger-bruising around the neck, bruises to the upper arms, and, hidden beneath the bedclothes, bruising to the thighs and tears to the vagina and anus. ‘What about in court?’ she asked, almost inaudibly.

Pam Murphy mustered a smile. ‘You didn’t see his face, so it may not come to that.’

Holst touched her hand to her split lip and grew teary. She was about to speak but sank again into the pillows heaped behind her.

The little room, like the corridor outside it, smelt of life and death and blood and cleansers and chemical intervention. Murphy knew the smell all right. She’d visited enough suspects and victims in emergency rooms over the years, been treated for cuts and bruises. She glanced around at Challis and then out of the window and saw nothing to guide her through this. Sergeant Destry would know what to do, but the sergeant was on her way to Europe.

She turned to Holst again. ‘What happened after he flashed his lights?’

‘It happened near the intersection with Balnarring Road, so I was slowing down anyway. I hate that corner.’

A high-speed blind corner, a fatal corner over the years, with no clear view of traffic belting down the hill until you were halfway across the intersection. ‘Me too,’ Pam said.

‘He flashed his lights at me from behind, then cut across in front of me as I was stopping. Then he got out and started waving ID at me.’

Challis said, in his low voice, ‘Can you describe the car?’

‘A newish white Falcon.’

‘Sure?’

‘My dad has one. I actually thought it was him for a moment.’

‘What time was this?’

‘About midnight.’

‘No other traffic?’

‘No.’

‘Go on.’

‘I thought maybe my rear lights weren’t working, or I’d hit something, you know. I thought something serious was wrong, so I wound down my window.’

Pam Murphy said, referring to her notes, ‘You told the ambulance officers that you were raped by someone wearing a ski mask. Was he wearing a ski mask when he stopped you?’

‘I know what you’re asking,’ the young woman said, with some wobbly heat. ‘How come I didn’t just drive off, right? But he wasn’t wearing the mask when he stopped me, plus it was dark, plus he had his hand up to his eyes like my headlights were blinding him. Plus he was wearing a police uniform and he shouted at me, sounding really urgent, said for my own safety I had to pull in under the trees.’

Pam pictured the small parking area on the south-east corner, abutting Buckley’s Reserve, a school-bus stop five mornings a week but otherwise used only by drivers taking a mobile phone call, blackberry pickers, road-repair gangs on a tea-break from patching potholes. She pictured it at night, full of tricky shapes and shadows. ‘Just to be clear, the man who abducted you wasn’t Constable Tankard, the policeman who frightened you earlier?’

Chloe Holst shook her head. ‘Too fat. It was…I just saw the uniform and freaked out.’

‘I understand. Then what happened?’

‘I was scared. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. I hadn’t been drinking or speeding, but I thought I must have done something wrong, or something bad had happened to my mum and dad or something. Anyway, I did what he asked and before I could get out or anything, he climbed into the back seat and put a knife to my neck. He pricked me with it, look.’

A small, scratched hand pulled down the neckline, the delicate jaw craned upwards, revealing flesh that looked shockingly naked to Challis just then. A short, clean nick.