Garry Disher - Blood Moon

She wriggled. ‘Do we have time?’

‘Certainly not.’

In the shower afterwards, Challis outlined what he knew of the assault. ‘The Landseer School?’ said Ellen in dismay.

‘Exactly,’ Challis said. He watched the water stream over her breasts, fascinated.

‘Keep your mind on the job, pal.’

‘Fine,’ he said, ‘I’ll attend at the assault.’ He stepped out and started towelling himself, watching as Ellen wrapped one towel around her head and another around her body.

She gave him a complicated look. ‘And you want me in the office?’

He nodded. ‘If you could follow up on that sexual assault from Saturday night…’

This was delicate territory, there was the faintest tension between them. He was her boss, they were living together and it was too soon to know what the fallout would be. But it would come, sooner or later. It was there in their minds as they dressed, Challis in a suit today, guessing he would need to make an impression on the media or his boss later. He knotted his tie, watching Ellen pull on tailored pants, low-heeled shoes and a charcoal jacket over a vivid white T-shirt, the dark colours an attractive contrast with the shirt and her pale skin and straw-coloured hair. It was a familiar outfit to Challis, sensible work wear for a detective who might sit at a desk one minute and be obliged to trudge through grass to view a corpse the next, but she still managed to look spruce and intemperate. Her clever, expressive face caught him watching. ‘What?’

‘I’ll never tire of looking at you.’

She went a little pink. ‘Ditto.’

They breakfasted at a rickety camping table on the back verandah, where the sun reached them through a tangled vine heavy with vigorous new growth. Realising that he’d forgotten the jam, Challis returned to the kitchen. He was pretty sure that one jar of quince remained from the batch he’d made back in April, but when he checked the pantry, he saw that the spices, condiments and tubs of rice and pasta were on the middle shelves, where he’d traditionally stocked jam, honey and Vegemite. These had been moved to a bottom shelf.

Challis and Destry left in separate cars, knowing the job would scatter them as the day progressed. Ellen’s new Corolla was bright blue but streaked with dust and mud like all of the locals’ cars. Challis followed in his unreliable Triumph. It had held its secrets firmly for years, but now they were all coming out: rust patches at the bottoms of the doors and in the footwells, oil leaks, corrosion, a broken speedo cable, a slipping clutch, a whining differential. And the shockers were shot: he hit a pothole in his driveway and felt the jarring through the steering wheel.

He glanced across at his house as he left the driveway. It was a pretty building, in the Californian-bungalow style, dating from the Second World War. It sat naturally in the landscape on three acres of grass, fruit trees and vague scrub, the only neighbours an orchardist and a vigneron. He liked the seclusion; seclusion was his natural state. But did it bother Ellen? Until her separation and divorce from Alan Destry she’d lived at Penzance Beach, in a small suburban house right next door to similar houses, amid people who mowed their lawns, cooked on backyard barbecues, knocked on the door to ask for a cup of sugar, sometimes played music too loudly.

Perhaps he should be asking: would the seclusion bother her, over time? They’d only been together for three weeks. He’d asked her to house-sit while he took leave to be with his dying father, and within a couple of hours of his return they were lovers. It had surprised them both-kind of. She’d muttered something about finding her own place, but only half-heartedly, and he urged her to stay.

He tried to sort out his reasons now. Of course, attraction played the greatest part, desire, affection, even though he hadn’t spelt out any of this to her. They were not good at endearments. There were no ‘I love you’s’ yet. It seemed they both thought endearments and declarations were currency too easily squandered.

And he couldn’t discount the fact that he’d returned to the Peninsula from his father’s funeral feeling vulnerable and a little unhinged. He wasn’t sleeping, the job promised continued human misery and droning days. The death of his father was raw in him. Back when his mother had died he’d thought about her every few minutes at first, then every few weeks, and every few months, fading into occasional happy memories, but then when his father began to die the grief was rekindled. Double grief. Now, when least expected and often when least wanted, he’d hear his parents’ voices, see their faces and remember the past with frightening clarity.

Challis had never been a man to need a crutch, but Ellen Destry was a balm to him, in addition to everything else.

On the other hand, they worked closely together. Too closely, on problems too complicated, for love to work as well? Never mind that some police bureaucrat was bound to wave a regulation in their faces sooner or later. Challis reached the end of the dirt road and pulled over. He’d replaced the old cassette player with a CD unit and was in the mood for Chris Smither. ‘Drive You Home Again’ blaring, he turned onto the sealed road toward Waterloo. Soon he was passing an aspirant French chalet and a Tuscanesque villa, new houses that didn’t sit naturally in the landscape but had claimed the high ground from the ever-shrinking farmland. It sometimes seemed that he’d blink and a new mansion would have gone up overnight.

The towns of the Peninsula were also changing, their original dimensions swelled by new housing estates which attracted young families shackled to debt on house-and-land packages they couldn’t afford. The social divide between them and the cashed-up retirees and sea-change professionals was growing; the schools, hospitals, welfare agencies and police were overburdened.

He came to the intersection with Coolart Road and stopped for an approaching school bus. The mock colonial paling fence on his right contained a herd-mob? fleece?-of alpacas. Ten years ago there hadn’t been any alpacas on the Peninsula. Now they were everywhere, looking like toys, made-up creatures. Then the bus was past, ‘The Landseer School’ scrolled across its big rump. Challis sighed: one of the most exclusive schools in the country, fees close to twenty thousand a year, a place he’d normally have nothing to do with-and now he’d have to send in one of his officers to see if it was linked to the assault on its chaplain.

Following the road past vines and more alpacas he came to the garden centres, plumbing suppliers and timber yards on the outskirts of Waterloo. One of the biggest towns on the Peninsula, Waterloo had been down-at-heel at one time but was undergoing a renaissance: a K-Mart, new housing, a delicatessen that offered imported delicacies, the old fleapit second-hand shops bulldozed to make way for small arcades with smoky glass. It was all bringing some pride back into the place.

He skirted the southern flank of the town, coming to Trevally Street, a long street that ran parallel to the shoreline, residential on one side, parkland, the municipal swimming pool, skateboard ramps, coin barbecues, walking paths and a yacht club on the other. Apart from a crammed collection of brightly coloured nylon tents on a vacant lot beside the tennis courts, it was all familiar to Challis.

Those tents. The first had appeared on Friday afternoon, dozens more on the weekend, erected by eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds who’d come to Waterloo intent on celebrating the end of their Year 12 exams. Schoolies Week. The main schoolie playground continued to be Queensland’s Gold Coast, followed in popularity by the Victorian towns of Lorne and Sorrento, but cost, distance, overcrowding and parental nervousness had led some kids to seek out low-rent alternatives, like Waterloo. Last year a hundred of them had discovered the town, which had reeled a little. This year many more were expected and the locals were better prepared. The motels and boarding houses were offering special rates, vacant land had been opened up for camping, and there was a greater police and volunteer presence to cope with the drunkenness, overdoses, assaults and tears.