Garry Disher - Blood Moon

Challis supposed that it could be true. A good defence barrister would add some definition to the hazy outline and make it seem probable. We need hard evidence, he thought.

‘Why didn’t you tell us this before? Didn’t you want us to find your wife’s killer? You know how crucial the early stages of an investigation are.’

‘I was ashamed,’ said Wishart with a burst of feeling. He turned to Ellen, eyes damp, and seemed to shrink before her. ‘You said I was pathetic. Well, it’s true, I am.’

‘How awful for you,’ said Ellen.

All Pam Murphy had wanted to do that Saturday was spend it in bed with Andy Cree, but tomorrow was the end of Schoolies Week and she was expected to be around until then. So, late morning, she kissed Andy goodbye, drove to Waterloo and tackled the paperwork on Josh Brownlee for the Director of Public Prosecutions. Josh had been remanded in the lockup and would appear before a magistrate on Monday. He might not get bail, owing to the serious nature of the attack on Lachlan Roe. Or maybe his parents would fork out for a good lawyer, one who’d air the damage that Roe had caused. She almost felt sorry for Josh, but recalled that the little shit was also a rapist-probably a rapist-and for that she hoped they’d throw away the key.

The only cure for her sour mood was to think about Andy, his body and smile and the way he made her feel. She glowed, a tingling low in her abdomen.

The hours wore on. The paperwork mounted. Eventually she grew aware of sniggering in the corridor outside CIU. What the hell was going on? There were fewer people around, as usual on a Saturday, but all morning she’d sensed an unmistakeable undercurrent of cloaked conversations and sudden, red-faced silences. And now the sniggering.

She looked up, catching Smith and Jones staring at her from across the office.

John Tankard had spent the last few hours watching Pam Murphy’s rented house in Penzance Beach. He saw Murph leave for work, but Andy Cree had remained, the shit.

What made it worse, he was starving. He’d also been obliged to take a slash against a ti-tree, hoping the people in the fibro holiday shack behind him weren’t watching. That would be great, a patrol car comes out from Waterloo and says, ‘What the fuck are you doing, Tank? We got a report of some guy waving his donger around.’

Then, at noon, Cree emerged, to stand beside his car yawning, scratching his balls, hair a sex-tossed mess. Tank got ready, hand hovering at the ignition key, but Cree went back inside again. An hour passed before Cree drove away, Tank following him through the blind dirt lanes of Penzance Beach and out across farmland to Frankston-Flinders Road, and all the way to Somerville.

Cree lived in a block of flats behind the supermarket. There was some heat in the air now, forecast top of 34 degrees today, one of those very still days, cicadas buzzing crazily, the world a little heat-stunned and waiting for a thunderstorm.

‘Oi,’ Tank said.

Cree had his key in the lock. He saw Tank coming up the path and grew tense, casting his gaze behind and to either side of Tank. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’

Tank had printed out the Web photos of Lachlan Roe. ‘You took these shots. You posted them on the Internet.’

Cree glanced at them, then up at Tank, searching Tank’s face. ‘Mate,’ he said mildly, ‘what are you on about?’

‘You took these,’ Tank said, experiencing a flicker of doubt.

‘Now, why would I do that?’

‘Used your mobile phone.’

‘I’m going inside, John.’

‘If you fuck with Pam, I’ll-’

‘So that’s it,’ said Cree, turning the key in his lock. ‘Not amused, okay?’

Then he was inside, beginning to close the door. ‘I don’t know what your beef is, Tank. Your problem, not mine. As for those photos, check with the crime scene techs before you go accusing me.’

Dirk Roe was at his brother’s bedside, talking and talking, willing his voice into Lachlan’s ear and consciousness. ‘Pictures of you all over the Web. I couldn’t believe it. It’s not right.’

He peered at the slack face. ‘Can you hear me? It’s me-Dirk.’

He lost interest and gazed at the pale walls, a kind of beige, not a colour you could name. One of the nurses came in and he watched her covertly, tight uniform, the seams of her underwear showing through. Dirk began to hum madly before he caught himself. He swallowed. More than anything he was trying to stave off utter ruination, for he had nothing left. Sacked and bereaved and no one left in his life to love him. ‘Irreparable brain damage,’ the doctor had said. But the doctor was a foreigner, what did he know?

‘I can talk to my brother, right?’ Dirk had demanded. ‘He’ll be able to hear me? It’ll bring him back?’

‘No,’ the doctor said. ‘I’m sorry.’

Dirk leaned over Lachlan and said, ‘Someone’s got to pay.’

After delivering his daughter to a church hall behind the shops in Somerville, where her ballet, jazz and tap teachers had set up stow-away tables groaning with cupcakes, doughnuts and lime cordial for the end-of-term party, Scobie Sutton did the shopping, determined not to be rushed just because Challis and Destry wanted it that way. And so it was lunchtime before he arrived at work that Saturday.

He began by examining tapes and speed camera photographs from four locations: Planning East’s carpark, the traffic lights in Tyabb, the Caltex service station in Waterloo and a stretch of Frankston-Flinders Road between Penzance Beach and Flinders. Mapping Ludmilla Wishart’s movements had so far involved a mixture of guesswork, her desk diary entries and tiny amounts of actual evidence. If only Wishart had planted his tracking device on his wife on Wednesday: all Scobie had to go on so far was a single credit card transaction-at 3.42 on Wednesday afternoon, Ludmilla Wishart had purchased 47 litres of unleaded petrol from the Caltex service station. The timing and location indicated that she’d been on her way to meet Carl Vernon in Penzance Beach; according to Vernon, she’d been on time.

Backtracking through her diary, Scobie guessed that she’d been coming from Tyabb, where she’d investigated an unauthorised bed-and-breakfast development. She’d stopped for petrol, made her way to see Carl Vernon, where she stayed for about thirty minutes, then driven to the big house on the headland near Shoreham, where she’d been murdered.

With a ham and gherkin sandwich under his belt, washed down by dense black tea, Scobie began fast-forwarding through the videotapes from the Caltex service station. The quality was poor and the camera had been badly angled. It was also possible that the time and date notations were inaccurate, so he started running the tape at the normal speed well before 3.42, the time at which Wishart’s credit card had registered the petrol purchase.

He spotted Ludmilla at 3.37, her silver Golf edging cautiously into the top segment of the screen and stopping at pump 5, the pump obscuring the woman and her car a little. He saw her head emerge, saw her arm take down the nozzle and disappear with it. Then the arm reappeared and he saw her pass through another quadrant of the screen, presumably to pay for the petrol. She re-emerged, got into the Golf, drove away.

But given that the camera had been poorly installed or knocked out of alignment at some point, only the two pumps closest to the road were visible. They formed the foreground of the image. The greater part of the screen was focused on the stretch of main road in and out of Waterloo, showing clearly the access ramp into the service station, a bus stop and an Australia Post box.