Garry Disher - Blood Moon

And a late 1980s Mercedes. Twenty seconds after Ludmilla Wishart’s Golf appeared at the pumps via the access ramp, a Mercedes sedan had pulled to the side of the road and idled there, a faint puff of exhaust smoke showing. Twenty seconds after Wishart drove out again, it followed.

Scobie put his head in his hands and closed his eyes, thinking hard. He’d seen that car before. He wasn’t a petrol head or a car nut, and an older-style Mercedes isn’t a car you’d normally remember, but his brother-in-law had offered to sell him one earlier in the year. He was trading up to a new car but had been offered only $1,000 as a trade-in price when the car was worth at least $7,000. ‘Diesel,’ he told Scobie, ‘low mileage, full service history.’ Scobie had been mildly tempted, but he didn’t have $7,000 to spare and Beth had insisted that if they were going to buy another car, it needed to have airbags. In the end, Scobie’s brother-in-law had sold the Mercedes for $5,000 on eBay, and Scobie had been kicking himself ever since.

So who owned this one and where had he seen one like it recently? If he hadn’t been so miserable in the head about his wife, he’d have been paying more attention to the life around him.

Then he remembered: the break-in at the planning office. The Mercedes had been parked at the rear. The only staff member in attendance at the time was the chief planner, Groot.

He replayed the tape. The Mercedes outside the service station was in profile, so he couldn’t get the plate number. The windows were heavily tinted. No side window stickers, no fox tails hanging from the radio antenna. But there was a towbar, and one hubcap was missing.

He ejected the tape and walked through to the incident room and the photo arrays on the whiteboard: Ludmilla Wishart, Adrian Wishart, Ludmilla’s car, the broader crime scene, the clump of mud that had formed and dried inside a wheel arch before falling out near the crime scene.

He went to one of the plastic tubs on the long table, knowing there’d be more photos of the mud. He found them, together with a preliminary report from the laboratory. Wading through terms like ‘locus’, ‘diatoms’, ‘vegetable matter’ and ‘moisture gradient’ he understood that the mud had originated near a marsh or a wetland.

And probably from a local marsh or wetland, Scobie thought, telling himself that mud collected inside a wheel arch from further afield would have shaken loose long before the driver reached the Peninsula-or more specifically, the murder scene. He bundled the photos together and called Challis.

Challis listened, said, ‘I’m at the hospital. Coming back now.’

While he waited, Scobie phoned his house, a kind of trepidation settling in him. He half wanted Beth not to be home. It would confirm one of his greatest fears, that she’d run off with the Ascensionists. He could see his wife in some remote compound, wearing a drab and shapeless cotton dress, her hair to her shoulders and tied in a scarf, chanting ecstatically and doing a cold man’s bidding.

But she answered in the dull tones that had become her habit and to his questions and nervy patter she gave monosyllabic replies that were, if anything, worse than all of his imaginings.

The call from Scobie Sutton came as a relief. Challis, in the canteen, said, ‘I’ll be right up,’ and pocketed his phone.

The canteen was a depressing place on Saturdays and Sundays, understaffed, the food stale. He looked despairingly at yesterday’s congealed lasagne and Irish stew and settled for a ham-and-salad roll, biting into it as he trudged up to CIU. The bread was crusty on the outside, almost wet on the inside.

He found Sutton in his office, the detective standing four-square before the desk when another officer would have taken a seat to wait. ‘Sit,’ Challis said.

Instead of doing that, Sutton laid out a number of photographs. ‘I think I know who our killer is.’

Intrigued, Challis stood beside him, looking down at the array. Close-ups of the mud deposit, taken from various angles; a Golf at the pumps of a service station; a detail of the same scene, only enlarged to reveal an older-style Mercedes sedan parked on the road outside the service station.

‘This car,’ Sutton said, poking the Golf, ‘is Ludmilla Wishart’s. This car’-the Mercedes-’pulled in a few seconds later.’

‘Following her?’

‘I think so. It pulled out again soon after she did.’

‘There are plenty of these old Mercs around, Scobie, and we can’t see the plates.’

‘True, but I know who owns a car exactly like this one.’

Sutton was spinning it out. Challis guessed that he was trying to regain lost ground in some way. ‘Good work.’

Sutton flushed. ‘Thanks.’

‘So, whose car is it?’

‘Mrs Wishart’s boss, Groot.’

‘How sure are you?’

‘I’ve just been around to Groot’s house. His Mercedes was parked out in the street. I took these pictures.’

Sutton was holding a digital camera. The little LCD screen glowed and then he was scrolling through a dozen images. It was as if he’d set out to create abstract representations of the mechanical era: Challis saw axles, springs, shock absorbers, brake lines, panels and under-body insulation, taken at unnatural angles and harshly lit.

‘See the mud traces clinging here, and here? I scraped off a small sample.’

‘Excellent,’ Challis said.

‘I sent it to the lab.’

Challis picked up one of the photographs. ‘This is enough to bring him in for questioning.’

‘I agree.’

‘But Groot can argue that his job entailed travelling from site to site. If the mud at the murder scene came from his car, it’s not proof of when he was there, and a long way from proving he murdered Ludmilla Wishart.’

‘I checked the phone records of everyone in the planning office,’ Sutton said. ‘There were calls to the Ebelings from his office phone the day before the house at Penzance Beach was demolished.’

‘But did Groot also call the Ebelings at other times?’

‘Well, yeah,’ Sutton admitted.

‘And did our victim also call the Ebelings?’

‘Yes,’ Sutton conceded.

‘Any calls to the Ebelings from anyone in the planning office can be explained away as work related, not a tip-off,’ said Challis. ‘The Ebelings applied for, and were granted, a demolition permit. They also applied for planning permission to build a new house. You’d expect calls back and forth over a long period.’

‘But why was Groot following Ludmilla?’

‘That’, said Challis, ‘won’t be so easy for the guy to explain away. You collect his financial records. I’ll bring him in for questioning.’

They both questioned Groot. Before the planner could muster outrage, Challis came in hard and fast.

‘Here’s you, in your car, following Ludmilla Wishart on the afternoon she was murdered. We have photographs from other CCTV cameras backing it up, and they’re being enhanced to show the numberplate and your face in more detail.’

A lie, but feasible. Groot crumpled a little. He’d been gardening and wore a long-sleeved khaki shirt, jeans and a heat flush that might have been from the sun or exertion but was probably his unravelling nerves. ‘I wasn’t…I mean…’

‘You followed Mrs Wishart to the house above the beach between Shoreham and Flinders, and you killed her.’

‘No! I was out checking on planning applications and I happened to spot her on the road! That’s all, I swear.’

‘You followed her. Stalked her. Was it obsession? You wanted to have sex with her but she wouldn’t be in it?’

‘No! I’m happily married.’