Garry Disher - Snapshot

He was a solid man, close to being fleshy from all those hours spent sitting in a patrol car. He’d been transferred to the Accident Investigation Squad recently, but for many years before that had worked Traffic. He always tanned up a little over summer, looked healthier, but in winter his gingery fairness went a shade too pale, an unhealthy paleness. Not for the first time, Ellen wondered why she stayed with him, for theirs had long been a loveless marriage. And what did he get out of it? The sex was perfunctory, they didn’t nourish one another and they always bickered. It would be easy for them to separate, now that Larrayne no longer lived at home or depended on them.

But it would destroy him if she left. He’d be helpless and hopeless. That was no reason for staying with him, but it made the first step towards leaving him difficult.

He narrowed his pouchy eyes as she sat opposite him with her muesli and a mug of coffee. ‘Have you ever left the heater switched on during the day?’

She had, two or three or maybe a dozen times this winter. ‘No,’ she said emphatically.

‘Liar.’ Then he was doubtful. ‘Maybe it’s the meter, giving a false reading.’

‘It has been a cold winter so far,’ she said, and, as if to reinforce the observation, the foghorns boomed from Westernport Bay.

‘So?’

‘I think we should install central heating.’

‘We’ve been through this.’

We? There’s no ‘we’, Ellen thought. And if I’m serious about leaving him, why am I thinking about installing central heating? Is it because I’m assuming I’ll get the house? Whoa, she thought, you’re getting ahead of yourself.

‘Another thing,’ Alan said, ‘sometimes you sit there with the heater on and a window open. How stupid is that? It’s like trying to heat not only the room but also the rest of Australia.’

‘Central heating.’

‘No.’

A stupid, futile, demeaning squabble, symptomatic of her husband’s simple but dangerous failings and grievances, which boiled down to two things: he’d failed his sergeant’s exam, and his wife had been fast-tracked because she was a woman.

The phone rang and Alan sprang for it, listened, said curtly. ‘She’s got a morning off, sorry,’ and banged the handset down.

‘Who was it?’

‘Challis.’

‘Jesus, Alan.’

Ellen picked up the phone and dialled Challis’s mobile. ‘Hal, I’m sorry-’

He cut her off, telling her that the super’s daughter-in-law had been murdered and outlining the circumstances. ‘I’ll set up an incident room and brief everyone at lunchtime. Meanwhile I need you to sniff around Bayside Counselling: get a feel for Janine McQuarrie and the people she worked with, see if her diary or calendar tell you anything about her movements today.’

‘I’ll take Scobie with me.’

‘If he’s finished in court.’

Scobie Sutton stifled a yawn; he was sitting in the Frankston Magistrates’ Court, a thin man with the look of a mournful preacher. Heather Cobb was appearing this morning on drugs charges and Scobie, who’d arrested her, was there to ensure that she wouldn’t go to jail.

It had started two weeks ago, when he’d been called to a Waterloo primary school. At show-and-tell that morning Sherry Cobb, barely nine years old, had presented the class with a marijuana plant in a plastic pot. Scobie’s interview with the child, and subsequent visit to her home, had uncovered a typical story of poverty, addiction and neglect. There were five children in the Cobb family, ranging in age from three to eighteen; father in jail; mother an alcoholic. They lived in a two-bedroom weatherboard shack between the railway line and a timber yard.

Now, in the Frankston Magistrates’ Court, Scobie glanced at Natalie Cobb. She was the eighteen-year-old, in Year 12, wagging school today to provide moral support for her mother. When he’d first gone to question Heather Cobb, Natalie had been there, dressed in a tracksuit and slumped in front of the TV. She was a fine looking young woman, but it was two o’clock in the afternoon and she should have been at school. Today she looked not eighteen but twenty-eight, and as poised-in her best clothes, not her school uniform-as any of the young female lawyers you saw around the Magistrates’ Court. Natalie smiled at her mother, then gave Scobie a complicated look.

Complicated girl, Scobie thought.

The cases droned by, and then it was Heather’s turn. As expected, the magistrate let her off with a caution. ‘While I accept that you didn’t grow the plant, Mrs Cobb, you nevertheless allowed your premises to be used for the cultivation of marijuana.’

Heather, dressed in a thin summer dress and ragged parka, glanced worriedly at Scobie through pouchy eyes. He smiled at her, nodded, and mouthed the word sorry to her across the courtroom.

Heather brightened, brushed a greasy comma of hair away from her eyes, and looked confidently at the magistrate. She told him how sorry she was, it would never happen again, the man who’d grown the plants was a bully and she’d been scared of him, but he was in prison in Brisbane now, and no way was she going to let him back into her life.

She means it, too, Scobie thought.

Outside afterwards, Heather Cobb trembled as her tensions eased. ‘Mr Sutton, I don’t know how to thank you.’

‘That’s okay,’ Scobie said. ‘It was a good result.’

‘The magistrate listened to your recommendations,’ Natalie said. ‘You swung it for us. Thanks,’ she said, and pecked him on the cheek.

He blushed. ‘My wife knows you. The youth club on the estate?’

Natalie looked guarded. ‘Mrs Sutton, the social worker? She’s your wife?’

Damn, Scobie thought. I should have kept my big trap shut. If Natalie refuses to work with Beth as a result, I’ll have set back community relations and all of my wife’s good work.

A small van pulled into the kerb, the driver tooting. ‘Got to go,’ Natalie said. ‘See ya, Mr Sutton. See ya, Mum.’

‘Boyfriend,’ Heather Cobb said, watching the van peel away.

Somehow Scobie didn’t think the boyfriend was taking Natalie back to school. His mobile rang. It was Ellen Destry. ‘You finished?’

‘Yes.’

‘I need you back here,’ she said, but didn’t explain.

‘Come on,’ he said to Heather, ‘I’ll give you a lift home.’

Tessa Kane had heard about the murder at 9.45 a.m., a call from an ambulance officer, one of her many contacts. She’d immediately rung Hal Challis, but he was apparently out of the station and not answering his mobile phone-or not to her, at any rate. Ellen Destry and Scobie Sutton weren’t available. And nobody else at the Waterloo police station would talk to her. She felt frantic for thirty minutes, then asked herself what the point was. She published a weekly paper: the dailies would have all the scoops on this story, and she’d have to be content with an overview in next Tuesday’s edition, when no doubt the case would be long closed.

And then, at 11 a.m., Challis returned her call, suggesting they meet for coffee. Five minutes later she was walking down High Street to Cafe Laconic, where she sat at a window table, looking out at the canopied, unoccupied footpath tables, a public phone booth and a plane tree. There had been a dense fog all morning, but it had lifted here on High Street, as if burnt off by human endeavour. Tessa drew her coat tighter around her shoulders and glanced at the corkboard on the adjacent wall: this week’s program at the drive-in cinema in Dromana, a couple of garage sales-she loved garage sales-a scattering of business cards and a federal election poster eighteen months out of date.