‘I treasure this,’ Ellen Destry said later, in the gentle twilight.
They’d driven home from the pub and now they were on foot, halfway up the hill behind the house.
‘Walking with me?’
‘Walking.’ She snuggled against Challis briefly. ‘And walking with you.’
If she didn’t walk every day she felt sluggish, muscle-locked, unfit. She quite liked these evening walks, loved walking with Hal, but unspoken was the fact that she missed her dawn walks on Penzance Beach. Now her dawns were spent having sex or making love or whatever you wanted to call it. Which was fine-enjoy it while it lasts.
She pumped her arms and lengthened her stride. This wasn’t the beach, it wasn’t dawn, but had its compensations. It was a pretty corner of the world, a patchwork of vines, orchards and grazing paddocks stitched together with gravel roads lined with fences and trees. The birds were busy feeding their young. The air smelt fresh: one of the farmers had been slashing the spring grasses.
Then she recoiled. ‘What’s that awful smell?’
Sharp, basic, sinus-burning. She tracked it to a tangle of bracken between the side of the road and a cattle ramp. ‘Shells?’ she asked, peering into the gloom, one hand over her nose and mouth.
‘Abalone,’ said Challis, joining her.
The pile was half a metre high, grey and ghostly in the half-light, each ribbed and unlovely shell the size of a saucer. ‘Some guy dumps them along here every year,’ Challis said. ‘One day I’ll nab him.’
‘A poacher?’
‘Probably.’
‘Huh,’ Ellen said, storing away another piece of useless information. ‘This doesn’t happen in Penzance Beach.’
He squeezed her and laughed. ‘It’s pretty wild out here on the frontier.’
They looked up. A helicopter was slicing across a corner of the darkening sky. It was some distance away but the sound was unmistakeably that of a police Dauphin, more turbo whine than eggbeater chop. They glanced at each other. There were a couple of notorious black spots on the Peninsula, blind intersections where motorists had lost their lives. The locals liked to speculate what the cut-off point was before VicRoads improved safety by installing a roundabout or chopping down a few trees: ten lives? Twenty?
‘Hal?’
‘Yes, oh gorgeous one.’
She took his hand in hers. ‘What are you going to do about your plane?’
He was restoring a vintage aeroplane. Correction: he had been, but now it sat gathering dust in a hangar on a little local airfield. Ellen was oddly bothered by that. She had no interest in the plane but the idea of Challis with an interest apart from police work-apart from her, for that matter-was important. She thought back to life with her husband. Alan had several obsessions-the fact that she’d been promoted to sergeant, the electricity bill, their daughter’s boyfriends- but he’d had no interests. Had that been her fault? Was it her fault that Hal Challis no longer fiddled with his old wreck of an aeroplane?
‘I honestly don’t know,’ he said.
She squeezed then released his hand.
‘I wish I had more time,’ he said.
‘Do I take up your spare time?’
‘I like spending it with you.’
She bit her lip. ‘Hal, I can’t be everything to you, or for you.’
‘Of course not. I know that.’
‘And you can’t be everything to me.’
‘Is this going somewhere?’
They walked in the deepening shadows, down the final slope toward his house. Their house. Ellen’s head was whirling with a whole stack of issues, apparently unrelated but joined in complex ways.
‘Hal, do you sometimes find it hard working together with me?’
‘Yes.’
He said it promptly. That was good. ‘In what way?’ she asked.
‘I keep wanting to touch you. There you are, sitting at your computer, and I want to rip your clothes off
She did and didn’t want to hear that. She moved half a pace away from him and folded her arms.
But he wasn’t thick, or stubborn, and said at once, ‘I hate having to give orders to you, so I try to make it sound like a suggestion. I’m always conscious of not sounding critical, or questioning your judgment, but sometimes I find myself needing to do that. But if I do, will you take it the wrong way? And what do Scobie and Pam think? Do they feel I give you preferential treatment? But you are a sergeant.’
It came out in a heartfelt rush. Ellen linked arms with him again. ‘Something needs to change. But not yet.’
She sensed that he wanted to say more about working with her, but the moment passed. Instead he said, ‘Do you like living with me?’
‘Yes,’ she said firmly, not feeling a hundred per cent firm.
Hal said nothing but they continued companionably to the driveway entrance and up to the house. They’d bought a stir-fry mix from the butcher: all they had to do was toss it in a spitting wok and cook some rice. They would eat in tonight. They would eat together. They’d had a walk. This was a good evening and, in their line of work, good evenings were rare.
At their house outside Waterloo, Ludmilla Wishart was playing the piano. She played frequently, and expertly, and Adrian hated it. Her eyes, mind and body when she played were not there with him but far away, possibly in a better place-according to her-and he hated that.
He stopped her slender fingers on the keys and said, ‘I’m hungry’ She gasped and came back to earth. Hurried to the kitchen to make things better.
Scobie Sutton went home miserably from the Chillout Zone. Rather than accompany him, Beth had climbed onto her bicycle, saying she’d sit with Lachlan Roe until he regained consciousness. ‘He needs me.’
‘Beth, it could be days, weeks.’
‘He needs me.’
‘So do we, love. And he has his brother.’
‘That so-and-so!’
He’d tried his hardest but she wouldn’t listen. Scobie felt aggrieved, stuck between two uncomfortable forces: his boss and his wife. Neither one wanted or needed him, it seemed, yet they both held sway over him. He was betting that Challis would never remove Ellen Destry from a case. The benefits of sleeping with the boss. I’m still useful, aren’t I? he demanded. I could be tracking down witnesses, tracing, interviewing, eliminating. Instead of which you want me investigating the theft of a ride-on mower.
He boiled inside. When he got home at six-thirty there was Roslyn, a small, wan figure in the dark kitchen, her school atlas open at the mess that was the Indonesian islands. With a scrape of her chair she was on her feet and hugging him fiercely, weeping so copiously that her tears soaked his shirt. ‘Sweetheart,’ he said, overwhelmed.
She hugged him tighter, released him, returned to her homework. He tried to help her as he cooked chops for dinner, but the Roe brothers had taken root in his mind and he wanted to harm them in some way. He examined that notion, surprised that he didn’t feel any guilt.
Caz Moon knew where the anger had come from today, the courage, but she’d been a little in awe of herself even so. She hadn’t always been angry and brave. For months after the rape she’d been, in her own words, a mumbling mess, contained on the outside, contained enough to manage the surf shop, but distraught on the inside. She couldn’t believe some of the feelings she’d had: defilement, yeah, but guilt, too, for letting it happen. As if she’d had a choice!
To make it worse, her memories had been hazy at first, no clarity or definition, so she wasn’t sure what had happened. But slowly she pieced it together and even more slowly she’d picked herself up off the ground.
And now, as the evening light eased toward full darkness, Caz Moon couldn’t believe her luck. Here was Josh Brownlee again, queuing to get into Retro, the club behind the RSL hall, hitting on the youngest sister of someone she’d gone to school with, what was her name, Hayley, Hayley with a bare midriff, heavily kohled eyes, nipples like pebbles in the cool air, a skirt less than a whisker past her groin, chewing gum and enjoying Josh’s pickup bullshit.
‘Josh! Joshy!’ cried Caz. ‘Raped anyone yet? He’s a rapist,’ she informed Hayley, Hayley’s mates and everyone else in earshot.
Josh lunged at her, she dodged away laughing, and that cop lady was there again, saying, ‘Everything okay here?’
‘Fine!’ said Caz in her sparkling voice.
The cop glanced at Josh, then at Caz and murmured, ‘Do you want to report a crime?’
‘Me? No!’
‘Caz,’ said the cop flatly. ‘I just heard you accuse that boy of rape.’
‘Me? I was just kidding.’
The cop stared at her, not in the least bit satisfied. Finally she shoved a photo under Caz’s nose. ‘Have you seen this man?’
‘Not me,’ Caz said, striding off in her conquering-the-world way.
When Pam looked, the boy had disappeared.