Then Challis drove from the Ebelings’ house in bayside Brighton to the centre of the city, where he prowled around for thirty minutes before finding a public carpark with a vacancy. Five minutes later he was in the foyer of the state’s planning appeals tribunal, where the marble, the steel, the glass and the attitudes were cool, verging on cold-like the judge’s aide standing before him.
‘The judge is overseas,’ she said.
‘When will he be back?’
The aide was about twenty-five, dressed in a slimline black dress, stockings and heels. A recent law graduate, guessed Challis. She gazed at him unblinkingly over the rim of chic half-lenses. ‘Justice Marlowe is giving a paper at a conference in San Francisco.’
‘When will he be back?’ said Challis again.
She cocked an eyebrow faintly as if to say that while police officers were as much on the side of law and order as lawyers and judges, their job was grubbier, and it showed in their manner and breeding. ‘He’s staying on for a couple of weeks.’
‘Skiing at Aspen?’ said Challis idly, but saw to his surprise that he’d scored a hit. The aide flushed and said, ‘May I ask what this is about?’
He outlined the matter swiftly: the Ebelings, the demolition of Somerland, the development of the site and how it involved Ludmilla Wishart.
The aide swallowed. Challis intuited that behind the severe grooming she was young and insecure and probably adored the judge. Raising doubts about the judge’s bias wasn’t going to get him very far, so he said, ‘As I’m sure you’re aware, a group of Penzance Beach residents-old-timers and preservationists and historical society people-have lodged an objection to the development.’
‘I cannot comment on cases before they’ve been heard. Not even then.’
‘I was wondering, did the victim correspond with the judge at all? Have the Ebelings?’
‘Justice Marlowe will be back in a fortnight,’ the aide said, turning on her gleaming high heels.
‘An off-the-record confirmation is all-’
‘Put it in writing,’ she said over her shoulder, heading for the lifts with a scrape of fabric and a trim clatter.
Challis headed out of the city again, taking the Monash Freeway and striking heavy traffic. Melbourne was a city that preferred motor vehicles and roads to trains and trams, even though the road system didn’t work because there were too many cars because the public transport system didn’t work because…
He exited at Blackburn Road and wound his way behind Monash University to the Westall Extension, which bypassed Springvale and put him on the Frankston Freeway. It wasn’t much of a freeway: road works had limited the speed to 80 km/h for years now.
After Frankston he headed across to Somerville and a house on several hectares of cleared land abutting French’s Reserve. The owners had cleared the land without first lodging an application. According to Ludmilla Wishart’s files, Planning East had threatened to take the owner and the clearing contractor to the magistrates’ court, where they’d be liable for fines of up to $120,000 and a requirement to undertake replacement planting.
He pulled to the side of the road and re-read the file. The air outside his open window was mild, full of cut-grass odours and something heavier, marshier. That made sense: the nearby paddocks had been slashed for hay, and French’s Reserve was, according to a report in the file written by a Melbourne University ecologist who’d studied it for ten years, ‘a regionally significant wetland’. Challis read on: ‘Any clearing of the land adjacent to the reserve will have a detrimental impact on a rare orchid, “Astral ladies’ tresses”, and on the growling grass frogs, the southern toadlets, the swamp skinks, the dwarf galaxias and the southern brown bandicoots.’
Challis glanced out at the denuded land, which lay torn and sunbaked between his car and the Reserve. He thought that $120,000 plus an appearance in court and other reparations was a pretty fair motive for murdering the person who’d brought it all upon you. Then he saw the For Sale sign, and when he drove in to the farmhouse, he saw that it had been cleared of all furniture and all desire for a future there.
He made a note of the real estate agent’s phone number, and headed further southeast to Bittern, where a husband and wife named Read had removed indigenous trees from a house block in a residential zone without a permit. When warned by Ludmilla Wishart to cease, they went on to remove understorey vegetation. They were fined $16,000 in the magistrates’ court in Waterloo, and from the dock had hurled abuse at Wishart.
He found the Reads on their property, directing as two teenage boys planted trees and grasses on the area that had been illegally cleared. The Reads were elderly and grossly overweight, Tom Read wheezing in a wheelchair and Bev Read in a walking frame.
‘We paid the fine,’ said the husband, gasping the words out.
His wife was smoking. ‘We’re putting in new trees and that.’
‘So leave us alone.’
Challis said firmly, ‘After sentencing, you were heard shouting “You’ll get yours, bitch” at Mrs Wishart.’
‘I been drinking,’ wheezed Tom Read.
‘He was that upset,’ his wife said, the cigarette bobbing in her mouth, grey smoke wreathing her grey face and hair.
They were unlikely murderers. They’d probably cheated, thieved and lied for all of their lives, but they weren’t killers. They were the kind to sulk and blame others when they got caught, not get violent.
Challis’s last call was to the environment protection manager for the eastern zone. ‘I’ve just been to French’s Reserve,’ he said.
Jessie Heinz looked like a Girl Guide leader: tanned, energetic, comfortable in a khaki shirt and shorts, probably never owned a dress in her life. ‘That one’s a nightmare,’ she said. ‘The owners put the place on the market a month ago and skipped to Queensland.’
‘Do you know if they threatened Mrs Wishart in any way?’
‘They threatened me. Set their dogs on me.’
‘But Mrs Wishart?’
‘Her role in this one was behind the scenes,’ Heinz said. She paused. ‘They’d have a greater motive to murder me. I made an issue out of the threat to the ecology of the reserve. They couldn’t seem to get it into their heads that it was serious. They kept saying, “We can clear our own land if we want to” and “What ecology?” and “The reserve’s on the other side of the farm and a breeding ground for mosquitoes.” They called me a tree-hugger.’
It was said with a grin and Challis grinned back. ‘Are there any other sensitive ecological issues that you and Mrs Wishart were investigating? We’re aware of the tree clearing at the property where her body was found,’ he said, ‘but what else was she working on? Particularly issues that hadn’t made it as far as a written report.’
‘Trees,’ said Heinz. ‘It’s always trees.’ She crossed her office to a wall map. ‘About a hundred trees have been vandalised along this part of the bay in the past year.’ She indicated the coastline between Waterloo and Flinders. ‘It’s the same on the other side of the Peninsula. People drill holes in the trees and fill them with poison. The trees die, we have to cut them down. Or they skip the poisoning and come along after dark with a chainsaw.’
‘People with homes overlooking the sea?’
‘And property developers. There’s been a flurry of apartment developments all along both coastlines in the past decade.’
Heinz paused and grinned again. ‘We’ve had to get quite creative. Sure, we plant five trees for every one killed, but we’ve also been wrapping the poisoned trees in bright orange plastic, and we’re seeking council approval to erect view-blocking screens like they have along the Surf and Bass coasts.’ She paused again. ‘Ludmilla’s ideas.’
‘That would have made her very unpopular.’
‘But who would have known it was her?’ Heinz demanded.
Deciding that he could trust her, Challis said, ‘Tell me about Mr Groot.’
She looked at him steadily. ‘Pro-development.’
‘For example?’
‘He doesn’t appreciate the village atmosphere of the coastal towns. Twice now he’s approved the commercial development of a general store, one dating back to the 1920s, another to 1935. Sweet little buildings, kind of the village hub. Sure, they needed some tender loving care, but he was allowing Melbourne developers to put up six-storey shop and apartment blocks in their place. The other planners hate his guts, but he always knows the fine print and can be pretty insistent and persuasive.’
‘A slash-and-burn kind of guy.’
‘An over-development kind of guy.’