By now it was early afternoon. Scobie Sutton had spent the morning obtaining CCTV and speed camera coverage of the Nepean Highway. Assuming that Adrian Wishart had joined the Nepean as far south as Frankston on Wednesday afternoon, that was a lot of ground to cover, but all he needed were time-stamped images revealing the guy had driven to and from his uncle’s place at the times claimed in his formal statement.
Meanwhile he was still waiting for Ludmilla Wishart’s phone and credit card records, and he was trying to locate Peninsula-based CCTV and speed cameras. So far all he’d got were frowns and scratched heads. It was as if the local bureaucrats had never been asked to provide that kind of information or cooperation before-and perhaps they hadn’t.
An hour passed. His eyes hurt. The grainy images jerked and flickered until one vehicle began to look like another and the locations merged. A second hour, a third. He was due to collect Ros from school and take her to netball soon. He couldn’t rely on Beth to do that kind of thing any more. But Challis was breathing down his neck, wanting to know where Ludmilla Wishart had been, wanting to know where her husband had been.
He almost missed it, the beetly little Citroen zipping through a Nepean Highway intersection. He checked the time: 12.17. That matched the uncle’s account. According to Terry Wishart, Adrian had arrived at his shop after twelve-thirty but before one o’clock. Then they’d gone to lunch at Terry’s local RSL.
Scobie rubbed his eyes. Now he had to track the Citroen’s return journey. Ludmilla had been seen alive at around four or four-thirty, and according to the post-mortem report, murdered late afternoon or early evening. Adrian had reported her missing at 8 p.m., claiming he’d left the city to drive back to the Peninsula at around 5 p.m. Scobie decided to map movements and times as though Wishart had lied. How long would it take him to return to the Peninsula, track down his wife, then murder her? More than an hour-maybe as much as ninety minutes, or even two hours. So he might have left his brother as early as three o’clock, three-thirty.
Scobie’s window was suddenly very wide.
Time passed and his eyes felt scratchy, as if he’d been in a sandstorm. He knuckled them. That didn’t help, only aggravated the problem. He made several trips to the men’s bathroom to splash water on them. He even went to the sick bay and searched futilely for eye drops, until a civilian collator took pity on him. She belonged to their church. Of course, she asked about Beth.
‘I haven’t seen her for ages, Scobie. Is everything all right?’
‘Everything’s fine,’ Scobie said.
‘I heard she’d joined another denomination,’ the woman said carefully.
If Scobie had been a different kind of man he’d have said, ‘Fuck you.’ He thanked the woman and returned to the monitor and the tapes.
Eventually he was convinced: Adrian Wishart had not driven back along the Nepean between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. In the hands of a good lawyer, that might seem like compelling evidence, but Scobie knew there were other routes back to the Peninsula, and other means of transport.
He’d have to start all over again.