Hal Challis hadn’t yet seen Ellen Destry in all of her phases. Their situation was too new for that. The things he did know about her he’d learned over the years and they were constant: she was beautiful; she was an efficient and creative work colleague; she was fearless, loyal, smart, quick and proud. And more recently he’d discovered the shifting contours of her bare skin, the little cries she uttered, and the swiftly changing moods and expressions when she was at her most intense and intimate: a kind of surrender, bawdiness, a delight in taking charge, selflessness…
But when he’d called her from his car late that Friday afternoon to suggest they eat at the Thai restaurant in Waterloo, she said no curtly, saying she had dinner under control, and when he arrived home she barely inclined her cheek for a kiss but continued to hack at chicken breasts and add them to a bowl of marinade. He’d scarcely seen her all day. He’d missed her. But the tension was palpable. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Tell me.’
Instead she washed her hands and began to slice cloves of garlic, and within seconds her thumb was bleeding and she was shouting, ‘Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.’
‘Wash it under the tap.’
She scowled furiously but complied.
‘What’s wrong, Ellen?’
‘Nothing.’ Then: ‘I never know where anything is in this place.’
Hovering in the doorway, he decided to take the reply at face value. ‘What are you looking for?’
She turned to him with a ragged expression. ‘What am I looking for?’
‘Yes.’
Whatever it was had nothing to do with where he kept his garlic crusher. He waited. She examined her thumb and said, ‘Forget it. Sorry I snapped.’
‘Did something happen today?’
‘Hal, forget it, okay?’
His heart said to cross the room and wrap his arms around her. His head told him to wait. He left the kitchen and found a bandaid in the medicine cabinet. While he pasted it over her thumb she stood stiff and mute, then returned to her chopping board. He sighed unconsciously, poured her a glass of Merricks Creek pinot and left it at her elbow. She glanced at the wine, sniffled, said nothing, but some tiny realignment of her body seemed to signal appreciation, and so Challis wandered through to the sitting room and tried to think his way into his CD collection. What would match her mood just then, her present needs? He settled on Eric Clapton Unplugged.
Anyhow, he needed it.
No protests from the kitchen.
He spread his Wishart case notes over the coffee table and flipped through them half-heartedly. It was no good, his mood was shot.
He wondered if she felt trapped. They hadn’t been together for long but she’d had some months of freedom between her divorce and setting up house with him. And she hadn’t actually chosen to set up house with him: she’d been minding his place while he tended to his dying father in South Australia last month, and had simply stayed on when he returned.
An arrangement, an understanding, sealed by one sudden, glorious fuck just one hour after he’d pulled up in his car.
But this was his house, not hers. She’d not made her mark on it yet and maybe was hesitant to. Maybe she hated the house but liked- loved?-him. Maybe if she hated the house, she’d grow to hate him.
Or the other way around. She knew him now and didn’t like what she knew, and couldn’t wait to get out.
She was waiting for the right time to tell him and it was driving her crazy.
Challis felt a kind of surliness settle inside him. He’d always been too solitary to have much of a love life and the two main relationships of his recent years-recent meaning the past ten years-had ended disastrously. First, the wife who’d tried to kill him, then the editor of Waterloo’s weekly newspaper, shot dead by a killer he was hunting.
So he must have been mad to fall in love with Ellen Destry. Not only did he work with her, she was also under his formal command. Did those kinds of relationships ever work? Were they as valid as relationships that resulted from meeting someone by chance, like at a party? Wasn’t it true that couples who met through work later found that work was all they had in common? Don’t you need more than that? Did he and Ellen have more than that?
A little bit of him fractured inside. He took a swig of the wine in an effort to shake off the blues and began flicking through the Wishart case notes, looking for anomalies, looking for connections. His hammering heart eased, and after a while he realised that he’d left the autopsy report back at the office. He heaved a sigh. He should have scanned everything and stored it on his laptop or portable hard drive but he was a hands-on kind of cop. He needed to hold a file in his hand, not read a screen. He didn’t want to become one of those wankers who walks around wearing a memory stick on a lanyard around his neck.
But Ellen always stored her files electronically. She’d probably have the autopsy report on her memory stick-not that she was a wanker. He cocked his head: judging by the sounds and smells, she’d fired up the wok and begun adding onions, garlic, ginger, the chicken and strips of capsicum, so instead of bothering her he went searching for her work gear. Sometimes she dumped everything in the hallway, sometimes the bedroom, sometimes the floor of the walk-in robe. Mornings were occasionally a little tense, Ellen storming up and down, demanding to know where her keys were. Or her bag. Or her wallet, her memory stick, her sunglasses.
Maybe his life was too orderly for her? She needed chaos?
He located her briefcase in the hall, her bag in the bedroom. The briefcase merely yielded files. The bag was a bag of many zips and compartments, and he found pens, mints, receipts, address book, note book, tampons, tissues, business cards, lint and three memory sticks.
For some reason he selected the memory stick that was slightly different from the others. It was called a TrackStick, and when he plugged it into his laptop, he found himself looking at local maps and a record of coordinates, dates and times. In wonderment he carried the laptop through to the kitchen, saying, ‘What’s this weird stuff on your memory stick?’
Her gaze, at first faintly impatient, grew alarmed, then mortified. To his astonishment, her body went into an imploring or self-protective spasm, as if she’d witnessed a shocking accident, he were about to attack her, or her child had been torn from her breast. She balled her fists, her face crumpled and she began to cry gustily, shaking her head.
He was appalled and went to her immediately, first placing the laptop on the table. ‘Ells, sweetheart, what’s the matter, what is it?’ he said, folding her against him.
And she froze, her body resisting him. Only her face surrendered, pressed into his chest, tears wetting his shirt.
‘Ells?’
She stepped back, raw with emotions, turned jerkily to the wok and switched off the gas. ‘You’re going to hate me.’
‘Hate you? Why?’
‘You don’t know me.’
‘Tell me what’s wrong.’
She gestured at the door through to the sitting room. ‘Can we turn that crap off first?’
‘Crap? That’s Eric Clapton crap.’
She didn’t smile at the old joke. He followed her through to the sitting room, where she snapped off the CD player. The silence and her mood-cool, almost cold-frightened Challis.
‘Please tell me.’
She sat on the sofa. She said, ‘No, you sit over there.’
So he sat opposite her, in the armchair.
‘I’ve got something to tell you and it will change how you see me.’
Challis wanted to say: Don’t be so dramatic. He reckoned that he’d seen and learned everything about human nature, and didn’t figure he’d be surprised by what she had to reveal. What mattered was that Ellen thought it mattered. ‘Okay.’
‘I steal things.’
He waited.
‘I’ve always stolen things, ever since I was a kid.’
He nodded. He almost told her he’d been nabbed for lifting chewing gum from the corner store when he was eight years old, but thought better of it.
‘I feel the urge when we search people’s houses,’ she went on. ‘Suspects, victims, it doesn’t matter, if there’s cash lying about, trinkets, I feel the urge to take it.’
Challis waited. What was he supposed to say? How much? How often’?
‘I mean,’ said Ellen, ‘I almost never steal; it’s been years, in fact. I’ve been fighting it. The last time I did it I put the money into a church charity box.’
‘Okay.’
‘Not okay. The desire is there all the time.’
He nodded.
‘I told you you’d hate me, think less of me.’
In fact, Challis had no thoughts about the matter and knew his face hadn’t betrayed any. He felt desperately sad that she was so upset, that’s all. He said simply, ‘I love you.’
Tears pricked her eyes. ‘No you don’t. How could you?’
‘I love you.’
She wailed, ‘It’s over.’
‘No it isn’t.’
‘I’m a police officer and I steal. Don’t you get it?’
‘Counselling. Therapy. Hypnotism.’
‘It’s not that simple.’
‘Yes it is.’
‘I feel grubby.’
‘So get clean.’
‘I’m a police officer.’
‘You still catch the bad guys, right? You don’t take bribes, you don’t look the other way?’
‘I’m a hypocrite.’
‘Who isn’t?’
She was shaking her head in frustration. It was as if she wanted him to hate her. ‘And the job,’ she continued. ‘They’re not going to let us work together now that we’re living together. Even if they did, the dynamics have changed. Even if we stop seeing each other and live apart, we can’t go back to the way things were. Would we take on separate cases? What if we weakened and fell into bed together, or had a quarrel, how could that not affect how we related to each other? If I disagreed with you professionally about something, or vice versa, would we be able to keep our feelings, our shared history, out of it? What if you subconsciously favoured me sometimes: how do you think Pam and Scobie would feel about that? What if you subconsciously punished me?’
Challis said immediately, ‘I’m not supposed to tell you this, but McQuarrie knows about us.’
‘Oh, shit.’
‘It’s okay,’ Challis said, holding up a placating hand, ‘he’s not going to transfer one of us to the bush or take disciplinary action. He has a high opinion of you.’
He went on to outline McQuarrie’s proposal for three new units on the Peninsula, saying, ‘I’m not supposed to tell you yet. He wants me to think on it and let him know which one I think he should offer you. You’d be promoted to senior sergeant.’
To his astonishment, her face fell. ‘Oh Hal, how can I even go on doing this job, let alone head a new unit? Listen to what I’ve just said about myself. How can you even support such a move? It’s out of the question.’
‘You’d be mad not to accept,’ he growled.
She flinched and looked away.
He pushed on. ‘First things first. Right now, we’ve got a job to do. A killer to catch.’
She breathed in and out. She seemed to struggle mightily with herself. ‘Okay. All right. And speaking of killers… That memory stick-I found it hidden in Adrian Wishart’s place.’
He stared at her.
‘I broke in,’ she said.
‘Another thing you do.’
‘It’s not funny,’ she flashed at him, her chin jutting.
‘I’m not laughing.’
‘Yes, it is another thing I do. Not often, and always case related.’
She was daring him to hate her. He said, ‘You don’t do it to steal. You do it to get a feel for the person living there and maybe find something the police can use.’
She gaped at him.
‘Ells,’ he said, ‘you’re not the first copper to do it and you won’t be the last.’
She swallowed, the motion distinct in her throat. ‘You, too?’
‘It’s been known to happen.’
She looked momentarily confused, and waved both hands jerkily as if to wipe away the distractions.
‘You’ve seen what’s on the device?’ said Challis. ‘The maps and co-ordinates? What’s that all about, I wonder.’
Ellen shifted uncomfortably. ‘You know more than I do. I was kind of trying to forget I had it.’ Then she looked at him intently and said, ‘Hal, I almost took some money as well.’
Challis went very still. ‘Hidden? A lot?’
‘No,’ she said, and explained the circumstances, staring miserably at the floor.
‘Come with me,’ Challis said, grabbing her hand and dragging her back to the kitchen. When they reached the laptop he said, ‘Okay, forget the past ten minutes, think like a cop.’
They stood together, staring at the screen. Presently he sensed Ellen grow calmer, her focus clearer. He waited, and after a while she pointed and said, ‘I know what this is.’
‘What?’
‘GPS locations. Adrian was mapping his wife’s movements.’
‘How does it work?’
She took out the memory stick and examined it. ‘This is the locator. He sticks it in his wife’s car or bag, and retrieves it at the end of the day to see where she’s been.’
Challis’s mouth was dry. ‘We need to see if it shows her movements on Wednesday. If so, he was at the murder scene. He retrieved it.’
‘Killed her, you mean,’ Ellen said.
‘Yes.’
Challis let Ellen sift through the data. Eventually she looked around at him. ‘Tuesday, and the days prior to Tuesday, but nothing for Wednesday.’
‘Damn.’
‘But it shows intent.’
‘Ells, we can’t use it in court. It’s not logged on as evidence. It was stolen from the guy’s house.’
She winced, chagrined. ‘Sorry.’
‘Not to worry. We’ll think of a way.’
That was a pact, and a renewal, and the strain evaporated until the next time.