After delivering his daughter to a church hall behind the shops in Somerville, where her ballet, jazz and tap teachers had set up stow-away tables groaning with cupcakes, doughnuts and lime cordial for the end-of-term party, Scobie Sutton did the shopping, determined not to be rushed just because Challis and Destry wanted it that way. And so it was lunchtime before he arrived at work that Saturday.
He began by examining tapes and speed camera photographs from four locations: Planning East’s carpark, the traffic lights in Tyabb, the Caltex service station in Waterloo and a stretch of Frankston-Flinders Road between Penzance Beach and Flinders. Mapping Ludmilla Wishart’s movements had so far involved a mixture of guesswork, her desk diary entries and tiny amounts of actual evidence. If only Wishart had planted his tracking device on his wife on Wednesday: all Scobie had to go on so far was a single credit card transaction-at 3.42 on Wednesday afternoon, Ludmilla Wishart had purchased 47 litres of unleaded petrol from the Caltex service station. The timing and location indicated that she’d been on her way to meet Carl Vernon in Penzance Beach; according to Vernon, she’d been on time.
Backtracking through her diary, Scobie guessed that she’d been coming from Tyabb, where she’d investigated an unauthorised bed-and-breakfast development. She’d stopped for petrol, made her way to see Carl Vernon, where she stayed for about thirty minutes, then driven to the big house on the headland near Shoreham, where she’d been murdered.
With a ham and gherkin sandwich under his belt, washed down by dense black tea, Scobie began fast-forwarding through the videotapes from the Caltex service station. The quality was poor and the camera had been badly angled. It was also possible that the time and date notations were inaccurate, so he started running the tape at the normal speed well before 3.42, the time at which Wishart’s credit card had registered the petrol purchase.
He spotted Ludmilla at 3.37, her silver Golf edging cautiously into the top segment of the screen and stopping at pump 5, the pump obscuring the woman and her car a little. He saw her head emerge, saw her arm take down the nozzle and disappear with it. Then the arm reappeared and he saw her pass through another quadrant of the screen, presumably to pay for the petrol. She re-emerged, got into the Golf, drove away.
But given that the camera had been poorly installed or knocked out of alignment at some point, only the two pumps closest to the road were visible. They formed the foreground of the image. The greater part of the screen was focused on the stretch of main road in and out of Waterloo, showing clearly the access ramp into the service station, a bus stop and an Australia Post box.
And a late 1980s Mercedes. Twenty seconds after Ludmilla Wishart’s Golf appeared at the pumps via the access ramp, a Mercedes sedan had pulled to the side of the road and idled there, a faint puff of exhaust smoke showing. Twenty seconds after Wishart drove out again, it followed.
Scobie put his head in his hands and closed his eyes, thinking hard. He’d seen that car before. He wasn’t a petrol head or a car nut, and an older-style Mercedes isn’t a car you’d normally remember, but his brother-in-law had offered to sell him one earlier in the year. He was trading up to a new car but had been offered only $1,000 as a trade-in price when the car was worth at least $7,000. ‘Diesel,’ he told Scobie, ‘low mileage, full service history.’ Scobie had been mildly tempted, but he didn’t have $7,000 to spare and Beth had insisted that if they were going to buy another car, it needed to have airbags. In the end, Scobie’s brother-in-law had sold the Mercedes for $5,000 on eBay, and Scobie had been kicking himself ever since.
So who owned this one and where had he seen one like it recently? If he hadn’t been so miserable in the head about his wife, he’d have been paying more attention to the life around him.
Then he remembered: the break-in at the planning office. The Mercedes had been parked at the rear. The only staff member in attendance at the time was the chief planner, Groot.
He replayed the tape. The Mercedes outside the service station was in profile, so he couldn’t get the plate number. The windows were heavily tinted. No side window stickers, no fox tails hanging from the radio antenna. But there was a towbar, and one hubcap was missing.
He ejected the tape and walked through to the incident room and the photo arrays on the whiteboard: Ludmilla Wishart, Adrian Wishart, Ludmilla’s car, the broader crime scene, the clump of mud that had formed and dried inside a wheel arch before falling out near the crime scene.
He went to one of the plastic tubs on the long table, knowing there’d be more photos of the mud. He found them, together with a preliminary report from the laboratory. Wading through terms like ‘locus’, ‘diatoms’, ‘vegetable matter’ and ‘moisture gradient’ he understood that the mud had originated near a marsh or a wetland.
And probably from a local marsh or wetland, Scobie thought, telling himself that mud collected inside a wheel arch from further afield would have shaken loose long before the driver reached the Peninsula-or more specifically, the murder scene. He bundled the photos together and called Challis.
Challis listened, said, ‘I’m at the hospital. Coming back now.’
While he waited, Scobie phoned his house, a kind of trepidation settling in him. He half wanted Beth not to be home. It would confirm one of his greatest fears, that she’d run off with the Ascensionists. He could see his wife in some remote compound, wearing a drab and shapeless cotton dress, her hair to her shoulders and tied in a scarf, chanting ecstatically and doing a cold man’s bidding.
But she answered in the dull tones that had become her habit and to his questions and nervy patter she gave monosyllabic replies that were, if anything, worse than all of his imaginings.