Challis - 04 - Chain of Evidence Read Online Free PDF Page A

watch and said, I have to get back.

    Larrayne leapt to her feet and took
her to the front door. Thanks for coming, Mum.

    Ellen said brightly, Is Travis your
boyfriend?

    So what if he is?

    Just wondering, sweetheart. How are
your studies?

    All right.

    If you need peace and quiet in the
lead up to the exams, come and spend a few days with me.

    You must be joking, me in lover boys
house, Larrayne said, and Ellen saw that nothing had changed. It might have
been bearable if Hal Challis were her lover boy.

    She felt heat rising inside her and
turned away before she said something shed later regret. Twenty minutes later,
as she headed southeast on the freeway toward Waterloo, her mind was still
stewing. If criminals can be granted the benefit of the concept of reasonable
doubt, why couldnt she? Instead, her daughter and her husband had examined the
evidence against hershed walked out on her marriage, shed always worked
closely with Hal Challis, she was now living in his houseand found her guilty
of adultery.

    I wish, she thought.

    I think I wish.

    The freeway was choked with traffic,
moving at a walking pace down a broad channel between seas of tiled roofs, home
to middle

    24

    Australia. The routes in and out of
Melbourne had never coped and never would, not when the satellite areas like
the Peninsula offered cheap, high-density housing but no jobs.

    Beside her a siren whooped, highway
patrol, festooned with antennas and decals, motioning at her mobile phone. She
showed them her badge through the window. They shrugged and shot away down the
shoulder of the freeway, looking for other mugs who were driving while talking
on a mobile phone.

    It was inevitable that thinking
about her own daughterand love, protection and responsibilitywould lead Ellen
to thinking about Katie Blasko. A ten-year-old, missing forshe glanced at her
watch twenty-four hours now. Was Katie at a friends house? Getting off the
bus in Sydney, where shed be swallowed up in the fleshpots of Kings Cross?
Twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours of heaven or hell.

    Her phone rang. It was a text
message from a Supreme Court clerk.

    Jarrett acquitted.

    All she wanted to do was call Hal
Challis. She had him on speed-dial. But he had a family crisis to contend with.
It wouldnt be fair. She had to do this alone.

    * * * *

    25

    Detective
Inspector Hal Challis was one thousand kilometres away, in the far mid-north of
South Australia, crossing a barrier of stony hills on a hazardous switchback
road at a point known as Isolation Pass. Drivers had been killed on the Pass.
Challis knew to take it cautiously that Friday afternoon, climbing the upward
slope in his rattly old Triumph, braking for the downward.

    Before long he caught sight of
Mawsons Bluff, his glimpses of the little settlement interrupted by
guardrails, then rock face, one alternating with the other. Complicated
feelings settled in him. The Bluff was a drowsy wheat and wool town on a
treeless plain, a place where they knew the cost of everything but the value of
nothing. It was named for Governor Mawsons son, who, in 1841, had set out from
Adelaide to survey the range of hills that now sheltered the town and the
merino stud properties, but failed to return, and was found a year later with a
spear pinched between the bones of his ribcage. Challis had been taught that at
the Bluffs little primary school. He hadnt been taught that it marked the
beginning of a doomed Aboriginal resistance to rifles, horses and sheep. No one
in Mawsons Bluff wanted to know that. He was only going home because his
sister had called him.

    Home. He still called it that. He visited
from time to time but hadnt lived there for twenty years.

    The road levelled out and he
accelerated. Before long he could read MAWSONS BLUFF painted on the roof of the
pub, a landmark for the buyers who flew in from the sheep stations of New South
Wales for the merino stud ram sales. And there was the cemetery, a dusty patch
of gum trees and