Challis - 04 - Chain of Evidence Read Online Free PDF

gravestones on a rise beyond the stockyards. Challis
swallowed. Hed attended a funeral there last year, and if things followed
their course, hed soon be attending another.

    He slowed at the outskirts of the
town. An old sensation went through him, of emptiness and isolation. Hed felt
it as a child, Broken Hill lying far to the east, Adelaide far to the south,
and nothing between them. He shook off the feeling and looked for changes.
Nothing had changed. The houses were the same, low, slumbering, walled in local
stone, protected from the sun by broad verandahs, gum trees and golden cypress
hedges. TV antennas fifteen metres high. The Methodist church in a square of
red dirt, where the ants were always busy. The returned servicemens hall where
he and Meg had dumped empty bottles for the annual Legacy drive. The stone
school with the steep, faded red corrugated iron roof. The old women watering
their geraniums and staring as he passed. The cars with their coatings of
powdered dirt. Not mud. This was a dry spring, of a dry year, of a dry decade.
Nothing had changed.

    But hed spoken too soon. He spotted
changes in the little main street. There was a caf now, a craft shop, and a
place selling collectibles. Every faade had been renovated in late colonial
styles. Then Challis saw a sign on a picket fence, and understood: Mawsons
Bluff Community Preservation and Historical Society.

    But the grassy plains still
stretched on forever, the droughty bluffs loomed over the town and the sky was
a cloudless dome above.

    Challis had slowed to no more than a
walking pace. The town was airless and still. No one moved. Curtains were
drawn. Presently a farmer emerged from the post office, nodded hello as if
Challis had never left the town, and drove away in one of the battered white
utilities that populate the outback. Challis recognised him as Paddy Finucane,
from an extensive clan that lurked on forgotten back roads, married into
similar struggling share-farming families and drove trucks for the local
council. There had been dozens of Finucanes in the convent school and the
football team when Challis was a boy. There always had been and always would
be. Some, he remembered, had been done for stealing sheep, diesel fuel,
chainsaws or anything else that hadnt been locked away in a shed. Paddy was
one of them.

    He came to the northern outskirts of
the town and turned down a rutted track toward a more recently built house.
Young wives of the prosperous 1960s had eschewed the cool old stone houses of
the midnorth of South Australia and insisted on triple-fronted brick veneer
houses with tile roofshouses indistinguishable from those in the new suburbs
and satellite towns of the major cities. Challiss own mother had got her dream
home. Challiss father had been happy to oblige her: the love was there, and
the money. In those first few years, Murray Challis had been the only lawyer in
a one hundred-kilometre radius, drawing up wills, contracts and occasional
divorce settlements for everyone from the mail contractor to the local gentry.
Now, forty years later, the house hed built for his wife still hadnt accommodated
itself naturally with the landscape. Like the old stone buildings of the region
it came complete with an avenue of pines, a garden of roses and shrubs,
rainwater tanks and a kelpie beating his tail in the dust, but it didnt quite
belong. Nor had the Challises, quite, and at the age of twenty Hal Challis had
left for the police academy. Perhaps it was wanting to belong that made him
apply for a posting back home when he graduated. Certainly that had been a
mistake. You can never go back. A couple of years later hed left the state,
and now was an inspector in the Victoria Police.

    Challis braked at the head of the
driveway, angling his car into the shade of the pepper trees. He got out,
stretched his aching back and looked north over the struggling wheat flats that
merged, in the far distance, with arid country, semi-desert, a land of