by Garry Disher
‘You haven’t already?’
‘Jess, I’m about to.’
‘Would he hurt me?’
‘Sweetheart, I don’t know,’ Charlie said. He wondered why he’d used that old endearment.
She carried on as if she hadn’t heard him. ‘I shouldn’t go home yet, in other words.’ Then, a wretched note in her voice: ‘Charlie, not again.’
‘It could be nothing,’ Charlie said, but she’d cut the connection.
Now he shot away from the kerb, one hand finding Sue Mead’s number.
‘Charlie?’
‘Can you send a car around to my ex-wife’s house straight away? They’ll listen to you.’
‘Charlie…’
‘Please, Sue, I can’t get hold of my daughter.’
‘Don’t snap at me. If you must know, I’ve been calling and texting the boss and he finally got back to me. He’s with his wife, so…you know, panic over. I feel shit enough, okay?’
‘Did he call you back on a landline?’
‘What?’
‘Did he call back on his mobile or his home phone?’
The sergeant was silent. ‘Oh,’ she said, regret dawning.
‘Like I said, I can’t get hold of my daughter,’ Charlie said.
‘I’ll try the landline and call you back.’ And she was gone.
Charlie was halfway to Coburg when she called. ‘You were right, he hasn’t been home and his wife’s beside herself.’
‘Car, Sue. Please.’
‘Yes: done.’
Lydiard Street was short and steep, plunging to a turning circle at the bottom, with squat wooden bollards separating it from parkland. This was a leafy green strolling-and-cycling world, a short walk from the community gardens and Merri Creek, and a short drive from Lygon Street if you wanted to eat Lebanese with hipsters, buy an amaro in a boutique bottle shop or service your $10,000 bicycle.
Knowing that parking would be a pain, Charlie left his car outside a netball court on the main road and walked. Lydiard was a mix of new townhouses, glass and concrete cubes and well-tended Californian bungalows. He was halfway down it, headed for the only townhouse with a glossy black door, when a marked police car swept past him. No siren—but not fucking around, either: good old Sue. It double-parked about halfway down. He increased his pace and was still fifty metres away when Allardyce stepped out of an alleyway between one townhouse complex and another, holding up his ID. In his suit, wreathed in smiles and neater than the last time Charlie had seen him. The uniforms got out, joined him on the footpath, Allardyce shaking hands amiably, a big guy who could turn on the charm or the malice without an intervening thought.
He’s going to send them away, Charlie thought. He began to run, calling, ‘Wait!’ and feeling ridiculous.
Allardyce saw him first. Swept back his jacket flap and shouted, ‘He’s got a gun!’
Murder by cop. Charlie skidded. Almost fell, then shrank to a half-crouch in the middle of the road, grabbing at the air. ‘I’m unarmed!’
The uniforms, who had also crouched, one behind the police car, the other still on the footpath, began to straighten. They stared at Charlie, one with his hand on his pistol butt, the other fiddling at his belt for the capsicum spray.
Charlie repeated it, shrill now: ‘I’m unarmed.’
The older uniform stepped off the footpath and started up the slope, saying, ‘On your knees, please, sir, hands laced behind your head.’
‘I know the drill,’ Charlie said, complying.
The road surface was sun-softened tar and small stone chips. His best jeans. ‘My daughter lives in that house,’ he shouted. ‘That man intends to harm her.’
The younger uniform joined his partner and they both came closer, eventually blocking Charlie’s view. Then they parted, one on either side of him, and he saw Allardyce hoofing it down to the park at the bottom.
‘He’s getting away!’
They ignored him, coming in carefully, hauling him to his feet, cuffing him neatly.
‘I told you, I’m not armed. I’m here to protect my daughter.’
‘A precaution, sir.’
Charlie nodded his head downhill. ‘He’s the one you need.’
They ignored that, the older one saying, ‘Your business here, sir.’
Charlie shrugged away from them and tottered a few steps towards the house with the black door. ‘My daughter.’
‘Whoa. Stay where you are.’
‘My daughter, moron. That man you just spoke to came here to harm her.’
Something twigged in the man’s eyes: perhaps Sue Mead’s strange call-out request was beginning to make sense. ‘The inspector’s the one?’
‘Yes.’
They were uneasy now. The young one glanced downhill. ‘Where’s he gone?’
‘He ran into the park,’ Charlie said.
They made to run after him, but Charlie was handcuffed, and they dithered.
‘Can we please check on my daughter?’
Another exchange of uneasy looks before the cuffs were removed, but they kept hard against him as he led the way down to Jess’s house. He knocked. Nothing. The house had the blankness of death just then and his whole body fretted as he picked up and put down his feet pointlessly.
It was a corner house, an alleyway path leading to a backyard and a side gate. ‘She might be in the yard.’
Still suspicious, they accompanied him, the pathway overshadowed by the adjacent units and cooler, suddenly, out of the sun. Charlie was about to rattle the gate handle when it sprang open and Emma wheeled her bike out, helmet on, singing away, buds in each ear, and she yelped and shrank to see them, her panic hurting Charlie the most.
38
THEY THRASHED IT out, Charlie insisting that he walk Emma to The Hive, Emma insisting that she’d ride her bike, the uniforms insisting they both stay until senior police arrived.
Barely holding on, Charlie told his daughter: ‘I’ll walk you there, I’ll wait around, I’ll walk you home afterwards.’
‘Sir, we need you both to stay here.’
Charlie turned. ‘Are we under arrest?’
‘No, but—’
‘You accept that this is my daughter, and this is where she lives?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘You spoke to Sergeant Mead just now and she told you that Inspector Allardyce may pose a threat?’
‘Sir, this is above our pay grade, frankly,’ the senior uniform said. ‘Please wait here for the time being.’
‘No.’
Charlie grabbed Emma’s bike by the handlebars and tussled with her, winning a little tug-of-war and wheeling it back into the yard. Propping it against Jess’s feijoa tree, he returned to the side path, shut the gate behind him, and stood there a moment, glaring at his daughter while she glared at him. Then they both moved at the same time, Emma heading downhill towards the trees that fringed the grassland leading to the creek, Charlie catching up.
‘Sir…’
Charlie flung the words over his shoulder: ‘You have my mobile number. We’ll both be back here at about six-fifteen.’
Father and daughter walked in silence then, across the grass, winding through to a footbridge, then up the slope towards a motley patchwork of roped-off tomato, lettuce, herb and sunflower beds, greenhouses and compost heaps stitched together by crooked paths and rickety gates in weathered post-and-rail fences. Still climbing, they passed through to a flat area, a central hub of grocery, bakery, plant nursery, classroom and café, open until six in summer. People walking or cycling home from work would stop in for vegetables, bread, seedlings, an iced tea, leftover morning pastries.
Emma broke the silence as they neared the café. ‘Sorry I snapped at you.’
‘Sorry I snapped,’ Charlie said.
‘Is he really dangerous?’
‘I honestly don’t know. But we must assume he is—he did come to your house, after all.’
‘He blames you?’
‘I think he’s las
hing out at everyone,’ Charlie said.
‘You don’t have to wait. Mum could fetch me when she gets home.’
‘I’ve asked her to stay away for a few hours.’
‘Bet she didn’t like that.’
‘She didn’t,’ Charlie said.
Emma, spotting a fellow volunteer, waved. ‘I’d better go. Bring you something to eat or drink?’
‘Iced tea.’
‘It’s going to be boring for you.’
‘There’s always social media. Get my follower count up.’
‘Ha, ha,’ Emma said, and she was gone.
Charlie found a bench seat at a wooden table under a shade cloth and people-watched for a while; sipped his tea; read the news feed on his phone; watched a trailer for a TV special in which a current affairs crew had embedded themselves for a week with an actor cleared of sexual misconduct charges. Apparently the guy had spent a lot of that week weeping, his wife stoic at his side. Spent a lot of it bare-chested, too.
Charlie dreamed through the hour. Watching kids and parents, the grey-hairs and the scruffs and the sharp young things, he thought that the world was split in two. On one side, sex offenders cried foul, reality-show idiots became presidents and marketing-executive prime ministers asked what God would do in their shoes. On the other side, people thought to create and work a place like The Hive: people whose salaries were cut, jobs rationalised, benefits slashed. He looked across the yard to the café; watched his daughter smilingly take and deliver orders. Her quick, subtle instincts, her good heart, would be imponderable to a politician. His self-interest imponderable to her.
My crosspatch soul, Charlie thought, getting up to return his used glass. He found himself standing in a short queue. Ahead of him was a helmeted cyclist wearing suit pants and, ahead of the cyclist, a thin twitchy woman holding out a blue ice-cream container to Emma. She had a toddler hanging off one leg, a girl of about eight on her other side, restlessly humming and pirouetting on the spot.
Emma took the container and flashed a smile as the woman thanked her, touched the toddler, the girl, as if for reassurance, and waited. Emma returned with a little tray: two chocolate drinks, soup sloshing in the ice-cream container.
‘Thank you so much,’ the woman said again, and Charlie realised that she’d been begging. She was hungry; the kids were hungry. The three of them headed for a table in the shade and tucked in with plastic spoons that the woman fished from a Coles shopping bag.
It all complicated his sadness. He felt breathless suddenly, close to panic, and returned to his table. He watched the woman. Wolfing it down. The kids filled up quickly and went off to play a game of hidey at an unattended table. The toddler got filthy; his sister went to Emma and returned with paper towels to wipe his knees and palms. A kid forced to grow up quickly, he thought. Obliged to be a parent when her mother’s parenting fell short.
Feeling large and inept, he crossed the yard. Didn’t want to stand too close, a subtle intruder, but gave the woman privacy as he leaned in a little and murmured, ‘This might help.’
Thirty dollars. All he had in his wallet.
She went very still, and an unwashed odour rose from her, and the money disappeared. At a chilly remove she said, loudly, ‘Thank you so much,’ once more and bent to her spoon again. Charlie returned to his table, wondering if what he’d just done was sound or wise or praiseworthy, or anything at all.
He tried to explain all of this to himself as he explained it to Emma when she finished work and they were walking back.
She shrugged. He realised she wasn’t surprised. ‘Sure we feed her.’
‘Where does she live?’
‘I don’t know. Walking distance.’
‘Is she homeless?’
‘They live in her car, I think. Couch-surfing when they can get it.’
Sensing his frustration, she took him by the wrist, squeezed it to buck him up. ‘If I’ve learnt anything here, it’s don’t sweat it. You must have done that in the police?’
Must he? Had he? He wasn’t sure. He was sure he had a shallow, fabricated sense of himself. He was sure his daughter was wise.
She tugged him again. ‘Let’s take the long way home.’
Down to the creek and along it, passing under electricity pylons to another footbridge and up to a path that ran along the edge of the park, and there was Allardyce in his maroon Pajero. Charlie grabbed Emma, jerking her back. ‘Wait.’
‘What?’
He pointed. ‘There.’ He fumbled out his phone. ‘We should probably go somewhere safe and wait.’
She dithered. ‘You sure we can’t just talk to him? He’s upset, Dad.’
Yeah, well, working at The Hive might make you a good person but it didn’t necessarily foster a self-protective instinct. And Charlie wanted something to hold on to, at this fag end of his career: don’t be a hero, let the real heroes deal with it.
He informed Sue Mead, then tugged at his daughter and she stumbled along with him, looking back. Then her face cleared, and she came willingly. ‘I just saw his head move.’
Not sitting there dead, in other words. Charlie had been fearing that, too.
39
‘JUST SITTING THERE in his car,’ Charlie said, a few days later.
Dr Fiske continued to regard him calmly, as incurious and outwardly neutral as she’d been about his other catchup stories: his mother and Billy Saul, Fay and his father, the Homicide Squad, the hit-and-run. Seated primly on her plain chair, as if reluctant to take up space. As if to give him all the room he needed.
If she moved, it was to ask a question. ‘What will happen to him?’
Charlie shrugged. ‘Stress leave?’
He considered his own situation. His suspension would be a permanent note in his record and follow him through the years. Senior officers would continue to bully and lie, and junior officers to close ranks and come snapping at his heels. He’d already been found guilty, was already being punished, even before any formal judgment had been passed.
Giving Fiske a crooked grin, he said, ‘Maybe they’ll send him to you.’
A minute relaxation of her face. Either she was amused or had expected that joke. ‘We’ll see.’
Feeling aimless and uneasy, Charlie glanced around her office. The same carpet separating them, the same furnishings and layout, but the photographs were new. With a glance to ask for permission, he crossed the room and peered at the rectangle of wall beside the door. Firefighters: shell-shocked, grimy, deeply fatigued. A burnt-out farmhouse. A kangaroo lying on its side, smoking, bloated—you could almost smell scorched death.
‘You took these?’
‘Yes.’
Charlie returned to his chair. ‘Powerful.’
The nod she gave him was reasonable, wise, assured—but not forthcoming, as he veered into personal territory.
Charlie persevered. ‘Your Mallacoota holiday?’
Her voice was flat. ‘You might say it turned out to be a working holiday. Quite a few people in need of counselling.’
Charlie felt useless suddenly, his concerns paltry in comparison, and began to tell her so and out of nowhere tears spurted and his words tumbled, all the hurts and the sense of lack that drove him. Painful hiccups interrupted the flow. He hunched in misery, grinding the heels of his hands against his eyes, and, when he recovered, she was standing in front of him with a box of tissues.
‘Sorry,’ he gasped.
‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘Take your time.’
‘Never happened before.’
‘Never?’
He thought about that. ‘Yeah.’
Well, never a full-blown bawling session before. A handful of tight, angry tears back when Jess walked out, but he wasn’t counting them. They’d been easily erased, a brisk wipe of his eyes. Now he was exhausted.
He looked at Fiske. ‘You’ve been waiting for that, right? As a sign of a successful consultation?’
‘That’s not worthy of you, Charlie.’
His eyes were still damp. He blinked a few times and tried a smile. ‘Not worthy. Doc, I’m shocked. Are you allowed to express judgments?’
She returned the smile faintly. ‘The occasional kick up the bum can do the world of good.’
‘It’s what I need,’ Charlie admitted sadly.
Fiske shifted in her seat. The reserve between them was evaporating. ‘Quite a few things surfaced just then, Charlie. Why don’t we unpick them one at a time.’
‘Unpick,’ said Charlie flatly.
She held up a hand. ‘I know, horrible word. Should be banned, along with “cohort”. But you know what I mean.’
Charlie gestured at the photographs. ‘After what those people have been through…’
‘It’s not a competition. You’re hurting—to use another horrible expression.’ She waited. Then: ‘Why don’t you start with your parents?’
Charlie stumbled through it, the whole sad mess. ‘The hidden hatreds of married life, right?’ he concluded.
‘Theirs—or yours?’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ Pause. ‘Both, I guess.’
‘You said it felt like stepping back into old habits, an old dialogue, when you warned your ex-wife about Inspector Allardyce.’
Charlie rolled his shoulders, avoiding the point. Then: ‘Yes.’
‘When she left you five years ago, what did you feel?’
He answered at once: ‘A vacuum.’
‘What do you suppose she felt?’
‘Hey, doc—this is all about me, remember?’
Her smile was tired. ‘What did she feel?’
‘You mean, what do I suppose she felt?’ Charlie took a deep breath and said, ‘That she’d found a breathing space.’
And he’d found a vacuum.
Fiske gave him a tiny nod and he realised what she was doing. This was about him: him in relation to others. He glanced at one of the photographs again, a fireman with gaunt, ash-grimy cheeks, and visualised Fiske counselling him. She’d be personable but not personal, involved but not invasive, firm but not bossy, sympathetic but not sentimental.
He returned his gaze to her, close to tears again. ‘I don’t think I’ll be coming back to see you.’