by Garry Disher
Clearly the work of the older child. ‘Is Owen the father of both your children, Christine?’
‘What’s it to you?’
Pam had to get out of there. Rapidly she went on, ‘Christine, were you here when Owen punched and kicked a man named Slatter a few days ago?’
‘Not his fault. That man just thought he could waltz in and—’
‘So you were here.’
‘Said I was, didn’t I?’
‘I need to speak to Owen about it, Christine.’
‘Told you, he run off on me.’ Misery suffused Penford’s face. ‘What am I supposed to do now?’
Taking a risk, Pam said, ‘Did Owen also take your stash, Christine?’
The eyes slid away. ‘What stash?’
Christine Penford was trying to moisten her mouth. She scratched at her face absently.
‘Christine, we found no vehicle registered in Owen’s name. How does he get around? There’s no bus service to Moonta.’
Penford jerked her head, indicating the Corolla in the driveway. ‘We share.’
‘But you take it to work each day.’
‘Yeah, so?’
‘So how does he get around when you’re not here? If he ran off on you, how did he do it?’
Penford shrugged. ‘How would I know? Bastard.’
On her way out, Pam asked, ‘Do you have a recent photo of Owen I could use?’
‘How come?’
‘To show people. The neighbours.’
Penford was alarmed now. ‘What do you mean?’
Pam said smoothly, ‘Standard procedure, Christine.’
Penford took out a cracked-screen iPhone, tapped and swiped. She showed Pam a head-and-shoulders shot of a man who could have been her clone. Dark where she was fair, he was slight, gaunt, feral. Holding a dog.
‘Text it to me,’ Pam said.
SHE WENT OUTSIDE WHERE the air was gusting and hot, but clean after the miserable Penford–Valentine hovel. Before heading for the CIU car she stepped into the car shed, half expecting to find stolen gear. Nothing. Dust, cobwebs, rusty tools, old paint tins. On the concrete floor a pool of white paint, dry but fresh-looking. What it meant, she didn’t know or care.
It was irrelevant that Slatter no longer wanted to press charges, the attack had been severe and now the assailant was missing, so Pam knocked on a few doors. Of the remaining ten houses in the street, six were weekenders owned by Melbourne families. They hadn’t been occupied on the evening Valentine attacked the Moth. The other four householders had been at home, and could attest to Slatter’s propensity for knocking on doors expectantly, half-tanked and ready to chat and drink on. ‘Irritating but harmless,’ she was told.
As for Valentine? He kept to himself mostly. Rarely went out. Seemed suspicious of the world. They hadn’t seen him for a few days. Didn’t know where he was.
MURPHY DROVE OUT OF THE choked collection of small houses on sandy lanes and back to the police station car park in Waterloo.
Four-thirty p.m. and John Tankard was climbing out of the CREST car. CREST: Community Response, Engagement and Social Tasking, which boiled down to a uniformed constable targeting parents who flouted road and parking rules outside schools at drop-off and pick-up times. Of the handful of schools in the Waterloo catchment area, two were cramped and poorly sited for car access. Frustrated parents competed for parking spots, the losers parking haphazardly and illegally. Some of them abused or attacked other parents and sometimes teachers.
To Pam it was a cruel irony that John Tankard was ever given CREST duty. He had little if any sense of community, engagement or responsibility.
He leaned his ample rump on the car, half-closing his eyes against a flurry of dust. ‘Murph.’
‘How’s it going, John?’
He began shaking his head. ‘They say kids are monsters, but it’s the parents.’
He was a large man, damp and hot; a man who stared at your breasts, and he was doing it now. Murphy retreated a little. ‘Yeah?’
‘Jan Quine’s husband.’
‘What about him?’
‘The Quine kids take the bus to school, right?’
‘Yeah, so?’
‘So this morning he gets it into his head that the driver goes too fast over the speed bumps.’
‘He followed the bus?’
‘Got it in one.’
Pam shook her head, not interested; not really surprised by anything she heard in this job. ‘Huh.’
‘Yep. I had the traffic moving nice and smooth and he gets out of his car and starts abusing the bus driver. I’m trying to calm him down and the bus is trying to turn around and the other parents are tooting and swearing at each other. Fucking nightmare.’
With a grunt he uncoiled from the car and they walked together to the back door of the station. Pam had heard the rumours about Janine Quine’s husband being a closet gambler. Janine struggling to pay off his debts and keep food on the table, working a thankless job in the Waterloo cop shop.
Upstairs in CIU, she was told that Challis had gone out for a drink with the drug-squad senior sergeant. But he’d left a note on her desk. Roslyn Wreidt, address in Tyabb. She’d come home to find her house had been burgled.
Back downstairs, Pam signed out the CIU car again.
OUT ALONG FRANKSTON-FLINDERS ROAD, newish housing estates on her left, businesses and occasional houses on her right. These days her gaze went automatically to FOR SALE and FOR RENT signs, houses with removalists parked outside. Her current house, backing onto farmland behind Penzance Beach, had been sold, the new owner due to take residence after Christmas. She had no idea where to go; had been too busy and too paralysed to look. And who moved house at this time of year?
Seeing nothing, she gently accelerated, slowing again when Traffic’s beefy unmarked station wagon came into view, grille lights flashing red and blue, the driver booking a kid in a hot little Subaru. She waved. He didn’t notice her.
The grass around her was dead and dying. Out in the east was a corner of burnt-out farmland. Canvas blinds were drawn over the eyes of the houses close to the road, fighting the heat. Death and decay hovered today. The Peninsula was normally green—fatly, moistly green—but this was the third drought year in a row. Straw and dirt prevailed now. Right up to the black fringe where the fire had prowled. And so the ghost bicycle was a shock. Starkly white, angular; chained to a gum tree to mark the site of a road fatality.
She stopped for a crew patching potholes and clearing a fallen pine tree. Drummed her fingers on the wheel as she waited. Searched the AM and FM bands for some decent music, found only ads and mindless banter. She switched off and thought of her mother.
Harriet Murphy had tried staying on in the sprawling family home after her husband died. Eventually she’d found the place unmanageable, and now she was in a retirement village.
Hated it.
Vagaries of the job permitting, Pam made the drive up to the city via EastLink to see her mother about once a week. They would sit together in the tiny cottage or out in the sun if one of the garden benches wasn’t occupied. None of it felt quite right. They both missed the old place, the airy rooms and leafy backyard.
Pam pondered this morning’s phone conversation. ‘I want to see the Peninsula before the place is crawling with holidaymakers,’ her mother had said.
‘Your old stomping ground.’
‘Exactly. Are you free on Sunday?’
Well, Challis had okayed it, and Pam thought she might even enjoy touring around with her mother. But it was yet another reminder that she was the only one of the Murphy children who ever saw Harriet. Harriet excused them: they had families, lived busy lives. And Pam’s life wasn’t busy?
She thought about her brothers Liam and Daniel. She liked the women they’d married, and adored her nieces and nephews, but her brothers were academics—PhDs, both of them—and keenly aware that most people weren’t.
What this meant, she was frequently reminded—often during Christmas lu
nch—was that a PhD didn’t mean mastery of just one field, but of all. Her brothers knew everything. They could speak authoritatively on issues of law and order, for example. Civil liberties. Prisons. The police service. The police and race relations. The police and the right of peaceful protest. The police as political servants or political tools. The police and excessive use of violence. The police and their love of cars, guns and gadgets.
One lectured in economics, the other in linguistics…
Perhaps they thought they knew everything because they spent most of their time with twenty-year-olds who knew nothing at all.
Pam wondered how they’d cope if they encountered a minority who didn’t fit one of their stereotypes. Like—to take a random example—a sharp female police officer.
She turned left, over the railway line in Tyabb, then left again before the airfield, and found where Roslyn Wreidt lived.
A SMALL BLOCK OF FLATS of a type common in city suburbs and country towns: about forty years old, grey stucco external wall, flat roof. Tiny apartments with aluminium-framed windows, low ceilings and an archway between sitting room and kitchen.
She walked around to the ground-floor rear apartment and knocked on a door in a dim entryway, almost dark; she could not at first form a clear impression of the woman who answered. A moment later she was shown to a room filled with pale Ikea fabrics and wood, the air stale.
‘Please sit,’ Roslyn Wreidt whispered. ‘Tea? Coffee? Juice or water?’
‘Water,’ Murphy said, realising she was parched.
Wreidt hovered briefly, as if processing the answer and the actions it necessitated. She was small-framed, with bowed shoulders, dipped chin and whispery voice; she looked defeated by life. Or the burglary. Late twenties, Pam guessed. Dressed in jeans, runners, socks and a long-sleeved, high-necked top despite the heat. Eventually she tried a smile and made her way through to the kitchen stiffly, slowly, as if wading through chest-high seas. The fridge door hissed, a jug landed on a benchtop, a glass rattled, water gurgled.
Pam Murphy didn’t discount the victim response to being burgled. Victims came home to broken glass, upturned or slashed furniture, missing valuables, turds on the bed, semen on their underwear. It was a violation, and victims grew vigilant and nervy. Some of them bought expensive security systems or moved house; some never stepped outside again. Then again, she’d seen plenty of householders who mentally rubbed their hands together and lied their way down the list of stolen valuables they intended to claim insurance on.
Wreidt returned with a dewy glass, so full the water level spilled over her fingers. She placed it on a coaster, jerked back, stared at her wet hand as if it were alien. She made to wipe it on her top, then her thigh, and finally dug a damp tissue from her sleeve.
She’s been weeping, Murphy thought. Tread gently.
‘Tell me about the break-in,’ she said. ‘You came home…’
In a whispery rush, Wreidt said, ‘I work part-time at the childcare place. I got home at lunchtime and there was this smell and I saw the mess on the floor and I was too scared to go in so I called the police.’
Pam smiled. She was on the sofa, Wreidt in an armchair, perched on the edge as if to flee. ‘Let’s go back a bit. You arrived home at lunchtime…Did you see anyone in the street? Strangers? Strange cars?’
‘No.’
‘A normal day.’
‘Yes.’
‘You opened the front door.’
‘Yes.’
‘With your key? It was locked?’
Wreidt’s eyes darted. ‘Yes.’
‘You smelled something. What, exactly?’ Not wanting to lead Wreidt, but knowing this could take forever, she said, ‘Cigarette smell? Petrol? Perfume or aftershave?’
‘A really rank smell.’
‘Body odour?’
Wreidt grimaced. She opened and closed her mouth, worked her tongue, as if tasting the air. ‘Like BO.’
The drug-squad briefing still vivid in her memory, Pam thought: ice addict? ‘You saw things scattered around the floor. In this room? Your bedroom?’
‘Here,’ whispered Wreidt. She pointed to a cabinet. ‘CDs and DVDs and some photos.’
‘The TV’s still here.’
Wreidt snorted, a little colour now in both face and voice. ‘Too small, too cheap, too old. Took my HD recorder, though. All my shows taped on it.’
‘And your bedroom?’
The eyes were wild again, looking for a way out. ‘Nothing.’
Ah. Roslyn Wreidt had been assaulted, maybe raped. A man had been in here waiting for her. Or she knew him. ‘You went outside immediately and called the police?’
‘Yes.’
‘On your mobile?’
‘Neighbour,’ Wreidt said, staring at the carpet.
Came home at lunchtime but didn’t call the police until mid-afternoon. And her mobile was stolen.
Murphy didn’t know where to go with this. She didn’t know what questions to ask or how to ask them. But she did know that Roslyn Wreidt would have to be handled gently, by an expert like Ellen Destry. She stepped around the coffee table and knelt at the woman’s knee and took the damp hands in hers. Felt resistance and then a massive unloading as Wreidt registered what Murphy said to her.
‘He hurt you, didn’t he, Ros?’
6
ELLEN DESTRY MIGHT HAVE responded promptly to Pam Murphy’s text, but it sat in the server for a few hours. She was busy anyway, trying to break Albie Rofe.
The Westernport region’s new sex-crimes unit was housed in a decrepit Californian bungalow two streets away from the police station. The house, owned by the shire, had sat unsold and empty for two years before being donated to Victoria Police. It needed painting, restumping and a new roof, but the interior was sound, if basic. Computers, phones, desks and filing cabinets crammed the largest room, another was the interview room, a third, fitted out with carpets, armchairs, a TV and a box of toys and children’s books, was for traumatised victims and their families, a fourth was a briefing room. The last, a tiny box, was Ellen’s office.
She was in the interview room with Rofe. The house, uninsulated, baked in the early summer sun, and Ellen felt grimy. Rofe, a soft mass of damp, loose flesh, looked not much better, and he scowled when Ellen remarked, ‘Beautiful weather we’re having, Albie.’
‘Wouldn’t know.’
‘Warm, sunny—beach weather. You hadn’t noticed?’
Rofe examined his hands, pudgy hands viewed by eyes in a pudgy face. He was twenty-two years old, poorly put together and in need of fresh clothes, shower, shave and haircut. He shrugged massively.
‘You like the outdoors, Albie? The beach?’
Rofe began to look hunted. He knew why he was there. He hadn’t asked for a lawyer and had looked blank when offered one.
‘Merricks Beach, Penzance Beach, Somers—you get around, Albie. A real lover of the outdoors.’
Maybe his palms were wet. He rubbed them on his thighs. The interview room, the size of a medium bathroom, was close and stale. Full of Rofe’s anxiety and pathetic nastiness now, five minutes into the interview. One window, but the kind that wound out from the bottom with only a small gap. It hindered rather than encouraged airflow. Who the hell had designed such a window? Ellen asked herself crankily. She got up, opened the door to let in warm, stale air. Picked up the manila folder that sat on the plastic table. Rofe was looking at it when he wasn’t looking at his stumpy fingers. Ellen he hadn’t looked at yet.
She opened the folder. Rofe flinched.
‘Is this you, Albie?’
In the photograph, Rofe—wearing the same arse-crack tracksuit pants and baggy T-shirt he was wearing now—was casting a frightened glance at the camera from behind a ti-tree. A hint of the vivid sea and the ruins of a little jetty in the background.
‘Here’s you,’ Ellen said, ‘enjoying the sea air at Balnarring Beach.’
Rofe said nothing.
Another photo: ‘Here’s your little Hyundai E
xcel. Close-up of your rear plate, in fact.’
Rofe was transfixed, as if caught in a spotlight.
‘I wonder why anyone would go to the trouble of taking such photos…Any ideas, Albie?’
‘No,’ he whispered.
‘Yes, it’s a hard question. I’ll answer it for you. A young woman was on the beach one day recently, minding her own business, sunbathing on her towel, reading a book and listening to her iPod, when a man came and sat beside her. Plenty of room on the beach, but he sat right next to her—and do you know what he did? He began to masturbate. She picked up her things and left.
‘But what do you know, when she told her friends, some of them had had similar experiences, or had heard of similar experiences: a guy lurking, perving on topless bathers, flashing his poor excuse for a penis at a couple of young girls, sitting too close to women sunbathing alone, et cetera. Know anything about that, Albie?’
He said nothing. Ellen said, ‘So the first woman I mentioned decided to do something about it. She came back several days in a row until she saw you again, and she took your photo, along with a photo of your numberplate.’
Ellen watched him. She said, ‘We needed to be sure, Albie, so we got the registered owner’s licence photo and showed it around. And guess what? Several women have identified that person as the person who shook his willie at them and perved on them and sat too close to them. And that person is you.’
Silence, the stillness deepening.
‘I’m sorry,’ gasped Rofe. ‘It won’t happen again.’
Rofe’s victims thought he was more pathetic than threatening, and none wanted to go the route of a trial, but Rofe didn’t know that. ‘Oh, you think you can just say sorry and that’s that? You just walk out of here and go home?’
He looked terrified. ‘I never touched them! I wouldn’t!’
‘I spoke to your mother…’
‘Please!’
‘She’s at her wits’ end with you. Scared you’ll molest your little sister, scared you’ll start looking in the neighbours’ windows. Scared you’ll start touching instead of looking.’