Signal Loss

by Garry Disher

  ‘Please, I never would.’

  Ellen felt grimy: the heat, Albie Rofe. ‘You do know what jail would mean, don’t you, Albie? You’d be eaten alive in there. Meanwhile you’d be on the sex offenders register for life, your name all over the newspapers. Your poor family would be forced to move to another town.’

  He was weeping, hot, splashing tears.

  ‘So here’s the thing, Albie. You start seeing a therapist. Your mother has agreed to that, and you have to as well. I’ll monitor your progress. If you miss a session without good reason, I’ll chase you down, understood?’

  He whispered it: ‘Understood.’

  ‘And that would mean jail time, Albie.’

  The air was close and stinking and Ellen washed her hands of Albie Rofe as she watched him slink out. Hoping she’d done the right thing.

  THE SEX-CRIMES UNIT WAS SMALL: Ellen Destry (sergeant), Ian Judd (senior constable) and two constables, Lois Katsoulas and Jared Rykert. Rykert was finger-stabbing his keyboard, face clenched, when Ellen walked in from the interview room.

  ‘How did it go?’

  He’d been in court all day. ‘The fu—bloody magistrate,’ he said, turning his attention to Ellen.

  ‘I can cope with the occasional four-letter word, Jared.’

  Rykert’s eyes were moist—fury and something else. Humiliation? ‘The prick got off with a warning,’ he said. ‘I spent weeks on it, Sarge.’

  Graham Tovey had assaulted four women in and around Waterloo in a three-week period, grabbing one on a service road behind a timber yard, another on the tidal flats boardwalk and two near the foreshore skate park. He’d followed them, brought them to the ground with an arm around the neck, then digitally penetrated them before running off with their purses.

  ‘A warning,’ echoed Ellen, shaking her head. Robbery and assault with intent to rape. The result should have been a sentence of up to ten years.

  ‘No priors, he pleaded on the purse snatching, and denied the sexual assault. The magistrate bought it.’

  The magistrate, Lewis Deere, was notoriously sceptical of sexual assault claims. Especially if there were no independent witnesses and the claimant was, or had been, in a relationship with the accused, or had been drunk or high or not, in his view, appropriately dressed. He’d never been warned or investigated by the Bar Council, his language was too careful for that, but the police hated it when he was rostered on to one of their prosecutions.

  Ellen pulled a chair up close to Rykert. He was young, athletic; looked more like a footballer or a brickie than a detective. He wore suit pants and a white shirt, the tie at half-mast, his ID on a blue lanyard around his neck. Strong, shapely fingers. He was almost handsome…but young, unformed, still easily wounded by setbacks.

  ‘Look,’ she said, gently but with a no-nonsense edge to her voice. ‘Shit happens. Especially shit like Lewis Deere. It’s disappointing, it’s sometimes outrageous and it will continue to happen.’

  He snorted. ‘Good to know, Sarge.’

  ‘Listen to me,’ she said, some steel in her now. ‘Your only responsibility is to carry out the best investigation you can, and present the best case you can. After that, it’s in the hands of lawyers, judges, magistrates and juries. Did you do the best job possible? Did you honour the victims?’

  ‘Hundred per cent, Sarge.’

  ‘Then don’t take it personally. Hold your head high.’

  ‘But there was no justice for those women.’

  ‘I know. It’s heartbreaking. But if it’s going to break you, you’d better leave the job right now, because you won’t function well enough to get justice for the next victim who comes along.’

  ‘Sarge.’

  ‘Tovey will stuff up again.’

  ‘Sarge.’

  ‘Do you want to stay on?’

  ‘Sarge.’

  ‘Good. Briefing in five.’

  ELLEN OPENED WINDOWS, turned on the electric fans, and stood at the head of the briefing room. She was new to this game, briefing a team. Under Hal Challis’s command in the old days, she’d admired the calm, genial way he ran things, the way he propped up the wall with his right shoulder and quizzed the team and let them speak and allotted tasks at the end of it. He always provided tea, coffee and pastries, but Ellen wasn’t going to do that at five o’clock on a hot afternoon, when all anyone wanted was a beer, a swim, somewhere cool to wind down. This briefing would be brief.

  Everyone seated, she outlined a couple of upcoming operations, including a foreshore playground stake-out in Mornington early the following week.

  ‘A man seen approaching and photographing child-ren,’ she said, ‘and the locals have requested our help.’ Allocating Rykert and Katsoulas, she went on to ask for a recap of ongoing cases, occasionally jotting notes as each member of her team spoke. Asking questions, encouraging comments and suggestions.

  Then she turned to Lois Katsoulas. ‘I now call on our social-media queen.’

  Katsoulas grinned. She was Rykert’s age but cannier, tougher, a slight woman in a thin, sleeveless dress and white running shoes. Dark hair and eyes, a face full of quick expressions and snap comprehensions. She seemed to spend her days glued to her digital devices, playing, texting, touching base like any young woman, but it was nearly always work-related. Her fingers flashed on her laptop keys now and she turned the screen until everyone could see it.

  ‘Here’s the assault on the Stony Point line, soon after the train left Bittern station.’

  She tapped a key, starting a video clip. The quality was grainy, tones of black, white and grey, showing the interior of a railway carriage, a bench seat under a window, where a young man in a hoodie sat beside a young woman wearing a dress and headphones. He edged closer, bunched tight against her, and licked her neck. She froze. His hand went to her knee, edged up under the hem of her skirt; his fingers moved. There were other people there, other heads and shoulders in profile, but no one noticed, no one acted. There was only this dedicated, soundless assault.

  Ellen watched intently. In the old days, the police had tended to look at the specifics of a sexual assault—who put what where, more or less—and laid charges if the case was strong enough. Her job still entailed that, but nowadays it was also important to understand the context, the power dynamics, the relationship between offender and victim.

  Watching the young woman freeze, Ellen reflected that she’d been like most people in the old days, unable to understand why sexual assault victims didn’t just scream, scratch, kick, punch, shout the house down. No one wanted that story. People wanted a revenge story, with victim and bystanders taking charge, brave, noble, as they wrestled the culprit to the ground and called the police.

  But now, and especially in this new job, she understood that most victims did freeze, especially if they were in a public place. They didn’t want to die or be hurt. Some felt shame. All felt a kind of paralysed disbelief and shock—like the young woman on the Stony Point train.

  And the offender was counting on that. He’d probably done this before, and got away with it. In his mind, his victims were giving him permission to continue. They weren’t saying no, so they must be saying yes. They weren’t pushing him away, they weren’t objecting, they were cooperating.

  And so Ellen made sure her team paid attention to how rapists manipulated their victims. How something happened had become as important as what had happened. ‘It’s up on Facebook?’

  ‘I posted it last night,’ Lois said.

  ‘Not the whole clip?’

  Lois shook her head. ‘Edited highlights, concentrating on the guy entering and leaving the carriage.’

  Facebook had become a useful crime-fighting tool. Officers like Katsoulas posted CCTV clips and images of assaults, criminal damage, petrol drive-aways, rubbish dumping, vandalism, shoplifting, hoon driving, theft from cars and graffiti acts. The wider community—witnesses, concerned citizens, law-and-order types as well as cop-haters and grievance-bearers—were able to post comm
ents and encouraged to pass information on to the police.

  Katsoulas spent a lot of time removing abusive and legally problematic responses, or bantering with the wits and the ratbags; but she’d also gleaned information that had led to arrests and deeper investigations. A snowdropper had been identified after a rash of thefts of underwear from the clotheslines of elderly women in Waterloo. Four Bandidos had been arrested after advertising the sale of tasers, pistols, swords and pit-bull terriers on a Facebook page. Two teen boys were in juvenile detention after showing clips of themselves doing burnouts in, and later torching, a stolen Audi.

  Ellen straightened her back, stretched the kinks. ‘And?’

  ‘Result, Sarge,’ Katsoulas said. ‘Four people gave us a name: Leo Hart, lives in Crib Point.’

  ‘Pick him up tomorrow.’

  Ian Judd scowled. ‘Why not now?’

  Ellen’s second-in-command was about fifty with sparse, greying hair and glasses, a tightly knotted tie at his throat. He was a hard worker but basically, she thought, a plodder. Years of experience but unimaginative; rarely given to insights or able to empathise readily with victims. He saw the world in terms of crime and punishment. A crime was committed, he investigated it. He would probably make an arrest, but the human factor was always irrelevant, even baffling. He was humourless, sometimes disapproving. The Facebook initiative was beyond his comprehension. It was words and images on a screen. It wasn’t real.

  Ellen stared at him, her mind racing. She was new to this, but was already aware that if she were to be a good boss, if she wanted the team to cohere around her while also being capable of independent thought and action, then she needed to know how to coax, and assist, and be firm, and neutral, and partial, and a host of other contradictions.

  ‘Tomorrow morning,’ she said, ‘because a guy like him sleeps till noon. This late in the afternoon, he could be anywhere.’ She smiled disarmingly at Judd. ‘I’ll come with you, but it will be your arrest.’

  He grunted, apparently mollified.

  7

  ELLEN TEXTED HAL, be there in 20, and took the long way home, directly across the Peninsula to Port Phillip Bay and down the coast road to Dromana. The sea, glistening at her elbow in the setting sun, cleansed and calmed her. Windows open, an Emmylou Harris CD in the slot, she kept one eye ready for kids on skateboards, dozy tourists, after-work shoppers braking for parking spots, and the other eye on the bay. Distant ships, one or two windsurfers.

  At the Dromana shops she turned left, upslope to a patchwork of small houses. Her own house, a bit paint-peeling and lived-in, was on a quiet dirt track screened by bush. The best feature, a broad wooden deck that offered a view of the water between the downhill neighbour’s trees, was where she expected Hal to be.

  And so he was. Except that her sister was there, too, drinking wine with him. Ellen parked, gathered her bag and her files, and locked the car, delaying her next moves. She hadn’t spent time with Hal for days, but she always had to steel herself for an encounter with Allie.

  She clomped up the wooden steps, around the corner of the house, to the deck, the outdoor table where her lover sat with her sister. The former sprawled a little in his chair, fatigued, but uncoiling easily when she appeared, a smile transforming his hawkish features. He grabbed her tightly and planted a kiss. She returned it, touching her palm to his cheek. ‘This is a pleasant surprise.’

  She meant Challis, but craned her head around to smile at Allie as she said it. Allie, perched like a bird, gave a weak smile in return.

  Ellen gave her attention back to Challis. ‘Hey there.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘First things first: are you remembering to water the pot plants?’

  ‘And piss on the lemon tree,’ Challis said.

  ‘Good work.’

  He pulled away, grabbed the wine bottle, a Flying Duck shiraz. ‘Drink?’

  ‘Just let me get out of my things…’

  She slid open the glass door to the house, across the polished floorboards to her bedroom. A quick toilet stop, a scoop of cold water over her face, patted dry with the hand towel, and all the time thinking…But the water felt so good. She stripped off her work clothes, took a one-minute shower, and pulled on shorts and a T-shirt.

  Punishing her hair with a brush at the bathroom mirror, Ellen continued to think. Allie wants something, she thought. A favour. Approval for some mad thing she wants to do.

  A visit from Allie was never just a visit.

  ‘JUST A VISIT,’ SAID ALLIE TENSELY, a minute later. ‘Aren’t I allowed to visit my big sister?’

  Ellen smiled brightly at her, smiled also at Challis, communicating one imperative: Whatever it is, I’ll need to deal with it. Best if you don’t stay.

  Damn it.

  He took a minute or two, chatting, glancing at his watch, draining his wine. ‘A stolen moment to keep me going,’ he said, rising from his chair, then bent to kiss each sister. ‘I have someone to meet in’—he glanced at his watch again—‘twenty minutes.’

  Then he was gone and Ellen was watching her sister.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You gave me that look.’

  ‘What look?’

  ‘Disapproving.’

  ‘Allie, I’ve been married and divorced, and twenty years in a job where I’ve seen everything. I don’t do disapproval.’

  Allie liked to see Ellen as the sensible one and herself as the loveable screwball: disorganised, but bright, intuitive and creative. An irresistible Annie Hall figure. Today she was wearing a hectic assemblage of thin, bright, sheer fabrics, with clanking bracelets, scarlet lips and dramatic eye shadow. She’d have been working hard on Challis—and he would have been impervious to it.

  It was all an act. Allie was in fact deeply conservative, craving order and acceptance even as she fought against both. She might have thought she’d found what she wanted in her first marriage, to a surgeon, but it transpired that he didn’t see anything wrong in his parents having a key to the house and letting themselves in on Sunday mornings. (‘They’d come straight to our bedroom, Ells!’) When the surgeon started calling her ‘Mother’, turning into his own father, she walked out. With almost a million dollars, which she had the nous not to fritter away on Indian ashrams, struggling artists or grow-your-wealth spruikers. Instead she spotted the wallet potential in a middle-aged real estate agent named Steve, who died leaving her with another million. The unifying theme of that marriage had been raunchy sex, and the loving couple never let you forget it. Ellen had called it the Allie and Steve Show. Steve’s death, from a massive coronary, had come to her as a guilty relief.

  She smiled at her sister. ‘You look well.’

  ‘You look tired,’ Allie said.

  Ellen took a nourishing mouthful of wine and closed her eyes. Tilted her face to the dying sun.

  ‘I’ve met this great guy,’ Allie said.

  Ellen opened one eye. Allie had her profile on several dating websites. Ellen had nothing against that; she’d met plenty of people who’d formed happy and lasting attachments that way. But she knew Allie was chronically incapable of discrimination or caution when it came to meeting men, so, feeling just a little guilty, she’d peeked one day at Allie’s EliteMatch profile:

  I am a vibrant, happy person, fit and healthy, and enjoy romantic dinners with a glass of quality wine (not a beer drinker), picnics, walks on the beach, sensitive, intimate but energetic love-making (my days of one night stands are long over), soul-searching conversations, great art, music and literature, films that move me emotionally and intellectually, and overseas travel (I’m an old hand at that!).

  The person I am looking for is my soul mate, a best friend, a confidant, a life partner, not just a lover. I want a man I can laugh with, talk with, make merry mischief with, grow old with.

  In other words, I have money and I’m looking for sex, Ellen had thought.

  She smiled, ‘On the net?’

  ‘Actually,
no,’ beamed Allie. She didn’t elaborate.

  Ellen said, ‘I look forward to meeting him.’

  ‘You will soon. I haven’t told him you’re with the police.’

  Ellen’s antennae quivered in a familiar way. ‘Is that a problem?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Ellen sipped her wine. There will be something off about him, she thought. Allie senses but can’t articulate it; meanwhile, she’s smitten, yearning for happiness and needing to convince herself she’s found the right one at last.

  ‘What does he do?’

  Allie leaned over the table and lowered her voice. ‘It’s a bit hush-hush.’

  ‘What, he’s a spy?’

  Allie laughed uncomfortably. ‘Don’t laugh. He’s an officer, military intelligence or something. He can’t really talk about what he does.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Ellen poured more wine and said roguishly over the rim of her glass, ‘Good in bed?’

  Allie seemed to shut down. She shifted uncomfortably. That was the conservative core of her: uncomfortable with sex talk sister-to-sister; fully capable of raucous innuendo in mixed company. Then she surprised Ellen.

  ‘Actually, we haven’t really…’

  Ellen felt embarrassed. She didn’t want to pry. ‘Sorry, none of my business. What’s his name?’

  ‘Clive.’

  Blushing, Allie passed her iPhone across the table. ‘This is him.’

  The screen showed a burly upper torso, a solid head, hair cropped militarily short. Forties, Ellen guessed. A lived-in face, wary eyes above a hesitant smile. Bushy eyebrows, ears that stuck out a little. Not handsome, but not ugly either.

  As if paging through more photographs, Ellen concealed the screen from Allie and found the messages in-box. Dozens, hundreds of messages from this Clive. He’s love-bombing her, she thought. She looked at times and dates: several times an hour.

  She pressed the home button, passed back the phone. ‘I’ll invite you both to dinner in a few days’ time.’

  ‘Unless your work gets in the way,’ Allie said, her tone a little sour, as if to say Ellen’s work had got in the way before, and would again; that she was the type to put it ahead of the needs of her little sister.