Signal Loss

by Garry Disher

  8

  ELLEN SLEPT POORLY. Thinking of Allie, of her daughter away at university, of Challis, who’d not spend the night owing to Allie’s visit, and her sex-crimes team and the victims they tried to help. At 2 a.m. she was at her window, looking out at the deep black stillness of the bay and feeling unsettled, sensing the night depths sounding maritime dangers, animals and men on the prowl. In bed she tossed and turned again and unbidden to her half-dreaming state came the image of her sister’s heavy-set boyfriend.

  He hadn’t wanted to be photographed, she realised.

  Thoroughly awake now, 4 a.m., Ellen checked her phone. A missed call from Pam Murphy, 4:45 yesterday, followed by a text that hadn’t come through until hours later. Ellen shook her head, reminded of Challis’s admonition, back when she was on his CIU team: If it’s important, call. Don’t send a text or an e-mail. You won’t even know if a text is received, let alone read, understood or acted on.

  I had my phone off, Ellen thought, and then I drove home and got embroiled with Allie’s drama.

  Murphy’s text was brief, but clear. A burglary victim had eventually admitted to being raped. Name, address and phone number followed. ‘She’s close-mouthed, Sarge.’

  Ellen collapsed back on her pillow, turned out the light, closed her eyes.

  And then it was dawn, birds quarrelling outside her window. Feeling a fog behind her eyes, her bones aching with tiredness, Ellen dragged herself through a jog down to the beach and back. Shower, muesli and coffee, and by the time she was in Crib Point with Senior Constable Judd, arresting Leo Hart, her old sharpness had returned.

  BACK AT THE STATION, she called Pam Murphy for more information on the probable rape of Ros Wreidt in Tyabb. ‘Probable?’

  ‘She’s reluctant, Sarge. I went in expecting a burglary, and only gradually realised she’d also been assaulted in some way. It took me ages to tease out her story, and there are lots of gaps in it.’

  Ellen thanked her and drove to Tyabb and knocked on the door of Wreidt’s flat.

  ‘I’ve already told the police everything,’ Wreidt said. ‘She had no right to tell the world about it.’

  ‘Constable Murphy is a very perceptive and sympathetic officer,’ Ellen said.

  They moved to the kitchen, Wreidt still in a dressing-gown, baggy cotton pyjamas and fluffy slippers. Comfort dress, Ellen thought, watching Wreidt sit with painful movements and close the gown at her throat.

  ‘Not going to work today?’

  ‘Calling in sick.’

  ‘Have you seen a doctor yet?’

  ‘No need.’

  And so it proceeded, Wreidt tentative, non-responsive, veering into tepid resistance if Ellen pushed. Then a glazier arrived, followed by the landlord, and an insurance assessor to check on the job, and it all boiled down to a crime scene trampled upon and handled by a host of strangers…

  That was odd. ‘Ms Wreidt, when were you robbed?’

  Wreidt looked away. ‘Friday.’

  ‘Just to be clear, Friday of last week, four days ago?’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

  ‘You led Constable Murphy to believe it happened yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘I reported it to the police yesterday afternoon. The insurance company said I had to.’

  Many showers and shampoos and laundered sheets and vacuumed carpets since then, Ellen thought.

  ‘But everything else is as you described it to Constable Murphy? You came home from work and encountered a man who sexually assaulted you and stole some of your belongings?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The story emerged haltingly. A man had been waiting for Wreidt (it transpired that he’d broken a laundry window to gain entry). He grabbed her from behind, tied her up with her own tights, and raped her. He used a condom and made her shower afterwards and tried to chat as he patted her dry and towelled her hair. When he left, together with her iPad, phone and the cash in her wallet, he told her to count to a hundred.

  He wore a balaclava. He stank.

  ‘Body odour?’

  ‘I don’t know, just this really awful smell.’

  THESE TWO FACTS—A BAD SMELL, count to a hundred—took Ellen to a cube of four small townhouses in Somerville. The FOR SALE sign outside the end unit, next to a laneway, was new, and she felt bleak to see it there, hammered into the lawn.

  Marilyn Sligo answered her knock on the door, a slim woman of thirty, dressed in cargo pants and a damp T-shirt. She held up oily hands. ‘I won’t shake or hug.’

  Ellen smiled, followed her into the kitchen, a warm, steamy region of benchtops, hanging copper-bottomed pots, serious knives in a wooden block, a shelf of cookbooks, one open to a slab of text and a luscious photograph.

  ‘Something smells good.’

  ‘Just a slow-cooking goulash thing, Don’s favourite,’ Marilyn said, giving Ellen a sad, intent look.

  Ellen nodded. The husband still wasn’t coping. According to Marilyn, he wasn’t bewildered, angry or accusatory, and he didn’t think of her as sullied. But he was tiptoeing around her, as if fearful of bruising her with his maleness. All Marilyn wanted was to return to her old life. Not deny the rape, pretend it hadn’t happened, life was all roses; just be her old self again. ‘How else am I going to come through this?’ she’d said, on Ellen’s last visit.

  They chatted for a while, Ellen saying bluntly, ‘Sorry you feel you have to move.’

  Marilyn closed then opened her eyes. ‘Isn’t human nature wonderful? This is a side street, right?’ she asked, gesturing towards the front of the house. ‘Not very busy? So explain the extra traffic.’

  Ellen didn’t need to. Sightseers. But how had they known a rape victim lived here?

  ‘They slow down and point,’ Marilyn said. ‘Losers.’

  With a look of profound cynicism she added, ‘And do you know what happened in Target a couple of weeks ago? I was buying work pants for Don, and ran into this woman I work with. I don’t know her very well, but she came over, full of false concern, and just dying to hear all the gory details. She said, “Well, you are pretty sexy, you know,” as if to say I should be thankful a stranger found me attractive enough to rape.’ She shook her head.

  Ellen grabbed her hand across the table and reworked a line from her favourite film, Love, Actually: ‘Tell me who this woman is. Trained police snipers are only a phone call away.’

  Marilyn laughed tiredly. ‘I wish.’

  Ellen released her hand. ‘Sorry to go over old ground, and I know it was three months ago, but you told me the man who raped you gave off a bad smell.’

  Marilyn shuddered. ‘God, yes.’

  ‘Body odour or something else?’

  ‘More like halitosis. Really rank breath, with an undercurrent of some other delightful stink.’

  ‘He helped you clean up afterwards and tried to chat.’

  ‘Yes,’ Marilyn said, before giving Ellen a hard, searching look. ‘He’s done it again.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Marilyn said, ‘Oh, God,’ and closed her eyes.

  Then Ellen saw her rub her wrist unconsciously, and remembered that Marilyn had been wearing a bracelet the day of the attack. A Pandora. Given to her by her husband, it was hung with six of the most expensive charms in the range.

  Ellen said, ‘Don was away, right?’

  The eyes snapped open. ‘You can’t believe Don raped me?’

  ‘No, no. But you were alone for two weeks…’

  Don Sligo was a fly-in, fly-out geologist working on a mining exploration lease in the Western Australian desert. Two weeks on, two off.

  Marilyn finished Ellen’s train of thought. ‘The guy watched me for a few days. He thought I was single.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Is your other victim single?’

  Ellen probably should have trotted out the company line about her inability to comment on an ongoing case. She said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘And she said he tried to talk to her afterwards?’

  E
llen nodded.

  Marilyn snorted. ‘He barely said anything to me during the rape, but afterwards he was all pally. Advised me the healthy thing to do was quickly put it all behind me.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Told me not to do or say anything for a while. Count to a hundred, he said.’

  ELLEN WALKED THROUGH THE hallucinatory noontime glare to her car, baking hot inside. She lowered all of the windows for a couple of minutes, the aircon blasting. Early summer, and already hot and dry, a droughty, bushfire summer stretching ahead.

  She returned to Waterloo, parked under a scrap of shade and called a briefing.

  ‘IF IT IS THE SAME MAN,’ Rykert said, ‘that hardly makes it a serial, Sarge.’

  ‘But we need to be sure,’ Ellen said. Running through the Wreidt and Sligo similarities again, she said, ‘Best-case scenario, we could have the beginnings of one, and we’ll catch him soon. But I think there’s a strong likelihood there are other victims. Ms Wreidt didn’t admit at first that she had been raped, and we’ve encountered that before. She reported it as a burglary, some days later. There might be other single women out there who reported burglaries and break-ins that were also in fact sexual assaults or rapes or incidents that had that potential—the guy was interrupted, for example, or got cold feet, or couldn’t function. I want you to look at anything and everything. Reports of strangers lurking, women followed to their homes.

  ‘Talk to CIU detectives in Waterloo, Mornington, Rosebud, Dromana, Rye and Sorrento, and draw up a list of single female burglary victims going back three months. Don’t approach these women yet: sound out responding police. Did the victim seem to be hiding anything? Did there seem to be more to the story? Were the circumstances odd in some way? You know the drill.’

  Lois shook her head. ‘Boss, the uniformed guys are always in a rush, and some of them have the emotional intelligence of a block of wood.’

  Ellen shrugged tiredly. ‘Do your best. If you do happen to uncover other instances, we’ll go in gently, Jared with me, Lois with Ian.’

  ‘What if one of us is in court and we can’t go in as pairs?’ Judd asked.

  ‘If it can’t be helped, it can’t be helped,’ Ellen said. ‘But if any of you find yourselves alone with a potential victim or witness, or transporting them back here, keep meticulous records of every minute of your time alone with them. I want you to note times—leaving, arriving, interview duration. I want meticulous vehicle logs—start and finish odometer readings, kilometres travelled, times, dates, everything. I don’t want any of you facing malicious claims of sexual harassment, coercion or anything else.’

  Didn’t want credible claims, either. Last month Judd had taken a witness statement from a sixteen-year-old girl who, with a friend, had been sexually assaulted by a team of teenage footballers at an eighteenth birthday party. A day after driving her home, he found himself accused of taking her to a deserted car park at Merricks Beach and touching her inappropriately. She later recanted, which threw her case against the footballers into doubt, but Ellen wondered. Had the girl felt waves of judgment or disapproval flowing from Ian Judd? Ellen had worked with him long enough to know he wasn’t judgmental, but his demeanour was so contained and remote that he wasn’t always the best person to interview victims.

  If he’d been able to provide travel times and distances last month, he’d have saved himself a headache.

  Saved her a headache. Being a boss wasn’t all roses.

  9

  AFTER IT ALL WENT WRONG FOR HIM—after the death, the arrest and the acquittal—Michael Traill faded from public view. His first impulse had been to head for Andamooka, Lightning Ridge or some other outback mining town, those havens for anyone wanting to hide and forget. But the distance, the heat. And his parents—cowed, then destroyed, by the publicity—were getting on. They needed him as he’d needed them, back when it all fell apart.

  So he ran, but only a short distance. Seventy kilometres, less than an hour by car. Still a long way from his old life, his inner-Melbourne bachelor pad and his turbo Golf and his job as head of security at an upmarket Docklands pub. A long way down to a rusty, listing caravan in the backyard of an egg producer, for which he paid a peppercorn rent in exchange for yard maintenance. A long way down to the graveyard shift at the BP petrol station on the Moorooduc Highway, sitting behind the cash register from 10 p.m. until 6 a.m., looking out at the night, the occasional headlights passing by.

  So here he was at 6:10 Wednesday morning, driving home. Taking a short cut east around the reservoir. Dawn light was leaking into the sky but the world would remain dim, blurred with shadows, for a while longer yet. Dawn, and the kangaroos were feeding, misty wraiths watching him from deep in the paddocks on either side of the road, and a kilometre down the road a small mob was crossing. He braked, skidded, his heart hammering. When the road was clear, he planted his foot, impatient now.

  Then a huge buck kangaroo was in front of him, out of nowhere, and he hit it with a bony smack, the roo flipping up over the nose of the car, starring the windscreen and banging over the roof and into the ditch. Traill, blinded, jerked the wheel as if that might bring clarity, and slammed into a tree.

  He sat, stunned.

  Was that petrol he could smell? He climbed out, rocky on his feet. The roo was dying: a feeble kick or two and he was still. Traill’s head hurt. He felt bruised, body and soul.

  Crap car anyway, but on a good morning it got him home. On a morning when it hadn’t been totalled by a kangaroo and a gum tree.

  Traill had the nous then, all of his senses returning, to fish out his mobile phone and call for help.

  Call who, exactly? The police? Animal welfare? His boss? A taxi? Tow truck?

  Not his loving parents. He’d used up all the help they could give him. Used up their savings, their health. Almost their love and good will.

  No signal bars anyway. ‘The Peninsula’s full of dead zones, mate,’ his landlord told him, the first day on the job. ‘No signal bars, the power goes off if a leaf falls, and if we’re not in the middle of a drought we’re slogging around in mud.’

  A bit of a grouch, his landlord. Maybe smelling chicken shit all day did that to you. Fending off health and animal welfare inspectors, complaints from the neighbours. But grouch or not, Michael Traill couldn’t call him for help because his phone showed not one signal bar.

  He stood, and thought, told himself it could be ages before a car came along, and began to walk. After five minutes, he came to a driveway entrance, the name C. HAUSER on the letterbox and a row of agapanthus and pine trees. What was it with the rural properties on the Peninsula, their pine trees and agapanthus? He walked in, his thoughts turning to farm dogs and nervous shotguns. But what choice did he have?

  Dogs, a quivering pair surging on their chains. They leapt, choked, made tight, demented circles and lunged again.

  Their water bowls were dry, poor things. Traill glanced at the house, a miserable place that never saw the sun but crouched in the shade of more pines. No lights, no signs of life.

  He turned to the dogs, stood there quietly, and began to sing. He was sweetly melodious, careful not to look directly into the eyes of either dog but at the ground. He approached. As he neared them he crouched, reducing his size. It all took five minutes and by now the dogs were alternating between yips and brief, bitten-off growls. They were not fearsome anymore but desperate. When he was very close he proffered his hand to one dog, then the other. They slobbered over him. They couldn’t get enough of his hands knuckling their skulls, his fingers scratching behind their ears. He unclipped their collars, stood again, and watched them.

  They knew something was wrong. They pressed hard against his legs, and when he carried their bowls to a water tank, stuck close to him. He filled the bowls, watched them drink, noisy and desperate.

  There was nothing for it now but to approach the house. The moment he turned, the dogs were with him, all the way to the veranda, where they stopped, whimpered a
nd dropped to their bellies. That was as far as they intended to go, and Traill was frightened now.

  He didn’t want to go in. Shouldn’t he check the sheds first? The dogs watched him go, their faith with the house.

  Nothing, only locked doors, dim shapes within. No farmer, dead or alive.

  And so Michael Traill returned to the little house and smelled death on the air the moment he stepped in.

  10

  UNIFORMS ATTENDED FIRST, confirmed Traill’s story, and notified Waterloo CIU. Challis took the call. He’d been listing and scratching out possible Christmas presents for Ellen Destry, so the call came at the right time.

  He met Pam Murphy in the car park, tossed her the keys to the CIU Holden. ‘You drive.’

  The car hadn’t been washed in weeks. Baked by the sun, windows up, the interior reeked of superheated plastics and stale humanity. Murphy wound down all of the windows and cranked up the air-conditioning. They sat like that for a couple of minutes before she sealed them off from the world again and drove out of the station yard. Slowly along the service road, then left into High Street, and left again at the roundabout, giving way to a red Maserati.

  Challis said, ‘Do you know the difference between a cactus and a Maserati?’

  Murphy said, ‘With a Maserati the pricks are on the inside—but the usual reference is to Porsches, boss.’

  ‘Thanks for ruining my joke, Detective Constable Murphy.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  She settled back, warmed by the sun streaming in, and said dreamily, ‘The thing about a Maserati is, it’s a fuck-off car. It says, “Don’t get the idea you’re equal to me.” Your four-wheel drive, on the other hand, is a fuck-you car. It says, “Get out of the way, I’m coming through.”’

  ‘And my ten-year-old BMW?’

  ‘That’s just sad,’ Murphy said. ‘With the greatest respect.’

  Murphy had keyed Colin Hauser’s address into the GPS and checked it now, murmuring, ‘Right into Coolart Road…’