Signal Loss

by Garry Disher

  Perhaps her anger flicked across her face; her mother was watching closely. ‘Darling,’ she said, the word a warning of some kind.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I love you. Always loved you, always will.’

  Tears pricked Pam’s eyes. ‘I know. I love you, too.’

  ‘Shall we go? The music’s terrible.’

  Pam hadn’t been aware of the music. Now she listened: pan pipes. God, was that coming back into fashion?

  AT THE PIRATE SHIP PLAYGROUND, her mother said, ‘Turn left, dear.’

  Then another turn, into a little side street that ran past St Macartan’s Catholic Church, where her mother said, ‘Stop.’

  Pam pulled in to the kerb. ‘I’m guessing the church has significance?’

  ‘It’s where we were married.’

  ‘It is?’

  Pam looked out at the reddish bricks, faintly perturbed. She’d seen the wedding photographs, had always assumed her parents had been married in Melbourne somewhere. She’d been on the Peninsula for a few years now, and had walked past this church several times; attended one wedding and a funeral there.

  ‘Was it a big wedding?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ Harriet Murphy said. Her eyes blinked. ‘My father refused to attend.’

  Revelation upon revelation. ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘Because I married a Catholic.’

  Pam felt mildly outraged. ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Water under the bridge. Not important.’

  ‘Of course it’s important,’ Pam said, thinking of emptiness and hard grudges and her mother’s hurt, all those years ago. ‘Did he come around in the end?’

  ‘Eventually. Your father wasn’t exactly a Papist, and I didn’t produce ten little Catholics.’

  Pam couldn’t recall attending church at all when she was growing up. ‘What other bombshells have you got for me?’

  ‘Was that a bombshell, dear?’

  NEXT PAM HEADED ACROSS to the Moorooduc Highway and then the freeway to the Red Hill exit. Passing the BP station where Michael Traill worked, she felt her shoulders tense, her hands tighten on the wheel.

  ‘Everything all right, dear?’

  Her mother, the detective. ‘Fine.’

  ‘Any boyfriends on the horizon? Girlfriends?’

  Her mother, the witch. ‘Far over the horizon, where they can’t be seen.’

  ‘Patience.’

  ‘How old were you when you met Dad?’

  ‘Twenty-two.’

  ‘I’m thirty,’ Pam said, as if to underline a point. What point, she couldn’t say.

  ‘But Dad wasn’t the first,’ her mother said.

  ‘If you were playing fast and loose, mother, I don’t think I want to hear about it.’

  ‘You young ones think you invented fun,’ Harriet Murphy said.

  Getting the expression slightly wrong: we’re supposed to have invented sex, Pam thought. She thought about the fun in her life: an early morning surf, taking her aged mother around in the car. That was about it.

  ‘So who were these other boyfriends of yours?’

  ‘One was a pilot,’ her mother said. ‘Another had a fishing boat on Westernport.’

  Active, outdoors men. And she’d married a professor.

  ‘So how did you meet Dad? He didn’t grow up here?’

  ‘He came apple picking.’

  Harriet had grown up on a Red Hill orchard. ‘And you saw him with his shirt off…’

  Harriet laughed. ‘Something like that.’

  Pam could only go so far, conjuring up her parents’ sex life. ‘Is that where we’re going now? The orchard?’

  ‘If you don’t mind.’

  ‘We’re doing a reverse run of your life,’ Pam said. ‘I collect you where you’re spending your declining years, then we have a squiz at where you spent the bulk of your married years, then your early married years, then the church where you were married, and now where you grew up.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right, dear,’ her mother said vaguely.

  THE OLD ORCHARD WAS A WINERY and restaurant now, a twee-looking place overlooking vines, expensive German cars nose-up to a rail beside the main building. Pam pulled into the shade of a pine windbreak and they looked over the hillside folds, smoothly rolling and intertwining like the limbs and trunks of lovers.

  ‘I just adored growing up here. A few houses and farms, that was about it.’

  ‘Does it bring back memories, even though it’s all altered?’

  ‘Memory isn’t just visual, dear. Smells, sounds…’

  ‘How long did Dad work for your father?’

  ‘Not long,’ Harriet said. She paused. ‘We got caught.’

  Pam opened her mouth, shut it again. She saw the hot sun, the dappled shade and the bare skin. ‘You wicked girl.’

  ‘My father’s exact words.’

  ‘Mother, do I really know you?’

  Harriet touched her forearm. ‘What you see is what you get, dear.’

  NEXT STOP, AFTERNOON TEA at the Merricks General Store, where there was more German car flesh. That’s what you get for driving around the Peninsula on a Sunday, Pam thought.

  They sat on the deck, shaded, drinking iced tea and eating scones and cream.

  ‘I used to go horse-riding near here.’

  ‘See? We’re going back and back in time. We’ve reached your childhood. Next you’ll be showing me where you were conceived.’

  Her mother patted her lips with a napkin. ‘An event I’ve never been able to visualise.’

  The people next to them were listening. A man, a woman, a second woman, aged about fifty. They grinned at Pam. Pam shrugged, grinned back. She was enjoying herself.

  ‘Where next?’

  Harriet looked at her watch. ‘We’ve just time to pop in at Shoreham, and then perhaps you can take me home?’

  ‘That’s where you were conceived?’

  ‘That’s where my best friend lived.’

  THE OLD PART OF SHOREHAM: the highest point, where old houses lurked with new ones behind dense stands of trees. Pam parked where the road ran out at the cliff top and said, ‘Here?’

  Harriet craned to look through her side window. ‘It’s still there, the old house.’

  ‘Who was your friend?’

  ‘Hazel Carlyle.’

  ‘Harriet and Hazel, the terrible twins.’

  ‘Yes, it was a bit like that. We were inseparable—when we could be together, that is.’

  ‘Is she still alive?’

  There was a tear on the pouchy cheek. ‘Mum, are you okay?’

  ‘Just memories, dear.’

  ‘Good? Bad?’

  ‘Hazel. She drowned when I was nine.’

  They sat there, mother and daughter, staring back along the years, and it occurred to Pam what today was all about. Her mother was dying. She was saying goodbye.

  LATE AFTERNOON NOW, PAM heading back after taking her mother home, the sun low on Peninsula Link. Traffic was light in her direction, with heavy outbound traffic, weekend tourists returning to the suburbs. Meanwhile a strange, bleak elation had settled in her, a feeling she couldn’t name. It was composed of grief, loneliness, love for her mother and her childhood memories, a sense of privilege in that she, not her brothers or anyone else, had been entrusted with the purpose of the day. The pilgrimage. Up and down and sideways, that’s what she felt. She felt unmoored.

  But the stream of traffic in the outbound lanes rooted her in the mundane again. Traffic, petrol. Her thoughts drifted to Michael Traill and to another set of feelings she couldn’t properly name.

  She checked the time, after 6 p.m., so at the Balnarring Road exit she circled back onto the Moorooduc Highway and up towards the BP station. He wasn’t there. ‘He doesn’t work Sundays,’ the man at the cash register said. Iranian, Afghani, Iraqi…maybe a doctor or an engineer trying to make a new start in a shit job.

  Like Michael Traill.

  AND SO HER CAR FOUND ITS way to the po
ultry farm, the driveway that curved around the owner’s house and through the scattered sheds and feed silos to the caravan at the rear.

  ‘A few more questions, Mr Traill.’

  He glanced at his watch. ‘You work long days.’

  Then he seemed to shake himself. ‘Sorry, forgetting my manners. Please come in.’

  He wore faded jeans, a grey T-shirt, scuffed trainers—knocking-around gear, but he looked fresh, trim. Pam, conscious of her hours behind the wheel, felt grainy and scattered.

  ‘Tea? Coffee?’

  ‘Water’s fine.’

  They sat at his little foldout table. He watched her expectantly. She matched his gaze, and then couldn’t match it. She didn’t know what she was doing here.

  So she glanced around at the interior. Crammed, tidy, clean. A monastic man lives here, she thought—habits that a man on remand might learn. But had he spent time in jail? She couldn’t remember.

  ‘Questions?’ he prompted her.

  ‘Were you ever aware of large vehicles coming and going from Mr Hauser’s property?’

  ‘No. But his place is a few kilometres away, and I’m usually asleep during the day.’

  ‘Any local gossip about the man?’

  His gaze was still calm and she formed the impression of a keen mind whirring away.

  ‘Would you like me to ask?’

  She smiled, shook her head. ‘We’ll do that.’

  ‘What do you suspect him of doing?’

  That was taking a liberty. She needed to put him in his place. ‘What makes you think we suspect him of something, Mr Traill?’

  ‘Have I heard rumours? Have I seen heavy vehicles coming and going?’

  She twitched her mouth left and right glumly. ‘Fair enough.’

  She should leave, but didn’t want to. With one punch he’d killed a man she’d idolised, and he thought he could just sit there calmly as if he hadn’t altered the world in a fundamental way. Or was Inspector Challis right in saying he’d been given a rough trot?

  ‘How do you like living in a caravan?’ she asked, as if that might remind him of who he was and how he’d been brought down.

  ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’

  She snorted, ready to scorn him further, but something stopped her. The slight tilt of his chin as he regarded her. The knowledge that he wasn’t seeking favours or forgiveness. His air of composure. Her absolute sense that he expected something better of her than an attempt to wound him.

  She felt small, suddenly. Mean.

  He looked down. Played with a ring of water from his drinking glass, a slender forefinger tracing shapes on the tabletop. Why did she want to reach across and stop the movement?

  She found herself talking. Telling him her housing woes: her lease lapsing, the owner selling. Missing out on the only rental place she could find in her price range. Her fear that she’d be forced to rent some crummy place far from work.

  He looked up. Said, ‘That’s bad luck,’ and meant it. Nothing trite in the words or their intent.

  As Pam held his gaze a current of understanding passed between them. They both blinked, a moment of shared astonishment.

  Traill remained composed, but it had slipped a little. She thought he seemed to float towards her, although of course he hadn’t moved.

  ‘If I hear of anything…’ he offered.

  She felt a surge of grief—about nothing, about everything; the lost certainties of her life—and reached, finally, across the table. His hand stiffened in hers. He might have drawn breath, a tiny sound. But he didn’t pull away and the warmth deepened and spread, from him, from her, seeking a kind of equilibrium.

  27

  THE DRUG SQUAD’S MOVE AGAINST Chloe Minchin that weekend had its genesis in a scared kid spilling to his parents.

  The kid, Josh Saville, twenty years old and the son of jewellers in Somerville, had been selling ice and ecstasy since he was in Year 12 at Peninsula School. Small amounts to friends, later branching into pubs and clubs, the Between the Bays music festival, the Westernport Festival, even at football and cricket matches. He was a bright, vaguely motivated kid, his motivations growing more focused as he witnessed the dedication and apparent healing power of the physical therapists who treated injuries among his footballer friends. So when he was accepted into a mid-year physiotherapy intake at La Trobe University’s Bendigo campus, he told his supplier he was quitting.

  ‘I’ve lined up a share house,’ he told the guy in late June, ‘filled the tank, pumped up the tyres, and kissed the oldies goodbye. I’m out of here.’

  Well, not immediately: the course didn’t start until July. So he was still residing in his parents’ house in Somerville when, later that week, his girlfriend’s car was torched. His supplier, Andy Molnar, who’d been a year ahead of him at school, said, with a note of apology, ‘Mate, you don’t just walk out on the boss, you negotiate.’

  Who the boss was Josh didn’t know. But he was scared enough to keep selling gear for another couple of weeks, then begged, ‘Please, I’m going away to uni, I need to quit. Can I talk to the boss?’

  He waited for his car to be torched or a Molotov cocktail to come flying through his parents’ shop window, but his supplier came back and said, ‘Here’s the deal: when someone pulls out of the syndicate, it fucks with the business model. There are costs involved. The boss wants thirty-five grand.’

  Josh had thirty-five thousand, but not a dollar more. He said, ‘Who’s the boss?’

  ‘Fucked if I know,’ Molnar said. ‘He uses this chick. So, you got the dosh?’

  Josh fell in a heap. If he paid up, he’d never be able to afford uni fees or living and accommodation costs. So he told his parents, who looked at him sideways and told the drug squad, who passed it on to Senior Sergeant Serena Coolidge.

  Who’d been thinking of mounting an operation on the Peninsula, and here was her way in. But it would take time. Using all her powers of persuasion and threat, she arranged for Josh to pay the money and clear off to Bendigo with one year’s financial support from his parents.

  She and her team began to watch Molnar. One Sunday in October he climbed into his mother’s Subaru and drove to AlburyWodonga, on the border with New South Wales. Two cars tailed him and watched as he entered a room in the Travelodge on the Wodonga side of the border. He remained inside for thirty minutes.

  When he emerged he was carrying a cheap nylon daypack, which he stowed in the rear of the Subaru. Telling two of her detectives to keep watching the motel, Coolidge and a third drug-squad detective followed Molnar back to his parents’ house in Mornington.

  Meanwhile in Wodonga, three more young people, a woman and two men, visited the motel room at staggered intervals and left carrying daypacks. They were photographed and their plates were run against the DMV database. Coolidge’s detectives kept watching the room. They needed to eyeball and tail the occupant who, according to the motel clerk, was a woman named Melanie Higgins.

  Melanie Higgins proved to be a sleek blonde aged about thirty, who climbed into a rented Mitsubishi and led the drug-squad car to the Hertz agency in Mornington, where she swapped to a taxi that took her to a flash-looking house in Safety Beach. An Audi TT sat in the driveway. They ran the plates. They ran the address. Car and house belonged to Chloe Minchin.

  CHLOE MINCHIN RAN A TRAVEL agency in Waterloo. She earned good money but the house, car, investments, lifestyle and lack of debt pointed to a higher income than her tax returns showed. She had boyfriends—a fitness instructor, a surfboard manufacturer, the owner of a bakery chain who was cheating on his wife—but preliminary checks of their phone and financial records yielded no red flags.

  Late one afternoon after Minchin had left work for the day, Serena Coolidge wandered into the travel agency and discussed a few cruise-ship holidays with one of the other agents. In her experience, people liked to be asked about their jobs; mostly they felt overlooked and unappreciated by the public. Bit by bit she elicited the information that, yes, tra
vel agents did get to view holiday destinations first hand, and that Minchin’s specialisation was local, taking her every couple of months to motels, hotels, resorts, wineries, tourist attractions and restaurants around Victoria. The woman Coolidge spoke to specialised in Pacific locations, so they spent a while discussing these, to take her mind off Minchin.

  Coolidge believed that Minchin was using these trips to take delivery of ice, speed and ecstasy. Instead of driving back with the drugs, she got her dealers to come to her. They then returned to their territories and started distributing to a lower rung of dealers, people like Josh. The fact that the October distribution had occurred on the New South Wales border pointed to the drugs coming down from Sydney.

  She broached her suspicions with her New South Wales counterparts. Working from times, dates, toll-road records and CCTV footage, together with some firm suspicions, they confirmed that the drop-offs had probably been made by a couple of drivers for a Sydney parcel-delivery firm. Digging around in a thicket of company records, they uncovered the name of a woman who was the sister-in-law of a major drug importer named Hector Kaye.

  MEANWHILE, ON THE FRIDAY morning when Coolidge was ascertaining that two of Kaye’s enforcers were possibly involved in the disappearance of a local addict and low-level dealer, the watch on Chloe Minchin paid off. Minchin booked a Saturday morning pickup from the Hertz agency in Frankston, a Toyota Camry, and a room at the Colonial Motor Inn in Mildura for Saturday night. An innocent tourist-amenities scouting trip? Coolidge doubted it. She saw significance in the different car rental agency and location: by varying the pattern, Minchin was less likely to draw attention to herself.

  In the short time available to her, Coolidge arranged for cameras and microphones to be installed in the Camry and the motel room. Her first instinct had been to shirtfront the managers of both businesses, but wisdom prevailed—her senior constable’s ‘Softly, softly, boss.’

  ‘You’re not serious.’

  ‘Boss, if you appeal to their crime-fighting and cloak-and-dagger instincts, they’ll be only too glad to help.’