by Garry Disher
‘Me and Donna like to do stuff together on Thursdays,’ said Pedder. ‘Shopping up at Southland. A movie. The races. If we’re going to be late, we arrange for Katie to stay at a friend’s house. It’s like her second home.’
Gets more love there than here, thought Ellen. She referred to her notes. ‘The friend’s name is Sarah Benton?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that’s what you’d arranged for last night?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What time did you get home from the races?’
‘About seven.’
‘Seven in the evening. And you didn’t call to see that she was all right?’
They shrugged as if to say: Why would we?
‘But you did call this morning?’
‘Yes,’ said Donna, suddenly wailing, her face damp and ravaged. ‘Sarah’s mum said Katie wasn’t there and hadn’t been there and she didn’t know anything about it.’
‘But I thought you’d arranged it?’
Donna squirmed. ‘Katie was supposed to ask Sarah if she could stay. She must of forgot to.’
Ellen liked to change tack swiftly. ‘Do you live here, Mr Pedder?’
‘Me?’
Ellen gazed about the room for other Mr Pedders. ‘Yes.’
‘Sure.’
‘But this is Donna’s house?’
He gazed at her bleakly. ‘I get where you’re coming from. Yeah, I’ve got a place of my own that no one knows about and I took Katie there and did her in.’
‘Justin!’ wailed Donna.
‘Aw, sorry, love, but it’s so fucking typical. Blame the bloke.’
‘We wouldn’t be doing our job if we didn’t examine every avenue, Mr Pedder.’
‘I know, I know, sorry I said what I said. Look, I was renting a flat until I met Donna.’
‘You always spend your nights here?’
‘You interested in my sex life now?’
‘Answer the question, Mr Pedder.’
‘He lives here,’ asserted Donna. ‘He’s here every night.’
Ellen turned her gaze to Donna. ‘Did that bother Katie?’
‘No. Why should it? Justin’s good to Katie, aren’t you, Jus? Never hits her or anything. No funny business, if that’s what you’re on about.’
They were both staring at her hotly now. ‘We have to ask these questions,’ Ellen said.
According to Scobie Sutton’s brief preliminary investigation, the neighbours considered Donna to be a reasonably good mother, but there had been a few boyfriends over the years. The police had been called to noisy parties a couple of times. Sarah Benton’s mother claimed there was no point in trying to phone the Blasko household after about seven in the evening, for Donna and Justin were probably getting quietly stoned and never answered the phone. You’d leave messages but they’d never be returned. It was a common picture, in Ellen’s experience. No real cruelty, just ignorance and benign neglect- and mothers putting their partners first, ahead of their children, afraid of being single again.
‘Maybe Katie’s little sister knows something?’
‘Shelly?’ said Donna, amazed. ‘Shelly was next door, weren’t you, love?’
The child continued to play. Ellen said, ‘Next door?’
‘Mrs Lucas. She likes to baby-sit Shell, but Katie can’t stand her.’
Ellen was watching Pedder. Apparently struck by the cuteness of the child playing on the floor, he reached out a flash running shoe and poked her tiny waist. The child battered his foot away absently. No fear or submission, Ellen noted. The child hadn’t been introduced to her. Ellen had always introduced her own daughter, even when she was a toddler. It was good manners. Had she been taught good manners by her own parents? She couldn’t recall. Then again, good manners were a matter of commonsense, surely.
I am sour today. She said pointedly, ‘When you realised that Katie hadn’t slept at Sarah’s last night, what did you do?’
‘Made a couple of calls.’
‘Who did you call?’
‘My mum,’ said Donna. ‘She lives up in Frankston.’
‘You thought Katie was there? Why?’
Pedder exchanged a glance with Donna. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘she sometimes runs away, all right?’
‘Ah.’
‘She always comes back.’
‘She runs away from you?’ Ellen demanded.
‘No,’ said Pedder stiffly.
‘We usually track her down to me mum’s or another of her friend’s, but this time no one’s seen her,’ said Donna, tearing up swiftly and dabbing her eyes with a damp, crumpled tissue. There was a box of them beside her, a cheap, yellow, no-name brand from the supermarket.
‘And so you called the police?’
‘Yeah,’ Pedder said.
‘How many times has Katie run away before?’
‘Not many. A few.’
‘Do you fight with her? Argue? Smack her when she’s naughty?’
‘We’ve never smacked her.’
‘Fights? Arguments?’
‘No more than any other family.’
‘How about Wednesday night, Thursday morning?’
‘Nothing happened.’
‘Does she ever spend time on the Internet?’
‘When she’s got a school project and that,’ said Donna.
Pedder was quicker. ‘Are you asking did she spend time in chat rooms? You think she met a paedo, a paedo’s got her?’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘I’m asking you.’
‘We’ll need to look at any computers you have,’ Ellen said. ‘We’ll give you a receipt.’
‘Oh, God,’ said Donna.
‘We’ll also need a list of all Katie’s friends and acquaintances.’
Donna was sobbing now. ‘You think she met some pervert on the Internet, don’t you?’
‘Very unlikely,’ said Ellen soothingly. ‘Has she ever wandered off before?’
‘We already told you she does.’
‘I don’t mean running away; I mean is she a dreamer? Maybe she likes to explore creeks, the beach, farmland, deserted houses.’
‘Not really.’
‘Not the beach? I know I did when I was a kid.’
She hadn’t done anything of the kind. She’d grown up in the hills. She meant that her own daughter had liked to explore the beach, back when she was little, back when Ellen and her husband and Larrayne had been a happy family.
‘Maybe with her friends of a weekend, but she has to ask permission first,’ said Donna, the responsible mother.
‘You think she drowned?’ said Pedder.
Donna moaned. Ellen gave Pedder a look that made him go pale. ‘What about the area between here and the highway?’
‘Katie’s scared of snakes,’ said Donna.
Larrayne had been, too.
They’d all run out of things to say. Ellen gathered her notes together and got to her feet.
‘What do you think happened to my baby?’ whispered Donna.
That was in the script, too: the words and the whispered voice. ‘Kids go missing every day,’ said Ellen warmly. ‘They always turn up again.’
She glanced at Justin Pedder as she said it, warning him not to say the obvious.
3
It was now 11 am. Ellen was due at the Supreme Court by early afternoon. Saying goodbye to Donna Blasko and Justin Pedder, she called Scobie Sutton’s mobile, and met him outside Katie Blasko’s primary school. ‘I’ll have to leave it in your hands for a few hours,’ she told him. ‘It’s possible that Katie simply ran away, but why would she stay away for this long? To be on the safe side, continue the doorknock, check with hospitals, contact family and friends. I’m going to see Kellock. We need more uniforms.’
‘Thanks.’ He shivered. ‘Missing kid. I hate it, Ellen.’
Scobie Sutton was nuts about his own child, Roslyn, who was also aged ten. He could be a bore about it. ‘Stay in touch during the day,’ Ellen told him. ‘Call or text me if you
find anything.’
The police station was by the roundabout at the head of High Street. She parked at the rear and entered, heading first for her pigeonhole, where she collected a sheaf of letters and memos. She found Kellock, the uniformed senior sergeant in charge of the station, in his office. He was a barrel of a man, his head a whiskery slab on a neckless torso. There were cuts on the hunks of flesh that were his hands. He tugged down his shirtsleeves self-consciously and scowled, ‘Been pruning roses.’
She was about to say that she should have been mowing Hal Challis’s grass, but stopped herself. She didn’t want to broadcast the fact that she was staying in Challis’s house. Just then Kellock’s desk phone rang. ‘Be with you in a minute,’ he said.
She sifted through her mail while he took the call. Most of it she’d bin; the rest was bound for her in-tray. One item enraged her. It was a memo from Superintendent McQuarrie: ‘Owing to budgetary constraints, all of Peninsula Command’s forensic testing will henceforth be carried out by ForenZics, an independent specialist laboratory based in Chadstone. Not only are ForenZics’ fees significantly lower, their laboratory is closer and their promised turnaround time quicker than the state government’s lab.’ Ellen shook her head. She’d never heard of ForenZics. She and Challis had always worked with Freya Berg and her colleagues in the state lab.
Just then Kellock snarled, ‘They’re all scum.’
Ellen glanced at him inquiringly. He put a massive hand over the receiver and said, ‘It’s Sergeant van Alphen. He’s in the courtroom, says Nick Jarrett’s family’s been heckling and jeering.’
‘Doesn’t surprise me,’ Ellen said.
Kellock ignored her, barking into his phone: ‘I want a car stationed outside their house all night, okay?’
He listened to the reply, grunted, replaced the receiver and said to Ellen, ‘If the jury acquits, the Jarretts will come home and celebrate. If they convict, the Jarretts will hold a wake. Either way, it’s not going to be much fun for us. Now, how can I help you?’
‘Katie Blasko, aged ten, been missing since yesterday.’
She wasn’t sure that Kellock had heard her. His face was like bleak wastes of granite, revealing no emotions, but under it he probably continued to be furious and vengeful about the Jarretts. Then there was a subtle shift. He twisted his mouth. She supposed it was a smile. With Kellock you couldn’t be entirely sure, not until he spoke. ‘You want some uniforms to help search?’
‘If you can spare them.’
‘You already have Murphy and Tankard. I can spare a couple more, maybe a probationer or two.’
Ellen grimaced. The perennial shortage of available police on the Peninsula affected them both. ‘Thanks. If we don’t find her soon, we’ll need more bodies, more overtime.’
He nodded. ‘I’ll square it with the boss.’
He meant Superintendent McQuarrie. It was said that he was McQuarrie’s spy, but that could be a good thing if he was also able to drum up support when it was needed. ‘Thanks, Kel.’
‘We’ll find her, Ells, don’t worry.’
Kellock was bulky and confident. Ellen felt a little better about everything.
Finally she headed up to the city, striking heavy traffic. It took her ninety minutes to reach. Melbourne and then find a car park near the Supreme Court. It was two o’clock by the time she entered the courtroom, and she was dismayed to see McQuarrie there.
‘You’re late, sergeant.’
‘Sorry, sir,’ Ellen murmured, sliding onto the bench seat, her movements stirring the air, arousing faintly the odours of floor wax and furniture polish.
McQuarrie sniffed: a good sniffer, Ellen thought. He was a neat, precise, humourless man who professed a glum kind of Christianity, like many ministers in the federal government. She darted a glance past his costly dress uniform at Sergeant Kees van Alphen, who with Ellen had arrested Nick Jarrett all those months ago, and helped put the case together for the Office of Public Prosecutions. He winked; she grinned.
Finally she gathered herself, willed her racing pulse to settle. It soon became clear that she hadn’t missed much of the prosecutor’s final summation to the jury. He droned on, a man with almost no presence, when the trial of Nick Jarrett surely required prosecutorial outrage. Eventually, with a weak flourish, he finished.
Nick Jarrett s lawyer leapt to his feet, placed his hand on his client’s shoulder, and said, ‘Reasonable doubt, ladies and gentlemen.’
Ellen snorted. McQuarrie glanced at her sourly. So did the judge. She ignored them. Reasonable doubt? Nick Jarrett was twenty-four, a wiry, fleshless speed addict, his skin jumping today in a suit that might have come from the Salvation Army op-shop in Waterloo. Barely literate, but cunning, driven by amphetamines and base instincts, not intellect. Young men like Nick Jarrett passed through the courts every day of the week. Owing to the drugs and the alcohol, they were vicious and unpredictable. They hurt people, and got hurt. They made stupid mistakes and got arrested. But not all of them ran over cyclists for sport.
One day in May, Nick Jarrett and his mate, Brad O’Connor, had been engaged in their latest enterprise, carjacking. They’d done it six times since March, and had developed a taste for it. What you did was, you hung around a car park, like the dusty overflow area of a hospital, somewhere there are no security cameras, and some woman comes along, blinded by tears because her husband’s dying in intensive care, or joy because she’s newly a grandmother, and you shove a blood-filled syringe in her face before she can buckle her seatbelt. Sometimes, for a laugh, you take her for a little ride to the middle of nowhere, and shove her out of the door.
The cars from the first five carjackings had never been found. Ellen suspected they’d been stolen to order by Nick and Brad, taken to a chop-shop or straight onto a shipping container, but that wasn’t the issue before the court today. The issue here was vehicular manslaughter, and the police had impounded the sixth car, which had yielded some-admittedly not very compelling-forensic evidence.
What young Nick Jarrett liked to do, while driving his carjacked vehicle to who-knew-where, was play chicken with cyclists and pedestrians. He’d got pretty good at it, pretty deft with the brakes and the steering wheel. To give his victims an extra thrill, he liked to open his door at the last minute, watch those schoolkids and old ladies duck and weave, throw themselves down on the bitumen. He’d always liked mucking around with cars. Never meant no harm by it.
But on 13 May he’d crossed a median strip and misjudged things a little. A lot, really. Tony Balfour, aged fifteen, on his way home from school. Everything to live for, said the newspapers. A young life cruelly snatched, etcetera. Not only that, he was the son of a popular civilian clerk employed at the Waterloo police station.
Ellen and van Alphen had gone for murder, but the OPP had reduced that to criminal negligence. After all, Nick had been driving under the influence of amphetamines and alcohol, to which he was addicted.
Now his defence lawyer had the nerve to argue reasonable doubt, and was doing a pretty good job of it, too, Ellen realised. She stiffened to see thoughtful nods on the faces of the jury. It had barely registered during the trial, but now the testimony of Nick’s mate, Brad O’Connor, was looking pretty shaky. Yes, Brad had testified against his friend, but had he really done that to assuage his guilty feelings and see justice done? ‘I don’t think so,’ Nick’s lawyer thundered. ‘Mr O’Connor was driven by malice and greed: malice because his de facto wife had developed a relationship with my client, and greed because he wanted the fifty thousand dollars reward offered by the victim’s family. Put that together with the fact that no forensic evidence places my client in the car that struck the particular blow, and you have no alternative, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, but to find that a reasonable doubt exists, and find him not guilty.’
‘I thought the forensic evidence proved it,’ snarled McQuarrie from the corner of his mouth. ‘I thought this was sewn up, Sergeant Destry.’
‘It links the veh
icle with the victim but not to Jarrett, sir, but even so…’
McQuarrie gestured for her to shut up. A chill went through her. She risked a glance over her shoulder. The dead boy’s mother and sister were weeping on one side of the courtroom; the Jarrett clan was taking up three rows of seats on the other. Rowdy and ever-present during the trial, they were now flashing grins at the prosecution team. They clearly thought a reasonable doubt had been shown to exist. The only exception was the clan’s patriarch, Laurie Jarrett. Aged fifty, a hard, motionless presence, he was staring at Ellen as though he’d never had a thought or a feeling in his life.
4
The jury retired to consider its verdict, and now it was a waiting game. Hours. Days. Ellen left the court building and glanced at her watch. Mid-afternoon, but it was Friday, so the traffic would be hell wherever she went now. She bit her lip indecisively: return to Waterloo and the search for Katie Blasko, or catch up with her daughter?
She pulled out her phone. ‘It’s me, Scobie. Any news?’
‘Not yet. What about you?’
‘The jury’s out. Look, I’d like to see Larrayne, since I’m in the city.’
He was silent; she could imagine his sombre face. ‘I guess that’s okay.’
She wanted to say that she didn’t need his permission, then wondered if he were judging her for not racing back to help find Katie Blasko. ‘I’ll be back before five o’clock. I want to have another go at the parents.’
‘All right.’
The man irritated her. She made another call. ‘Hi, sweetie. I’m in the city. Would it be okay if I popped in to say hello?’
Ellen’s daughter was nineteen, a health sciences undergraduate who shared a house in Carlton with two other students. She was always prickly these days. She blamed Ellen for splitting the family up. ‘I should be studying, Mum. Exams soon.’
‘I won’t stay long, promise.’
Larrayne sighed heavily. ‘If you like.’
A ringing endorsement. Ellen retrieved her car and skirted around the glassy office towers of Melbourne’s central business district, fighting the traffic to the inner suburb of Carlton. Workers had lived here in the boom years after the 1850s gold rushes. In the early decades of the twentieth century much of Carlton had been a slum, then home to the waves of Italian and Greek immigrants after the Second World War, and was now sought after by yuppies, who paid half-a-million dollars for the little brick cottages along the side streets, either living in them or renting them out to students like Larrayne Destry. Ellen could see the appeal: Melbourne University, RMIT, Chinatown and the downtown boutiques and cinemas were only a short walk or tram ride away.