Chain of Evidence ic-4

by Garry Disher

  ‘They’re not the ones I’m scared of.’

  ‘I know,’ said van Alphen gloomily.

  His mobile phone rang. He only did police business on it, he never ignored it. He answered, Billy pouting prettily, playing with him.

  ‘Van Alphen.’

  ‘You gotta help me, Mr V.’

  Lester, one of his informants. ‘That’s not how it works, Lester. You help me, and you get paid to do it.’

  ‘It’s me brother. He’s bipolar.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Well, he’s threatenin’ to kill me sister with a knife.’

  ‘Call triple zero.’

  ‘Can’t we do this off the books? Keep the authorities out of it? I’ll see he takes his meds, I guarantee it.’

  No one would accept a Lester guarantee, but van Alphen was feeling in the mood to be helpful. He asked for the address, somewhere on the Seaview Park estate. ‘I can’t promise anything.’

  ‘Thanks, Mr V, you’re a champion.’

  ‘Meet me there,’ growled van Alphen.

  ‘Count on it.’

  You didn’t count on Lester, either. Completing the call, van Alphen pointed to the papers spread out upon the table and told Billy to go through his statement and the photographs again. ‘I have to go out for a while.’

  Billy fluttered his eyes, hung his mouth open, spread his knees wide in the kitchen chair, and stretched to show his slender bare stomach. ‘I’ll wait up for you.’

  ‘Cut it out, Billy,’ said van Alphen, who had no interest in touching him. ‘Don’t answer the door. Don’t answer the phone.’

  ‘You’re no fun,’ Billy said.

  At about the same time, Ellen Destry was startled to see headlights swoop across the sitting room windows and then she heard tyres crushing Challis’s gravelled driveway. She checked her watch, faintly perplexed. Maybe Challis had enemies she didn’t know about. Ditto vengeful ex-girlfriends. She opened the front door a crack and saw her daughter lumping bags from the back seat of her car. Larrayne saw her, and at once crumpled up her face and said, ‘Oh, Mum.’

  ‘Sweetheart,’ said Ellen, rushing out.

  ‘Oh, Mum,’ Larrayne said again.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Can I stay for a while? Maybe till after the exams?’

  Ellen felt a surge of happiness. ‘Sure you can.’

  She helped Larrayne into the house and along a corridor to the spare bedroom, which was musty, sterile. Larrayne stood, diminished looking, in the centre of the room, her backpack over one shoulder, her laptop case beside her on the floor. ‘This is so weird.’

  Ellen was careful not to push or probe. ‘If you’d rather go to your father’s, I won’t be hurt,’ she said, knowing she would be.

  ‘It just feels weird, that’s all,’ Larrayne said, suddenly decisive with the backpack, bouncing it down on the surface of the bed. A little dust rose, Ellen noted guiltily. She mentally retorted to Challis: So, am I supposed to run major investigations and sweep and dust?

  ‘Dad’s place is too small,’ Larrayne said. ‘It’s right on the highway, so there’s all this noise. I’d never be able to concentrate. I’m packing death over these exams, Mum.’

  Ellen got extraordinary pleasure from hearing her daughter say ‘Mum’. It was as though she’d not heard it for months and was parched. ‘I’ll show you where the bathroom is.’

  ‘I don’t have to shower with a bucket at my feet, do I?’

  Challis relied on tank water for his house and garden, not mains water. In a dry season he’d recycle shower, laundry and washing-up water onto his garden. But this was spring, a season of occasional downpours, and so his tanks were full. Why hadn’t Larrayne figured that out? She was a city girl through and through. ‘No,’ Ellen said amusedly. ‘But no tampons down the loo-it’s a septic system.’

  Larrayne rolled her eyes. ‘Whatever.’

  Mother and daughter glanced at each other uneasily. ‘Want me to help you unpack?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Where’s the rest of your stuff?’

  ‘In the car. It can wait.’

  ‘Hungry?’

  ‘I ate with Dad.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Ellen wondered if ‘Dad’ was going to lurk in the corners of every conversation. She wondered if Challis would lurk, also, leading to snide recriminations from Larrayne.

  ‘Tea? Coffee? Proper coffee.’

  Challis had installed coffee machines at work and at home. He had a special terror of being obliged to drink instant coffee in the homes of witnesses or friends.

  ‘Coffee. I need to stay awake.’

  ‘You’re going to study tonight?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’d better use the dining room table.’

  When Ellen was in the kitchen, the phone rang. ‘It’s only me,’ Challis said.

  Ellen kept it short and murmured, explaining about the dog and the upcoming interrogation of Duyker. ‘Larrayne has just arrived.’

  ‘To stay?’

  ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Of course not. Is she okay?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Ellen said. ‘I’m waiting for her to tell me.’

  ‘Speak to you soon,’ Challis said, and he was gone.

  Ellen carried the coffee with a couple of chocolate biscuits through to the sitting room. Larrayne was pacing the room. At one point she scanned the shelves of CDs and shook her head. ‘There’s exactly nothing here I want to listen to.’ Then suddenly she was sniffing, and looked young and small. ‘Mum, Travis broke up with me.’

  ‘Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s the worst time. Just before exams.’

  Ellen hugged her. Larrayne, so unyielding for months, hugged her back fiercely.

  Meanwhile van Alphen was heading down to Waterloo and Westernport Bay, ten minutes away. It was out of order for Lester to ask for his help in what was a private, not police, matter, but he had to admit that his informants didn’t often ask him to intervene in their affairs. It was all about balance. As a copper, van Alphen couldn’t operate without a stable of informants, registered and unregistered alike. Sure, they often fed him poor tips about small-time crimes and criminals, but now and then they came up with gold. Lester was unregistered: probably, thought van Alphen now, because the little prick enjoyed informing for several of Waterloo’s finest. Lester was always playing some kind of game. He liked to be seen in public with van Alphen (‘Here’s my tame cop’), and take van Alphen to auction houses and pawnshops that dealt in stolen goods (‘This cop’s on the take’), his intention clear: Mr V, if you ever try to break this partnership, I can make you look dirty.

  Van Alphen tolerated Lester, knowing never to sink all of his hopes in just one informant. It was impossible to know how long Lester would be useful to him, however, or even how long Lester would live. Meanwhile Lester was in it for different types of gain: to get money, or revenge, or some hard guy off his back; to feel good about himself; to divert the attention of the police away from his own activities. Van Alphen knew all of this, but he needed guys like Lester. After all, Lester had told him where on the Peninsula he’d find the likes of Billy DaCosta.

  Not that Lester went in for young boys, or girls. There was something oddly asexual about the man. He lived with his mother above the betting shop they ran, on High Street in Waterloo. She fed information to van Alphen sometimes, too.

  Van Alphen drove. He’d never met Lester’s sister or brother. He’d heard all about them, though: the sister a single mother, on methadone, the brother a head case who kept forgetting to take his medication. A typical Seaview Park estate story…At that moment, van Alphen frowned: he could have sworn that Lester’s sister and brother lived on a housing estate outside Mornington, on the other side of the Peninsula. Still, people like that tended to move around a lot.

  He entered Seaview Park estate and crept along the darkened streets. More than half of the overhead lights were out, shards of glass at the
base of the poles. The houses watched him mutely, most well kept but others with old cars in the front yards, rusting inside a shroud of dead grass. No one stirred. This was a country of shift workers and young families: any noise would come from people like the Jarretts, or those who had no job or anything to look forward to but blowing the welfare payment on booze and dope every night. And so it was quiet and dark along Bittern Close, Albatross Crescent, Osprey Avenue and, finally, Sealers Road. Van Alphen wound down his window and aimed his powerful torch at the front windows of 19 Sealers Road. It was the last house in the street, deep within a corner of the estate, bound on one side and the rear by the estate’s stained pine perimeter fence, and on the other by an unoccupied house, a For Sale sign on a lean in the dead front lawn. Number 19 looked dead, too, but if Lester’s sister was a junkie, or a recovering junkie, she probably didn’t care about the upkeep of her garden or want light pouring in.

  Van Alphen parked his car and knocked on the front door. A dog some distance away barked, but otherwise there was only the wind, and the sensation of the earth whispering through space. Van Alphen had these fancies sometimes-encouraged now by the scudding clouds and the moon behind them. There was no sign of Lester’s little Ford Fiesta, big surprise.

  After a while he went around the side of the house, peering through windows, to the back yard, where someone had jemmied open the glass sliding door, buckling the aluminium frame and cracking the glass. He froze. He edged aside the curtain with his torch and went in, to where there was sudden movement behind him and a shotgun exploding, the sound deadened by a pillow, but not the outcome.

  43

  Challis completed his call to Ellen Destry feeling a little frustrated. He’d wanted to tell her that his father had been taken to hospital that morning. He’d wanted to tell her that it was maybe his fault.

  It started after Gavin’s funeral, when he’d argued with Meg, the argument continuing all weekend.

  ‘Can’t you see?’ she said. ‘Dad’s worse.’

  ‘He seems the same to me,’ Challis had said.

  ‘It’s subtle, but he’s definitely worse. He should go back into hospital.’

  ‘What can they do, except observe? All that to-ing and fro-ing will do more harm than good. He needs rest.’

  Saturday passed, Sunday, some bad old history informing their arguments. Eve forced them to apologise, but they were wrung out and could not do more than that. They were stubborn; it was a standoff.

  And then, as if to underscore the fact that Meg knew what she was talking about because she’d stayed close to her family and Challis hadn’t, the old man had collapsed after breakfast and been rushed to hospital. Challis had just come home from spending the day there.

  His conversation with Ellen cut short, he felt restless and incomplete. The house oppressed him at night, and he didn’t want to sit for hours in the hospital again.

  Then the kitchen phone rang and he looked at it with dread. Meg’s voice was low and ragged. ‘It’s Dad.’

  At once Challis pictured it: their father in the grip of another stroke or one of the weeping fits that seized him from time to time, as though life was desolate now. He asked foolishly, ‘Is he okay?’

  The raggedness became tears. ‘Oh, Hal.’

  Challis understood. ‘I’ll be right there.’

  He fishtailed the Triumph out of his father’s driveway and sped across town to the hospital. There was a scattering of cars parked around it, but otherwise the place seemed benign, even deserted, as though illness and grief had taken a rest for the day. He parked beside a dusty ambulance and barged through the doors. Here at last were people, but no sense of urgency or of lives unravelling.

  ‘Hal!’

  He wheeled around. A dim corridor, smelling of disinfectant, the linoleum floors scuffed here and there by black rubber wheels. Meg and Eve were sitting outside one of the single rooms with Rob Minchin, who patted Meg and got to his feet as Challis approached.

  ‘So sorry, Hal.’

  The two men embraced briefly. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ Minchin said. ‘Couple of babies due some time tonight.’

  Challis turned to Meg and Eve. Their faces were full of dampish misery, but uplifted a little to see him, as though he were their rock. He didn’t feel like a rock. It was a lie. He was quiet and thoughtful, and people mistook that for strength. In fact, all he wanted to do was join Meg and Eve in weeping.

  Meg drew him onto a chair beside her. Eve gave him a wobbly smile.

  He said gently, ‘What happened?’

  ‘Massive cerebral haemorrhage.’

  He found that he couldn’t bear to think of it. There would have been suffering, brief, but intense. There would have been a moment of extreme fear. He didn’t like to think of his father’s last moments.

  Meg held his hand in her left and Eve’s in her right. ‘It could have been worse,’ she said.

  They sat quietly. ‘Can I see him?’

  Meg released his hand and pointed. ‘In there.’

  The room was ablaze, a nurse and an orderly bustling and joking as they worked. They sobered when they saw him. ‘Hal,’ said the nurse.

  He peered at her. ‘Nance?’

  She nodded. Another one he’d gone to school with, the younger sister of…

  ‘How’s…’ He couldn’t remember her husband’s name.

  ‘Oh, he’s history. Good riddance.’

  She took Challis by the elbow and gently ushered him to the bedside. ‘We have to move him soon, but I can give you a few minutes.’ She patted him and he was aware of the lights dimming and of Nance leaving with the orderly.

  His father’s mouth hung open, and that, with his scrawny neck and tight cheekbones, seemed to configure despair, as though the old man wasn’t dead but imploring someone to help him. Challis began to weep. He tried to close his father’s mouth but nothing was malleable. Maybe the old guy had never been malleable. Challis pulled up a chair, sat, and held a light, papery hand. He let the tears run until Meg joined him and he found the strength to say to himself, Enough. Enough for now, at any rate.

  44

  On Tuesday morning Scobie Sutton stared in fascination at the man who had abducted and raped Katie Blasko, possibly abducted and murdered other young girls, and also cheated a stack of people of $395 plus booking fee. Duyker, with his eyes dead as pebbles, dry, heavily seamed cheeks and neck, and patchy, tufted brown hair, did look disturbing close up. At surveillance distance he’d seemed nondescript, a tradesman on his day off, maybe, a man who favoured pale coloured chinos, deck shoes and a polo shirt. You wouldn’t look twice at him. Now Scobie couldn’t take his eyes off the man. He visualised Grace Duyker, sweet Grace, with her skin like ripe fruit, sitting unconsciously close to him as he’d interviewed her about Duyker. Well, the closeness was probably unconscious, but Scobie had liked it, and had ‘unconsciously’ moved his bony thigh closer to hers as she told him about family occasions when she was young, and the creepy way Uncle Peter had looked at her.

  He forced himself to pay attention, and heard Ellen Destry say, ‘You’ve been identified by a witness, Mr Duyker. You, Neville Clode and other men have for many years been sexually abusing underage boys.’

  An equal opportunity child rapist, Scobie thought, boys and girls. Of course, Ellen was jumping the gun here. Van Alphen hadn’t produced his witness yet, hadn’t even come in to work yet.

  Duyker, on the other side of the interview table, folded his arms and stared at the ceiling panels. Scobie looked up, astonished and angry to see wadded tissue stuck up there, as though this was a public toilet. He privately vowed never to leave a witness alone in an interview room. ‘Mr Duyker?’ he prodded.

  ‘I’m not saying anything until my lawyer gets here.’

  Out of the corner of his eye, Scobie saw Ellen lean back in her seat. ‘Now, where have I heard that before?’ she said. Scobie continued to stare at Duyker, looking for the flinch that said to keep pushing. Duyker was expressionless. The air in the li
ttle room contained an evil stink, suddenly, as if Duyker exuded contempt through his pores while his eyes remained fiat and dead. Contempt for young girls, police, anything decent at all. Scobie shivered involuntarily and said a few words of prayer to himself.

  ‘We have enough to hold you, Mr Duyker,’ Scobie said. ‘May I call you Pete? Peter?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Fraud, in addition to the sex offences.’

  Nothing.

  ‘You defrauded my wife of $395,’ Scobie went on. ‘A policeman’s wife. We have a pattern here, don’t we? Your record shows fraud charges in New South Wales and across the water in New Zealand.’

  Duyker said flatly, ‘My lawyer.’

  ‘He’s not helping us with our inquiries, Pete, you are,’ Ellen said.

  Scobie pretended to read a page from the file that lay before him on the chipped table, where coffee rings overlapped like Olympic logos rendered by deranged children. ‘This pretend photography. It wasn’t all pretend, was it? You took actual photographs sometimes? Little girls? Naked? Having sex with you and your mates while they were too drugged to resist?’

  Scobie found himself reeling in distress at the sudden pictures in his head, of his sweet daughter at Duyker’s hands, and he himself floundering, unable to save her.

  Duyker sat unblinking.

  So Scobie said, headlong and spiteful, ‘Your DNA matches DNA found in the house where Katie Blasko was found.’

  Beside him Ellen threw her pen down softly. Around him the air shifted, and a slow smile started up in Duyker’s face, an empty smile but a smile.

  ‘I don’t recall giving you a sample from which to make a match. I don’t recall that you asked for one. Meanwhile my DNA is not on file anywhere. Stop playing games.’

  ‘We’ll be asking for a sample,’ Scobie said, going red. Ellen breathed out her disgust.

  Duyker was amused. ‘I wonder what my lawyer will say.’

  Scobie and Ellen were silent, Scobie mentally kicking himself. Never give them ammunition to use against you: Challis had drilled that into him time and time again. And this interview was being videotaped: a good copper always keeps his facial expressions neutral in those circumstances.