by Garry Disher
‘But not protected’, the foreman said. ‘Besides, the Trust is weak as piss. A hobby for the idle rich.’
He looked as though he were about to give an explosive lecture on the subject but thought better of it. ‘Look, a call came in last night, flatten the place first thing this morning. I checked out the legal situation, me and my boys are in the clear.’
Pam was disgusted. ‘You couldn’t even empty the rooms first?’ she asked, shouting above the sounds of the bulldozers as a scoop of planks and a leather armchair were tipped into the skip.
The foreman snarled, ‘Because of those loonies-’ he pointed to the protesters’-it had to be done this way. People like that, nothing better to do…’ he finished, shaking his head.
‘What’s going up in its place?’
‘Fucked if I know,’ the man said, looking pointedly at the houses on either side, monstrosities that blocked the sun.
‘Who’s developing it? Who called you?’
‘That’s confidential information.’
Dispirited by the waste, greed and contempt, Pam crossed the road to where Vernon had rejoined the protesters. ‘There’s nothing I can do. Sorry.’
‘Arrest them,’ a woman said, tears in her eyes.
‘They have a valid demolition permit.’
‘That’s not the point. We were under the impression that the Ebelings valued the house.’
‘The Ebelings?’
‘Hugh Ebeling and his wife.’
Pam had never heard of them. ‘I’m very sorry, I’m as heartsick as you are, but it’s a civil, not a police matter. I suggest you take it up with the shire.’
That made the teary woman angry. ‘The shire? Don’t you think it’s significant that the house was heritage listed yesterday, and demolished by the Ebelings today, just before an emergency protection order could be granted? They were tipped off by someone on the inside.’
‘Are you reporting a crime?’
The woman looked flustered. Carl Vernon took charge, thanking Pam and speaking calming words to the men and women who milled about helplessly. He said, as Pam began her slow jog toward home, ‘If we can prove anything, will you look into it?’
Pam waved, her way of saying yes. She was tired, hungry, needed a coffee. She jogged past the site; already the guards were piling into two black Range Rovers with tinted windows, the demolition workers beginning to load the bulldozers onto semitrailers.
Thirty minutes later, Pam returned, driving past on her way to work, hair damp, coffee and porridge sitting comfortably in her belly. The site was empty. She braked cautiously: no it wasn’t. Some of the locals were fishing around in the rubbish skips, retrieving electrical goods, furniture, clothing and books.
Good luck to them. She tried to figure out what kind of person would authorise and abet the bulldozing of that pretty little house and saw only a terrible barrenness.
She drove away slowly. She saw Carl Vernon outside a nearby cottage, beside a silver Golf, talking to a young woman with red hair. At the bottom of the hill she braked suddenly for a red Citroen. She tracked it as it passed, seeing it slip into the shadows beneath a plane tree near the crest and remain there.
Pam Murphy shrugged, accelerated and headed to the police station in Waterloo, where she parked in a corner of the yard, away from the bird-shit gums. She entered by the rear doors, using her swipe card, collected a sheaf of circulars and memos from her pigeonhole, and climbed the stairs to CIU. She had things to do.
She was bemused to find that she’d beaten the others to work: usually she was late. Thinking she should mark the occasion by brewing the coffee, Pam wandered into the tearoom and stared doubtfully at the coffee machine that Challis had installed. The boss loved his coffee. Never drank instant. Made terrific coffee, too, and had shown her how to load the machine, but now all of that information had vanished into thin air.
Challis saved her from making a fool of herself. He came easily up the stairs, looking fresh and benign, as though he’d had a good shag this morning. Perhaps he had: living with Sergeant Destry seemed to be doing him good. He would never be called Laughing Boy by the troops-his face saw to that, with its narrow planes, dark cast and air of permanent scepticism-but he was lighter on his feet these days, burned more slowly, as if a great weight had been removed from his shoulders.
They stood about for a while, waiting for the coffee to brew. She told him about the bulldozed house, about the man named Hugh Ebeling and his contemptuous act, but Challis was distracted. ‘Ebeling,’ he murmured. ‘Don’t know anything about the guy.’
There was a way of finding out, though. All Pam needed was for Challis and the others to leave the building for an hour or two.
****
18
While Challis and Murphy drank their coffee that Wednesday morning, Ellen Destry was standing in the grounds of the Landseer School with the deputy head, watching as buses, BMWs and Range Rovers pulled in, unloaded and pulled out again. She saw one Chinese face and one Indian, but the school community was pretty much a monoculture. The Landseer School for Blonde Children, she thought.
‘That’s Zara,’ Moorhouse said, pointing suddenly.
Tall, fair, faintly voluptuous, gloriously self-absorbed. Ellen began to move, saying from the corner of her mouth, ‘I’ll need you to sit in while I interview her.’
‘I’d have insisted anyway,’ Moorhouse said.
Ellen nodded. It was playing out as she wanted it to play out. It would look bad if she questioned Zara Selkirk without an appropriate adult present. Moorhouse had status but was not, it seemed, in thrall to the money, power and prestige that surrounded the school; and the school was a better environment for Ellen’s purposes than Zara’s home, where she might find herself obstructed by a parent or a lawyer.
Besides, she wanted to ambush the kid.
Five minutes later, they were in Moorhouse’s office, an environment of papery smells and disordered bookshelves and files, Zara Selkirk saying, ‘I was sick yesterday. I brought a note from my mother.’
‘Cut the crap,’ Ellen said. ‘You wagged school. You went up to the city after school on Monday afternoon, attended a concert that evening, and spent the night in your family’s Southbank apartment. A day’s shopping with your mother yesterday, and back home last night.’
Zara Selkirk sulked. ‘What’s it to you?’
‘I’m not a truant officer. I’m investigating the assault on the school chaplain.’
‘You can’t pin that on me. I wasn’t even here.’
‘But you were at school on Monday. Yours was the only appointment in his diary.’
‘So?’
‘So tell me about it.’
‘Not fair.’
‘Zara,’ said the deputy head, ‘the sooner you answer the sergeant’s questions the sooner you can return to class.’
There was a moment when the girl seemed almost to weigh these options. Her face cleared and she said, ‘Because of some stuff that wasn’t even my idea I had to like you know, apologise to some old… the library lady. Like she’s not even a teacher or anything.’
Ellen said distinctly, ‘Zara, you and your friends set up a fake Facebook page that caused immense distress to an innocent middle-aged woman who’s not in a position to defend herself
‘Well it was a joke. She should learn to take jokes.’
‘Why did you meet with Mr Roe on Monday?’
‘He was like the go-between.’
‘He was the mediator between you and Mrs Richardson?’
Zara Selkirk said, ‘Yeah,’ as though everything was obvious and why didn’t Ellen get it.
‘But she didn’t attend?’
‘Bitch went to a lawyer.’
‘Zara,’ warned Moorhouse.
The girl’s face grew drowsy with satisfaction. ‘Well she is.’
Ellen stepped in. ‘What did you and Mr Roe talk about?’
With a twist of her mouth, Zara Selkirk said, ‘Pervert. He said I should write
to her but mainly he was interested in my tits.’
Ellen, remembering what Hal had discovered about the Roe brothers’ upbringing, visualised the scene. Lachlan Roe, forty years old, the Landseer chaplain but an unloved or unlovely man, waits in his poky office for the only appointment of the day. The Year 12s are no longer around, they’re off enjoying Schoolies Week-not that they’d ever sought his advice or counselling anyway. It’s a long morning. All of his mornings are long. Maybe he wanders the corridors, looking for lost souls, a staff member perhaps, but no one wants him. He returns to his office and logs on to a pornography site or his brother’s blog or reads and sends e-mails.
Then soon after lunch there’s a knock on his door. ‘Come,’ he calls, in his smooth, disarming way.
The sixteen-year-old who slips into his room has the breasts of a woman and the face of a child. The chaplain notices these things in that order. She’s wearing aspects of the Landseer girls’ uniform, a white blouse over a long charcoal skirt, so he can’t assess her legs, but her wrists and hands are soft and plump. He takes in her hair, which is the kind of blonde that is almost white, her expressive lips and her body language, which both entices and expresses contempt for him. She doesn’t want to be in the same room with him.
‘How did he seem to you?’ said Ellen now.
‘Who?’
Ellen closed and opened her eyes and said carefully, ‘What kind of mood was Mr Roe in?’
‘A dirty-old-man mood.’
Lachlan Roe is slender, of medium height, and believes he has an air of boyish charm. He’s the same age as the child’s father but he’s not uncool, like most fathers. He’s youthful looking in his black silk T-shirt and grey linen jacket with the cuffs turned back.
The jacket that later collected another person’s mucus.
He lets Zara wait on his strip of carpet for a long moment, then loads his face and body with soulful gentleness and murmurs, ‘Hello, Zara, please take a seat.’
She’s a gawkily lovely teenager, and an old ugliness stirs inside him. There in his sterile office the drowsy mid-November sun streams in, banding the threadbare carpet, the girl’s lap and one forearm, her fine hairs fairly glowing, so that he swallows and coughs nervously.
Ellen could see it all. ‘Was there any specific thing Mr Roe did or said that made you feel uncomfortable?’
‘You think I attacked him. I told you, I was at a concert.’
‘I know that. I’m trying to get a feeling for the kind of man Mr Roe was…is.’
Zara considered this, looking for traps. ‘If you think I paid someone to attack him, well I didn’t. And my dad didn’t do it, ‘cause he’s away.’
‘Zara, what did Mr Roe do and say?’
‘He goes, do my parents know why I’m here? I go, yes, they said I had to apologise to old Merle. He goes, “Well, Zara, they are your parents, one does have a duty to one’s parents.” Moron.’
‘Zara,’ said Moorhouse.
‘Well, it’s not fair. He said I had all these unworldly people around me and I was like, defiled by them.’
‘Defiled? What did he mean by that?’
‘I told him it wasn’t my idea, the Facebook thing, it was Amber and Megan. He said purity comes from separating yourself from defiling influences and was I a lesbian. Pervert.’
Ellen thought she was probably right. ‘What else?’
‘He got this mad look on his face. He said he could see my future. Drugs, sex, backpacking in Europe and stuff.’
‘Backpacking in Europe?’
‘He was barking mad. He said I would meet some guy with caramel skin and liquid eyes who would ask me to deliver a package.’
‘What package?’
‘How should I know? I’m supposed to listen to this guy?’
‘What else? Did he touch you?’
Zara shuddered. ‘No way. Just told me as chaplain he understood the teenage mindset. I said, Yeah, but do you have any like, formal qualifications?’
Ellen and Moorhouse exchanged a smile. ‘What did he say?’
‘He said, forget further study, university is too narrowing, forget travel, I’ll meet drug couriers and terrorists. He said it’s my duty to get married and have children and honour my parents. “You young people come to me with your tight clothes and your soul-damaging mobile phones, wanting Godless freedoms,”‘ Zara said mincingly, hooking her fingers in quotation marks around the chaplain’s words.
‘What then?’
With an apologetic glance at Moorhouse, Zara Selkirk said, ‘I cleared out, sorry.’
‘He didn’t raise the issue of your apology to Mrs Richardson?’
‘He said, “I am the elect,” like he was God or Jesus or something. I was a bit scared, actually. He was so weird.’
‘Did you tell anyone about the session?’
Zara looked away. ‘No.’
‘No one?’
‘Like, who would believe me?’ Zara said.
****
19
The morning passed. Pam Murphy followed up on a handful of residents’ complaints that probably stemmed from schoolies’ exuberance-used condoms on the front lawn of a house opposite the foreshore tents, a parked car sideswiped in the same area, the shoplifting of Bolle sunglasses from HangTen-but mostly she was waiting for CIU to empty.
Finally Challis left to interview Dirk Roe’s office colleagues and the members of Lachlan Roe’s congregation, and Scobie Sutton headed out to track down a ride-on mower. The poor guy looked wretched.
Still, there was always a lot of traffic on the first floor, uniforms coming and going with paperwork that demanded attention, the station’s new sergeant and senior sergeant keeping an eye on things, the IT geek returning with Lachlan Roe’s laptop, someone from the canteen taking lunch orders… Pam ordered a tuna salad, and she thanked the sergeant for letting her have Tank and Cree as backup that night, during the eclipse, but mostly she kept her head down and waited.
When it was quiet, she logged on to the Law Enforcement Database. Strict protocols were in place for using LED, and she was breaking most of them, but the image of this morning’s wilful destruction wouldn’t leave her alone and soon she had Hugh Ebeling’s details on the screen. The man who’d torn down Somerland just so he could dominate the ridge and the sky above Penzance Beach was forty-two years old, a property developer, married to Mia, aged forty. Mia was a senior executive with Lotto Link, a Swiss company that had recently acquired licences to sell scratch cards and install poker machines in Victorian pubs and clubs. So, not short of a dollar. No children.
They lived in Brighton-pronounced ‘Brahton’, Pam believed, by the nipped, tucked and Botoxed men and women who lived there. Presumably Penzance Beach would be their weekend residence. Two houses overlooking the water, lucky devils.
They owned a Range Rover, a Maserati and BMW. Hugh had lost two points for speeding, Mia nine. Various parking infringements. No criminal record for either person but Hugh had been sued by a consortium of clients for building on a flood plain in northern New South Wales, and Mia was a discharged bankrupt.
But casual dishonesty and steering close to the wind were probably not unusual in the nouveau riche circles the Ebelings moved in. Pam continued her search, and by way of links to the Age and Brighton Argus newspapers and a residents’ action group, discovered that numerous well-established trees on the roadway between the Ebelings’ Brighton house and the waters of the bay had been chopped down or poisoned. The Ebelings had expressed outrage at the destruction, but it was widely believed that they’d ordered it, wanting a sea view from their top windows.
Finally, Mia’s cousin was Justice Stephen Marlowe of the state’s planning appeals tribunal. You might as well give up, Pam thought, throwing down her pen in disgust. You’re never going to beat the bastards.
****
Scobie Sutton drove to a dealer in second-hand farm machinery in Cranbourne and found the stolen ride-on mower. He knew the dealer was vaguely bent, but he was to
o deeply fatigued and discouraged to pursue that angle. Instead, he said, ‘Can you give me a name?’
‘I can give you a numberplate.’
Which belonged to a van owned by Laurie Jarrett on the Seaview Park estate in Waterloo. Jarrett was well known to the police.
After that he drove to the hospital and there was his wife, at the bedside of Lachlan Roe. ‘Sweetheart, come home please, we need you.’
‘He hasn’t moved. He hasn’t said anything.’
They looked at Roe’s pinched, bruised face, the bandages swaddling his head. ‘Sweetheart, let the nurses do their job.’
‘I’ve been talking to him non-stop,’ Beth wailed. ‘Not a flicker.’
‘Come home. You’re tired. You need to sleep. It’s Ros’s concert tonight. Please, Beth.’
‘Full moon tonight,’ said Beth in her new, wild-eyed way.
‘Ros’s concert tonight,’ said Scobie firmly, feeling that his heart would break.
She came eventually, as though drugged with something you could never measure or trace.
****
After viewing the bulldozed remains of Somerland with Carl Vernon, Ludmilla Wishart returned to Planning East and made a flurry of phone calls. Yes, the minister had received the emergency application to protect Somerland, but hadn’t intended to act on it until Friday, after he’d had further advice and consultation. His minder said that the minister wished to convey his deepest regrets, but the demolition had, on the face of it, proceeded lawfully, thank you, goodbye.
Then the calls began. A journalist from the local paper. Distressed Penzance Beach residents. And anonymous callers, abusive callers, placing her in the pockets of wealthy developers. ‘I’m not!’ she insisted, but these were not people who were interested in debating the point.
In fact, she was pretty sure who had tipped off the Ebelings. She’d gathered plenty of evidence over the past weeks and months, but when and how she should use it, she didn’t quite know.