by Garry Disher
Clara touched his chest briefly. ‘Not very nice of her.’
‘Not real nice, no. Still, old history now.’
‘Just one drink. Or at least sit with me till I stop shaking.’
He found himself warming to her, to the notion that someone wanted to touch him, that someone needed him. ‘I’ll have to call in and tell them I’m still here.’
‘Tell them you’re following up clues,’ Clara said, with shaky humour.
Four
Seven a.m. and already some heat in the sun. Showers with a weak change forecast for later in the week. Ellen Destry poked her head around the door of her daughter’s room. Larrayne lay on her back asleep, apparently peaceful, but as usual the top sheet was tangled about her slim legs and her hair was fanned over the pillow and across one cheek. She’d been a restless sleeper ever since she was little. Then Ellen returned to the kitchen and kissed her husband, putting her arms around his neck briefly as he read the paper at the kitchen table. She paused on the way out, standing at the door that opened on to the carport. No, Alan didn’t look up, nothing to bid her a good day ahead.
She wound the car past holiday homes and shacks, slowing for the speed bumps. She lived in Penzance Beach, some distance south around the coast from Waterloo (for you didn’t live where you worked, not if you were a copper). On an impulse, she began a sweep of some of the township’s side streets on her way to the intersection with the main road. There had been an 18 per cent increase in burglaries in Penzance Beach over the past year.
Penzance. What did the ‘pen’ prefix mean? Penzance, Penrose, Penhaligon, Penrith, Penleigh, Penbank, Penfold, Pengilly. ‘Town of…’ maybe?
Then she saw the new uniformed constable, what was her name, Pam Murphy, waiting at the bus stop with a surfboard.
Ellen stopped the car, wound down her window. ‘Morning.’
The younger woman stiffened, eyes darting warily left and right before fixing on the car itself. Cop’s instincts, Ellen thought.
‘Sergeant Destry. Didn’t recognise you.’
‘Day off?’
‘Morning off. I’m on again this afternoon.’
‘Surfing. Lucky you,’ Ellen said. ‘Where?’
Pam Murphy pointed farther south. ‘Myers Point.’
They stared at each other for a moment. Ellen said, ‘How are you finding things? Settling in okay?’
‘Yes, thanks.’
Ellen took a chance. ‘What about John Tankard? Or Sergeant van Alphen?’
She saw the wariness in Murphy’s eyes. Who could you trust in this job? ‘I wouldn’t know, Sarge.’
‘Wouldn’t you?’ Ellen leaned her head out a little more. ‘This is off the record.’
‘Off the record?’
‘Yes.’
The younger woman looked away. ‘They do things differently.’
‘Like how?’
She swung back. ‘They get people’s backs up. Shouting. The odd swift clip over the ear. Pulling old people over and breathalysing them, people who’ve never had a drink in their lives. Always lurking to catch people speeding. Just to increase their arrest rates. They say I’m too soft. Not performing.’
Ellen mused on that, and sighed. ‘I’m CIB, not uniform. There’s not much I can do.’
‘Will that be all, Sarge?’
‘You’ll have to get yourself a car,’ Ellen said. ‘That bus? God.’
She saw the younger woman close up and look away. What nerve had she touched? ‘Well, I won’t keep you.’
‘Have a good one, Sarge.’
Ellen Destry skirted around the naval base and on to Waterloo. Murphy seemed lonely. She tried to imagine life as a uniformed constable again, working with a pair of thugs like van Alphen and Tankard. I could offer to take her to work in the mornings, she thought. Then again, it would only complicate things.
She parked her car at the rear of the police station. It was now seven-fifteen, her normal arrival time for a 8 a.m. start. She stretched the kinks out of her back. There was a gym upstairs. It would do her good to use it sometimes.
The air-conditioning man pulled in at the courthouse next door, his Jeep top-heavy with a roof-rack of ladders and PVC tubes. Ellen noted the name, Rhys Hartnett, painted on the side, and took a moment to watch Hartnett as he got out. She was doing this a lot lately, watching men, the way they moved.
He caught her at it and winked across the driveway separating the courthouse from the police station. ‘Another hot one.’
‘Not even January yet,’ she agreed.
She watched him prop open the rear doors of his van. ‘Typical,’ she remarked. ‘The courthouse is only used once or twice a week and gets air-conditioning fitted. We’re in and out of the police station twenty-four hours a day and can’t even requisition a fan.’
He stood back, began to eye the courthouse windows. He’d lost interest in her.
‘Well, see you. No doubt you’ll be around for a few days.’
‘Couple of weeks, at least.’
On an impulse she said, ‘Maybe you could give me a quote to air-condition my house.’
That got his attention. He could ignore her but not the chance to make another buck or two. ‘Where do you live?’
‘Penzance Beach.’
‘I could drop by sometime. Got a card?’
She closed the gap between them, stepping over a line of white-painted driveway rocks and straggly low shrubs to get to him. There were leaves and pods from the flowering gums scattered over the ground. She registered the snap and buzz of summer heat in the air, and the smell of the gum trees, and the brine of the nearby sea. She proffered her card. He was very graceful, movements delicate, voice soft, and the smile was a real charmer, so no wonder all of her senses were alert.
He looked impressed. ‘Sergeant. Where’s your uniform?’
‘I’m a detective.’
‘No kidding.’
‘Boss of detectives.’
He raised his palm to her. ‘You know how it is, see a cop and immediately feel guilty about something.’
‘I’m flesh and blood,’ she said, to give him something to ponder upon, then tapped the card in his hand. ‘I mean it about the quote. Give me a call.’
‘Will do.’
She entered the station and went immediately to the uniform branch for the previous night’s crime reports. A dozen mailboxes torched, two setting off small fires. Summer’s here, she thought. She flipped through the reports. Three burglaries. A tent slashed at the caravan park. An assault. Three pub brawls. Theft of a car.
Then she logged on to the grid, the Central Data Entry Bureau, a state-wide database which recorded details of crimes, who reported them, victims’ names, who attended, and so on.
There was a knock on the door and Kellock, the station boss, walked in. As usual, he seemed to regard her with distaste: after all, she was plainclothes, and a woman. ‘You left me a note requesting half-a-dozen more uniforms for your door-to-door on the highway.’
‘That’s right.’
‘It’s not on, Ellen. The budget won’t cover it.’
‘Sir, we’re stretched in CIB.’
‘Not my problem,’ Kellock said.
Kellock was a senior sergeant, middle-aged and comfortable-looking with his uniform and his rank. ‘I can stretch it to two uniforms.’
‘Thank you.’
Kellock left the room. Ellen logged off and headed for the stairs, in time to hear Kellock remonstrating with Kees van Alphen about claiming overtime. ‘All you had to do was get a statement from her. You can’t justify a claim for three hours above your normal load last night.’ Van Alphen, she noted, looked exhausted, as if all of his arrogance had been ground away by the long night, and he wore a dressing on one hand. ‘You smell of smoke, Van,’ Kellock said. ‘Go and have a shower.’
Ellen climbed the stairs to the first floor. She glanced out over the car park. Challis wasn’t in yet.
Challis woke at seven and lay listening to a conve
rsation between kookaburras in the nature reserve opposite his house. It sounded like a dispute: sudden eruptions of name-calling, trailing off into muttered hurt feelings. Then he remembered last night, and Angela’s telephone call, and that Superintendent McQuarrie was coming down to Waterloo sometime during the day to discuss the implications of the killer’s letter.
His mood didn’t improve when he opened his mailbox to fetch the Age and discovered that someone had tried to burn it down during the night.
The exterior was intact, the interior charred but serviceable. The S-bend chain-link support was blackened. Challis wiped his fingers and stood regarding the box gloomily. He lived well back from the road, but still, he was a light sleeper, so it was a wonder he hadn’t heard anything. Enough had happened to him in his life to make him alert to the sound of a vehicle at night.
A voice called, ‘I see they got you as well.’
It was his neighbour. He’s been waiting for me, Challis thought. ‘You too?’
‘Mine’s a milk can,’ the neighbour said, ‘but the bastards chucked a burning rag in it just the same. Mrs Gibbs, around the corner? She found her box in pieces out on the main road.’
‘I’ll have a word with the local station,’ Challis said. ‘See if they can send a patrol around for the next few nights.’
‘Appreciated,’ the neighbour said, wandering away.
Challis read the Age over toast and coffee. Wednesday, 20 December. A banner across the top of the front page read: ‘Five shopping days until Christmas.’ News papers don’t exist any more, he thought. They’ve been replaced by lifestyle papers.
He locked the house and eased the Triumph over the ruts outside his driveway. He wasn’t looking forward to Christmas. The world assumed that Christmas Day must be lonely for him, and so set about ensuring that it wouldn’t be. Drinks at Ellen Destry’s house in the morning. Lunch with his parents and siblings. Then at six in the evening, when lunch was barely digested, an early dinner with Angela’s parents. There were those in his family who couldn’t understand why he’d want to see his parents-in-law, couldn’t understand when he explained that he liked them, and they liked him. You’re surely not intending…? No, Challis wasn’t intending to resume his life with Angela when and if she was ever released. Then why haven’t you divorced her? I’ll get around to it, he told them.
He drove on. Christmas Day. With any luck, someone would find a body and free him from Christmas Day.
Challis was on the road that linked with the Old Highway when he saw them, two teenage boys carrying fishing rods, buckets, a net and tackle boxes. His neighbour’s trout-dam poachers? But the trout dam was in the opposite direction. Maybe they were after the fish in someone else’s dam or lake or creek. They looked guilty, whatever their purpose, keeping close under the roadside gums and pines, keeping their faces averted as he went by. Challis mentally flicked his fingers. Saltmarsh, that was their name. They were cousins.
He reached Waterloo at eight-fifteen. The town looked dewy and clean. He parked the Triumph at the rear of the station and climbed the stairs to the incident room.
At ten o’clock an elderly couple entered the station and said, ‘Constable Murphy told us to come in.’
‘Did she indeed.’
‘She came by last night. She calls on us every week.’
The desk sergeant nodded. The station had a register of elderly citizens, old single men and women, and married couples, who were checked on from time to time by the uniformed constables.
‘And why did Constable Murphy tell you to come into the station?’
‘We’ve been robbed.’
When the desk sergeant had the details he took them through to an interview room to make a statement. ‘It’s CIB’s case now,’ he said. ‘Someone will be with you shortly.’
The man who came in a few minutes later was tall and gangly, with protuberant eyes and long, bony hands. ‘I’m Detective Constable Scobie Sutton. A woman robbed you? Can you describe her?’
The husband, his white hair badly combed, stains on his cardigan, said, ‘She was New Australian.’
His wife was sharper. ‘You great galoot.’ She leaned toward Sutton. ‘He means she looked a bit exotic. Darkish skin, wearing bright clothes, lots of gold-rings, earrings, bracelets, neck chains. But she wasn’t foreign. She was Australian, judging by her accent.’
‘How old, would you say?’
‘Hard to tell. Forty-odd?’
‘You said she came in and offered to bless your house.’
The old woman said, ‘Ask him, ask the genius. He let her in. I was in the garden.’
Sutton turned to the old man, who said, ‘I couldn’t see the harm. She said it would bring financial reward. It’s not easy, being on a pension.’
‘Mad. Cracked in the head,’ his wife said.
‘This woman told me,’ the old man continued stubbornly, ‘that whatever she blessed would multiply to our advantage. She said the house was cursed. She could see black smoke coming off it, and it needed cleansing.’
‘Did she ask you for payment?’
‘A donation. I gave her a dollar.’
‘You great galoot.’
‘A dollar,’ Sutton said. He looked incensed for a moment, as if he’d been asked to get a cat out of a tree. ‘And then what happened?’
‘The phone rang. I was at the front door, but the phone’s down the passage, in the kitchen. I was only gone a minute.’
‘She was alone, this woman?’
‘Had a child with her. Couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. Cute little thing.’
Sutton nodded. The woman would engage the occupants- usually elderly men and women-while the child slipped away unnoticed to hunt out wallets, watches and jewellery. Or, while the occupants went to fetch the child something to eat or drink, the woman would rob them.
But this time the woman hadn’t needed to stage a distraction. The phone had done it for her. ‘And when you came back…?’
‘They were gone,’ the old man said. ‘I waited, but-’
‘Fool.’
‘-but they didn’t come back.’
‘What was taken?’
‘My purse,’ the old woman said. ‘I always leave it on the hallstand, along with my keys, gloves and hat. Forty dollars and some loose change, my Myer charge card, Medicare card, pension card, some other odds and ends.’
Sutton scribbled down the details. ‘Only the purse, or the keys as well?’
‘The keys as well.’
‘Better get your locks changed.’
‘Oh dear.’
The old man said, ‘Her eyes, that’s what I remember. She knew things. She looked right through you.’
Jane Gideon was almost forty-eight hours old, and still no body. The trail was growing cold. Challis re-read the file on Kymbly Abbott, talked to the VAA operator who had taken Jane Gideon’s emergency call, and began telephoning numbers from a rolodex that had been next to the telephone in Gideon’s flat.
One small piece of information: at eleven o’clock he took a call from a woman who claimed that she had seen Kymbly Abbott on the night of the twelfth.
‘Can you be sure of the date?’
‘My wedding anniversary. My husband and I were coming home from the city.’
‘Did he see her, too?’
A laugh. ‘He was asleep in the car. I was driving.’ Another laugh. ‘But I hadn’t been drinking. Or not much.’
Challis responded to the warmth in her voice. ‘Can you tell me what Miss Abbott was doing when you saw her?’
‘Poor thing, she was sitting in the kerb at the intersection, sticking out her thumb whenever a car went by.’
‘This is the intersection at the start of the highway?’
‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t see anyone stop for her? No vehicle that stood out in any way?’
‘I’m afraid not, no.’ The woman paused. There was anguish in her voice. ‘I wish I’d stopped for her, seen that she was all rig
ht, but I live only a block from the intersection, and last month a pack of young girls her age mugged me at an automatic teller machine.’
‘I understand,’ Challis said. ‘You’re sure it was her?’
‘I saw her quite clearly, and the clothes she was wearing match the description in the paper.’
‘Is there a reason why you waited until now to contact us?’
‘I didn’t connect it with anything until I saw the story about the latest case.’
‘All right, thank you,’ Challis said. He took down her details and filed them on computer.
He worked steadily through the morning, hearing the background hum of voices and keyboards. At twelve-thirty he asked Ellen Destry to have lunch with him, aware that the encounter with Tessa Kane still rankled with her. ‘Something simple,’ he said.
‘I know a place that does good rolls.’
‘Suits me.’
They wandered down High Street. A carolling loudspeaker blasted them from the doorway of the $2 Bargains shop. All of the shop windows were frosted and hung with silver and gold tinsel. The bargains shop was very busy; the others only moderately so. Here and there Challis saw signs begging him to support his local trader, and he guessed there’d be a few closures in the new year. But not at $2 Bargains.
‘Done your shopping?’
‘Not yet. I know what will happen: at the last minute I’ll buy Alan some T-shirts and wine, and Larrayne some T-shirts and CD vouchers. Same as last year, and the year before. It’s depressing. You?’
‘No. Frankly, Christmas makes me anxious. So many people have so much riding on it that you feel somehow responsible for their happiness.’
She glanced at him worriedly. ‘You’re still coming for drinks on Christmas morning, aren’t you?’
He stopped and touched her arm. ‘Sure. I didn’t mean you when I said that.’
They walked on. Challis felt a sudden small surge of pleasure. The town was struggling, and there was a killer circling it, but it felt good to be walking along a sunny street with Ellen Destry and to see the shops and the people shopping for Christmas. There was a general good will in the air. ‘It’s strange,’ he said, ‘but I need to do things like this occasionally, to remind myself I’m just a working hack like everyone else, not a copper and therefore separate from them.’