by Garry Disher
The tearoom was next to the photocopy room. Challis crossed to the cluttered sink in the corner, four young uniformed constables falling silent as he filled a cup with tap water. He looked at his watch. Time for the briefing.
He wandered upstairs and found the CIB detectives and a handful of uniformed sergeants waiting for him in the Displan room. The morning light streamed in. It was a large, airy room, but he knew that it would be stuffy by the end of the day. The room had been fitted with extra phone lines, photocopiers, computers, large-scale wall maps and a television set. Every incoming telephone call could be automatically timed and recorded on cassette, and there was a direct line to Telstra so that calls could be traced.
Challis nodded as he entered the room. There were murmured hellos in return and someone said, 'Here's the dragon man.' He crossed to a desk that sat between a whiteboard and a wall of maps. He positioned himself behind the desk, leaned both hands on the back of a chair, and said, without preamble:
'On Sunday night a young woman named Jane Gideon made an emergency call from a phone box on the Old Peninsula Highway. She hasn't been seen since, and given that another young woman, Kymbly Abbott, was found raped and murdered by the side of the highway a week ago, we're treating the circumstances as suspicious.'
He straightened his back and looked out above their heads. 'You're Jane Gideon. You work at the Odeon cinema. You catch the last train to Frankston from the city, collect your car, an old Holden, and head down the highway, your usual route home. Picture the highway at night. Almost midnight. No street lighting, cloudy moon, very few cars about, no sense of humankind out there except for a farmhouse porch light on a distant hillside. It's a hot night, the hills are steep in places, your car badly needs a tune. Eventually the radiator boils over. You limp as far as the gravelled area in front of Foursquare Produce, which is a huge barn of a place, set in the middle of nowhere, but there is a Telstra phone box nearby. No doors on it, very little glass, mostly steel mesh painted blue-grey. Feeling exposed to the darkness, you call the VAA.'
He slipped a cassette tape into a machine and pressed the play button. They strained to listen:
"Victorian Automobile Association. How may I help you?'
'Yes, my name's Jane Gideon. My car's broken down. I think it's the radiator. I'm scared to keep going in case I break something.'
Your membership number?'
'Er—'
They heard a rattle of keys. 'Here it is: MP six three zero zero four slash nine six.'
There was a pause, then: 'Sorry, we have no record of that number. Perhaps you allowed your membership to elapse?'
'Please, can't you still send someone?'
'You'll have to rejoin.'
'Jesus Christ,' someone muttered. Challis held up his hand for quiet.
'I don't care. Just send someone.'
'How would you like to pay?'
There was a pause filled with the hiss of radio signals in the dark night. Then Jane Gideon's voice came on the line again, an edge to it.
'Someone's coming.'
'You don't require assistance after all?'
'I mean, there's a car. It's slowed right down. Hang on.'
There was the sound of more coins being fed into the phone. 'I'm back.'
The operator's tone was neutral, as though she could not sense the black night, the isolated call box and the young woman's fear. 'Your address, please.'
'Um, there's this shed, says Foursquare Produce.'
'But where? Your membership number, that's the Peninsula, correct?'
'I'm on the Old Peninsula Highway. Oh no, he's stopping.'
'Where on the highway? Can you give me a reference point?A house number? An intersecting road?'
'It's a man. Oh God.'
The operator's tone sharpened. 'Jane, listen, is something going on there where you are?'
'A car.'
'Is there a house nearby?'
'No.' She was sobbing now. 'No house anywhere, just this shed.'
'I'll tell you what I'm going to do. You—'
'It's okay, he's driving away.'
'Jane. Get inside your car. If it's driveable, find somewhere off the road where it can't be seen. Maybe behind that shed.Then stay inside the car. Lock all the doors and wind up all the windows. Can you do that for me?'
'Suppose so.'
'Meanwhile I'll call the police, and I'll also send one of our breakdown vehicles out to you. You can rejoin the VAA on the spot. Okay? Jane? You there?'
'What if he comes back? I'm scared. I've never been so scared.'
Her voice was breaking as her fear rose. The operator replied calmly, but there was no comfort in her advice: 'Get in the car, lock the doors, do not speak to anyone, even if they offer help.'
'I could hide.'
Clearly the operator was torn. The Victorian Automobile Association had been taping its emergency calls ever since a member had sued them for offering wrong advice which proved costly, with the result that operators were now careful not to offer advice of any kind—but a young woman alone on a deserted road at night? She deserved wise counsel of some kind.
'I don't know,' the operator confessed. 'If you think it would do any good. Hide where? Hello? Hello?'
There was the sound of a vehicle, muffled voices, a long pause, then the line went dead.
'The rest you know,' Challis said. 'The VAA operator called 000, who contacted Frankston, who sent a car down there. They found Jane Gideon's car. The phone was on the hook. No signs of a struggle. They searched around the nearby sheds and orchards in case Gideon had decided to hide herself, but found nothing.' He glanced at his watch. 'Uniforms started searching the area at daybreak yesterday. Our first task will be a door knock.'
He paused. 'It's early days, so try not to let one case colour the other, but we can't discount the possible links between Kymbly Abbott's murder and Jane Gideon's disappearance. Since I'm already working on Abbott, I've brought her files with me. Any questions so far?'
'What are the links, boss?'
'The Old Peninsula Highway for a start,' Challis said. He turned to a wall map. It showed the city of Melbourne, and the main arteries into the rural areas. Pointing to a network of streets which marked the suburb of Frankston, on the south-eastern edge of the city, he said, 'Kymbly Abbott had been at a party here, in Frankston. The highway starts here, a few hundred metres away. Abbott was last seen walking toward it, intending to hitch a ride home.' He traced the highway down the hook of the Peninsula. 'She lived with her parents here, in Dromana. They own a shoe shop. I have her leaving the party at one o'clock in the morning, possibly drunk, possibly stoned, so her judgment would have been shot. No-one at the party gave her a lift, though I will be talking to them all again. Her body was found here, by the side of the highway, just seven kilometres south of Frankston. We're appealing for witnesses, the usual thing, did anyone see her, give her a lift, see someone else give her a lift.'
'But that suggests our man's also prowling in Frankston itself, not simply up and down the highway.'
'I know. Or he lives in the Frankston area and was just setting out somewhere, or lives down here and was on his way home. Now, other similarities. Both incidents happened late at night. Both victims are young women who were alone at the time.'
He passed out crime-scene photographs. They showed Kymbly Abbott like a cast-aside rag doll in death, her throat and her thighs swollen and cruelly bruised. 'Raped and strangled. If that was the first time for our man, he might have been on a high for a few days, eager to try again on Sunday night.'
'Slim, boss,' someone said.
'I know it's slim,' said Challis, showing some heat for the first time, 'but until we've got more to go on what can we do but use our imaginations and think our way into what might have happened?' He tapped his right temple. 'Try to get a feel for this guy.'
'What about the VAA mechanic?'
'He got there after the police did. He's in the clear.'
A detective s
aid, 'I got called to a Jane Gideon's maybe six, seven months ago? Here in Waterloo. She'd had a break-in. A flat near the jetty.'
'That's her,' Challis said. 'I checked her flat in the early hours of Monday morning to see if she'd simply been given a lift home.'
He put his hands on his hips. 'There's a lot riding on this. Waterloo's not a big place. A lot of people would have known her. They're going to be upset, edgy, wanting results in a hurry.'
He waited. When there were no more questions, he turned to a Lands Department aerial survey map on the wall behind him. I want two of you to take a few uniforms and conduct a door-to-door along the highway. Much of it's through farmland, so that helps. I drove along it on my way here this morning and saw only a couple of utilities and a school bus. One 24-hour service station here, where the Mornington road cuts it. Most of the farmhouses are set back from the road, but they'll still need checking out. And certain businesses. A place called The Stables, sells antiques. A couple of wineries. A deer farm, ostrich farm, flying school, Christmas tree farm— they'll be doing increased trade at this time of the year. A pottery, a mobile mechanic—look twice at him, okay? See if he had any late calls on Sunday night and the night Kymbly Abbott was killed. Also, in addition to Foursquare Produce there are two other fruit and vegetable places with roadside stalls.'
He turned to face them again. 'That's it for now. We'll meet here again at five o'clock. Scobie, I want you to draw up a list of known sex offenders who live on the Peninsula. Ellen, come with me.'
Two
'A young uniform tried to book me for a cracked windscreen when I arrived this morning. Beefy-looking, arrogant. Know who it would be?'
As CIB sergeant at Waterloo, Ellen Destry had very little to do with the uniformed constables, but she knew who Challis was talking about. 'That would be John Tankard. They call him Tank.'
'Fitting. Built like a water tank, roll over you like an army tank.'
'There have been a few complaints,' Ellen admitted. 'Someone's been distributing leaflets about him, calling him a stormtrooper.'
She fastened her seatbelt and started the car. They were going to Jane Gideon's flat, and she eased the CIB Falcon out of the car park behind the station and down High Street, toward the jetty. She was reminded by the holly and the tinsel that she'd asked people over for drinks on Christmas morning, and still hadn't bought presents for her husband and daughter.
That brought her by degrees to thinking about Kymbly Abbott and Jane Gideon. No Christmases for them, and an awful Christmas for their families. She tried to shake it off. You could get too close. Challis had once told her that being a copper meant stepping inside the skins of other people— victim, villain, witness—and playing roles—priest-confessor, counsellor, shoulder to cry on. But ultimately, he'd said, you were there to exact justice, and when a homicide was involved that meant exacting justice for those who had no-one else to stand up for them.
She glanced across at him, slouched in the passenger seat, one elbow on the side window ledge, his hand supporting his forehead. At the briefing he'd displayed his usual restless intelligence, but in repose there was sadness and fatigue under the thin, dark cast of his face. She knew that he looked down a long unhappiness, and she didn't suppose it would ever go away. But he was only forty, attractive in a haunted kind of way. He deserved a new start.
He said unexpectedly, 'You like living on the Peninsula?'
'Love it.'
'So do I.'
He fell silent again. She loved the Peninsula, but that didn't mean she loved life itself. Things were difficult with her husband and daughter, for a start. Alan, a senior constable with the Eastern Traffic Division, had a long drive to work each day and resented her promotion to sergeant. 'They're fast-tracking you because you're a woman,' he said. And Larrayne was a pain in the neck, fifteen years old, all hormones and hatred.
The real estate agency which managed Jane Gideon's block of flats was next to a dress shop that had gone out of business six months earlier. A sign saying 'Support Local Traders' was pasted inside the dusty glass window. Ellen double-parked the car and waited for Challis to collect the key. She watched a clutch of teenage boys on the footpath. They wore pants that dragged along the ground, over-large T-shirts on their skinny frames, narrow wrap-around sunglasses, hair gelled into porcupine spikes. They were idly flipping skateboards into the air with their feet, and one or two were spinning around on old bicycles. 'Nerds and rednecks, Mum,' Larrayne was always saying. 'You've brought me to live among nerds and rednecks.'
Challis slipped into the car and she pulled away from the kerb. She slowed at the jetty. Water made her feel peaceful. The tide was out and she watched a fishing boat steer a course between the red and green markers in the channel. Waterloo did have a down-at-heel, small-town feel about it, so she could see Larrayne's point-of-view, but before that they'd lived up in the city, where Alan's asthma had been worse, and the teenagers more prone to try drugs, and Ellen had wanted to get her family out of all that.
Jane Gideon's flat was on a narrow street of plain brick veneer houses. Ellen parked and they got out. Old smells lingered in the stairwell: curry, cat piss, dope. 'Number four, top right,' Challis said.
Ellen pictured him two nights ago, the darkness, his exhaustion, the long drive down here just to knock on the door of this sad-looking flat in the hope that Jane Gideon had not been abducted but given a lift home by a friendly stranger. He turned the key. Ellen followed him inside, knowing there wouldn't be anything worth finding, only a poor mother's phone number.
Before logging on to the computer and doing a printout of sex offenders, Detective Constable Scobie Sutton signed out a Falcon from the car pool and drove to the Waterloo Childcare Centre. He'd scarcely been able to keep his feelings under control during the briefing, and drove hunched over, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.
He pulled on to the grass at the side of the cyclone fence, and watched. Morning tea. The kids were seated in circles on the grass, grouped according to their ages. There she was, in the dress she called her blue ballet, happy as Larry now, her little face absorbed under the shade of a cotton explorer hat, slurping from a plastic cup and sticking her little fist into what looked to be a tupperware container of biscuits. She turned to the kid next to her and Sutton saw her grin, and then both children leaned until their foreheads touched.
He felt the tension drain away. But that didn't change the fact that his daughter had screamed the place down when he'd dropped her off at eight o'clock. I don't want to go in! I want to be with you!' Six weeks earlier the shire council, hit by budget constraints, had shut down another of its childcare centres and forced an amalgamation with Waterloo. Twenty new kids, six new staff, nowhere to fit them all. Kids are conservative. They don't like upheavals in their routines. The cheery woman who'd been in charge of his daughter's room, the two-to-three-year olds, had taken a redundancy package— no doubt out of anger and frustration. Now a stranger was in charge of the two-to-three room, and Roslyn threw a wobbly whenever Sutton dropped her off each morning. Was this woman slapping her on the sly? Being mean to her?
At least she was happy now. Sutton started the Falcon and wound his way back through the town to the police station.
The desk sergeant caught him at the foot of the stairs. 'Scobe, I got a woman out front. Says she's got some information about Jane Gideon.'
'What's she like?'
'A crank,' the desk sergeant said simply.
Scobie took the woman through to an interview room. She had to be humoured, like all the cranks.
'Name?'
The woman drew herself up. 'Sofia.'
'Sofia. You say you've got information about Jane Gideon's disappearance?'
The woman leaned forward and said, her voice low and rasping, her eyes like glittering stones, 'Not just a disappearance. Murder.'
'Do you have direct knowledge of this?'
'I felt it.'
'You felt it.'
'I am a
Romany. I am a seer.'
She stared at him. Her eyes: he'd never seen such intensity. She seemed to be able to switch it off and on, too. His gaze faltered. He examined her hair, black and wild, her ears, ringed with fine gold hoops, her neck, hung with gold chains, and the tops of her brown breasts in a thin, loose, hectically coloured cotton dress. A gypsy, he thought, and wondered whether or not there were gypsies in Australia.
'You mean you kind of sensed it?'
'She died violently.'
He doodled on his pad. 'But you have no direct knowledge.'
'Water,' she said. 'That's where you'll find her.'
'You mean, the sea?'
The woman stared into vast distances. I don't think so. An area of still water.'
He pushed back in his chair. 'Fine, we'll certainly look into that. Thank you for coming in.'
She smiled dazzlingly and waited while he got the door. She was stunning, compelling, in a creepy kind of way. The gold, the hair, the vivid dress and the soft leather, they all seemed to fit her naturally.
'You have a little girl,' she said, as she stepped out of the room.
Sutton froze. It was a rule of thumb, never let members of the public know anything about your private life. He looked at her coolly. For all he knew, she might have a kid at the childcare centre, might have seen him dropping Roslyn off in the mornings. She didn't seem to be looking for a lever to use against him, so he said simply, 'Yes.'
'She's confused by the changes in her life, but she'll come through. She's resilient.'
'Thank you,' Sutton said, and wondered why—just like that, in a flash—he believed her.
Challis returned to the abduction site that afternoon and later drove to the bayside suburb where Jane Gideon's parents lived. They had nothing to add to what they'd told him the previous day. Their daughter had moved down to the Peninsula originally because she'd met a cadet at the Navy base there, and had stayed on when he broke up with her. No, he was serving in the Gulf somewhere.
When he got back to Waterloo he found Ellen Destry standing wary guard over Tessa Kane, who was perched on the edge of a steel folding chair and smiling a smile that his sergeant was bound to find insufferable. 'Tess, how are you?' he said.