by Garry Disher
He paused, looking hard at Sutton. ‘Scobie, this morning you gave Dirk Roe permission to collect personal items for the victim?’
Scobie wouldn’t look at him. ‘Correct.’
‘How did Dirk know that his brother had been attacked?’
Scobie coughed, shifted about in his seat. ‘I phoned him.’
‘You know these men?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
Sutton looked hunted and tried to find a place for his hands. ‘My wife.. .through the church.’
‘You thought you’d do the right thing,’ said Challis flatly.
‘Yes.’
‘Scobie, the brother could be our assailant.’
Sutton swallowed. ‘I doubt it. They were close.’
‘Perhaps you should recuse yourself,’ Challis said.
In fact, that was the last thing he wanted, if only because he couldn’t afford to lose the manpower. But he needed to know that Scobie Sutton wouldn’t try second-guessing any aspect of the investigation.
‘I’m fine, boss. Honest.’
‘Even so, I don’t want you talking to Dirk—or his brother, if and when he regains consciousness. Finish the doorknock, okay?’
‘Boss.’
‘Ellen, if you could check out the school angle?’
‘Will do.’
Challis turned again to Pam Murphy. ‘Murph, you’ll continue to liaise with the schoolies.’
She’d been sitting quietly, taking everything in. ‘Sir.’
‘But keep your ear close to the ground. Maybe they saw something last night. Maybe Lachlan had made himself unpopular, told them to keep the noise down; maybe he made unwelcome advances and they beat him up for it.’
‘Boss.’
‘Meanwhile, there’s bound to be some media attention in the next few hours. Some influential people send their kids to Landseer, and the victim’s brother works in Ollie Hindmarsh’s electoral office on High Street.’
He allowed that to sink in. ‘Any questions?’
Headshakes and murmurs.
‘Okay, see you late afternoon for a further briefing.’
They gathered their folders, coffee mugs and plates and began to file out, but Pam Murphy said, ‘Sir, there is one thing,’ squirming in her seat, looking embarrassed.
‘What?’
‘The eclipse.’
‘The what?’
‘Wednesday’s eclipse.’
She squirmed again in the face of his amused scrutiny, but soon Challis began to glimpse where she was going with her reference to the eclipse. At present the moon was almost full, sitting high over the land at night, agitating the crazy people. Like all police officers, he knew about a full moon. But Wednesday night promised extra craziness, for the earth was due to pass directly between the sun and the moon, and the latter, according to the Bureau of Meteorology, would glow eerily red for some time.
He began to nod. ‘You think it’ll set off the schoolies?’
With relief she said, ‘They’re saying it’s going to be the ultimate high.’
‘Uh huh.’
Ellen was amused. ‘Unless it’s a cloudy night.’
Pam turned to her seriously and said, ‘In which case they’ll be disappointed, Sarge, and looking for other diversions.’
Ellen rubbed her hands together briskly. ‘Fair enough. I’ll speak to the duty sergeant for you. Some extra uniforms should do the trick.’
‘Thanks, Sarge.’
* * * *
7
The desk phone rang as soon as Challis was alone, a reporter from the Herald-Sun in Melbourne. Then he was obliged to go downstairs and speak to a reporter from the local rag. Finally McQuarrie rang, the superintendent sounding apologetic for once. ‘Just had Ollie Hindmarsh bending my ear.’
‘Bent mine too, sir.’
‘Getting anywhere?’
‘Too soon to say.’
‘We need to cover ourselves.’
That was typical of the man. ‘With respect, sir, I intend to investigate this without one eye on the media or our esteemed local member of parliament.’
After a long pause, McQuarrie said, ‘Fair enough. Just keep me posted.’
The only cure for the aggravation was more coffee. Challis brewed a fresh pot, shut his door, switched off his mobile and told the front desk to say he was out of the office until noon.
He started by examining Lachlan Roe’s laptop. He expected it to be password protected, which meant long delays until the department’s IT experts got around to examining the machine, but within moments he was in. Either the chaplain’s got nothing to hide, he thought, or he’d been confident that no one would ever be poking around in his files.
Challis went straight to Roe’s e-mail, finding only a dozen innocuous messages in the in-box. He checked the folder of deleted e-mails: nothing. Had the brother emptied it? Finally he scrolled through the e-mails sent by Roe, and hit paydirt. Hating to read anything on-screen, he printed out the offending item. The subject line was ‘Someone finally spoke up’ and the message read:
Proud To Be A White Australian
Someone finally said it.
How many are actually paying attention to this?
There are Aboriginals, Torres Strait Islanders, Kiwi Australians, Lebanese Australians, Asian Australians, Arab Australians, Boat People from all over the place, etc. And then there are just Australians.
You pass me on the street and sneer in my Direction.
You Call me “Australian Dog”, “White boy”, “Cracker”, “Honkey”, “Whitey”, “Caveman”. And that’s OK. But when I call you, Black Fellarr, Kike, Towel head, Sand nigger, Sheep Shager Camel Jockey, Gook or Chink, You call Me a racist.
You say that whites commit a lot of violence against you, so why are the Housing Estates the most dangerous places to Live?
Question: Why didn’t the Aboriginals explore the world like my European Forebears did? Answer they were waiting 60 thousand years for the water around Australia to go down before they set off.
You have the United Arab’s union, College Fund. You have Invasion Day. You Have Yom Hashoah, You have Ma’uled Al-Nabi. If we had White Entertainment Television, We’d be racists.
If we had White Pride Day.. You would call usRacists.
If we had White History Month, Racists.
If we had any organization for whites to advance OUR lifes. We’d be racists.
If we had a College fund that only gave white Students scholarships.....You know we’d be racists.
“White colleges”. That would be racist.
Your allowed to march for Your rights. If We march for Race and rights we are called racists.
You are proud to be black, brown or bringle, your not afraid to announce it. But when we announce our White Pride . You call us racists.
You rob us, break into our homes, even shoot. But, when a white police officer shoots a Muslim gang member or beats up a Lebanese Drug-dealer and Rapist when running away and a threat to Society, You call him a racist.
I am proud.
But, you call me a racist.
Why is it that only Whites can be racist?
There is nothing improper about this message.
Lets see which of you are proud enough to circulate it.
Challis had seen plenty of these things over the years. He was more interested in tracking the e-mail. According to the printout, it had been forwarded to Lachlan by his brother, Dirk, who had asked him to forward it to others. Challis put it together: Dirk hears that Lachlan has been assaulted and races around to the Villanova apartments to get rid of compromising material before the police can mount a thorough search. He has just enough time to delete the white-pride e-mail from the in-box of Lachlan’s laptop, and again from the list of deleted items, but Lachlan had forwarded the offending e-mail to various people and Dirk hadn’t had time to remove it from the ‘sent items’ box.
Challis pored over the message again, tracking its history.
>
Originating from smilingeyes with a hotmail address, it had been forwarded to four people: aquapac, homefries and reddog, who had netspace, optusnet and hotmail accounts respectively...
.. .and [email protected].
Challis breathed in and out. It didn’t mean that Scobie was a racist, or welcomed getting racist messages: he might simply have given his e-mail address to the wrong person. Challis continued to scan the printout. Red Dog, bless him, or her, had forwarded the e-mail to about thirty people. What had those thirty—the Lang Family, kathk67, wayneheidi, Elissa Devereaux at the defence department, and dirkroe, amongst others—done with it? Deleted it in disgust? Read it and nodded sagely? Relished the hate and passed it on? Clearly Dirk Roe had forwarded it to Lachlan, and Lachlan to people in his address book. Following a cyber trail like this would be a nightmare. Challis was hoping that finding Roe’s attacker would prove to be simpler than that.
Meanwhile, what else had Dirk deleted from Lachlan’s computer? Challis returned to the desktop screen and clicked on Recycle Bin. It was empty. He entered Internet Explorer and clicked on ‘Favorites’, finding Microsoft, the Commonwealth Bank, eBay and numerous expected sites, but also links to ‘useful counselling sites’ and ‘Dirk’s Blog’. Challis clicked on the former: it took him to a movie site called ‘LolitaClips’. He clicked on the latter and found himself at a blog called ‘The Roe Report’ and the strange, ugly world of Dirk Roe.
Roe had plenty to say on many topics, none of it enlightened. For example, there was his take on education. While in favour of the Prime Minister’s desire for more Australian History to be taught at school, Dirk believed that 60,000 years of Aboriginal History could be squeezed into one lesson. ‘As is well known,’ he wrote, ‘your typical aboriginal historical site is a mound of rubbish. Let’s be honest here, aboriginals and success hardly go hand in hand. This fact, although racist to some, is a fact nevertheless, and must be faced.’
Something had to be done about the employment of Indian doctors, too, Dirk argued. He was very clear about that. What was less clear was why. Challis tried to unpick the incoherent thoughts: Roe seemed to be saying that Indian doctors were physically repellent or poorly trained or Islamic terrorists, or all three.
He read on. A lot of it was innocuous and undirected doodling by Dirk: football tipping, speculations about the sex lives of Labor parliamentarians, praise for his boss, Ollie Hindmarsh, a belief that the United Nations was corrupt, and his personal list of the best fifty albums released since 1 January 2001 (no jazz, no classical). Challis was mildly disappointed to see that Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris’s All the Roadrunning wasn’t listed.
Dirk also invited his readers to post their replies. These were archived, and Challis scrolled through for a while. He found some echoes with the White Pride e-mail, reinforcing his sense of how extensive, subterranean and interconnected racism was. Scratch your neighbour’s back, he thought, and uncover a bigot.
Like the Macclesfield Cricket Club member who had posted his thoughts to The Roe Report on being obliged to play cricket against a Jewish team. ‘Being of German origin, I have to apologise that these Yids are in existence at all. My grandfathers did their best during the war but must have missed a few.’
To which Dirk Roe responded: ‘Pity: now they control all the world’s banking and trade.’
With a follow up from Lachlan Roe: ‘And they undermine the Christian faith.’
Feeling grubby and sour, Challis shut down the computer. He propped his feet on the edge of his desk and stared out at the sky above Waterloo. Some scraps of cloud had moved in. Nothing much surprised him any more. He wasn’t even astonished that Dirk Roe had been so stupid as to put his name to the blog, there were other cases of young Liberal Party wannabes posting their views on the Web. They’d soon been outed by the press and party officials, but Challis knew there must be others who were cannier, more guarded.
Meanwhile, how was he going to play this? It was his firm belief that most violent crimes were straightforward: you looked for the simple answer first. Yes, you gathered evidence, but mainly you asked who hated the victim, and why. Concentrate on the victim, then trace, interview and eliminate all witnesses, friends, enemies and acquaintances, and hope you end up with an individual who cannot be eliminated.
But if Lachlan Roe’s assailant was somehow linked to the White Pride e-mail, or Dirk Roe’s blog, the list of people to be investigated was huge. And what approach would work? A knock on the door, an invitation to come into the station for a chat? Or quiet infiltration, to tease out the embittered, the jaded, the jealous, the crazy, the wronged and the aggrieved?
Challis marked Scobie Sutton’s e-mail address with a green highlighter, then picked up the phone. ‘Scobie? I need to see you. Now, please.’
* * * *
8
Ellen Destry drove to the Landseer School in the car pool’s new Camry, not wanting to spend another minute in one of its tired, uncomfortable, plasticky, poorly engineered and odiferous Falcons. She glided across the Peninsula, passing boutique vineyards, shrinking orchards, riding stables and paddocks that had been pegged out for new housing or landscaped to death with stone walls, ponds, terraced gardens and the vast mansions of local plumbers and Melbourne embezzlers.
All that money, she thought angrily, and no taste at all. As a copper, of course, you had to approach things with an open mind. But that didn’t alter the fact that some people were bad and evil, others ugly, stupid and tasteless, full stop.
Finally the road went up and over a line of hills, offering a sweeping view of Port Phillip Bay before delivering her to the Nepean Highway and then to a stretch of vines between the highway and the bay. Two stone pillars announced The Landseer School, and inside the fenced vines was a further sign, Landseer School Viticulture Program. Ellen followed a well-kept dirt road between arching pines, coming to a mock castle and a scattering of other school buildings in a setting of manicured lawns and garden beds.
She glanced at her watch: 10.30 a.m. A couple of gardeners were about, but no kids, not even on the playing fields, which were vividly green, contrasting with the brilliant white of the goalposts, hurdles, line markers and fence rails. There was money here, too. And maybe even some intellect.
Ellen parked between a black BMW and a white Land Rover and climbed the worn stone steps of the main building, where she crossed a tiled verandah and pushed through heavy wooden doors to the reception desk. At one time the area would have been open and cavernous, but was now divided and subdivided into corridors and offices with low ceilings. There was still plenty of old wood panelling about, however, and the air smelt pleasantly of furniture polish. One wall was dense with photographs: the school in 1913, the first Landseer Pinot Noir bottling in 1985, the Year 12 Debating Championship team in 1962. A couple of past headmasters.
Then a woman with a professional smile spoke from behind a waist-high counter. ‘May I help you?’
Two minutes later, Ellen had signed the visitors’ book, clipped a name tag to her lapel, and was being escorted through a wing of the building to a massive oak door, a discreet sign on it reading ‘Headmaster’. Not ‘Principal’. What happens if they employ a woman? Ellen wondered. Perhaps the Landseer School wouldn’t dream of employing a woman to head it. Her suspicions were oddly confirmed when the headmaster greeted her in an English accent slightly plummier than Prince Charles’s. And here she’d been thinking that the cultural cringe was dead.
A terrible business,’ Thomas Ashby said. ‘Unconscionable. We’re deeply shocked.’
Ellen regarded him carefully. It was possible that he meant it. Ashby was lanky, dark-haired, expensively suited, faintly indifferent and impatient but too well-mannered to display it. It was possible that he didn’t welcome the publicity, hated women or found police attention grubby—or tick all of the above.
‘I’ll need to examine Mr Roe’s office,’ she said.
He inclined his head gravely. ‘And so you shal
l.’
I bet he’s had someone go through it with a nit comb, thought Ellen. ‘But first some background on his job here.’
‘His job? His job was school chaplain.’
‘I’m aware of that, but—’
‘This involved mentoring, crisis counselling and guidance in values and spiritual matters. And some religious instruction, but only in the context of, say, an English or History lesson. We are non-denominational here at Landseer.’
