by Garry Disher
People wanted to be helpful. In the days that followed, they flooded Ellen with useless information.
* * * *
Operation Calling Cardso-called because their burglar liked to leave an unflushed turd at the scene of every break-incame together quickly for Kellock and van Alphen. Of course, they could have obtained DNA from the calling card and matched it to Nick Jarrett, but youd have to be keen. Besides, in seven of the eight burglaries so far, the owners had come home, traced the offending odour to its source, and flushed the evidence away, feeling doubly violated.
So van Alphen and Kellock used a time-honoured method: while CIU and most of the uniforms were out looking for the missing kid, they put the hard word on some of their informants. This led them to Ivan Henniker, who had a speed habit, the speed produced in a fortified laboratory by the Yanqui motorcycle gang and distributed by members of the Jarrett family in the Waterloo area. Henniker feared the Jarretts and wanted to be free of them, but he also needed access to a ready supply. A dilemma, but van Alphen and Kellock helped him to resolve it. Surprising how effective a telephone book can be, in a soundless, windowless back room.
Your girlfriend works in Waterloo Travel?
Yes, sobbed Henniker. A jumpy, scrawny guy, limp hair owing to the speed hed run through his system over the years.
She gives you a list of names and addresses of whos away on holiday? So we should be arresting her, too?
No! No, dont do that. Shes got this little notebook computer.
Brings her work home with her.
I access it when shes taking a shower, said Henniker.
Lovely guy, said van Alphen to Kellock.
A real prince.
Henniker flushed. Do you want the details, or not?
Fire away.
Shes got this file, travel insurance, of people away on holiday.
And you pass on names and addresses to the Jarretts.
Yeah. Theyll kill me for this.
Not unless we kill you first, said Kellock. Who in the Jarrett clan?
Nick.
Van Alphen and Kellock beamed at each other.
Heres what we want you to do, van Alphen said, proceeding to lay it out for Henniker.
Nick will kill me, said Henniker miserably. Hes a mad bastard. They all are.
Well protect you, van Alphen said unconvincingly.
* * * *
18
Why do I do it to myself? wondered Pam Murphy late that afternoon.
Tests, exams and formal challenges of any kind always made her anxious. So why had she applied to do this course?
Shed been up since 5 am, when shed showered, had breakfast, packed, and driven to the training facility, a converted youth camp in the foothills outside Melbourne. Prefabricated huts, a gym, swimming pool, running track, classrooms, dining hall and firing range. The morning had been aimed at seeing how fit they were. Pam, placed in the top five of her last three triathlons, had made it through without raising a sweat. The afternoon had involved a mock conflict-resolution scenario, which shed stuffed up. This evening there would be a seminar. All in all, a testing regime of physical and intellectual activities aimed at sorting the wheat from the chaff. Two candidates had dropped out already.
Pam groaned, feeling stiff and sore. She was lying on a hard, monastic bed in a narrow room with flimsy walls. A guy in each of the adjacent rooms, and she wouldnt mind betting that both were snorers. Not many female candidates.
The second week might be better. They would attend further courses at the police academy in Glen Waverley, followed by a final week at Command Headquarters in the city. There had been other two-, three- and four-week courses over the past year, and this was the last round. If she graduated shed be entitled to apply for detective positions.
If she graduated.
She lay there, needing a shower but too sore and tired to move, and thought about the pressures faced by your average cop, wondering why she stuck it out. Tests, exams, even promotions and transfersall stress inducing. Malicious civilian complaints, which always had to be investigated and blotted your record. Giving court evidence, especially being cross-examined by snide, flash defence barristers.
And the day-to-day aggravations. Two weekends ago she and John Tankard had picked up a drunken thirteen-year-old girl at three in the morning, driven her home, and been screamed at by the parents for interfering in the familys affairs. This year alone shed attended five fatalities on the freewayalcohol, drugs and speeding. Earlier in the year shed arrested three teenagers from the Seaview Park estate whod gone out armed with knives and machetesJust in case we get attacked by the Jarretts. A month before that shed helped social workers remove three children aged under ten from a house in Seaview Park, the children starving and showing signs of years of abuse. Theyd kicked and screamed: I want my mum, I want my dad.
Her bedside alarm sounded. She had an hour free to study before dinner and the evening seminar. Stretching, groaning, she told herself to see the following days as an opportunity to learn rather than be found wanting for what she didnt know or couldnt achieve. She took her little transistor radio with her into the shower, turned it to the 6 pm news.
The water gushed, drowning out the first item.
* * * *
John Tankard was feeling a lot better that Monday. Good sleep last night, new car, Pam Murphy not around to bust his chops, an early finish time. He still burned inside, reliving that night on the back road behind the estate, but sensed that Kellock and van Alphen had a plan in mind.
He finished work at 3 pm, then shot up to Berwick in time to pick his little sister up from school. Nat was full of awe, running her hand over the duco of his new car. Cool, she said. She was skinny where he was fat, olive-skinned where he was fair, quick and darting where he was slow. He hated to think of strangers laying their hands on her.
He took her for a spin. She bubbled over, madly waving at her mates. He felt protective. He felt helpless. How could you have sex with a kid? How sick was that?
On the way back he sent a text message to the woman he knew only as Terri, confirming drinks in the Chaos Bar at 6 pm. Hed met her through an on-line dating service. She sounded hot in her e-mails and text messages, her voice over the phone low, pleasantly husky. Shed sent photos: dark hair, humorous eyes, perhaps a tad round-faced but that often spelt big tits. In just a couple of hours, his laughing gear around a glass of ale, hed know one way or the other.
You could get lucky and score on a first date. You were desperate, the chick was desperate (thats why you were using a dating service, right?), so hitting the mattress was the logical outcome. But Tank had a secret weapon. Hed read on the Internet how attraction and desire boiled down to the odours released by the body. A bloke subconsciously picks up the scent when a woman is ready to mate. Women are turned on by something virile in a guys perspiration. Testosterone? Pheromones? Something like that. Or maybe hed misunderstood the whole thing, the technical side of it, the long words.
Still, he spent late afternoon in the gym and went straight to the Chaos Bar without showering, a touch of healthy, moist heat in his face, hair and neck. Did the women turn their heads as he passed among them? Tank strode tall, that Monday afternoon at one minute to six. Chicks gasping for it, left, right and centre, nurses, receptionists, even a couple of young lawyers hed seen around the magistrates court.
To the table in the corner, where Terri waited, a pretty face, yeah, but short, tubby, her butt overflowing the chair. Before he could stop himself, the words popped into his head and straight out of his mouth: Looks-wise, you havent been exactly honest with me, have you?
She flushed. They stared at each other. Suddenly she recoiled. Body odour-wise, you really stink.
She got up and left.
Well, shit.
He watched her go, his eyes drawn to the street beyond the smoky glass, where his fire-engine-red Mazda was being ticketed by a parking inspector.
Double shit.
His mobile ra
ng. It was the producer of Evening Update. I need all you can give me on Katie Blasko.
Ive already given you everything.
Where she was found, who by, was she abused, the producer said.
Huh?
Tanks gaze went to the wide-screen TV on the wall. Later you got music clipsKylie Minogues lovely arse, Beyonces crotchbut right now it was the six oclock news, live feed coming in, Waterloo in the background, a reporter in the foreground, the familiar shot of Katie Blasko tucked into the top corner of the screen.
Alive? Dead? He strained to hear.
* * * *
19
Eddie Tran had come a fair way in life. Hed eventually eased his way out of the Vietnamese gang scene in Melbournethe co-ordinated shoplifting raids, the drug dealing, justice and revenge enacted with machetesand married a nice girl who, like him, was the offspring of parents whod spent time in a refugee camp in Malaysia in the early 1980s and later been allowed to settle in Australia. Eddie and his wife had lived on the Peninsula for five years now. Theyd run a $2 shop for a while, but there were too many such shops, and now they were partners in a bakery near the roundabout on High Street, Waterloo. They baked a tray of Vietnamese buns occasionally, but mostly the locals wanted white bread, doughnuts, scones, vanilla slice and apricot Danishes. And freshly made sandwiches at lunchtime.
The women in Eddies life ran the business, his wife and her mother and sister. There wasnt a lot for Eddie to do, once hed completed the baking every morning. And so he worked for CleanSwift, a contract cleaning business that called on Eddie and a couple of other immigrants once or twice a week for the shit jobs.
Literally. For example, the shire provided emergency and short-term housing for needy people: single-parent families, alcoholics whod burnt down their own houses, teenagers whod been kicked out of home, refugees from northern Africa, the hopeless, the luckless, the disgraced and distressed. Eddie saw people and a way of life that most Australians didnt see. He saw it because he wasnt an Australian, not in their eyes. Hed been born here, but he wasnt Anglo-Celtic. The number of astonished looks he got when he opened his mouth and out came a broad Aussie accent!
So it was usually Eddie and the other guys, a Somali and an Iraqi, who were sent to clean up whenever one of the shires emergency-housing properties fell vacant. They literally scrubbed shit off the walls, sometimes. Eddie had studied Psychology at Swinburne for a couple of years, before dropping out, and knew that smearing excrement on the walls was a symptom of some kind of psychosis. The emergency houses provided by the shire were very ordinary but maybe felt like prison walls to some poor individuals. The number of times Eddie and the guys had torn up carpets and thrown them out! Eddie, a fastidious man, and luckier than these poor souls, nevertheless found it hard not to despise them. Spend five minutes a day picking up after yourself, hed think, five minutes going from room to room with a garbage bag, and you wouldnt have to live like pigs. Pizza boxes, dozens of bottles and cans, unidentifiable smears and excretions, mouldy hamburger buns, used tampons and condoms, syringes, the carcasses of cockroaches, mice, rats and family pets, empty foil packets, scratched CDs, overdue Blockbuster videos, bras and knickers, unpaired shoes and earrings, toys, dust balls, skin magazines, hair clips, combs, cellophane wrappers like the husks of strange creatures.
Sometimes it would take days to clean a place. Then the painters would come in, the plasterers to fix holes in the internal walls (fists? boots? heads?), the locksmith, the carpet layer. Big, contemptuous guys, usually, who couldnt see why the shire would want to prettify a house just so another lot of crazies, addicts, immigrants and no-hopers could have somewhere nice to live. What was the point? Eddie sympathised with this view, while trying not to think of the conditions that his parents had lived in before they settled in the lucky country.
De Soto Lane lay at the forgotten end of the little township of Warrawee, ten kilometres northeast of Penzance Beach. Eddie and the guys parked the van outside number 24, a small brick-veneer house set well back from the road among blackberry canes and rusting cars lost in chest-high spring grasses. A timber yard sat on one side of it, behind a high cyclone fence. Behind it was a market gardeners packing shed. Opposite was a stand of tall pines, black cockatoos clinging to the top branches and squawking softly as they cracked cones with their powerful beaks. Amid the pine trees was a small brick house with drawn curtains. An old woman was pottering about in her garden. Otherwise the lane was sparsely populated, with the only other visible house a new but ugly McMansion, two storeys, red tiles, four-car garage, lots of off-white pillars and columns, a vast landscaped garden under construction. The market gardener lived there, Eddie guessed, or would live there soon, for there were heaps of soil and bricks lying around.
He shivered. Hed hate to live out here. Hed seen from the street directory that there was a Cadillac Court, a Mercedes Terrace, and a Buick Drive. Did they make De Soto cars any more? He didnt think so. Hed asked the other guys, but they didnt know what the hell he was talking about.
Eddie assessed number 24 rapidly that Monday afternoon. 1960s vintage, with only a handful of small, low-ceilinged rooms: living room, kitchen, laundry, bathroom, hallway and two bedrooms. He knew this at a glance. Hed cleaned dozens like it. The lawn needed mowing, he noticed, weeds thrived in the garden beds, scaly mould patches covered the roof tiles. He sniffed experimentally as he approached the front door. Often you could assess the size of the job within by the stench factor.
Nothing discernible.
Eddie went in first.
No furniture, no crud lying about. There was dust, sure, scuffs on the walls, but the place wasnt too bad. The carpet would need a shampoo, but thats all. The smudges would come off the walls okay. With any luck, they could be out of here by lunchtime tomorrow. Eddie made these assessments as he walked from the front door to the sitting room.
Then he heard a whimper and his skin crept. The other guys went round-eyed and took a step back involuntarily.
Anyone there? Eddie called, being the boss.
That whimper again. With a hammering heart, Eddie approached the room that in most of these houses was the smaller bedroom. He tried the door; it was locked. He rapped his knuckles. Anyone home?
More whimpering. Eddie figured it could be passed off as damage caused by the previous occupants if he forced the door, so he went out to the van and returned with a crowbar and splintered the door away from the jamb.
The stench was shocking. She was naked and afraid and lying in her own wastes. She scrabbled away from him on a mattress in a room decorated as a nursery, one wrist tethered to a hook in the wall. Eddie was nominally a Catholic; he crossed himself. Little girl, little girl, he cooed, the other guys coming in behind him then, hovering at his elbow. Who knew the trials, heartaches and torture they had experienced and witnessed in their own countries? Yet they rushed past him with distressed and comforting cries and gathered her up.
* * * *
20
Challis spent the day chatting with his father, reading aloud from Mr Midshipman Hornblower, and preparing simple meals. His childhood home seemed smaller than hed remembered; stuffier, older, less well cared for. Since his mothers death, his father had lost the will to be house-proud. Had nothing to live for, in fact. It was sad; it broke Challiss heart. He wanted to make things better. He wanted to run away.
Cup of tea, Dad? he said at four oclock, the afternoon sun angling into the back room, lighting the dust motes.
His father reached his right hand across his stomach and pulled his left into view. He examined his wristwatch for a whileas if time had now become a puzzle, where once it had ruled his life.
Id like to eat at five, five-thirty.
Challis said nothing. At five-twenty hed microwave the chicken soup that Meg had left in the fridge, grill a lamb chop, boil half a carrot, and add a lettuce leaf and a slice of tomato. Would he himself eat at five-thirty? Yes, to be companionable. Besides, being a policeman had accustomed him to snatchin
g dinner at all hours of the night and day. He was adaptable.
But the evening would be long. TV reception was poor this far north. A couple of his mothers opera and ballet videos in the cabinet under the TV set, a short shelf of CDs: light classics, mostly, The Seekers, Welsh male choirs. He couldnt go to the pub and leave his father alone. It was too soon to ask friends aroundand what friends, anyway?
There was his laptop. Work on the discussion paper on regional policing that he still hadnt written for Superintendent McQuarrie? Play solitaire? Somehow use the Web to find Gavin Hurst?
