Chain of Evidence ic-4

by Garry Disher

  His father began to shake his head. If he’d had a walking stick he’d have thumped it on the floor.

  ‘How often have I told you,’ he said, ‘avoid Adelaide, go through the Barossa. It saves time and petrol, and it’s safer.’

  It was an old refrain, but it still had the power to churn Challis up inside. He had trouble breathing. He was having an asthma attack. He coughed and gasped, ‘Be back in a sec’

  He collected his bag from the hallway and took it through to his old bedroom. The inhaler-rarely used these days-was in a plastic zip case together with his comb, razor, toothbrush and painkillers. He took a hit from the inhaler, eyes closed, holding it in for a few seconds before gently exhaling.

  Miraculous.

  What he couldn’t tell his father was that a feeling of wretchedness had settled in him as he’d driven the long kilometres ‘home’. He’d cut himself off from his family, not been there to help when misfortune had come to them. And so, resolving to do more, he’d stopped in Adelaide to consult the South Australia police file on Gavin Hurst’s disappearance. He couldn’t tell his father that he’d done that. The old man firmly believed that Gavin had simply left his car at the side of the road five years ago and walked out into the badlands to die. He’d loathed Gavin. Gavin was dead. Enough said. But Meg had evidence that Gavin was still alive, and Challis was determined to discover what had happened to him.

  6

  Kees van Alphen had returned to Waterloo and spread the unwelcome news about Nick Jarrett’s acquittal. Pam Murphy and John Tankard, coming off duty for the day, were sitting in his office, commiserating with him. ‘It sucks, Sarge,’ Pam said. She leaned toward his desk. ‘All that hard work down the drain.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Tankard said.

  Pam glanced at her partner. This was possibly the only time in history that she and Tank were in agreement on anything.

  ‘Who’d believe it?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Tankard said again.

  Van Alphen, the lean, wrathful son of Dutch immigrants, leaned his elbows on his desk. ‘What have I told you two over and over again?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ Pam muttered. ‘Doesn’t make it any better, Sarge.’

  ‘Constable,’ he said warningly.

  ‘Sorry, Sarge.’

  She didn’t look or feel sorry but sat upright in one of van Alphen’s hard office chairs. She was twenty-eight, precisely put together, tanned from surfing and toned by jogging and the gym. Her mind was keen, too, she’d been told, but she’d never quite accepted that, for her father and brothers were university academics and she’d been the youngest, a girl, mad about sport, average in the classroom.

  ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,’ van Alphen said, ‘your job is to help put a case together, help get the bastards into a courtroom. Your job is not to convict. Don’t take it personally. It’s not your fault Jarrett got off.’

  ‘We had a good case.’

  ‘He had a good lawyer.’

  There was silence. Then Ellen Destry was in the doorway, a little breathless. ‘I’ve just got back from the city. I suppose you’ve heard about Nick Jarrett?’

  ‘Yeah,’ growled van Alphen, ‘it stinks.’

  Then Ellen was nodding at Pam and Tank. ‘Thanks for your help today.’

  ‘Sorry we couldn’t find her, Sarge,’ Tank said.

  ‘I might need you both tomorrow, too,’ Ellen said, hurrying away again.

  When she was gone, John Tankard leaned forward, lowered his voice. ‘Is she overreacting, Sarge?’

  Van Alphen shrugged.

  Pam, feeling a surge of loyalty for Ellen Destry, glared at both men. ‘You guys are incredible. This is a missing kid. What if she’s been snatched? Maybe by this paedophile ring.’

  Tank turned to her. ‘What paedophile ring?’

  ‘On the Peninsula.’

  ‘They snatch kids off the street?’

  Van Alphen stirred. ‘Guys, it’s just a rumour. There have been no reports of abductions.’

  Tank ignored him. ‘So, if Katie Blasko was abducted, it could have been by someone from outside the area, not a local, not part of this ring.’

  ‘We don’t know that there is a ring, Tank,’ van Alphen said. ‘Just drop it, okay?’

  Tank looked at Pam. ‘Maybe someone with a holiday house down here?’

  ‘Who knows?’ she said, wondering why he was so fired up.

  ‘Drop it, okay?’ van Alphen said sharply. ‘Back to business. We need a car on the estate. The Jarretts could get rowdy.’

  Pam and Tank stirred. ‘We’re off duty, Sarge.’

  ‘We’re short-staffed,’ van Alphen countered. He leaned toward Pam and said, almost nastily, ‘Do you good, some ordinary police work before you go off to holiday camp.’

  She flushed. She hadn’t told Tank yet. Tank went on full alert, his chair creaking under his agitated weight as he turned to her. ‘What holiday camp?’

  Pam gestured. ‘Just some training thing I enrolled for.’

  ‘What training thing?’

  ‘Criminal investigation procedures, stuff like that.’

  Tank wasn’t buying it. His overheated face got hotter. ‘Detective training? You’re becoming a dee?’

  His tone said, You’re leaving me behind?

  ‘Probably won’t lead to anything,’ Pam said. ‘No vacancies.’

  ‘Bull shit,’ said John Tankard, spittle flying. ‘You’ve got bloody Destry mentoring you. You’ve been brown-nosing for years, don’t deny it.’

  ‘Can it, Tank.’

  ‘Children, children,’ van Alphen said.

  DC Scobie Sutton had given Ellen Destry an update, and now he was heading across town to the Community House on Seaview Park estate. His wife volunteered there. Beth had once worked there, paid by the shire, but then the bastards had retrenched her. Sacked her in order to come in under budget, the budget blowing out because the shire’s various managers had voted they be outfitted with a fleet of Ford Territories, one of the thirstiest four-wheel-drives on the market. Meanwhile Beth and Scobie were down to one car, a tired Magna station wagon. They couldn’t afford to run two cars now, so Scobie was forever running his wife and daughter around the Peninsula, trying to fit in Roslyn’s school and social activities, his wife’s volunteering and his own CIU work. Scobie Sutton felt a kind of low-level indignation these days. Until his wife’s sacking he’d been like most decent churchgoing folk and never thought about social justice issues.

  A different kind of indignation took him on a detour into the blighted part of Seaview Park where the Jarretts lived. News of Nick Jarrett’s acquittal had been all over the station and Scobie just wanted to sit and stare for a moment, as if that might cure him. He idled at the kerb: there were three cars crowding the patch of dirt that passed as the Jarrett’s front lawn, and he could feel the percussive force of a sound system at full volume. The Jarretts were celebrating. That usually meant escalating noise, violence and calls to 000.

  A couple of neighbours came out to stare at Scobie with mingled appeal and reproach. The Jarretts had made their lives a living hell, and what good had the police ever been?

  The Jarretts had once lived in Cranbourne, but their Housing Commission house had burnt to the ground-suspected arson, probably payback by someone they’d cheated-and the Commission had relocated them to Seaview Park estate, in Waterloo, which had no view of the sea and no park, only a hundred cheap houses elbow to elbow along bewilderingly curved streets or huddled together in blind culs-de-sac. This was a region of older cars, weedy front yards behind a range of mismatched fences, washing lines visible in back yards, and the occasional Australian flag hanging limply from a stubby pole. Families struggled on the Seaview, but it was generally an honest struggle. Unemployment was high, and the police were often called, but most residents did not rely on welfare or attract the attention of the authorities.

  Unlike the Jarretts. At last count there were twelve of them, an extended clan that
included cousins, live-in girlfriends and boyfriends, half brothers and sisters, the odd uncle or grandmother. Scobie had never been able to sort them out. If they worked, it was ‘at this and that’. The children were more often shoplifting than attending school. Sons and husbands would disappear for a stretch of jail time and come home to find someone else in their beds. Ex-boyfriends and girlfriends, remembering some old insult or unpaid debt, would come around with a carload of mates to smash windows and kneecaps. Neighbours were burgled; there were drunken and drug-crazed arguments and brawls; hotted-up, unroadworthy cars performed burnouts in the narrow streets and ploughed over lawns, fences and letterboxes. Scobie had once been called out when a boyfriend or husband, making an access visit to his kids, had been attacked by his ex-wife, who’d come storming out of the house with her new bloke and proceeded to bash the guy and his car with steel bars, the kids screaming, ‘Don’t kill my dad, don’t kill my dad.’ Which didn’t mean the kids were little angels. In fact, they scared Scobie the most. They were knowing and cold, and if not the sexual playthings of the adults, or addicts, they surely witnessed the adults having sex or out of their skulls on booze or speed.

  All in all, you didn’t dare meet the eye of a Jarrett: you crossed the street or stayed indoors if a Jarrett was around. You didn’t complain: It was never proven but they’d firebombed the house of a woman who’d got up a petition against them.

  It hadn’t taken long for public opinion on the estate to turn against the police. Scobie was sympathetic. The Jarretts should have been evicted long ago, but the Waterloo cop shop was understaffed, like many on the Peninsula, the Jarretts were cunning, and the younger constables found excuses to respond late, or not at all, to callouts to the Jarrett house. Meanwhile the Housing Commission bureaucrats lived in the city, not on the estate, and liked to say that they worked for a government that stood for the battlers in society. In their view the Jarretts paid their rent (more or less), hadn’t trashed the house much), and were a struggling family deserving of charity, not criticism, from those who were luckier than they were. Besides, it was argued, the Commission’s resources were stretched to the limit.

  Did they have a fleet of brand-new, fuel guzzling four-wheel-drives too? wondered Scobie.

  If Nick Jarrett had been convicted, he thought, we could have made a start on dismantling the whole clan. Pursued charges against the others, found decent homes for the kids, weakened Laurie Jarrett’s power base.

  Now they’d have to start all over again.

  Just then a marked patrol car pulled up behind him and tooted. He glanced in the mirror: Pam Murphy and John Tankard, here to watch the Jarrett house. Scobie waved and drove on to the Community Centre and there was his wife. ‘Hello, love,’ she said, taking him away from all of the badness for a while.

  On the other side of Waterloo, Ellen Destry was asking Donna Blasko how she was coping.

  ‘I’m a wreck,’ Donna told her, ‘all this coming and going.’

  ‘It must be hard,’ Ellen said. ‘Have you thought any more about where Katie might have gone?’

  Donna shook her head. ‘We’ve both been out searching.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Justin Pedder, ‘doing your job for you.’

  Ellen ignored him. ‘No one’s seen anything? Heard anything?’

  Donna shook her head. ‘Maybe Katie’s trying to ride her bike to my mother’s place.’

  Ellen went very still. Bike. Why was she only just learning about a bike? Why hadn’t it occurred to her that there would be a bike? ‘Katie rides to school?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can you describe the bike for me?’

  ‘Just a bike.’

  ‘A Malvern Star,’ said Justin. ‘Gears, a pannier. I keep it in good nick for her.’

  ‘And Katie would have been riding her bike when she left school yesterday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did she also have a helmet? A school bag?’

  Donna nodded wretchedly. ‘We looked everywhere. She can be a bit careless sometimes, you know how kids are, she’s coming home from school and meets a friend and just dumps her stuff on the ground while she has a play, then comes home empty-handed. But no way would she leave her Tamagotchi on the footpath, it was her favourite thing in the whole world.’

  Two streets away, Sasha was home. A cross between a Shi-Tzu and a Silky Terrier, with a squashed-in face and adenoidal breathing, Sasha was small, guileless and hairy. She didn’t discriminate between humans, for all humans adored her. She sought them out. She sought warmth- human and sun. When she’d jumped into the Tarago van yesterday, it wasn’t the first time she’d done something like that. Last year she’d travelled all over the Peninsula in the back of an electrician’s van, asleep under the guy’s spare overalls. When called on his mobile phone by Sasha’s owner, he’d sworn black and blue that Sasha wasn’t with him. The poor owner had gone out of his mind looking for Sasha, phoning the dog pound, the RSPCA, all the vets in the local phone book. Then, at the end of a long day, he’d received a sheepish call from the electrician: ‘Got your dog here, mate. Sorry.’

  Everyone knew the story, and so, when an elderly woman who lived on Trevally Street saw Sasha jump out of an unfamiliar white van that Friday afternoon, she smiled indulgently and watched Sasha race home. The stories she could tell if she could talk, thought the old woman fondly. What adventures has she had this time?

  If Sasha had been able to talk, she might have revealed that she hadn’t been fed for twenty-four hours. She also hadn’t been loved for twenty-four hours. Her instincts had told her to cuddle up to the child, but the child had been asleep for most of the time. At one point Sasha had bared her teeth in protection of the child, had even drawn blood, and been kicked clear across the room for her pains.

  7

  Sitting in the patrol car outside the Jarrett house, John Tankard was thinking about life after Pam Murphy.

  He felt betrayed. Sure, he knew that he’d often rubbed her up the wrong way, and she hadn’t appreciated his clumsy attempts to get her to sleep with him over the years, but he’d always counted her as an ally, one of the gang, us against them-them being ordinary citizens, crooks and senior police officers.

  Now she was leaving him behind, stepping over a line that would take her into the ranks of the enemy. He didn’t know if he could work with anyone else. Would a new partner put up with his bullshit, or report him? Would a new partner watch his back? Console him when things got a bit rough, personally speaking?

  He shifted in his seat, half closed his eyes and gazed at the Jarretts’ wreck of a house. Three cars crowded the front yard: a rusting Toyota twin-cab, a little black Subaru and a lowered silver Mercedes with smoky windows. Just then, four Jarrett kids came out, boys, one of them sauntering over to the front gate, where he turned and swiftly dropped his jeans. Pale, skinny shanks. Tank was furious. ‘We can arrest him for that.’

  Murphy said wearily, ‘Leave it, Tank.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ said Tank uselessly.

  Who at Waterloo did he like and trust apart from Pam? Some of the other constables were okay, guys you could have a beer with, but they came and they went. The plain-clothed crew, like Challis, Destry and Sutton, were a bit up themselves. Kellock and van Alphen were okay, old-school coppers crippled by the kinds of procedures and regulations that made it hard to do your job properly. Yeah, John Tankard had plenty of time for Kellock and van Alphen.

  Pity they were a lot older than him. Pity they were senior in rank. He couldn’t see either of them becoming his best pal when Murph left. He respected them, that’s all. Looked up to them. Thank Christ he had that in his life.

  Two girls aged about ten walked past, beating their knees with tennis racquets. Sweet kids, friends, not a care in the world. Then they saw the Jarretts and veered away, suddenly afraid, and John Tankard acknowledged what was at the back of his mind: an image of Natalie, his kid sister, and how awful it would be if anything ever happened to her.

  The r
adio crackled. Sergeant van Alphen was replacing them. Apparently Sergeant Destry had called an urgent briefing.

  Pam was glad of the reprieve. It was close in the patrol car; even closer, with big, sweaty John Tankard behind the wheel, overheated from watching the Jarretts and from learning that she might be leaving the uniform behind. Even so, she couldn’t see any harm in raising the temperature a little. ‘Are you going to miss me, John?’

  She usually called him Tank. He scowled and muttered, reading ‘John’ as an insult, and pressed hard on the accelerator pedal.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that?’

  ‘Think your shit doesn’t stink.’

  ‘Charming as ever.’

  She looked away at the run of tyre outlets and engineering firms that lay between the estate and the Waterloo police station. He is going to miss me, she thought. He’s always been half in love or lust with me, I don’t let his bullshit get to me, and he’s afraid of being left behind. ‘It’s no big deal, Tank. It’s just a training course. Doesn’t mean there are any detective positions open once I’ve completed it.’

  ‘A training course for a select few,’ he said. ‘Who did you suck up to? Challis? Destry?’

  ‘I’m not going to honour that with an answer, John.’

  They rode in silence. The shadows were lengthening, pines and gums striping a roadside field that would soon be crammed with new housing. Plenty of traffic, people returning home from work, heading for the pub, the Waterloo Show-or just cruising, Pam thought, as a lowered Falcon utility roared up behind them, two kids on board, nervous about passing a police vehicle but itching to all the same. Pam, her window down, could hear the hotted-up motor.

  ‘Tank,’ she said, ‘is everything okay?’

  After a pause he said, ‘I’m working a “one-up” tomorrow night.’

  A ‘one-up’ was a lone patrol, just you in the vehicle, owing to a shortage of police on the Peninsula. Pam herself had made several lone patrols in the past few weeks. Nothing bad had happened to her, but you heard stories. ‘Take it easy, okay?’ she said, meaning it.