by Garry Disher
‘Are you staying long?’
‘As long as it takes,’ he said.
Eve sighed and edged closer to him. He couldn’t be a father to her, or even much of an uncle, but did she want something like that from him? He scarcely knew her, and wondered if the things he might say to her, or the very act of saying them, would perplex her. He put his arm around her and they chatted inconsequentially. ‘Mum really needed a break,’ she said at one point. ‘Thanks, Uncle Hal.’
‘Well, he is my old man.’
‘But not easy.’
‘No.’ Challis reconsidered his reply. ‘Look, your grandfather was never mean to us, he never hit us, he was a good father. It’s just that he was…stern, inflexible.’
‘Uh huh.’
They were silent. Eve said, ‘He didn’t like Dad much.’
‘I know.’
Challis guessed that so long as Eve didn’t know where her father was, or what he’d done, or even if he was alive or dead, she couldn’t say a proper goodbye to him. The parents of Ellen Destry’s missing kid would be feeling that too, only more acutely. How could he broach it with Eve, that he’d been thinking of Gavin, been doing some digging? Maybe Eve, like her mother, didn’t want him to do that.
Eve sighed. ‘I wish it was the end of the year.’
It seemed to Challis that her words were loaded with meaning. On an immediate level she was saying that she should be at home studying for her final exams, not mucking around with her friends, even if it was a Sunday. She was also saying that her grandfather’s decline was bad timing;-not that she was blaming him. And finally she was saying that the future was huge and beckoning. What were her dreams? Why didn’t he know? He thought back to the culture of the high school and the town when he was eighteen. It had been assumed by teachers, parents and the kids themselves that you would marry each other and remain in the district. You didn’t leave-or certainly not to attend a university.
He found himself saying, ‘What will your friends do next year?’
She was sitting so close to him that she had to scoot away to gauge his face. She shrugged. ‘Nursing. Teachers’ college. Home on the farm.’
‘You?’
‘Not sure yet. I’d love to travel, just fly overseas and move around, stay in youth hostels and get waitressing jobs for a while, you know?’
She was wistful and it was heartbreaking. ‘Do it,’ Challis said fervently.
‘I don’t know. I can’t. What about Mum, here all alone?’
‘Do it!’
He’d startled her. ‘Yes, sir,’ she said, snapping him a salute.
‘You’ll come back refreshed,’ he said, moderating his tone, trying to be a wise uncle or father. ‘University will be a breeze.’
A white Toyota Land Cruiser with police markings pulled up. A policeman got out, tall, heavyset and scowling in a crisp tan uniform. A sergeant. ‘Oh shit,’ said Eve, and one of the boys grew wary and still.
‘What?’
‘It’s Sergeant Wurfel. He’s super anal.’
They watched Wurfel advance on the boy. ‘Who’s your friend?’
‘Mark Finucane.’
A Finucane. Challis wanted to say, ‘That figures.’ Then the sergeant clasped the boy, who went rigid and shouted, ‘Fucking leave off.’
Eve clutched Challis. ‘Uncle Hal, stop him.’
Challis had to be careful. He approached, gave his name but not his occupation or rank. ‘May I ask what’s going on?’
The sergeant gazed at him tiredly. ‘No offence, sir, but am I obliged to tell you?’
Eve reached past Challis to put her arm around the Finucane boy. ‘Leave him alone. He hasn’t done anything.’
Wurfel blocked her. ‘Settle down, Eve, okay? We just need to speak to Mark about a couple of things.’
‘Speak to him? I know what that means.’
Sergeant Wurfel grew very still. ‘Eve, if you get in my face, I’ll take you down to the station, too.’
Challis said quietly, ‘There’s no need for that.’
Wurfel looked fed up, and stared at all of them one by one. ‘You want to know why I want to question him? Your little pal took the hearse for a joyride last night, okay?’
He paused, staring at Challis. ‘You think this is funny?’
Challis straightened his face. One night when he was sixteen he and a couple of others had stolen a ride in a shire tip truck. ‘Not at all. Eve, sweetheart, let the man do his job.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s not fair.’
Her temper was up, her colour high, her eyes flashing, but then it evaporated. They all watched while Wurfel opened the passenger door for Mark Finucane, who gave them a quick grin and a cocky thumbs up.
‘Evo,’ said one of Eve’s friends, ‘want a game? Hal, a game?’
‘Sure,’ they both said.
That evening Ellen Destry called him. He felt a strange relief, realising that he’d been waiting. There was no reason why they should call each other regularly, or turns about, but he had opened that possibility when he’d called her on Friday.
Her mood was flat. ‘Is Katie Blasko getting to you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I can’t help feeling that I’ve fumbled the ball. I let myself be blinded by her dysfunctional family, when I should have been concentrating on harm from outside it.’
‘In most cases it is internal,’ Challis said. He found himself telling her about Gavin Hurst, and the effects on Eve.
Ellen grunted. ‘Like the poet said, your parents fuck you up. Larrayne is so prickly with me these days.’ She paused. ‘And when I’m old and infirm, the poor thing will feel obliged to look after me- or maybe not. Sorry, Hal, insensitive of me, given your current situation.’
He laughed. He wasn’t offended. A comfortable silence settled around them. ‘What’s your next step?’
‘Tomorrow we re-enact Katie’s bike ride home from school.’
Challis experienced a sudden and intense mental flash of Waterloo and the flat streets near the mangrove flats. He could almost smell them. Then it occurred to him that for a long time after he’d left Mawson’s Bluff he’d smelt dust, wheat and sheep. Home is where the nose is, he thought.
‘It might trigger something.’
‘A lot of false leads, probably.’
17
Monday.
Ellen started the day with Donna Blasko and Justin Pedder, who seemed confused about Katie’s bike (‘It was a blue bike.’ ‘No, it was purple.’ ‘It had a basket on the handlebars.’ ‘No, that was her old bike.’). Sighing, she drove to the bike shop in High Street and borrowed a purple bike and helmet. The bike shop used to be Cafй Laconic, and a jeans-and-T-shirt shop before that, so she guessed it would be selling something else this time next year. Ellen missed Cafй Laconic. You couldn’t get decent coffee anywhere in Waterloo now.
As she was wheeling the bike to her car, a voice said, ‘Need a hand?’
She turned. Laurie Jarrett, with two teenage boys. Being Jarretts, the boys knew who she was, and smirked. The smirk said, ‘We won, you lost.’
‘How’s it feel, copper?’ sneered one of the boys.
Laurie surprised her. He thumped the back of the boy’s head, not hard, and said, ‘A bit of respect, okay?’
‘Ow!’ sulked the boy.
Ellen glanced at Jarrett, trying to read him. Despite herself, she was compelled by his looks. She was fascinated by the shapeliness of his hands and head, unnoticed by her before. He was dressed neatly and, unlike the other males-and females-of his clan, he didn’t carry scars or tattoos. He wasn’t overweight. He didn’t smell like a brewery. His eyes were clear. No giveaway facial tics or hand tremors. She’d heard he was a charmer. He lived with two women, sisters, apparently. There was also a daughter, Alysha, twelve or thirteen, with learning difficulties, whom Jarrett doted on.
‘Help you with the bike?’ he said again.
Why not? She watched him stow it in her car
.
‘Present for your kid?’ he asked.
‘For a re-enactment,’ she said. ‘Katie Blasko, her route home from school. You’ve got a large network: pass the word around.’
He nodded abruptly and left, the boys trailing him.
What had all that been about?
She returned to the station. By late morning she’d obtained reports of three recent abduction attempts on the Peninsula. In June a middle-aged man had tried to lure a ten-year-old boy into his car in Frankston South. Two months earlier, a young man grabbed the arm of an eight-year-old girl who was riding her bike to school in Mornington. And during the January school holidays, a nine-year-old boy had been lured out of his front yard by two young men, who had then been chased off by a neighbour.
No worthwhile descriptions. No trace evidence.
The long day passed. At 3 pm, she met Scobie and his daughter outside the gates of Katie Blasko’s primary school. A dozen uniformed police were there, too, an open jeep fitted with a public-address system, and plenty of media. Scattered among the spectators and the media pack were plain-clothed officers, who would video and photograph the onlookers.
Roslyn Sutton resembled Katie Blasko in colouring, height and build. Ellen crouched beside her. Roslyn looked very pleased with herself. An unappealing child, Ellen had often thought. She smiled stiffly. All set?’
Roslyn immediately planted her foot on the pedal and hunched her shoulders as though to speed away. ‘Steady on, not yet, darling,’ her father said.
Ellen didn’t think she could bear to see all of Scobie’s doting love just then, pouring out, and avoided his eye. She smiled at Roslyn again. ‘The kids don’t get out until 3.15. Wait until we hear the bell, then a while longer for them to appear with their bags. Katie was neither early nor late leaving school last Thursday, so we’ll allow time for half the kids to be picked up or start walking or riding home before you set off, okay?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘Your role is very important. We’re very proud of you.’
Roslyn Sutton knew it. She couldn’t mask it.
‘Ride slowly,’ Ellen said. ‘Apparently Katie rode slowly, too, but we also need time for people to watch you, and perhaps remember something. Okay?’
‘Yes.’
At 3.23, the caravan set out, Ellen standing in the Jeep with the microphone. Several times during the forty minutes that followed, she repeated the same message: A child has gone missing. Her name is Katie Blasko and she’s ten years old. We are re-enacting her ride home from school last Thursday afternoon. Did you see Katie on that day or any other day, either alone or in the company of someone? Did she deviate from her routine or route in any way? Any help you can give us, however trivial it might seem, could be vital in finding her. You may approach any of our officers or phone the Waterloo police station.’
People wanted to be helpful. In the days that followed, they flooded Ellen with useless information.
Operation Calling Card-so-called because their burglar liked to leave an unflushed turd at the scene of every break-in-came 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 you’d 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 he’d run through his system over the years.
‘She gives you a list of names and addresses of who’s away on holiday? So we should be arresting her, too?’
‘No! No, don’t do that. She’s got this little notebook computer.’
‘Brings her work home with her.’
‘I access it when she’s 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.’
‘She’s got this file, travel insurance, of people away on holiday.’
‘And you pass on names and addresses to the Jarretts.’
‘Yeah. They’ll 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.
‘Here’s what we want you to do,’ van Alphen said, proceeding to lay it out for Henniker.
‘Nick will kill me,’ said Henniker miserably. ‘He’s a mad bastard. They all are.’
‘We’ll 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?
She’d been up since 5 am, when she’d 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 she’d 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 wouldn’t 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 she’d 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 transfers-all 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 family’s affairs. This year alone she’d attended five fatalities on the freeway-alcohol, drugs and speeding. Earlier in the year she’d arrested three teenagers from the Seaview Park estate who’d gone out armed with knives and machetes-’Just in case we get attacked by the Jarretts.’ A month before that she’d 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. They’d 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 didn’t know or couldn’t 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. He’d 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. She’d 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, he’d know one way or the other.
You could get lucky and score on a first date. You were desperate, the chick was desperate (that’s why you were using a dating service, right?), so hitting the mattress was the logical outcome. But Tank had a secret weapon. He’d 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 guy’s perspiration. Testosterone? Pheromones? Something like that. Or maybe he’d 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 he’d seen around the magistrates’ court.
