by Garry Disher
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 haven’t 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 rang. It was the producer of ‘Evening Update’. ‘I need all you can give me on Katie Blasko.’
‘I’ve already given you everything.’
‘Where she was found, who by, was she abused,’ the producer said.
‘Huh?’
Tank’s gaze went to the wide-screen TV on the wall. Later you got music clips-Kylie Minogue’s lovely arse, Beyonce’s crotch-but right now it was the six o’clock 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. He’d eventually eased his way out of the Vietnamese gang scene in Melbourne-the co-ordinated shoplifting raids, the drug dealing, ‘justice’ and revenge enacted with machetes-and married a nice girl who, like him, was the offspring of parents who’d 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. They’d 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 Eddie’s life ran the business, his wife and her mother and sister. There wasn’t a lot for Eddie to do, once he’d 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 who’d burnt down their own houses, teenagers who’d 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 didn’t see. He saw it because he wasn’t an Australian, not in their eyes. He’d been born here, but he wasn’t 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 shire’s 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, he’d think, five minutes going from room to room with a garbage bag, and you wouldn’t 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 couldn’t 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 gardener’s 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. He’d hate to live out here. He’d 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 didn’t think so. He’d asked the other guys, but they didn’t 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. He’d 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 wasn’t too bad. The carpet would need a shampoo, but that’s 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 he’d remembered; stuffier, older, less well cared for. Since his mother’s death, his father had lost the will to be house-proud. Had nothing to live for,
in fact. It was sad; it broke Challis’s heart. He wanted to make things better. He wanted to run away.
‘Cup of tea, Dad?’ he said at four o’clock, 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 while-as if time had now become a puzzle, where once it had ruled his life.
‘I’d like to eat at five, five-thirty.’
Challis said nothing. At five-twenty he’d 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 snatching 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 mother’s 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 couldn’t go to the pub and leave his father alone. It was too soon to ask friends around-and what friends, anyway?
There was his laptop. Work on the discussion paper on regional policing that he still hadn’t written for Superintendent McQuarrie? Play solitaire? Somehow use the Web to find Gavin Hurst?
Actually, there was one thing he could do. He’d been restoring an old aeroplane before things had got so complicated in his life. It was gathering dust in a hangar on the little regional airport near Waterloo, and he knew, as one did know these things, that his not completing the restoration was symptomatic of a malaise, of a life that marked time, that waited when it should act. He’d feel better about himself if he went on-line and searched for missing parts-instrument-panel switches, for example.
The doorbell chimed, the sound bringing back vivid memories of his childhood, when friends had visited this house. The feeling strengthened as Challis made his way along the passageway to the front door, past his mother’s framed tapestries of English rural scenes, thatched cottages and haystacks, past the upended shell casing from the Second World War, now crammed with walking sticks and umbrellas.
And continued when he saw Rob Minchin on the doorstep.
‘Hal, old son.’
‘Rob.’
They shook hands, then embraced awkwardly. ‘How’s my patient?’
‘Cranky.’
‘Unchanged, in other words.’
Like Challis, Minchin had gone away, trained, and returned to the town. Unlike Challis, he’d stayed. He was the only doctor in the district, run ragged by surgery consultations, hospital rounds and house calls. He travelled huge distances, attending home births on remote farms, talking through the anxieties of lonely widows, taking the temperatures of sick children, pronouncing death when stockmen ran their mustering bikes into gullies and broke their necks. He was also the on-call pathologist for the region.
And Challis’s one-time friend. Time and distance had weakened the friendship, and fine distinctions in ambition and personality had become marked disparities, but, still, history always counts for something, and Challis and Minchin grinned at each other now.
‘Wish the circumstances were better,’ the doctor said.
Shorter than Challis, Minchin had grown solid over the years. He was fair-skinned and had always looked a little pink from sunburn or embarrassment. His hair was straight, reddish, limp and needed cutting. He’d been married, but his wife had run away with his partner in the little practice he’d inherited from his father.
‘It’s a waiting game,’ Challis murmured.
They went into the sitting room, where the old man was slumped in his chair. Minchin hurried to his side, but then a ripping snore stopped him.
Challis laughed. ‘Kept me awake last night.’
Minchin nodded. ‘Might as well let him sleep. I’m just checking in. No scares?’
He meant the series of minor strokes. Everyone was waiting for the big one. ‘No,’ said Challis. ‘Offer you a drink?’
‘Better make it coffee.’
‘If you can call it that,’ Challis said, leading the way to the kitchen.
When it was poured, Minchin asked, ‘How’s Meg holding up?’
The guy’s still in love with her, Challis thought. He saw how he could use that. ‘Not too bad, given all she’s had to deal with in the past few years.’
‘Yes.’
‘Gavin running out on her like that.’
‘Yeah,’ said Minchin flatly.
‘Rob,’ said Challis after a considering pause, ‘without breaching patient confidentiality, what sort of state was he in before he disappeared?’
‘You asked me that at the time.’
‘I didn’t take it in.’
Minchin leaned forward across the kitchen table, dropping his voice in case the old man was listening. ‘Gavin was veering from one extreme to the other. I prescribed medication to level him out, but I don’t know if he ever took it.’ He paused. ‘He hit Meg a couple of times, you know.’
Challis nodded sagely, but he hadn’t known. Just then, Minchin slapped at his solid thigh, leaned to one side and fetched a mobile phone from his side pocket. ‘Minchin. Yep. Yep. Oh, Christ, be right there.’
He pocketed his phone again and looked at Challis. ‘Do you know Ted Anderson?’
‘No.’
‘Wife died of cancer five years ago, leaving him with a baby to bring up. He’s gone off the Pass.’
‘Gone off the Pass’. Everyone knew what that meant. ‘Killed?’
Minchin nodded. ‘The kid’s okay, but trapped in the car.’
‘You’d better go, Rob.’
‘Tell your old man I’ll look in again when I can.’
‘Will do.’
Small-town tragedies, Challis thought, watching Minchin drive away. Next week it might be an ambulance officer coming upon his own wife in a burning car. Last year five teenagers had been killed when they failed to beat a train over a level crossing. When he was growing up, a bride-to-be from the next town was killed on her way to her wedding. As a young constable in Mawson’s Bluff, he’d attended when a jack-knifing semi-trailer had wiped out a family of five. There was never an end to it.
He was drawn back into the house by the ringing of the phone. ‘Hal?’
‘Ells,’ he said.
And she told him about Katie Blasko.
21
The atmosphere crackled on Tuesday morning, affecting everyone in the Waterloo police station, uniformed officers, detectives and civilian staff alike. It was most evident at the briefing, the mood heightened and expectant as Ellen began to talk. Ellen herself was fierce, dynamic, showing sorrow, disgust and anger. Those seated close to her saw that her eyes were damp as she described the house, the room, the small, abused body.
Then, unwinding, she got down to business. ‘As you can see, there are fewer of us today.’
She didn’t need to explain why. Word always got around the station quickly. Now that Katie Blasko had been found alive, Superintendent McQuarrie wanted those uniformed constables who had been on the search detail back on regular duties, and was allowing Ellen only a small team to investigate the abduction. Van Alphen and Kellock were not obliged to attend, but had offered their services, arguing that they knew the case and could allocate uniformed assistance from time to time.
‘Let’s start with the house,’ she said. ‘Our man was taking a chance, using the shire’s emergency housing.’
She looked around the room, inviting reasons for that. It was van Alphen who answered. ‘Those houses are sometimes empty for days, weeks,’ he said. ‘People move on without informing their social workers, parole officers or the shire.’
‘You’re saying that many people could have known about that particular house, and that it would be empty for a while?’
‘Yes.’
Scobie supplied another detail. ‘I spoke to the shire housing officer. There’s been a sudden increase i
n demand. The order to clean De Soto Lane came in yesterday morning. Clearly our man wasn’t expecting that.’
John Tankard stirred as if making a vital point. ‘Meaning he could come back.’
Kellock smiled at him without much humour. ‘Unlikely. Have you seen the publicity? But I’m sure we can roster you to watch the place.’
‘Senior Sergeant,’ Tankard muttered, going red.
‘What scenario are we looking at here?’ demanded Ellen. ‘They keep her prisoner for a few days, dress her up in school uniforms, frilly underwear, nighties, film each other having sex with her, then let her go?’
‘Or kill and dump her,’ Scobie said.
Ellen made a brief, bitter gesture. ‘Meanwhile the neighbours can’t tell us a thing.’
She’d examined the house last night and again early that morning. It was well chosen, for there were no neighbours to speak of. The builder erecting the market gardener’s new house had recently gone bankrupt and so no one had been working at the site. The few workers employed in the timber yard and the market garden had seen nothing, owing to trees, shrubbery and high fences. The elderly couple living in the little house opposite were used to seeing cars come and go at 24 De Soto Lane, and had paid no attention to recent activities there. ‘So long as they aren’t noisy and aren’t going to murder us in our beds, we leave them be,’ the old woman had told Ellen.
‘But didn’t they think about what they were seeing?’ Scobie Sutton demanded now. ‘Didn’t they hear anything?’
Because of his height, he sometimes sprawled like an arrangement of twigs, but this morning he sat stiffly upright, as if too distressed to concentrate. Ellen didn’t want that. ‘Scobie, take Constable Tankard and question everyone again. Are there surveillance cameras on the timber yard or the packing shed? Did the mailman deliver to the house late last week and again yesterday? Track down anyone who bought timber or fruit and vegetables in De Soto Lane over the past several days-go back prior to the day Katie was abducted. Did the old couple have visitors during the past few days? All right?’