The Dragon Man ic-1

by Garry Disher

  ‘No shit.’

  Sutton pursed his lips, staring ahead through the windscreen, remembering what this Sofia had said about his daughter. How had she known it? Next to him, Tankard said, ‘Scobe? You awake in there?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Jane Gideon.’

  Sutton waved his arm. ‘Oh, the information was too vague. The point is, I checked the daily crime reports. If it’s the same woman, she’s robbed half-a-dozen people.’

  Tankard slowed for a level crossing. The tyres slapped over the rails and then he accelerated again. ‘You could bring her in, put her in a line-up, see if anyone identifies her.’

  ‘The boss would never okay it. This is just a hunch,’ Sutton said. ‘But a photograph, now that’s a different matter.’

  He reached back between the seats to a camera and dumped it in Tankard’s lap. It was a Canon fitted with a telephoto lens.

  ‘I hope you know how to use it,’ Sutton said.

  ‘No problem. Just keep her talking where I can get a clear shot at her.’

  They came to the Tidal River Caravan Park, a depressing patch of stunted ti-tree, dirty sand and stagnant, mosquito-infested water that wasn’t a river and hadn’t seen a tide in a long time. The main area consisted of toilet blocks, a laundry, the main office and early summer holidaymakers in large caravans with tent annexes. The margins of the park, nearest the main road and poorly sheltered from dust, noise, wind and sun, had been set aside for longer term tenants in caravans, recreation vehicles and plywood or aluminium portable homes.

  ‘Gypsies?’ the park manager said.

  ‘A woman calling herself Sofia. Tells fortunes,’ Sutton said.

  ‘Oh, her. A gypsy? Didn’t know we had any. I just thought she was a wog. Goes to show.’

  ‘If you’d point it out on the map?’ Sutton said.

  The map was rain-stained and sun-faded behind a sheet of thick, scratched perspex. The manager pointed. ‘There, in the corner. Her and her brothers and a few kids.’

  Tankard drove slowly through the park. Sutton sensed his restless, swivelling eyes. To be that obsessed would be to invite an ulcer, he thought. He pointed. ‘There.’

  Sofia and a small naked girl were sitting on frayed nylon folding chairs under a canvas awning at the side of a dirty white Holden Jackaroo that had been converted into a small mobile home. There was a matching Jackaroo behind it and a caravan behind that. There was no vehicle coupled to the caravan but a rugged, snouty-looking Land Cruiser was parked under a nearby tree. Sutton saw three men watching from a cement bench-seat and table in the shade of a leaning wattle. The ground was bare and hard. Sutton had an impression of untidiness, even though Sofia and the men were neatly dressed and there was no sign of litter at the site.

  Perhaps it was the dog, a skinny, threadbare blue heeler. It was lying in the dirt, paws on what Sutton realised had recently been a good-quality leather backpack, the fine black leather now torn and chewed.

  The three men watched him get out of the Commodore. As he closed the door, one got to his feet and sauntered away. Before Sutton had reached Sofia and the child, a second man strolled off, his hands in his pockets. Then the third. What flashed into Sutton’s mind then was the fact of the four-wheel-drive vehicles with rear compartments. Then he thought of Sofia and the reason for his visit, and realised that, with the men gone, John Tankard could aim his camera without being spotted.

  ‘Remember me, Sofia?’

  She watched him. There was no humour or animation in her face. ‘Your little girl is happier.’

  ‘That’s because the crиche is closed from now until the end of January. My wife-’

  ‘She needs time to adjust.’

  Sutton supposed that Sofia meant his daughter, not his wife, and wondered if she were being clairvoyant now or simply expressing an obvious truth.

  ‘Two things, Sofia. Number one. You came to us saying you knew where Jane Gideon was. Have you thought any more about that? Was this a feeling you had, did someone tell you where she was, did you actually see her? I might have been a bit offhand the other day,’ he concluded hastily.

  ‘Not offhand. Disbelieving. You disbelieved me.’

  ‘Well, it’s not every day-’

  ‘You found her near water, didn’t you, just as I said you would.’

  ‘Perhaps your brothers-’

  ‘They don’t know anything.’

  ‘Fine. So you felt that Jane Gideon was dead, is that what you’re saying? You had no direct knowledge?’

  ‘If you want to put it that way. What’s the second matter you want to talk about?’

  Sutton looked at the dog. It had fallen asleep with its jaw on the backpack. ‘Sofia, in your role as clairvoyant-’

  ‘Seer.’

  ‘-seer, do you sometimes bless people? Their homes or their possessions, I mean. Tell them their worldly goods will multiply, that kind of thing?’

  Sofia seemed to draw upon her reserves of dignity. ‘I’m not a magician. I don’t conjure up things that aren’t there to begin with.’

  ‘Fine, fine.’

  ‘There are charlatans who say they can do these things.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know of any of them? Where I can find them?’

  At that point, a small brown snake began to cross the space between the rotting nylon chairs and the caravan. Neither Sutton nor Sofia said anything, but Sofia gently stepped over to the child in the second chair and lifted her free of it. The snake glided, unconcerned, beneath the caravan.

  ‘You learn to live with them,’ Sofia said.

  There was a special article about him in the main Saturday paper. It said he’d ‘snatched’ both women. What a laugh; they both got willingly into the passenger seat. Number three, now, she was snatched, good and proper.

  He hadn’t been prowling when he saw her the first time. It had been dawn, first light, and he’d been on his way to work. He saw her jogging, slim legs pounding, elbows pumping, shoulderblades flexing beneath the narrow straps of a singlet top. Sweatband to hold her hair back. His headlights in the uncertain dawn picking up the reflective strips on the heels of her running shoes. The air was cool. It would be hot later, and she probably had a job to go to, so that’s why she was running at dawn. He veered wide around her, went on down the Old Peninsula Highway, thinking it through.

  That had been several days ago. Each morning after that, the pattern had been repeated.

  This morning he’d left half an hour earlier, pulled over on to the dirt at the side of the road, raised the passenger-side rear wheel with a quick-release hydraulic jack, removed the hubcap and one wheel nut, and waited.

  When she came upon him he was walking around in small circles at the back wheel, bent over, his hands clasped behind his back. Her feet pounded, coming closer, and began to falter.

  ‘Lost something?’

  He looked up at her with relief, flashing a smile. ‘Blasted wheel nut. The light’s not good enough and I haven’t got a torch.’

  Half-bent, he continued to search near the jack. She joined him. In these conditions-dawn, air quite still-he’d have plenty of warning if another vehicle were coming. He and number three walked around like that for a short time, then, when she widened the search to take in the area near the exhaust pipe, and crouched to peer beneath the rear axle, he took her.

  Now, that was a snatch.

  Ten

  Bye-bye, Sprog,’ Scobie Sutton said.

  ‘Not Sprog. Roslyn. Ros… lyn.’

  ‘Roslyn.’

  Her little arms shot up, there at the back door. ‘Daddy, you hold me.’

  ‘I have to go to work now, sweetie.’

  ‘You take me? Please?’

  ‘Maybe another day.’

  ‘Scobie, love, you’ll give her false hope.’

  It was often like this. You really had to think hard before you said or did anything around a three-year-old, for if they got the wrong message about something, a lot of the groundwork could go out the
window.

  He said, ‘Kiss Daddy goodbye. We’ll have a barbecue tonight, how would that be?’

  ‘Shotchidge?’

  ‘Shotchidge on bread with lots of sauce.’

  ‘Two shotchidge?’

  ‘As many as you like.’

  Through the kisses goodbye, he heard his wife say, ‘I’m so lucky, I can’t believe it.’

  ‘I’ll try to get home early.’

  ‘It is Christmas Eve, my love.’

  Pam Murphy went surfing early that morning, hoping to stumble upon Ginger with a class, but he wasn’t there. Sunday, Christmas Eve, she should have expected it. The day stretched ahead of her. She rang her parents.

  Ninety minutes later she was getting off the Melbourne train and on to the Kew tram. Her parents lived in a turn-of-the-century house set in an overgrown garden on a hill overlooking Studley Park. Visiting them was something she did from time to time, not only because they were her parents, and getting on in years, but because, just once, she’d like them to express approval of the life she’d made for herself.

  And today she wanted to put Tankard, Kellock and McQuarrie out of her mind, and give her parents their Christmas presents, and get some presents from them, and generally put her police life out of her mind for a few hours before she had to report for duty again at 4 p.m..

  The house was in bad shape, rotting window frames, peeling paint and wallpaper, salt damp in the walls, leaking roof, even if it did sit on half an acre of prime real estate.

  She had her own key.

  ‘That you, dear?’

  Who else? Pam thought. ‘Me, mum.’

  Kerlunk, kerlunk, and then a scrape as her mother’s walking frame manoeuvred through the sitting-room door, and more kerlunking as the old woman made her way along the hallway. It was dark inside the house, despite the dazzling sun outside. It beat against the heavy front door and barely lit up the stained glass.

  Pam kissed her mother. ‘How’s Dad?’

  A considering frown: ‘Let’s say he’s had a so-so day.’

  ‘Typing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Pam rubbed the palms of her hands together, gearing up for the long walk past her mother and down the dim, dampish hallway to the back room, where her father lived now, surrounded by his books. Dr Murphy didn’t seem to sleep. He spent all of his time propped up by pillows, a portable typewriter on his lap.

  Pam hesitated. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘We spent the morning squabbling about the use of a hyphen,’ her mother replied. ‘He insisted that it should be oil hyphen painting, I said that once upon a time it would have been, but that two single words was acceptable nowadays.’

  There were three PhDs in the family. Pam’s father, and both of her brothers, who were several years older than her. The brothers were teaching at universities in the United States and were never coming back. That left Pam, who’d still been a child, an afterthought, when her brothers left home to live in university colleges. Some of the family’s intellectual sparkle seemed to go with them, and Pam grew up in the belief that her own development hadn’t mattered as much to her parents, that the family’s brains hadn’t been passed on to her. And so she made it clear that she was happy to swim and cycle and play tennis and go cross-country skiing. Solitary sports, mostly. But she made an interesting discovery: these sports taught her to think well, for they encouraged problem solving, solitude and reflection, so that she no longer believed that she wasn’t clever. When she graduated from the Police Academy, she was ranked third in her class.

  Not that the family registered that fact.

  ‘Hi, Dad.’

  ‘What is this “hi” business? Should I now respond “low”?’

  ‘Hello, Dad, Father, Pater, O Kingly One.’

  Her father grinned. The room smelt musty, a smell composed of old flesh and old furnishings and books. Pam crossed to the window.

  ‘Leave it!’ her father said.

  ‘As you wish.’

  ‘Sit, sweetie. What are the lawless up to?’

  And Pam told him, embellishing, watching her father’s avid face. It was more than a simple desire for salacious detail. Pam suspected that he took a certain eugenicist position on crime.

  ‘And what did this fellow look like?’

  ‘Oh, pretty average,’ Pam said. ‘How’s the book going?’

  Dr Murphy had been a lecturer in mathematics. He’d led an uneventful life, but was trying to screw an autobiography out of it.

  ‘At the rate I’m writing,’ he said sourly, ‘I’m likely to die before I’ve been conceived.’

  That afternoon, van Alphen wondered about the relationship between sexual desire and cocaine. Clearly Clara wanted him, but he didn’t know how to read it. Simple desire, for him as an individual? Gratitude for his being there when she needed him after the fire? Or was it chemical, the cocaine itself acting on her, and nothing to do with him as a person?

  She was discreet. He’d never seen her take the stuff. She’d hidden it away without taking any the night he delivered it, and when he’d called around yesterday it was clear that she’d already had some. No way did he want to see her take it, and she was protecting him, insisting that he always contact her before he called in to see her.

  Whatever, she was always ready for him. But did she need to get stoked first? Did she see him as no more than her supplier, who had to be kept sweet, because he didn’t want payment in cash but in sex?

  He was a long way in, now. He’d given her grams and grams of the stuff. ‘Clara, don’t be offended, you’re not going to sell the stuff on, are you?’

  She was shocked, genuinely outraged. ‘Van, I told you, it’s for my nerves.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You can see it’s helping, can’t you? I mean, do I seem as jumpy to you any more?’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘No. So don’t ask me that. I feel ashamed enough as it is.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘It’s not as if I’m a junkie or anything.’

  There were old scars, scarcely visible. Maybe she had been, once upon a time. ‘Forget I said it, Clara, okay?’

  ‘All right,’ she said grudgingly, then stretched out fully against his flank. ‘God you’re good for me.’

  She’d drawn the curtains. Incense was burning. In the perfumed dimness he turned and kissed her. She broke away. ‘We’re forgetting you, Van. You seem edgy.’

  ‘Ahhh,’ he said, rolling on to his back and flinging an arm across his eyes, ‘it’s been a hell of a couple of days. Two of my constables arrested some rich prat two nights ago, now the mother’s making waves, complaining to the superintendent.’

  ‘Plus that girl being found murdered.’

  ‘Plus that.’

  They fell silent, began to caress each other. Afterwards, heartbeat and blood flow ebbing pleasantly, he propped himself on one elbow and with the tips of his fingers began to trace her breasts and stomach and the glorious hollows inside her thighs. ‘Incredible skin,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t be part Maori, would you?’

  Her body seemed to alter under his gaze, recoiling, shutting him out. ‘Here we go,’ she said. ‘It had to come, sooner or later.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Does it make a difference who or what I am?’

  ‘Of course not. I just asked-’

  ‘You like a bit of black meat, is that it? Or maybe you’re disgusted but can’t help yourself? Or are you trying to break it off with me?’

  ‘I only said-’

  ‘Just you remember where the coke came from, big boy. Hurt me again, insult me, get me into trouble, and I’ll spill everything so fast you won’t know what hit you. “Cop steals drugs for girlfriend,” I can see it now.’

  ‘Jesus, I only said-’

  ‘I’m flesh and blood, aren’t I, like you? I got feelings?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I deserve respect.’

  ‘I respect you.’

  ‘Well don
’t say anything insulting to me again. Don’t even think it. I especially don’t want to hear anything about Maoris or New Zealand or anything about my past, okay?’

  ‘Sure.’

  She pushed down on his head. ‘Do me with your tongue. That’s it… that’s it…’

  She was slippery ground, but sex was firm ground, and van Alphen threw himself into it. He heard, through the dampish slap of her inner thighs against his ears, a sound like pleasure and pain.

  At four o’clock, just as John Tankard was finishing a cup of tea in the staff canteen before going on patrol with Pam Murphy, someone called, ‘Hey, Tank, bad luck, mate.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks.’

  ‘Dropping the charges, what bastards.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘So, did you get to screw old Cindy, or what?’

  John Tankard propelled the other man across the room, forearm to the throat, flattening him against the wall. ‘You arsehole.’

  ‘Chill out, Tank. He was only joking.’

  ‘Yeah, let him go, Tank. Look, we’re all on your side. They think if they’ve got money they can get away with anything. It’s not right. We’re on your side. So let him go.’

  Tankard released his colleague. It wasn’t often-ever? — that the others were on his side.

  Challis picked up the phone and heard Tessa Kane say, ‘Hal, I thought I’d ring now to wish you Merry Christmas. I’ll be with my family all day tomorrow.’

  There was a touch of desolation in her voice. Was her life like his? He breathed out heavily. ‘Have a happy day.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Then her voice dropped, taking on slow, lonely tones. ‘You should have called.’

  Challis waited, then said carefully, ‘I was going to.’

  ‘I wish you hadn’t left like that.’

  They were silent. Eventually Challis said softly, ‘I’d better go. I’d like to see you again soon.’

  ‘Wait! I heard you arrested-’

  Challis put the phone down. Arrested Lady Bastian’s son, she was going to say, and apparently there were questions all over the arrest, but that wasn’t his problem.