by Garry Disher
He glanced at his watch. Six-thirty. He decided against going home and then coming back again, and walked down High Street to the Fish Bar, a bistro between the shire offices and the jetty. From the window he could see the open ground that the town had set aside for fairs and carnivals. Tonight: Carols by Candlelight. Late January: the Westernport Festival. Anzac Day: dawn service.
He liked eating alone. He often had no choice but to eat alone, but he did like it, most of the time. Tonight it would have been better to have dined with someone, for he felt peaceful and relaxed for the first time in a while-which owed a lot to the fact that it was Christmas Eve and the town-even the police station all that day-was in a slowed-down mood, everyone benign and full of good intentions.
At eight o’clock he paid his bill, and as he was standing, waiting, folding his credit card receipt into his pocket, he saw Scobie Sutton’s car draw into the kerb on the other side of the road. The grassy area near the little bandstand was filling rapidly. Sutton and his wife and daughter got out of the car, carrying blankets and hymn books. The child was sleepy. Challis watched them join the crowd. Someone gave them candles from a cardboard box, and they settled on to their blankets. But Challis didn’t join them when the carol singing began. He might have, and been welcomed, but he found a corner of the crowd where he could sing and not be expected to talk.
Eleven
Challis woke at six on Christmas morning and desolation flooded him. He hadn’t expected to feel this way. He’d thought he was above all that. He remembered what he’d read somewhere-if you’re depressed, go for a long walk-and swung immediately out of bed and hunted for his Nike gardening shoes, a T-shirt and an old pair of shorts.
He walked for an hour. As the bad feeling lifted, he found himself listening to the birds. He could swear he was hearing bellbirds, the first in his five years on the Peninsula. The world was still and silent, and he was alone and light-footed in it, this morning. He took deep breaths. Yellow-breasted robins watched him and a thrush sang high in the canopy of branches above his head. There were creatures scratching in the bracken. Only a plastic shopping bag caught in a blackberry cane spoiled the morning for him-that, and the realisation that he’d been depressed but wasn’t now, yet might be again as the day developed.
At nine-thirty he left the house. Ellen Destry and her husband and daughter lived in a cedar house on stilts in an airless pocket between ti-trees and a small, humped hill at Penzance Beach. The house looked like-and had been, before the Destrys bought it-someone’s holiday house. And nothing- not even the new shrubs and herbs and fruit trees, or the fresh paint job and the hanging plants-would alter that. Three cars in the driveway, three out on the street. Challis groaned. He wasn’t ready for a crowd. He mostly preferred solitariness yet worked in an occupation that demanded permanent sociality.
Alan Destry came to the door. ‘Hal. Come in, come in, Merry Christmas.’
Ellen’s husband wore an air of grievance. He was a constable, attached to the Traffic Division in the Outer Eastern zone, married to a fast-tracking CIB detective. That’s how Ellen had explained it to Challis once, at the pub, when she wanted to stay and drink and not go home. ‘Merry Christmas yourself,’ Challis said, offering his hand.
At that moment a light plane passed overhead, following the shoreline. Distracted, Challis looked up. Twin-engined Cessna. He didn’t recognise it.
‘Some people have their feet on the ground,’ Alan Destry said.
It was a clumsy insult, delivered with a grin of Christmas cheer. Challis wanted to say that some people had all the luck, but let it go. People underestimated him, he knew that, and didn’t care. They thought that a policeman who liked to restore old aeroplanes and had a wife who’d tried to have him shot was a man who would allow things to happen to him. A man destined to remain stuck where he was in the force, detective inspector, no higher.
He proffered a terracotta pot wrapped in green and red Christmas paper. There was a clump of lobelia spilling over the edges. ‘Good of you,’ Destry said, looking about for a flat surface and deciding on the verandah floor, beside the door.
They went through to the sitting room. The windows were open, admitting gusts of warm, dusty air. It was an oppressive room. No wonder Ellen intended to have air-conditioning installed. She wasn’t in the room. Nor was Scobie Sutton. But the other CIB officers were, and a couple of Alan Destry’s colleagues, together with spouses and children. The Destrys’ daughter, Larrayne, scowled in a corner, trying to ward off the imploring fingers of a small boy.
‘Ellen not here?’
‘Ah, mate, a sudden death. A kid.’
Challis felt sick. To lose a child on Christmas Day.
He forced down a glass of beer and absently palmed toffee nuts into his mouth from a bowl on the television set. There were cards on the sideboard and on a loop of string across the far wall. Mistletoe. Parcels heaped at the foot of a tired, tinselly pine-tree branch that was shedding needles. As he watched, a bauble fell to the carpet. The small boy rushed to it, kicked it in his haste, and Challis saw it smash against the skirting board.
The Destrys’ daughter looked so miserable and put-upon that Challis crossed the room to her, greeting people as he went. Larrayne saw him coming. She stared fixedly at the floor, as if to hide or appear too negligible to be bothered with. She wore a short denim skirt, a Savage Garden T-shirt and sandals. She’d painted her nails. Her legs, knees together and inclined to one side, seemed too long for her slight frame. Wings of hair furled down about her young round face. She was fifteen but looked at once ten and twenty.
‘Hello, Larrayne.’
She was low in an uncomfortable chair and Challis towered above her. She was forced to stretch her neck to see his face, and that strangled her voice. ‘Hello.’ She said it quickly and looked away again.
Challis crouched beside her. ‘Merry Christmas.’
She muttered a reply, leaning her knees away from him.
‘It’s a pity your poor mum had to go out on a call.’
Larrayne shrugged, then said, ‘Me and Dad had to do everything, as per usual. She invites people over, then goes out, leaving us to do everything.’
Challis knee-creaked until he was standing again. He couldn’t be bothered with the Destrys’ daughter. He wandered across to the main window.
When Alan Destry came by with a bowl of nuts, Challis said, ‘Did Scobie go with Ellie?’
‘Yep.’
‘Do we know what happened?’
‘Cot death.’
A cot death. Challis wondered how secure he really was in life. His eyes pricked. He felt very alone again, and welcomed the despatcher’s call when it came.
Twelve
They were country people: decent, bewildered, fearing the worst. They’d been expecting Trina to arrive some time on Christmas Eve. It’s a long drive from Frankston to Shepparton, so, although they’d been worried when their daughter hadn’t arrived, they’d told themselves to expect her after they’d gone to bed, or Christmas morning at the latest, though they’d have been cross with her if she had left it that late. She’d always been a bit wilful and inconsiderate. Not malicious, mind you, just always went her own way. But when she hadn’t arrived by ten o’clock, they’d phoned. No answer. Then, remembering that two girls had been abducted and murdered, they’d phoned the police in Frankston, who sent a divisional van to their daughter’s address.
Trina Unger lived in a small, worn-looking home unit. The doors were locked, the blinds drawn. The police had broken in eventually, but the place was empty. Trina Unger’s bed was unmade. A half-packed weekender bag sat on the end of the bed. The other bedroom had been hastily tidied. There was a flatmate, according to the Ungers. They didn’t know where she was. At her parents’ for Christmas? — as Trina should have been.
Then at lunchtime Trina Unger’s car was found on a lonely stretch of the Old Peninsula Highway, just ten kilometres from Frankston. All of the windows had been smashed in.
Now it was three in the afternoon. The parents had arrived from Shepparton, and Challis and Sutton were interviewing them in their daughter’s sitting room. The walls were close and faintly grubby, the ceiling too low, and the overstuffed, mismatched op-shop armchairs crowded the small, tufted orange carpet. The place smelt damp, despite the heat of summer.
‘The second bedroom?’ Challis said.
‘That would be Den’s,’ Mrs Unger said. ‘Denise.’
‘Do you know where we can contact her?’
‘Afraid not.’
Challis nodded to Sutton, who stood and made for the bedroom. All of the detective constable’s movements were slow and automatic, his bony face drawn, his eyes ready to brim, as though he could not get the image of the cot-death baby out of his head.
Challis turned to the Ungers again. ‘We found your daughter’s car.’
Kurt Unger was sitting upright, his fists bunched neatly on his large knees. The words wouldn’t come clearly, so he coughed and tried again. ‘Yes.’
‘On the Old Peninsula Highway,’ Challis continued. ‘That’s in the opposite direction from Shepparton. And she’d started packing, but hadn’t finished. Have you any idea where she might have been going?’
‘None,’ Freda Unger said.
‘Does she have a boyfriend? Could he have called her?’
Freda Unger made a wide gesture with both arms. ‘Who knows? We never met any, if she did have boyfriends. But she was young still.’
‘Twenty?’
‘Twenty-one in March.’
Kurt Unger coughed. He said, ‘I overheard a policeman say the windows were broken on her car.’
Challis cursed under his breath. ‘Yes.’
‘She locked her doors but he broke her windows with a rock and dragged her out,’ Kurt Unger said fixedly. Nothing moved, only his bottom jaw.
His wife crumpled. ‘Oh, Kurt, don’t.’
‘We don’t know what happened,’ Challis said. ‘My feeling is, it’s not related to her disappearance. All of the windows were smashed, suggesting vandals, and the radio had been ripped out and the boot forced open. Someone saw her car there and decided on the spur of the moment to break in.’
‘But what was she doing there?’
‘It’s possible your daughter’s flatmate will know,’ Challis said. ‘We’re tracking her down now.’
As he spoke, Scobie Sutton entered, holding an envelope in his long fingers. The flap was open; there was a letter inside. ‘It’s from this Denise character’s mother,’ he said. ‘There’s a return address on the back, somewhere in East Bentleigh. Do you know where the phone is, Mrs Unger?’
‘The kitchen.’
‘Right.’
‘Excuse me,’ Challis said, and he joined Sutton in the kitchen nook. ‘Scobie,’ he muttered, ‘if the girl’s there, ask her what Trina’s car was doing on the highway.’
Sutton looked as though he’d just remembered his manners. He held out the handset. ‘You want to make the call, boss?’
‘No, I didn’t mean that. Ask her the obvious questions, Trina’s movements over the past couple of days, any boyfriend, was she aware Trina was missing, that kind of thing, but we must know about the car.’
Challis returned to the sitting room. The parents were whispering to each other. Reluctant to intrude, he crossed the room to the front door, stepped outside, and wandered across to the police car that had been parked in the driveway for most of the morning. A uniformed constable sat in the driver’s seat with the door open, eating a sandwich. She swallowed hurriedly. ‘Do you need me inside again, sir?’
‘Not just yet. They’re holding up for the moment.’
‘Sir, we just got word a walkman and a sweatband have been found near the car.’
‘How near?’
‘A few hundred metres away.’
Jogging, Challis thought. That’s what she was doing there. But when? Yesterday? The day before? Why hadn’t the flatmate noticed her missing?
Sutton joined him. He tried for some humour. ‘Denise has been hitting the Christmas champagne pretty hard. Hard to get any sense out of her. But she said Trina Unger likes to go jogging on the highway. Used to jog around the park, but got scared off by a flasher a few months ago, and now jogs on the highway because it’s quiet.’
‘What time of day?’
‘Early morning. Daybreak.’
‘Never in the evening?’
‘Not according to Denise.’
‘When did she last see Trina?’
‘Friday night. On Saturday she went to stay with her parents in East Bentleigh to help her mother get ready for Christmas. She noticed that Trina hadn’t come back from her run, but didn’t think any more about it.’
‘Boyfriend?’
‘She didn’t know of one.’
Challis stared unseeingly over the rooftops. Young men and women left home to lead their separate, secret lives, and some of them didn’t make it. ‘Scobie, go home, spend some time with your wife and kid. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Thirteen
On Boxing Day the Age and the Herald Sun carried stories about the missing girl. At 8 a.m., Tessa Kane came to the station and told Challis that she was bringing out an issue between Christmas and the New Year after all. ‘We received another letter. It was hand-delivered to the box we have next to the main entrance.’
Challis spread it out inside its clear plastic slip case and read: Like you, my eyes are everywhere. But mine know what to look for. Do yours?
‘Fancies himself,’ Challis said. ‘Well, that’s true to form.’ He sighed. ‘You’ve taken a copy?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll send this to the lab.’
‘We go to press tomorrow night.’
‘Tess, you’re inflaming the situation.’
‘Try and stop me, Hal. I’ve had legal advice.’
‘That’s not the point,’ Challis said. ‘You’re scaring people, and in danger of attracting crackpots, not to mention copycats.’
‘That doesn’t negate the fact that there’s been two murders and a possible third.’
‘At this stage it’s an abduction.’
‘Hal, come on.’
Challis said, ‘I’d prefer it if you didn’t publish, that’s all.’
Ellen parked her car. Rhys was waiting for her again. Working on Boxing Day? Talk about keen. He crossed to where she was standing and handed her an envelope. ‘Your quote.’
She opened it, saying, ‘Rhys, this is the season to be jolly. It’s also the season to get the phone bill, the gas bill, the electricity bill…’
She said it with a grin, but there was a flash of irritation and he said, ‘I thought you were serious. I kept the costs down as much as possible.’ He turned toward the shrubbery border to cross into the grounds of the courthouse.
‘Rhys, wait.’
She caught up to him and said, ‘Look, I didn’t mean to offend you. You must be wondering what you’ve got yourself into with my family.’
He was still prickly. ‘I got the distinct impression the other day that your husband doesn’t want aircon fitted.’
Ellen said, keeping it light, ‘Oh, he’ll come around eventually.’
‘He didn’t seem to like me much. That I can do without.’
There was no point in avoiding what had happened. Rhys had stayed for a barbecue lunch, but it had been a disaster. ‘Alan gets like that sometimes. It’s not a pleasant job he’s got, he sees terrible road accidents.’ She grinned. ‘But yeah, I don’t think another barbecue is a good idea just now.’
She saw the tightness go out of him a little. He looked at his watch. ‘I’d better get back to work. Why don’t you look over the quote and I’ll catch up with you later in the week.’
She said, ‘A drink would be nice.’
He hesitated. She seemed to wait for a long time for him to smile and say, ‘Good idea.’
Challis briefed them at eight-thirty, saying: ‘Unger, curiously, was sna
tched at dawn, when she’d gone for an early morning jog. But what does that tell us? Not much. Does our man prowl up and down the highway for hours every night, to see what he can find? Was he coming home when he saw Unger, or on his way somewhere, to work perhaps? Was it opportunistic, or had he seen her jogging before?
‘Which brings us to his psychological make-up. A loner, according to one of our shrinks. Probably smart, in his thirties, a normally functioning citizen on the surface. You’d live next door to him for years and not know he liked to rape and kill young women. Probably some trouble in his childhood. Drunken, abusive father, unhealthy attachment to his mother. Unable now to relate easily to women, beyond surface pleasantries. We’ve heard it all before, there’s no point knowing these things unless to have them proven after the fact. The point is, he looks, and behaves, like the man next door, he has no work, family or other link to his victims, and so we’ll simply have to rely on luck and chance along with good old-fashioned detective work.
‘I won’t kid you, things have stalled. Not much forensic joy from the bodies, and nothing on the letter sent to the Progress. The paper comes from laser printer paper available at any newsagent and many supermarkets. The printer was a Canon, and they’re a dime a dozen, found in businesses and homes all over the country. The envelope was post office issue. There are prints on the envelope, but they’re smudged and likely to be from mail-sorters and posties. We’re checking that now.’
He paused. ‘Since then, another letter has come.’
‘Any more on the vehicle, boss?’
It was one of the Rosebud detectives. So far there was no sign that Ellen Destry’s crew, or the reinforcements arranged by McQuarrie, were losing faith in him. ‘No. And once you ask yourself who on the Peninsula uses a four-wheel drive, you want to have a Bex and a good lie down.’
He started numbering his fingers. ‘First, any farmer, orchardist, winegrower or stock breeder. Then we have your ordinary suburban cowboy, who’s never taken his pride and joy off the sealed roads. After that, your average house painter, electrician and handyman.’ He stopped numbering. ‘Not to mention mobile mechanics, courier drivers, shire council workers, power-line inspectors, food transporters.’
