The Dragon Man ic-1

by Garry Disher

  He gazed at them. ‘The link we need could come by accident. We have to be alert, and read the daily crime reports. Maybe our man is known to us, or will become known to us, for a quite different offence. Maybe his vehicle’s been involved in something-Yes, Scobie?’

  Scobie Sutton was half way out of his chair. ‘Boss, while we’re on that subject, I’ve got one possibility.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘On Saturday I went out to Tidal River to question a gypsy woman for theft. She was camped there with three blokes and at least one kid. Two camper homes, one caravan, a couple of Holden Jackaroos. The thing is, she came to the station last week more or less saying she’d had a vision of where we could find the body. Near water, she said. I thought she was a crank. Sorry, boss.’

  Challis was angry but tried not to show it. ‘You’d better get out there straight away.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  Kees van Alphen delivered a second freezer bag. ‘You’re really getting through this stuff, Clara. Hadn’t you better cut down a bit?’

  He felt her arms go around his neck. ‘Gives me an appetite. Haven’t you noticed?’

  ‘I’ll say.’

  ‘Then what’s your problem?’

  ‘Supply, that’s my problem. Getting found out. Going to gaol. How’s that for starters?’

  ‘Then you’d better bust a few dealers, hadn’t you? Restock the evidence cupboard and deal direct.’

  He’d thought of that. He could do it, but didn’t feel good about it.

  Afterwards, on her patterned carpet, lit by the curtained window light, he traced her nipple and said, ‘I have to go.’

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘The neighbours are going to wonder why there’s always a police car in your driveway.’

  ‘Them? They scarcely know I exist.’

  Scobie Sutton asked for two vans, a police car and two probationary constables. Pam found herself driving him. She’d had a call earlier to say that her mother had fallen, not badly, but enough to bruise her poor, ropey arm. Pam had been ironing her uniform when the call came, listening to a new CD, a compilation of ‘60s surfing songs: ‘Wipeout’, ‘Pipeline’, ‘Apache’, a couple of Beach Boys hits. Ginger had once told her you could hear, in the beat and the guitar of ‘60s surfing instrumentals, the shudder in the wall of a breaking wave, so she’d been listening hard, as she ironed her uniform shirt and longed for him.

  Sutton broke in. ‘You know how my kid pronounces “quickly”? “Trickly.” To get her to go to the loo when she wakes in the morning we have to pretend her teddy needs a wee. So she rushes off to the loo on her little legs, saying, “Trickly, Blue Ted, trickly, hold it in, hold it in.”‘

  His bony face was wreathed in smiles. ‘Huh,’ Pam said, trying to work up some good humour.

  ‘And vegemite sandwiches? She calls them sammymites.’

  ‘Cute.’

  She sensed that Sutton had turned his protuberant eyes upon her, gauging her remark. After a while, he looked away again.

  Five days until New Year’s Eve. She had time off, and thought about Ginger and the parties he was bound to be going to.

  They entered the Tidal River caravan park, skirted the central reserve, and made their way to a dismal, unsheltered corner by the main road.

  Sutton groaned. ‘They’ve legged it.’

  Hard-baked, grassless earth, spotted with oil, but no sign of any gypsies. Pam watched Sutton get out of the Commodore and peer at the ground, as if searching for tyre tracks. He looked livid. Then he crossed to a rubbish bin and began hauling out food scraps, takeaway containers and bottles. At the bottom was what looked to Pam like a wad of black cloth. Then Sutton shook it out, and she saw straps and buckles, and realised that he was looking at a backpack. It was a mess. Sutton shoved it back into the bin.

  Fourteen

  On Wednesday 27 December, dark cloud masses rolled in from the west and banked up in huge thunderheads above the bay. By lunchtime an electrical storm had brewed. It lurked and muttered through the afternoon, approaching the Peninsula, building with gusting winds into a cloudburst at four o’clock. Challis, in the incident room at Waterloo, wondered how clogged his gutters were. He couldn’t afford to have rainwater overflowing the gutters before it reached the down-pipes that took it to his underground tank. Ellen Destry, also in the incident room, thought of her house, shut up all day in the heat. Would Larrayne have had the sense to open the windows? She glanced out across the car park to the courthouse. Rhys Hartnett, stripped to the waist, was snipping tin vents in the rain. His body glistened. He seemed to sense her there; straightening, lifting his streaming head to the rain, he shook the water from his thick hair. John Tankard, out in the divisional van, switched on the wipers and pulled in to the rear of the Fiddlers Creek Hotel, opened his window, snatched the sixpack of Crown Lager from the manager, and slipped away again, stopping by his flat on the way back to the station. Meanwhile the ground under Clara’s mailbox had turned to blackish mud. Kees van Alphen, exhausted in his bed at home, heard nothing of the storm. Four days had passed since Trina Unger’s abduction. Her body had not been found. Life went on.

  On Thursday the Waterloo Progress came out in a small special edition. There was little advertising and only a handful of news items and a page of sports results. The front page was devoted to the second letter, under the banner: KILLER MOCKS POLICE. There was also a sidebar speculating that a four-wheel-drive vehicle had been used for the abductions. And, at the bottom, an item headlined ‘Charges Dropped’:

  ‘Police this week announced the dropping of charges against Mr Julian Bastian, 21-year-old playboy son of Melbourne and Portsea society matron, Lady Susan Bastian.

  ‘Mr Bastian was facing charges of driving while intoxicated. When arrested, his companion, Miss Cindy Price, 19, of Mount Eliza, was in the driver’s seat of his BMW sportscar. Arresting police alleged that Bastian persuaded Miss Price to say that she was the driver.

  ‘Senior Sergeant Kellock of the Waterloo police station said: “There were procedural errors in the arrest.”

  ‘Lady Bastian’s late husband, Sir Edgar Bastian, was the moving force behind the White Sands Golf Course. Members include Superintendent Mark McQuarrie, of the Victoria Police.

  ‘Superintendent McQuarrie is superintendent of Peninsula District.’

  On Friday, Pam Murphy and John Tankard were back on the day shift, making their regular sweep of the town and the side roads.

  ‘See the paper yesterday, Murph?’

  Pam’s mother had been treated for a blood clot. The treatment was plenty of rest and pills to dissolve the clot, but was she going to get much rest? Not likely, not with the old man the way he was.

  ‘You see it?’

  Pam looked through the windscreen, the side window, alert for kids on bikes and skateboards. ‘See what?’

  ‘The article about that Bastian prick.’

  ‘I saw it.’

  ‘Pretty good, eh?’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Well, it raises doubts, doesn’t it? If I can get some senior officers to swing behind this, maybe the charges will be reinstated.’

  ‘And pigs might fly.’

  ‘You’re a negative bitch, you know that?’

  And Tankard folded his arms and leaned, tired and depressed, against the passenger door with his eyes closed.

  On Saturday morning Challis noted that the road outside of his front gate was dry and dusty again, almost as if there hadn’t been rain earlier in the week. He made for the Old Peninsula Highway, as he always did. But this week he’d been braking slowly when he reached the Foursquare Produce barn and pulling on to the gravel forecourt. As usual today there were two cars parked hard against the building itself-employees’ vehicles. The main door was open. He could see them, two women, one building a pyramid of apples, the other preparing price labels with a black marker pen. They recognised him and waved. He wondered what they thought of the occupant of the third car, which was parked
next to the phone box. Pity? And embarrassment, for when we see such naked grief and desperation we turn away from it.

  He got out. As he approached the car, the driver’s door opened and a woman eased out from behind the wheel. ‘Inspector Challis.’

  ‘Hello, Mrs Gideon.’

  There were posters as large as television screens over the rear windows: Did you see who took our daughter? A blurred photograph, Jane Gideon clipped from a group of friends, smiling a little crookedly, a little drunkenly, for the camera. There was a tangle of streamers behind her, the edge of one or two balloons, and a man’s shoulder tucked into hers. A few lines of description under the photograph, and the circumstances of her abduction. If this jogs your memory, please call the police on, and a direct number to the incident room.

  There were smaller copies pasted on to the nearby power poles and to the sides of the phone box. Mrs Gideon also kept a bundle in her car and patiently through the long days she handed them to anyone who stopped at Foursquare.

  Challis asked what he’d asked every day since Boxing Day: ‘Any nibbles?’

  Mrs Gideon smiled tiredly. She hadn’t washed her hair. She was overweight, a heavy breather, which seemed to intensify the desperation that she was showing to the world. ‘People are very kind. They always look closely, and they listen, but they always shake their heads.’

  ‘You’re doing your best.’

  ‘But are the police, Mr Challis?’ she chided gently. ‘It strikes me as unusual that there have been no developments.’

  ‘It’s baffling,’ Challis said. He never liked to hedge or lie. By telling Mrs Gideon that the police were baffled, he was stressing their commonality with her and the man and woman in the street.

  Fifteen

  At midday that same day, Danny Holsinger and Boyd Jolic were in a stolen Fairmont, approaching a secluded dirt road behind the Waterloo racecourse. Quiet Saturday lunch-time, no-one around, everyone on holiday.

  ‘Here we are,’ Jolic said.

  A big house set back from the road. Plenty of trees, acres of close-cropped lawns, white railing fences for hundreds of metres, holding yards in the same white railing, a stable block, sheds, dam, fruit trees. A ‘forthcoming auction’ sign had been bolted next to the driveway entrance. It all spelt money. Well, so it should. Last year’s Caulfield Cup winner had been bred and trained there.

  But as Jolic slowed to turn in, the engine cut out. ‘Fuel’s vaporising,’ he’d said, the first time it had happened, and now here it was, happening again. ‘Piece of shit,’ he said, grinding the starter, pumping the pedal. The Fairmont coughed and shook and they steered their shuddering way up a clean white gravelled drive to the side of the house.

  And just as they were getting out, a woman stepped through a screen door and said, ‘Are you the new farrier?’

  Unoccupied, Jolic had said. He had a plan of the house and assurances that the owners were holidaying in Bali until mid-January. A manager to feed and water the horses and a gardener two or three times a week, but that’s all, and no-one around on a Saturday afternoon.

  So, who the fuck was this? Danny turned to Jolic, ‘Jesus, Joll,’ and Jolic elbowed him hard, in the chest. ‘Want to give the bitch our fucking names?’

  Next thing, Jolic was out of the car and running straight at the woman, one arm concealing his face from her, reaching her and spinning her around and clamping a hand over her mouth. ‘Shut up and you won’t get hurt.’

  He caught Danny’s eye, jerked it at the screen door. Danny, also concealing his face, ran with a crush and scrape across the gravel and opened the door.

  They bundled the woman inside. They were in the kitchen: copper pots on hooks, a huge Aga oven, a bench as long and broad as a couple of single beds end to end, stained wooden floors and inbuilt cupboards. Searching frantically, Jolic snatched a cast-iron frying pan from a wall hook and slammed it against the side of the woman’s head.

  She dropped like a stone.

  They were panting. Danny thought they might have been yelling.

  Who else was on the property?

  Had he said it aloud? Yes, he was shouting it, and it was accusatory, telling Jolic he was acting on piss-poor information, doing over an ‘empty’ house. Now it was an aggravated burglary, and, for all Danny knew, from the way the woman had fallen and now just lay there like a rag doll, murder.

  ‘You arsehole, who else is here?’

  He’d never called Jolic that before, not to his face.

  ‘Well why don’t you go and fucking look, Dan.’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘We’ll both do it.’

  They ran through the house, room to room, and saw no-one. So they calmed a little. Jolic bent over the woman, removed the plain gold necklace from around her neck, gave it to Danny. ‘Sorry, mate. Give this to your sheila.’

  Mollified, Danny said, ‘Ta.’

  Jolic took out his floorplan. He’d marked it with red crosses-a crystal cabinet here, solid silver cutlery there; here an antique clock, there some china figurines and a top-of-the-range sound system. They wrapped the delicate stuff in bubble wrap and stuffed everything into garbage bags.

  There was a man in the kitchen corridor. He had his back to them and had clearly just stepped in from working outside: dusty, sweaty, smelling of horses, a weary hand in the small of his back. Water darkened his hair and collar, as though he’d come in via the laundry, freshening himself up a little first. Late lunch, Danny thought. Just fucking bloody perfect.

  Yelling, charging like he was playing American football, Jolic took the man down in a low tackle. The man flipped back at the waist and Danny saw his head smack the wall before he crumpled to the floor.

  Two down. How many more to go?

  Jolic was like a cornered tiger now, stepping from foot to foot and swinging his head about, searching for his pursuers. Danny saw why some women might be attracted to him. He was fierce, reckless, arrogant, quick and light on his feet, his eyes alight. But he was also mad and dangerous, and snarled at Danny, ‘Help me get ‘em out.’

  ‘Out?’

  ‘Out on the fucking lawn, dickbrain. Now.’

  The woman, then the man, letting their heads bump like potatoes in a sack down the back step and over a border of white-painted stones and on to the cool cropped grass.

  ‘Well away from the house,’ Jolic said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘We’ve left evidence behind, moron.’

  The woman coming out of the house like that had distracted them. They’d failed to remember the latex gloves in their pockets. It meant going through and wiping everything. Unless

  ‘Joll, no, you’re-’ what was the word? ‘-escalating it.’

  ‘Escalating my arse,’ and Danny trailed behind him, into the workshop, where there was plenty in the way of rags and tins marked ‘flammable’. Then back to the kitchen and the other rooms, splashing it about, chucking matches as they retreated, kitchen last, then out the side door and into the Fairmont.

  Which wouldn’t start. They heard it grinding away, tireder and tireder. ‘Fuck!’ Jolic slammed his palms on the wheel.

  ‘Jol, look.’

  A Falcon ute, hot lilac paint job, chrome roll bar, fat tyres, smoky glass all round, towing a covered trailer in the same paint job, marked Steve Pickhaven, Farrier. By now there was smoke leaking from the house, and flames behind the glass as the curtains went up. They saw the guy get out, his bottom jaw dropping in disbelief as he put two and two together. Then he was digging in his top pocket for a mobile phone and punching at the keys.

  Jolic was calm now, thinking, a dangerous condition in him. ‘Got a hankie? Quick wipe of the car, dashboard, door handle, window, everything. Forget the stereo, we’ll take the smaller stuff with us.’

  ‘On foot?’

  ‘Got a better idea?’

  Within one minute they were through the railing fence and cutting across a paddock, past a horse trough and skirting a dam and losing themselves in a small wood
ed area on top of a rise. Here they had a view of the approach roads. Danny groaned. He went behind a tree and lowered his jeans and jockeys and felt it slide out of him, quick, soothing and perfectly formed. He fastened his jeans again, spat on his hands and rubbed them on his shirt, and felt unclean, the stink of defeat sticking to him.

  But Jolic was more intent on their predicament. ‘Didn’t take the bastards long. Look.’

  Pursuit cars, red and blue lights flashing, a distant wail of sirens. They were coming in on the house from both directions. And now a fire engine. It was doubtful, Danny thought, that he and Jolic would have made it even if the Fairmont hadn’t given up the ghost. Roadblocks, the police helicopter, they’d have been caught like rats in a trap.

  Jolic watched avidly. He looks like he wants to be there, Danny thought, fighting the fire from the back of the Waterloo CFA truck. After a while, Jolic backed away, turned, began to cut through the trees, the garbage bag of stolen items bouncing over his shoulder. He didn’t say anything to Danny. What was Danny supposed to do? What was their plan? Was Jolic abandoning him? He ran, hard at Jolic’s heels.

  ‘Where we going?’

  Jolic panted, ‘We pinch a car, right?’

  Around the edge of the Waterloo racecourse, to a roundabout, then along the side of a housing estate, new houses cheek to jowl behind a high wooden fence. In at the first entrance, then along a couple of winding side streets, to a maroon Mitsubishi Pajero, sitting in the driveway of a house, dripping water on to the forecourt, keys in the ignition.

  Sirens in the distance.

  There had been a flurry when Jane Gideon’s body was found, but the investigation had stalled, so an aggravated burglary was good for sweeping the cobwebs away.