by Garry Disher
The briefing started. It was a pep talk, as if the Unit C.O. had seen too many war movies. He slapped one hand into the palm of the other as he spoke:
‘A vital job, gentlemen. Three fatalities on the whole of the Peninsula last year, six so far this year.
‘And it’s spring—season of love, boozy lunches, winery tours and eighteen-year-olds finishing their exams. Lovely. But not to be seen as excuses for stupid behaviour on the open road. Zero tolerance, gentlemen. Let’s get the dills off the road.
‘So we’ll set up on hills, we’ll set up on corners and bends, and we’ll be out every day for the rest of the week. And just when the locals get wind of us in one location, we’ll move to another—only to return a couple of days later, same road, different hill or bend.
‘Keep them on their toes, guys, okay?’
His words fired the young ones. One of them even whooped. Tank looked out at the street again, the pursuit cars festooned with antennas and stripes, and wondered if he’d be given the chance to drive one. It was usually his job to say, ‘Blow into this, please, sir,’ not give chase in a fast car. Strangely, sir or madam would always show a moment’s hesitation, a flicker of disquiet, as if they had something to hide. Maybe they were scared of germs.
‘Another thing,’ said the Traffic boss. He passed around a stack of A4-sized photographs. ‘Be on the lookout for this guy.’
A grainy shot of a man carrying a shotgun, face averted, beanie pulled low over his brow. ‘Robs banks,’ the Traffic boss said. ‘Apparently he’s headed this way.’
19
Tuesday, publication day, and by 8 a.m. Challis was lifting a copy of the News-Pictorial from a wire rack outside the newsagency on High Street. He read it in the car.
Jack Porteous had been circumspect with the abduction and rape, at one point writing: ‘…an unconfirmed report that a man wearing a police uniform…’ Challis supposed that was better than an outright accusation, and turned to the reporter’s second story.
Again, fair, accurate reporting. Challis had said all the things Porteous reported him as saying. The thing was, the reporter had given more weight to Challis’s unimpressed view of the state government and police command than his list of daily operational concerns.
Challis gnawed at the inside of his mouth. With any luck, the story would fizzle out. He was only an inspector, the newspaper only a local weekly. If anything he said was thought to matter, Porteous’s mates on the Melbourne dailies would have called him by now.
He started the car, drove to the police station and found a silver Holden slewed crosswise in the senior officers’ section. He pulled the Triumph into a space beside the dump bin at the rear. When he switched off, the motor ran on with asthmatic wheezing, smoke and a last heaving shudder.
‘Ah, the smell of unburnt fuel in the morning,’ John Tankard said, watching him. ‘The rattle of misfiring cylinders.’
Challis got out. ‘This is a classic of British motoring, John.’
‘Classic of something, anyway.’
Tankard was ready to hit the road with the RBT team, but had something else on his mind. He coughed, toed the potholed asphalt. ‘Read what you said about resources and manpower, sir,’ he said shyly. ‘You hit the nail on the head.’
Challis thanked him and entered the station through the rear doors, wondering how others would see the story. Plenty of sidelong looks, a couple of nods and smiles. But no one said anything as he walked down the main corridor to check his pigeonhole—the usual crap—and the overnight log. A handful of burglaries, bar fights, car thefts, but nothing resembling abduction and rape. He signed out the CIU Falcon, brought it around to the car park exit and waited for Scobie Sutton to arrive.
When Pam Murphy reached work that morning there was a post-it note on her desk, asking her to meet the sex crimes sergeant in the car park at the rear of the police station. She found Jeannie Schiff fiddling with a mobile phone beside an unmarked silver Holden, the car at a haphazard angle across the slots marked ‘Superintendent’ and ‘Inspector’.
‘Where first?’ asked Schiff, barely looking up from the screen of her phone.
Pam had spent yesterday working on the sex offenders list. Glancing now at the folder of names, she said, ‘Laurence Matchan in Penzance Beach.’
They got into the car. Schiff said, ‘Point the way,’ and spurted towards the exit.
And there was Challis, propped patiently against the driver’s door of the CIU car. Schiff pulled up alongside him, Pam powered down her window. ‘Morning, boss.’
‘Constable,’ said Challis with a nod. ‘Sergeant.’
‘Inspector.’
‘Off to talk to scumbags?’
Pam nodded. Tiptoeing a little, she said, ‘Er, you haven’t read the local paper by any chance?’
Challis crossed his arms. ‘Completely different Inspector Challis.’
‘That’s what I thought. See you later, boss.’
‘Good luck.’
Schiff accelerated out onto the main road. ‘What was he on about?’
Pam shifted in her seat. Choosing her words, she said, ‘The weekly paper ran a story quoting him on police under-resourcing.’
Schiff shrugged; she didn’t care. ‘What do we know about Laurence Matchan?’
Pam opened her folder. Matchan, she said, had managed a group home for four men and one woman with intellectual disabilities in Mornington. ‘When he realised the men were fighting each other to have sex with the woman, he drew up a roster but before long he was having sex with her too. At trial he argued the sex was consensual, and anyway he’d saved the men from having to visit prostitutes. He got out six months ago.’
‘What a charming fellow,’ said Schiff, speeding through Waterloo. ‘Who else?’
Pam leafed through the files, rattling off a series of outlines. Most of the local sex offenders were small fry, their crimes considered minor by the courts—lewd conduct, carnal knowledge of a minor, fondling and groping—and she’d had to decide which of them were capable of graduating to abduction and rape. She’d been able to rule some out—three were aged in their late seventies, a couple were borderline retarded and couldn’t drive—but there were still quite a few. In the end, she’d used her instincts. If a man looked like a brute in his mug shot, she prioritised him. She also paid close attention to those who lived near the reserve, owned a car and might have access to police equipment and forensic knowhow. A Somerville ambulance driver, for example. It wasn’t very scientific, but she didn’t tell Schiff that.
Soon they were passing through open farmland, some of the paddocks cropped for hay, the unmown grass flexing in long, rolling waves as the wind passed over it. Schiff was silent, unreadable, and Pam found herself saying, ‘Sarge, do you think it will turn out to be a cop?’
‘Entirely possible.’
Pam subsided. The police were often maligned, with or without good reason, and this would make it worse. COP RAPIST? That had been the headline in Saturday’s Herald Sun. If the rapist was a cop, he deserved to be found, tried and punished, but Pam would hate to be in the middle of all that. The police boys’ club would chew her up and spit her out if she crossed it in any way; yet she could feel as protective of her colleague as the next officer. Us against them, the police against the rabble.
Meanwhile she had to spend the day with a woman who gave every appearance of impatience and boredom, as if a rural investigation were beneath her. They rode in silence until Pam stirred and said, ‘Next left.’
Penzance Beach was at the end of a side road that ran off Frankston-Flinders Road, and as they drew near, she wondered whether to tell Schiff that she lived there, in a little house opposite a chicken farm, at the poorer edge of the town.
‘This is where I live, coincidentally.’
‘Yeah? Not friends with Laurence Matchan, are you?’
‘No.’
‘Nothing to worry about, then,’ Schiff said, looking about as they entered the little settlement. ‘Pretty pl
ace.’
This was the heart of the town: fibro shacks on stilts, log cabins, weatherboard cottages—humble holiday and permanent homes on small blocks, all of it squeezed into a small space between the bay waters and a long ridge. Schiff followed the road as it curved around parallel to the beach, slowing for speed bumps, until Pam said, ‘Turn right.’
Now the road climbed up on to the ridge, where the big money lived, in huge houses that clawed for air space giving uninterrupted views of the sea. Behind them were dwellings smaller than the cliff-top mansions but larger than the sea-level cottages, the homes of prosperous family doctors, accountants, teachers, electricians. And that’s where Murphy and Schiff found Laurence Matchan, in a plain old farmhouse that faced the grasslands behind the town, set in a weedy garden shaded by a giant palm tree.
Matchan answered the door. He was middle-aged, comfortable rather than fat, thick hair threaded with silver, some acne scarring. A crumpled tan suit over a light blue shirt; dark blue tie knot an enormous wedge under his chins. A grey, fatigued cast to his face, as if life had let him down.
‘Going somewhere, Mr Matchan?’
‘Reporting to police, if you must know.’
Schiff looked at Murphy, who asked, ‘Parole condition?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which station?’
‘Rosebud.’
‘Where were you last Thursday night?’
‘Here.’
‘Can anyone vouch for that?’
‘No.’
‘So we have a problem.’
‘My wife left me while I was in jail. She took the car, the house… This is my sister’s house. She’s overseas for a year.’
Pam glanced at the empty carport, at the empty street that ran past the house. ‘Do you have access to a car, Mr Matchan?’
‘No.’
A horn tooted. A taxi pulled up.
‘My ride,’ Matchan said, and he almost smiled.
*
Scobie Sutton was often late—his wife; getting his kid to school—and Challis made allowances. As he waited, he fiddled idly with his mobile and heard the beep of an incoming text message. Superintendent McQuarrie, and clearly the super had read, or been told about, the News-Pictorial story: My office, 1 pm Fri, consider PA rep.
Bring the Police Association in?
He’s going to sack me? wondered Challis. On his golf day?
Then Sutton was parking his Volvo and hurrying across to the CIU car, agitated, his upper lip beaded with perspiration. Nerves or health, thought Challis, getting behind the wheel, waiting for Sutton to buckle himself into the passenger seat. ‘You okay?’
‘Sorry I’m late, sir. Roslyn tells me at the last minute she was supposed to be at school at seven-forty-five because all the Year 7s are taking a chartered bus to the Olympic pool in Frankston and of course we missed it and I had to chase it down the road.’
Sutton was a shocking driver. Challis pictured the knuckles clenched on the wheel, the pointless surges and braking, the overtaking on hills and blind corners. ‘You’re here now,’ he said, starting the car and heading north through the town.
Cranbourne was outside their district but less than thirty minutes from the Chicory Kiln. After fixing it with the officer in charge, they were given a room and access to a trainee constable named Rick Dixon, who had reported his uniform stolen from a laundromat dryer a few days earlier. Soft, perspiring, very young, Dixon had gelled hair and a sulky, plump lower lip. ‘I swear I was only gone five minutes. Slipped out to pay some bills.’
He might not be lying, Challis thought, eyeing him closely, but he is skating a little. ‘Where was this?’
‘Near where I live.’
‘And where is that?’
‘Berwick.’
‘Name?’
‘Er, Richard Dixon, sir.’
‘Not you, the laundromat.’
‘Not sure, sir.’
Sutton said, ‘Can you give us a location?’
Dixon described a strip of shops, a Mobil service station on one corner, a VideoEzy opposite, enough for Challis to locate it using a telephone directory.
With Dixon out of the interview room, he dialled the number.
‘Yeah,’ scratched a voice in his ear. ‘I remember. Officious little prick—no offence.’
‘Do you have security cameras?’
‘Mate, this isn’t exactly the Bank of England.’
‘Was any other clothing stolen that day?’
‘That’s the whole point: none was stolen, then or any other day. The moron used hot water and a hot dryer setting and his lovely new uniform shrank. Tried to blame it on me.’
Challis called Dixon back and said, before the trainee had time to sit, ‘You made a false theft report.’
Dixon’s colour drained away; perspiration beaded and ran. ‘No way.’
There were times, like now, when Challis questioned the training academy’s selection procedures. He’d discerned a kind of cravenness in Dixon at the start of the interview; now the trainee contrived to look wounded, distantly accusing and aggrieved, working innocence onto his soft face and puzzlement into his tangled eyebrows.
This enraged Challis. ‘You fucked up. You ruined your uniform because you’re ignorant, and rather than fork out for a new one you tried blaming another person and made a false report. Were you hoping you’d be issued another uniform, free of charge?’
‘You’re so wrong about this.’
‘You’re so wrong about this, sir,’ barked Challis.
Dixon’s eyes scouted for a way out. ‘Will this go on my record?’
‘What did you do with the old uniform?’ Sutton asked.
‘Binned it. Look, I’m sorry, okay? Sir? Won’t happen again.’
‘That’s for sure,’ Challis said, even as he pictured himself in Dixon’s position, being bawled out by a superior officer when Friday came around.
Meanwhile he was stuck in Cranbourne: the paperwork fallout from Dixon’s dishonesty, the laundromat story to be checked, the rubbish bin to be located and searched, not to mention the shire tip.
The day passed. For Pam Murphy it had boiled down to questioning pathetic men with weak alibis who didn’t resemble the man described by Chloe Holst, and scary men who did resemble him but had cast-iron alibis. Tedious. Unbearable if the sex crimes sergeant had remained standoffish, but Jeannie Schiff had gradually unwound, growing talkative, relating blackly comic stories of some of her victories. And her defeats. At one point, early afternoon, she revealed how she’d been torn apart by the defence barrister in court the previous afternoon, and Pam was astonished to hear a faint catch in her voice.
After that, she found herself stealing looks at Schiff. A finely-shaped nose and cheekbones, a mole at the hinge of her jaw, another on her neck, a third on the strong brown swell of her left breast. Wisps of hair escaping the knot at the back of her head. Long fingers tapping the steering wheel. She watched the way Schiff’s plump bottom lip peeled slowly from the top whenever she began to relate another story, about another deadshit rapist, another deadshit barrister.
‘You can understand why there are so many lawyer jokes,’ said Pam, after one such story.
Schiff shot her a look. Pam felt the gaze flicker all over her: face, breasts, lap and face and breasts again. Her chest tightened, she tingled low in her trunk and she did not understand or trust her responses, not in the first degree.
To deflect the unfamiliar feelings, she related courtroom stories of her own, and so they rode north and south, east and west, crossing the Peninsula in the springtime warmth.
Mid-afternoon they knocked at a house in Tyabb. ‘Hello, Richard,’ Pam said.
Richard Van Der Net blinked at them, his face creased and puffy, his hair this way and that. He hadn’t bathed or shaved and Pam Murphy could imagine the miasmic conditions under which he lived. ‘Quick word.’
Van Der Net sniffed. According to his driver’s licence he was twenty-eight years old. He’d lived here,
with his parents, for six months. Before that, Somerville. Before that, South Frankston, Chelsea, Pakenham…
‘Don’t have to talk to no cops.’
Schiff took out her notebook and wrote in it, muttering, ‘Time, four-thirty-two p.m., suspect refused to cooperate with police.’
‘Whoa. What are you writing? What do you mean, suspect? I done nothing.’
Pam opened a folder, revealing a series of grainy mobile phone photographs. ‘Remember these, Richard?’
Van Der Net had been arrested after several complaints during the previous summer. He liked to drive to the Peninsula’s beaches and bother women who were walking or sunbathing. He’d begin by admiring their bodies, then ask if they’d watch while he masturbated. Most ran away, some froze, one took photographs.
‘I like this one, Richard.’
The sands at Merricks Beach, mild sunshine, Richard plucking at his penis.
‘And these.’
Richard walking back through ti-trees, a pack on his back. Richard getting into his Toyota van. A shot of the number plate.
‘What gets me,’ Schiff said, ‘is how fucking dumb you guys are.’
Van Der Net’s mouth was open. He wanted to duck inside the house but Pam was blocking the doorway. He hovered on a dingy patch of grass between door and front gate, looking desperately at the street beyond Schiff’s stylish shoulder. He seemed to sense that freedom beckoned out there on the poky streets, but freedom of a treacherous kind.
Van Der Net rubbed his mucousy eyes and nostrils. Filthy teeth: rotted by amphetamines was Pam’s guess. She supposed you could pity him. You’d have to overlook the distress he’d left behind him over the years, though.
‘You keep moving house, Richard.’
‘So?’
‘What, asked to leave? Given warnings? Told you weren’t welcome?’
‘I just, you know…’
‘Where were you last Thursday night?’
‘I never did nothing.’
‘You graduated from waving your willie around to abduction and rape.’
Van Der Net opened and closed his mouth and eventually fainted. His mother came to the door and said, ‘I’ll have you for police brutality.’ Then his father appeared and threw a punch. Phone calls were made, police cars arrived, the paperwork became a headache and, at the very last moment, a methadone clinic nurse gave Van Der Net an alibi that Murphy and Schiff couldn’t shake.
