by Garry Disher
He'd got to the school early one morning and a classmate of Roslyn's had said, 'Come and see the koala.' So they'd made their way along the path, red-brick pavers winding between tan-bark islands, shrubs, gumtrees and classrooms, to a solitary gum beside the After School Care room. There was a pink hair tie at the base of the tree, a dewy school windcheater draped over a pine rail nearby.
Scobie looked up. Sure enough, there was a koala halfway up the tree. And sure enough, the mother of the other child was soon hoofing it toward him, darting suspicious looks at him, as though he might spirit her kid away.
Scobie wanted to say nastily, 'Is there a problem?' but felt small and mean. That mother—any mother—was right to be wary. Even so, he was in no hurry to inform them that he did have a wife, and if not for her job up in the city, which obliged her to leave home at seven-thirty am and get home at six-thirty pm, she'd gladly be sharing the school run with him.
You didn't usually get fathers making the school run but one was there this morning, Mostyn Pearce, a thin, narrow-faced, agitated-looking individual, dressed in jeans, trainers and a Collingwood football jumper. His daughter, Jessie, pale, weedy, undernourished-looking, stood clutching his leg, ducking her face away when Scobie caught her eye. In any other child it might have been an appealingly shy gesture, but by some twist of heredity it was unappealing in Jessie Pearce.
Leaning against the man's other leg was a ferret on a lead. The child and the ferret were perfect reproductions of the man: slight, edgy, sly, quick, a mass of nerve endings.
The other children were drawn to but afraid of the ferret, and stood watching in a cluster some distance away. Scobie heard Pearce say, 'It's all right, he won't bite.' There was impatience in his tone, as though he spent his life explaining things to people who were slow, obtuse or careless. His gaze skittered over Scobie's, taking in everything, settling on nothing.
Scobie stood alone for a few minutes, smiling and nodding as mothers arrived with their children. He said a breezy hello half a dozen times, but no one approached him. Eight-fifty am… Inger would be opening the classroom door soon. Older children raced past, yelling. It was a cheerful, nourishing sort of school, but there were no black or Asian faces, no round veiled faces, and—judging by the tone of the weekly newsletter and other take-home notices—no sign that a feminist perspective had reached this far south.
He listened to the conversations around him. Did you go away for Easter? Footie season soon. The kids dragged their heels this morning. How would the blooming mayor feel if he had a detention centre on his doorstep, that's what I'd like to know…
And then Scobie saw Aileen Munro. She seemed to sidle in and stood well back, a bulky presence along the serpentine path leading to Prep I. As Scobie watched, she bobbed to kiss her two older children goodbye, watched them race to their respective classrooms, then stood with her youngest daughter, scarcely daring to meet the eyes of the other parents. Then, apparently sensing his scrutiny, she looked up and her gaze locked on Scobie's, anguished and beseeching.
She knew who he was. She'd known for the past eighteen months that he was a CIB detective based at Waterloo. She was embarrassed to know him, embarrassed that he'd had cause to visit and question her in her farmhouse kitchen on Five Furlong Road.
Her husband, Ian Munro, had been suspected of sending a padded envelope containing a .303 bullet to a bank official in Waterloo. The bank had earlier threatened to foreclose on a loan taken out by Munro. When Munro sold off a parcel of land to repay the loan, the matter was dropped, but there had been a series of other incidents since then. Munro had apparently brandished a rifle at repossession agents, run the tyres of his ute over the toes of the council sheriff, and punched a process server who was attempting to deliver a legal document. He'd been abusive to shire officers and suspected of placing gelignite on the driver's seat of the bank loan officer's car.
Scobie had investigated, and urged people to press charges, but Munro was a bully, stocky, cold and unremitting, and the locals knew better than to come forward.
Scobie watched Aileen Munro edge through the other parents until she was able to murmur in his ear, 'I'm worried about Ian.'
Scobie jerked his head. They moved away from inquisitive ears. 'Tell me,' he said.
Aileen Munro's lined face looked up at him. 'He's all hyper. It's like he's going to explode.'
Aileen's daughter was clinging to her mother's dry, bony fingers, gazing at Scobie. There was a cut across her nose, a hint of bruising beneath one eye. Then she scratched her scalp and his gaze went to her hair and he shuddered to think of lice crawling there.
He turned to Aileen. 'Has Ian been violent with you or the kids?'
'Ian? No, never.'
'How did Shannon cut her face?'
'Fell off the trampoline,' Aileen said, her expression saying that was her story and she was sticking to it.
'All right,' Scobie said, sighing. 'So, what's wrong with Ian?'
'Like I said, he's all wound up.'
'About anything in particular?'
'Money It's always money. It was all right till he took out that loan. Now he's in too deep and not paying the bills. The government this, the government that. He's letting the place run down.'
'I thought he'd paid off the loan.'
'This is a new loan.'
The banks have a lot to answer for, Scobie thought. 'I don't see there's much the police can do at this point,' he said. 'If you like I could talk to him, but—'
'Oh, no,' Aileen said, horrified. 'He's already had a row with a man from the RSPCA. He'd throw a real wobbly if he thought I'd been talking about him to the police, going behind his back.'
'Have you talked to the bank? They could tailor the repayments to suit your income.'
'Yeah, right, you know what he thinks of banks.'
'Then I don't see what I can do.'
'I just want you to know, that's all. Be prepared, kind of thing,' Aileen Munro said as the siren sounded for the beginning of classes.
She paused. 'I don't know if I can hack it any longer. He's got guns, you know.'
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Challis slept badly and woke early on Tuesday morning. To clear his head he walked for an hour, pumping his arms and striding out in order to stir his sluggish blood. It seemed to work, and by seven-thirty he'd showered and dressed and was drinking coffee on his deck, which faced the healing early sun through leaves on the turn.
By seven-fifty he was heading for Waterloo, where a temporary office had been allocated to him ten months earlier for the investigation into the disappearance of the Tully child. That case had dragged on and after a time he'd had to attend to more pressing but less interesting homicides—mostly domestics—elsewhere on the Peninsula; but then the Flinders Floater had been found and he'd returned to Waterloo, where the little office was still available. Then that case had gone stale but this time he stayed on, electing to use Waterloo as his base. It was a recent Force Command initiative, allocating a senior Homicide Squad officer to each of the main non-metropolitan regions. The old system of sending a team of Melbourne detectives long distances to remote regions had been inefficient and the cause of local resentment. Challis liked Waterloo. The staff were easygoing and it was close to home.
He parked the Triumph, entered through the back door and went upstairs to the CIB office, a large, open-plan room with partitioned cubicles along the walls. His office was in one corner and overlooked the carpark. He happened to glance down and saw Ellen Destry park her car and enter the building. No sign of Scobie Sutton's car.
There were message slips on his desk. A Land Rover had been found. It bore dents and scratches on the passenger-side wing. The owner had reported it stolen at about the time Constable Tankard had found it while on patrol.
Challis stared at the phone. His hand reached out, collapsed on the desk again. He didn't want to call the prison and see how his wife was doing; he also ought not to use police time and resources. But a call from work wo
uld somehow make him feel less intimate and committed than a call from his home.
He made the call. His wife was back in her cell, on suicide watch. Did the inspector wish to talk to her? It might help her. No, Challis said. Tell her I called.
Then he went to the poky kitchen and brewed coffee, wondering who'd been at his packet of Lavazza. He'd learnt a long time ago always to provide his own tea and coffee. Police station coffee tended to come in a Maxwell House tin the size of a fuel drum and no one had ever heard of weak tea, let alone peppermint.
Finally, with a mug of coffee at his elbow, he opened the Progress, printed overnight and hot off the press. There was the Meddler's letter, and Tessa's column about the wanker with the ferret, and her sharper, more contentious observations about the asylum seekers and the detention centre. He could practically hear her spitting as she wrote that she'd found it necessary to point out to the worthy citizens of Waterloo that her objection to the local detention centre was not to that detention centre on that bit of land but to the notion of incarceration of asylum seekers in the first place.
No doubt she'd lose some advertising now, and the coppers of Waterloo police station would glance at him sideways and wonder about his relationship with the ratbag, leftist, pinko editor of the local rag.
He threw the newspaper into a bin and took out the Floater file. Not for the first time, he wondered about the thousands who go missing each year, unreported and apparently unloved and untraceable. Surely someone loved them? Surely someone remembered them? Here's a man prosperous enough to own a Rolex watch: surely he left a trace somewhere?
On an impulse, Challis reached for the local yellow pages and under the heading 'watchmakers' found a young woman who told him that the figures etched into the case of the Floater's Rolex were service marks. She jotted them down and said she'd make a few calls and let him know in a day or two who had serviced the watch.
So that was progress. Next Challis examined Kitty Casement's aerial photograph of the cannabis crop. There was a topographical map of the Peninsula on his wall but he was unable to match the tiny patch of coastline represented in the photograph to any part of the map.
A job for CIB and after that the Drug Squad, so he went in search of Ellen Destry. She was not in her cubicle. He walked downstairs and into a throng of uniformed and plain-clothes police, some cramming breakfast hamburgers from the fast-food joint across the street into their mouths.
Challis shuddered, saw Pam Murphy and edged toward her. 'What's going on?'
She blushed faintly, as if surprised that he knew her or would want to talk to her. In fact, Challis rated highly her detection abilities and knew she wanted to move on from uniformed work. 'The Monday talk, except it's on Tuesday this week.'
She pointed to a typed notice on the wall of the corridor. Challis read that Senior Sergeant Kellock would be addressing staff on 'Self-Selection and the Criminal Mind', starting at nine am, finishing at nine-forty. Kellock had scrawled at the bottom: 'All staff are urged to attend'.
Not for me, Challis thought, but then Ellen entered the corridor and tugged at his sleeve. 'Come on, Hal, you might learn something.'
He let her lead him into the main conference room and found himself leaning on the back wall with her, looking over a sea of heads to a table and a whiteboard at the front of the room.
'Scobie not here yet?'
Ellen shook her head. 'School run.'
Kellock was aptly named. It suggested a bullock, and the man was constructed of a thick pelt and a heavy superstructure of chest and shoulder bones and muscles. Waterloo was his station. He ran a tight ship. He also used to say that his door was always open, but last year someone had swiped the keys to the drugs safe and now the words were more metaphoric than literal.
'As you know,' he said, swinging his massive head about, 'I've been in the States and Europe on a Churchill Fellowship.'
'And pretty darned pleased with myself,' murmured Ellen in Challis's ear. Challis grinned.
'The topic of today's chat is a very useful finding made by criminologists in the UK,' Kellock said. 'I mean, it's so obvious and simple, all you can do is shake your head in wonder.'
He looked at them expectantly, waiting for them to bite, but the air in that little room was too warm, too stale, too overburdened with yawns and settling stomachs and aftershave and scented soaps and shampoos for that.
So he said, 'Simply put, your bad guy self-selects.'
He waited.
Nothing.
'What do I mean by that? Well, your criminal type tends not to let himself be bound by everyday laws and conventions. He'll park illegally, for example. He'll think nothing of speeding, running a red light, driving an unregistered and unroadworthy vehicle. And so on. There's a serial killer case in the States that was solved only because the killer was pulled over for driving with bald tyres. They opened the boot of his car and found his latest victim inside.'
Challis, like the others, looked at him attentively, wondering where this was going.
Frustration showing through for the first time, Kellock said, 'So, one of the best places to find a criminal is in the disabled-parking bay at your local supermarket.'
He referred to his notes. 'In a six months' study in Huddersfield in the north of England, it was found that one-third of illegal parkers had criminal records, half had committed previous road traffic offences, and a fifth were of immediate police interest owing to suspected connections with unsolved crimes.' His big head looked out at the room again. 'Those are significant figures, ladies and gentlemen. Furthermore, one in ten of the cars illegally parked by these characters was found to be unroadworthy and a fifth had a direct or indirect link to various criminal offences: getaway vehicle, transportation of stolen goods, etcetera, etcetera.'
The audience shifted, murmured. Ellen muttered to Challis, 'So what are we supposed to do, check out every disabled-parking spot?'
'So what I want you to do,' Kellock said, 'in the normal course of your duties, is run an immediate numberplate check on any car you see parked illegally. I want to test the Huddersfield study here on the Peninsula. If I'm not mistaken, the results will duplicate the Huddersfield results. Any questions?'
John Tankard was scowling. 'Sarge, why can't the traffic wardens do that? We've got enough on our plates as it is.'
'Because the traffic wardens don't have the power to arrest or the means to carry out computer searches of registration plates, that's why. Next question?'
There were a few desultory questions and someone shouted that no one ever said your average crim was a genius, and then the meeting broke up.
CHAPTER TWELVE
When Challis and Ellen went upstairs afterwards they found Scobie Sutton at the water cooler, staring into space, his long, mournful face heavy with thought.
'Penny for them,' Ellen said.
He came out of his trance. 'It's just… sometimes you're reminded how precious and vulnerable children are, and how precarious everything is, and how hard it is for some people.'
Sutton could be overly sentimental sometimes, but that was probably not a bad thing, Challis thought. It didn't make Sutton a worse copper—probably the opposite. In fact, Challis believed that his own sentimentality was leaking away and he wondered whether he'd have to chuck the job in when it was gone.
Meanwhile he said nothing. Scobie Sutton could be an earbasher on the subject of his little daughter. To avoid that, Challis said, 'Could I have a word with both of you?'
'Sure, boss,' Sutton said.
Ellen took off her jacket. 'What about?'
'Two things, but they're both linked to the one person.'
He ushered them into his office and shut the door. The flimsy wall shook.
'A woman called Janet Casement operates a flying business out at the aerodrome. Some charter work, aerial photography, joyrides—'
'The one you call Kitty?'
'That's right.'
'Someone rammed her plane on the weekend,' Ellen
said.
'Yes.'
They looked at him expectantly. He said, 'John Tankard found the Land Rover on patrol yesterday. I'd like to question the owner.' He held the palm of his hand out toward them, as though to forestall objections. 'I know it's not strictly my area, but maybe it was attempted murder. Also, I know Kitty, and saw the incident, so I have a personal interest.'
Ellen looked at Scobie for confirmation. He nodded and she said, 'Fine by us, Hal.'
'Next matter.' He showed them Kitty Casement's aerial photograph. 'I found this pinned to a noticeboard in the hangar where she works.'
He watched them lean forward to peer at it. Scobie's hair was thinning, he noticed. Ellen's was neatly parted down the centre of her scalp, short fair hairs standing up here and there amongst the longer ones, and he felt an absurd, everyday connection with her, and remembered his childhood and playing with his sister on the sitting-room floor.
'What are we looking at?' Scobie said.
Ellen knew. Her long thin forefinger tapped the area of dark green under the washed-out eucalyptus tones. 'Marijuana crop,' she said. 'Mature plants, ready for harvesting by the look of it.' The finger moved. 'Irrigation pipes here and here, leading down from this dam. Pump housing. This could be the curing shed.' She looked up at Challis. 'Where was this taken?'
He shrugged.
Scobie said, 'Is she involved?'
'I don't know,' Challis said. 'People commission her to take aerial photographs all the time. We can't be sure she knows what's in this photograph.'
'Does she know you're with the police?'
'Yes.'
'Then she'd be a mug to leave it out where you can see it, wouldn't she?'
'That's what I was thinking,' Challis said.
'But either way,' Ellen said, 'we have to talk to her. At least find out where this place is.'
