Next he’d made his way to Dot’s where he explained only enough to convince her to tell no one of his visit. She let him use her shower and gave him a set of her husband’s clothes.
The borrowed boots pinched and Monty was stiff and sore from waiting for Baggly to come home. His muscles screamed in protest as he struggled to maintain his crouch, anxious to discover the identity of the van’s driver.
At last the lights clicked off, the van door opened, and Justin stepped into the carport. Monty unfolded his stiffening limbs and stood up as Justin was putting his key to the front door. Then the crunch of gravel in the driveway alerted him to the arrival of another car. He ducked back behind the bush and watched as Justin tentatively approached the visitor. Despite the uncharacteristically dishevelled hairstyle, there was no mistaking the angles of the face and the long, lean figure of James De Vakey illuminated by the front porch light.
Monty heard Justin say, ‘Oh, it’s you, Mr De Vakey. I’m afraid Dad’s not home yet, he’s still busy with the reenactment.’ ‘It’s all right, Justin, it’s you I wanted to see.’ De Vakey’s shadow loomed over the younger man.
‘Me?’ Justin’s voice cracked.
De Vakey patted him on the shoulder. ‘I got the impression from you the other day that there was something you wanted to discuss with me, something more important than just signing your books.’
‘Oh, that, yes, maybe. But now isn’t really a good time. Dad could be home any minute.’
‘Well, I think this problem you wanted to discuss might involve him anyway, am I right? Let’s go inside, out of the rain. We need to talk.’
Monty decided to hover in the darkness a while longer. De Vakey’s psychic antennae must have picked up on a problem with Justin that might provide Monty with some of the answers he needed. And Justin would probably find De Vakey easier to spill to than himself. The man was a pro, after all.
He waited for the front door to close before extracting himself once more. A light came on in the front room and he glimpsed them behind the net curtains before Justin drew the heavier drapes. Moving towards the window Monty pressed his ear against the glass, but could hear only the occasional word. This was getting him nowhere. He had to find a way to get in.
Baggly’s security system proved to be almost non-existent. Within seconds Monty had crept around the house, tripped the back door lock with his credit card and tiptoed through the kitchen to the front hallway.
He’d never been in the superintendent’s home before and was surprised at the contrast between this and his office. Here were no cabinets of fine china, leather Chesterfields and antique furniture. The furnishings were old and faded, a collection of odds and ends that could have come from an op-shop. The house had an unlived-in feel, the slight chemical tang in the air reminiscent more of an institution than a home. He’d suspected earlier that the fruits of Baggly’s corruption were not those of material gain and now he saw it for himself.
The voices of the men in the living room were clear now. He hugged the wall near the half-open door and listened.
De Vakey was saying, ‘It’s always encouraging for an author to get such positive feedback, but I feel your interest in my books is not just professional, maybe it involves something more personal. Am I correct?’
Monty could feel the magnetic pull of De Vakey’s voice even from where he stood.
The boy shifted in the stiff-backed chair. ‘You’re a psychologist. What people say to you is confidential?’
‘In therapy, yes.’
‘Well,’ the boy hesitated. ‘There’s something I need to talk to you about, but you have to give me your word that you won’t tell anyone else.’
‘I think I can manage that.’
‘In your books you’re always talking about family backgrounds, the huge part they have to play in shaping the minds of killers. Well sometimes I worry about myself. I failed the aptitude tests for the academy, you see; they said I wasn’t psychologically suited for the police. They reckoned I had some ... er ... problems.’
‘A lot of people would find themselves unsuited to the police, Justin,’ De Vakey said gently.
‘But there’s other things too. I’ve been reading your latest book, it’s kept me awake. I see myself in so many of those cases you describe, and the more I read about them the more I feel like I’m cracking up. Since I was a kid I’ve wanted to be a cop, but now that chance has gone and I don’t know what to do any more, I feel lost...’
Monty peeped through the gap in the door. Mouth turned down, eyes fixed on twisting hands, the boy looked to be on the verge of tears. Shit, Justin was in more of a mess than he’d imagined. The kid was going to need some understanding and help from his friends, and Monty would make sure that he got it—but first he needed to see if the boy had any of the answers he was looking for.
Ask him about his father, ask him about his father, he endeavoured to transmit his subliminal message to De Vakey.
‘Do you ever have the urge to kill or torture anyone?’ De Vakey asked.
The boy shuddered. ‘Oh, God no, nothing like that. I hate violence.’
De Vakey smiled reassuringly. ‘Then I’m sure you have nothing to worry about.’ De Vakey’s allowed a long pause. ‘But I think you know that too, deep down, don’t you?’
Justin nodded.
‘I think you really just need someone to talk to, am I right?’
‘Mmmm.’ Justin stared at the floor.
De Vakey let the silence settle for a moment. ‘Justin, tell me about your family life, your father.’
At bloody last.
The kid gulped in a breath. ‘I hate him.’ He pressed his palms to his eyes. ‘He repulses me, but he’s still my father.’
‘Now, why would that be I wonder? Can you relate these feelings to any particular events or has it always been this way?’
De Vakey’s tone was soothing and calm, could have been lifted from a self-hypnosis tape. If I wasn’t feeling so bloody uptight, Monty thought, I might be fighting the urge to nod off myself.
After a moment’s hesitation Justin took a deep breath. ‘My mother left my father when I was about twelve for reasons I couldn’t understand at the time. I blamed her; she’d been cheating on him. She tried to get me to go and live down south with her but I refused—the new boyfriend was a creep.
‘Then about a year later I came home from school early one afternoon and found Dad in bed with a boy not much older than me.’
Monty saw a shudder pass through the kid’s body.
‘No wonder she left him,’ Justin said. ‘I was out of here; I went to live with Mum after that. I only came back here to go to uni. I thought Dad seemed a little better—at least I haven’t caught him with any more boys. But over the last few weeks he’s been acting really weird. Something’s going on, he’s edgy and frightened, he’s up to something illegal, I’m sure, but I don’t know what and I don’t know what I should do about it.’
Monty decided it was time to step into the lounge room. ‘It’s okay, son,’ he said. ‘I thought it might have been something like this. You haven’t given your father away, he’s given himself away.’
Justin looked at him with amazement. De Vakey jumped to his feet, taking in Monty’s appearance with a look of disgust, as if a tramp had just burst into one of his therapy sessions. In a way, one had.