They had the Show sussed out within five minutes. The eleven-year-old said, ‘You like it up the arse?’ to a young woman pushing a pram. The nine-year-old snatched a purse. The twins pushed and shoved an old geezer who went red and breathless and an ambulance was called. They grabbed a fistful of Have You Seen Katie? leaflets from Donna Blasko and dumped them in a rubbish bin. On flowed the estate kids, untouchable, undetectable until the last moment, which was when their victims recognised that distinctive estate/Jarrett look, something quick and soulless.
‘Where you from?’ they demanded at one point.
Four kids visiting from Cranbourne, thirty minutes away. Outsider kids. The Jarretts knew all of the local kids.
‘Nowhere,’ the Cranbourne kids said.
‘Gotta be from somewhere.’
‘Over there,’ said one of the Cranbourne kids, meaning a few hundred metres up the road.
‘Liar.’
They crowded the outsiders, poked and jabbed. Wallets were taken. A knife was pulled, flashed once, leaving a ribbon of blood. Miraculously, an opening appeared. The Cranbourne kids ran for their lives. Whooping, the estate kids chased them, herded them, out of the showgrounds and back up High Street.
‘Save us!’ cried the visitors.
‘Get out,’ said the local shopkeepers, recognising the pursuers.
‘Youths hospitalised,’ said the next edition of the local paper.
While that was going on, Alysha Jarrett climbed over the fence at the rear of Neville Clode’s house, trampling the onion weed as it lay limp and dying, and knocked on his back door. When it opened she stood there wordlessly, looking at but not seeing the doorsill or his bare feet, the left foot with its birthmark like the remnant of a wine-red sock, the nails hooked and yellow.
‘Don’t remember inviting you,’ he said, smirking.
She said nothing. He made room for her and she passed him, into the house. She breathed shallowly. He never aired the place, but that wasn’t uncommon in Alysha’s experience. She came from people who kept their doors and windows closed and abhorred the sun. She could detect cigarettes, alcohol and semen. She knew those smells.
‘Can’t keep away, can you?’ he said. She was thirteen and would soon be too old.
She shrugged. She never talked, never looked him in the face. Never looked at him anywhere if she could help it. She never used her own hands and mouth on him but pretended they belonged to someone else. Everything switched off when she came here. In fact she was never entirely switched on when she was away from here. She floated. She was unmoored. Her body had nothing to do with her.
‘Here you go,’ he said afterwards, giving her twenty dollars. Sometimes it was smokes, lollies, a bottle of sweet sherry. At the back door he sniffed, holding a tissue to his nostrils; he often got a nosebleed from the strain of labouring away at her body. Giving her what he called a cuddle, he peered out into his yard like a nervy mouse. ‘The coast is clear,’ he said, giving her bottom a pat. He’d washed her in the spa. She felt damp here and there. Alysha floated away with her $20, which she later spent on pills and went further away in her head.
Meanwhile Tank had the morning off. He’d been slotted for a grid search of Myers Reserve later in the day, followed by night patrol, so the morning was his one chance to take delivery of his Mazda. He went by train, getting off one station past Frankston, where the road that ran parallel to the tracks was used-car heaven, yards stretching in either direction, plastic flags snapping joyously in the breeze from the Bay. He set out on foot for Prestige Autos.
It was good to be decisive. Last weekend he’d driven all the way up to Car City, on the Maroondah Highway, and been told, at more than one yard, ‘It’s no good taking this car for a drive unless you mean to do business today’ Tank couldn’t believe it. ‘How do you sell cars if you don’t let anyone test drive them?’ The salesmen would gesture as if they didn’t care. Perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps there were plenty of idiots with money to burn. ‘Do I look like a tyre kicker to you?’Tank had demanded. Another indifferent shrug. ‘Don’t you want my business? Do you think I’m broke?’ And they’d said, Are you prepared to do business today, or are you “just looking”?’
Tank shook his head now at their stupidity and the obscure shame he’d felt. Anyhow, last weekend he’d also stopped off here in Frankston, and in the third caryard visited he’d found the Mazda. Sleek lines, as new, Yokohama tyres, the paint still glossy and unmarked. The guy there had no problem with Tank taking the car for a burn: ‘Go for your life, mate,’ he’d said. Luckily, the freeway was close by, and Tank was able to really test the car. In the blink of an eye he was doing 140 km/h on the straight. Effortlessly. The car sat straight and true, braked well, the exhaust snarling so sweetly it got him in the pit of the stomach. Tank, being canny, had even run a fridge magnet all over the bodywork. Not a trace of filler anywhere.
‘I’ll take it,’ he said, moments later. As he’d told Murph yesterday, he’d negotiated the guy down in price by $5000. What he hadn’t told her was he’d arranged a loan through the caryard’s finance company.
‘We haven’t had time to register the car in Victoria,’ the guy had said last weekend, ‘it’s only just come in, but the Northern Territory registration is still current, so you can drive it around.’
‘No problemo,’ Tank had said. All he needed to do was get a roadworthy certificate from Waterloo Motors, then register the car at the VicRoads office in Waterloo.
He strolled into Prestige Autos now, and there she was, gleaming in the sun.
11
The long day passed. At 3.30 that Saturday afternoon, Pam Murphy uncovered a lead. Given that her detective training was due to start on Monday, this was possibly her last act as a uniformed constable. Katie Blasko had been missing for forty-eight hours.
‘This was when?’ she asked the woman in Snapper Way.
‘After school.’
‘On Thursday?’
‘I think it was Thursday.’
Pam gazed at the woman, said politely, ‘Could it have been yesterday?’
‘Let’s see, yesterday was Friday. No, it wasn’t yesterday I saw her. I don’t work on Fridays. It must have been Thursday. Or Wednesday.’
Pam was door knocking in an area bounded by Katie Blasko’s house, her school, Trevally Street and the Waterloo foreshore. Some of the houses were fibro-cement or weatherboard holiday and weekender shacks owned by city people, but most were brick veneer houses dating from the 1960s and ‘70s, their old-fashioned rose gardens pointing to leathery retirees who walked their dogs on the nearby beach and collected sea weed for fertiliser, and their bicycles, plastic toys and glossy four-wheel-drives pointing to young families who probably had no cash to spare after paying off their gadget, car and home loans. Pam met many women aged around sixty that afternoon, and many aged around thirty, like this woman, Sharon Elliott, the library aide at Katie Blasko’s primary school. Short, round, cheery, anxious to please, dense-and, Pam decided, blind as a bat without her glasses.
‘If you could tell me where you saw her, it might help jog your memory.’
‘Near the shops.’
‘In High Street?’
‘Well, no,’ Elliott said, as though that should have been obvious to Pam. ‘Of course, I do my main shopping at the Safeway, but if I run out of bread or whatever I nip across to the corner shop.’ She pointed vaguely. ‘You pay more, but if I drove over to Safeway every time I wanted bread or milk, what I spent on fuel would outweigh the money I saved.’