She took the bottle. He watched the motions of her throat. ‘Thirsty girl,’ he said approvingly.
He started the engine. He could see that she would start to fret before the Temazepam took effect. She’d want to know where her mother was and where he was taking her.
But, astoundingly, that didn’t happen this time. ‘Oh, what a cute puppy,’ she gushed.
Puppy? What puppy? Pete followed her gaze, and sure enough, some mutt of a dog lay curled on the old sleeping bag he kept in the back, one drowsy eye on the girl. It beat its tail sleepily, gave a shuddering sigh.
Must have jumped in when my back was turned, Pete thought. He assessed things rapidly. If he ejected the dog now, he’d upset the girl. The dog would ease the girl’s mind. Ergo…
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘To see your mum.’
Frown. ‘But she went up to Melbourne,’ the kid said, as if she’d only just remembered it. ‘To the races. She’ll be back late.’
‘She had an accident on the freeway,’ Pete said.
The girl didn’t buy it. ‘Let me out,’ she mumbled, already feeling the Temazepam.
They were clear of the leafy grove by now and on the access road, with cars, kids wobbling home on their bikes and a knot of people yarning and eating ice creams at the bench seats outside the only corner shop in this part of Waterloo. Pete concentrated. The girl, fading rapidly, turned heavy eyes to her side window and mouthed ‘Help me’ at Mrs Elliott, the library aide at her school, who had stopped by for a litre of milk. Mrs Elliott gave her a cheery wave and disappeared, and soon Pete had, too.
That was Thursday.
2
Friday was Sergeant Ellen Destry’s first morning stretched out in Inspector Hal Challis’s bed. Challis wasn’t in the bed, but she lay there convinced that some trace or imprint of him lingered.
Six o’clock, according to the bedside clock, and sufficiently light outside for her customary walk, but to hell with that. She closed her eyes, giving herself up to daydreams and fugitive sensations, and the real world retreated. Challis’s house was an old-style Californian bungalow on two acres of grass along a dirt back road a few kilometres inland of Waterloo, and he’d asked her to mow the grass while he was away, for the spring growth was particularly rampant this year, but the mowing could wait. The final summations in the Supreme Court trial of Nick Jarrett were expected later, but not until early afternoon. And so Ellen Destry lay there, barely moving.
The next thing she knew it was 8.30 and she was awakening from a dream-filled, stupefying sleep. Her limbs were heavy, head dense, and surroundings alien. She groaned. When she moved it was sluggishly, and she couldn’t figure out how to adjust the shower temperature. She dozed under the stream of water, and then remembered that Challis’s house ran on rainwater, not mains water, so she cut the shower short. ‘Stop the world, I want to get off,’ she said to the misted mirror. Her neck wound looked raw and nasty, even though it had happened months ago, a graze from a hired killer’s 9 mm Browning.
Her first breakfast in Challis’s house was scarcely any easier. The coffee came too weak from his famous machine and she couldn’t make sense of how he’d arranged his cupboards and drawers. Finally, as she spooned up her muesli-organic, from High Street Health, two hundred metres down from the police station in Waterloo-she realised that she missed the sounds of human habitation. She’d had neighbours when she’d lived in Penzance Beach, the next town around from Waterloo. She’d lived with her husband and daughter, for God’s sake. They’d created a comforting background murmur of voices, slammed doors and morning radio. But that house was sold now, she was estranged from her family, and reduced to this, housesitting for her boss.
Standing in for him at work, too. Challis, head of Peninsula East’s Crime Investigation Unit, was away for a month, maybe longer. Family business. He seemed to think that she was perfectly capable of coping until he got back, but, in her worst moments, Ellen found herself biting her bottom lip. She felt an ever-present, low-level anxiety. Her everyday work as a CIU detective often involved up to a dozen cases at a time: some small, some middling, none very large, but the point was that she managed. But as temporary head of CIU, the job seemed enormous. She just knew that her male colleagues expected her to fail. Maybe I’m depressed, she thought. She should speak to the naturopath who gave free consultations in High Street Health, go on a course of St John’s wort.
She glanced at Challis’s wall calendar, hanging next to a cork pin board, hoping that its rows of unmarked days might give her a sense of security. False security. She moved her gaze to the photos pinned to the board. They showed Challis with the old aeroplane he was restoring. A weird hobby. Still, it was a hobby. What interests did she have, outside of work?
Sometimes it’s the little things that set the world right again. She moved her breakfast things out onto the deck, where the morning sun drenched her. Presently the wood ducks wandered into view, a male, a female and seven ducklings-down from ten ducklings, owing to a fox, according to Hal. They paid her no mind but foraged through the flowering grasses that passed for a lawn out here, far from town.
Another reason not to do the mowing yet. She stretched, wondering if Challis liked to breakfast in the sun. She tried to picture it. She saw toast, coffee and a newspaper. Curiously, she didn’t see a woman. There had been women, but he sat alone, and she was thinking about that when the phone rang. It was Scobie Sutton, one of the detective constables under her command. ‘Ellen? We’ve got a missing child.’
Ellen wanted to say, ‘So?’ Kids went missing every day. It was a job for uniform, not CIU. Instead she said, ‘How bad is it?’
‘Katie Blasko, ten years old, missing since yesterday.’
‘Yesterday? When were we notified?’
‘Uniform were notified an hour ago.’
Ellen closed her eyes. She would never fathom how careless, vicious or stupid some parents could be. ‘Be there as soon as I can.’
Katie Blasko lived in a house on Trevally Street in Waterloo, a few blocks from the mangrove flats and the yacht basin. The house was small, a yellowish brick veneer structure with a tiled roof and rotting eaves. Ellen met Scobie at the front gate. The detective was wearing one of the funereal suits that exaggerated his earnestness and awkward, stick figure shape. Two uniformed constables, Pam Murphy and John Tankard, were doorknocking in the distance.
‘What can you tell me?’ Ellen said.
Scobie flipped open his notebook and began a long, sonorous account of his findings. Katie Blasko had attended her primary school the previous day, but hadn’t been seen after that. ‘There was some mix up. She was supposed to stay at a friend’s house last night.’
Ellen copied the relevant names, addresses and phone numbers. She glanced at her watch. ‘Head over to the school, check with her teachers and classmates. I’ll catch up with you as soon as I’ve finished here.’
‘Sure.’
Ellen stepped through a little gate and up to the front door. The woman who answered was thin, nervy, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. She looked wrung out and pleaded, ‘Have you found her?’
Ellen shook her head. ‘Not yet, but you mustn’t worry, it’s only a matter of time. Why don’t we go inside and you can fill me in.’
‘I already told the police everything. A guy called Scobie.’
Her voice was peevish and distraught, not that Ellen was blaming her, exactly. ‘If you could just go over it again, Mrs Blasko,’ she said gently.
Like, why did you wait so long before reporting your daughter missing?