‘You think she drowned?’ said Pedder.
Donna moaned. Ellen gave Pedder a look that made him go pale. ‘What about the area between here and the highway?’
‘Katie’s scared of snakes,’ said Donna.
Larrayne had been, too.
They’d all run out of things to say. Ellen gathered her notes together and got to her feet.
‘What do you think happened to my baby?’ whispered Donna.
That was in the script, too: the words and the whispered voice. ‘Kids go missing every day,’ said Ellen warmly. ‘They always turn up again.’
She glanced at Justin Pedder as she said it, warning him not to say the obvious.
3
It was now 11 am. Ellen was due at the Supreme Court by early afternoon. Saying goodbye to Donna Blasko and Justin Pedder, she called Scobie Sutton’s mobile, and met him outside Katie Blasko’s primary school. ‘I’ll have to leave it in your hands for a few hours,’ she told him. ‘It’s possible that Katie simply ran away, but why would she stay away for this long? To be on the safe side, continue the doorknock, check with hospitals, contact family and friends. I’m going to see Kellock. We need more uniforms.’
‘Thanks.’ He shivered. ‘Missing kid. I hate it, Ellen.’
Scobie Sutton was nuts about his own child, Roslyn, who was also aged ten. He could be a bore about it. ‘Stay in touch during the day,’ Ellen told him. ‘Call or text me if you find anything.’
The police station was by the roundabout at the head of High Street. She parked at the rear and entered, heading first for her pigeonhole, where she collected a sheaf of letters and memos. She found Kellock, the uniformed senior sergeant in charge of the station, in his office. He was a barrel of a man, his head a whiskery slab on a neckless torso. There were cuts on the hunks of flesh that were his hands. He tugged down his shirtsleeves self-consciously and scowled, ‘Been pruning roses.’
She was about to say that she should have been mowing Hal Challis’s grass, but stopped herself. She didn’t want to broadcast the fact that she was staying in Challis’s house. Just then Kellock’s desk phone rang. ‘Be with you in a minute,’ he said.
She sifted through her mail while he took the call. Most of it she’d bin; the rest was bound for her in-tray. One item enraged her. It was a memo from Superintendent McQuarrie: ‘Owing to budgetary constraints, all of Peninsula Command’s forensic testing will henceforth be carried out by ForenZics, an independent specialist laboratory based in Chadstone. Not only are ForenZics’ fees significantly lower, their laboratory is closer and their promised turnaround time quicker than the state government’s lab.’ Ellen shook her head. She’d never heard of ForenZics. She and Challis had always worked with Freya Berg and her colleagues in the state lab.
Just then Kellock snarled, ‘They’re all scum.’
Ellen glanced at him inquiringly. He put a massive hand over the receiver and said, ‘It’s Sergeant van Alphen. He’s in the courtroom, says Nick Jarrett’s family’s been heckling and jeering.’
‘Doesn’t surprise me,’ Ellen said.
Kellock ignored her, barking into his phone: ‘I want a car stationed outside their house all night, okay?’
He listened to the reply, grunted, replaced the receiver and said to Ellen, ‘If the jury acquits, the Jarretts will come home and celebrate. If they convict, the Jarretts will hold a wake. Either way, it’s not going to be much fun for us. Now, how can I help you?’
‘Katie Blasko, aged ten, been missing since yesterday.’
She wasn’t sure that Kellock had heard her. His face was like bleak wastes of granite, revealing no emotions, but under it he probably continued to be furious and vengeful about the Jarretts. Then there was a subtle shift. He twisted his mouth. She supposed it was a smile. With Kellock you couldn’t be entirely sure, not until he spoke. ‘You want some uniforms to help search?’
‘If you can spare them.’
‘You already have Murphy and Tankard. I can spare a couple more, maybe a probationer or two.’
Ellen grimaced. The perennial shortage of available police on the Peninsula affected them both. ‘Thanks. If we don’t find her soon, we’ll need more bodies, more overtime.’
He nodded. ‘I’ll square it with the boss.’
He meant Superintendent McQuarrie. It was said that he was McQuarrie’s spy, but that could be a good thing if he was also able to drum up support when it was needed. ‘Thanks, Kel.’
‘We’ll find her, Ells, don’t worry.’
Kellock was bulky and confident. Ellen felt a little better about everything.
Finally she headed up to the city, striking heavy traffic. It took her ninety minutes to reach. Melbourne and then find a car park near the Supreme Court. It was two o’clock by the time she entered the courtroom, and she was dismayed to see McQuarrie there.
‘You’re late, sergeant.’
‘Sorry, sir,’ Ellen murmured, sliding onto the bench seat, her movements stirring the air, arousing faintly the odours of floor wax and furniture polish.
McQuarrie sniffed: a good sniffer, Ellen thought. He was a neat, precise, humourless man who professed a glum kind of Christianity, like many ministers in the federal government. She darted a glance past his costly dress uniform at Sergeant Kees van Alphen, who with Ellen had arrested Nick Jarrett all those months ago, and helped put the case together for the Office of Public Prosecutions. He winked; she grinned.
Finally she gathered herself, willed her racing pulse to settle. It soon became clear that she hadn’t missed much of the prosecutor’s final summation to the jury. He droned on, a man with almost no presence, when the trial of Nick Jarrett surely required prosecutorial outrage. Eventually, with a weak flourish, he finished.
Nick Jarrett s lawyer leapt to his feet, placed his hand on his client’s shoulder, and said, ‘Reasonable doubt, ladies and gentlemen.’
Ellen snorted. McQuarrie glanced at her sourly. So did the judge. She ignored them. Reasonable doubt? Nick Jarrett was twenty-four, a wiry, fleshless speed addict, his skin jumping today in a suit that might have come from the Salvation Army op-shop in Waterloo. Barely literate, but cunning, driven by amphetamines and base instincts, not intellect. Young men like Nick Jarrett passed through the courts every day of the week. Owing to the drugs and the alcohol, they were vicious and unpredictable. They hurt people, and got hurt. They made stupid mistakes and got arrested. But not all of them ran over cyclists for sport.
One day in May, Nick Jarrett and his mate, Brad O’Connor, had been engaged in their latest enterprise, carjacking. They’d done it six times since March, and had developed a taste for it. What you did was, you hung around a car park, like the dusty overflow area of a hospital, somewhere there are no security cameras, and some woman comes along, blinded by tears because her husband’s dying in intensive care, or joy because she’s newly a grandmother, and you shove a blood-filled syringe in her face before she can buckle her seatbelt. Sometimes, for a laugh, you take her for a little ride to the middle of nowhere, and shove her out of the door.
The cars from the first five carjackings had never been found. Ellen suspected they’d been stolen to order by Nick and Brad, taken to a chop-shop or straight onto a shipping container, but that wasn’t the issue before the court today. The issue here was vehicular manslaughter, and the police had impounded the sixth car, which had yielded some-admittedly not very compelling-forensic evidence.
What young Nick Jarrett liked to do, while driving his carjacked vehicle to who-knew-where, was play chicken with cyclists and pedestrians. He’d got pretty good at it, pretty deft with the brakes and the steering wheel. To give his victims an extra thrill, he liked to open his door at the last minute, watch those schoolkids and old ladies duck and weave, throw themselves down on the bitumen. He’d always liked mucking around with cars. Never meant no harm by it.