But on 13 May he’d crossed a median strip and misjudged things a little. A lot, really. Tony Balfour, aged fifteen, on his way home from school. Everything to live for, said the newspapers. A young life cruelly snatched, etcetera. Not only that, he was the son of a popular civilian clerk employed at the Waterloo police station.
Ellen and van Alphen had gone for murder, but the OPP had reduced that to criminal negligence. After all, Nick had been driving under the influence of amphetamines and alcohol, to which he was addicted.
Now his defence lawyer had the nerve to argue reasonable doubt, and was doing a pretty good job of it, too, Ellen realised. She stiffened to see thoughtful nods on the faces of the jury. It had barely registered during the trial, but now the testimony of Nick’s mate, Brad O’Connor, was looking pretty shaky. Yes, Brad had testified against his friend, but had he really done that to assuage his guilty feelings and see justice done? ‘I don’t think so,’ Nick’s lawyer thundered. ‘Mr O’Connor was driven by malice and greed: malice because his de facto wife had developed a relationship with my client, and greed because he wanted the fifty thousand dollars reward offered by the victim’s family. Put that together with the fact that no forensic evidence places my client in the car that struck the particular blow, and you have no alternative, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, but to find that a reasonable doubt exists, and find him not guilty.’
‘I thought the forensic evidence proved it,’ snarled McQuarrie from the corner of his mouth. ‘I thought this was sewn up, Sergeant Destry.’
‘It links the vehicle with the victim but not to Jarrett, sir, but even so…’
McQuarrie gestured for her to shut up. A chill went through her. She risked a glance over her shoulder. The dead boy’s mother and sister were weeping on one side of the courtroom; the Jarrett clan was taking up three rows of seats on the other. Rowdy and ever-present during the trial, they were now flashing grins at the prosecution team. They clearly thought a reasonable doubt had been shown to exist. The only exception was the clan’s patriarch, Laurie Jarrett. Aged fifty, a hard, motionless presence, he was staring at Ellen as though he’d never had a thought or a feeling in his life.
4
The jury retired to consider its verdict, and now it was a waiting game. Hours. Days. Ellen left the court building and glanced at her watch. Mid-afternoon, but it was Friday, so the traffic would be hell wherever she went now. She bit her lip indecisively: return to Waterloo and the search for Katie Blasko, or catch up with her daughter?
She pulled out her phone. ‘It’s me, Scobie. Any news?’
‘Not yet. What about you?’
‘The jury’s out. Look, I’d like to see Larrayne, since I’m in the city.’
He was silent; she could imagine his sombre face. ‘I guess that’s okay.’
She wanted to say that she didn’t need his permission, then wondered if he were judging her for not racing back to help find Katie Blasko. ‘I’ll be back before five o’clock. I want to have another go at the parents.’
‘All right.’
The man irritated her. She made another call. ‘Hi, sweetie. I’m in the city. Would it be okay if I popped in to say hello?’
Ellen’s daughter was nineteen, a health sciences undergraduate who shared a house in Carlton with two other students. She was always prickly these days. She blamed Ellen for splitting the family up. ‘I should be studying, Mum. Exams soon.’
‘I won’t stay long, promise.’
Larrayne sighed heavily. ‘If you like.’
A ringing endorsement. Ellen retrieved her car and skirted around the glassy office towers of Melbourne’s central business district, fighting the traffic to the inner suburb of Carlton. Workers had lived here in the boom years after the 1850s gold rushes. In the early decades of the twentieth century much of Carlton had been a slum, then home to the waves of Italian and Greek immigrants after the Second World War, and was now sought after by yuppies, who paid half-a-million dollars for the little brick cottages along the side streets, either living in them or renting them out to students like Larrayne Destry. Ellen could see the appeaclass="underline" Melbourne University, RMIT, Chinatown and the downtown boutiques and cinemas were only a short walk or tram ride away.
She parked on a hydrant, hoping she wouldn’t get booked. Owing to the lack of off-street parking, small European and Japanese cars crowded both kerbs. These days, in this place, it was difficult to tell if the Audis and the Subarus belonged to student renters or yuppie owners, but there was no mistaking her daughter’s 1991 Toyota Camry. It was a first car, a student car, through and through.
Ellen banged the iron knocker on the front door. After a long delay, Larrayne answered, and Ellen picked up conflicting clues. Her daughter looked flustered, her pinned-up hair escaping in wisps, her T-shirt wrinkled, but she also looked studious in the elegant reading glasses she’d been prescribed a year earlier.
Mother and daughter kissed and hugged briefly. ‘I won’t stay long,’ Ellen said again.
‘Okay.’
The faзade of the house, unchanged since the colonial era and preserved by council regulations, gave way to a short hallway of closed bedroom doors and then a large, airy living room. Typically, some interior walls had been knocked down and skylights, a mezzanine floor and a rear sundeck put in. The furniture was a mismatched collection of op-shop armchairs, Ikea stools and bright, cheap floor coverings and cushions. A kid of about twenty leapt from one of the armchairs. He was skinny, with earrings and chopped-about hair. ‘Hi, Mrs Destry. I’m Travis.’
The boyfriend? A new tenant? Ellen glanced at Larrayne, who said expressionlessly, ‘Tea? Coffee?’
‘Coffee.’
Ellen stayed for thirty painful minutes. Her daughter was unresponsive; the boy overcompensated with chatter. Finally Ellen glanced at her watch and said, ‘I have to get back.’
Larrayne leapt to her feet and took her to the front door. ‘Thanks for coming, Mum.’
Ellen said brightly, ‘Is Travis your boyfriend?’
‘So what if he is?’
‘Just wondering, sweetheart. How are your studies?’
‘All right.’
‘If you need peace and quiet in the lead up to the exams, come and spend a few days with me.’
‘You must be joking, me in lover boy’s house,’ Larrayne said, and Ellen saw that nothing had changed. It might have been bearable if Hal Challis were her lover boy.
She felt heat rising inside her and turned away before she said something she’d later regret. Twenty minutes later, as she headed southeast on the freeway toward Waterloo, her mind was still stewing. If criminals can be granted the benefit of the concept of reasonable doubt, why couldn’t she? Instead, her daughter and her husband had examined the ‘evidence’ against her-she’d walked out on her marriage, she’d always worked closely with Hal Challis, she was now living in his house-and found her guilty of adultery.
I wish, she thought.
I think I wish.
The freeway was choked with traffic, moving at a walking pace down a broad channel between seas of tiled roofs, home to middle
Australia. The routes in and out of Melbourne had never coped and never would, not when the satellite areas like the Peninsula offered cheap, high-density housing but no jobs.
Beside her a siren whooped, highway patrol, festooned with antennas and decals, motioning at her mobile phone. She showed them her badge through the window. They shrugged and shot away down the shoulder of the freeway, looking for other mugs who were driving while talking on a mobile phone.
It was inevitable that thinking about her own daughter-and love, protection and responsibility-would lead Ellen to thinking about Katie Blasko. A ten-year-old, missing for-she glanced at her watch- twenty-four hours now. Was Katie at a friend’s house? Getting off the bus in Sydney, where she’d be swallowed up in the fleshpots of Kings Cross? Twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours of heaven or hell.