‘He seems the same to me,’ Challis had said.
‘It’s subtle, but he’s definitely worse. He should go back into hospital.’
‘What can they do, except observe? All that to-ing and fro-ing will do more harm than good. He needs rest.’
Saturday passed, Sunday, some bad old history informing their arguments. Eve forced them to apologise, but they were wrung out and could not do more than that. They were stubborn; it was a standoff.
And then, as if to underscore the fact that Meg knew what she was talking about because she’d stayed close to her family and Challis hadn’t, the old man had collapsed after breakfast and been rushed to hospital. Challis had just come home from spending the day there.
His conversation with Ellen cut short, he felt restless and incomplete. The house oppressed him at night, and he didn’t want to sit for hours in the hospital again.
Then the kitchen phone rang and he looked at it with dread. Meg’s voice was low and ragged. ‘It’s Dad.’
At once Challis pictured it: their father in the grip of another stroke or one of the weeping fits that seized him from time to time, as though life was desolate now. He asked foolishly, ‘Is he okay?’
The raggedness became tears. ‘Oh, Hal.’
Challis understood. ‘I’ll be right there.’
He fishtailed the Triumph out of his father’s driveway and sped across town to the hospital. There was a scattering of cars parked around it, but otherwise the place seemed benign, even deserted, as though illness and grief had taken a rest for the day. He parked beside a dusty ambulance and barged through the doors. Here at last were people, but no sense of urgency or of lives unravelling.
‘Hal!’
He wheeled around. A dim corridor, smelling of disinfectant, the linoleum floors scuffed here and there by black rubber wheels. Meg and Eve were sitting outside one of the single rooms with Rob Minchin, who patted Meg and got to his feet as Challis approached.
‘So sorry, Hal.’
The two men embraced briefly. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ Minchin said. ‘Couple of babies due some time tonight.’
Challis turned to Meg and Eve. Their faces were full of dampish misery, but uplifted a little to see him, as though he were their rock. He didn’t feel like a rock. It was a lie. He was quiet and thoughtful, and people mistook that for strength. In fact, all he wanted to do was join Meg and Eve in weeping.
Meg drew him onto a chair beside her. Eve gave him a wobbly smile.
He said gently, ‘What happened?’
‘Massive cerebral haemorrhage.’
He found that he couldn’t bear to think of it. There would have been suffering, brief, but intense. There would have been a moment of extreme fear. He didn’t like to think of his father’s last moments.
Meg held his hand in her left and Eve’s in her right. ‘It could have been worse,’ she said.
They sat quietly. ‘Can I see him?’
Meg released his hand and pointed. ‘In there.’
The room was ablaze, a nurse and an orderly bustling and joking as they worked. They sobered when they saw him. ‘Hal,’ said the nurse.
He peered at her. ‘Nance?’
She nodded. Another one he’d gone to school with, the younger sister of…
‘How’s…’ He couldn’t remember her husband’s name.
‘Oh, he’s history. Good riddance.’
She took Challis by the elbow and gently ushered him to the bedside. ‘We have to move him soon, but I can give you a few minutes.’ She patted him and he was aware of the lights dimming and of Nance leaving with the orderly.
His father’s mouth hung open, and that, with his scrawny neck and tight cheekbones, seemed to configure despair, as though the old man wasn’t dead but imploring someone to help him. Challis began to weep. He tried to close his father’s mouth but nothing was malleable. Maybe the old guy had never been malleable. Challis pulled up a chair, sat, and held a light, papery hand. He let the tears run until Meg joined him and he found the strength to say to himself, Enough. Enough for now, at any rate.
44
On Tuesday morning Scobie Sutton stared in fascination at the man who had abducted and raped Katie Blasko, possibly abducted and murdered other young girls, and also cheated a stack of people of $395 plus booking fee. Duyker, with his eyes dead as pebbles, dry, heavily seamed cheeks and neck, and patchy, tufted brown hair, did look disturbing close up. At surveillance distance he’d seemed nondescript, a tradesman on his day off, maybe, a man who favoured pale coloured chinos, deck shoes and a polo shirt. You wouldn’t look twice at him. Now Scobie couldn’t take his eyes off the man. He visualised Grace Duyker, sweet Grace, with her skin like ripe fruit, sitting unconsciously close to him as he’d interviewed her about Duyker. Well, the closeness was probably unconscious, but Scobie had liked it, and had ‘unconsciously’ moved his bony thigh closer to hers as she told him about family occasions when she was young, and the creepy way Uncle Peter had looked at her.
He forced himself to pay attention, and heard Ellen Destry say, ‘You’ve been identified by a witness, Mr Duyker. You, Neville Clode and other men have for many years been sexually abusing underage boys.’
An equal opportunity child rapist, Scobie thought, boys and girls. Of course, Ellen was jumping the gun here. Van Alphen hadn’t produced his witness yet, hadn’t even come in to work yet.
Duyker, on the other side of the interview table, folded his arms and stared at the ceiling panels. Scobie looked up, astonished and angry to see wadded tissue stuck up there, as though this was a public toilet. He privately vowed never to leave a witness alone in an interview room. ‘Mr Duyker?’ he prodded.
‘I’m not saying anything until my lawyer gets here.’
Out of the corner of his eye, Scobie saw Ellen lean back in her seat. ‘Now, where have I heard that before?’ she said. Scobie continued to stare at Duyker, looking for the flinch that said to keep pushing. Duyker was expressionless. The air in the little room contained an evil stink, suddenly, as if Duyker exuded contempt through his pores while his eyes remained fiat and dead. Contempt for young girls, police, anything decent at all. Scobie shivered involuntarily and said a few words of prayer to himself.
‘We have enough to hold you, Mr Duyker,’ Scobie said. ‘May I call you Pete? Peter?’
Nothing.
‘Fraud, in addition to the sex offences.’
Nothing.
‘You defrauded my wife of $395,’ Scobie went on. ‘A policeman’s wife. We have a pattern here, don’t we? Your record shows fraud charges in New South Wales and across the water in New Zealand.’
Duyker said flatly, ‘My lawyer.’
‘He’s not helping us with our inquiries, Pete, you are,’ Ellen said.
Scobie pretended to read a page from the file that lay before him on the chipped table, where coffee rings overlapped like Olympic logos rendered by deranged children. ‘This pretend photography. It wasn’t all pretend, was it? You took actual photographs sometimes? Little girls? Naked? Having sex with you and your mates while they were too drugged to resist?’
Scobie found himself reeling in distress at the sudden pictures in his head, of his sweet daughter at Duyker’s hands, and he himself floundering, unable to save her.
Duyker sat unblinking.
So Scobie said, headlong and spiteful, ‘Your DNA matches DNA found in the house where Katie Blasko was found.’
Beside him Ellen threw her pen down softly. Around him the air shifted, and a slow smile started up in Duyker’s face, an empty smile but a smile.
‘I don’t recall giving you a sample from which to make a match. I don’t recall that you asked for one. Meanwhile my DNA is not on file anywhere. Stop playing games.’
‘We’ll be asking for a sample,’ Scobie said, going red. Ellen breathed out her disgust.
Duyker was amused. ‘I wonder what my lawyer will say.’
Scobie and Ellen were silent, Scobie mentally kicking himself. Never give them ammunition to use against you: Challis had drilled that into him time and time again. And this interview was being videotaped: a good copper always keeps his facial expressions neutral in those circumstances.