This time she saw a shape slip past one of the windows.
Ellen did not vary her pace but continued along the road, up and over the hill, past the farm with the barking dogs, letting the sound of her car apparently dwindle into the distance. She drove for a kilometre, and then pulled into the driveway of a hobby farm. The owner, a Melbourne accountant, was never there during the week.
She went back to Challis’s on foot, avoiding the loose gravel of the road, which would announce her presence and fill her own ears with distracting sounds. Instead, she headed overland, trotting carefully through grassy paddocks, vaulting over the wire fences, until she came to the rear of the house. Behind her was another slope and another hobby farm, several hundred metres away and also empty tonight.
From here she was slightly elevated and could look down on the back of Challis’s house. His rear boundary was another wire fence. She paused for a while, listening. Her eyes were accustomed to the darkness now and she was alert for all sounds and movements. She waited for ten minutes before she saw Kellock. A brief, chancy beam of moonlight caught him, just as she was about to advance on the house. It was not so much his face as his stance, his bulky alertness, that she recognised. He watched and waited, and so did she, for a solid hour. He was patient, she was patient. She could smell him, she realised, an amalgam of aftershave and perspiration. Did he sense her? Her perfume, this morning’s scented shampoo and conditioner? He gave no sign of it. She was distracted by thoughts of Challis then. How would she characterise his smell? Clean, undisguised. There wasn’t much in the way of scented soaps in his bathroom. No old aftershave containers. Skulking like this in the nighttime and its shadows was arousing her.
Kellock broke first. One moment he was there and the next he was gone. Ellen shrank deeper into the grass and waited, just in case he was flanking her. She thought about the blood on Sasha’s collar. Of course it was Kellock’s, and of course he’d got it when Sasha bit him. But a defence lawyer would have a field day with that evidence. He’d cite the discredited lab work and Scobie Sutton’s balls-up at the scene of the Jarrett shooting, and propose another scenario: ‘My client is in charge of the Waterloo police station. Naturally he keeps abreast of all its functions and activities. He patted the dog when it was brought in to the station on its way to the lab. The dog bit him. There is nothing sinister in his blood being found on the collar.’
Ellen tensed. She heard a motorbike fire up in the distance. It revved once or twice, idled, and then howled away. She’d wondered how Kellock had got here, and now she knew. She slipped inside the house, gathered together a change of clothing and spent the night in the Sanctuary Motor Inn, up in the hills northeast of Melbourne, where she paid cash and used a false name.
59
She drove to work on Wednesday wondering if she’d be able to control her face. She’d had plenty of practice over the years, hiding her reactions and feelings from the men around her-hiding attraction and repulsion-but she’d never had to hide something as monumental as the information she held in her head.
She used the front door, feeling almost sick, expecting to encounter Kellock.
But Kellock wasn’t in his office. No one had seen him, and he hadn’t called in. What did that mean? Had the lab, apologetic, contacted him to say they’d found his DNA on the dog’s collar but it was all a mistake? Ellen had expressly told Riggs not to inform Kellock, but Kellock had cronies everywhere. All kinds of paperwork crossed his desk. Was he out there somewhere, getting rid of evidence? Were his mates covering their tracks?
And so she was predisposed to find significance in anything Scobie Sutton did. When she walked into the incident room and saw him hunched covertly over his desk phone, she was immediately suspicious. When he’d completed the call, she asked, ‘Everything okay, Scobie?’
He looked hunted, a little sulky, and went very red. ‘Just the wife.’
Then Pam arrived. She wore tan slacks and a white T-shirt under a crumpled cotton jacket. Her hair was pulled back severely from her face. She looked scrubbed, athletic, ready for action. They worked in silence and the morning passed, empty coffee cups accumulating. Ellen put Scobie to work watching videotapes from the closed-circuit security cameras; she and Pam read documents. Then, when Scobie and Pam went out to buy pastries for morning tea, she pressed the redial button on Scobie’s phone.
‘Grace Duyker speaking.’
‘This is Sergeant Ellen Destry, of the Waterloo police station-’
The woman cut her off. ‘Are you taking his side? Is that it? Now I’m the ogre?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Look, he’s a nice guy and everything, but it’s inappropriate. I’m happily married. He’s married. I swear I never encouraged him, but he’s got it into his head that I-’
Thinking rapidly, Ellen said, ‘I think he understands that now.’
‘I don’t want to get him into trouble. I don’t want him to get me into trouble.’
‘You have my assurance on that,’ Ellen said.
Pam and Scobie came in, Scobie’s gaze going straight to Ellen on his phone. He looked as though he might burst into tears, but Ellen said pitilessly, feeling like a stern aunt, ‘I was just informing Grace Duyker that she can rely on us to be discreet. Scobie, you’ll endorse that?’
‘Ellen,’ he muttered, head down, while Pam cocked her head and said nothing.
Ellen watched him and pondered. His mortification was genuine: she should trust him. Still, she withheld that. She wanted a stronger indication that he could be trusted.
It came just before lunch. Ellen walked down High Street to the delicatessen, bought three smoked salmon and avocado rolls, and came back to find Pam and Scobie side by side in the incident room, deeply absorbed. She stood back to watch and listen for a couple of minutes, trying to read Sutton. He was explaining the progress and lack of progress in the Katie Blasko case. Pam was asking him questions-but she, also, was trying to read him, Ellen realised. She watched them sift through the statements, photographs and other documentary evidence, Scobie gesturing once or twice as if overwhelmed by the workload. He hadn’t spotted Ellen yet. ‘A ton of stuff to go through,’ he said. ‘Just look at it alclass="underline" CCTV footage, parking and speeding fines, witness statements to check again.’ He glanced at Pam, trying for humour. ‘I bet you wish you were back in a patrol car.’
‘No thanks, Scobe,’ she said brightly. She peered at the sheet of paper in her hand. ‘Rising Stars Agency,’ she read. ‘What’s this?’
Scobie almost broke then. He told Pam about Duyker’s scam, his voice catching as if he couldn’t comprehend the evil that Duyker represented. ‘My own daughter could have been his next victim.’
Pam was watching Ellen over his shoulder. They communicated silently, instinctively, and Pam said, ‘Oh, hi, Sarge.’
Scobie turned. ‘Sorry. I was just catching Pam up on some things.’
‘Scobie,’ Ellen said, ‘there’s something you should know.’
It took her ten minutes. He was shocked, now and then glancing uneasily at the door, as though Kellock might materialise there.
‘Scobie, keep your cool.’
‘I cant.’
‘Yes you can. You’ll have to.’
They ate lunch hurriedly, and then resumed work, Scobie throwing himself into it, as if work might cure his fear and agitation, and punish him because he’d felt desire for another woman and been naive about human wickedness.
And he found salvation of a kind. ‘I think I’ve got something,’ he said two hours later. ‘Duyker gave us a cash register receipt to prove he wasn’t in Waterloo between three and four on the Thursday Katie was abducted?’
‘Correct. A big newsagency in the city.’
‘Duyker wasn’t there,’ Scobie said, leaning forward and tapping the monitor screen, ‘but Neville Clode was. I’ve got him picking discarded receipts off the floor inside the main door of the newsagency that same afternoon. Five-thirty, to be precise.’