‘Yeah,’ Tankard said.
Pam glanced at her partner. This was possibly the only time in history that she and Tank were in agreement on anything.
‘Who’d believe it?’ she asked.
‘Yeah,’ Tankard said again.
Van Alphen, the lean, wrathful son of Dutch immigrants, leaned his elbows on his desk. ‘What have I told you two over and over again?’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ Pam muttered. ‘Doesn’t make it any better, Sarge.’
‘Constable,’ he said warningly.
‘Sorry, Sarge.’
She didn’t look or feel sorry but sat upright in one of van Alphen’s hard office chairs. She was twenty-eight, precisely put together, tanned from surfing and toned by jogging and the gym. Her mind was keen, too, she’d been told, but she’d never quite accepted that, for her father and brothers were university academics and she’d been the youngest, a girl, mad about sport, average in the classroom.
‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again,’ van Alphen said, ‘your job is to help put a case together, help get the bastards into a courtroom. Your job is not to convict. Don’t take it personally. It’s not your fault Jarrett got off.’
‘We had a good case.’
‘He had a good lawyer.’
There was silence. Then Ellen Destry was in the doorway, a little breathless. ‘I’ve just got back from the city. I suppose you’ve heard about Nick Jarrett?’
‘Yeah,’ growled van Alphen, ‘it stinks.’
Then Ellen was nodding at Pam and Tank. ‘Thanks for your help today.’
‘Sorry we couldn’t find her, Sarge,’ Tank said.
‘I might need you both tomorrow, too,’ Ellen said, hurrying away again.
When she was gone, John Tankard leaned forward, lowered his voice. ‘Is she overreacting, Sarge?’
Van Alphen shrugged.
Pam, feeling a surge of loyalty for Ellen Destry, glared at both men. ‘You guys are incredible. This is a missing kid. What if she’s been snatched? Maybe by this paedophile ring.’
Tank turned to her. ‘What paedophile ring?’
‘On the Peninsula.’
‘They snatch kids off the street?’
Van Alphen stirred. ‘Guys, it’s just a rumour. There have been no reports of abductions.’
Tank ignored him. ‘So, if Katie Blasko was abducted, it could have been by someone from outside the area, not a local, not part of this ring.’
‘We don’t know that there is a ring, Tank,’ van Alphen said. ‘Just drop it, okay?’
Tank looked at Pam. ‘Maybe someone with a holiday house down here?’
‘Who knows?’ she said, wondering why he was so fired up.
‘Drop it, okay?’ van Alphen said sharply. ‘Back to business. We need a car on the estate. The Jarretts could get rowdy.’
Pam and Tank stirred. ‘We’re off duty, Sarge.’
‘We’re short-staffed,’ van Alphen countered. He leaned toward Pam and said, almost nastily, ‘Do you good, some ordinary police work before you go off to holiday camp.’
She flushed. She hadn’t told Tank yet. Tank went on full alert, his chair creaking under his agitated weight as he turned to her. ‘What holiday camp?’
Pam gestured. ‘Just some training thing I enrolled for.’
‘What training thing?’
‘Criminal investigation procedures, stuff like that.’
Tank wasn’t buying it. His overheated face got hotter. ‘Detective training? You’re becoming a dee?’
His tone said, You’re leaving me behind?
‘Probably won’t lead to anything,’ Pam said. ‘No vacancies.’
‘Bull shit,’ said John Tankard, spittle flying. ‘You’ve got bloody Destry mentoring you. You’ve been brown-nosing for years, don’t deny it.’
‘Can it, Tank.’
‘Children, children,’ van Alphen said.
DC Scobie Sutton had given Ellen Destry an update, and now he was heading across town to the Community House on Seaview Park estate. His wife volunteered there. Beth had once worked there, paid by the shire, but then the bastards had retrenched her. Sacked her in order to come in under budget, the budget blowing out because the shire’s various managers had voted they be outfitted with a fleet of Ford Territories, one of the thirstiest four-wheel-drives on the market. Meanwhile Beth and Scobie were down to one car, a tired Magna station wagon. They couldn’t afford to run two cars now, so Scobie was forever running his wife and daughter around the Peninsula, trying to fit in Roslyn’s school and social activities, his wife’s volunteering and his own CIU work. Scobie Sutton felt a kind of low-level indignation these days. Until his wife’s sacking he’d been like most decent churchgoing folk and never thought about social justice issues.
A different kind of indignation took him on a detour into the blighted part of Seaview Park where the Jarretts lived. News of Nick Jarrett’s acquittal had been all over the station and Scobie just wanted to sit and stare for a moment, as if that might cure him. He idled at the kerb: there were three cars crowding the patch of dirt that passed as the Jarrett’s front lawn, and he could feel the percussive force of a sound system at full volume. The Jarretts were celebrating. That usually meant escalating noise, violence and calls to 000.
A couple of neighbours came out to stare at Scobie with mingled appeal and reproach. The Jarretts had made their lives a living hell, and what good had the police ever been?
The Jarretts had once lived in Cranbourne, but their Housing Commission house had burnt to the ground-suspected arson, probably payback by someone they’d cheated-and the Commission had relocated them to Seaview Park estate, in Waterloo, which had no view of the sea and no park, only a hundred cheap houses elbow to elbow along bewilderingly curved streets or huddled together in blind culs-de-sac. This was a region of older cars, weedy front yards behind a range of mismatched fences, washing lines visible in back yards, and the occasional Australian flag hanging limply from a stubby pole. Families struggled on the Seaview, but it was generally an honest struggle. Unemployment was high, and the police were often called, but most residents did not rely on welfare or attract the attention of the authorities.
Unlike the Jarretts. At last count there were twelve of them, an extended clan that included cousins, live-in girlfriends and boyfriends, half brothers and sisters, the odd uncle or grandmother. Scobie had never been able to sort them out. If they worked, it was ‘at this and that’. The children were more often shoplifting than attending school. Sons and husbands would disappear for a stretch of jail time and come home to find someone else in their beds. Ex-boyfriends and girlfriends, remembering some old insult or unpaid debt, would come around with a carload of mates to smash windows and kneecaps. Neighbours were burgled; there were drunken and drug-crazed arguments and brawls; hotted-up, unroadworthy cars performed burnouts in the narrow streets and ploughed over lawns, fences and letterboxes. Scobie had once been called out when a boyfriend or husband, making an access visit to his kids, had been attacked by his ex-wife, who’d come storming out of the house with her new bloke and proceeded to bash the guy and his car with steel bars, the kids screaming, ‘Don’t kill my dad, don’t kill my dad.’ Which didn’t mean the kids were little angels. In fact, they scared Scobie the most. They were knowing and cold, and if not the sexual playthings of the adults, or addicts, they surely witnessed the adults having sex or out of their skulls on booze or speed.
All in all, you didn’t dare meet the eye of a Jarrett: you crossed the street or stayed indoors if a Jarrett was around. You didn’t complain: It was never proven but they’d firebombed the house of a woman who’d got up a petition against them.
It hadn’t taken long for public opinion on the estate to turn against the police. Scobie was sympathetic. The Jarretts should have been evicted long ago, but the Waterloo cop shop was understaffed, like many on the Peninsula, the Jarretts were cunning, and the younger constables found excuses to respond late, or not at all, to callouts to the Jarrett house. Meanwhile the Housing Commission bureaucrats lived in the city, not on the estate, and liked to say that they worked for a government that stood for the battlers in society. In their view the Jarretts paid their rent (more or less), hadn’t trashed the house much), and were a struggling family deserving of charity, not criticism, from those who were luckier than they were. Besides, it was argued, the Commission’s resources were stretched to the limit.