The other parents. Mums, mostly. April now, relatively early in the year, and they were still sussing him out. Scobie forced them to acknowledge him. He learnt their names, made sure they knew his (though not that he was a copper), made eye contact with them and engaged them in conversation. Most were thawing to him, but they still had unvoiced questions for him. He could read it in their faces. Are you a single father? If so, why? Why aren't you at work? Are you unemployed? A male parent, alone with a female child. Is it safe to let my daughter go to your house to play with your daughter after school?
He'd got to the school early one morning and a classmate of Roslyn's had said, 'Come and see the koala.' So they'd made their way along the path, red-brick pavers winding between tan-bark islands, shrubs, gumtrees and classrooms, to a solitary gum beside the After School Care room. There was a pink hair tie at the base of the tree, a dewy school windcheater draped over a pine rail nearby.
Scobie looked up. Sure enough, there was a koala halfway up the tree. And sure enough, the mother of the other child was soon hoofing it toward him, darting suspicious looks at him, as though he might spirit her kid away.
Scobie wanted to say nastily, 'Is there a problem?' but felt small and mean. That mother-any mother-was right to be wary. Even so, he was in no hurry to inform them that he did have a wife, and if not for her job up in the city, which obliged her to leave home at seven-thirty am and get home at six-thirty pm, she'd gladly be sharing the school run with him.
You didn't usually get fathers making the school run but one was there this morning, Mostyn Pearce, a thin, narrow-faced, agitated-looking individual, dressed in jeans, trainers and a Collingwood football jumper. His daughter, Jessie, pale, weedy, undernourished-looking, stood clutching his leg, ducking her face away when Scobie caught her eye. In any other child it might have been an appealingly shy gesture, but by some twist of heredity it was unappealing in Jessie Pearce.
Leaning against the man's other leg was a ferret on a lead. The child and the ferret were perfect reproductions of the man: slight, edgy, sly, quick, a mass of nerve endings.
The other children were drawn to but afraid of the ferret, and stood watching in a cluster some distance away. Scobie heard Pearce say, 'It's all right, he won't bite.' There was impatience in his tone, as though he spent his life explaining things to people who were slow, obtuse or careless. His gaze skittered over Scobie's, taking in everything, settling on nothing.
Scobie stood alone for a few minutes, smiling and nodding as mothers arrived with their children. He said a breezy hello half a dozen times, but no one approached him. Eight-fifty am… Inger would be opening the classroom door soon. Older children raced past, yelling. It was a cheerful, nourishing sort of school, but there were no black or Asian faces, no round veiled faces, and-judging by the tone of the weekly newsletter and other take-home notices-no sign that a feminist perspective had reached this far south.
He listened to the conversations around him. Did you go away for Easter? Footie season soon. The kids dragged their heels this morning. How would the blooming mayor feel if he had a detention centre on his doorstep, that's what I'd like to know…
And then Scobie saw Aileen Munro. She seemed to sidle in and stood well back, a bulky presence along the serpentine path leading to Prep I. As Scobie watched, she bobbed to kiss her two older children goodbye, watched them race to their respective classrooms, then stood with her youngest daughter, scarcely daring to meet the eyes of the other parents. Then, apparently sensing his scrutiny, she looked up and her gaze locked on Scobie's, anguished and beseeching.
She knew who he was. She'd known for the past eighteen months that he was a CIB detective based at Waterloo. She was embarrassed to know him, embarrassed that he'd had cause to visit and question her in her farmhouse kitchen on Five Furlong Road.
Her husband, Ian Munro, had been suspected of sending a padded envelope containing a.303 bullet to a bank official in Waterloo. The bank had earlier threatened to foreclose on a loan taken out by Munro. When Munro sold off a parcel of land to repay the loan, the matter was dropped, but there had been a series of other incidents since then. Munro had apparently brandished a rifle at repossession agents, run the tyres of his ute over the toes of the council sheriff, and punched a process server who was attempting to deliver a legal document. He'd been abusive to shire officers and suspected of placing gelignite on the driver's seat of the bank loan officer's car.
Scobie had investigated, and urged people to press charges, but Munro was a bully, stocky, cold and unremitting, and the locals knew better than to come forward.
Scobie watched Aileen Munro edge through the other parents until she was able to murmur in his ear, 'I'm worried about Ian.'
Scobie jerked his head. They moved away from inquisitive ears. 'Tell me,' he said.
Aileen Munro's lined face looked up at him. 'He's all hyper. It's like he's going to explode.'
Aileen's daughter was clinging to her mother's dry, bony fingers, gazing at Scobie. There was a cut across her nose, a hint of bruising beneath one eye. Then she scratched her scalp and his gaze went to her hair and he shuddered to think of lice crawling there.
He turned to Aileen. 'Has Ian been violent with you or the kids?'
'Ian? No, never.'
'How did Shannon cut her face?'
'Fell off the trampoline,' Aileen said, her expression saying that was her story and she was sticking to it.
'All right,' Scobie said, sighing. 'So, what's wrong with Ian?'
'Like I said, he's all wound up.'
'About anything in particular?'
'Money It's always money. It was all right till he took out that loan. Now he's in too deep and not paying the bills. The government this, the government that. He's letting the place run down.'
'I thought he'd paid off the loan.'
'This is a new loan.'
The banks have a lot to answer for, Scobie thought. 'I don't see there's much the police can do at this point,' he said. 'If you like I could talk to him, but-'
'Oh, no,' Aileen said, horrified. 'He's already had a row with a man from the RSPCA. He'd throw a real wobbly if he thought I'd been talking about him to the police, going behind his back.'
'Have you talked to the bank? They could tailor the repayments to suit your income.'
'Yeah, right, you know what he thinks of banks.'
'Then I don't see what I can do.'
'I just want you to know, that's all. Be prepared, kind of thing,' Aileen Munro said as the siren sounded for the beginning of classes.
She paused. 'I don't know if I can hack it any longer. He's got guns, you know.'
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Challis slept badly and woke early on Tuesday morning. To clear his head he walked for an hour, pumping his arms and striding out in order to stir his sluggish blood. It seemed to work, and by seven-thirty he'd showered and dressed and was drinking coffee on his deck, which faced the healing early sun through leaves on the turn.
By seven-fifty he was heading for Waterloo, where a temporary office had been allocated to him ten months earlier for the investigation into the disappearance of the Tully child. That case had dragged on and after a time he'd had to attend to more pressing but less interesting homicides-mostly domestics-elsewhere on the Peninsula; but then the Flinders Floater had been found and he'd returned to Waterloo, where the little office was still available. Then that case had gone stale but this time he stayed on, electing to use Waterloo as his base. It was a recent Force Command initiative, allocating a senior Homicide Squad officer to each of the main non-metropolitan regions. The old system of sending a team of Melbourne detectives long distances to remote regions had been inefficient and the cause of local resentment. Challis liked Waterloo. The staff were easygoing and it was close to home.