'Sitting at a computer.'
'Yes, Tank, but what's he doing?'
'Take a wild guess.'
And so Pam took a reasoned guess, mentally linking Internet pornography with that day, ten months ago, when Bradley Pike, aged twenty-two, unemployed and unemployable, had been babysitting his defacto's two-year-old daughter, Jasmine Tully. It had been a Saturday, and to settle Jasmine for her afternoon nap he'd driven around with her in his car. When she was asleep he slipped into a milk bar for cigarettes. 'I was gone five minutes,' he said. 'No, three minutes. Three minutes tops.' When he got back, the child was missing. He hadn't bothered to lock the car. The car hadn't yielded forensic evidence except what you'd expect from a car shared by people like Bradley Pike and Lisa Tully. They were young, poor, badly educated, neglectful and stupid. Lisa Tully had taken the train to Frankston with her sister Donna that day, and when she got back to Waterloo, smelling of perfume samples and rattling with shoplifted aerosols, and found her child missing, she'd started spitting and screaming. 'You done it, Brad, I know you done it.'
The police were of a similar view and had searched the house and garden. Nothing. They grilled Pike for days on end and search teams had scoured the Peninsula: culverts, rock pools, bracken thickets, rubbish tips and farmland. The child was never found. Pike was never tried.
Like a moron, Pam thought, Pike had stayed on in Waterloo. And just to show how fucked-up some people are, he could still be seen with Lisa from time to time, although the rest of the district would have nothing to do with him.
'You know what it is, don't you?' Tankard demanded. 'No one will fuck him anymore so he gets off on pornography.'
It could be true, Pam thought. The latest in Pike's on-again, off-again relationship with Lisa Tully was the restraining order that Lisa had taken out on him, claiming harassment. Before that she'd had a change of heart and said she no longer believed he'd been behind her daughter's disappearance. Before that she'd been adamant that he had been responsible. Pike was challenging the restraining order-because no one else was stupid enough to fuck him, the town said, and he needed her back again. Pam knew that the restraining order didn't mean much. It kept Lisa and Donna Tully in the public eye, though.
'I'd like to flatten the little cunt,' Tankard said now, clenching his fist.
Pam nodded absently. They'd have to get into the library unobserved and try to see what Pike was doing on the computer. That was their main concern. Unfortunately, Pike knew both their faces. After all, they'd had plenty of contact with him ten months ago. Since then he'd been beaten up a couple of times. And there was the night he'd gone to hospital with minor scorches to his face and hands after siphoning petrol from an abandoned car and using a cigarette lighter for illumination. He'd also come into the police station in an outrage one day because the marijuana plant he'd been cultivating in a pot on his back verandah had been nicked. Then just the other day, when she'd seen him on the street and he'd told her about Venn being the lovers' lane rapist, he'd claimed that he was being stalked. Pam shook her head. Not real bright, our Bradley.
'How are we going to do this?'
'For all we know, he's doing research on his car, not downloading kiddie porn.'
Pike drove an unroadworthy Torana.
'Simple. We just go over and hassle him. I'm looking forward to this. We might get lucky.'
Pam knew all about Tankard's approach to crime: hassle offenders and suspected offenders until they commit a crime, then arrest them. She shrugged. 'Okay go for it.'
They went in, Tankard heading like a bull on heat across the room to a partitioned corner. Pam followed, threading her way around a scattering of tables filled with Year 12 kids doing research projects, elderly men reading the daily papers in armchairs, a photocopy machine, a portable noticeboard displaying breast cancer posters.
She reached the computers in time to see Pike's screen go blank as Tankard grabbed-too late-at Pike's mouse hand. Pike, expressing indignation, began to shout, 'Leave us alone, I'm being stalked, okay? I'm just doing research on stalking, okay?'
'Still on about that, Brad?' Pam said, cocking her head and looking at his emaciated face, sunken chest and unwashed hair worn mullet style. God knew what Lisa Tully had ever seen in him.
Just then a librarian stopped them. 'Excuse me, you're wanted on the telephone,' she said, eyeing Pike with mingled apprehension and glee.
Pam took the call. It was Sergeant Destry, saying drop everything, CIB wanted her and Tank to help with a search of Ian Munro's farm. 'I'll see you at the station in five minutes for a briefing.'
'Yes, Sarge,' Pam said.
'Your lucky day, Bradley,' she told Pike as they left.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It was nerve-wracking, sure, but somehow liberating at the same time. The old Meddler would have made an anonymous call, tipping off the police to see justice done, but receiving none of the glory and certainly not profiting in any way.
Like cash in hand.
Stung by the 'wanker with the ferret' article, Mostyn Pearce was shaking off the old Meddler. No more lurking in the bushes or selflessly standing by. The meek shall inherit the earth? Fuck that for a joke. The strong shall inherit the earth. The strong take action. The strong take.
So, before going to work that afternoon, Pearce grabbed his shotgun, fully licensed, no problems with the paperwork given that he worked in law enforcement, and knocked on the guy's front door.
The guy opened the door and saw the shotgun and the Meddler saw a flicker in the guy's eyes, no mistake. Fear? Acknowledgement that the Meddler wasn't to be trifled with? Resignation? All of the above.
Anyway, he had the guy's immediate attention, and said, without preamble: 'I know who you really are.'
The guy said nothing.
'Your real name is Michael Trigg.' No reaction.
'I was thinking a one-off payment of a hundred grand,' the Meddler said. Nothing. Then: 'You'd better come in,' the guy said.
After his run-in with the cops in the library, Bradley Pike walked back up High Street via Coolart Computers. Last week they'd had a second-hand trade-in there. Five hundred bucks got you a PC with a monitor, internal modem, sound card, speakers, keyboard, a couple of gigs on the hard drive, Windows 95 already installed. Surf the Web in the privacy of your own home.
Better than some easily shocked sheila peering over your shoulder in the library and dobbing you in to the cops.
Except he didn't have five hundred bucks. Went via the shop anyway and discovered they'd sold the trade-in and didn't have another.
'But keep dropping in,' they told him.
Or the young guy serving said it. He didn't know Brad Pike from a bar of soap. But the manager of the shop recognised Pike, and Pike could tell from the dirty look that he, like the rest of the good citizens of Waterloo, thought that Bradley Pike was guilty of murdering Lisa Tully's little girl.
So on the way out of the shop, Pike made a point of getting in the manager's face and saying, 'Charges were dropped, okay?'
Without batting an eyelid the manager replied, 'That's not the same as being found not guilty, though, is it?'
That hurt Pike and he continued up High Street punching his fist into his palm.
And saw Dwayne Venn and the Tully sisters on the other side of the street. His first thought was to run and hide. But then he realised that would look bad. He had to tough it out like he'd toughed out the past few months in this town, all the whispers and slights and bad-mouthing he'd had to endure.
Besides, if he ran now it would look suspicious. It was he who'd tipped off that female cop, Murphy, about Venn and the lovers' lane rapes. Venn had been doped to the eyeballs around at the Tully sisters' house, bragging about this sheila he'd done over in the Stony Point carpark one night and flashing this matchbox full of pubic hair. Genuine blonde, too.