Larrayne had lost weight in the past year. She'd been plump and awkwardly shaped before, as though her torso and arms had lengthened but not her legs or neck. Now she was perfectly proportioned: tall, willowy and, when the puffiness and skin blemishes faded from her cheeks in the next year or so, likely to be a stunner. Larrayne raised her damp, blotchy face. 'Someone brought vodka and ecstasy, Mum,' she said, baffled and offended.
Ellen folded her daughter close against her and glanced inquiringly at her husband.
He took offence. 'Lay off. Don't blame me. What was I supposed to do? I'm just one person, not a squad of security guards.'
A straggle of teenagers edged past them in the hallway, eyeing them apprehensively, all of the cheer gone out of their goodbyes. Then the Destrys were alone in the house, the front door sealing them from the night, the last car accelerating through the slumbering streets.
'I'm really sorry,' Ellen said. 'I tried to get home early but we were on a stakeout and made an arrest and it all took a while.'
She lifted a hand from her daughter's shoulderblades and reached for her husband's arm. 'Alan, sweetheart…'
Some of the tension left him. He wore jeans and a T-shirt and looked deeply fatigued, rubbing both hands along his bulky jaw. 'One of the kids must have chucked booze and pills over the back fence. It took me a while to realise that half of the kids were stoned and others were coming and going from the back yard all night.' He laughed bitterly. 'I thought they were after fresh air.'
'Do we know who it was?'
Larrayne disengaged herself from Ellen and shook her head miserably. 'I told everyone no alcohol or drugs. Everyone knows you're both in the police. How could they do this to me?'
'We'd better search the yard,' Ellen said.
If she could find the remains of the stash, maybe she could get some useful prints and track them back to the supplier. It was the supplier she wanted, not the kid. If she arrested the kid, then her daughter's name would be mud. Fetching a torch from the wall hook beside the back door, she stepped out onto the deck that overlooked the yard, and began to poke the torchlight into the shadows beneath her.
Plenty of bottles and cans. Someone's windcheater. Crumpled cigarette packets.
And, half concealed by shrubbery, a pair of slender legs in jeans and trainers.
Beside her Alan said, 'God almighty,' and clattered down the steps then across the blighted lawn.
Ellen followed. Behind her Larrayne wailed, 'That's Skip.'
Skip Lister. Larrayne had brought him home for a meal a couple of times. A slender, edgy but pleasant kid, anxious to please without being fawning, a student at the Frankston campus of Monash University, drove an old Holden fitted with surfboard racks. He lived in an exclusive part of the Peninsula, just off Five Furlong Road in Upper Penzance. Ellen glanced up into the night, past the dark mass that was sloping farmland on the outskirts of Penzance Beach, to Upper Penzance, as if she might see the lights of the Lister house.
Too late, too dark, too far away.
Larrayne pushed past her, knelt beside Alan and reached her hand to Skip's face, then recoiled as vomit spurted over her hand.
'Yuck,' she said. 'Gross.'
'Roll him onto his side,' Ellen said calmly.
Her husband snapped, 'I know, I know, I work Traffic, remember? I know what to do.'
He rolled the boy over, cleared the vomit from the slack mouth, and checked for breathing.
Skip would have choked to death on his own vomit if we hadn't found him, Ellen thought.
Suddenly she was furious. She wouldn't mind betting that Skip Lister's parents had no idea where their son was or what he was up to. The police saw it all the time and were usually the ones to pick up the pieces: brawls, convenience-store hold-ups, cars wrapped around trees resulting in injury and death.
The parents never knew. Most were shocked to find out what their kids had been doing. Some didn't give a damn.
Stewing, Ellen went inside, looked up the number for Carl Lister in Upper Penzance and dialled. It was one-thirty in the morning but the phone was snatched up at the first ring. 'Yo.'
Yo yourself, Ellen thought. 'Mr Lister?'
The tone changed, as though this wasn't the call that Carl Lister had been expecting. 'Yep.'
'Ellen Destry speaking.'
Silence, then, 'Sorry, do I know you?'
A hint of an accent in Lister's voice. South African, that was it. 'Your son attended my daughter's birthday party tonight.'
'Uh-huh.'
'Well, he's lying in our back yard in a pool of vomit.'
A suggestion of matey laughter. 'Little bugger.'
Ellen clenched her jaw. 'Mr Lister? I said, your son's lying here-'
'Look, give him a coffee, put him in his car, send him home. I'll sort him out when he gets here.'
'I can't do that. He's been drinking.'
'Well, obviously, it was a party, wasn't it?'
'Mr Lister, he could crash his car and kill himself. Worse, he could kill or injure someone else.'
Irritation showed in Carl Lister's voice. 'I don't know what I'm supposed to do about it.'
'You're his father, aren't you?'
'He's old enough to look after himself. Old enough to clean up after himself.'
'He's barely nineteen.'
'So? When I was eighteen I-'
'Mr Lister, please come and collect your son.'
'Can't he sleep it off there? Drive himself home in the morning?'
'I don't run a hotel.'
'Christ, look, it's not convenient right now.'
Ellen went icy. She disliked playing the cop card, but sometimes it was necessary and it usually got results.
'I know what we can do,' she said. 'I'll ring the Waterloo police station and say to the duty officer, "It's Detective Sergeant Destry speaking. Send a van to my house, I've got a prisoner for the station lockup".'
In the silence that followed, she said, 'How would that do, Mr Lister? You can drive to the station in the morning and fetch your son. That way only a couple of constables-who would be on patrol duty anyway-will be inconvenienced.'
Carl Lister snarled, 'Give us your address. I'll leave right away.'
Ellen smiled and there was no warmth in it.
CHAPTER SIX
Mid-afternoon on Easter Sunday. Mostyn Pearce fed Blur, his ferret, then went for a walk. He walked for an hour a day obsessively, counting cars, counting gates and potholes, and his walk always took in Five Furlong Road. You had Ian Munro's paddocks on the left, sloping down to Penzance Beach, and higher up on the right, along a ridge that commanded million-dollar views of the sea, you had Upper Penzance, an enclave of twenty or thirty houses on two- and three-acre blocks, ranging in price from $400 000 to $750 000. Trucked-in palm trees and other exotics, dirt roads, a general sense of shutting out the rat race.
Shutting out Mostyn Pearce in his dingy new housing-estate bungalow at the bottom of the hill, in other words.
What irritated Pearce-and he'd written to the editor of the Progress about it-was the air of privilege, like there were rules for the residents of Upper Penzance and different rules for people like him. It was stupid. They resisted mains water, insisting that every householder use tank water. They didn't want made roads, only leafy dirt lanes. They even kept taking down the roadsign to discourage daytrippers.
As Pearce had pointed out in one of his letters to the Progress: 'What if there's a house or bushfire in Upper Penzance? The access roads are choked with trees, the tracks are potholed, there's very little available water, let alone water pressure'.
The editor had printed that one. She didn't take everything he sent her, like his defence of the detention centre and the need to isolate the queue jumpers, but given that he sent her several letters a week and the newspaper came out only once a week, there was always something for her to use. She'd started calling him the Meddler about six months ago. At first he'd been offended-it sounded derisive-but now he liked it. And after every Meddler column there was always plenty of supportive mail for her letters-to-the-editor column.