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‘Boyfriends?’

‘Not really. She went out a couple of times with a kid from Shore. Bit of a wimp. Didn’t know a thing. Wouldn’t have been one of the bunch with an income under a hundred thousand.’

I grunted. ‘You checked the usual?’

‘All negative: horses, drugs, booze, religion-all negative.’

‘What did she take?’

‘Clothes, records, video cassettes.’

‘Diary?’

There was a silence at the other end, then she spoke slowly. ‘No mention of any diary, no.’

‘What did you make of the parents?’

‘Rock solid. The stepfather’s a partner in an ad agency, doing well. The mother…’

‘Fills in her time.’

‘That’s right. Sailing, aerobic dancing, bit of gardening, reads a lot. Looks after herself.’

‘Thanks. Did she have a bank account, Portia I mean. Christ, what a name!’

Detective Constable Burns laughed. ‘Yeah, she hated the name. Called herself Ann. She had a passbook savings account with a couple of hundred bucks in it-didn’t even take the book. It’s a tough one, and you know the toughest part?’

‘Tell me.’

‘She made it in one jump. Usually they have a dry run or two and you can get a line on what’s bugging them and what they’re likely to do. Not Portia. She wouldn’t have spent ten nights away from home in the last ten years, the way they tell it.’

‘ Over-protected?’

‘Could be.’

I thanked her and put the phone down. What she’d told me jelled pretty well with what I knew from the missing persons cases I’d handled over the past fourteen years. Not many of them had been juveniles, but the principles were the same. A high proportion of the runaways just wanted to get attention-the run was a call for help; some had reached a temporary impasse in their lives and used the run to break the log-jam and get some movement going from which they could draw comfort or a course of action. A few go for good; they go a long way off, burrow and pull the hole in over them. A few meet with foul play and it worried me that no one had made any mention of that so far.

I read over a selection of cases including the handful of juveniles, made some notes and put through some calls to get a picture of the Stevensons. Jeff Stevenson was a partner in Armstrong amp; Stevenson, which was a biggish advertising agency with an office in North Sydney. His credit rating was tops, and his firm had good accounts with brewers and distillers and other pillars of our social life like a Japanese car manufacturer and a Taiwan-based toy importer.

It was mid-winter, which meant that Sydney turned on fine, bright days, ideal for tennis-playing in the morning and afternoon, but cold and dark by 5 p.m. In the mid-afternoon I drove out to Castlecrag to take a look at the school. The suburb’s roads have military names like The Ramparts and The Bastion and the area has a defensive, fortressed look. The wealth and property behind the high walls and beyond the deep, verdant gardens would be worth defending.

The school looked like a stately home, somewhat on the large side. It boasted a high wall and massive gate house; the main building was a rambling, pseudo-Georgian affair with enough ivy on it to camouflage Ayers Rock. Playing fields stretched away and flagstoned paths wound between tennis courts, garden beds and an artificial pond.

I took this in from my car which I stopped on the other side of the road from the huge iron gates, and from a stroll along the west perimeter. As I watched, the place came to life. Schoolgirls suddenly spilled out of the main building from a couple of doors and started straggling along the paths-some towards the main gate and others off to two new buildings in the far distance which I took to be dormitories. I wondered if things had changed in the dorm since Anne Of Green Gables, a book of my sister’s which I’d read with guilt and longing.

Even a brief loiter outside a girls’ school is difficult to explain, so I moved the car a hundred yards to where I could observe a few of the novitiate socialites heading for the bus stop. They ranged in age from about twelve to seventeen; they wore a uniform-dark-blue tunic with white trimming and a hat-but most had managed to contrive some individuality through the cut of the clothes and the accessories. Some were trying for a Boy George look, others opted for Princess Diana. They fell over each other, screamed, punched and lounged at the bus stop as if their parents weren’t paying two thousand bucks a term.

I drove a half-circuit of the school grounds and spotted the stables which had been mentioned in a booklet called Selecting Schools in NSW which I’d picked up in a newsagent. The establishment boasted a gymnasium, swimming pool, computer room, archery range, putting green, film and video studios and a theatrette. Social contacts with the leaders of tomorrow at the brother school were encouraged: unless she was on heroin or heavily into S amp;M, it didn’t sound like such a bad place for a seventeen-year-old girl to be.

The light was failing; I needed petrol, a drink, some food and coffee and time to prepare myself to meet the Stevensons on their home ground. It was partly a matter of steeling myself for the flock of photographs, tattered toys and possible tears, and partly of repressing prejudice-rich ad men of Cammeray are not birds of my feather.

I drove to a pub in Mosman which I remembered for its roast beef sandwiches, house claret and quiet clientele. I was dressed for the weather and the company in woollen shirt, leather jacket, cords and not-so-old Italian shoes. Very Mosman. The pub had changed; it was crowded with under-age drinkers forking out for double bourbons and coke and puffing their way through packets of 30s. The sandwiches had given way to a junk food bar, and a glass of wine cost a dollar fifty. I had one with a packet of chips and let the music batter me senseless. I wondered if any of the girls spent their days behind the high walls and what went on under the wigs and dyed hair. A young woman done up like a gypsy in a variety of colours and fabrics with a fringed skirt that brushed the floor in places, bumped me and spilled her drink.

‘Ooh, sorry,’ she said.

‘Your drink, not mine. Let me get you another one.’

Her black-rimmed eyes opened wide. ‘Why?’

‘Ask you a question in return. What’re you having?’

‘Brandy’n coke. Ta.’

She stood with her back to a wall and waited while I got the drink. I handed it to her and took a good look at her olive-skinned face: it was unlined and fresh despite the goo around her eyes and on her mouth. She had strong, white teeth and three studs in the lobe of each ear. She thanked me again and took a sip.

‘What’s the question, then?’

‘What matters most in the world to you?’

She laughed. ‘Thought you were gonna ask m’age. Let’s see, now.’ She looked around the jam-packed room where bodies moved fractionally and the noise was like an endless, deafening echo. ‘That’s pretty easy, really. The most important thing in the world to me is to have a bloody, bloody, bloody good time. Bye.’

‘Good luck.’

The Stevensons’ house backed onto the water of Long Bay and was designed to take advantage of that fact. It seemed to have very little purchase on the land at all, but to be straining off the cliff face towards the water. It was the last house in row of similarly poised structures. I parked where the narrow, winding street wound least, and walked back towards the house. Even at the front gate I could hear water slapping at boats and the creaking of ropes. A short path took me through a determinedly native garden to the wide verandah that ran along the front of the house. I knocked at the door at 8.30 precisely and Jessie Stevenson answered it as if she’d been standing inside with her hand on the knob.

‘Cliff, thank you for coming.’

I nodded and followed her down a passage to a sun room where the back of the house swooped out over the water. A tall, heavily built man lumbered up off a cane lounge as Jessie waved me through.