His mood didn’t improve when he opened his mailbox to fetch the Age and discovered that someone had tried to burn it down during the night.
The exterior was intact, the interior charred but serviceable. The S-bend chain-link support was blackened. Challis wiped his fingers and stood regarding the box gloomily. He lived well back from the road, but still, he was a light sleeper, so it was a wonder he hadn’t heard anything. Enough had happened to him in his life to make him alert to the sound of a vehicle at night.
A voice called, ‘I see they got you as well.’
It was his neighbour. He’s been waiting for me, Challis thought. ‘You too?’
‘Mine’s a milk can,’ the neighbour said, ‘but the bastards chucked a burning rag in it just the same. Mrs Gibbs, around the corner? She found her box in pieces out on the main road.’
‘I’ll have a word with the local station,’ Challis said. ‘See if they can send a patrol around for the next few nights.’
‘Appreciated,’ the neighbour said, wandering away.
Challis read the Age over toast and coffee. Wednesday, 20 December. A banner across the top of the front page read: ‘Five shopping days until Christmas.’ News papers don’t exist any more, he thought. They’ve been replaced by lifestyle papers.
He locked the house and eased the Triumph over the ruts outside his driveway. He wasn’t looking forward to Christmas. The world assumed that Christmas Day must be lonely for him, and so set about ensuring that it wouldn’t be. Drinks at Ellen Destry’s house in the morning. Lunch with his parents and siblings. Then at six in the evening, when lunch was barely digested, an early dinner with Angela’s parents. There were those in his family who couldn’t understand why he’d want to see his parents-in-law, couldn’t understand when he explained that he liked them, and they liked him. You’re surely not intending…? No, Challis wasn’t intending to resume his life with Angela when and if she was ever released. Then why haven’t you divorced her? I’ll get around to it, he told them.
He drove on. Christmas Day. With any luck, someone would find a body and free him from Christmas Day.
Challis was on the road that linked with the Old Highway when he saw them, two teenage boys carrying fishing rods, buckets, a net and tackle boxes. His neighbour’s trout-dam poachers? But the trout dam was in the opposite direction. Maybe they were after the fish in someone else’s dam or lake or creek. They looked guilty, whatever their purpose, keeping close under the roadside gums and pines, keeping their faces averted as he went by. Challis mentally flicked his fingers. Saltmarsh, that was their name. They were cousins.
He reached Waterloo at eight-fifteen. The town looked dewy and clean. He parked the Triumph at the rear of the station and climbed the stairs to the incident room.
At ten o’clock an elderly couple entered the station and said, ‘Constable Murphy told us to come in.’
‘Did she indeed.’
‘She came by last night. She calls on us every week.’
The desk sergeant nodded. The station had a register of elderly citizens, old single men and women, and married couples, who were checked on from time to time by the uniformed constables.
‘And why did Constable Murphy tell you to come into the station?’
‘We’ve been robbed.’
When the desk sergeant had the details he took them through to an interview room to make a statement. ‘It’s CIB’s case now,’ he said. ‘Someone will be with you shortly.’
The man who came in a few minutes later was tall and gangly, with protuberant eyes and long, bony hands. ‘I’m Detective Constable Scobie Sutton. A woman robbed you? Can you describe her?’
The husband, his white hair badly combed, stains on his cardigan, said, ‘She was New Australian.’
His wife was sharper. ‘You great galoot.’ She leaned toward Sutton. ‘He means she looked a bit exotic. Darkish skin, wearing bright clothes, lots of gold-rings, earrings, bracelets, neck chains. But she wasn’t foreign. She was Australian, judging by her accent.’
‘How old, would you say?’
‘Hard to tell. Forty-odd?’
‘You said she came in and offered to bless your house.’
The old woman said, ‘Ask him, ask the genius. He let her in. I was in the garden.’
Sutton turned to the old man, who said, ‘I couldn’t see the harm. She said it would bring financial reward. It’s not easy, being on a pension.’
‘Mad. Cracked in the head,’ his wife said.
‘This woman told me,’ the old man continued stubbornly, ‘that whatever she blessed would multiply to our advantage. She said the house was cursed. She could see black smoke coming off it, and it needed cleansing.’
‘Did she ask you for payment?’
‘A donation. I gave her a dollar.’
‘You great galoot.’
‘A dollar,’ Sutton said. He looked incensed for a moment, as if he’d been asked to get a cat out of a tree. ‘And then what happened?’
‘The phone rang. I was at the front door, but the phone’s down the passage, in the kitchen. I was only gone a minute.’
‘She was alone, this woman?’
‘Had a child with her. Couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. Cute little thing.’
Sutton nodded. The woman would engage the occupants- usually elderly men and women-while the child slipped away unnoticed to hunt out wallets, watches and jewellery. Or, while the occupants went to fetch the child something to eat or drink, the woman would rob them.
But this time the woman hadn’t needed to stage a distraction. The phone had done it for her. ‘And when you came back…?’
‘They were gone,’ the old man said. ‘I waited, but-’
‘Fool.’
‘-but they didn’t come back.’
‘What was taken?’
‘My purse,’ the old woman said. ‘I always leave it on the hallstand, along with my keys, gloves and hat. Forty dollars and some loose change, my Myer charge card, Medicare card, pension card, some other odds and ends.’
Sutton scribbled down the details. ‘Only the purse, or the keys as well?’
‘The keys as well.’
‘Better get your locks changed.’
‘Oh dear.’
The old man said, ‘Her eyes, that’s what I remember. She knew things. She looked right through you.’
Jane Gideon was almost forty-eight hours old, and still no body. The trail was growing cold. Challis re-read the file on Kymbly Abbott, talked to the VAA operator who had taken Jane Gideon’s emergency call, and began telephoning numbers from a rolodex that had been next to the telephone in Gideon’s flat.
One small piece of information: at eleven o’clock he took a call from a woman who claimed that she had seen Kymbly Abbott on the night of the twelfth.
‘Can you be sure of the date?’
‘My wedding anniversary. My husband and I were coming home from the city.’
‘Did he see her, too?’
A laugh. ‘He was asleep in the car. I was driving.’ Another laugh. ‘But I hadn’t been drinking. Or not much.’
Challis responded to the warmth in her voice. ‘Can you tell me what Miss Abbott was doing when you saw her?’
‘Poor thing, she was sitting in the kerb at the intersection, sticking out her thumb whenever a car went by.’
‘This is the intersection at the start of the highway?’
‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t see anyone stop for her? No vehicle that stood out in any way?’
‘I’m afraid not, no.’ The woman paused. There was anguish in her voice. ‘I wish I’d stopped for her, seen that she was all right, but I live only a block from the intersection, and last month a pack of young girls her age mugged me at an automatic teller machine.’
‘I understand,’ Challis said. ‘You’re sure it was her?’
‘I saw her quite clearly, and the clothes she was wearing match the description in the paper.’
‘Is there a reason why you waited until now to contact us?’