She looked up to see that McQuarrie was watching her, waiting for her to pay attention. ‘First, I want to say that I think you’re doing a fine job under difficult circumstances. For that reason, I will arrange for extra detectives to be assigned to the case from Rosebud and Mornington. Sergeant Destry, you will continue to be in charge on the ground, answerable to Inspector Challis.’
She gave him a tight little smile. He washed his palms together. ‘Now, clearly this is the work of one man. Our priorities are to find him before he kills again. Equally, we need to provide a safe environment here on the Peninsula. We also need to find the vehicle used to dump Jane Gideon’s body. Finally, we need to think about the mindset of the person behind these killings.’
Mindset, Ellen thought. God.
‘Similarities between the victims,’ McQuarrie went on. ‘Differences. Did they know one another.’
Now he’s telling us how to do our job, Ellen thought.
‘Kymbly Abbott, Jane Gideon,’ McQuarrie went on. He shook his head and laughed, and it was a laugh that went wrong, even as he uttered it and said, ‘Kymbly. Where do these people get their names from?’
No-one shared the laughter. He was speaking ill of the dead. Meanwhile Ellen Destry felt herself blush, for she’d named her daughter Larrayne, not Lorraine, so what did that say about her? McQuarrie was a prick.
It was with relief that she went to her car at the end of the day and was able to snatch a moment with Rhys Hartnett. She wasn’t sure, but there was something there, in the way he looked at her. ‘Are we still on for twelve o’clock Saturday?’
‘I’ll be there.’
‘If you like, stay on and have some lunch with us,’ she said.
Challis worked until six-thirty that evening. As he was leaving the station, the prison called. Apparently his wife had tried to saw across her wrists with a plastic knife and had written a note that said, ‘Forgive me.’ They’d assumed that the note was for him. Maybe it was. Challis had long forgiven her, he was past making judgments about her, and had even told himself that she wasn’t his responsibility any more, but it was always him they called whenever she went off the rails. The call depressed him. He slumped back in his chair and stared at the wall maps.
Then the front desk buzzed him. ‘Tessa Kane to see you, sir.’
He put his hand to his forehead briefly. ‘Show her up.’
He stepped into the corridor and waited. He was alone on the first floor. When Tessa appeared with a young constable, he sent the constable back downstairs. Tessa’s eyes were bright and searching. She was pleased with herself, but also gauging what he thought of her now. ‘Hal, don’t be mad at me.’
‘I thought you agreed you wouldn’t publish.’
‘No, I said I’d consider not publishing. Your finding Jane Gideon made it imperative, Hal. This was a scoop. It meant a lot to me, and I think it was in the public interest.’
‘I’ve never heard a more cynical-’
‘Hal,’ she said, and reached up and kissed him. He closed his eyes.
In her low voice, she said, ‘I’ve been wanting to do that for ages.’
He was surprised to find that his anger was gone, and made a sound in his throat that might have been assent and pleasure.
‘Hal, would you have dinner with me tonight?’
Challis thought about it. He felt better about Tessa Kane, but doubted that he had energy and selflessness enough to be pleasant company for her. All he wanted to do was drive to the aerodrome and work on the Dragon.
‘Not tonight. Tomorrow?’
‘Fine.’
‘Somewhere out of the public eye,’ he said.
‘That’s easy.’
When he let himself into the hangar, twenty minutes later, he saw that Kitty had left the new issue of Vintage Aircraft on his tailplane, open at the centre spread. It showed a restored Dragon at Bankstown airport, full colour, the red and silver livery of an airline that had folded in 1936. Challis didn’t think he’d ever seen a more beautiful aeroplane. The rounded nose reminded him of a tentative, questing snake, but in all other respects the Dragon Rapide was nothing like a snake. An insect? It suggested delicacy, restraint, grace, and the atmosphere of England-to-Australia races and records as the world came out of the 1930s Great Depression, before it all went wrong again.
He turned the pages to the ‘Help Wanted’ column. His letter was there. Somewhere in the world there might be a man or a woman who knew a little of the history of his aeroplane.
Kees van Alphen sat in the window of Pizza Hut. They were used to him in there; he often ate there. He saw Tessa Kane leave the station. At seven-fifteen, Challis’s car pulled out of the station car park. Van Alphen waited for the 8 p.m. shift to get under way before he walked back across the road and into the station.
Thursday night, a bit of action in town, what with people spending their pay cheques and gearing up for Christmas and the summer break. But quiet in the station itself. Van Alphen prowled about the building, opening and closing doors, chatting to the young constable on the front desk, the probationers in the tearoom, a couple of other sergeants writing up reports. In effect, he was mentally mapping the station, placing everyone, anticipating where they might accidentally wander. When he was satisfied, he walked into the office of Senior Sergeant Kellock-he who said his door was always open-and located the key to the evidence safe.
The drugs were on the top shelf, just a handful of small plastic sealables of coke and hashish, some pill bottles of ecstasy, some amphetamines from a garden-shed laboratory in a twist of paper. Van Alphen substituted two of the cocaine baggies for baggies of castor sugar, double checked the paperwork-they’d not be needed in trial for another six weeks yet-and left the office, locking the safe behind him.
‘I’ll be out for a couple of hours,’ he told the constable on the front desk.
‘Okay, Sarge.’
‘Our pyromaniacs might decide on return visits.’
‘Good one, boss.’
The constable seemed to be assessing him.
‘What are you looking at, Sunshine?’
‘Sorry, nothing, Sarge. I mean, you’re not on night shift tonight.’
‘Things hot up before Christmas, you know that. Plus we got members down with a stomach bug. I like to keep on top of things. It’s what makes a cop, that little bit extra.’
‘Yes, Sarge.’
‘All right then.’
Van Alphen took an unmarked Commodore from the car pool and drove to Clara’s house with the radio dispatcher’s voice scratching in the darkness and all of his heartaches on his mind. Fucking Tessa Kane and her editorials. What was she doing at the station? Trying to get more dirt?
Three strikes and you’re out. He’d been warned for over-enthusiastic policing in his previous two districts, and now it was happening again. No-one understood that you had to start hard and carry through on it, or the scumbags won. But the top brass were hypersensitive to the image the press gave the force, and the civil libertarians were always making a noise about police brutality. Fuck them. He knew his methods got results. He’d had the highest arrest record in each of his districts, which proved that crime was always there, under the surface, and had been allowed to tick over unchecked.
It was a pity the women in his life hadn’t been able to hack it. His wife and daughter had walked out, finally, saying they couldn’t stand the stares, the whispers, the aggravation. He felt sorry they’d had to suffer, but the fact that they hadn’t stuck by him left a sour taste in his mouth.
Then Clara wrapped herself around him like a cat, and his cares flew out of the window.
Eight
Challis rose at six on Friday morning and, dressed in trousers, shirt and tie, sat on the decking at the rear of his house to watch the lightening sky and the swallows as they caught mosquitoes and other insects on the wing. The garden, such as it was, showed signs of cracked soiclass="underline" even the weeds were dying. We were lucky to get that tyre track, he thought. The rest of the Peninsula is bone dry. But the tyre was all they had. No semen traces, for the killer had used a condom. No prints, for he’d worn gloves. What he’d left on his victims were absences, including the absence of life.