‘Remember me, Sofia?’
She watched him. There was no humour or animation in her face. ‘Your little girl is happier.’
‘That’s because the crиche is closed from now until the end of January. My wife-’
‘She needs time to adjust.’
Sutton supposed that Sofia meant his daughter, not his wife, and wondered if she were being clairvoyant now or simply expressing an obvious truth.
‘Two things, Sofia. Number one. You came to us saying you knew where Jane Gideon was. Have you thought any more about that? Was this a feeling you had, did someone tell you where she was, did you actually see her? I might have been a bit offhand the other day,’ he concluded hastily.
‘Not offhand. Disbelieving. You disbelieved me.’
‘Well, it’s not every day-’
‘You found her near water, didn’t you, just as I said you would.’
‘Perhaps your brothers-’
‘They don’t know anything.’
‘Fine. So you felt that Jane Gideon was dead, is that what you’re saying? You had no direct knowledge?’
‘If you want to put it that way. What’s the second matter you want to talk about?’
Sutton looked at the dog. It had fallen asleep with its jaw on the backpack. ‘Sofia, in your role as clairvoyant-’
‘Seer.’
‘-seer, do you sometimes bless people? Their homes or their possessions, I mean. Tell them their worldly goods will multiply, that kind of thing?’
Sofia seemed to draw upon her reserves of dignity. ‘I’m not a magician. I don’t conjure up things that aren’t there to begin with.’
‘Fine, fine.’
‘There are charlatans who say they can do these things.’
‘You wouldn’t know of any of them? Where I can find them?’
At that point, a small brown snake began to cross the space between the rotting nylon chairs and the caravan. Neither Sutton nor Sofia said anything, but Sofia gently stepped over to the child in the second chair and lifted her free of it. The snake glided, unconcerned, beneath the caravan.
‘You learn to live with them,’ Sofia said.
There was a special article about him in the main Saturday paper. It said he’d ‘snatched’ both women. What a laugh; they both got willingly into the passenger seat. Number three, now, she was snatched, good and proper.
He hadn’t been prowling when he saw her the first time. It had been dawn, first light, and he’d been on his way to work. He saw her jogging, slim legs pounding, elbows pumping, shoulderblades flexing beneath the narrow straps of a singlet top. Sweatband to hold her hair back. His headlights in the uncertain dawn picking up the reflective strips on the heels of her running shoes. The air was cool. It would be hot later, and she probably had a job to go to, so that’s why she was running at dawn. He veered wide around her, went on down the Old Peninsula Highway, thinking it through.
That had been several days ago. Each morning after that, the pattern had been repeated.
This morning he’d left half an hour earlier, pulled over on to the dirt at the side of the road, raised the passenger-side rear wheel with a quick-release hydraulic jack, removed the hubcap and one wheel nut, and waited.
When she came upon him he was walking around in small circles at the back wheel, bent over, his hands clasped behind his back. Her feet pounded, coming closer, and began to falter.
‘Lost something?’
He looked up at her with relief, flashing a smile. ‘Blasted wheel nut. The light’s not good enough and I haven’t got a torch.’
Half-bent, he continued to search near the jack. She joined him. In these conditions-dawn, air quite still-he’d have plenty of warning if another vehicle were coming. He and number three walked around like that for a short time, then, when she widened the search to take in the area near the exhaust pipe, and crouched to peer beneath the rear axle, he took her.
Now, that was a snatch.
Ten
Bye-bye, Sprog,’ Scobie Sutton said.
‘Not Sprog. Roslyn. Ros… lyn.’
‘Roslyn.’
Her little arms shot up, there at the back door. ‘Daddy, you hold me.’
‘I have to go to work now, sweetie.’
‘You take me? Please?’
‘Maybe another day.’
‘Scobie, love, you’ll give her false hope.’
It was often like this. You really had to think hard before you said or did anything around a three-year-old, for if they got the wrong message about something, a lot of the groundwork could go out the window.
He said, ‘Kiss Daddy goodbye. We’ll have a barbecue tonight, how would that be?’
‘Shotchidge?’
‘Shotchidge on bread with lots of sauce.’
‘Two shotchidge?’
‘As many as you like.’
Through the kisses goodbye, he heard his wife say, ‘I’m so lucky, I can’t believe it.’
‘I’ll try to get home early.’
‘It is Christmas Eve, my love.’
Pam Murphy went surfing early that morning, hoping to stumble upon Ginger with a class, but he wasn’t there. Sunday, Christmas Eve, she should have expected it. The day stretched ahead of her. She rang her parents.
Ninety minutes later she was getting off the Melbourne train and on to the Kew tram. Her parents lived in a turn-of-the-century house set in an overgrown garden on a hill overlooking Studley Park. Visiting them was something she did from time to time, not only because they were her parents, and getting on in years, but because, just once, she’d like them to express approval of the life she’d made for herself.
And today she wanted to put Tankard, Kellock and McQuarrie out of her mind, and give her parents their Christmas presents, and get some presents from them, and generally put her police life out of her mind for a few hours before she had to report for duty again at 4 p.m..
The house was in bad shape, rotting window frames, peeling paint and wallpaper, salt damp in the walls, leaking roof, even if it did sit on half an acre of prime real estate.
She had her own key.
‘That you, dear?’
Who else? Pam thought. ‘Me, mum.’
Kerlunk, kerlunk, and then a scrape as her mother’s walking frame manoeuvred through the sitting-room door, and more kerlunking as the old woman made her way along the hallway. It was dark inside the house, despite the dazzling sun outside. It beat against the heavy front door and barely lit up the stained glass.
Pam kissed her mother. ‘How’s Dad?’
A considering frown: ‘Let’s say he’s had a so-so day.’
‘Typing?’
‘Yes.’
Pam rubbed the palms of her hands together, gearing up for the long walk past her mother and down the dim, dampish hallway to the back room, where her father lived now, surrounded by his books. Dr Murphy didn’t seem to sleep. He spent all of his time propped up by pillows, a portable typewriter on his lap.
Pam hesitated. ‘How’s it going?’
‘We spent the morning squabbling about the use of a hyphen,’ her mother replied. ‘He insisted that it should be oil hyphen painting, I said that once upon a time it would have been, but that two single words was acceptable nowadays.’
There were three PhDs in the family. Pam’s father, and both of her brothers, who were several years older than her. The brothers were teaching at universities in the United States and were never coming back. That left Pam, who’d still been a child, an afterthought, when her brothers left home to live in university colleges. Some of the family’s intellectual sparkle seemed to go with them, and Pam grew up in the belief that her own development hadn’t mattered as much to her parents, that the family’s brains hadn’t been passed on to her. And so she made it clear that she was happy to swim and cycle and play tennis and go cross-country skiing. Solitary sports, mostly. But she made an interesting discovery: these sports taught her to think well, for they encouraged problem solving, solitude and reflection, so that she no longer believed that she wasn’t clever. When she graduated from the Police Academy, she was ranked third in her class.