Eleven
Challis woke at six on Christmas morning and desolation flooded him. He hadn’t expected to feel this way. He’d thought he was above all that. He remembered what he’d read somewhere-if you’re depressed, go for a long walk-and swung immediately out of bed and hunted for his Nike gardening shoes, a T-shirt and an old pair of shorts.
He walked for an hour. As the bad feeling lifted, he found himself listening to the birds. He could swear he was hearing bellbirds, the first in his five years on the Peninsula. The world was still and silent, and he was alone and light-footed in it, this morning. He took deep breaths. Yellow-breasted robins watched him and a thrush sang high in the canopy of branches above his head. There were creatures scratching in the bracken. Only a plastic shopping bag caught in a blackberry cane spoiled the morning for him-that, and the realisation that he’d been depressed but wasn’t now, yet might be again as the day developed.
At nine-thirty he left the house. Ellen Destry and her husband and daughter lived in a cedar house on stilts in an airless pocket between ti-trees and a small, humped hill at Penzance Beach. The house looked like-and had been, before the Destrys bought it-someone’s holiday house. And nothing- not even the new shrubs and herbs and fruit trees, or the fresh paint job and the hanging plants-would alter that. Three cars in the driveway, three out on the street. Challis groaned. He wasn’t ready for a crowd. He mostly preferred solitariness yet worked in an occupation that demanded permanent sociality.
Alan Destry came to the door. ‘Hal. Come in, come in, Merry Christmas.’
Ellen’s husband wore an air of grievance. He was a constable, attached to the Traffic Division in the Outer Eastern zone, married to a fast-tracking CIB detective. That’s how Ellen had explained it to Challis once, at the pub, when she wanted to stay and drink and not go home. ‘Merry Christmas yourself,’ Challis said, offering his hand.
At that moment a light plane passed overhead, following the shoreline. Distracted, Challis looked up. Twin-engined Cessna. He didn’t recognise it.
‘Some people have their feet on the ground,’ Alan Destry said.
It was a clumsy insult, delivered with a grin of Christmas cheer. Challis wanted to say that some people had all the luck, but let it go. People underestimated him, he knew that, and didn’t care. They thought that a policeman who liked to restore old aeroplanes and had a wife who’d tried to have him shot was a man who would allow things to happen to him. A man destined to remain stuck where he was in the force, detective inspector, no higher.
He proffered a terracotta pot wrapped in green and red Christmas paper. There was a clump of lobelia spilling over the edges. ‘Good of you,’ Destry said, looking about for a flat surface and deciding on the verandah floor, beside the door.
They went through to the sitting room. The windows were open, admitting gusts of warm, dusty air. It was an oppressive room. No wonder Ellen intended to have air-conditioning installed. She wasn’t in the room. Nor was Scobie Sutton. But the other CIB officers were, and a couple of Alan Destry’s colleagues, together with spouses and children. The Destrys’ daughter, Larrayne, scowled in a corner, trying to ward off the imploring fingers of a small boy.
‘Ellen not here?’
‘Ah, mate, a sudden death. A kid.’
Challis felt sick. To lose a child on Christmas Day.
He forced down a glass of beer and absently palmed toffee nuts into his mouth from a bowl on the television set. There were cards on the sideboard and on a loop of string across the far wall. Mistletoe. Parcels heaped at the foot of a tired, tinselly pine-tree branch that was shedding needles. As he watched, a bauble fell to the carpet. The small boy rushed to it, kicked it in his haste, and Challis saw it smash against the skirting board.
The Destrys’ daughter looked so miserable and put-upon that Challis crossed the room to her, greeting people as he went. Larrayne saw him coming. She stared fixedly at the floor, as if to hide or appear too negligible to be bothered with. She wore a short denim skirt, a Savage Garden T-shirt and sandals. She’d painted her nails. Her legs, knees together and inclined to one side, seemed too long for her slight frame. Wings of hair furled down about her young round face. She was fifteen but looked at once ten and twenty.
‘Hello, Larrayne.’
She was low in an uncomfortable chair and Challis towered above her. She was forced to stretch her neck to see his face, and that strangled her voice. ‘Hello.’ She said it quickly and looked away again.
Challis crouched beside her. ‘Merry Christmas.’
She muttered a reply, leaning her knees away from him.
‘It’s a pity your poor mum had to go out on a call.’
Larrayne shrugged, then said, ‘Me and Dad had to do everything, as per usual. She invites people over, then goes out, leaving us to do everything.’
Challis knee-creaked until he was standing again. He couldn’t be bothered with the Destrys’ daughter. He wandered across to the main window.
When Alan Destry came by with a bowl of nuts, Challis said, ‘Did Scobie go with Ellie?’
‘Yep.’
‘Do we know what happened?’
‘Cot death.’
A cot death. Challis wondered how secure he really was in life. His eyes pricked. He felt very alone again, and welcomed the despatcher’s call when it came.
Twelve
They were country people: decent, bewildered, fearing the worst. They’d been expecting Trina to arrive some time on Christmas Eve. It’s a long drive from Frankston to Shepparton, so, although they’d been worried when their daughter hadn’t arrived, they’d told themselves to expect her after they’d gone to bed, or Christmas morning at the latest, though they’d have been cross with her if she had left it that late. She’d always been a bit wilful and inconsiderate. Not malicious, mind you, just always went her own way. But when she hadn’t arrived by ten o’clock, they’d phoned. No answer. Then, remembering that two girls had been abducted and murdered, they’d phoned the police in Frankston, who sent a divisional van to their daughter’s address.
Trina Unger lived in a small, worn-looking home unit. The doors were locked, the blinds drawn. The police had broken in eventually, but the place was empty. Trina Unger’s bed was unmade. A half-packed weekender bag sat on the end of the bed. The other bedroom had been hastily tidied. There was a flatmate, according to the Ungers. They didn’t know where she was. At her parents’ for Christmas? — as Trina should have been.
Then at lunchtime Trina Unger’s car was found on a lonely stretch of the Old Peninsula Highway, just ten kilometres from Frankston. All of the windows had been smashed in.
Now it was three in the afternoon. The parents had arrived from Shepparton, and Challis and Sutton were interviewing them in their daughter’s sitting room. The walls were close and faintly grubby, the ceiling too low, and the overstuffed, mismatched op-shop armchairs crowded the small, tufted orange carpet. The place smelt damp, despite the heat of summer.
‘The second bedroom?’ Challis said.
‘That would be Den’s,’ Mrs Unger said. ‘Denise.’
‘Do you know where we can contact her?’
‘Afraid not.’
Challis nodded to Sutton, who stood and made for the bedroom. All of the detective constable’s movements were slow and automatic, his bony face drawn, his eyes ready to brim, as though he could not get the image of the cot-death baby out of his head.
Challis turned to the Ungers again. ‘We found your daughter’s car.’
Kurt Unger was sitting upright, his fists bunched neatly on his large knees. The words wouldn’t come clearly, so he coughed and tried again. ‘Yes.’
‘On the Old Peninsula Highway,’ Challis continued. ‘That’s in the opposite direction from Shepparton. And she’d started packing, but hadn’t finished. Have you any idea where she might have been going?’