He paused. ‘Since then, another letter has come.’
‘Any more on the vehicle, boss?’
It was one of the Rosebud detectives. So far there was no sign that Ellen Destry’s crew, or the reinforcements arranged by McQuarrie, were losing faith in him. ‘No. And once you ask yourself who on the Peninsula uses a four-wheel drive, you want to have a Bex and a good lie down.’
He started numbering his fingers. ‘First, any farmer, orchardist, winegrower or stock breeder. Then we have your ordinary suburban cowboy, who’s never taken his pride and joy off the sealed roads. After that, your average house painter, electrician and handyman.’ He stopped numbering. ‘Not to mention mobile mechanics, courier drivers, shire council workers, power-line inspectors, food transporters.’
He gazed at them. ‘The link we need could come by accident. We have to be alert, and read the daily crime reports. Maybe our man is known to us, or will become known to us, for a quite different offence. Maybe his vehicle’s been involved in something-Yes, Scobie?’
Scobie Sutton was half way out of his chair. ‘Boss, while we’re on that subject, I’ve got one possibility.’
‘Go on.’
‘On Saturday I went out to Tidal River to question a gypsy woman for theft. She was camped there with three blokes and at least one kid. Two camper homes, one caravan, a couple of Holden Jackaroos. The thing is, she came to the station last week more or less saying she’d had a vision of where we could find the body. Near water, she said. I thought she was a crank. Sorry, boss.’
Challis was angry but tried not to show it. ‘You’d better get out there straight away.’
‘Yes, boss.’
Kees van Alphen delivered a second freezer bag. ‘You’re really getting through this stuff, Clara. Hadn’t you better cut down a bit?’
He felt her arms go around his neck. ‘Gives me an appetite. Haven’t you noticed?’
‘I’ll say.’
‘Then what’s your problem?’
‘Supply, that’s my problem. Getting found out. Going to gaol. How’s that for starters?’
‘Then you’d better bust a few dealers, hadn’t you? Restock the evidence cupboard and deal direct.’
He’d thought of that. He could do it, but didn’t feel good about it.
Afterwards, on her patterned carpet, lit by the curtained window light, he traced her nipple and said, ‘I have to go.’
‘So soon?’
‘The neighbours are going to wonder why there’s always a police car in your driveway.’
‘Them? They scarcely know I exist.’
Scobie Sutton asked for two vans, a police car and two probationary constables. Pam found herself driving him. She’d had a call earlier to say that her mother had fallen, not badly, but enough to bruise her poor, ropey arm. Pam had been ironing her uniform when the call came, listening to a new CD, a compilation of ‘60s surfing songs: ‘Wipeout’, ‘Pipeline’, ‘Apache’, a couple of Beach Boys hits. Ginger had once told her you could hear, in the beat and the guitar of ‘60s surfing instrumentals, the shudder in the wall of a breaking wave, so she’d been listening hard, as she ironed her uniform shirt and longed for him.
Sutton broke in. ‘You know how my kid pronounces “quickly”? “Trickly.” To get her to go to the loo when she wakes in the morning we have to pretend her teddy needs a wee. So she rushes off to the loo on her little legs, saying, “Trickly, Blue Ted, trickly, hold it in, hold it in.”‘
His bony face was wreathed in smiles. ‘Huh,’ Pam said, trying to work up some good humour.
‘And vegemite sandwiches? She calls them sammymites.’
‘Cute.’
She sensed that Sutton had turned his protuberant eyes upon her, gauging her remark. After a while, he looked away again.
Five days until New Year’s Eve. She had time off, and thought about Ginger and the parties he was bound to be going to.
They entered the Tidal River caravan park, skirted the central reserve, and made their way to a dismal, unsheltered corner by the main road.
Sutton groaned. ‘They’ve legged it.’
Hard-baked, grassless earth, spotted with oil, but no sign of any gypsies. Pam watched Sutton get out of the Commodore and peer at the ground, as if searching for tyre tracks. He looked livid. Then he crossed to a rubbish bin and began hauling out food scraps, takeaway containers and bottles. At the bottom was what looked to Pam like a wad of black cloth. Then Sutton shook it out, and she saw straps and buckles, and realised that he was looking at a backpack. It was a mess. Sutton shoved it back into the bin.
Fourteen
On Wednesday 27 December, dark cloud masses rolled in from the west and banked up in huge thunderheads above the bay. By lunchtime an electrical storm had brewed. It lurked and muttered through the afternoon, approaching the Peninsula, building with gusting winds into a cloudburst at four o’clock. Challis, in the incident room at Waterloo, wondered how clogged his gutters were. He couldn’t afford to have rainwater overflowing the gutters before it reached the down-pipes that took it to his underground tank. Ellen Destry, also in the incident room, thought of her house, shut up all day in the heat. Would Larrayne have had the sense to open the windows? She glanced out across the car park to the courthouse. Rhys Hartnett, stripped to the waist, was snipping tin vents in the rain. His body glistened. He seemed to sense her there; straightening, lifting his streaming head to the rain, he shook the water from his thick hair. John Tankard, out in the divisional van, switched on the wipers and pulled in to the rear of the Fiddlers Creek Hotel, opened his window, snatched the sixpack of Crown Lager from the manager, and slipped away again, stopping by his flat on the way back to the station. Meanwhile the ground under Clara’s mailbox had turned to blackish mud. Kees van Alphen, exhausted in his bed at home, heard nothing of the storm. Four days had passed since Trina Unger’s abduction. Her body had not been found. Life went on.
On Thursday the Waterloo Progress came out in a small special edition. There was little advertising and only a handful of news items and a page of sports results. The front page was devoted to the second letter, under the banner: KILLER MOCKS POLICE. There was also a sidebar speculating that a four-wheel-drive vehicle had been used for the abductions. And, at the bottom, an item headlined ‘Charges Dropped’:
‘Police this week announced the dropping of charges against Mr Julian Bastian, 21-year-old playboy son of Melbourne and Portsea society matron, Lady Susan Bastian.
‘Mr Bastian was facing charges of driving while intoxicated. When arrested, his companion, Miss Cindy Price, 19, of Mount Eliza, was in the driver’s seat of his BMW sportscar. Arresting police alleged that Bastian persuaded Miss Price to say that she was the driver.
‘Senior Sergeant Kellock of the Waterloo police station said: “There were procedural errors in the arrest.”
‘Lady Bastian’s late husband, Sir Edgar Bastian, was the moving force behind the White Sands Golf Course. Members include Superintendent Mark McQuarrie, of the Victoria Police.
‘Superintendent McQuarrie is superintendent of Peninsula District.’
On Friday, Pam Murphy and John Tankard were back on the day shift, making their regular sweep of the town and the side roads.
‘See the paper yesterday, Murph?’
Pam’s mother had been treated for a blood clot. The treatment was plenty of rest and pills to dissolve the clot, but was she going to get much rest? Not likely, not with the old man the way he was.
‘You see it?’
Pam looked through the windscreen, the side window, alert for kids on bikes and skateboards. ‘See what?’
‘The article about that Bastian prick.’
‘I saw it.’