‘Pretty good, eh?’
‘In what way?’
‘Well, it raises doubts, doesn’t it? If I can get some senior officers to swing behind this, maybe the charges will be reinstated.’
‘And pigs might fly.’
‘You’re a negative bitch, you know that?’
And Tankard folded his arms and leaned, tired and depressed, against the passenger door with his eyes closed.
On Saturday morning Challis noted that the road outside of his front gate was dry and dusty again, almost as if there hadn’t been rain earlier in the week. He made for the Old Peninsula Highway, as he always did. But this week he’d been braking slowly when he reached the Foursquare Produce barn and pulling on to the gravel forecourt. As usual today there were two cars parked hard against the building itself-employees’ vehicles. The main door was open. He could see them, two women, one building a pyramid of apples, the other preparing price labels with a black marker pen. They recognised him and waved. He wondered what they thought of the occupant of the third car, which was parked next to the phone box. Pity? And embarrassment, for when we see such naked grief and desperation we turn away from it.
He got out. As he approached the car, the driver’s door opened and a woman eased out from behind the wheel. ‘Inspector Challis.’
‘Hello, Mrs Gideon.’
There were posters as large as television screens over the rear windows: Did you see who took our daughter? A blurred photograph, Jane Gideon clipped from a group of friends, smiling a little crookedly, a little drunkenly, for the camera. There was a tangle of streamers behind her, the edge of one or two balloons, and a man’s shoulder tucked into hers. A few lines of description under the photograph, and the circumstances of her abduction. If this jogs your memory, please call the police on, and a direct number to the incident room.
There were smaller copies pasted on to the nearby power poles and to the sides of the phone box. Mrs Gideon also kept a bundle in her car and patiently through the long days she handed them to anyone who stopped at Foursquare.
Challis asked what he’d asked every day since Boxing Day: ‘Any nibbles?’
Mrs Gideon smiled tiredly. She hadn’t washed her hair. She was overweight, a heavy breather, which seemed to intensify the desperation that she was showing to the world. ‘People are very kind. They always look closely, and they listen, but they always shake their heads.’
‘You’re doing your best.’
‘But are the police, Mr Challis?’ she chided gently. ‘It strikes me as unusual that there have been no developments.’
‘It’s baffling,’ Challis said. He never liked to hedge or lie. By telling Mrs Gideon that the police were baffled, he was stressing their commonality with her and the man and woman in the street.
Fifteen
At midday that same day, Danny Holsinger and Boyd Jolic were in a stolen Fairmont, approaching a secluded dirt road behind the Waterloo racecourse. Quiet Saturday lunch-time, no-one around, everyone on holiday.
‘Here we are,’ Jolic said.
A big house set back from the road. Plenty of trees, acres of close-cropped lawns, white railing fences for hundreds of metres, holding yards in the same white railing, a stable block, sheds, dam, fruit trees. A ‘forthcoming auction’ sign had been bolted next to the driveway entrance. It all spelt money. Well, so it should. Last year’s Caulfield Cup winner had been bred and trained there.
But as Jolic slowed to turn in, the engine cut out. ‘Fuel’s vaporising,’ he’d said, the first time it had happened, and now here it was, happening again. ‘Piece of shit,’ he said, grinding the starter, pumping the pedal. The Fairmont coughed and shook and they steered their shuddering way up a clean white gravelled drive to the side of the house.
And just as they were getting out, a woman stepped through a screen door and said, ‘Are you the new farrier?’
Unoccupied, Jolic had said. He had a plan of the house and assurances that the owners were holidaying in Bali until mid-January. A manager to feed and water the horses and a gardener two or three times a week, but that’s all, and no-one around on a Saturday afternoon.
So, who the fuck was this? Danny turned to Jolic, ‘Jesus, Joll,’ and Jolic elbowed him hard, in the chest. ‘Want to give the bitch our fucking names?’
Next thing, Jolic was out of the car and running straight at the woman, one arm concealing his face from her, reaching her and spinning her around and clamping a hand over her mouth. ‘Shut up and you won’t get hurt.’
He caught Danny’s eye, jerked it at the screen door. Danny, also concealing his face, ran with a crush and scrape across the gravel and opened the door.
They bundled the woman inside. They were in the kitchen: copper pots on hooks, a huge Aga oven, a bench as long and broad as a couple of single beds end to end, stained wooden floors and inbuilt cupboards. Searching frantically, Jolic snatched a cast-iron frying pan from a wall hook and slammed it against the side of the woman’s head.
She dropped like a stone.
They were panting. Danny thought they might have been yelling.
Who else was on the property?
Had he said it aloud? Yes, he was shouting it, and it was accusatory, telling Jolic he was acting on piss-poor information, doing over an ‘empty’ house. Now it was an aggravated burglary, and, for all Danny knew, from the way the woman had fallen and now just lay there like a rag doll, murder.
‘You arsehole, who else is here?’
He’d never called Jolic that before, not to his face.
‘Well why don’t you go and fucking look, Dan.’
‘Not me.’
‘We’ll both do it.’
They ran through the house, room to room, and saw no-one. So they calmed a little. Jolic bent over the woman, removed the plain gold necklace from around her neck, gave it to Danny. ‘Sorry, mate. Give this to your sheila.’
Mollified, Danny said, ‘Ta.’
Jolic took out his floorplan. He’d marked it with red crosses-a crystal cabinet here, solid silver cutlery there; here an antique clock, there some china figurines and a top-of-the-range sound system. They wrapped the delicate stuff in bubble wrap and stuffed everything into garbage bags.
There was a man in the kitchen corridor. He had his back to them and had clearly just stepped in from working outside: dusty, sweaty, smelling of horses, a weary hand in the small of his back. Water darkened his hair and collar, as though he’d come in via the laundry, freshening himself up a little first. Late lunch, Danny thought. Just fucking bloody perfect.
Yelling, charging like he was playing American football, Jolic took the man down in a low tackle. The man flipped back at the waist and Danny saw his head smack the wall before he crumpled to the floor.
Two down. How many more to go?
Jolic was like a cornered tiger now, stepping from foot to foot and swinging his head about, searching for his pursuers. Danny saw why some women might be attracted to him. He was fierce, reckless, arrogant, quick and light on his feet, his eyes alight. But he was also mad and dangerous, and snarled at Danny, ‘Help me get ‘em out.’
‘Out?’
‘Out on the fucking lawn, dickbrain. Now.’
The woman, then the man, letting their heads bump like potatoes in a sack down the back step and over a border of white-painted stones and on to the cool cropped grass.
‘Well away from the house,’ Jolic said.
‘What for?’
‘We’ve left evidence behind, moron.’
The woman coming out of the house like that had distracted them. They’d failed to remember the latex gloves in their pockets. It meant going through and wiping everything. Unless
‘Joll, no, you’re-’ what was the word? ‘-escalating it.’
‘Escalating my arse,’ and Danny trailed behind him, into the workshop, where there was plenty in the way of rags and tins marked ‘flammable’. Then back to the kitchen and the other rooms, splashing it about, chucking matches as they retreated, kitchen last, then out the side door and into the Fairmont.