Which they do, as she turns into Quarterhorse Lane.
Snap decision. If they follow her to her door, they might attack her.
She remembers that before Christmas there’d been a bit of drama at the other end of the lane, near where it meets the Old Peninsula Highway. Clara, that was her name. Someone had set fire to her mailbox. Since then Clara had been having pretty frequent visits from a policeman-almost daily.
Boyfriend?
So Stella doesn’t drive the Mercedes home. She turns right, noting the charred mailbox, into Clara’s driveway, hoping, as she follows the curving gravel, that the police car is there.
It isn’t.
Behind her, the Pajero brakes, but doesn’t turn in. It waits, dark and malevolent looking, its engine ticking over. Then it reverses into the driveway before accelerating away again, back the way it had come.
Her breathing is ragged now. Her hands are trembling. But then a curtain twitches at a front window of the house, so she drives the Mercedes out of that driveway as hard as she can, up the road to her own house before those men come back and spot where she’s gone.
Tomorrow she’s flying to Sydney for a few days, friends on the North Shore, and, frankly, tomorrow can’t come soon enough.
The numberplate? A vanity plate, LANCEL, whatever that meant.
Pam Murphy had her notebook open. ‘You didn’t see them steal it?’
‘No, I’m telling you,’ the woman said, ‘I just stepped inside for a minute to wash the dirt off the chamois.’
‘That’s when you heard the engine start?’
‘Yes. Thought at first it was the people next door.’
They were standing in the hallway of a house in Seaview Estate, Scobie Sutton just behind Pam, letting her ask the questions. She took it as a vote of confidence. Meanwhile the Pajero’s owner, Vicki Mudge, was in a curious state, angry because her vehicle had been stolen from under her nose, but with an edginess under that, as if she didn’t want the police involved at all.
‘We’ll talk to your neighbours in a minute,’ Pam said. ‘Meanwhile, I’ll need some details about the vehicle itself. Mitsubishi Pajero,’ she said, scribbling in her notebook. ‘Colour?’
‘Maroon.’
‘Year?’
‘Er, not sure.’
‘All right. Petrol? Diesel?’
‘Petrol. I think.’
‘Registration number?’
Here the woman’s face seemed to close down. Pam couldn’t read outrage or anxiety or any other useful emotion in it.
‘Look, if it turns up, it turns up. Probably kids out for a joyride. If it gets damaged, insurance will cover it.’
‘We still need the registration number, Mrs Mudge.’
Vicki Mudge folded her arms and stared at the carpet and said woodenly, ‘Personalised plate. Lancel.’
Pam asked for the spelling. Then suspicion hardened in her. She was suddenly very alert. ‘Mrs Mudge, are you employed at the moment?’
‘What are you getting at? What’s that got to do with the price of eggs?’
‘I have to ask you this: did you arrange to have the Pajero stolen?’
The woman snarled, ‘By Jesus, you’ve got a nerve.’
Sutton cleared his throat. ‘Who else lives here, Mrs Mudge?’
‘My husband. He’s in Thailand on business.’
‘You do want your vehicle back again, I take it?’ Pam said.
Vicki Mudge shot a look past her ear. ‘Yeah, sure, it’s insured.’
There’s something there, Pam thought. A suggestion that she’d be uncomfortable if the Pajero turned up.
When van Alphen found Clara she was trembling, sitting in curtained gloom, a kitchen knife in her hands. No incense this time.
‘Clara?’
‘I’ve been trying to reach you all day!’
‘We had a suspicious fire.’
‘They were here!’
‘Who were?’
‘The people who want me dead.’
He crossed to her, thinking that he couldn’t keep up with her and she was bad news, but he was in too deep to let her go. She bewildered him. She’d be lucid, calm and funny, her head firmly on her shoulders, then a little sultry and uninhibited when it was time for sex, then strangely hyper and funny but also easy in her head whenever she’d done a line of coke-and then she could be like this, freaked out and making no sense. He couldn’t avoid thinking that she’d never been a casual user in the past, but an addict, and it had fried her brain, only she was good at hiding the fact. And now she was on the stuff again, courtesy of him, and the madness was showing.
He thought all of these things even as he hugged her tight and stroked her temples and wanted her so badly that he slipped his hands under her T-shirt, to where her flesh was hot and pliant.
She erupted, shoving, screaming at him. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? They were here!’
‘Clara, who were?’
‘I told you, the people who want me dead.’
‘Who wants you dead?’
‘People from my past. It doesn’t matter. The thing is, I need protection.’
‘What did they look like?’
‘I didn’t see them.’
‘Then how-’
‘I saw their car.’
‘Where?’
‘It came right into my driveway, sat there, then went away again.’
‘Ah,’ van Alphen said. Maybe she wasn’t losing her marbles. ‘Can you describe it?’
‘It was a white Mercedes.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I had one like it once, in the good old, bad old days.’
See? Sharp and self-mocking again.
‘Okay, white Mercedes. Did you-’
‘I had the impression,’ Clara said, concentrating, ‘that there was another car out on the road, a big dark one. It slowed as it went past the gate, but by then I was paying more attention to the white one in the driveway.’
‘Did you get the registration?’
‘Forgot. I was too scared.’
‘That’s okay, most people forget.’
‘What will you do?’
‘Stay the night, for a start.’
She hugged her upper arms, sat rocking, her knees together. ‘I’m really strung out, Van.’
‘I’ll give you a massage.’
She rounded on him, shouting, ‘I don’t want a fucking massage. I need you to get me some more blow.’
‘Clara, lay off that stuff. You’ve had a shitload since I met you.’
She was scornful, looking him up and down. ‘You want me, right? My cunt?’
‘Clara, I-’
‘If you want me you’re going to have to pay for it, like any punter. Do I owe you special privileges? I don’t think so.’
He was dismayed to find himself so hurt and so floundering. ‘I thought-’
‘You thought this was special? Uh, uh. I’m special. You want me, lover boy, you pay for me. What’s wrong? Shocked, are we? Thought I was a little angel, did you?’
‘I looked after you.’
‘Then fucking continue looking after me. Get me some more stuff, or fork out a hundred bucks a time to see me naked.’
She lifted her T-shirt, waggled her torso briefly, covered herself again. Something fractured a little further in van Alphen then. That life boiled down to supply and demand, rather than values, was the position he’d reached after a working life doing this shitty job.
Saturday night, about eleven o’clock, and Challis was alone in the incident room, logging on to the database to see what the analysts had found. He was looking for a similar pattern of abductions and rape-murders in other parts of the country, with cross-references to mini-vans, four-wheel drives and other rear-compartment vehicles.
When the call came, a Mitsubishi Pajero found abandoned and torched at the side of a dirt road near the Old Peninsula Highway, his first thought was: Maybe our man’s panicking, getting rid of evidence.
But within an hour he’d established that the Pajero had been stolen earlier in the day, probably by two men fleeing from an aggravated burglary, and, disappointed, he logged off and left the building.
He got home just as one day drifted into the next and it was New Year’s Eve.