He could see the irony. He’d just spent a few days of his spare time in shadowing a local dealer, finally getting lucky when he searched an empty flat the guy had visited twice in a row. He’d found a stash of cocaine and amphetamines hidden above a ceiling batten in the bathroom. He’d flushed away most of it, bagging just enough to replace what he’d removed from the evidence safe. He’d nearly been caught, but the point was he hadn’t been caught, and he’d walked coolly back into that old feeling of being able to take on the world and win.
The chink in the armour was Clara.
‘You don’t need the stuff any more. You need to get straightened out.’
‘What are you, my father? My brother? Both of them fucked me, so what’s the difference?’
He found himself snapping, ‘Grow up.’
‘Oh, that’s a good one. Look who’s talking.’
He struck her, a quick hard cheek slap that rocked back her head and shocked her. She was livid. ‘Just for that, I’m dobbing you in.’
She’d said it before, as if it were a hold she had over him. ‘Yeah, sure.’
‘You’re piss weak. No wonder your wife walked out.’
They were snapping off the insults now. Van Alphen felt pressure building inside his skull. ‘I could kill you,’ he said.
‘You wouldn’t have the guts.’
Boyd Jolic was grabbing some shut-eye when the phone rang. He stumbled through to the kitchen and snatched it up, but the ringing continued and he stared blearily at the handset before he located the source.
His mobile was on the table, next to a greasy plate, a stripped-down Holley carburettor and an oily rag. All of his old practised motions seemed to desert him as he fumbled to find the right button. ‘Yeah?’
‘I need to see you.’
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he muttered.
‘And lovely to hear your voice, too, Boyd. Just what a girl needs after a hard day.’
A long time since you were a girl, Jolic thought, as he scratched his stomach, his back. He began to contort, his fingers searching under his T-shirt, reaching high, between the shoulderblades. ‘When do you want to see me?’
‘Now. Tonight. Whenever.’
The itch relieved, he looked across the room at a Country Fire Authority poster on the wall above his sofa: WILDFIRES: WILL YOU SURVIVE? ‘Can’t tonight,’ he said.
‘Why, have you had a better offer?’
‘Unfinished business,’ Jolic said, but told her later in the week, and cut her off.
He liked to keep her eager.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon. He might as well stay up, now that he was up. Work out a plan of action, given that he’d be on his own tonight, that little prick Danny wimping out on him.
Tessa Kane was out all day, and didn’t open her office mail until five o’clock. There was only one item. She knew at once who it was from: the same block capitals, the same kind of envelope.
She weighed the envelope down with a stapler while she opened the flap with a letter opener. Then, pinching the envelope by one corner, she teased the letter out with the blade, and found that she was thinking of Challis. She was doing this for Challis, keeping her prints off.
The letter read:
Hit a brick wall, have you? Put me in the too hard basket?
Big mistake, fuckers.
Am I resting-or am I feeling the itch again? That’s what you should be asking yourselfs. People don’t care about burglars or the spoilt rich. They want to know if it’s safe for their daughters to go out alone.
Tessa laughed. She’d put his nose out of joint. He wanted to be back on page one.
She lifted the phone.
Damn. Challis had left, according to the receptionist. Wouldn’t be in again until the morning. She looked up his home number, made to dial, and hovered.
The phone was ringing when Challis got in that evening.
‘Hal.’
‘Hello, Ange,’ he said.
He looked at his watch. Seven. Surely they should all be in their cells by now?
‘Hal, I had to hear your voice.’
‘How are you, Ange?’
‘Don’t be like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘Standoffish. Shutting me out.’
‘Look, Ange, I’m tired, I’ve only just this minute stepped in the door. I’m talking on the hall phone, briefcase in one hand. Let me take this call in the kitchen, okay?’
‘You’re always just walking in the door.’
‘Ange-’
‘I wish I could see your place. I keep trying to visualise it. I-’
Challis went to the kitchen. He tried to spin out the fixing of a drink and a sandwich, but she was still there when he lifted the handset from the cradle above the cutting bench.
‘I’m back.’
‘It hasn’t been a good day for me.’
‘I didn’t expect to hear from you at this hour, Ange.’
His wife replied brightly, like a child just home from schooclass="underline" ‘I’m in the play! We’ve been rehearsing this evening.’
She told him about it. He thought about his killer on the Old Peninsula Highway, and he thought about Tessa Kane. He’d hoped it might be her, when he’d heard the phone, ringing to repair the damage.
Or was that up to him?
Either way, he wanted to hear her low growl in his ear.
Clara had driven to Frankston after van Alphen left her, where she scored a small amount of coke from an islander kid who called her ‘sister’. The quantity was small but the price was high, and he’d offered her a better deal on heroin, said it was pure and there was plenty of it around, but she told him she wasn’t touching that stuff. Then two cops on bicycle patrol, looking like jet-streamed insects, had come pedalling down the mall, and the islander kid had scarpered and she’d turned on her heel and ducked into the closest shop. It had NEW YEAR SPECIALS! pasted across the window and sold computers. She’d never been in a computer shop in her life before. She said, ‘Just browsing,’ and when she looked at the equipment and the vividly coloured boxes on the shelves, she felt scared, ignorant, ignored, left behind in life, and couldn’t wait to get out of there. She went straight to her car and did three lines of coke, and felt so high she didn’t want to risk driving home but took a taxi instead. The good thing about Witness Protection, there was a little money there from time to time if she ever needed it.
So now she had a pleasant buzz on, but it would wear off pretty soon. She knew she’d want to score again, but she could hardly go back to Frankston at this hour of the night, one-thirty in the morning. Besides, she’d left her car there.
Then the background sounds of the night seemed to alter in her consciousness and one of them clarified as a tyre crush on gravel outside of her window. She was just formulating an adage from her old days, ‘Never get involved with a copper,’ when glass smashed somewhere at the rear of the house.
Eighteen
It was a night of hot northerlies, hotter where they passed over the flaming roof timbers. Sparks streamed from the burning house, and some alighted here and there in long grass that had not been slashed despite a request from the shire inspectors. The small fierce firefronts became one, consuming the grass, and then treetops caught, and one eucalyptus after another exploded in the nature reserve between the burning house and the orchard, which bordered the winery on the northern boundary fence and a horse stud at the rear. The orchardist heard his dogs before he was fully awake and able to separate the smell of the smoke from his dreams and the fact that his dogs were agitated. In the stables beyond his eastern boundary fence, horses were panicking, waking the stud manager and his wife. They stepped outside and saw the firefront, rolling as hungrily as a tidal wave upon a sleeping coastline. Evacuate. Evacuate.