‘Slim, boss,’ someone said.
‘I know it’s slim,’ said Challis, showing some heat for the first time, ‘but until we’ve got more to go on what can we do but use our imaginations and think our way into what might have happened?’ He tapped his right temple. ‘Try to get a feel for this guy.’
‘What about the VAA mechanic?’
‘He got there after the police did. He’s in the clear.’
A detective said, ‘I got called to a Jane Gideon’s maybe six, seven months ago? Here in Waterloo. She’d had a break-in. A flat near the jetty.’
‘That’s her,’ Challis said. ‘I checked her flat in the early hours of Monday morning to see if she’d simply been given a lift home.’
He put his hands on his hips. ‘There’s a lot riding on this. Waterloo’s not a big place. A lot of people would have known her. They’re going to be upset, edgy, wanting results in a hurry.’
He waited. When there were no more questions, he turned to a Lands Department aerial survey map on the wall behind him. ‘I want two of you to take a few uniforms and conduct a door-to-door along the highway. Much of it’s through farmland, so that helps. I drove along it on my way here this morning and saw only a couple of utilities and a school bus. One 24-hour service station here, where the Mornington road cuts it. Most of the farmhouses are set back from the road, but they’ll still need checking out. And certain businesses. A place called The Stables, sells antiques. A couple of wineries. A deer farm, ostrich farm, flying school, Christmas tree farm- they’ll be doing increased trade at this time of the year. A pottery, a mobile mechanic-look twice at him, okay? See if he had any late calls on Sunday night and the night Kymbly Abbott was killed. Also, in addition to Foursquare Produce there are two other fruit and vegetable places with roadside stalls.’
He turned to face them again. ‘That’s it for now. We’ll meet here again at five o’clock. Scobie, I want you to draw up a list of known sex offenders who live on the Peninsula. Ellen, come with me.’
Two
A young uniform tried to book me for a cracked windscreen when I arrived this morning. Beefy-looking, arrogant. Know who it would be?’
As CIB sergeant at Waterloo, Ellen Destry had very little to do with the uniformed constables, but she knew who Challis was talking about. ‘That would be John Tankard. They call him Tank.’
‘Fitting. Built like a water tank, roll over you like an army tank.’
‘There have been a few complaints,’ Ellen admitted. ‘Someone’s been distributing leaflets about him, calling him a stormtrooper.’
She fastened her seatbelt and started the car. They were going to Jane Gideon’s flat, and she eased the CIB Falcon out of the car park behind the station and down High Street, toward the jetty. She was reminded by the holly and the tinsel that she’d asked people over for drinks on Christmas morning, and still hadn’t bought presents for her husband and daughter.
That brought her by degrees to thinking about Kymbly Abbott and Jane Gideon. No Christmases for them, and an awful Christmas for their families. She tried to shake it off. You could get too close. Challis had once told her that being a copper meant stepping inside the skins of other people-victim, villain, witness-and playing roles-priest-confessor, counsellor, shoulder to cry on. But ultimately, he’d said, you were there to exact justice, and when a homicide was involved that meant exacting justice for those who had no-one else to stand up for them.
She glanced across at him, slouched in the passenger seat, one elbow on the side window ledge, his hand supporting his forehead. At the briefing he’d displayed his usual restless intelligence, but in repose there was sadness and fatigue under the thin, dark cast of his face. She knew that he looked down a long unhappiness, and she didn’t suppose it would ever go away. But he was only forty, attractive in a haunted kind of way. He deserved a new start.
He said unexpectedly, ‘You like living on the Peninsula?’
‘Love it.’
‘So do I.’
He fell silent again. She loved the Peninsula, but that didn’t mean she loved life itself. Things were difficult with her husband and daughter, for a start. Alan, a senior constable with the Eastern Traffic Division, had a long drive to work each day and resented her promotion to sergeant. ‘They’re fast-tracking you because you’re a woman,’ he said. And Larrayne was a pain in the neck, fifteen years old, all hormones and hatred.
The real estate agency which managed Jane Gideon’s block of flats was next to a dress shop that had gone out of business six months earlier. A sign saying ‘Support Local Traders’ was pasted inside the dusty glass window. Ellen double-parked the car and waited for Challis to collect the key. She watched a clutch of teenage boys on the footpath. They wore pants that dragged along the ground, over-large T-shirts on their skinny frames, narrow wrap-around sunglasses, hair gelled into porcupine spikes. They were idly flipping skateboards into the air with their feet, and one or two were spinning around on old bicycles. ‘Nerds and rednecks, Mum,’ Larrayne was always saying. ‘You’ve brought me to live among nerds and rednecks.’
Challis slipped into the car and she pulled away from the kerb. She slowed at the jetty. Water made her feel peaceful. The tide was out and she watched a fishing boat steer a course between the red and green markers in the channel. Waterloo did have a down-at-heel, small-town feel about it, so she could see Larrayne’s point-of-view, but before that they’d lived up in the city, where Alan’s asthma had been worse, and the teenagers more prone to try drugs, and Ellen had wanted to get her family out of all that.
Jane Gideon’s flat was on a narrow street of plain brick veneer houses. Ellen parked and they got out. Old smells lingered in the stairwelclass="underline" curry, cat piss, dope. ‘Number four, top right,’ Challis said.
Ellen pictured him two nights ago, the darkness, his exhaustion, the long drive down here just to knock on the door of this sad-looking flat in the hope that Jane Gideon had not been abducted but given a lift home by a friendly stranger. He turned the key. Ellen followed him inside, knowing there wouldn’t be anything worth finding, only a poor mother’s phone number.
Before logging on to the computer and doing a printout of sex offenders, Detective Constable Scobie Sutton signed out a Falcon from the car pool and drove to the Waterloo Childcare Centre. He’d scarcely been able to keep his feelings under control during the briefing, and drove hunched over, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.
He pulled on to the grass at the side of the cyclone fence, and watched. Morning tea. The kids were seated in circles on the grass, grouped according to their ages. There she was, in the dress she called her blue ballet, happy as Larry now, her little face absorbed under the shade of a cotton explorer hat, slurping from a plastic cup and sticking her little fist into what looked to be a tupperware container of biscuits. She turned to the kid next to her and Sutton saw her grin, and then both children leaned until their foreheads touched.
He felt the tension drain away. But that didn’t change the fact that his daughter had screamed the place down when he’d dropped her off at eight o’clock. ‘I don’t want to go in! I want to be with you!’ Six weeks earlier the shire council, hit by budget constraints, had shut down another of its childcare centres and forced an amalgamation with Waterloo. Twenty new kids, six new staff, nowhere to fit them all. Kids are conservative. They don’t like upheavals in their routines. The cheery woman who’d been in charge of his daughter’s room, the two-to-three-year olds, had taken a redundancy package-no doubt out of anger and frustration. Now a stranger was in charge of the two-to-three room, and Roslyn threw a wobbly whenever Sutton dropped her off each morning. Was this woman slapping her on the sly? Being mean to her?