‘I know that. I’ve been waiting around to take her.’
‘She’s probably at Kathy’s. She’s done this sort of thing before. Just wait for her.’
Ellen’s tone was: Do I have to do everything?
Her husband said, ‘I rang Kathy. She said she hasn’t seen Larrayne at all today.’
Ellen felt a crawling chill on the surface of her arms. Her heart seemed to shut down. Then she was shouting:
‘Why the fuck didn’t you say so!’
He sounded hurt. ‘It’s school holidays, you cow. Why would I be worried she wasn’t here? I thought I’d understood it wrong and you were taking her to tennis.’
She found herself sniping, ‘Then why did you ring me?’ when she should have been slamming the phone down and taking action.
‘I just thought I’d double-check, that’s all. More than you would do, you fucking bitch.’
This time she didn’t respond. She stood there, frozen, and something in her face and manner must have alerted Challis, for his hand closed over hers and he was taking the phone from her and taking charge of her fears.
Twenty-Four
I’ll kill him,’ she said.
‘No you won’t,’ Challis said.
‘If he’s got her and he’s hurt her, I’ll kill him, Hal, see if I don’t.’
Two sedans and a divisional van. Three detectives, four uniforms and two forensic officers. They were converging on the housing estate where Lance Ledwich lived. Scobie Sutton had taken a fourth car to detain Ledwich at his place of work and take him to the house.
‘Don’t jump to conclusions,’ Challis said. ‘His Pajero was destroyed, remember, so how did he snatch Larrayne?’
She seemed to fill with relief, then immediately tensed again. ‘His wife’s got a car. A station wagon.’
‘Ah.’
She pushed her hands back through her hair. ‘I don’t understand how it could have happened. He must have snatched her on her way to Kathy’s. But how? I mean, the kid of coppers, she’d never willingly go with a stranger.’
Then she seemed to understand the implications of what she’d said and groaned and put her hands over her face.
There were other explanations, but Challis didn’t offer them. Your daughter is a ratty teenager. Your daughter hates you and has run off with a boyfriend. Somehow he knew that there was only one: Your daughter was smacked over the head with a tyre iron.
‘He’s shifted his locus, Hal,’ Ellen said, taking her hands away from her face. ‘All that publicity, we’ve driven him away from the highway. Now he’s preying where people actually live. God.’
Challis heard the rising note in her voice, the fear, outrage and hysteria. ‘One thing we’ve got going for us, it’s daylight,’ he said. ‘Now calm down and think like a copper.’
‘Daylight? How does that help us? He snatched her in daylight and no-one noticed.’
‘But he won’t-’
He was about to say, won’t dump her body in daylight. He said, ‘Ledwich has a job. He’s accountable to people during the day. He won’t do anything until it’s dark.’
‘Keep her tied up all day? God, bad as that is, I hope so.’
They were creeping over speedbumps now. Challis pointed. ‘Scobie’s already here. That was quick.’
The CIB Falcon was parked across Ledwich’s driveway, effectively blocking off the station wagon, which was parked at the side of the house. Ellen was peering at the figures in the Falcon. ‘I don’t see Ledwich anywhere. Don’t tell me he’s done a runner.’
Then Sutton was at Challis’s window. ‘He wasn’t at work, boss. Called in sick yesterday.’
Ellen Destry seemed to crumple. She began to bite on her finger. ‘Oh God.’
‘Have you tried the house?’
‘Waiting for you, boss.’
They got out and approached the house. Challis pushed a button next to the front door, which was a heavy, carven thing, varnish peeling from its daily beating from the sun. Challis itched to pick at the varnish strips. The door opened.
‘Mrs Ledwich?’
‘Yes?’
Challis motioned Sutton and two of the uniformed constables to make for the rear of the property, then pushed through, into the house, followed by Ellen Destry and the other officers.
‘We have a warrant to search these premises and any vehicles that you may own. Is your husband here?’
Ledwich’s wife looked tired and distracted. ‘He’s in bed. Summer flu.’ Then she stared from one to the other. ‘Why don’t you leave him alone? He almost lost his job over you lot coming around and asking questions. Give him a break.’
‘We just need to talk to him,’ Challis said.
Beside him, Ellen was fuming. She pushed forward. ‘Look, are you going to take us through to him or not?’
‘Keep your undies on.’
The house was depressing. The ceilings and walls were designed for a small race of people. The furniture was too big for it, as if composed of intrusive angles and surfaces. Challis saw a massive television set and an exercise machine. A radio somewhere was tuned to a talkback show. They came to the bedroom. Ledwich was lumped under a sheet and a pink blanket and he looked wretched, his features red and sodden, his breathing rattling with phlegm.
‘What do you bastards want?’
Challis introduced himself but knew that something was wrong. He wasn’t looking at a man who’d gone out earlier that day and abducted and raped and killed or at least hidden a teenage girl.
Ellen Destry knew it, too. Challis sensed her disappointment. She said, ‘Lance, where were you this morning?’
‘Right here. In this bed. Been here since yesterday.’
Challis looked around at the wallpaper, the gleaming white built-in wardrobe, the lace curtains. There was an odour of illness and stale air in the little room. The bed was a costly, vulgar monstrosity, fitted with a silvery-gold vinyl headboard. Rows of brass studs dimpled the vinyl, and there was a radio and a pair of speakers set into it.
He turned to Ledwich. ‘You haven’t been in Penzance Beach?’
‘I’m flaming crook, I tell ya.’
‘Okay, let’s try this. Can you account for your movements on the nights of the twelfth and the seventeenth of December, and around dawn on the twenty-third?’
‘I already told this bitch here-’
Ellen stepped close to the bed and neatly clouted him at the hairline.
‘Ow.’ He rubbed his head.
‘Answer the question, Lance.’
‘Like I told you, I was at work.’
‘According to the foreman, you were often liberal with your hours.’
‘Yeah, but not enough to go out and grab and kill someone and stash her somewhere. And if you arseholes done your homework you’d know I started day shift on the twenty-third. Six a.m. start. The wife’s got it written down on the calendar. I know, because I double-checked after you done me over the last time. So I couldn’t of killed whoever it was that time, and I didn’t kill none of the others.’
Challis nodded to Ellen, who left the room.
‘Before your Pajero was stolen, had it ever been used by another person? A friend, neighbour, member of your family?’
‘My sister, my brother-in-law.’
‘I understand your brother-in-law’s been in Thailand for the past month. Who else has had access to it?’
A blush and a twist of sullenness under the red chapped skin. ‘Look, I know it wasn’t registered, I know I’m not licensed at the moment, I’ll cop to that, but I was desperate, I had to get to work.’
‘So you stored it at your sister’s house and drove it from time to time?’
‘Yes. I had to get to work.’
‘Couldn’t your wife have taken you?’
‘She’s got her own work to go to.’
‘You thought that if the police ever happened to check up on you here-checking you weren’t driving around while unlicensed-they’d not see the Pajero, or see you coming and going in it, and they’d assume you were being a good boy.’
‘Something like that.’