‘What did you do with the old uniform?’ Sutton asked.
‘Binned it. Look, I’m sorry, okay? Sir? Won’t happen again.’
‘That’s for sure,’ Challis said, even as he pictured himself in Dixon’s position, being bawled out by a superior officer when Friday came around.
Meanwhile he was stuck in Cranbourne: the paperwork fallout from Dixon’s dishonesty, the laundromat story to be checked, the rubbish bin to be located and searched, not to mention the shire tip.
The day passed. For Pam Murphy it had boiled down to questioning pathetic men with weak alibis who didn’t resemble the man described by Chloe Holst, and scary men who did resemble him but had cast-iron alibis. Tedious. Unbearable if the sex crimes sergeant had remained standoffish, but Jeannie Schiff had gradually unwound, growing talkative, relating blackly comic stories of some of her victories. And her defeats. At one point, early afternoon, she revealed how she’d been torn apart by the defence barrister in court the previous afternoon, and Pam was astonished to hear a faint catch in her voice.
After that, she found herself stealing looks at Schiff. A finely-shaped nose and cheekbones, a mole at the hinge of her jaw, another on her neck, a third on the strong brown swell of her left breast. Wisps of hair escaping the knot at the back of her head. Long fingers tapping the steering wheel. She watched the way Schiff’s plump bottom lip peeled slowly from the top whenever she began to relate another story, about another deadshit rapist, another deadshit barrister.
‘You can understand why there are so many lawyer jokes,’ said Pam, after one such story.
Schiff shot her a look. Pam felt the gaze flicker all over her: face, breasts, lap and face and breasts again. Her chest tightened, she tingled low in her trunk and she did not understand or trust her responses, not in the first degree.
To deflect the unfamiliar feelings, she related courtroom stories of her own, and so they rode north and south, east and west, crossing the Peninsula in the springtime warmth.
Mid-afternoon they knocked at a house in Tyabb. ‘Hello, Richard,’ Pam said.
Richard Van Der Net blinked at them, his face creased and puffy, his hair this way and that. He hadn’t bathed or shaved and Pam Murphy could imagine the miasmic conditions under which he lived. ‘Quick word.’
Van Der Net sniffed. According to his driver’s licence he was twenty-eight years old. He’d lived here, with his parents, for six months. Before that, Somerville. Before that, South Frankston, Chelsea, Pakenham…
‘Don’t have to talk to no cops.’
Schiff took out her notebook and wrote in it, muttering, ‘Time, four-thirty-two p.m., suspect refused to cooperate with police.’
‘Whoa. What are you writing? What do you mean, suspect? I done nothing.’
Pam opened a folder, revealing a series of grainy mobile phone photographs. ‘Remember these, Richard?’
Van Der Net had been arrested after several complaints during the previous summer. He liked to drive to the Peninsula’s beaches and bother women who were walking or sunbathing. He’d begin by admiring their bodies, then ask if they’d watch while he masturbated. Most ran away, some froze, one took photographs.
‘I like this one, Richard.’
The sands at Merricks Beach, mild sunshine, Richard plucking at his penis.
‘And these.’
Richard walking back through ti-trees, a pack on his back. Richard getting into his Toyota van. A shot of the number plate.
‘What gets me,’ Schiff said, ‘is how fucking dumb you guys are.’
Van Der Net’s mouth was open. He wanted to duck inside the house but Pam was blocking the doorway. He hovered on a dingy patch of grass between door and front gate, looking desperately at the street beyond Schiff’s stylish shoulder. He seemed to sense that freedom beckoned out there on the poky streets, but freedom of a treacherous kind.
Van Der Net rubbed his mucousy eyes and nostrils. Filthy teeth: rotted by amphetamines was Pam’s guess. She supposed you could pity him. You’d have to overlook the distress he’d left behind him over the years, though.
‘You keep moving house, Richard.’
‘So?’
‘What, asked to leave? Given warnings? Told you weren’t welcome?’
‘I just, you know…’
‘Where were you last Thursday night?’
‘I never did nothing.’
‘You graduated from waving your willie around to abduction and rape.’
Van Der Net opened and closed his mouth and eventually fainted. His mother came to the door and said, ‘I’ll have you for police brutality.’ Then his father appeared and threw a punch. Phone calls were made, police cars arrived, the paperwork became a headache and, at the very last moment, a methadone clinic nurse gave Van Der Net an alibi that Murphy and Schiff couldn’t shake.
‘A big, fat zero.’ said Jeannie Schiff when it was all over. ‘So how about a drink?’
At the end of his working day, Challis poured himself a scotch. He looked out at the closing-in light of evening and talked to Ellen Destry on Skype.
‘He wants me in his office next Friday. I should consider representation.’
‘He didn’t phone you, just sent a text?’
‘It was curt, even for a text. As if he didn’t trust himself to speak.’
‘To sack you?’
‘He probably can’t do that,’ Challis said, ‘but he can make life uncomfortable.’
They were silent. Challis reached out a hand to the webcam as if to touch Ellen’s face. ‘You’ve been gone four days already.’
‘What, you’re saying the time drags when I’m around?’
Challis held up a finger. ‘Let me rephrase that.’
20
Wednesday started with a briefing in CIU, croissants piled on a plate at the centre of the long table. Scudding clouds today, and without a morning sun beating through the windows, the walls and carpet were grey and sombre. Begging for colour, finding it in Jeannie Schiff’s vivid lipstick and glossy black hair.
And Pam Murphy’s earrings. That was unusual. Challis peered, realised he was looking at a trickle of tiny feathers in finely spun silver set with chips of turquoise.
She caught him looking and went pink. ‘Dream catchers, boss. Navaho.’
‘Oh.’ He had no idea what dream catchers were. He only knew she was looking happy, a spark in her eyes. Meanwhile Schiff was simultaneously checking her mobile and watching him with a lazy-lidded half smile. So she’s read the story about me, too, he thought. And there were other undercurrents; they had nothing to do with him.
‘Our duties for today,’ he said, leaning one shoulder against a wall. ‘Sergeant Schiff?’
‘Pam-Constable Murphy-and I will continue with the register. Admittedly, we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel now. Knickersniffers and teenage boys who slept with an underage girlfriend.’
She stopped to stare at him and he realised it was his turn to speak. He smiled, the smile there and gone again, unpeeled from the wall, and leaned over the table to break off a corner of almond croissant, dusting the powdered sugar from his fingers. ‘Constable Sutton and I will keep going on the stolen uniform and ID reports.’
Schiff turned her gaze onto Sutton, and Scobie’s twig-like fingers agitated his set of manila folders as if he’d become unglued a little.
First up for Challis and Sutton was a Waterloo officer named Jeff Greener. Five minutes to eight and he was in the canteen, about to go on duty. They took him through to an empty room on the ground floor.
‘Am I in trouble?’ Greener asked, looking untroubled.
‘Not yet,’ said Challis, some steel in his voice. ‘You reported your uniform stolen last month?’
‘That’s right.’
‘ID, too?’
‘Just the uniform.’
‘Circumstances?’
Greener gazed at Challis. He was an older man, a senior constable with receding hair and deep creases beside his mouth. He’d been a copper for a long time and was not impressed by a senior officer’s impatience. A man with a nerveless quality, oddly appealing.