He glanced away from Challis, taking in Sutton and Sutton’s collection of files. ‘You have my report, sir,’ he said calmly. ‘My house was burgled. Three of my neighbours were burgled, then half a dozen in Balnarring one hour later. A regular crime spree.’
Challis decided to drop the harshness. He leaned back, twisted his body around, lay one arm across the back of his chair. ‘Do you know who it was?’
Greener smiled crookedly. ‘We rounded up and bashed the usual suspects, but you know how it is, the smart ones don’t hang onto stolen gear, they shift it straight away. My guess, they shoved my uniform into an incinerator soon as they realised what they’d lifted. Or they sold it to someone who’ll use it to hijack a payroll.’
Or go hunting for rape victims, thought Challis.
As they broke from the table, Greener said, ‘Sir, for what it’s worth, I think you spoke the truth and I think you’ve got guts.’
‘Thank you,’ Challis murmured, oddly touched.
‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’
Meanwhile Pam, with Schiff in the passenger seat, was driving the sex crimes Holden to the outskirts of Waterloo, where a collection of cheap housing known as the Seaview Estate nestled in a vast, shallow depression in the landscape. The place evoked complicated feelings of dread and sympathy in her. She knew that the Seaview struggled. The city of Melbourne was seventy-five minutes north-west by road, or one hour by train from Frankston, and some of the estate’s working residents made that journey every day. Others worked in Dandenong factories and businesses, or more locally in Waterloo and elsewhere on the Peninsula, awaiting the next round of job cuts.
But living beside them on the estate were the underemployed, the unemployed, the elderly poor, struggling single parents and housing commission, welfare and mental health clients. Uneducated and unhealthy, left stranded by the IT revolution. Most were law abiding, but a handful were responsible for some of the nasty, and plenty of the mundane, crime in Waterloo, a permanent heartache for social services and a headache for the police. And they were largely invisible to the people who treated the Peninsula as a playground: Melbourne’s retirees, sea-change professionals, cocaine footballers and casino executives.
Out of nowhere, Jeannie Schiff said, ‘Does he like you?’
‘What? Who?’
‘Challis.’
Pam said quickly, ‘I hope so, but not in the way you mean. He’s got someone.’
‘Have you got someone?’
‘We’re here,’ Pam deflected the question and slowed to enter the estate’s little streets. The houses were cramped, almost forlorn, but orderly. Most of the lives here were orderly: only a handful of the bland facades concealed the kinds of misery and sour ambition that warranted the attention of the police.
Bernard Fahey’s house was mildewed red brick, the houses on either side yellow brick. His lawns were parched, clumps of dry grass dotted with outbreaks of bare soil, as if animals scratched there for worms, buried bones or a place in the sun. The front door showed years of kicks and slams and the scratches of powerful claws, but today it was ajar, and Schiff nodded towards the figure materialising there. ‘Pam,’ she said warningly.
‘I see him,’ Murphy said. ‘The man himself.’
They got out. Fahey, dressed in greasy overalls, wiping his hands on an oily rag, spat at the ground as they approached. He had the pinched face of a fifty-year smoker and was small and wiry, a useful trait for a mechanic. Or for a man who liked to crawl through windows or into roof cavities, kidding himself he was a burglar when really he was a rapist who targeted women who lived alone.
Giving him a grin guaranteed to rile, Pam said, ‘Hello, Bernie. Don’t tell me you’re servicing the Harley on the sitting-room carpet again?’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Now, now, let’s not get off on the wrong foot.’
‘Fuck off’s what I say to Jehovah’s Witnesses and cops.’
‘Just a quick word, Mr Fahey,’ said Jeannie Schiff.
‘Who’s the girlfriend?’ said Fahey, ignoring her.
‘That would be Sergeant Schiff of the sex crimes unit,’ Pam said, ‘and she’d like a quick word, all right?’
‘See this?’ said Fahey.
He lifted a leg of his baggy overalls, revealing a plaster cast. His eyes gleeful, yet aggrieved, he said, ‘Come off me bike six weeks ago. Can’t drive, can’t work, can’t hardly walk.’
Pam gave her grin again. ‘Can’t hardly walk between the sofa and the fridge?’
‘Not funny. So whatever it is you fucken think I did, I didn’t.’
Pam ran a flat stare over the cast, the scribblings of friends and family. ‘To Grampa get well soon Jemma XXX’ and ‘Another good man bites the dust’ and ‘You never washed this leg anyway’.
Another dead end.
Challis and Sutton’s next stop was the Mornington police station. Allocated a small room behind the front office, they interviewed a sergeant named Paul Henry, whose wallet and warrant card had been stolen from a gym locker while he was lifting weights one evening after work. Other lockers had also been broken into. There were security cameras but none in the change rooms or locker area.
‘That was nine months ago, sir,’ Henry said.
His look of curious sympathy told Challis that here was another reader of the local rag. ‘Ever get your wallet and ID back?’
Henry looked exhausted, a man who lived on coffee and long hours. ‘No, sir.’
He yawned and added: ‘Nor my uniform.’
Challis glanced sharply at Scobie Sutton, then back at Henry. ‘I thought only your wallet was stolen. Did we know about the uniform?’
Henry shrugged. ‘I reported it.’
‘It was also in your locker?’ asked Challis, aware that Scobie Sutton was fumbling through his files.
Henry shook his head with a weary kind of disgust. ‘I had a dry-cleaning docket in the wallet. For my uniform. The pricks collected it.’
‘Cameras?’
‘At the dry-cleaners? No.’
Next stop, Flinders. Pam Murphy briefed Jeannie Schiff as they drove. Wired on speed one afternoon six years ago, Ron Varley had stopped for two fifteen-year-old girls who were hitchhiking home from the Between the Bays music festival. When they refused to get into his car, he got out, grabbed both by the wrist and manhandled them onto his back seat. One shot across to the other door and escaped, convinced that her friend was with her.
She wasn’t.
Varley’s wife opened the door, took one look at Murphy and Schiff and said, ‘What’s he done now?’
‘May we speak to him, Mrs Varley?’
‘If you don’t mind driving all the way to Ararat.’
Pam sighed. ‘The jail?’
‘Locked up six months ago. Don’t you people talk to each other?’
‘Clearly not enough,’ muttered Schiff and the two women trudged back to their car. Seated, they glanced at each other, Pam a little nervous, expecting a reprimand, but Schiff grinned. Leaning in from the passenger seat, she placed two warm fingers on the back of Pam’s hand and said, ‘Anything that can go wrong, as they say.’
Pam had heard it before. ‘I know, I know, Murphy’s Law.’
Then to Mount Martha and the home of Carl Saker. After perfecting the art of taking photographs under women’s skirts, Saker had moved on to fondling schoolgirls on the Frankston train, and, finally, raping sexworkers.
According to his mother-and a quick phone call confirmed it- Saker had been in the psych unit of the Frankston Hospital since last Tuesday.
Steven Brough of Rosebud had raped an eighty-five-year-old woman in a nursing home in 1998. On his release, he’d gone to live with his parents. Six weeks later, he’d committed suicide.
‘So much for up-to-date records,’ Pam said.
Schiff grinned. ‘We need to redefine your law, Murphy. Every thing that can go wrong, will go wrong.’
By now it was mid-afternoon. They interviewed three more men before evening. All had solid alibis.
Meanwhile Challis had frittered away his afternoon in Mornington, first checking that Sergeant Henry had reported the theft of his uniform from the dry-cleaner, then questioning the dry-cleaner and the gym staff. Sutton trailed him mutely, cowed by his cold vehemence and focus, knowing he’d stuffed up.