By Tuesday, she was running out of time. A week’s holiday in Sydney, Mara Niekirk had said. What if they came home early?
So after breakfast she caught a bus to Geelong and hired an eight-year-old Camry from WreckRent, 95,000 km on the clock but V6 power and the gearbox still tight. Fitting it with false plates, she caught the Queenscliff ferry and was on the Peninsula by noon, wearing a charcoal grey pencil skirt and plain white blouse.
The Niekirks’ alarm system was a Messer. Grace headed up the freeway to Mornington, a new industrial estate outside the town, where there was a Messer agency in a security installation firm. Using a clipped, professional woman’s voice, she said, ‘My mother has a Messer system in her house, and I was thinking I might get one installed, but I couldn’t make head nor tail of her owner’s manual.’
The salesman drank her in. She knew he would. He actually rubbed his hands together. ‘We have a good deal on Messer at the moment.’
‘Yes, but that’s no good to me if I can’t understand the technology. Can you explain it?’
‘Sure can,’ the salesman said.
He dug out a few catalogues, called in an installer, and together they told her how the system worked. Grace nodded in all of the right places, but with an overlay of doubt. They tried harder. Her doubts receded. Another doubt, another reassurance…
Finally she reached a decision, blessing them with a smile. And when she offered to pay a deposit of $100, any reservations they had flew right out the window.
‘All righty. Address?’
Grace was a mite embarrassed. ‘I’ve bid on two townhouses on the Esplanade,’ she said, ‘I won’t hear until the weekend which one’s mine. When I find out, I’ll call with the address and arrange access for you.’
That was fine with them, and she drove out of the industrial estate and up to Frankston. When she failed to contact them again, they wouldn’t follow up very strenuously: after all, they were $100 ahead on the deal.
From Frankston she headed north-east to Dandenong, buying a can of insulation foam in a hardware store. Then out to a chain motel on the Princes Highway in Berwick. The remainder of the afternoon stretched ahead. She ate sparingly but kept hydrated and filled in the hours with a walk, junk TV and a booklet of Sudoku puzzles. She wondered how many more times she’d find herself in a nondescript motel room like this one. It seemed to her that rooms like this had become a big part of her life, a living-from-day-to-day life, with one sad, simple goal, to stay one step ahead of Ian Galt.
Once upon a time she’d dismissed the aims and achievements of ordinary people. It wasn’t that she’d thought herself extraordinary. A family, a home, a job, holidays, a circle of friends and someone to love and be loved by-they were extraordinary. They weren’t the kinds of things she’d be allowed to have.
But now…
She blamed the icon for unsettling her. The icon gave her hope, and she wasn’t sure she wanted that.
By late evening she was scouting around in Lowther, a little town outside Waterloo and only three kilometres across country from the property known as ‘Lindisfarne’. She made a trial run, on foot, in the moonlight, then drove back to her anonymous motel.
35
Pam Murphy leaned against the one-way glass and snatched a few minutes to read the News-Pictorial, the weekly hot off the press.
This time the paper had sought the viewpoint of senior police, who’d wheeled out an assistant commissioner to counter Challis’s claims. ‘I speak for the Commissioner, the Police Minister and all Victoria Police members in stating that we take very seriously the fight against crime, and…’
And blah, blah, blah. Pam scanned through the article. Crime figures were only apparently on the increase. Crime reporting was improving, that’s all. For example, domestic violence victims had become more confident about seeking police assistance. ‘Other increases are trivial,’ the assistant commissioner was quoted as saying. ‘People fitting stolen number plates to their cars so they can drive off without paying for petrol, for example.’
That might be true, thought Murphy, but it doesn’t address the issue of resources.
There was movement on the other side of the glass and she folded the newspaper under her arm. Darren Muschamp was escorted into the interrogation room by a uniformed officer, who took up position in the corner. Then Sergeant Schiff and Inspector Challis entered, sliding onto chairs opposite Muschamp, Schiff saying: ‘So, Mr Muschamp, three abductions and rapes, one of which ended in murder.’
Muschamp was jiggling in his chair, occasionally sniffing then wiping a sleeve across his nostrils, his gaze flicking into all corners of the room. ‘Wasn’t three. Wasn’t even two. And I never murdered no one.’
Schiff, sending off sparks of energy, said, ‘Okay if I call you by your first name, Darren?’
He shrugged.
‘Are you feeling all right, Daz?’
He shrugged, not wanting to admit that he needed a fix.
‘Because our doctor cleared you as fit to be interviewed.’
‘Hit my head in the crash.’
Schiff narrowed her gaze. ‘I don’t see any serious damage.’
He had nothing to say to that.
‘You’ve been offered a lawyer. I’m renewing that offer.’
‘You got me, fair and square. I don’t need a lawyer.’
‘We do indeed have you fair and square. Abduction, assault with intent to rape, sexual assault and false imprisonment, between the hours of midnight last night and six o’clock this morning.’
‘I can do the time.’
Pam knew a little of Muschamp’s life story, and had read his criminal record. Grew up near Cranbourne, his mother a hairdresser, his father a taxi driver. Above average student, began an RMIT course but started taking drugs. Dropped out and returned to live among his old high school friends, many of them unemployed, some of them with criminal histories. Soon he was stealing cars and robbing houses to feed his drug habit.
Arrested in 2008, two years in jail for aggravated burglary. The victim, a twenty-six-year-old woman who lived alone, had awoken one night to find Muschamp stealing her plasma TV. He’d punched and kicked her-but Pam was wondering now if he’d also assaulted her sexually, and for whatever reason she hadn’t wanted to report it. Maybe that’s how he’d got his taste for rape? There was nothing else in his file.
She watched Schiff lean back, twirling a pen in her slender fingers. Gold glinted, and Pam could see, even in profile, the dangerous, full-wattage certainty in Jeannie’s face. A look she wore during sex, too.
‘Do the time, Darren? Life in prison?’
‘Get real.’
He wasn’t taking Schiff seriously. He was responding to her presence, but mostly watching Challis warily, as if waiting for a proper cop to start asking the questions. Challis was yet to speak or move, and Pam guessed he was stewing over the News-Pictorial story. It probably seemed intimidating to Muschamp.
‘Dazza,’ said Jeannie Schiff in a matey voice, ‘I’ve never been more real.’
‘Don’t call me that.’
‘Sorry, Darren, Mr Muschamp. You attended a tertiary institution, after all, so you’re a bright boy, deserving of my respect. And being a bright boy, you’re admitting the offences against Tina Knorr, without benefit of a lawyer, hoping we’ll leave it at that and not charge you with anything more serious, like rape or murder.’
‘Because I didn’t do no rape or murder.’
Schiff grinned. ‘So, Daz, you like wearing women’s clothing?’
Muschamp flushed, picked at a gouge in the table with a grimy nail. ‘A cop uniform is a cop uniform.’
‘Your cousin Mandy’s cop uniform, to be precise.’
Pam saw the tension in Inspector Challis’s shoulders. He’d given Scobie an earful at the morning briefing for not listing women whose uniforms had been stolen.
‘So what if I want to dress up as a cop?’ retorted Muschamp.
‘A bit more than that, Darren. You dressed as a police officer in order to give a false sense of security to women so that you could abduct and rape them.’