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  Chain of Evidence

  ( Inspector Challis - 4 )

  Garry Disher

  Garry Disher

  Chain of Evidence

  1

  Down here in Victoria he was the Rising Stars Agency, but he’d been Catwalk Casting up in New South Wales, and Model Miss Promotions in Queensland before that. Pete Duyker figured that he had another three months on the Peninsula before the cops and the Supreme Court caught up with him again, obliging him to move on.

  ‘Gorgeous,’ he said, firing off a few shots with the Nikon that had no film in it but was bulky and professional-looking, and emitted all of the expected clicks and whirs. For his other work he was strictly digital.

  The mother simpered. ‘Yeth,’ she said, reminding Pete of that old Carry On movie, the doctor with his stethoscope saying ‘Big breaths’ and the tarty teenager in his consulting room saying, ‘Yeth, and I’m only thixteen.’ He fired off a few more shots of the woman’s five-year-old. The brat’s lank hair scarcely shifted in the breeze on the top of Arthur’s Seat, the waters of the bay and the curve of the Peninsula spreading dramatically behind her, the smog-hazed towers of Melbourne faintly visible to the northwest. ‘Just gorgeous,’ he reiterated, snapping away.

  She wasn’t gorgeous. That didn’t matter. Plenty of them were gorgeous, and had factored in to his plans over the years. This one had skinny legs, knobbly knees, crooked teeth and a ghastly pink gingham outfit. It hadn’t taken Pete very long to figure out that a mother’s love is blind, her ambition for her youngster boundless.

  ‘Golden,’ Pete said now, fitting a wide-angle lens from one of his camera bags, the bag satisfyingly battered and worn, a working photographer’s gear. ‘That last shot was golden.’

  The mother beamed, a bony anorexic in skin-tight jeans, brilliant white T-shirt, huge, smoky shades and high-heeled sandals, her nod to the springtime balminess here on the Peninsula. Hers was the ugly face of motherhood, the greed naked. She was seeing a portfolio of flattering shots of her kid and the television work that would flow from it, all for a once-only, up-front charge of $395 plus a $75 registration fee. In about a week’s time she’d start to get antsy and call his mobile, but Pete had several mobile phones, all of them untraceable clones and throwaways.

  He looked at his watch. He’d led her to believe that he had to rush back to Melbourne now, to update a client’s portfolio, the kid who played little Bethany in that Channel 10 soap, ‘A Twist in Time’.

  ‘You’ll hear from me by next Friday,’ he lied.

  ‘Thankth,’ said the mother as the kid scratched her calf and Pete Duyker drove off in his white Tarago van, erasing them from his mind.

  The time was 2.45, a Thursday afternoon in late September. The primary school in Waterloo got out at 3.15, so he was cutting it fine. There was always Friday, and the weekend, but the latter was risky, and besides, the impulse was on him now, fine and urgent, so it had to be today.

  He drove on, heading across to the Westernport side of the Peninsula, winding through townships and farmland, many of the hillsides terraced with vineyards and orchards. Not entirely unspoilt, he thought, spotting an ugly great faux-Tuscan mansion, and here and there whole stands of gum trees looked dead. Pete racked his brains: ‘dieback’ it was called. Some kind of disease. But the thought didn’t dent his equilibrium, not on such a clear, still day, the air perfumed and the Peninsula giddy with springtime growth all around him: orchard blossom, weeds, tall grass going to seed beside the road, the bottlebrush flowering.

  He reached the coastal plain and soon he was in Waterloo. Pete was a bit of a sociologist. He liked to get the feel of a place before he went active, and he already knew Waterloo to be a town of extremes: rich and poor, urban and rural, privileged and disadvantaged. You didn’t see the wealthy very often. They lived in converted farmhouses or architectural nightmares a few kilometres outside town or on bluffs overlooking the bay. The poor lived in small brick and weatherboard houses behind the town’s couple of shopping streets, and in newer but still depressing housing estates on the town’s perimeter. You didn’t see the poor buying ride-on mowers, reins and bridles, lucerne hay or $30 bottles of the local pinot noir: they ate at McDonald’s, bought Christmas presents in the $2 shops, drove huge old inefficient V8s. They didn’t cycle, jog or attend the gym but presented to the local surgeries with long-untreated illnesses brought on by bad diets, alcohol and drug abuse, or injuries from hard physical labour in the nearby refinery or on some rich guy’s boutique vineyard. They were the extremes. There were a lot of people who ticked over nicely, thank you, because the state or local governments employed them, or because rich and poor alike depended on them.

  Earlier in the week Pete had driven into town via the road that skirted the mangrove flats, but today he drove right through the centre of Waterloo, slowly down High Street, reflecting, spotting changes and tendencies, making connections. He wouldn’t mind betting the new gourmet deli might flourish, but wasn’t surprised to see For Sale signs in the camping and electronic shops, not with a new K-Mart in the next block. It made him mad, briefly. His instincts were to support the little man.

  He drove on, passing a couple of pharmacies, a health food shop, bakery, ANZ bank, travel agency, Salvation Army op-shop, the library and shire offices, and finally High Street opened onto the foreshore reserve: extensively treed parkland, picnic tables, skateboard ramps, a belt of mangroves skirting the bay, and an area given over to the annual Waterloo Show, not busy today but all of the rides and sideshows would be in full swing on the weekend.

  Pete passed the Show, making for the far end of the reserve, where he parked beside a toilet block that he’d scouted out earlier in the week: grimy brick, odiferous, no disguising what it was. He went in, checked that he was alone, and changed into a grey wig, grey paste-on moustache, white lab coat and black horn rims with clear lenses. Then he drove to Trevally Street and parked where the sunlight through the plane trees cast transfiguring patterns over himself and his van. He wasn’t a smoker, but had been known to toss other men’s cigarette butts at a scene, to throw off the cops.

  Now Pete waited. He waited by the van’s open door, a clipboard in his hand. Time passed. Maybe she had detention, or after-school care, or was dawdling on the playground. He walked to the corner and back. Surely she’d be along soon, dreamily pumping the pedals of her bike, helmet crooked on her gleaming curls, backpack bumping against her downy spine.

  Of course, she might not come, but twice now he’d watched her take this detour after school. Rather than ride straight home she had made her way along Trevally and down to the waterfront reserve, to the magic of the Waterloo Show, with its dodgem cars, Ferris wheel, the Mad Mouse ride, the Ghost Train, fairy floss on a stick. The Show was a magnet to all kinds of kids, but Pete had chosen only one kid. He paced up and down, the van door partly open, listening to the bees in some nearby roses.

  But then she appeared. Just as he’d imagined. He stood and waited as she approached.

  Finally she was upon him and he stepped into her path, saying, ‘Your mum was taken ill. She wants me to take you to her.’

  She gave him a doubting frown, and quite rightly, too, but his lab coat spelt doctor, nurse or ambulance officer, and he was counting on her natural impulse to be at her mother’s side. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, glancing both ways along the street, ‘hop in.’ If necessary, he’d show her the fish-gutting knife.

  She dismounted prettily from the bike and her slender fingers played at her arched throat, undoing the buckle of her helmet. Pete was overcome. When she got into a fluster with the helmet, her backpack and a small electronic toy she had hanging from a strap around her neck, he itched to help her get untangled.

&
nbsp; ‘Would you like a drink?’ he said, when she was buckled into the seatbelt and bike, bag and helmet were on board. They’d both forgotten the toy, which lay on the grassy verge alongside a crooked brick fence. ‘Lemonade,’ he explained, shaking an old sports drink bottle. ‘Do you like lemonade?’

  She took the bottle. He watched the motions of her throat. ‘Thirsty girl,’ he said approvingly.

  He started the engine. He could see that she would start to fret before the Temazepam took effect. She’d want to know where her mother was and where he was taking her.

  But, astoundingly, that didn’t happen this time. ‘Oh, what a cute puppy,’ she gushed.

  Puppy? What puppy? Pete followed her gaze, and sure enough, some mutt of a dog lay curled on the old sleeping bag he kept in the back, one drowsy eye on the girl. It beat its tail sleepily, gave a shuddering sigh.

  Must have jumped in when my back was turned, Pete thought. He assessed things rapidly. If he ejected the dog now, he’d upset the girl. The dog would ease the girl’s mind. Ergo…

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘To see your mum.’

  Frown. ‘But she went up to Melbourne,’ the kid said, as if she’d only just remembered it. ‘To the races. She’ll be back late.’

  ‘She had an accident on the freeway,’ Pete said.

  The girl didn’t buy it. ‘Let me out,’ she mumbled, already feeling the Temazepam.

  They were clear of the leafy grove by now and on the access road, with cars, kids wobbling home on their bikes and a knot of people yarning and eating ice creams at the bench seats outside the only corner shop in this part of Waterloo. Pete concentrated. The girl, fading rapidly, turned heavy eyes to her side window and mouthed ‘Help me’ at Mrs Elliott, the library aide at her school, who had stopped by for a litre of milk. Mrs Elliott gave her a cheery wave and disappeared, and soon Pete had, too.

  That was Thursday.

  2

  Friday was Sergeant Ellen Destry’s first morning stretched out in Inspector Hal Challis’s bed. Challis wasn’t in the bed, but she lay there convinced that some trace or imprint of him lingered.

  Six o’clock, according to the bedside clock, and sufficiently light outside for her customary walk, but to hell with that. She closed her eyes, giving herself up to daydreams and fugitive sensations, and the real world retreated. Challis’s house was an old-style Californian bungalow on two acres of grass along a dirt back road a few kilometres inland of Waterloo, and he’d asked her to mow the grass while he was away, for the spring growth was particularly rampant this year, but the mowing could wait. The final summations in the Supreme Court trial of Nick Jarrett were expected later, but not until early afternoon. And so Ellen Destry lay there, barely moving.

  The next thing she knew it was 8.30 and she was awakening from a dream-filled, stupefying sleep. Her limbs were heavy, head dense, and surroundings alien. She groaned. When she moved it was sluggishly, and she couldn’t figure out how to adjust the shower temperature. She dozed under the stream of water, and then remembered that Challis’s house ran on rainwater, not mains water, so she cut the shower short. ‘Stop the world, I want to get off,’ she said to the misted mirror. Her neck wound looked raw and nasty, even though it had happened months ago, a graze from a hired killer’s 9 mm Browning.

  Her first breakfast in Challis’s house was scarcely any easier. The coffee came too weak from his famous machine and she couldn’t make sense of how he’d arranged his cupboards and drawers. Finally, as she spooned up her muesli-organic, from High Street Health, two hundred metres down from the police station in Waterloo-she realised that she missed the sounds of human habitation. She’d had neighbours when she’d lived in Penzance Beach, the next town around from Waterloo. She’d lived with her husband and daughter, for God’s sake. They’d created a comforting background murmur of voices, slammed doors and morning radio. But that house was sold now, she was estranged from her family, and reduced to this, housesitting for her boss.

  Standing in for him at work, too. Challis, head of Peninsula East’s Crime Investigation Unit, was away for a month, maybe longer. Family business. He seemed to think that she was perfectly capable of coping until he got back, but, in her worst moments, Ellen found herself biting her bottom lip. She felt an ever-present, low-level anxiety. Her everyday work as a CIU detective often involved up to a dozen cases at a time: some small, some middling, none very large, but the point was that she managed. But as temporary head of CIU, the job seemed enormous. She just knew that her male colleagues expected her to fail. Maybe I’m depressed, she thought. She should speak to the naturopath who gave free consultations in High Street Health, go on a course of St John’s wort.

  She glanced at Challis’s wall calendar, hanging next to a cork pin board, hoping that its rows of unmarked days might give her a sense of security. False security. She moved her gaze to the photos pinned to the board. They showed Challis with the old aeroplane he was restoring. A weird hobby. Still, it was a hobby. What interests did she have, outside of work?

  Sometimes it’s the little things that set the world right again. She moved her breakfast things out onto the deck, where the morning sun drenched her. Presently the wood ducks wandered into view, a male, a female and seven ducklings-down from ten ducklings, owing to a fox, according to Hal. They paid her no mind but foraged through the flowering grasses that passed for a lawn out here, far from town.

  Another reason not to do the mowing yet. She stretched, wondering if Challis liked to breakfast in the sun. She tried to picture it. She saw toast, coffee and a newspaper. Curiously, she didn’t see a woman. There had been women, but he sat alone, and she was thinking about that when the phone rang. It was Scobie Sutton, one of the detective constables under her command. ‘Ellen? We’ve got a missing child.’

  Ellen wanted to say, ‘So?’ Kids went missing every day. It was a job for uniform, not CIU. Instead she said, ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘Katie Blasko, ten years old, missing since yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday? When were we notified?’

  ‘Uniform were notified an hour ago.’

  Ellen closed her eyes. She would never fathom how careless, vicious or stupid some parents could be. ‘Be there as soon as I can.’

  Katie Blasko lived in a house on Trevally Street in Waterloo, a few blocks from the mangrove flats and the yacht basin. The house was small, a yellowish brick veneer structure with a tiled roof and rotting eaves. Ellen met Scobie at the front gate. The detective was wearing one of the funereal suits that exaggerated his earnestness and awkward, stick figure shape. Two uniformed constables, Pam Murphy and John Tankard, were doorknocking in the distance.

  ‘What can you tell me?’ Ellen said.

  Scobie flipped open his notebook and began a long, sonorous account of his findings. Katie Blasko had attended her primary school the previous day, but hadn’t been seen after that. ‘There was some mix up. She was supposed to stay at a friend’s house last night.’

  Ellen copied the relevant names, addresses and phone numbers. She glanced at her watch. ‘Head over to the school, check with her teachers and classmates. I’ll catch up with you as soon as I’ve finished here.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Ellen stepped through a little gate and up to the front door. The woman who answered was thin, nervy, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. She looked wrung out and pleaded, ‘Have you found her?’

  Ellen shook her head. ‘Not yet, but you mustn’t worry, it’s only a matter of time. Why don’t we go inside and you can fill me in.’

  ‘I already told the police everything. A guy called Scobie.’

  Her voice was peevish and distraught, not that Ellen was blaming her, exactly. ‘If you could just go over it again, Mrs Blasko,’ she said gently.

  Like, why did you wait so long before reporting your daughter missing?

  Donna Blasko’s sitting room was a pokey space dominated by a puffed-up sofa and a wide-screen TV. A six-year-old girl sprawled o
n the floor, stretching tiny, rubbery dresses and pants over the unresponsive plastic limbs of Polly Pocket dolls, alternately humming and talking to them. A cat twitched its tail on the carpet under a chunky coffee table. And, as Scobie had said, there was also a man, Donna Blasko’s de facto, Justin Pedder. Ellen wasn’t the least bit surprised to see that he was stocky, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with a shaven head to complete the picture. If you’re a blue-collar male aged between twenty and forty in Australia, that’s how you cloned yourself. You had no imagination at all. Nor did your parents, who named you Justin, Darren or Brad.

  God I’m in a sour mood today, Ellen thought.

  Donna sat beside Pedder, saying gracelessly, ‘This is Justin.’

  Ellen nodded. She’d be running his name through the databases as soon as she got back to the station. As if he saw that in her eyes and wanted to deflect her, he scowled. ‘You should be out there looking for Katie instead of questioning us again.’

  He might have been expected to say that. It was in the script. Ellen stared at a yellow lava lamp on an empty shelf and said, ‘I have constables doorknocking the area at this very moment. Now, according to Constable Sutton, you were both up in the city yesterday afternoon, correct?’

  ‘Spring carnival,’ said Pedder.

  Horse racing. ‘Back any winners?’

  Pedder gave her a humourless smile. ‘You want to see our betting slips, right? To prove we were there?’

  Ellen went on. ‘Katie has her own key?’

  ‘We work, except for Thursdays,’ Pedder said. ‘Katie always lets herself in.’

  ‘She makes herself a snack,’ said Donna, ‘does her homework and watches TV until we get home. The TV goes off then. She’s not allowed to watch it after dinner. She’s a good girl.’

  And we’re good parents, thought Ellen. ‘And last night?’