While Challis and Murphy drank their coffee that Wednesday morning, Ellen Destry was standing in the grounds of the Landseer School with the deputy head, watching as buses, BMWs and Range Rovers pulled in, unloaded and pulled out again. She saw one Chinese face and one Indian, but the school community was pretty much a monoculture. The Landseer School for Blonde Children, she thought.
‘That’s Zara,’ Moorhouse said, pointing suddenly.
Tall, fair, faintly voluptuous, gloriously self-absorbed. Ellen began to move, saying from the corner of her mouth, ‘I’ll need you to sit in while I interview her.’
‘I’d have insisted anyway,’ Moorhouse said.
Ellen nodded. It was playing out as she wanted it to play out. It would look bad if she questioned Zara Selkirk without an appropriate adult present. Moorhouse had status but was not, it seemed, in thrall to the money, power and prestige that surrounded the school; and the school was a better environment for Ellen’s purposes than Zara’s home, where she might find herself obstructed by a parent or a lawyer.
Besides, she wanted to ambush the kid.
Five minutes later, they were in Moorhouse’s office, an environment of papery smells and disordered bookshelves and files, Zara Selkirk saying, ‘I was sick yesterday. I brought a note from my mother.’
‘Cut the crap,’ Ellen said. ‘You wagged school. You went up to the city after school on Monday afternoon, attended a concert that evening, and spent the night in your family’s Southbank apartment. A day’s shopping with your mother yesterday, and back home last night.’
Zara Selkirk sulked. ‘What’s it to you?’
‘I’m not a truant officer. I’m investigating the assault on the school chaplain.’
‘You can’t pin that on me. I wasn’t even here.’
‘But you were at school on Monday. Yours was the only appointment in his diary.’
‘So?’
‘So tell me about it.’
‘Not fair.’
‘Zara,’ said the deputy head, ‘the sooner you answer the sergeant’s questions the sooner you can return to class.’
There was a moment when the girl seemed almost to weigh these options. Her face cleared and she said, ‘Because of some stuff that wasn’t even my idea I had to like you know, apologise to some old… the library lady. Like she’s not even a teacher or anything.’
Ellen said distinctly, ‘Zara, you and your friends set up a fake Facebook page that caused immense distress to an innocent middle-aged woman who’s not in a position to defend herself
‘Well it was a joke. She should learn to take jokes.’
‘Why did you meet with Mr Roe on Monday?’
‘He was like the go-between.’
‘He was the mediator between you and Mrs Richardson?’
Zara Selkirk said, ‘Yeah,’ as though everything was obvious and why didn’t Ellen get it.
‘But she didn’t attend?’
‘Bitch went to a lawyer.’
‘Zara,’ warned Moorhouse.
The girl’s face grew drowsy with satisfaction. ‘Well she is.’
Ellen stepped in. ‘What did you and Mr Roe talk about?’
With a twist of her mouth, Zara Selkirk said, ‘Pervert. He said I should write to her but mainly he was interested in my tits.’
Ellen, remembering what Hal had discovered about the Roe brothers’ upbringing, visualised the scene. Lachlan Roe, forty years old, the Landseer chaplain but an unloved or unlovely man, waits in his poky office for the only appointment of the day. The Year 12s are no longer around, they’re off enjoying Schoolies Week-not that they’d ever sought his advice or counselling anyway. It’s a long morning. All of his mornings are long. Maybe he wanders the corridors, looking for lost souls, a staff member perhaps, but no one wants him. He returns to his office and logs on to a pornography site or his brother’s blog or reads and sends e-mails.
Then soon after lunch there’s a knock on his door. ‘Come,’ he calls, in his smooth, disarming way.
The sixteen-year-old who slips into his room has the breasts of a woman and the face of a child. The chaplain notices these things in that order. She’s wearing aspects of the Landseer girls’ uniform, a white blouse over a long charcoal skirt, so he can’t assess her legs, but her wrists and hands are soft and plump. He takes in her hair, which is the kind of blonde that is almost white, her expressive lips and her body language, which both entices and expresses contempt for him. She doesn’t want to be in the same room with him.
‘How did he seem to you?’ said Ellen now.
‘Who?’
Ellen closed and opened her eyes and said carefully, ‘What kind of mood was Mr Roe in?’
‘A dirty-old-man mood.’
Lachlan Roe is slender, of medium height, and believes he has an air of boyish charm. He’s the same age as the child’s father but he’s not uncool, like most fathers. He’s youthful looking in his black silk T-shirt and grey linen jacket with the cuffs turned back.
The jacket that later collected another person’s mucus.
He lets Zara wait on his strip of carpet for a long moment, then loads his face and body with soulful gentleness and murmurs, ‘Hello, Zara, please take a seat.’
She’s a gawkily lovely teenager, and an old ugliness stirs inside him. There in his sterile office the drowsy mid-November sun streams in, banding the threadbare carpet, the girl’s lap and one forearm, her fine hairs fairly glowing, so that he swallows and coughs nervously.
Ellen could see it all. ‘Was there any specific thing Mr Roe did or said that made you feel uncomfortable?’
‘You think I attacked him. I told you, I was at a concert.’
‘I know that. I’m trying to get a feeling for the kind of man Mr Roe was…is.’
Zara considered this, looking for traps. ‘If you think I paid someone to attack him, well I didn’t. And my dad didn’t do it, ‘cause he’s away.’
‘Zara, what did Mr Roe do and say?’
‘He goes, do my parents know why I’m here? I go, yes, they said I had to apologise to old Merle. He goes, “Well, Zara, they are your parents, one does have a duty to one’s parents.” Moron.’
‘Zara,’ said Moorhouse.
‘Well, it’s not fair. He said I had all these unworldly people around me and I was like, defiled by them.’
‘Defiled? What did he mean by that?’
‘I told him it wasn’t my idea, the Facebook thing, it was Amber and Megan. He said purity comes from separating yourself from defiling influences and was I a lesbian. Pervert.’
Ellen thought she was probably right. ‘What else?’
‘He got this mad look on his face. He said he could see my future. Drugs, sex, backpacking in Europe and stuff.’
‘Backpacking in Europe?’
‘He was barking mad. He said I would meet some guy with caramel skin and liquid eyes who would ask me to deliver a package.’
‘What package?’
‘How should I know? I’m supposed to listen to this guy?’
‘What else? Did he touch you?’
Zara shuddered. ‘No way. Just told me as chaplain he understood the teenage mindset. I said, Yeah, but do you have any like, formal qualifications?’
Ellen and Moorhouse exchanged a smile. ‘What did he say?’
‘He said, forget further study, university is too narrowing, forget travel, I’ll meet drug couriers and terrorists. He said it’s my duty to get married and have children and honour my parents. “You young people come to me with your tight clothes and your soul-damaging mobile phones, wanting Godless freedoms,”‘ Zara said mincingly, hooking her fingers in quotation marks around the chaplain’s words.
‘What then?’
With an apologetic glance at Moorhouse, Zara Selkirk said, ‘I cleared out, sorry.’
‘He didn’t raise the issue of your apology to Mrs Richardson?’
‘He said, “I am the elect,” like he was God or Jesus or something. I was a bit scared, actually. He was so weird.’
‘Did you tell anyone about the session?’
Zara looked away. ‘No.’
‘No one?’
‘Like, who would believe me?’ Zara said.