Challis bought a ham and salad roll for lunch and ate it in his office. He’d spent all morning driving from house to house, office to office, trying to get a fix on Lachlan Roe and the First Ascensionists. He heard the same story, over and over again: ‘Lachlan is a lovely, lovely man…Can’t think who would want to hurt him like that…I hope you find the monster who did it…’
Dirk? No one had much time for Dirk. But Dirk was young and foolish rather than evil. Looked up to his brother.
No one could back up the aunt’s claim that the boys were twisted.
It was a relief to hear the phone ring and have Superintendent McQuarrie summon him to regional headquarters in Frankston. ‘As soon as you can, inspector.’
‘Sir.’
The old, peremptory McQuarrie. Challis finished eating and clattered down the stairs and out to the carpark. Maybe it’s going to be Outer Woop-Woop for Ellen or me after all, he thought, as he steered onto Frankston-Flinders Road.
Twenty minutes later he was threading around a series of shopping-centre carparks, looking for somewhere to leave his car. Frankston, a suburb on the outermost southeastern edge of the sprawl that was Melbourne, was the kind of place that says there is no such thing as too much commerce. He found a slot in the baking sun, trotted across a busy street to the complex that housed the police and the magistrates’ courts and took the lift to the top floor.
Superintendent McQuarrie answered, ‘Come,’ to Challis’s knock. Challis found him sitting behind a vast desk, looking small and tidy-in full dress uniform today, for some reason, loads of braid, chrome and brass hanging from his chest and shoulders, as if to diminish the size of the desk and inflate his own. An open laptop sat before him; beside him was a portable screen, the Victoria Police logo shimmering there in hazy focus.
‘Inspector.’
‘Sir,’ countered Challis.
‘I know you’re a busy man. I won’t waste more of your time than is necessary.’
So not the sack; a demotion or a transfer? wondered Challis.
‘In order to achieve benchmark aims and improve forward efficiency, I’m proposing three new initiatives for the Peninsula.’
Challis gazed at the super, wanting to say: You summoned me all the way up here to listen to some gobbledegook? Besides, he was pretty certain that the initiatives had come from Force Command, not McQuarrie.
McQuarrie began to peck at the keys of his laptop as if it might bite him. ‘First, a specialist sex crimes unit.’
Well, Challis would welcome that, they all would, but the image that swam into view on the screen showed a crime scene, detectives with clipboards and shirtsleeves standing around watching forensic experts in disposable oversuits and overshoes searching on and around a body on a stretch of waste ground.
‘Wrong slide,’ said McQuarrie crossly. All right, let’s leave the sex crimes unit for now. Another proposal is for a self-contained IRU, or initial response unit, which will attend crime scenes and carry out all the tasks currently undertaken by several disparate individuals. It will consist of thirteen officers: a sergeant, eleven senior constables and one constable. It will be solely responsible for securing the scene, recording it via photos and video, and collecting evidence such as fingerprints, DNA and fibres. This evidence will then be passed on to the relevant divisions for analysis-the fingerprint division and the Forensic Science Centre, for example. Once the information has been recorded and analysed, it will be handed on to CIU for further investigation.’
Challis had mixed feelings. What if the evidence got lost? What could be done about the inevitable delays when there were three stages in the process? Would an officer in such a unit feel ‘loyal’ to the evidence he or she had collected, and want to follow through? Then again, it would free a CIU head like himself to manage targeted operations more simply, and also free up uniformed police, who often got bogged down at crime scenes and spent hours standing around.
But he didn’t say any of this. He wanted to see what else McQuarrie had in mind.
‘Any questions?’
‘The idea has merit, sir.’
McQuarrie narrowed his gaze at Challis, expecting a trap. When it didn’t come, he said, ‘Right, let’s see the next slide.’
It was a breakdown of the proposed unit, with boxes and arrows. McQuarrie skipped over it. Another image appeared: a roomful of desks, computers and analysts.
‘Right, Project Nimbus. As you know, this has been trialled successfully in other regions. Briefly, tactical intelligence officers will be employed to target particular crimes, monitor the movements of known criminals and their associates, including those recently released from prison, and identify geographical hotspots on the Peninsula.’
Challis said, ‘An extension of the work currently done by the collators, sir?’
McQuarrie frowned. ‘If you like. But the collators are still only useful after the event. Our aim is to become increasingly strategic and proactive.’
He began to count on his fingers. ‘Imagine being able to identify crime and traffic hotspots and place officers there before there’s trouble. Or being able to anticipate the intentions of a loose confederacy of individuals. Or knowing when certain types of offences are likely to occur.’
This would have helped Ellen and Murph with Schoolies Week, Challis thought.
‘We need to make informed decisions based on evidence,’ McQuarrie said. ‘What we have now is a culture in which information is not shared between stations and districts, where a vital piece of intelligence is locked inside a computer somewhere, and young or lazy officers fail to complete or write reports, or do follow-ups.’
Challis quite liked the idea. What kinds of data would he log into such a system? Environmental factors, certainly. For example, drought. With drought came the theft of water and livestock, and increased social distress leading to domestic violence, suicide and threats to public officials. He went into a kind of musing daydream, staring past McQuarrie’s head at the sky outside the window, the wispy cloud and scrappy birds flying past. Economic factors like recession, he thought; there’s always an associated increase in property crimes. And ethnic clustering. One of the Frankston inspectors had told him what a headache it was, educating young Sudanese men: they reacted aggressively to being arrested or questioned by female officers, for example, and believed that a learner’s permit was a full driving licence and one car registration payment covered them forever.
And Challis thought about the recent spate of car break-ins around the little three-screen Waterloo cinema: was he correct in thinking they occurred mostly on Tuesday nights, when the cinema offered half-price tickets and the adjacent carparks and streets were full?
But would Ellen want to head such a task?-assuming that’s where McQuarrie was going with this meeting. Challis couldn’t see it. She’d want to be more hands-on in any new prospect being mooted for her.
‘Finally,’ McQuarrie said, irritably searching for the correct slide, ‘we come to sex crimes.’