At 4 o’clock that afternoon, John Tankard arrived at the Waterloo cop shop, feeling pretty rested. After leaving Cree in the Fiddlers Creek yesterday he’d driven out to Berwick, where his parents and little sister lived. He’d downed a couple of coldies with the old man-who’d been a copper in London before bringing his young family out to Australia, and was now groundskeeper of a golf course-and ‘helped’ Natalie with her Bog People homework project, Nat grabbing the mouse and keyboard from him because he was so slow and clumsy, and so fascinated. Then he got stuck into his mother’s shepherd’s pie-she hadn’t wanted to migrate, and still clung to the things that brought comfort and reminders of home-and was tucked up in his own bed by eleven o’clock. He’d slept in this morning, knowing he wasn’t on duty until this afternoon.
He was nursing a coffee in the canteen when Pam Murphy- looking good in jeans and a close-fitting white T-shirt-was in his face, saying, ‘Where’s Andy?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Well, has he come in yet? Tonight could get messy and I need to brief you guys.’
Tank wanted to say, Don’t take it out on me, I’m not the one who’s late. He drank his coffee.
‘Could you find him for me?’
Feeling maligned, Tank went looking. ‘Seen Andy Cree?’ he said, in the canteen, the carpark, the sergeants’ common room, the front desk, the gym. No sign of Cree. All he found was some guys watching porn in a forgotten storeroom in a back corner of the police complex.
‘You fucking morons,’ he said.
A guy from the Traffic Management unit, three probationers, and the guy who washed dishes in the canteen. They were huddled around a DVD/VCR combo, watching five guys jacking off onto a kneeling woman. They all turned half lidded eyes on him, sleepily aroused.
‘Turn that crap off. Get back to work,’ Tank said, feeling like someone’s father or teacher.
‘Come on, Tank,’ drawled the guy from Traffic, ‘pull up a pew and pull on your pecker.’
They all sniggered, arranged around the screen on milk crates. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and something thick and undefinable, as if some ugliness were exuding from their pores. John Tankard, who for years had been the bad boy of Waterloo, found himself snarling like one of his old sergeants. ‘All of you, back to work.’
The kitchen guy and the probationers scuttled away, edging around Tank, who filled the doorway and watched expressionlessly as the guy from Traffic made slow work of turning off the machine and boxing up the DVD. Tank guessed they’d been watching stuff that had been seized on a raid. ‘Seen Andy Cree around?’
‘Not me.’
Tank, feeling even more like the wise old man of policing, sighed and went back upstairs to report to Murph. He tracked her down to the CIU briefing room, where photographs of Lachlan Roe, Dirk Roe, the Landseer School, a teenage girl and a man he realised was Ollie Hindmarsh, the local member of parliament, were arranged on whiteboards. And there was Cree, standing with her at the far end of the briefing table, near a stack of folders and leaflets. Before he could stop himself, Tank retorted, ‘Jesus, Andy, I’ve been looking everywhere for you.’
Cree gave him a mild look of inquiry. ‘Well, here I am, John.’
Tank managed to keep his trap shut. But what really pissed him off then was Murph saying briskly, ‘Gentlemen,’ as she got down to business. The word and its delivery didn’t feel right. The old Pam, who until a few months ago had been his patrol partner, would never have sounded like this, as if she’d had a senior-officer transplant. Plus she was barely noticing him, and in his dim way he realised that her body was taut, humming, and it certainly wasn’t him doing that to her. Fucking Cree. Tank jerked out a chair and plonked himself down and folded his arms, making it clear he didn’t have all day.
No one noticed. ‘This is Lachlan Roe, our assault victim,’ Murph said, handing them each a photograph. ‘Tonight, as we keep an eye on the schoolies, I’d like you to show it to everyone you meet.’
Cree got there quickly, the prick. ‘CIU thinks Roe was hanging around the schoolies? What, selling drugs? Buying? Looking for pussy?’
She smiled at him. ‘Just a possibility. Your main task tonight is to keep an eye on the kids. It’s the eclipse, and they’re all hyped up about it. Maybe the sight of a red moon will bliss them out and we can all go home to bed early, maybe it will stir them up.’
Her gaze lingered. Cree gazed back. To break up the love-fest, Tank said, ‘So how do we play it?’
She turned to him reluctantly and said, ‘Mingle, John. Let yourselves be seen. Talk to the kids, let them know you’ve got their backs if they get into strife. Warn off the toolies, step in if an argument looks like brewing, confiscate car keys from kids who are too drunk or high to drive. And turn a blind eye to minor infringements. Don’t make unnecessary paperwork for yourselves. Let the kids have their fun, so long as no one gets hurt-schoolie or local.’
She swung around to Cree again, as if seeking his okay. ‘Any questions?’
‘How do you mean, mingle?’ Tank demanded. ‘We’re coppers. We look like coppers. We’re old, to them.’
With a quick glance at the ceiling and down again, Murph said, ‘That’s the whole point. We’re not there to spy, we’re there to give help and comfort. Be a presence. Get chatting. Give advice. If anyone needs food or water or money, provide it.’
‘We get reimbursed?’
Pam merely smiled. Tank said in disgust, ‘Terrific.’
‘I’m talking about ten bucks for a bus fare, Tank, not your annual salary.’
She was glancing at Cree. Tank felt very lonely in the world. ‘Whatever.’
By late that same afternoon, Ellen Destry had finished at the Landseer School. She’d re-questioned the library staff and anyone who’d taught Zara Selkirk, learning only that the girl and her two Facebook friends were no better or worse than other spoilt-brat bullies who’d passed through the school. Ellen heard stories of binge drinking, drug taking and sexual romps, and the careless, unreflective and vulgar culture that allowed it to happen. Moorhouse said, ‘I’m a generation older than many of these parents. It’s as if they don’t know how to be parents, how to apply discipline. Of course, they’re also too rich and too busy. Needless to say, we’ve placed filters on the school’s computers, banning access to sites like Facebook.’
Good luck, thought Ellen. The kids have home computers. They can access software that will get through any filter a school or a parent cares to install.
Next she drove to a small brick house beside the railway line in Baxter, where the spring weeds were rampant and Merle Richardson spoke in a defeated whisper: ‘I just want to forget about it and get on with my life.’
Ellen said gently, ‘How did you feel when the school offered an apology, to be mediated by the chaplain?’
Richardson screwed a damp handkerchief between her knuckly fingers. ‘Too little, too late.’
‘Did you resent the chaplain’s role? Could he have been more supportive of you?’
‘I know what you’re implying. I want nothing to do with an apology. My brother urged me to get legal advice, and the lawyer told me that accepting an apology would compromise my chances of getting a financial settlement from the school.’
‘Did you tell the school that you were seeking legal advice?’
‘My lawyer did.’
‘Did you cancel the meeting with the chaplain?’
‘My lawyer did.’
‘Did the chaplain try to change your mind?’
‘I’ve had nothing to do with the school or anyone in it since the abuse happened.’
Ellen nodded, wondering if she could charge Zara Selkirk and her friends with stalking, misuse of a telecommunications device, and manufacturing pornography. ‘Okay, thank you,’ she said, hoping that Merle Richardson got millions in compensation.
She was trudging toward her car, head down, when she saw that she was missing a wheel trim. She cursed, blaming the rough dirt roads near Hal’s house-her house. Two weeks earlier, she’d lost another wheel trim, finding it again on one of her walks. Could she keep losing and finding wheel trims?
By now it was early evening. Before starting the engine she called Challis. It went to voicemail. ‘It’s only me,’ she said. ‘Heading for home. See you when I see you.’
It was often like this: they wanted to see each other, eat with each other, spend the evening together, but always the job’s obligations intervened, the overdue reports, pending phone calls, last-minute interruptions.
As Ellen drove away she could feel Merle Richardson behind a curtain, watching, waiting, feeling unsafe. Distracted by feelings of impotence, she at first didn’t realise that she’d made a wrong turning, one that took her up into the southern edge of Frankston. She drove past little houses, parks and shops, past kids on bikes and commuters returning from the station or the city, and wondered how it would be to live like that again, amid neighbours. Quite a few of the houses were for sale. Could she afford to buy one? Did she want to live here?
More to the point, did she want to live alone? Would that hurt Hal? Could she hurt him?
She corrected her direction at the next roundabout. The traffic was streaming out of Frankston and boxed her in. She was deeply fatigued, and on the outskirts of Somerville saw a broken-backed magpie in the waning light, its bewildered mate hopping out of the path of her car with what seemed to Ellen to be a look of reproach and appeal.
Challis had ended up spending the entire afternoon with McQuarrie. He returned to Waterloo feeling fired up, wanting to talk to Ellen. But she wasn’t in CIU, and, instead of driving straight home, he made the mistake of checking his e-mails and message slips. Soon evening settled and he was returning phone calls from the media and handling a stack of paperwork. His in tray, like the top of his desk in general, was overflowing with material from numerous cases, including the Roe assault: forensic reports, investigation and crime-scene worksheets; witness lists and statements; field notes; sketches, photographs and cased videos; interview transcriptions; and ongoing investigative narratives, which were updated from time to time as needed. No murder book just now, thank God.
But then he came across an internal alert notifying him that one of his officers had accessed the Law Enforcement Database that morning. It was a touchy issue: when the system was first set up, bored coppers had used it to look into the private lives of TV stars and celebrity footballers, and before long the abuse had grown more serious. One officer had been demoted for accumulating information on his estranged wife’s new lover, a handful of others admonished for searching the files of a parliamentary candidate who’d campaigned on the issue of police corruption, and one detective sacked for leaking LED material on one drug dealer to a rival dealer.
Challis didn’t know why Pam Murphy had logged on, only that an audit had triggered automatically when she logged out. He didn’t doubt that she’d searched the database as part of her official duties, but she hadn’t advised him first and now he was obliged to follow it up.
He leaned back, lacing his fingers behind his head. He was a very private man. He hated for anyone to know anything about him, but they did know things, and there was little he could do to control the flow of information. At the same time, his daily work demanded that he uncover people’s secrets. The issue of privacy ceased to exist, in many investigations. Achieving justice, and maintaining public safety, demanded that he dig up, expose and use the things that people wanted to hide. It was another illustration of the great divide: us and them, the police and the general mass of people. That’s why access to the LED database had to be tightly controlled. A lesser man than Challis might want to use it to learn if his new lover had secret debts, for example, or if his lover’s daughter was involved in the drug scene.
Meanwhile, who was Hugh Ebeling, and why had Pam Murphy been looking into his affairs?
The phone rang again and the front desk said, ‘Sorry, Inspector, but we’ve got a missing person and there’s no one else available.’
Challis groaned. Mis per cases were a headache. A spouse, partner or child might have very good reasons for disappearing, and police attention might make things worse for them. Many returned of their own accord, or at least made contact, but some feared they’d be harmed if they did. Of course, others were missing because they’d been murdered and their bodies disposed of. ‘Details?’
‘Best if you came down and talked to the gentleman concerned.’
The time was eight o’clock.