T
hey were country people: decent, bewildered, fearing the worst. They’d been expecting Trina to arrive some time on Christmas Eve. It’s a long drive from Frankston to Shepparton, so, although they’d been worried when their daughter hadn’t arrived, they’d told themselves to expect her after they’d gone to bed, or Christmas morning at the latest, though they’d have been cross with her if she had left it that late. She’d always been a bit wilful and inconsiderate. Not malicious, mind you, just always went her own way. But when she hadn’t arrived by ten o’clock, they’d phoned. No answer. Then, remembering that two girls had been abducted and murdered, they’d phoned the police in Frankston, who sent a divisional van to their daughter’s address.
Trina Unger lived in a small, worn-looking home unit. The doors were locked, the blinds drawn. The police had broken in eventually, but the place was empty. Trina Unger’s bed was unmade. A half-packed weekender bag sat on the end of the bed. The other bedroom had been hastily tidied. There was a flatmate, according to the Ungers. They didn’t know where she was. At her parents’ for Christmas?-as Trina should have been.
Then at lunchtime Trina Unger’s car was found on a lonely stretch of the Old Peninsula Highway, just ten kilometres from Frankston. All of the windows had been smashed in.
Now it was three in the afternoon. The parents had arrived from Shepparton, and Challis and Sutton were interviewing them in their daughter’s sitting room. The walls were close and faintly grubby, the ceiling too low, and the overstuffed, mismatched op-shop armchairs crowded the small, tufted orange carpet. The place smelt damp, despite the heat of summer.
‘The second bedroom?’ Challis said.
‘That would be Den’s,’ Mrs Unger said. ‘Denise.’
‘Do you know where we can contact her?’
‘Afraid not.’
Challis nodded to Sutton, who stood and made for the bedroom. All of the detective constable’s movements were slow and automatic, his bony face drawn, his eyes ready to brim, as though he could not get the image of the cot-death baby out of his head.
Challis turned to the Ungers again. ‘We found your daughter’s car.’
Kurt Unger was sitting upright, his fists bunched neatly on his large knees. The words wouldn’t come clearly, so he coughed and tried again. ‘Yes.’
‘On the Old Peninsula Highway,’ Challis continued. ‘That’s in the opposite direction from Shepparton. And she’d started packing, but hadn’t finished. Have you any idea where she might have been going?’
‘None,’ Freda Unger said.
‘Does she have a boyfriend? Could he have called her?’
Freda Unger made a wide gesture with both arms. ‘Who knows? We never met any, if she did have boyfriends. But she was young still.’
‘Twenty?’
‘Twenty-one in March.’
Kurt Unger coughed. He said, ‘I overheard a policeman say the windows were broken on her car.’
Challis cursed under his breath. ‘Yes.’
‘She locked her doors but he broke her windows with a rock and dragged her out,’ Kurt Unger said fixedly. Nothing moved, only his bottom jaw.
His wife crumpled. ‘Oh, Kurt, don’t.’
‘We don’t know what happened,’ Challis said. ‘My feeling is, it’s not related to her disappearance. All of the windows were smashed, suggesting vandals, and the radio had been ripped out and the boot forced open. Someone saw her car there and decided on the spur of the moment to break in.’
‘But what was she doing there?’
‘It’s possible your daughter’s flatmate will know,’ Challis said. ‘We’re tracking her down now.’
As he spoke, Scobie Sutton entered, holding an envelope in his long fingers. The flap was open; there was a letter inside. ‘It’s from this Denise character’s mother,’ he said. ‘There’s a return address on the back, somewhere in East Bentleigh. Do you know where the phone is, Mrs Unger?’
‘The kitchen.’
‘Right.’
‘Excuse me,’ Challis said, and he joined Sutton in the kitchen nook. ‘Scobie,’ he muttered, ‘if the girl’s there, ask her what Trina’s car was doing on the highway.’
Sutton looked as though he’d just remembered his manners. He held out the handset. ‘You want to make the call, boss?’
‘No, I didn’t mean that. Ask her the obvious questions, Trina’s movements over the past couple of days, any boyfriend, was she aware Trina was missing, that kind of thing, but we must know about the car.’
Challis returned to the sitting room. The parents were whispering to each other. Reluctant to intrude, he crossed the room to the front door, stepped outside, and wandered across to the police car that had been parked in the driveway for most of the morning. A uniformed constable sat in the driver’s seat with the door open, eating a sandwich. She swallowed hurriedly. ‘Do you need me inside again, sir?’
‘Not just yet. They’re holding up for the moment.’
‘Sir, we just got word a walkman and a sweatband have been found near the car.’
‘How near?’
‘A few hundred metres away.’
Jogging, Challis thought. That’s what she was doing there. But when? Yesterday? The day before? Why hadn’t the flatmate noticed her missing?
Sutton joined him. He tried for some humour. ‘Denise has been hitting the Christmas champagne pretty hard. Hard to get any sense out of her. But she said Trina Unger likes to go jogging on the highway. Used to jog around the park, but got scared off by a flasher a few months ago, and now jogs on the highway because it’s quiet.’
‘What time of day?’
‘Early morning. Daybreak.’
‘Never in the evening?’
‘Not according to Denise.’
‘When did she last see Trina?’
‘Friday night. On Saturday she went to stay with her parents in East Bentleigh to help her mother get ready for Christmas. She noticed that Trina hadn’t come back from her run, but didn’t think any more about it.’
‘Boyfriend?’
‘She didn’t know of one.’
Challis stared unseeingly over the rooftops. Young men and women left home to lead their separate, secret lives, and some of them didn’t make it. ‘Scobie, go home, spend some time with your wife and kid. I’ll see you tomorrow.’