Take Out (4 page)

Fowler drew himself up, on full alert since he’d discovered he wasn’t dealing with an easily bullied member of the public. ‘You were at the house next door when we arrived. What were you doing there?’

She could have lied, could have told him she’d been admiring the last of the bulbs in Mrs Hardegan’s front garden, but to hell with self-preservation. Telling the truth and risking an official reprimand was worth every gram of pleasure she’d get from stirring up this self-important prat. ‘I was talking to Mrs Hardegan, the woman who raised the alarm.’

Fowler rubbed his square chin. ‘If you’re involved with the cyber predator team, you must be with Sex Crimes. This is way out of your jurisdiction, Hooper. You’ve already breached police procedure; you should have waited here for me as instructed. How am I to know how you handled the witness, what false memories you might have sown in her mind?’

Stevie sighed—so much for amiable cooperation. ‘I had to do something while I waited; you took long enough. Anyway, you won’t get much sense from her. She’s had a stroke and has trouble talking. I suggest you start with the other people in the street. Get a decent description of the couple and find out if there are any family members who can tell you anything before you start phoning the hospitals and stirring up a media frenzy. And now, if you excuse me, I have a call to make.’

She glared back at Fowler, challenging him to stop her as she punched Skye’s number into her phone. A vanload of cops pulled up alongside the Pavels’ driveway and he was called away.

Stevie listened gravely to Skye’s report on the doctor’s findings and told her a detective was on the way to interview her at the hospital. While they spoke Stevie watched Fowler brief the newly arrived cops and another plainclothes officer.

Toward the end of her conversation, Stevie was hit by a thought that made her laugh out loud.

‘I don’t see what’s so funny. The baby’s condition is serious.’ Skye sounded miffed.

‘Sorry, Skye, I’m not laughing at anything you said, I was just watching the sergeant marshal his troops. I thought I’d seen him before, and now I remember where.’ She pulled herself together. ‘Have you ever seen an Action Man doll?’

Despite Stevie’s intentions of returning home, she felt uneasy about the way the investigation was being handled and couldn’t bring herself to leave. For a while she loitered with the other rubberneckers in the street, trying to glean more information, hoping Fowler would feel her eyes burning into his back.

A TV news van arrived and Fowler gave a stony-faced interview loaded with cop-speak. He made a public plea for news of the whereabouts of Jon and Delia Pavel and briefly mentioned the abandoned ‘male infant.’ The journalist lost interest when Fowler said that, at this stage in the investigation, the parents’ disappearance was not being regarded as suspicious, probably just an unfortunate misdemeanour or accident. Was he understating his suspicions deliberately? Stevie wondered. Was this all part of his procedural tactics, or did he really believe what he was saying? With Action Man wearing his sunglasses again, it was impossible to tell.

Hunger and boredom finally drove her to the corner deli. The family-run corner store was a rarity these days in the more gentrified Perth suburbs. Few owners could compete with the big chains or hack the long hours. Like Mrs Hardegan’s house, this place was a bastion against change. A patchwork of colourful brand names covered the windowless sidewalls; private notices about lost pets, babysitting and piano lessons curled down one pane of the front display window. Toward the back, the battlements of an old brick dunny jutted over the top of a rickety wooden fence, and next to this, a sun-bleached weatherboard garage.

Stevie waited to be served behind a group of chattering landscape gardeners and found her gaze drawn to a rack of classic DVDs near the large front window.

‘How much are the DVDs?’ she asked at the counter when her turn came.

‘Ten dollars,’ the girl said, lisping through her tongue stud.

Stevie jingled through her purse, counting up the change. ‘Damn, I can’t make it.’ She ordered a salad sandwich and an iced coffee, moved to the DVD rack and selected a copy of
Gone With The Wind.
‘Mind putting this aside for me?’ she asked. ‘It’s the same collectors’ edition I’ve had my eye on at Amazon.’ Stevie’s passion for old movies had developed with her time in The Job: the more she saw of real life, the less she wanted to see of it on the screen. Modern romantic comedies, especially those starring George Clooney, were the only exception to her nothing-under-fifty-years-old rule.

The girl made no comment and took down Stevie’s particulars with one eye on the clock, no doubt counting down the hours till the end of her shift.

‘I noticed a bunch of cop cars down the street—any idea what’s going on?’ Stevie said. Ancient movies might be of no interest to the girl, but surely this kind of action would.

‘Oh yeah, it’s soooo sad,’ the girl said, brightening immediately. ‘The poor little baby was left alone for days and the police can’t find his parents anywhere—they think they might have been killed in a car crash.’

‘Days?’

The girl shrugged. ‘That’s what everyone’s saying.’

‘That’s terrible. Did you know them?’

‘Kind of, they came in here sometimes. The baby was so cute, but the mum and dad were like really weird.’

High heels clacked across the tiles and a well-dressed woman with tight porcelain skin and a prominent gap between her front teeth appeared from the storage area at the back of the shop.

‘What’s going on out here, Leila?’ the woman said. She might have looked Madonna, but her accent was all
Kath and Kim.
To Stevie she added, ‘I hope she isn’t holding you up.’

‘It’s fine,’ said Stevie, ‘I was just asking about the missing people down the road.’

‘Oh them, yes—a strange pair.’

Leila rolled her eyes. ‘How would you know, Eva? You’re hardly ever here.’

Eva did not appear bothered by the girl’s insolent tone. She asked Stevie if the couple had been found yet.

‘Haven’t a clue,’ Stevie said, conscious of the woman looking her up and down, glad that today she didn’t look like a cop: maybe she could get something useful out of them.

Eva pointed to the DVD on the counter. ‘I’ve given up on that one, makes me cry too much, ’specially when the little girl dies. When it comes to the oldies, give me something funny over serious any day—the Ealing comedies or the original
St Trinian’s
movies—remember them? What a great escape they are.’

Stevie agreed. She had a feeling this woman had experienced more reality than she cared to admit to. She paid for her lunch with a clatter of loose change upon the counter.

But Eva wasn’t ready to let Stevie go just yet. It seemed Stevie wasn’t the deli’s first visitor from the Pavel house that afternoon and it soon became obvious that the woman knew far more about what was going on up the street than she ought to. Stevie would have put money on the identity of at least one of the deli’s recent customers—William Trotman, without a doubt.

Stevie adopted the role of gossiping tradesperson, leaning on the deli counter among the boxes of lollies, and took a bite of her sandwich.

‘Apparently the poor little boy’s in a dreadful state,’ Eva said. ‘They’re not even sure if he’ll make it. Just as well the Meals on Wheels lady from next door decided to look in when she did.’

Stevie smiled to herself—Skye would not appreciate the demotion. Eva turned to Leila who stood agog, listening to her boss gossiping. Evidently even she hadn’t heard the whole story.

‘Come on,’ Eva said to Leila. ‘We haven’t got all day. You can listen and clean the grill at the same time.’ The air was greasy with cooked onions even though the lunchtime rush had ended long ago.

Leila shot her employer a
whatever
look, took up a scourer and began to dab half-heartedly at the filthy grill.

So what are they like then, this family?’ Stevie asked. ‘Rich by the look of the house—I’m glad it wasn’t me painting all those eaves. Leila said they sometimes called by the shop.’

‘They got their papers here sometimes. A quiet couple, not particularly friendly—I don’t think I ever so much as heard her speak.’

Leila opened her mouth to interrupt, glanced at Eva and closed it again.

‘Rich bitch, eh?’ Stevie asked.

‘Not many of the people round here like them much,’ Eva said. ‘You can’t run a business like ours and not hear talk. Nothing major or bad enough to make anyone want to harm them, I’m sure. Just very inconsiderate neighbours from what I’ve heard.’

‘What, loud music, parties?’

‘No, not their scene. More like backwashing the pool into the vegie patch of the people behind them, burning rubbish on a windy day and covering everyone’s washing in ash—that kind of thing.’ The woman shrugged. ‘They’re eastern European; they’re not like us.’

‘Oh? Where in Europe are they from, do you know?’

‘Couldn’t say, they all sound Russian to me.’

‘What do the police think has happened to them?’

‘No idea. If you find out anything, come back and tell me, okay? I’ll shout you a free lunch.’

Stevie said she would, wondering if a similar deal had been struck with William Trotman.

On Stevie’s return she spotted a solitary crime scene tech pacing the perimeter of the cordoned area. A general duties constable stood guard in the doorway of the Pavel house. Stevie watched for movement through the windows and detected none, meaning that the remaining officers, including Fowler, must still be door-knocking the neighbours. She spotted a couple of cop cars parked further down the street. The lack of action had driven even the most curious of onlookers home and there wasn’t a reporter in sight.

Chattering swallows darted in and out of the eaves of the Pavel house as they prepared for the approaching bad weather. The light was fading fast, dark clouds closing in. When the storm finally did come through, any outside evidence would be obliterated.

With this in mind, Stevie stepped towards the tape. She caught the attention of the crime scene tech treading the path outside, head bowed, covered with the hood of his blue forensic overalls like a meditating monk. He stopped his pacing when she told him who she was and regarded her suspiciously. She had no form of ID and no William Trotman close at hand to greet her by name. When she asked if he’d found anything in the garden bed by the kitchen window, he told her it wasn’t in his brief. Nor would he tell her if he’d taken scrapings from the brown stains under the chesterfield—how did he know she wasn’t a reporter? he said. But he did agree to check out the button near the front gate. He sounded bored, but polite enough, covering his options in case she really was who she said she was.

There was only one thing for it.

Stevie had more success convincing the hovering uniform in the street that she was part of the investigating team. No questions were asked when she strode toward the white van and pulled on a pair of overalls and booties from the storage box in the back and snapped on a pair of gloves. Stepping over the crime scene tape, she made her way across the overgrown grass towards the side of the house and the kitchen window. Crushed weeds choked the garden bed below. She squatted on her haunches and combed through them with her gloved hands. What she was expecting to find, she had no idea. No footprints were evident on the dry surface, though it was obvious something or someone had recently trampled down the weeds. The flyscreen had also been removed and propped up against the wall.

She straightened and peered through the open window, seeing no sign of police in the house. She wondered if the substance from the floor really had been scraped up and dispatched to the lab. The thoroughness of the investigation at this stage would largely depend on how seriously Fowler was taking the disappearance of the couple; not very, if the interview with the press was anything to go on. With budget restrictions as they were he couldn’t afford unnecessary procedures. This could, after all, merely be a case of crossed wires, such as a babysitter failing to turn up, or, as Fowler had mused earlier, a horrible accident. For all they knew the couple could at this very moment be lying on a beach in Bali, unconscious in hospital, or worse still, on a slab in the morgue.

If foul play was the last thing on Fowler’s mind, why then was it at the front of hers? Perhaps it was the feeling she’d had earlier when exploring the house. Maybe it was the odour of the baby still rising up from her clothes. Whatever it was, she had been with the police long enough to know that these kinds of feelings should not be ignored. Bugger Fowler.

She approached the front porch and looked around. No one seemed to be paying her the least bit of attention. A couple of cops had returned to stand by their patrol car, lounging with their backs to the house, drinking from plastic cups. The door of the house was open enough for her to slip through without a sound.

The false dusk of the oncoming storm had made the interior gloomy and the searchers had left all the lights downstairs ablaze, which was just as well because it meant she didn’t have to draw attention to herself by turning them on. There didn’t appear to be much evidence of the crime scene tech’s activities in here, no coating of fingerprint dust across the surfaces of the kitchen and no apparent interference with the food on the table. One of the chesterfields had been moved, though, and Stevie did detect fresh scrapings in the brown coating on the tiles. At least something had been taken seriously.

When the unpleasant smell became too much, she decided to have another look upstairs, an area she hadn’t had the chance to thoroughly explore earlier.

As with downstairs, a similar state of neglect was evident here, but with less sign of human habitation. Things were dusty and spidery, but not unhygienic. The stairs led to an unfurnished room with a new looking grey-flecked carpet, power points and an aerial connection. A TV-or playroom, she’d hazard a guess. A bathroom and two bedrooms led from this central room. One of the bedrooms was tiny, not much more than a storeroom, and stacked with removalist’s boxes. She prised some of the lids and found an assortment of cooking utensils, a collection of baby’s toys, folded clothes, a pile of old shoes. Stevie and Monty still hadn’t unpacked boxes in their house from their recent move, so there was nothing strange about these. But Skye had told her the couple had lived here for a while—were they preparing to move house perhaps? If they were, the dusty lids must mean they’d packed a while ago. She must remember to ask Skye if she could discover more from Mrs Hardegan; find out just how reliable a source of information the old lady might be.