Whispering Death (11 page)

Challis sipped his coffee and swivelled in his chair, using his feet on the open bottom drawer of his desk as leverage. The outer offices were quiet. He checked his watch, idled a while, then jerked forward and typed ‘Trading Post' into Google, waited five years for the site to load, and made an Australia-wide search of TR4 prices.

Christ. One car in the whole country, fully restored, low mileage on a new motor, new everything, asking price $35,000. Surely his old bomb would fetch at least twenty?

He continued to idle, listening to voices and footsteps. Pam Murphy arrived, stuck her head around his door, grinned and chatted. They never ran their tongues for long. She disappeared into the tea room, and then Sutton was knocking, saying, ‘Someone from sex crimes at the front desk.'

‘Thanks. You and Murph wait in the briefing room.'

Challis headed downstairs, pausing for a moment to gauge the visitor on the other side of the glass before he stepped through to the foyer. He saw a young woman with long black hair and stylish black-rimmed glasses, dressed in a cotton jacket over tight jeans and a T-shirt. She also wore the fatigue of long hours, but that vanished when Challis was buzzed through. She seemed to spark with energy, sticking out her hand, giving her name as Jeannie Schiff, sergeant. And she stared at Challis, a sizing-up.

‘Thanks for coming down,' Challis said. ‘As I said on the phone, our sexual offences team isn't in place yet, so we could do with some help.'

‘Well, yeah,' drawled Schiff. ‘Abduction and rape? A bit different from some sad bloke waving his penis at schoolgirls.'

Her voice was raspy, low, not unpleasant, but sharp underneath. Challis shrugged mentally and said, ‘My team's upstairs.'

She followed him. He paused outside the briefing room. ‘Tea? Coffee? Proper coffee.'

‘You wouldn't have green tea?'

Challis wouldn't have had green tea before Pam Murphy joined CIU. Now the teabag jar was crammed with exotic brews. ‘No problem.'

The tea made, he introduced her to Sutton and Murphy and stepped back to prop up one of the side walls. The morning sun striped the long briefing room table. On the other side of the window he could see the treetops that marked the rear of the car park.

Schiff took command of the room, standing at the head of the table. All that had been tense, uncertain or vigilant about her had disappeared, replaced by an air of calm authority, a routine determination. She'd been through this before and knew how it would play out.

‘We'll work this on several fronts,' she announced, without preamble. ‘Witnesses, if any, local sex offenders, forensics, victimology.'

The morning sun was coming in hard behind her. She was a hazy shape, and, seeing his officers wince and shade their eyes, Challis stepped behind her and released the venetian blind. It fell with a clatter.

Schiff ignored him. He leaned his shoulder against the wall again.

‘I'm due in court this afternoon,' Schiff said, glancing at her watch, ‘so this will be a racing visit, to get you started. I'll be back tomorrow and then I can give you until the end of the week, okay?' She didn't pause to find out. ‘Right. Three main areas to action. First, do we have a list of local sex offenders? We need to start knocking on doors tomorrow.'

She cast an interrogative look at Challis, who said, ‘Constable Murphy will do that.'

Schiff flashed Pam a smile. ‘Next, the cop angle bothers me. Why would a police member announce himself? Did he hope to intimidate? Well, it did intimidate, but did he think Ms Holst would be too scared to tell police that she'd been raped by a police officer? I need someone to run a nationwide search of similar cases, cross-referenced against police who have been arrested, charged, jailed or suspected of sex offences, and against police officers whose ID or uniforms have been stolen recently.'

Scobie Sutton raised his hand. ‘I'll do that.'

‘Good, thank you. Next, Ms Holst herself. Her movements last Thursday night, workmates, family, friends, old and current and wannabe boyfriends…I want to know who she is, in other words. Look at Facebook and Twitter to see if anyone had it in for her. Any altercations at work, pissed-off workmates and customers.'

Challis uncoiled from the wall. ‘Constable Murphy and I have been working on that.'

Schiff gave a vivid smile. ‘Terrific. Maybe we'll get a result sooner than expected. Meanwhile, forensics. Early days yet, I imagine.'

Scobie Sutton stirred. ‘Preliminary results are in. Plenty of fibres and prints in and on the victim's car, but no way of knowing whose.'

‘No hits in Crimtrac?'

‘Not yet.'

‘Anything at the scene?'

‘Ice-cream wrappers, plastic bags, Coke bottles, the usual.'

‘Anything on the victim?'

Here Sutton squirmed. ‘He cleaned her up, unfortunately. He used a condom, popular brand, according to the spermicide.'

He coughed to clear his throat. His words had conjured images that Sutton, who had been a detective for twelve years, couldn't cope with.

‘Thank you, constable. I wonder about the cleaning up he did. A policeman? Someone who watches
CSI
on TV?'

They didn't have an answer for her.

Pam Murphy seemed about to add to the discussion, but slumped in her seat again. The morning was deepening outside the police station.

18

Elsewhere in the building, John Tankard was changing into his uniform and facing down smirks. The guys had heard what happened last Friday, the naked chick appearing out of the bushes and screaming at the sight of him. Thank Christ it had been cleared up quickly. He hadn't abducted and raped anyone. But, as he gave each of his mates the finger, he couldn't help wondering: Did you do it? Or
you
?

Then, to cap off this brilliant start to the day, he was told to report to the Traffic Management Unit. ‘They want you for an RBT.'

A random breath test campaign. ‘Jesus, Sarge, not again.'

Tankard was an old hand in the ranks of uniformed constables at Waterloo. Mostly, he roamed around in the divisional van, answering calls. Throwing drunks out of bars, arresting a wife who'd stuck a knife in her husband or vice versa, handing out on-the-spot fines for jaywalking.

But now and then he was seconded to Traffic. The TMU was always engaged in some blitz against motorists: drink driving, unregistered vehicles, speeding, failure to wear a seatbelt…A unit of ten officers, but there was always someone in court, on holiday or down with the flu, so guys like Tank took up the slack.

‘Your local knowledge and sparkling personality, Tank.'

‘Yeah, thanks, Sarge.'

John Tankard was pink and sweaty. Short hairs sprouted from the fleshy rolls above his collar, his heavy damp limbs pushed at the seams of his uniform. He didn't welcome too much action on the job, yet his chief impression of his last RBT, earlier in the year, was of incredible boredom. Even shifting location every few hours had only amounted to a few minutes of activity. Mostly an RBT consisted of standing around in the sun or the rain with your finger up your bum, hoping some idiot would try to dodge the breathalyser or pick a fight.

‘Now?'

‘Right away.'

Tank hauled out leathers, cap and yellow jacket from the storage locker, balanced his sunglasses on the visor of the cap, and joined the others in the Traffic briefing room on the ground floor. The window caught the morning sun and flashed from the windscreens creeping along the McDonald's drive-through on the other side of High Street. Big mistake, spotting Macca's: now he felt hungry. He moved his gaze to the kerb outside the police station where the Unit's patrol cars and motorbikes stood in full, snarling livery, waiting to terrorise the good citizens of the Peninsula.

Weariness took the place of hunger and he dragged his eyes away. He glanced around at the other officers: all men, all young, all petrol heads. They loved the storm-trooper gear, the cars and bikes, as Tank himself once had. But he was thirty now and he felt old here, in this room, with these guys.

The briefing started. It was a pep talk, as if the Unit C.O. had seen too many war movies. He slapped one hand into the palm of the other as he spoke:

‘A vital job, gentlemen. Three fatalities on the whole of the Peninsula last year, six so far this year.

‘And it's spring—season of love, boozy lunches, winery tours and eighteen-year-olds finishing their exams. Lovely. But not to be seen as excuses for stupid behaviour on the open road. Zero tolerance, gentlemen. Let's get the dills off the road.

‘So we'll set up on hills, we'll set up on corners and bends, and we'll be out every day for the rest of the week. And just when the locals get wind of us in one location, we'll move to another—only to return a couple of days later, same road, different hill or bend.

‘Keep them on their toes, guys, okay?'

His words fired the young ones. One of them even whooped. Tank looked out at the street again, the pursuit cars festooned with antennas and stripes, and wondered if he'd be given the chance to drive one. It was usually his job to say, ‘Blow into this, please, sir,' not give chase in a fast car. Strangely, sir or madam would always show a moment's hesitation, a flicker of disquiet, as if they had something to hide. Maybe they were scared of germs.

‘Another thing,' said the Traffic boss. He passed around a stack of A4-sized photographs. ‘Be on the lookout for this guy.'

A grainy shot of a man carrying a shotgun, face averted, beanie pulled low over his brow. ‘Robs banks,' the Traffic boss said. ‘Apparently he's headed this way.'

19

Tuesday, publication day, and by 8 a.m. Challis was lifting a copy of the
News-Pictorial
from a wire rack outside the newsagency on High Street. He read it in the car.

Jack Porteous had been circumspect with the abduction and rape, at one point writing: ‘…an unconfirmed report that a man wearing a police uniform…' Challis supposed that was better than an outright accusation, and turned to the reporter's second story.

Again, fair, accurate reporting. Challis had said all the things Porteous reported him as saying. The thing was, the reporter had given more weight to Challis's unimpressed view of the state government and police command than his list of daily operational concerns.

Challis gnawed at the inside of his mouth. With any luck, the story would fizzle out. He was only an inspector, the newspaper only a local weekly. If anything he said was thought to matter, Porteous's mates on the Melbourne dailies would have called him by now.

He started the car, drove to the police station and found a silver Holden slewed crosswise in the senior officers' section. He pulled the Triumph into a space beside the dump bin at the rear. When he switched off, the motor ran on with asthmatic wheezing, smoke and a last heaving shudder.

‘Ah, the smell of unburnt fuel in the morning,' John Tankard said, watching him. ‘The rattle of misfiring cylinders.'

Challis got out. ‘This is a classic of British motoring, John.'

‘Classic of something, anyway.'

Tankard was ready to hit the road with the RBT team, but had something else on his mind. He coughed, toed the potholed asphalt. ‘Read what you said about resources and manpower, sir,' he said shyly. ‘You hit the nail on the head.'

Challis thanked him and entered the station through the rear doors, wondering how others would see the story. Plenty of sidelong looks, a couple of nods and smiles. But no one said anything as he walked down the main corridor to check his pigeonhole—the usual crap—and the overnight log. A handful of burglaries, bar fights, car thefts, but nothing resembling abduction and rape. He signed out the CIU Falcon, brought it around to the car park exit and waited for Scobie Sutton to arrive.

When Pam Murphy reached work that morning there was a post-it note on her desk, asking her to meet the sex crimes sergeant in the car park at the rear of the police station. She found Jeannie Schiff fiddling with a mobile phone beside an unmarked silver Holden, the car at a haphazard angle across the slots marked ‘Superintendent' and ‘Inspector'.

‘Where first?' asked Schiff, barely looking up from the screen of her phone.

Pam had spent yesterday working on the sex offenders list. Glancing now at the folder of names, she said, ‘Laurence Matchan in Penzance Beach.'

They got into the car. Schiff said, ‘Point the way,' and spurted towards the exit.

And there was Challis, propped patiently against the driver's door of the CIU car. Schiff pulled up alongside him, Pam powered down her window. ‘Morning, boss.'

‘Constable,' said Challis with a nod. ‘Sergeant.'

‘Inspector.'

‘Off to talk to scumbags?'

Pam nodded. Tiptoeing a little, she said, ‘Er, you haven't read the local paper by any chance?'

Challis crossed his arms. ‘Completely different Inspector Challis.'

‘That's what I thought. See you later, boss.'

‘Good luck.'

Schiff accelerated out onto the main road. ‘What was he on about?'

Pam shifted in her seat. Choosing her words, she said, ‘The weekly paper ran a story quoting him on police under-resourcing.'

Schiff shrugged; she didn't care. ‘What do we know about Laurence Matchan?'

Pam opened her folder. Matchan, she said, had managed a group home for four men and one woman with intellectual disabilities in Mornington. ‘When he realised the men were fighting each other to have sex with the woman, he drew up a roster but before long he was having sex with her too. At trial he argued the sex was consensual, and anyway he'd saved the men from having to visit prostitutes. He got out six months ago.'

‘What a charming fellow,' said Schiff, speeding through Waterloo. ‘Who else?'

Pam leafed through the files, rattling off a series of outlines. Most of the local sex offenders were small fry, their crimes considered minor by the courts—lewd conduct, carnal knowledge of a minor, fondling and groping—and she'd had to decide which of them were capable of graduating to abduction and rape. She'd been able to rule some out—three were aged in their late seventies, a couple were borderline retarded and couldn't drive—but there were still quite a few. In the end, she'd used her instincts. If a man looked like a brute in his mug shot, she prioritised him. She also paid close attention to those who lived near the reserve, owned a car and might have access to police equipment and forensic knowhow. A Somerville ambulance driver, for example. It wasn't very scientific, but she didn't tell Schiff that.