Whispering Death (12 page)

Soon they were passing through open farmland, some of the paddocks cropped for hay, the unmown grass flexing in long, rolling waves as the wind passed over it. Schiff was silent, unreadable, and Pam found herself saying, ‘Sarge, do you think it
will
turn out to be a cop?'

‘Entirely possible.'

Pam subsided. The police were often maligned, with or without good reason, and this would make it worse.
COP RAPIST?
That had been the headline in Saturday's
Herald Sun
. If the rapist was a cop, he deserved to be found, tried and punished, but Pam would hate to be in the middle of all that. The police boys' club would chew her up and spit her out if she crossed it in any way; yet she could feel as protective of her colleague as the next officer. Us against them, the police against the rabble.

Meanwhile she had to spend the day with a woman who gave every appearance of impatience and boredom, as if a rural investigation were beneath her. They rode in silence until Pam stirred and said, ‘Next left.'

Penzance Beach was at the end of a side road that ran off Frankston-Flinders Road, and as they drew near, she wondered whether to tell Schiff that she lived there, in a little house opposite a chicken farm, at the poorer edge of the town.

‘This is where I live, coincidentally.'

‘Yeah? Not friends with Laurence Matchan, are you?'

‘No.'

‘Nothing to worry about, then,' Schiff said, looking about as they entered the little settlement. ‘Pretty place.'

This was the heart of the town: fibro shacks on stilts, log cabins, weatherboard cottages—humble holiday and permanent homes on small blocks, all of it squeezed into a small space between the bay waters and a long ridge. Schiff followed the road as it curved around parallel to the beach, slowing for speed bumps, until Pam said, ‘Turn right.'

Now the road climbed up on to the ridge, where the big money lived, in huge houses that clawed for air space giving uninterrupted views of the sea. Behind them were dwellings smaller than the cliff-top mansions but larger than the sea-level cottages, the homes of prosperous family doctors, accountants, teachers, electricians. And that's where Murphy and Schiff found Laurence Matchan, in a plain old farmhouse that faced the grasslands behind the town, set in a weedy garden shaded by a giant palm tree.

Matchan answered the door. He was middle-aged, comfortable rather than fat, thick hair threaded with silver, some acne scarring. A crumpled tan suit over a light blue shirt; dark blue tie knot an enormous wedge under his chins. A grey, fatigued cast to his face, as if life had let him down.

‘Going somewhere, Mr Matchan?'

‘Reporting to police, if you must know.'

Schiff looked at Murphy, who asked, ‘Parole condition?'

‘Yes.'

‘Which station?'

‘Rosebud.'

‘Where were you last Thursday night?'

‘Here.'

‘Can anyone vouch for that?'

‘No.'

‘So we have a problem.'

‘My wife left me while I was in jail. She took the car, the house… This is my sister's house. She's overseas for a year.'

Pam glanced at the empty carport, at the empty street that ran past the house. ‘Do you have access to a car, Mr Matchan?'

‘No.'

A horn tooted. A taxi pulled up.

‘My ride,' Matchan said, and he almost smiled.

*

Scobie Sutton was often late—his wife; getting his kid to school—and Challis made allowances. As he waited, he fiddled idly with his mobile and heard the beep of an incoming text message. Superintendent McQuarrie, and clearly the super had read, or been told about, the
News-Pictorial
story:
My office, 1 pm Fri, consider PA rep
.

Bring the Police Association in?

He's going to sack me? wondered Challis. On his golf day?

Then Sutton was parking his Volvo and hurrying across to the CIU car, agitated, his upper lip beaded with perspiration. Nerves or health, thought Challis, getting behind the wheel, waiting for Sutton to buckle himself into the passenger seat. ‘You okay?'

‘Sorry I'm late, sir. Roslyn tells me at the last minute she was supposed to be at school at seven-forty-five because all the Year 7s are taking a chartered bus to the Olympic pool in Frankston and of course we missed it and I had to chase it down the road.'

Sutton was a shocking driver. Challis pictured the knuckles clenched on the wheel, the pointless surges and braking, the overtaking on hills and blind corners. ‘You're here now,' he said, starting the car and heading north through the town.

Cranbourne was outside their district but less than thirty minutes from the Chicory Kiln. After fixing it with the officer in charge, they were given a room and access to a trainee constable named Rick Dixon, who had reported his uniform stolen from a laundromat dryer a few days earlier. Soft, perspiring, very young, Dixon had gelled hair and a sulky, plump lower lip. ‘I swear I was only gone five minutes. Slipped out to pay some bills.'

He might not be lying, Challis thought, eyeing him closely, but he is skating a little. ‘Where was this?'

‘Near where I live.'

‘And where is that?'

‘Berwick.'

‘Name?'

‘Er, Richard Dixon, sir.'

‘Not you, the laundromat.'

‘Not sure, sir.'

Sutton said, ‘Can you give us a location?'

Dixon described a strip of shops, a Mobil service station on one corner, a VideoEzy opposite, enough for Challis to locate it using a telephone directory.

With Dixon out of the interview room, he dialled the number.

‘Yeah,' scratched a voice in his ear. ‘I remember. Officious little prick—no offence.'

‘Do you have security cameras?'

‘Mate, this isn't exactly the Bank of England.'

‘Was any other clothing stolen that day?'

‘That's the whole point: none was stolen, then or any other day. The moron used hot water and a hot dryer setting and his lovely new uniform shrank. Tried to blame it on me.'

Challis called Dixon back and said, before the trainee had time to sit, ‘You made a false theft report.'

Dixon's colour drained away; perspiration beaded and ran. ‘No way.'

There were times, like now, when Challis questioned the training academy's selection procedures. He'd discerned a kind of cravenness in Dixon at the start of the interview; now the trainee contrived to look wounded, distantly accusing and aggrieved, working innocence onto his soft face and puzzlement into his tangled eyebrows.

This enraged Challis. ‘You fucked up. You ruined your uniform because you're ignorant, and rather than fork out for a new one you tried blaming another person and made a false report. Were you hoping you'd be issued another uniform, free of charge?'

‘You're so wrong about this.'

‘You're so wrong about this,
sir
,' barked Challis.

Dixon's eyes scouted for a way out. ‘Will this go on my record?'

‘What did you do with the old uniform?' Sutton asked.

‘Binned it. Look, I'm sorry, okay? Sir? Won't happen again.'

‘That's for sure,' Challis said, even as he pictured himself in Dixon's position, being bawled out by a superior officer when Friday came around.

Meanwhile he was stuck in Cranbourne: the paperwork fallout from Dixon's dishonesty, the laundromat story to be checked, the rubbish bin to be located and searched, not to mention the shire tip.

The day passed. For Pam Murphy it had boiled down to questioning pathetic men with weak alibis who didn't resemble the man described by Chloe Holst, and scary men who did resemble him but had cast-iron alibis. Tedious. Unbearable if the sex crimes sergeant had remained standoffish, but Jeannie Schiff had gradually unwound, growing talkative, relating blackly comic stories of some of her victories. And her defeats. At one point, early afternoon, she revealed how she'd been torn apart by the defence barrister in court the previous afternoon, and Pam was astonished to hear a faint catch in her voice.

After that, she found herself stealing looks at Schiff. A finely-shaped nose and cheekbones, a mole at the hinge of her jaw, another on her neck, a third on the strong brown swell of her left breast. Wisps of hair escaping the knot at the back of her head. Long fingers tapping the steering wheel. She watched the way Schiff's plump bottom lip peeled slowly from the top whenever she began to relate another story, about another deadshit rapist, another deadshit barrister.

‘You can understand why there are so many lawyer jokes,' said Pam, after one such story.

Schiff shot her a look. Pam felt the gaze flicker all over her: face, breasts, lap and face and breasts again. Her chest tightened, she tingled low in her trunk and she did not understand or trust her responses, not in the first degree.

To deflect the unfamiliar feelings, she related courtroom stories of her own, and so they rode north and south, east and west, crossing the Peninsula in the springtime warmth.

Mid-afternoon they knocked at a house in Tyabb. ‘Hello, Richard,' Pam said.

Richard Van Der Net blinked at them, his face creased and puffy, his hair this way and that. He hadn't bathed or shaved and Pam Murphy could imagine the miasmic conditions under which he lived. ‘Quick word.'

Van Der Net sniffed. According to his driver's licence he was twenty-eight years old. He'd lived here, with his parents, for six months. Before that, Somerville. Before that, South Frankston, Chelsea, Pakenham…

‘Don't have to talk to no cops.'

Schiff took out her notebook and wrote in it, muttering, ‘Time, four-thirty-two p.m., suspect refused to cooperate with police.'

‘Whoa. What are you writing? What do you mean, suspect? I done nothing.'

Pam opened a folder, revealing a series of grainy mobile phone photographs. ‘Remember these, Richard?'

Van Der Net had been arrested after several complaints during the previous summer. He liked to drive to the Peninsula's beaches and bother women who were walking or sunbathing. He'd begin by admiring their bodies, then ask if they'd watch while he masturbated. Most ran away, some froze, one took photographs.

‘I like this one, Richard.'

The sands at Merricks Beach, mild sunshine, Richard plucking at his penis.

‘And these.'

Richard walking back through ti-trees, a pack on his back. Richard getting into his Toyota van. A shot of the number plate.

‘What gets me,' Schiff said, ‘is how fucking dumb you guys are.'

Van Der Net's mouth was open. He wanted to duck inside the house but Pam was blocking the doorway. He hovered on a dingy patch of grass between door and front gate, looking desperately at the street beyond Schiff's stylish shoulder. He seemed to sense that freedom beckoned out there on the poky streets, but freedom of a treacherous kind.

Van Der Net rubbed his mucousy eyes and nostrils. Filthy teeth: rotted by amphetamines was Pam's guess. She supposed you could pity him. You'd have to overlook the distress he'd left behind him over the years, though.

‘You keep moving house, Richard.'

‘So?'

‘What, asked to leave? Given warnings? Told you weren't welcome?'

‘I just, you know…'

‘Where were you last Thursday night?'

‘I never did nothing.'

‘You graduated from waving your willie around to abduction and rape.'

Van Der Net opened and closed his mouth and eventually fainted. His mother came to the door and said, ‘I'll have you for police brutality.' Then his father appeared and threw a punch. Phone calls were made, police cars arrived, the paperwork became a headache and, at the very last moment, a methadone clinic nurse gave Van Der Net an alibi that Murphy and Schiff couldn't shake.

‘A big, fat zero.' said Jeannie Schiff when it was all over. ‘So how about a drink?'

At the end of his working day, Challis poured himself a scotch. He looked out at the closing-in light of evening and talked to Ellen Destry on Skype.

‘He wants me in his office next Friday. I should consider representation.'

‘He didn't phone you, just sent a text?'

‘It was curt, even for a text. As if he didn't trust himself to speak.'

‘To sack you?'

‘He probably can't do that,' Challis said, ‘but he can make life uncomfortable.'

They were silent. Challis reached out a hand to the webcam as if to touch Ellen's face. ‘You've been gone four days already.'

‘What, you're saying the time drags when I'm around?'

Challis held up a finger. ‘Let me rephrase that.'

20

Wednesday started with a briefing in CIU, croissants piled on a plate at the centre of the long table. Scudding clouds today, and without a morning sun beating through the windows, the walls and carpet were grey and sombre. Begging for colour, finding it in Jeannie Schiff's vivid lipstick and glossy black hair.

And Pam Murphy's earrings. That was unusual. Challis peered, realised he was looking at a trickle of tiny feathers in finely spun silver set with chips of turquoise.

She caught him looking and went pink. ‘Dream catchers, boss. Navaho.'

‘Oh.' He had no idea what dream catchers were. He only knew she was looking happy, a spark in her eyes. Meanwhile Schiff was simultaneously checking her mobile and watching him with a lazy-lidded half smile. So she's read the story about me, too, he thought. And there were other undercurrents; they had nothing to do with him.

‘Our duties for today,' he said, leaning one shoulder against a wall. ‘Sergeant Schiff?'

‘Pam—Constable Murphy—and I will continue with the register. Admittedly, we're scraping the bottom of the barrel now. Knickersniffers and teenage boys who slept with an underage girlfriend.'

She stopped to stare at him and he realised it was his turn to speak. He smiled, the smile there and gone again, unpeeled from the wall, and leaned over the table to break off a corner of almond croissant, dusting the powdered sugar from his fingers. ‘Constable Sutton and I will keep going on the stolen uniform and ID reports.'