"The Dragon Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disher Garry)

Two

A

young uniform tried to book me for a cracked windscreen when I arrived this morning. Beefy-looking, arrogant. Know who it would be?’

As CIB sergeant at Waterloo, Ellen Destry had very little to do with the uniformed constables, but she knew who Challis was talking about. ‘That would be John Tankard. They call him Tank.’

‘Fitting. Built like a water tank, roll over you like an army tank.’

‘There have been a few complaints,’ Ellen admitted. ‘Someone’s been distributing leaflets about him, calling him a stormtrooper.’

She fastened her seatbelt and started the car. They were going to Jane Gideon’s flat, and she eased the CIB Falcon out of the car park behind the station and down High Street, toward the jetty. She was reminded by the holly and the tinsel that she’d asked people over for drinks on Christmas morning, and still hadn’t bought presents for her husband and daughter.

That brought her by degrees to thinking about Kymbly Abbott and Jane Gideon. No Christmases for them, and an awful Christmas for their families. She tried to shake it off. You could get too close. Challis had once told her that being a copper meant stepping inside the skins of other people-victim, villain, witness-and playing roles-priest-confessor, counsellor, shoulder to cry on. But ultimately, he’d said, you were there to exact justice, and when a homicide was involved that meant exacting justice for those who had no-one else to stand up for them.

She glanced across at him, slouched in the passenger seat, one elbow on the side window ledge, his hand supporting his forehead. At the briefing he’d displayed his usual restless intelligence, but in repose there was sadness and fatigue under the thin, dark cast of his face. She knew that he looked down a long unhappiness, and she didn’t suppose it would ever go away. But he was only forty, attractive in a haunted kind of way. He deserved a new start.

He said unexpectedly, ‘You like living on the Peninsula?’

‘Love it.’

‘So do I.’

He fell silent again. She loved the Peninsula, but that didn’t mean she loved life itself. Things were difficult with her husband and daughter, for a start. Alan, a senior constable with the Eastern Traffic Division, had a long drive to work each day and resented her promotion to sergeant. ‘They’re fast-tracking you because you’re a woman,’ he said. And Larrayne was a pain in the neck, fifteen years old, all hormones and hatred.

The real estate agency which managed Jane Gideon’s block of flats was next to a dress shop that had gone out of business six months earlier. A sign saying ‘Support Local Traders’ was pasted inside the dusty glass window. Ellen double-parked the car and waited for Challis to collect the key. She watched a clutch of teenage boys on the footpath. They wore pants that dragged along the ground, over-large T-shirts on their skinny frames, narrow wrap-around sunglasses, hair gelled into porcupine spikes. They were idly flipping skateboards into the air with their feet, and one or two were spinning around on old bicycles. ‘Nerds and rednecks, Mum,’ Larrayne was always saying. ‘You’ve brought me to live among nerds and rednecks.’

Challis slipped into the car and she pulled away from the kerb. She slowed at the jetty. Water made her feel peaceful. The tide was out and she watched a fishing boat steer a course between the red and green markers in the channel. Waterloo did have a down-at-heel, small-town feel about it, so she could see Larrayne’s point-of-view, but before that they’d lived up in the city, where Alan’s asthma had been worse, and the teenagers more prone to try drugs, and Ellen had wanted to get her family out of all that.

Jane Gideon’s flat was on a narrow street of plain brick veneer houses. Ellen parked and they got out. Old smells lingered in the stairwell: curry, cat piss, dope. ‘Number four, top right,’ Challis said.

Ellen pictured him two nights ago, the darkness, his exhaustion, the long drive down here just to knock on the door of this sad-looking flat in the hope that Jane Gideon had not been abducted but given a lift home by a friendly stranger. He turned the key. Ellen followed him inside, knowing there wouldn’t be anything worth finding, only a poor mother’s phone number.

Before logging on to the computer and doing a printout of sex offenders, Detective Constable Scobie Sutton signed out a Falcon from the car pool and drove to the Waterloo Childcare Centre. He’d scarcely been able to keep his feelings under control during the briefing, and drove hunched over, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.

He pulled on to the grass at the side of the cyclone fence, and watched. Morning tea. The kids were seated in circles on the grass, grouped according to their ages. There she was, in the dress she called her blue ballet, happy as Larry now, her little face absorbed under the shade of a cotton explorer hat, slurping from a plastic cup and sticking her little fist into what looked to be a tupperware container of biscuits. She turned to the kid next to her and Sutton saw her grin, and then both children leaned until their foreheads touched.

He felt the tension drain away. But that didn’t change the fact that his daughter had screamed the place down when he’d dropped her off at eight o’clock. ‘I don’t want to go in! I want to be with you!’ Six weeks earlier the shire council, hit by budget constraints, had shut down another of its childcare centres and forced an amalgamation with Waterloo. Twenty new kids, six new staff, nowhere to fit them all. Kids are conservative. They don’t like upheavals in their routines. The cheery woman who’d been in charge of his daughter’s room, the two-to-three-year olds, had taken a redundancy package-no doubt out of anger and frustration. Now a stranger was in charge of the two-to-three room, and Roslyn threw a wobbly whenever Sutton dropped her off each morning. Was this woman slapping her on the sly? Being mean to her?

At least she was happy now. Sutton started the Falcon and wound his way back through the town to the police station.

The desk sergeant caught him at the foot of the stairs. ‘Scobe, I got a woman out front. Says she’s got some information about Jane Gideon.’

‘What’s she like?’

‘A crank,’ the desk sergeant said simply.

Scobie took the woman through to an interview room. She had to be humoured, like all the cranks.

‘Name?’

The woman drew herself up. ‘Sofia.’

‘Sofia. You say you’ve got information about Jane Gideon’s disappearance?’

The woman leaned forward and said, her voice low and rasping, her eyes like glittering stones, ‘Not just a disappearance. Murder.’

‘Do you have direct knowledge of this?’

‘I felt it.’

‘You felt it.’

‘I am a Romany. I am a seer.’

She stared at him. Her eyes: he’d never seen such intensity. She seemed to be able to switch it off and on, too. His gaze faltered. He examined her hair, black and wild, her ears, ringed with fine gold hoops, her neck, hung with gold chains, and the tops of her brown breasts in a thin, loose, hectically coloured cotton dress. A gypsy, he thought, and wondered whether or not there were gypsies in Australia.

‘You mean you kind of sensed it?’

‘She died violently.’

He doodled on his pad. ‘But you have no direct knowledge.’

‘Water,’ she said. ‘That’s where you’ll find her.’

‘You mean, the sea?’

The woman stared into vast distances. ‘I don’t think so. An area of still water.’

He pushed back in his chair. ‘Fine, we’ll certainly look into that. Thank you for coming in.’

She smiled dazzlingly and waited while he got the door. She was stunning, compelling, in a creepy kind of way. The gold, the hair, the vivid dress and the soft leather, they all seemed to fit her naturally.

‘You have a little girl,’ she said, as she stepped out of the room.

Sutton froze. It was a rule of thumb, never let members of the public know anything about your private life. He looked at her coolly. For all he knew, she might have a kid at the childcare centre, might have seen him dropping Roslyn off in the mornings. She didn’t seem to be looking for a lever to use against him, so he said simply, ‘Yes.’

‘She’s confused by the changes in her life, but she’ll come through. She’s resilient.’

‘Thank you,’ Sutton said, and wondered why-just like that, in a flash-he believed her.

Challis returned to the abduction site that afternoon and later drove to the bayside suburb where Jane Gideon’s parents lived. They had nothing to add to what they’d told him the previous day. Their daughter had moved down to the Peninsula originally because she’d met a cadet at the Navy base there, and had stayed on when he broke up with her. No, he was serving in the Gulf somewhere.

When he got back to Waterloo he found Ellen Destry standing wary guard over Tessa Kane, who was perched on the edge of a steel folding chair and smiling a smile that his sergeant was bound to find insufferable. ‘Tess, how are you?’ he said.

‘Hal.’

‘Published any scoops lately?’

‘Scoops is a relative term in a weekly paper, Hal.’

‘Boss, I said you were busy and-’

‘That’s okay, Ellen,’ Challis said.

‘She says she’s got information.’

‘Got it, or want it, Tess?’

Tessa Kane’s voice was low and deep and faintly amused. ‘Both.’

‘When’s your next issue?’

‘Thursday. Then we miss an issue between Christmas and the New Year, and publish again on 4 January.’

Challis said. ‘A lot can happen.’

‘Hal, a lot has happened.’

Challis watched her stand and smooth her skirt over her thighs. She was shorter than Ellen Destry, always full of smiles, many of them false and dangerous, others lazy and uncomplicated. He liked her plump cheeks. Women disliked her. Challis had no opinion on the matter, beyond knowing that he had to watch what he said to her.

‘This information you say you’ve got,’ he began.

She cut him off. ‘Can we do this in there?’

‘The incident room? Tess, please.’

She grinned. ‘Just a thought. An office, maybe, instead of here in the corridor?’

Challis turned to Ellen. ‘Sergeant, let’s take Miss Kane into your office, if that’s okay by you?’

He saw Ellen sort out the implications. He was including her, not giving her the shove, so she said, ‘Fine with me, sir.’

The office was a plasterboard and frosted-glass cubicle further along the corridor, and once they were inside it Tessa Kane turned and said, ‘I was hoping-’

‘This is Sergeant Destry’s station, her office, her investigation-as my offsider. So, whatever it is you want to tell me, you tell her, too.’

‘Suit yourself.’

They watched her take a clear plastic freezer bag from her briefcase and lay it on the desk. ‘This came in the post this morning.’

A few lines of crisp type on a sheet of A4 printer paper. Challis leaned over to read through the plastic: This is an open letter to the people of Victoria. I would be loosing faith in the Police if I were you. There running around in circles looking for me. What have they got? One body. But where’s the second? Gone to a watery grave? And now there’s going to be a third. She’s in my sights.

‘Oh, God,’ Ellen said.

Are you scared yet? You ought to be.

‘Envelope?’ Challis said.

Tessa Kane took out a second freezer bag. He poked at it with a pencil, turning it so that he could read it. He sighed. Block capitals. There would be no useful prints, and no saliva, for the envelope was pre-paid, with a self-sealing flap, and available at any post office. He saw the words, ‘Eastern Mail Centre’, but no other indication of where it had been posted.

‘You got it this morning, and you waited until now to show us?’

‘Hal, I was out all day. It was left on my desk and I didn’t open it until a few minutes ago.’

He looked at her closely. ‘Have there been any others?’

‘No.’ She hooked a wing of hair behind her ear. ‘I think the spelling tells us a little about him.’

Ellen had been itching to say something. ‘Not necessarily. He’s probably trying to muddy the waters. Look at the tone, the way he uses short sentences for effect, the way his constructions are uneven, the words “a watery grave”, the apostrophes. I’d say he’s had a reasonable education and trying to make us think he hasn’t.’

Sniff. ‘You’re the expert.’

Challis stepped in. ‘We’ll need to examine the letter, Tess.’

‘No problem. I made a copy.’

‘You’re not going to publish, I hope.’

Her voice sharpened. ‘He’s talking about a third body, Hal. People have a right to be warned.’

‘We haven’t even found the second body yet,’ Ellen said. ‘Jane Gideon might be alive, for all we know.’

Challis backed her up. ‘Your letter writer might be a crank, Tess. An opportunist. Someone with a grudge against the police.’

He regarded her carefully, and saw that she understood the implications.

‘You’re not holding out on me?’

‘I swear it.’

‘But can I say the police think there may be a link between the first two?’

He sighed. ‘There may not be, but there probably is.’

She muttered, ‘Not that quoting you does me much good if you arrest him before Thursday’s issue.’

‘I can’t help that.’

She looked up at him. ‘People are scared, Hal. This morning I had a call from a real estate agent saying he’s had a couple of holiday cancellations. I checked with the caravan park and the camping ground. Same story. A lot of the locals depend on summer tourists.’

‘Tess, we’re doing everything we can. We’re following leads, checking our databases. As soon as there are any developments, I’ll give you a call ahead of anyone else.’

She touched the tips of her fingers to his chest and very lightly pressed him. ‘Would you? That’d be great, even if you do sound like a police spokesperson.’ She stepped away from him. ‘Well, Christmas soon. Season’s greetings and all that.’

‘You too.’

She turned to Ellen. ‘Someone’s been distributing leaflets about Constable Tankard. Anything you can tell me about that?’

‘No.’

‘Okay. Bye now.’

When Tessa Kane was gone, Ellen said, ‘I hate people who say “Bye now”.’

‘Ah, she’s okay. You just have to know how to handle her.’

‘Hal, don’t get in too deep.’

He frowned. ‘Are you my nursemaid now?’

‘I mean the police-media thing, not your private life.’

Challis was embarrassed. ‘Sorry.’

‘I’ll get this letter off to the lab.’

‘It won’t tell us anything.’

‘I know.’

Canteen gossip soon spread the word about John Tankard’s attempt to book Challis, so he was foul company that afternoon-as if he wasn’t touchy enough already, owing to that leaflet campaign against him. Pam Murphy trod delicately around him during the ground-search of the Jane Gideon abduction site. Being diverted to attend a domestic dispute with him, on their way back to the station, was the last thing she wanted. Tankard’s method of policing domestics was the bellow and the clip around the earhole.

She drove through the late-afternoon heat. A week before Christmas, and four months of hot weather lay ahead of them, the heat giving a particular spin to local crime. Your burglaries increased, as people went on holiday or left windows open to catch a breeze. Cowboy water-haulage contractors stole water from the mains. Brawling increased-in the home, the pub, the street; outside pinball parlours; on the foreshore on New Year’s Eve. Surfies reported thefts from their vans. Weekend farmers drove down from Toorak and Brighton in their BMWs and Range Rovers on Friday evenings and discovered that someone had emptied their sheds of ride-on mowers and whipper-snippers, or their paddocks of cattle, sheep, horses, angora goats. And now another highway murder.

‘Next right,’ Tankard said. He sounded keen, as if he could sense an arrest.

Pam turned the corner. The arrest rate was part of the problem. The sergeant was always urging a higher arrest rate, saying it was too low for the region. It’s not as if we’re in the inner suburbs, Pam thought, tackling knife gangs. Down here a quiet warning should be enough.

Still, she thought, I’m the rookie here, what do I know?

She braked the van gently about halfway along the street. There was no need to peer at house numbers: the focus of the drama was obvious, a gaggle of neighbours on the footpath. She pulled in hard against the kerb, pocketed the keys, and got to the front door of the house before Tankard could.

It was ajar. She knocked. ‘Police.’

The man who came along the corridor toward them wore a bathmat of body hair on a white, sagging trunk. His feet were bare, his knees like bedknobs under threadbare shorts. Someone had scratched his plump shoulders. He’d also have a black eye By the evening. ‘Look, sorry you were called out, but we’ve got it sorted.’

Pam said, ‘I’m Constable Murphy, this is Constable Tankard. Who else is in the house, sir?’

‘Just the wife, also the-’

John Tankard shouldered through. ‘We need to see her, pal.’

The man retreated in alarm. ‘She’s-’

Pam saw worry under the weariness, the poverty and the beer. She touched Tankard’s forearm warningly and said, ‘Constable Tankard and I just need a quick word with your wife, sir, if you don’t mind.’

The man twisted his features at her. ‘Look, girlie, I-’

It had been a long day. Pam pushed her face into his and breathed shallowly. She got ‘girlie’ twenty times an hour at the station; she didn’t need it from some civilian as well. ‘Are you obstructing us in our duty, sir? Because if you are-’

A priest appeared from a back room. ‘It’s all right, it’s all right. I’m talking to them. We’re sorting it out. There’s no need for police intervention.’

‘See? Told ya.’

Pam hooked her finger. ‘Father, could I have a minute?’

She took the priest out on to the lawn at the front of the house. Tankard scowled after her. She ignored him. ‘Father, I’m as anxious as you are to avoid trouble.’

The priest nodded. ‘Everything’s calm now. The fellow’s wife has a history, a personality condition. Sometimes, when it’s been hot for a few days, things get on top of her and she snaps. That’s what all the ruckus was about. She hit him, not the other way round.’

‘How is she now?’

‘Quiet. Ashamed. She hadn’t been taking her pills.’

Pam walked with the priest back to the front door. ‘Sir, we won’t be taking any further action.’

Tankard was furious with her in the van. ‘We should have talked to the wife.’

Pam explained. Tankard said nothing. He said nothing the whole way back to the station, not until he saw Inspector Challis outside the station, getting into his car to drive home.

‘Arsehole.’

There had been a time when Challis wanted to write a book about the things he’d seen and known and done, a lot of it bad. Fiction, because who’d believe it if he tried to pass it off as fact? He’d studied with a novelist at the TAFE College in Frankston, Novel Writing, every Wednesday evening from six until ten-when he wasn’t on call somewhere, staking out a house, feeling for a pulse, arresting someone who didn’t want to be arrested-but soon realised that although he had plenty to say, he didn’t know how to say it. It was locked inside him, in the stiff language of an official report. He couldn’t find the key that would let the words sing on the page. He’d confessed all of this to the novelist, who congratulated him, saying, ‘My other students either have nothing to say or never realise that they haven’t got a voice, so count yourself lucky.’

Challis had smiled tiredly. ‘You mean, you count yourself lucky you’re not stuck with one more bad writer.’

The novelist laughed and invited him to the pub to say goodbye.

But one thing stuck in Challis’s mind-a quote from a writers’ handbook. Georges Simenon, author of the Maigret novels, had said: ‘I would like to carve my novels in a piece of wood’. Challis felt like that now. As he drove away from the Waterloo police station at six o’clock that evening, he thought that he’d like to be able to stand back from this case, his life, and gauge where the shape was pleasing and where it was all wrong.

He turned right at the sign for the aerodrome and splashed the Triumph into a parking bay at the rear of the main hangar. He went in. One end had been partitioned off, and here Challis pulled on a pair of overalls, tuned in to Radio National, and went to work.

When he’d first moved to the Peninsula, he’d joined the Aero Club and learned of a Dragon Rapide lying in pieces in a barn north of Toowoomba. He’d paid ten thousand dollars to buy the wreck and a further fifteen hundred to have it trucked down to Victoria. There was a serial number, A33-8, as well as an old VH registration, but Challis knew nothing else of the particular history of his aeroplane. He knew that in 1934 de Havilland had flown the prototype at Stag Lane, in the UK, as a faster and more comfortable version of the DH84 Dragon, with Gipsy Queen 6 motors instead of the Gipsy Major 4s, but who had imported his Rapide, and what had she been used for?

He turned on a lathe. Several pieces of the airframe had been damaged, sections of the plywood fuselage casing were lifting away, the six passenger seats had rotted through, and both motors would need to be rebuilt. He was also attempting to find new tyres, and had asked a machinist to manufacture a number of metal parts to replace those too rusty to be restored. It could all take years. Challis was in no hurry.

A woman came in, smiling a greeting. ‘The dragon man.’

‘Kitty.’

Challis knew that Kitty wasn’t her real name, but derived from Kittyhawk. They exchanged pleasantries, then Kitty fetched overalls from a hook on the wall and went to the other end of the partitioned space, where the fuselage of a 1943 Kittyhawk fighter sat on the concrete floor, next to an engine block. The only other restoration project in the room was a 1930 Desoutter, which was close to completion.

Challis returned to his lathe work. Behind him, Kitty began to remove the sludge from the engine block. It was companionable working with her. Challis felt some of the blackness lift away. He didn’t have to account for himself here. He didn’t have to apologise for, or hide, his obsession with the Dragon. Here it was as if he didn’t carry his whiff of people who had died terribly or committed terrible things. He was simply Hal Challis, who liked to fly aeroplanes and was restoring a 1930s Rapide.

The moon was out when he finally drove home. The eyes of small animals gleamed in his headlights. The telephone was ringing in his hallway.

‘Yes.’ He never said his name.

‘Hal?’

His sense of calm left him. Some of the day’s badness came leaking in to take its place. He dropped onto the little stool beside the phone. ‘Hello, Ange.’

She didn’t speak for a while. ‘An early Merry Christmas, Hal.’

‘You, too.’

‘I thought, I might not get an opportunity to ring you next week. Everyone here will be hogging the phones on Christmas Day, so I thought, why not call you tonight, get in early.’

‘Good thinking,’ Challis said. He wished he had a drink. ‘Look, Ange, I’ll take this in the kitchen, okay?’

‘If this is a bad time I’ll-’

‘No, now’s fine, just wait a moment while I go to the kitchen.’

He poured Scotch into a glass, stood the glass on the bench top, stared a moment at the wall phone next to the fridge, then let out his breath.

‘I’m back, Ange.’

‘I’m trying to picture your house.’

‘It’s just a house.’

A catch in her voice. ‘Not that I’ll ever see the inside of it.’

‘Ange, I-’

‘I imagine somewhere peaceful and quiet. I miss that.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m not a bad person, Hal. Not deep down inside.’

‘I know you’re not.’

‘Temporary madness.’

‘Yes.’

‘I can’t really believe it all happened like that. Like a bad dream.’

‘Yes.’

‘You do forgive me, don’t you?’

‘I forgive you.’

The answers came automatically. He’d been giving them for years.

She said, in a wondering voice: ‘You’re an unusual man, Hal. Other husbands wouldn’t forgive their wives, not for something like that.’

Challis swallowed his drink. ‘So, Ange, will your mum and dad come on Christmas Day?’

‘Change the subject, why don’t you? Mum will, Dad won’t. He doesn’t want to know me.’ She broke down. ‘God, seven years, and he hasn’t been once to see me.’

Challis let her cry herself out.

‘You still there, Hal?’

‘I’m here.’

The night was still and dark. The house was like an echoing shell around him.

‘You don’t say much.’

‘Ange-’

‘It’s okay, Hal, I have to go anyway. My phonecard’s almost used up.’

‘Take it easy, Ange.’

‘I shouldn’t be here, Hal. I don’t belong, not really.’

Challis said gently, ‘I know.’

‘It’s not as if I did anything. Conspiracy to murder, God, how did I know he’d try it?’

‘Ange-’

She sighed. ‘Spilt milk, eh?’

‘Spilt milk.’

‘Get on with my life.’

‘That’s the spirit.’

‘I can’t believe I wanted him instead of you.’

Challis drained his glass. He said, ‘Ange, I have to go now. Take it easy, okay? Keep your spirits up.’

‘You’re my lifeline,’ his wife said.