‘I won’t let my daughter take that road any more.’
‘My niece, she takes the bus to Frankston now, in case her car breaks down.’
The shopgirl said, ‘It makes you think twice about going to the pictures and that.’ She shivered. ‘Stay home and watch a video instead.’
‘They’re cowards, you know. If you’re a woman and you’re driving alone at night, take someone along with you. They’re cowards. They won’t pick on two.’
‘Makes you think.’
‘I’ll say.’
There was no advice that Challis could offer them, so he said nothing. He’d seen women take stupid risks and pay for it. He’d seen them take extra care and still fall victim to rapists and killers. He’d seen them fall victim in public thoroughfares, where they might expect a measure of security. What good would it do for him to tell the women in the shop: ‘You’re right to be cautious’?
He bought a pita bread pocket stuffed with lettuce, tomato, fetta and leaky mayonnaise, Ellen a slice of quiche. They wandered down to the playground next to the public swimming pool. Some of their lightness had evaporated. ‘Then something like that happens,’ Challis said, knowing that Ellen would follow the trail of his thoughts, ‘and I realise that I am different, I am separate from everyone else. I’m expected to be. No-one’s saying, “Come in here with us”, they’re saying, “Stay out there and watch over us.” It’s a crying shame,’ he said, hurling the remains of his lunch toward the seagulls, ‘and nothing can be done about it.’
Ellen leaned briefly against him and said, ‘Hal,’ softly.
They wandered back to the station, saying little, but feeling a kind of commonality with each other, and sadness.
They hadn’t been in the incident room for long when Ellen murmured, ‘McQuarrie’s here.’
The man coming toward them wore a natty suit and the alert, clipped, close-shaven look of an army officer in an old British film. ‘Afternoon, everyone.’
‘Superintendent.’
‘Hal, have you seen one of these?’
Challis glanced at it, a leaflet headed ‘Our very own stormtrooper.’
‘I was aware they were around, sir.’
‘The night shift found them on their cars this morning. Someone had the nerve to walk in under our noses.’
Since McQuarrie was based in Frankston and rarely visited the regional stations, Challis didn’t know why he was saying our noses. ‘I see.’
‘I’ve talked to Mr Kellock. He’s going to post a stakeout over the car park tonight.’
Challis glanced past the superintendent at Ellen Destry, in time to catch a fleeting grin. ‘Good for you, sir.’
‘It’s the thin edge of the wedge.’
For all of his talk about the thin edge of the wedge, the superintendent was a diplomat, a man who bent with the wind. His was the face the public saw whenever the police had to explain anything. Challis knew that McQuarrie played golf with well-heeled men, and he had no trouble seeing him scurrying along behind, letting them set the agenda.
‘Right, Kymbly Abbott,’ McQuarrie said. ‘Bring me up to speed. Any forensic joy?’
‘Nothing to speak of. He used a condom. No prints, but indications of a latex glove.’
‘Tyres, footprints, sightings, nothing like that?’
‘Nothing, sir, except one witness, who phoned this morning. She saw Abbott on the highway the night she was murdered.’
McQuarrie spun around and regarded the wall map, his long hands on his bony hips. Challis winked at Ellen, then joined McQuarrie at the map. ‘Here, sir, where it starts. Apparently she was sitting on the kerb, her feet in the gutter, holding out her thumb.’
‘Pity our witness didn’t pick her up.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Mad. These young girls, I don’t know.’
Challis couldn’t find an adequate response to that. He pointed at the map. ‘And here’s where Jane Gideon went missing.’
‘The cases might not be related.’
‘That’s occurred to us.’
‘She might have recognised the driver and gone off with him. Isn’t aware that people are worried about her.’
Challis rubbed his forehead irritably. ‘True.’
McQuarrie said, ‘But doubtful. It’s been too long and we can’t discount that letter.’
‘I agree.’
‘I had Tessa Kane on the blower.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Wanted a comment. Of course, I didn’t tell her anything.’
‘Wise, sir.’
McQuarrie clapped his hands together. ‘Right, well, keep me posted.’
Five
After her encounter with Sergeant Destry that morning, Pam Murphy had caught the bus for Myers Point. It had swayed along the coast road, Pam swaying with it, her surfboard upright against her knees like a broad, blank- faced, yellow extra passenger. The drivers were used to her by now. Every Wednesday morning-shift work allowing-since mid-October. The other passengers she’d never seen before: two tired-looking men in blue overalls, a raucous mother with a four-year-old who seemed to suffer clips about the ears without pain, and an elderly woman with a handbag.
The elderly woman alighted with her at Myers Point and limped toward a small weatherboard cottage. A woman watering the garden there carefully turned off the tap and embraced her visitor. Pam found that she was moved by the little incident. She had a sense of lifelong friends, who saw one another when they could and spoke on the telephone every day.
She walked around to the surfing beach. The board grew heavy and awkward. She was hot. She needed a car, but money somehow failed to stick to her. She was chronically in debt. She was barely able to scrape up thirty dollars for this morning’s lesson-not that Ginger would have insisted, but he was only a kid and it wouldn’t have been right.
He was waiting in the car park next to the public lavatories at the head of the dunes. Five others this morning, four women like herself and a guy in his fifties, a fit-looking character decorated with tattoos and a ponytail. Sure enough, there was a big chrome and black enamel Harley parked nearby.
Ginger flashed her a smile. She wished it was just Ginger and herself and the wide blue sea this morning-as it had been once or twice before.
The little group walked down through the gap in the dunes and came out upon flat sand opposite a mildly chopping sea. Ginger turned right and led them for some distance, staring critically at the water, the way the waves were forming and breaking. Pam admired the way he walked at an easy lope across the sand, while she and the others made hard work of it. Plenty of natural grace in that walk, nice tight muscles, long arms and legs, chin tipped back, his chopped-short, sun-bleached hair catching the sun. A wonderfully shapely face for a seventeen-year-old. No adolescent roundness, pimples or bumfluff. Cheerful. Uncomplicated. All that mattered to him were the surf and the surf school. It would be good if he had a little left over for her, she sometimes thought, even if he were
