‘Not Sprog. Roslyn. Ros… lyn.’
‘Roslyn.’
Her little arms shot up, there at the back door. ‘Daddy, you hold me.’
‘I have to go to work now, sweetie.’
‘You take me? Please?’
‘Maybe another day.’
‘Scobie, love, you’ll give her false hope.’
It was often like this. You really had to think hard before you said or did anything around a three-year-old, for if they got the wrong message about something, a lot of the groundwork could go out the window.
He said, ‘Kiss Daddy goodbye. We’ll have a barbecue tonight, how would that be?’
‘Shotchidge?’
‘Shotchidge on bread with lots of sauce.’
‘Two shotchidge?’
‘As many as you like.’
Through the kisses goodbye, he heard his wife say, ‘I’m so lucky, I can’t believe it.’
‘I’ll try to get home early.’
‘It is Christmas Eve, my love.’
Pam Murphy went surfing early that morning, hoping to stumble upon Ginger with a class, but he wasn’t there. Sunday, Christmas Eve, she should have expected it. The day stretched ahead of her. She rang her parents.
Ninety minutes later she was getting off the Melbourne train and on to the Kew tram. Her parents lived in a turn-of-the-century house set in an overgrown garden on a hill overlooking Studley Park. Visiting them was something she did from time to time, not only because they were her parents, and getting on in years, but because, just once, she’d like them to express approval of the life she’d made for herself.
And today she wanted to put Tankard, Kellock and McQuarrie out of her mind, and give her parents their Christmas presents, and get some presents from them, and generally put her police life out of her mind for a few hours before she had to report for duty again at 4 p.m..
The house was in bad shape, rotting window frames, peeling paint and wallpaper, salt damp in the walls, leaking roof, even if it did sit on half an acre of prime real estate.
She had her own key.
‘That you, dear?’
Who else? Pam thought. ‘Me, mum.’
Kerlunk, kerlunk, and then a scrape as her mother’s walking frame manoeuvred through the sitting-room door, and more kerlunking as the old woman made her way along the hallway. It was dark inside the house, despite the dazzling sun outside. It beat against the heavy front door and barely lit up the stained glass.
Pam kissed her mother. ‘How’s Dad?’
A considering frown: ‘Let’s say he’s had a so-so day.’
‘Typing?’
‘Yes.’
Pam rubbed the palms of her hands together, gearing up for the long walk past her mother and down the dim, dampish hallway to the back room, where her father lived now, surrounded by his books. Dr Murphy didn’t seem to sleep. He spent all of his time propped up by pillows, a portable typewriter on his lap.
Pam hesitated. ‘How’s it going?’
‘We spent the morning squabbling about the use of a hyphen,’ her mother replied. ‘He insisted that it should be oil hyphen painting, I said that once upon a time it would have been, but that two single words was acceptable nowadays.’
There were three PhDs in the family. Pam’s father, and both of her brothers, who were several years older than her. The brothers were teaching at universities in the United States and were never coming back. That left Pam, who’d still been a child, an afterthought, when her brothers left home to live in university colleges. Some of the family’s intellectual sparkle seemed to go with them, and Pam grew up in the belief that her own development hadn’t mattered as much to her parents, that the family’s brains hadn’t been passed on to her. And so she made it clear that she was happy to swim and cycle and play tennis and go cross-country skiing. Solitary sports, mostly. But she made an interesting discovery: these sports taught her to think well, for they encouraged problem solving, solitude and reflection, so that she no longer believed that she wasn’t clever. When she graduated from the Police Academy, she was ranked third in her class.
Not that the family registered that fact.
‘Hi, Dad.’
‘What is this “hi” business? Should I now respond “low”?’
‘Hello, Dad, Father, Pater, O Kingly One.’
Her father grinned. The room smelt musty, a smell composed of old flesh and old furnishings and books. Pam crossed to the window.
‘Leave it!’ her father said.
‘As you wish.’
‘Sit, sweetie. What are the lawless up to?’
And Pam told him, embellishing, watching her father’s avid face. It was more than a simple desire for salacious detail. Pam suspected that he took a certain eugenicist position on crime.
‘And what did this fellow look like?’
‘Oh, pretty average,’ Pam said. ‘How’s the book going?’
Dr Murphy had been a lecturer in mathematics. He’d led an uneventful life, but was trying to screw an autobiography out of it.
‘At the rate I’m writing,’ he said sourly, ‘I’m likely to die before I’ve been conceived.’
That afternoon, van Alphen wondered about the relationship between sexual desire and cocaine. Clearly Clara wanted him, but he didn’t know how to read it. Simple desire, for him as an individual? Gratitude for his being there when she needed him after the fire? Or was it chemical, the cocaine itself acting on her, and nothing to do with him as a person?
She was discreet. He’d never seen her take the stuff. She’d hidden it away without taking any the night he delivered it, and when he’d called around yesterday it was clear that she’d already had some. No way did he want to see her take it, and she was protecting him, insisting that he always contact her before he called in to see her.
Whatever, she was always ready for him. But did she need to get stoked first? Did she see him as no more than her supplier, who had to be kept sweet, because he didn’t want payment in cash but in sex?
He was a long way in, now. He’d given her grams and grams of the stuff. ‘Clara, don’t be offended, you’re not going to sell the stuff on, are you?’
She was shocked, genuinely outraged. ‘Van, I told you, it’s for my nerves.’
‘I know.’
‘You can see it’s helping, can’t you? I mean, do I seem as jumpy to you any more?’
‘I guess not.’
‘No. So don’t ask me that. I feel ashamed enough as it is.’
‘Okay.’
‘It’s not as if I’m a junkie or anything.’
There were old scars, scarcely visible. Maybe she had been, once upon a time. ‘Forget I said it, Clara, okay?’
‘All right,’ she said grudgingly, then stretched out fully against his flank. ‘God you’re good for me.’
She’d drawn the curtains. Incense was burning. In the perfumed dimness he turned and kissed her. She broke away. ‘We’re forgetting you, Van. You seem edgy.’
