His pinched face screwed up in worry. ‘They all look the same.’
It was true. Small brick houses with tiled roofs, all about thirty years old. Native trees lined the streets. There were no front fences. The cars in the driveways or on the nature strips indicated modest incomes and aspirations. Challis slowed the car for a knot of teenagers playing cricket. Otherwise the streets were deserted.
He turned, completing the block, and started on the next. Then another.
Finally Danny said, ‘It was sort of like that one.’
‘Like that one, or was it that one?’
‘That one.’
Over-long grass and weeds, white pebble-dashed walls and glazed tiles set it apart from the other houses, but only just. ‘What do you recognise about it?’
‘I dunno. The walls, kind of thing. Plus that thing on the roof.’
A satellite dish.
‘Okay, let’s go.’
Fifteen minutes later, Challis said, ‘How sure are you?’
‘Fairly sure. It was night time.’
‘Danny, this house is unoccupied. It’s been like that for some time.’
In fact, Challis had found a To-Let sign lying in the grass.
‘Wasn’t when I broke in.’
‘Then you must have broken into a different house.’
Challis glanced at Ellen. Her face had fallen into lines of frustration and extreme anxiety. She blinked, letting the tears splash. ‘He’s got a new base. He could be anywhere.’
Challis took Sutton aside. ‘Check with the neighbours. And see if you can get an after-hours number for the agency handling the lease. We need to know who owns the place, who last rented it, forwarding address, etcetera.’
‘Right.’
Challis looked at the sky. It was almost dark. He could see the bluish flicker of television sets in a couple of houses. There was a glow on the horizon, the lights of Melbourne.
He returned to the car. ‘Okay, Danny, we’re taking you home.’
‘Home?’
Ellen snarled, ‘Your home for the next little while, unless you get bail, you useless piece of shit.’
Danny sniffed. He sniffed all the way out of the little estate, as Challis took wrong turnings and found himself in dead-end streets and on streets that wound back on themselves like the entrails of a complicated organism. Danny might have kept on sniffing as Challis finally found a street that would take them on to the highway if he hadn’t gone tense and pointed and said, ‘There. That’s the house.’
It was like the other in most details, except that the grass was short, and there was a signboard advertising a business name hammered into the grass, and a Jeep bearing the same sign parked in the driveway. Trees and dense shrubbery screened the house from the neighbours.
‘I remember the sign,’ Danny said.
Rhys Hartnett, Air-Conditioning Specialist.
Twenty-Seven
Challis parked farther along the street and radioed for Sutton and his team. When they arrived he directed one man to stand watch over the Jeep, and Sutton and the other men he directed to the yard at the rear. ‘Scobie, you wait by the back door. Put one man at either corner, so he can watch for movement at any of the windows along the sides of the house. Ellen and I will take the front.’
He turned back to the car. ‘Danny, give me your wrist, please. I hate to do this, but…’
He cuffed the thin, unresisting wrist to the roof handle above the door. ‘Not too tight?’
Danny’s eyes gleamed. ‘You’re going after him?’
‘Yes, Danny, we are.’
‘I’ll watch.’
‘You do that.’
Challis turned away. Ellen Destry was beside herself, marking time on the footpath, wanting to talk, wanting to act. She kicked the tyres on the Jeep. Even in the half-light, Challis could see that they were worn, mismatched. ‘These aren’t Cooper tyres.’
Ellen’s face was twisted with something like shame. ‘Hal, I think Hartnett saw me unloading the tyre casts we made at the reservoir. He probably replaced the Coopers with secondhand tyres later the same day.’ She looked away. ‘If he’s killed her, I’ll never forgive myself.’
There was no point in getting angry with her. Challis took her arm. ‘Are you ready?’
‘Am I ever.’
They approached the front door. Dogs were barking in the nearby yards. Challis slapped a mosquito away from his cheek. He could hear the irregular splash and rustle of someone hand-watering a garden bed at the house on the right. Ellen raised her knuckles and knocked.
A voice said, ‘Excuse me. You’re the police?’
Challis crossed swiftly to the border of trees and shrubs. ‘Yes.’
‘You after the air-conditioning bloke?’
‘What can you tell me about him, sir?’
‘We were talking just now. When he saw your car slow down, he went barging over my back fence.’
Hence the barking dogs, Challis thought. ‘Can you show me where?’
The man pointed. ‘I got the feeling he was heading for the reserve.’
Challis ran to the footpath. The reserve was a dark mass in the lowering light of evening. He thumbed the transmit button on his radio. ‘Scobie, is the back door unlocked?’
‘Yes, boss.’
‘Send a man in. Tell him to open the front door for Ellen. They’ll stay and search the house. You and the others come with me. He’s on foot, gone into scrubland.’
Ellen made a frantic search of the house, then gathered herself and searched again. She kept bumping into the uniformed constable. It was a small house. There was nothing ostensibly wrong about the man who lived in it. He owned a television set, a stereo, a handful of books. His habits were tidy. There was nothing freakish about the lighting, the wallpaper, the items in his cupboards and drawers. There was no pornography, there were no implements of cruelty. There was no body, alive or dead, or signs that one had ever been there.
But the house spoke of an inflexible life. No clutter, no dust, no sign that an ordinary person sprawled there at the end of the day. For just a moment, Ellen caught a sense of Rhys Hartnett, his rigidity and his hatred of disorder.
And, for what it was worth, there was a computer, and a Canon printer.
She remembered the bath. She levered off the side panels. Nothing.
Only an odour of dampness.
But he’d kept one souvenir, Kymbly Abbott’s backpack. Had he kept others? Or had he ceased to do that after Danny had broken in?
‘The ceiling, Sarge?’
There was a manhole. They positioned the hall table under it and she watched the constable haul himself through the narrow gap. She heard the roof beams creak. She heard a sneeze.
Then his face appeared. ‘Nothing, Sarge.’ He sneezed again.
