‘I’ll take it,’ he said, moments later. As he’d told Murph yesterday, he’d negotiated the guy down in price by $5000. What he hadn’t told her was he’d arranged a loan through the caryard’s finance company.
‘We haven’t had time to register the car in Victoria,’ the guy had said last weekend, ‘it’s only just come in, but the Northern Territory registration is still current, so you can drive it around.’
‘No problemo,’ Tank had said. All he needed to do was get a roadworthy certificate from Waterloo Motors, then register the car at the VicRoads office in Waterloo.
He strolled into Prestige Autos now, and there she was, gleaming in the sun.
11
The long day passed. At 3.30 that Saturday afternoon, Pam Murphy uncovered a lead. Given that her detective training was due to start on Monday, this was possibly her last act as a uniformed constable. Katie Blasko had been missing for forty-eight hours.
‘This was when?’ she asked the woman in Snapper Way.
‘After school.’
‘On Thursday?’
‘I think it was Thursday.’
Pam gazed at the woman, said politely, ‘Could it have been yesterday?’
‘Let’s see, yesterday was Friday. No, it wasn’t yesterday I saw her. I don’t work on Fridays. It must have been Thursday. Or Wednesday.’
Pam was door knocking in an area bounded by Katie Blasko’s house, her school, Trevally Street and the Waterloo foreshore. Some of the houses were fibro-cement or weatherboard holiday and weekender shacks owned by city people, but most were brick veneer houses dating from the 1960s and ‘70s, their old-fashioned rose gardens pointing to leathery retirees who walked their dogs on the nearby beach and collected sea weed for fertiliser, and their bicycles, plastic toys and glossy four-wheel-drives pointing to young families who probably had no cash to spare after paying off their gadget, car and home loans. Pam met many women aged around sixty that afternoon, and many aged around thirty, like this woman, Sharon Elliott, the library aide at Katie Blasko’s primary school. Short, round, cheery, anxious to please, dense-and, Pam decided, blind as a bat without her glasses.
‘If you could tell me where you saw her, it might help jog your memory.’
‘Near the shops.’
‘In High Street?’
‘Well, no,’ Elliott said, as though that should have been obvious to Pam. ‘Of course, I do my main shopping at the Safeway, but if I run out of bread or whatever I nip across to the corner shop.’ She pointed vaguely. ‘You pay more, but if I drove over to Safeway every time I wanted bread or milk, what I spent on fuel would outweigh the money I saved.’
Pam felt her eyes glazing over. ‘And you bought something in the corner shop last Thursday?’
‘I’m pretty sure. No. Wait. Yes, it was Thursday. I needed the latest Trading Post. I placed an ad to sell a mattress, and wanted to see if it had appeared.’
Pam knew that the Trading Post was published every Thursday. She beamed. The air was briny from the sea, the afternoon sun benign. The Peninsula had erupted with flowers, too, drawing the bees. It was a lazy, pleasure- laden Saturday in spring, and you were apt to forget that children could be abducted or murdered regardless of the season.
‘Good,’ said Pam encouragingly. ‘And you’re sure this was the girl?’
They examined the flyer again. ‘It looks like the girl I saw.’
‘Do you know her? Have you taught her?’
‘I’m just an aide at the school. Almost five hundred children go there. I know quite a few by sight and many by name.’
‘Yes, but did you ever have anything to do with this girl?’ Pam asked, wanting to beat the woman around the head with a damp fish.
Sharon Elliot gazed at her blankly. ‘What do you mean?’
Not for the first time, Pam realised that suspects and witnesses alike looked for traps behind your questions. They anticipated, evaded, lied, glossed the picture, told you what they thought you wanted to know, or got needlessly defensive. Or they were stupid. ‘I’m wondering,’ she said, trying to conceal her irritation, ‘if you recognise this likeness of Katie Blasko precisely because you’d encountered her at school recently, helped her find a library book, perhaps, comforted her because she’d been crying about something, or because you saw her outside the corner shop between three-thirty and four this past Thursday afternoon.’
‘Both,’ said Sharon Elliott promptly.
‘I see.’
‘She was a bit noisy during quiet reading. Mrs Sanders had the Preps that session so I was taking the Grade 6s, and had to ask Katie to keep the noise down, except I didn’t know her name was Katie, this was earlier in the week, so I was surprised when she waved to me.’
Pam didn’t try to sort through the account. Her feet and back ached. She’d welcome a cup of tea or coffee, but Sharon Elliott was keeping her there on the front verandah, beside potted plants that were leaking water onto the decking. Above her the roofing iron flexed in the heat. ‘She waved to you?’
‘Like this,’ said Sharon Elliott, gesturing.
‘Was it a cheerful wave? Did she smile? Or might it have been a gesture of some kind?’
‘A gesture?’
Pam didn’t want to lead this witness, but really, the woman was dense. ‘A beseeching gesture, for example, as if she needed help.’
Sharon Elliott gave her a blank look. ‘I don’t know. It was just a wave.’
‘Did you get a good look at the driver?’
‘No. I just assumed it was her dad.’
‘But it was a man?’
‘I think so. It could have been her mother.’
Did teachers’ aides ever become teachers, Pam wondered. She waited a beat and said, ‘What can you tell me about the vehicle.’
‘It was just a car.’
‘A car? I thought you said it was a van?’
The woman’s face crumpled. ‘Car, van, I don’t really know much about that kind of thing. My husband’s the driver in the family.’
‘Let’s see,’ said Pam, glancing up and down the street. ‘Was it the shape of that silver vehicle over there?’
A bulky four-wheel-drive. ‘Not really.’
‘Like that blue one?’
An old Nissan sedan. ‘Now that I think about it I’m sure it wasn’t small like that or have a lot of windows and big wheels like that silver one. More of a boxier shape.’
A van or a panel van, thought Pam. ‘Colour?’
‘Oh, now, white, I think.’
‘And what time did you see this vehicle?’
‘After school.’
‘Yes, but three-fifteen, three-thirty, quarter to four?’
‘Before four, anyway.’
‘And we’re not talking about separate things here, you’re saying the vehicle and the girl who waved at you are part of the same incident?’
‘I think so,’ said Sharon Elliott.
Pam made a note.
