‘Hello, my darlings,’ Scobie said, wondering if his tone alone would tip the balance toward harmony.
Beth was brushing oil over an uncooked chicken. Cubes of potato and pumpkin ringed it. She hardly dared to glance at him but kept her face and eyes averted as she accepted his kiss. She felt stiff in his arms.
Scobie turned to his daughter, who was absorbed with her homework. She liked to do her homework here. The kitchen was at the centre of things. The cheap pine desk in her bedroom wasn’t. He ruffled her hair and kissed her bent neck. She squirmed delightedly before saying ‘Daddy!’ and throwing her arms around him. He couldn’t get enough of that.
‘How was everyone’s day?’
‘Fine,’ his wife muttered.
His had been miserable. That poor, poor child.
Presently Roslyn wandered into the sitting room to watch ‘The Simpsons’. Scobie turned to his wife. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said, his tone a little sharp.
‘I’ve done something stupid.’
‘Such as?’
They kept current bills, letters and junk mail in an old in-tray beside the fridge. Beth took out a brochure. ‘I paid for this,’ she said, her face furiously red. ‘My own money.’
Scobie scanned the brochure. It said Rising Stars Agency in bold type, with a list of the agency’s accomplishments, including modelling contracts in Sydney and New York, and young actors placed in several films and TV shows. ‘I thought it would help our finances if Ros got picked,’ Beth said.
Scobie was pretty blind when it came to his daughter. His coworkers could have told him that-and some did. But even he didn’t think it likely that Roslyn would be hired to model little dresses and tops for the Myer or Pumpkin Patch catalogues, or get picked to play someone’s kid in a TV serial. ‘When was this?’
‘A month ago,’ said Beth in shame.
Scobie dimly recalled it. He’d been embroiled in a murder inquiry at the time, obliging him to spend long hours away from home, and had thought his daughter was having her photograph taken at school. He felt stricken: poor Beth. All she wanted was to help ease the family’s financial situation. But to do it like this! The world must be full of hopeful mothers, he thought, who believed their children photogenic enough to be models and actors. ‘Oh well,’ he said gently, ‘these sorts of things are bound to be a long shot.’
‘It’s not that,’ Beth whispered. ‘They promised they’d deliver the photos within seven days, but it’s been weeks now and they still haven’t arrived. I called the number on the brochure and got a recorded message, “Please check the number and call again”.’
Scobie frowned down at the brochure. No address, not even a post office box. Only a cell phone number.
‘You’ve been conned, sweetheart.’
Beth’s face crumpled. ‘Oh, Scobie, I’m so sorry.’
‘No harm done,’ Scobie said. He’d pass it on to the fraud squad. The guy’s prints might even be on the brochure.
‘You don’t have to go out again, do you?’ Beth said, wringing her hands a little.
Scobie shook his head. ‘I’m staying home all night.’
25
The darkest hours, well past midnight. Inside the ambush house, a roomy weatherboard cottage on a quiet street behind the fitness centre, van Alphen examined the expensive gear, the highly polished floorboards. The owner clearly made good money on the oil rigs. A tasteful place, if you discounted the Harley Davidson pennants and Grand Prix posters-which van Alphen didn’t.
A night spent in silence in an unfamiliar house is a long night. From time to time Kellock and van Alphen took turns to prowl through the dark rooms, but otherwise they were still, and rarely conversed. They pinpointed which floorboards creaked, which leather armchair crepitated under their weight. Van Alphen was a smoker but he couldn’t smoke tonight; Kellock badly wanted a drink. They didn’t touch a light switch, rarely used the torch.
At five minutes to four on the morning of Wednesday, 2 October, van Alphen whispered to Kellock, ‘We have a visitor.’
They waited. They tracked the glow of a torch as it passed one window and then another. Nothing happened for ten minutes. Finally there came the sounds of a window being forced. They were in the sitting room. A short hallway led from it. They moved to the hallway, listened again.
The spare bedroom.
Still they waited, allowing time for the guy-Nick Jarrett? — to boost himself through the window and into the room. They heard a soft thump, as though someone had jumped down onto a carpeted floor. ‘Now,’ whispered van Alphen.
Kellock moved first, a torch in one hand and his.38 Smith and Wesson service revolver in the other. ‘Police, don’t move!’ he shouted. ‘Police, don’t move!’
A retired forklift driver lived next door. Owing to his years of shift work at the oil depot on Westernport Bay, he often woke at four in the morning. He heard Kellock’s shout. ‘I heard it twice,’ he told investigators, in the days and weeks that followed.
‘And then?’
‘Nothing for a while, then I heard a couple of shots.’
‘Two shots?’
‘Yes.’
‘How long after the shouted warning?’
‘Hard to say, really. Could have been two minutes, could have been five.’
So much for Scobie Sutton’s vow to stay in all night. He got the call, beating the ambulance, in fact. Kellock and van Alphen met him at the door. He’d always been intimidated by them. They were big men, in size and in the way they carried themselves, and had always treated him with faintly amused contempt, as though he were not a man, as though decent men, churchgoing men, were a joke. It couldn’t be contempt though, could it? What sorts of upbringings had they had? What values had their parents instilled in them? Scobie couldn’t work them out and was afraid, as they stood there in the doorway, not letting him in.
Somehow he found the nerve to say, ‘Unusual for a sergeant and a senior sergeant to be on a stakeout together.’
Kellock made a wide, lazy gesture, snideness in his sleepy eyes.
‘Staff shortages, Scobe old son. Plus I had uniforms watching three other houses.’
Scobie swallowed. ‘Can I come in?’
Both men pantomimed are-we-stopping-you? Scobie edged past them, then paused, looking at Kellock’s arm. ‘You’ve cut yourself.’
‘Defensive wounds,’ van Alphen said matter-of-factly. He was right behind Scobie, practically breathing in his ear. ‘The little cunt pulled a knife on him, didn’t he, Kel?’
‘Yep.’
‘Who shot him?’ Scobie said, backing away from them.
‘I did,’ Kellock said.
‘Where is he?’
‘Along here.’
They took him to the spare bedroom. Nick Jarrett had apparently stumbled backwards, collided with the bed, and then fallen crookedly beside it. He wore overalls and had been shot twice in the chest. Gloved hands, his left clutching a knife. ‘Good riddance, eh, Scobe?’ said Kellock, crowding him there in the doorway.
‘What happened?’
‘Told you, he pulled a knife.’
