the room. At one point she scanned the shelves of CDs and shook her head. ‘There’s exactly nothing here I want to listen to.’ Then suddenly she was sniffing, and looked young and small. ‘Mum, Travis broke up with me.’
‘Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry.’
‘It’s the worst time. Just before exams.’
Ellen hugged her. Larrayne, so unyielding for months, hugged her back fiercely.
Meanwhile van Alphen was heading down to Waterloo and Westernport Bay, ten minutes away. It was out of order for Lester to ask for his help in what was a private, not police, matter, but he had to admit that his informants didn’t often ask him to intervene in their affairs. It was all about balance. As a copper, van Alphen couldn’t operate without a stable of informants, registered and unregistered alike. Sure, they often fed him poor tips about small- time crimes and criminals, but now and then they came up with gold. Lester was unregistered: probably, thought van Alphen now, because the little prick enjoyed informing for several of Waterloo’s finest. Lester was always playing some kind of game. He liked to be seen in public with van Alphen (‘Here’s my tame cop’), and take van Alphen to auction houses and pawnshops that dealt in stolen goods (‘This cop’s on the take’), his intention clear: Mr V, if you ever try to break this partnership, I can make you look dirty.
Van Alphen tolerated Lester, knowing never to sink all of his hopes in just one informant. It was impossible to know how long Lester would be useful to him, however, or even how long Lester would live. Meanwhile Lester was in it for different types of gain: to get money, or revenge, or some hard guy off his back; to feel good about himself; to divert the attention of the police away from his own activities. Van Alphen knew all of this, but he needed guys like Lester. After all, Lester had told him where on the Peninsula he’d find the likes of Billy DaCosta.
Not that Lester went in for young boys, or girls. There was something oddly asexual about the man. He lived with his mother above the betting shop they ran, on High Street in Waterloo. She fed information to van Alphen sometimes, too.
Van Alphen drove. He’d never met Lester’s sister or brother. He’d heard all about them, though: the sister a single mother, on methadone, the brother a head case who kept forgetting to take his medication. A typical Seaview Park estate story…At that moment, van Alphen frowned: he could have sworn that Lester’s sister and brother lived on a housing estate outside Mornington, on the other side of the Peninsula. Still, people like that tended to move around a lot.
He entered Seaview Park estate and crept along the darkened streets. More than half of the overhead lights were out, shards of glass at the base of the poles. The houses watched him mutely, most well kept but others with old cars in the front yards, rusting inside a shroud of dead grass. No one stirred. This was a country of shift workers and young families: any noise would come from people like the Jarretts, or those who had no job or anything to look forward to but blowing the welfare payment on booze and dope every night. And so it was quiet and dark along Bittern Close, Albatross Crescent, Osprey Avenue and, finally, Sealers Road. Van Alphen wound down his window and aimed his powerful torch at the front windows of 19 Sealers Road. It was the last house in the street, deep within a corner of the estate, bound on one side and the rear by the estate’s stained pine perimeter fence, and on the other by an unoccupied house, a For Sale sign on a lean in the dead front lawn. Number 19 looked dead, too, but if Lester’s sister was a junkie, or a recovering junkie, she probably didn’t care about the upkeep of her garden or want light pouring in.
Van Alphen parked his car and knocked on the front door. A dog some distance away barked, but otherwise there was only the wind, and the sensation of the earth whispering through space. Van Alphen had these fancies sometimes-encouraged now by the scudding clouds and the moon behind them. There was no sign of Lester’s little Ford Fiesta, big surprise.
After a while he went around the side of the house, peering through windows, to the back yard, where someone had jemmied open the glass sliding door, buckling the aluminium frame and cracking the glass. He froze. He edged aside the curtain with his torch and went in, to where there was sudden movement behind him and a shotgun exploding, the sound deadened by a pillow, but not the outcome.
43
Challis completed his call to Ellen Destry feeling a little frustrated. He’d wanted to tell her that his father had been taken to hospital that morning. He’d wanted to tell her that it was maybe his fault.
It started after Gavin’s funeral, when he’d argued with Meg, the argument continuing all weekend.
‘Can’t you see?’ she said. ‘Dad’s worse.’
‘He seems the same to me,’ Challis had said.
‘It’s subtle, but he’s definitely worse. He should go back into hospital.’
‘What can they do, except observe? All that to-ing and fro-ing will do more harm than good. He needs rest.’
Saturday passed, Sunday, some bad old history informing their arguments. Eve forced them to apologise, but they were wrung out and could not do more than that. They were stubborn; it was a standoff.
And then, as if to underscore the fact that Meg knew what she was talking about because she’d stayed close to her family and Challis hadn’t, the old man had collapsed after breakfast and been rushed to hospital. Challis had just come home from spending the day there.
His conversation with Ellen cut short, he felt restless and incomplete. The house oppressed him at night, and he didn’t want to sit for hours in the hospital again.
Then the kitchen phone rang and he looked at it with dread. Meg’s voice was low and ragged. ‘It’s Dad.’
At once Challis pictured it: their father in the grip of another stroke or one of the weeping fits that seized him from time to time, as though life was desolate now. He asked foolishly, ‘Is he okay?’
The raggedness became tears. ‘Oh, Hal.’
Challis understood. ‘I’ll be right there.’
He fishtailed the Triumph out of his father’s driveway and sped across town to the hospital. There was a scattering of cars parked around it, but otherwise the place seemed benign, even deserted, as though illness and grief had taken a rest for the day. He parked beside a dusty ambulance and barged through the doors. Here at last were people, but no sense of urgency or of lives unravelling.
‘Hal!’
He wheeled around. A dim corridor, smelling of disinfectant, the linoleum floors scuffed here and there by black rubber wheels. Meg and Eve were sitting outside one of the single rooms with Rob Minchin, who patted Meg and got to his feet as Challis approached.
‘So sorry, Hal.’
The two men embraced briefly. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ Minchin said. ‘Couple of babies due some time tonight.’
Challis turned to Meg and Eve. Their faces were full of dampish misery, but uplifted a little to see him, as though he were their rock. He didn’t feel like a rock. It was a lie. He was quiet and thoughtful, and people mistook that for strength. In fact, all he wanted to do was join Meg and Eve in weeping.
Meg drew him onto a chair beside her. Eve gave him a wobbly smile.
He said gently, ‘What happened?’
‘Massive cerebral haemorrhage.’
He found that he couldn’t bear to think of it. There would have been suffering, brief, but intense. There would have been a moment of extreme fear. He didn’t like to think of his father’s last moments.
Meg held his hand in her left and Eve’s in her right. ‘It could have been worse,’ she said.
They sat quietly. ‘Can I see him?’
Meg released his hand and pointed. ‘In there.’
The room was ablaze, a nurse and an orderly bustling and joking as they worked. They sobered when they saw him. ‘Hal,’ said the nurse.
He peered at her. ‘Nance?’
