She’d scarcely made a start on the paperwork cluttering her desk when Superintendent McQuarrie called. ‘I hear you let our cop killer go.’
This aroused conflicting emotions in Ellen. She twirled in her chair, the phone held to her ear. McQuarrie was too neat and precise a man to use the term ‘cop killer’. He was trying out the phrase, trying to sound tough or ingratiate himself. Also, his tone was accusatory. Did he ever praise? Would he ever praise her? Had he ever praised Hal Challis? Finally, the man had spies and cronies everywhere. She couldn’t blame Kellock: it was his job to keep his superiors abreast of things. Still, McQuarrie’s tone was reminding her yet again that the police force was made up of many wheels. Her own was small and barely revolved, it seemed to her. It didn’t exist within, or intersect with, the wheels that mattered.
‘Sir, we didn’t have enough evidence to hold Mr Jarrett.’
‘Gunshot residue?’
‘None.’
‘Then someone from his appalling family carried it out.’
‘They all have alibis, sir.’
‘Good ones?’
‘Yes, sir.’
She was tired of calling him ‘sir’.
‘Jarrett could have washed off the GSR. How’s his alibi?’
‘Solid, sir. We have a witness who heard a shot at eleven o’clock last night and…’
‘This fine, upstanding person didn’t think to report it?’
‘Sir, it’s the estate. At the time Sergeant van Alphen was shot, Laurie Jarrett’s daughter was being examined by a doctor and a nurse in Casualty at the Waterloo hospital. Laurie was with her the whole time. It checks out.’
‘Convenient. What about Jarrett’s wife, the kid’s mother?’
‘She’s in a drug rehab clinic in Perth, heroin addiction, court ordered after she was arrested for burglary and shoplifting offences.’
‘Divorced? Separated?’
‘Never married. She left home when Alysha was born.’
‘Making Laurie a heroic single dad,’ snarled McQuarrie. ‘It makes me sick.’
She suspected he meant the loose family arrangements you found these days. She felt like reminding him that his own family wasn’t squeaky clean, that his own son had taken part in suburban sex parties-then reflected sourly that sex parties were probably seen as an acceptable aberration of the upper classes, whereas children born out of wedlock to addicts was seen as a condemnatory characteristic of the lower classes.
She cast her mind back to her interrogation with Laurie Jarrett. Deciding against a lawyer, he’d opened up finally, seeming almost genial. For the first time, Ellen glimpsed what it was like for him. He was an old-style crim, who didn’t use or condone drugs. He stole to make money, an income, not to feed a drug habit, unlike his sons, cousins, nephews, de facto…He was loyal to his family, bailed them out, but sometimes that love must have been sorely tested.
‘He still could have ordered the hit,’ McQuarrie was saying now.
‘Ordered the hit’ was another expression that sat oddly in the super. ‘We’ll keep checking, sir.’
‘You sound doubtful. In fact, you have doubtful outcomes mounting up all around you, Sergeant.’
He sounded cocky and provocative. He was the kind of man who hated and feared women-the hate and the fear being one and the same thing, really, for he hated women because they made him fear them. She said nothing, but a kind of black light suffused her. If he’d been there with her she’d have struck him. Instead, she hit him another way. ‘Speaking of doubtful outcomes, sir,’ she said, ‘did you know that Sergeant van Alphen had been coaching a witness, a street kid called Billy DaCosta, to give false evidence against the men we suspect of abducting and abusing Katie Blasko?’
There was a silence. Then, in a constrained voice, McQuarrie said, ‘Is he connected to the Jarretts, this DaCosta person?’
Ellen had checked. ‘No, sir.’
‘How can you be sure? The Jarretts are behind this. It’s a revenge killing, of a police officer, and won’t be tolerated.’
‘Sir.’
‘It’s too big for you, for your team.’
‘Sir.’
She felt oddly relieved as McQuarrie went on to tell her that Homicide Squad officers would come down from the city to take over the investigation into van Alphen’s murder. ‘They have the resources and the expertise.’
‘Sir.’
‘Leaving you free to do whatever it was you were doing before this.’
As though Katie’s abduction and abuse were minor things, easily forgotten. In his mind, McQuarrie probably thought that he’d successfully undermined Ellen. She had a creepy sense of the forces at work around her.
50
The days passed and she made no headway. The urgency had gone from the investigation. Not even the van Alphen murder could galvanise anyone, for when the Homicide Squad detectives took over the case, they immediately shut Waterloo staff out. There were four of them, three men and a woman, young, sleek, educated and close-mouthed.
Commandeering one of the conference rooms, they interviewed all thirty of the staff based at the station- uniformed officers, probationary constables, Ellen’s CIU detectives, collators, civilian clerks and cleaners-their manner clipped and impersonal, arousing resentment.
On Friday they interviewed Ellen. They seemed cynical with her. Doubting. Probably because she’d had charge of the investigation for the first few hours, she thought.
‘I didn’t really know him,’ she told them.
‘You had him digging around in that abduction case.’
‘He was assigned to desk duties pending the inquiry into the Nick Jarrett shooting,’ Ellen said. ‘He wanted to be useful.’
‘So useful he left his desk and operated in secret.’
They were well informed. Ellen said, ‘Unfortunately he didn’t confide in me.’
‘Did he like little boys?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘He was shacked up with a street kid.’
She supposed that their besmirching van Alphen was part of a strategy. They wanted to know if van Alphen’s hidden interests and activities had made him a target. They wanted people to be outraged, and talk.
‘As I understand it,’ she said carefully, ‘he was protecting a witness.’
‘Do you still understand that to be the case?’
Ellen shrugged. ‘The witness claimed that he’d been coached by Sergeant van Alphen, so I don’t know what to believe.’
‘Hissy fits, sudden flare-ups of temper, biting, scratching and kicking. It can get quite volatile, the gay scene.’
Ellen wasn’t going to let them provoke her. ‘We don’t know that he was gay. We don’t know that he liked little boys. They’re not even the same thing. Look, I know you have to examine every contingency, but why this one? It impinges on my case. Why aren’t you looking at the Jarrett clan?’
‘Like you said, we’ll look into everything.’
Ellen watched them expressionlessly, their four clever faces staring back at her, giving nothing away. She’d
