‘Sarge,’ said Pam, still scribbling.
‘You force suspects and witnesses alike to separate what they think they know from what is actually true, you help them through uncertainties and attack their certainties.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘And always, always, you ask earlier questions again, worded differently.’
‘Sarge,’ said Pam, wondering if she had enough for three thousand words. She thought she might look up old case notes and reproduce interview transcripts, generally pad out her essay in the time-honoured way of all students everywhere.
‘Always get their story first,’ van Alphen said. ‘Get them to commit to it. Then you take it apart, detail-by-detail. You’ll find that most people can lie convincingly some or even a lot of the time, but only the good liars remember exactly what they said.’
‘He doesn’t work here any more,’ said the manager of Prestige Autos late that Friday afternoon. ‘I sacked him.’
John Tankard stood there with his mouth open, feeling powerless. He hadn’t felt this bad since that time he’d shot a deranged farmer. He’d gone on stress leave for it, then returned to work and thrown himself into the job, together with coaching a junior football team, and these things had been pretty successful in staving off depression, but it was his new car that he’d been counting on most to make himself feel better.
‘The guy ripped me off,’ he said hotly, ‘while employed by you.’
The manager, a portly older guy with furry eyebrows, made a what-can-I-do? gesture. Plastic pennants snapped in the breeze. A salesman in a sissy-looking suit was putting the hard word to a young guy who was critically but longingly circling a Subaru WRX-drug dealers’ car, thought Tank sourly-while his girlfriend looked on in boredom. A bus belched past. And so life was going on unchanged around John Tankard but he himself was breaking inside. Over a car, but still.
‘I was sold the car on your premises. I bought it in good faith. You’re obliged by law to provide a warranty.’
The manager was unmoved. ‘The salesman who sold you that car was doing so off the books. The car was never possessed by this business. I’m a victim here, too. This is bad for my reputation.’
Tank was incredulous. ‘I have to feel sorry for you?’
‘Look, son, I have no legal obligation to give you your money back.’
‘I’m not your son. Anyway, this does involve you because your finance company financed the deal.’
‘Again, that was done without my authority. As I understand it, your contract is with them. I think you’ll find it’s legally binding. It has nothing to do with me.’
‘I’m out thousands and thousands of dollars,’ Tank said, wiping away tears.
‘Sell the car. You’ll get most of your money back. You might even make a profit.’
‘I can’t. It’s been black-flagged in all states and territories. I can’t register the fucking thing anywhere.’
‘All right,’ the manager said slowly, ‘spend a few thousand to get it in compliance.’
‘Where am I going to get that kind of money?’ asked Tank rhetorically.
‘I could structure a loan for you,’ said the manager smoothly
‘Prick.’
‘There’s no need for that.’
‘Thousands of dollars,’ John Tankard said, his mind shooting in all directions. Had anyone been cheated like he’d been cheated…? Refuse payments to the finance company…Put a bullet through his brain…
That night ‘Evening Update’ floated the idea that a person of interest to the police in the Katie Blasko case had possibly been active for years in Victoria and interstate. It was a good story, kept the level of moral panic raging in the community, and worth a thousand bucks to John Tankard.
But it was more than the money. Tank considered it important to keep people in the loop. Keep them vigilant against the creeps. Protect little kids like his sister. He kept telling himself that.
Scobie came home feeling so hurt and aggrieved that he was curt to his wife. ‘Is this the man?’ he demanded, showing her Duyker’s mugshots.
‘Yes,’ said Beth defensively.
They were in their sitting room, Beth putting aside one of their daughter’s T-shirts, in the act of cutting out the label inside the collar, which Roslyn said was itching her.
‘You paid him money for photographs.’
Beth looked mortified. The house needed airing. She sometimes shut herself in for hours, trying to keep busy. Scobie often found her gazing into space, or in tears. ‘I need to find a job, Scobe,’ she’d say.
‘By cheque or cash?’ he went on furiously. He didn’t like himself for it. It’s the pressure, he told himself. The police shooting board inquiry. His feelings for Grace Duyker. He was confused and lonely and unhappy.
Beth was close to tears, and that made it worse. ‘Cash,’ she said.
‘Damn.’
‘I can show you the receipt.’
She left the room and came back with a receipt torn from a receipt book that had probably been purchased in a stationery store for $2. Scrawled blue ballpoint writing. Maybe the lab could lift Duyker’s prints from it, but so what?
‘Beth, listen carefully, did you ever leave Ros alone with him?’
Beth went very still and turned an appalled face to him. ‘Is this more than fraud? Do you suspect him of, you know, you’re working on the Katie Blasko abduction and you…’
He touched her wrist to stop the panic. ‘Settle down, for God’s sake.’
‘You have to believe I would never knowingly put our daughter at risk like that. He never touched her.’
‘Did he look at her in a certain way?’
‘No!’
‘Good.’
‘He was a bit creepy. Smiled a lot,’ Beth said.
Scobie patted her forearm absently. He prowled around the house and garden, muttering, clenching his fist. He went to the back fence and pulled out his mobile phone. ‘Grace? Scobie Sutton here.’
She sounded pleased to hear from him, and that gave him an absurd little lift, the kind he’d not felt for years and years and one of the first things to go in a marriage. ‘I wondered if I could pop round tomorrow,’ he said. ‘A few more questions.’
‘Of course,’ she said.
That same night, Kees van Alphen went on a prowl of the beaches. He knew them all, the nude beaches, small and tucked away, known only to nudists and a few pathetic peeping toms, the gay beaches, one near the Navy base, another near the huge bayside estate-now carved into a few exclusive house blocks-of an airline magnate. He knew all of the hangouts of the Peninsula’s druggies, street kids, prostitutes, gays and rent boys. He knew that a place could be one thing by day and quite another by night.
He waited until almost midnight, and then he started to make contact. Matches flared in the darkness, briefly lighting hollow cheeks. The susurrations of the sea, the moon glow on it. A drift of marijuana smoke. Feet squeaking on the sand. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked and far away a siren sounded down a long, empty road.
Fifty bucks for a blowjob.
Van Alphen said he could be interested.
Five hundred for the whole night. Or a threesome could be arranged.
He moved on. They were very young, some of them. Barely twelve, and looking younger-older, if you looked at the experiences behind their eyes.
Then he found Billy DaCosta.
38
‘But you had a history with him, Paddy,’ said Challis on Saturday morning. ‘Gavin had it in for you.’
‘Like I told them city coppers, I never fucking seen Hurst that day.’
They were standing in Paddy’s dusty yard, which was a vast area of soil erosion stained here and there by motor oil, paint and animal droppings. Around it were rusting truck bodies, ploughshares, harrows and car batteries, standing in collars of tall dry grass, and several corrugated iron sheds: doorless sheds for Paddy’s tractor, plough, truck and hay bales, a set of low-slung pig pens, a fenced dog run and a hen house. Challis had set all of the animals into a frenzy when he drove his aged Triumph into the yard.