‘Have you got someone I can call in the forensic lab, that’s all.’
‘Sorry, pal.’
As if to mark the end of something, a querulous voice called to Challis then, and he returned to the dark rooms of his father’s house.
39
Ellen Destry’s Saturday had started with a one-hour walk, the morning air almost sickeningly scented from the springtime blossom and grasses, with the result that she returned with red-rimmed nostrils and itchy eyes. A shower cooled her hot face, and she ate breakfast outside, in the low sun. No sign of the ducks, but the open slope of land beyond Challis’s boundary fence was dotted with ibis and a couple of herons. She barely registered them. She and Scobie Sutton would begin shadowing Peter Duyker today. Van Alphen and Tankard were owed time off, and didn’t intend to start helping until Monday.
She cleared away her cup and bowl, and drove to Duyker’s house. She soon established that he was there, but he didn’t stir until mid morning, when he drove to the netball courts in Mornington and watched girls playing netball. Scobie relieved her at 2 pm, thirty minutes later than he’d said he’d be. She relieved him at 6 pm, by which time Duyker had returned home. She watched until midnight; Duyker went out once, walking to his local pub and staying until 11 pm. She followed him home and saw his light go off at 11.45.
Scobie had first watch on Sunday. She relieved him at 1.30, when he reported that Duyker had gone out once, late morning, to buy bread, milk and the Sunday newspapers. She waited until 3 pm before Duyker appeared. She tailed him to a couple of popular beaches, where he watched children dig sandcastles and play with kites. He went home at 6 pm. Scobie rang her three hours later to say that Duyker was apparently watching television. She told him to wrap it up for the day.
She had extra hands to help her from Monday, and a long week unfolded. At the beginning and end of every day, she held a briefing, always starting with the words, ‘So, what’s our guy been up to?’
Variations on his weekend movements, apparently, and sufficient to arouse their suspicions. Ellen herself reported that she had seen him cruise slowly past a school playground one lunchtime and again at going-home time. At morning recess the next day he’d returned to the school and parked next to the fence line, where an old woman wheeling a shopping cart had stopped to watch the children at play, together with two much younger women, the kind of idle, anxious mothers who live through their children and haunt their children’s schools.
‘Duyker actually joined them,’ she reported. ‘You’d think that would have made them suspicious, but he seemed to be sharing a joke with them.’
Later in the week John Tankard reported that Duyker had spent the whole lunch hour watching from his van. ‘Finally a teacher came out of the gate and tapped on his window.’
‘What did he do?’
‘Talked to her, then drove off. I asked her what he’d said. Apparently Duyker had a newspaper propped on his steering wheel and was eating a sandwich. Said he was a tradesman on his lunch break. She wasn’t suspicious.’
Scobie Sutton tailed Duyker on Wednesday night. At Thursday morning’s briefing he reported that Duyker had watched netball training.
‘Netball again?’
Scobie looked sick at heart. ‘Kids Ros’s age.’
‘And after netball?’
‘He went straight home.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I removed a globe from his rear lights so I wouldn’t lose him in the dark.’
‘Scobie, put it back again.’
‘It’s just a globe.’
‘I don’t want some gung-ho traffic cop pulling him over and spooking him. Put it back.’
Scobie sighed. ‘Fair enough.’
Ellen witnessed the next incident. At 3.45 on Thursday afternoon she tailed Duyker to a dusty lot opposite a small church hall on the outskirts of Penzance Beach. Several cars were waiting, some of the occupants leaning against their doors, talking to each other. A few minutes after 4 pm a succession of school buses pulled in, discharging kids from a range of far-flung secondary schools. One by one the waiting parents drove away until only Duyker’s van was left, parked among trees and almost invisible. She couldn’t see Duyker.
Alarmed, she got out, peeked in his window, looked around wildly. A sealed bicycle path wound through a scattering of nearby pine trees. On the other side of the pines it veered past a set of rusty swings and seesaws and around the perimeter of the football ground and tennis courts. There were houses after that, backing on to open farmland. It was a desolate stretch of land, choked with chest-high grass, blackberry canes and shadowy hollows. A solitary figure was walking along the bicycle path, almost one hundred metres ahead of Ellen, who recognised the uniform of Woodside, a well-heeled private school on the other side of the Peninsula. The girl wore the skirt very short, her long legs shapely but lazy under it, as she scuffed along the path. Suddenly the girl stiffened, stood stock-still in the centre of the path as Ellen hurried up behind her. Duyker was in a little clearing, barely visible in the transfiguring light. What a clichй, was Ellens first thought, for he wore a long coat. He was hunched a little, his hands busy, but Ellen could only speculate, for the girl was obscuring her view.
Suddenly Duyker crashed away through the trees and the girl laughed raucously at his back and tossed a stone after him. ‘Loser!’
‘Excuse me!’ yelled Ellen, out of breath.
‘What?’
It was Holly Stillwell. Ellen’s daughter had gone to school with Holly’s older sister. ‘Didn’t recognise you, Holly.’
‘Hi, Mrs Destry.’
‘Did that man…was that man…’
‘Creep!’ said Holly, laughing.
‘Did he expose himself to you?’
‘Gross!’ said Holly, still laughing. ‘Pathetic!’
‘I’ll walk you home,’ Ellen said.
‘That’s okay, Mrs Destry. No need, I’m all right.’
‘No, I insist.’
They walked. ‘How’s Larrayne? I haven’t seen her for like ages,’ Holly said.
‘She’s fine. Got exams soon. Look, Holly, I need you to give me a statement.’
Holly still thought it was a huge joke. ‘Forget it,’ she said, as if Ellen had offered to do her a favour. ‘I’ve seen worse. He’s just a pathetic little man.’
‘Still, it was indecent exposure and it’s illegal.’
‘Yeah, but all he did was wave his stupid willie at me. It’s not the first time that’s happened. I mean, it’s gross, but no big deal. No big deal, get it?’
The girl was irrepressible. ‘I get it,’ Ellen said. ‘But if it’s happened to you before, was it that man?’
‘Never seen him before,’ said Holly.
Ellen left it at that. Duyker would be on his guard now-in fact, Scobie Sutton saw Duyker dump half-a-dozen pornographic magazines that night.
And then, at Friday’s evening briefing, Ellen presented her little team with a more pressing development.
‘Owing to Van’s work, trawling through the files,’ she said, nodding her head at van Alphen, who replied with the briefest of expressionless smiles, ‘we have a very instructive cold case.’ She indicated an array of crime scene photographs, tapping them with her forefinger. ‘Serena Hanlon, eight years old, raped and strangled in 1996. Her body was found here, in Ferny Creek.’ She tapped a wall map that showed the city of Melbourne and the ranges to its east. ‘Her schoolbag was later found here, several kilometres away.’ She indicated the town of Sherbrooke.
‘Duyker?’ said Scobie.
Ellen leaned both hands on the back of her chair, inclining her body tensely over the head of the table. ‘In 1996 Duyker was living near Ferny Creek. He was working near Sherbrooke.’
‘Was he questioned?’
Ellen looked to van Alphen, who said, ‘No. He should have been a person of interest because he’d been questioned over an indecent behaviour incident in Sherbrooke a year earlier, but his name wasn’t passed on to detectives investigating the murder.’