‘I did.’
‘And it had nothing to do with rank. I’m a woman, ergo I don’t have a brain.’ She paused. ‘Be interesting to know what his relationship with Janine was like.’
‘Yes.’
After a pause she said, as if testing the waters, ‘Hal, what did you make of the super and his wife?’
Challis cocked his eyebrow at her. ‘Not exactly heartbroken.’
‘No.’
‘They praise Janine, but secretly didn’t like her, or thought her unworthy of their son.’
Ellen nodded. ‘That’s the impression I got.’
‘And if you’re asking should we consider the super, or even Mrs Super, a suspect, the answer’s yes.’
There, it was out in the open. With anyone other than Ellen, he’d have kept his suspicions to himself. He saw her nod. ‘And your reasons are…?’ she said.
‘Little things: lack of grief, being protective of his son and granddaughter, being faintly obstructive and wanting to guide the investigation. All explicable, but we can’t rule him out, or not entirely, and we can’t rule out the possibility that he suspects his son and is protecting him.’
‘Yes,’ said Ellen simply, confirming that she’d come to the same conclusions. ‘He can’t take over the investigation, can he?’
Challis shook his head. ‘Regulations won’t allow it.’
‘But he’ll meddle?’
‘Yes.’
Then a little Mazda sports car was beside them, tooting. Ellen tooted back and the Mazda shot away along the rain-slicked highway. Challis stirred. ‘Who was that?’
‘Pam Murphy and John Tankard.’
Challis frowned, then twigged. ‘Kellock’s safe driving campaign.’
12
Constables Pam Murphy and John Tankard, dressed as if they belonged to the Special Operations Group or the FBI, with peaked caps, waisted jackets and pants tucked into their boots, promptly began discussing Challis and Destry. Tankard thought they had a thing going.
‘No way.’
‘They’re always together.’
‘Tank, we’re always together.’
He subsided, muttering, but it was short-lived. ‘What about the newspaper chick?’
‘What about her?’
‘Is he still giving her one?’
‘I don’t know and I don’t care. It’s none of my business.’
Then, with his old nudge nudge, wink wink: ‘Has he given you one yet?’
‘Tank, grow up, okay?’
It was no joke, cooped up with John Tankard in the little sports car. It was bad enough that he was a big, fleshy man, but ever since coming back from six months’ stress leave for shooting dead a deranged and armed farmer, he’d been a little unstable. His mood today was pretty typical of the Tankard she remembered, the racist and bully who’d been called a storm trooper by the locals, the partner who was more interested in her tits than police work, but he was also given to moments of moody daydreaming and insecurity-which she attributed to counselling that hadn’t taken very well.
She could sense him looking at her, and confirmed it with a quick, sideways glance, disturbed to see and feel a queer, sulky heat coming from him as he asked, ‘Could you do it?’
‘Do what?’
‘What that newspaper chick did, have sex with a lot of guys, everyone watching.’ He cocked his head at her assessingly. ‘Nah, can’t see you doing that.’
As if throwing her a crude challenge, hoping she’d rise to it and come across for him. ‘She didn’t have sex with anyone. She was there as a reporter.’
‘Yeah, yeah, whatever. Bet Challis was pissed off. But if you can’t keep your chick in line, what do you expect?’
She ignored him.
‘I mean,’ he went on, ‘he couldn’t even control his wife. She sleeps around on him and tries to have him killed.’
‘Tank,’ Pam snarled, ‘only Neanderthals feel the need to keep their women in line.’
He sniggered to see her riled. She drove on, cross with herself. Early afternoon, and still the fog persisted. As they approached a roundabout, she said, ‘Mornington, Tyabb or straight ahead?’
But Tankard was in a reverie beside her and failed to answer. Maybe he was looking inwards again, at his sorrows. Pam was suspicious of Tank’s new-found introspection, wondering if it would slow his response times, blunt his survival instincts. Well, she wasn’t put on earth to cure him. Still, she’d always known where she stood with the old Tankard. He’d been reliably suspicious of everyone, confrontational but not unsteady, with the instincts of a cop driven by self-preservation rather than ambition. In fact, he’d been entirely lacking in ambition, relying on the police force for a sense of brotherhood and security, even as he distrusted or despised his fellow cops.
She chose to drive straight ahead, which would take them to Penzance Beach and Waterloo.
He stirred. ‘Did you say something?’
‘Forget it.’
Tankard struggled like a dim schoolboy caught staring out of the window. Finally he said, in the faintly lost manner of the new John Tankard, ‘Do you see the point of this? Spending four hours a day on the roads thanking people for the one time in a thousand they happen to show courtesy to another motorist or signal before turning a corner? This is bullshit.’
‘True,’ Pam said.
They were passing the detention centre near Waterloo when she was forced onto the gravel verge by an oncoming Subaru, which veered across in front of her and onto the centre’s main driveway, narrowly missing a silver Passat that had emerged to wait for a gap in traffic. Tessa Kane, who clearly didn’t deserve a showbag. Pam tooted, and so did the Passat.
13
Whoops, she’d cut off those cops in their sports car and nearly collected a Passat. Tessa Kane grinned ruefully, shrugging an apology at Pam Murphy and John Tankard. Pam returned the grin, her cap at a rakish angle. A tough little broad, Tessa thought, heading towards the main gate.
The detention centre was a cheerless expanse of chilly cement-block huts behind razor wire. Originally intended for 350 inmates, it had held almost 500 asylum seekers at one stage, in a concentrated knot of misery. Now the ‘flood’ of asylum seekers had dried up and most of the detainees had been shipped back and a few granted residence visas. Eighty were left: a handful of asylum seekers from the Middle East, and people who had breached or overstayed their tourist visas. Soon all would be deported.
The centre had delivered no benefits to Waterloo that Tessa had seen. Most of the locals had been apathetic, a handful angry and ashamed, and the remainder rubbed their hands together at this God-given opportunity to relish their prejudices. They seemed to applaud the perimeter guard who’d shouted at a detainee: ‘You are one ugly fucking Arab.’ There had been plenty of letters to the editor after Tessa had published that quote, objecting to the word ‘fucking’; none objecting to the matter of detention itself, of course, or the centre, or the mindset of the guard. It had been-still was-an unhappy place. Last week there had been a riot-termed a ‘disturbance’ by corrections staff-and today Tessa could see men and children on the flat roof of the gymnasium, displaying banners: We Are Human Not Animal. In the first six weeks of operation, two men had been trapped on the razor wire; over a ten-month period in the second year, seven inmates had sewn their lips together; and most had gone on a hunger strike at one time or another. Fires had been lit, rocks thrown, tear gas used.
That had been the public face of almost all of Australia’s detention centres, the one you saw on commercial television’s current affairs programs. Tessa had been interested in the hidden stories: mental illness; treatment refused for sexually abused children; the dubious backgrounds and qualifications of the guards; the attitudes of the Refugee Review Tribunal and Department of Immigration staff. There had also been whispers of corruption. Apparently Charlie Mead and his section heads had routinely defrauded the federal, state and local governments by artificially inflating the cost of repairs, provisions, services and wages, the benefit flowing to their employer, ANZCOR, an American company that managed prisons and detention centres under contract to the governments of Australia and New Zealand. They operated out of Utah and had branches in Canada and the UK.