‘Ah,’ said Scobie musingly.
‘In another case I heard about, a man came to her because his wife was beating him. Janine thought he was lying in order to cover up his own acts of violence, and reported him to the police. She doesn’t double check, Scobie. She doesn’t follow up.’
He sighed. ‘Well, someone sure followed up on her.’
‘Who would do such a thing?’
It’s what good people, innocent people, said at such times. Scobie himself still said it, even after years on the job. He suspected that Challis and Ellen didn’t say it: they knew, or were past being baffled.
But Scobie was patient. He waited, and his wife went on: ‘No one deserves to die like that, but she was awful sometimes, just awful. She was a relief psychologist for the prison service, but rarely got invited back. Children’s Services stopped referring kids to her. She’d insult them-you know, blame the victim-and us.’
‘Can you give me any names? Social workers? Kids?’
‘Oh, Scobie, I don’t think any of the social workers would shoot her. And where would a kid get a gun?’
You’d be surprised, Scobie thought. ‘Even so, she clearly made enemies, Beth.’
‘It was all hearsay, I shouldn’t even be telling you this,’ his wife said, and gathered her things to go.
‘What about lovers?’
‘Oh, Scobie, how would I know a thing like that?’
‘Ask around, could you, love? Discreetly? Who she kept company with. Anyone heard making threats, anyone harmed by one of her decisions…We need their names, even if only to cross them off the list.’
Beth’s face twisted in anguish but she gave him a hurried peck goodbye. ‘I’d better call on the Cobbs,’ she said, and a moment later was hurrying out to her car.
Scobie sighed and returned to the reception desk. A minute later he was shown to a corner room where the afternoon light struggled to reach a high, narrow bed and the woman in it, who was observing him with sly good humour, as if she’d never had an operation in her life. ‘Police, eh?’
She was a down-to-earth, big-boned woman aged in her seventies, and Scobie hated to think of those bones failing her. He sat, mustering a knockabout look on his face to suit her canny, expectant expression. ‘Mrs Humphreys, I understand you live at 283 Lofty Ridge Road in Penzance North?’
‘Call me Joy. And out with it, no beating about the bush.’
So he told her.
‘Good lord. You think those jokers were after me?’
‘Were they?’
‘Blameless, son, a blameless life,’ she said, twinkling. ‘All of my enemies are too old and tired to do me in, or I’ve outlasted them. Who’s the dead woman?’
‘Her name’s Janine McQuarrie.’
‘Never heard of her.’
‘You weren’t expecting any visitors to the house today?’
‘No.’
Scobie showed her the photograph of Janine McQuarrie from the Bayside Counselling brochure. ‘Have you seen this woman before?’
‘No.’
He sighed. ‘It’s possible she was lost and went to your house by mistake.’
‘Followed,’ Mrs Humphreys said, ‘or ambushed? If ambushed, why at my place?’
Scobie grinned. ‘You’re trying to do my job for me.’ He paused. ‘Reporters will want to talk to you.’
‘Let them,’ Mrs Humphreys said.
She was tiring now, winced once in pain, and struggled to muster a return grin. ‘I don’t have a soul in the world but my goddaughter.’
Scobie stiffened. ‘God-daughter?’
‘She was staying with me a couple of months ago but she’s in London now.’
Scobie uncapped his pen. ‘I think you’d better tell me all about her.’
17
Mead showed Tessa around the detention centre, a tour that avoided any contact with the detainees, and took her back along an exposed path to the administration wing. ‘Coffee before you go? Tea?’
‘We haven’t finished, Mr Mead.’
‘Call me Charlie,’ he said automatically. ‘What else do you need?’
A chilly wind was blowing from the southwest, right off the bay. Tess shivered, as much from Mead’s indifference as the wind. ‘Some grave allegations have been made.’
‘There are always allegations. There always will be. But spit it out: what allegations?’
‘According to a nurse, a guard and a section manager who once worked for you, ANZCOR systematically defrauded the Department of Immigration to the tune of millions of dollars.’
‘Prove it.’
‘For example, you and your staff created artificial riot situations in which equipment and buildings were damaged, in order to submit inflated repair bills.’
‘Is that a question or an opinion?’
‘If any of your section managers raised concerns, they were threatened with the sack and their reports were censored or conveniently lost.’
‘Lady,’ Mead said, leaning towards her menacingly, ‘put up or shut up.’
‘Do you care to comment on these allegations, Mr Mead?’
‘Call me Charlie,’ Mead said, swinging around to face her again. ‘Will that be all? Good,’ he said, opening a side door. ‘Someone will show you out.’
As Tessa left the main building, a guard, bored and scowling, ran his metal detector over a steel door idly, listening to it squawk. He did it over and over again. No one else seemed to notice. In fact, a vicious kind of indifference was the pervasive atmosphere of the place, and Tessa wondered if that was all down to Charlie Mead: who he was and who he had been.
She stopped dead in her tracks. Why continue to look at who he was now? He’d be leaving soon, and she continued to run into brick walls. Why not look at who he had been and where he’d come from?
Andy Asche was driving: Natalie Cobb back from the city. He marvelled at how great she looked, despite being stuck in court all morning holding the hand of her fucked-up mother, followed by an afternoon ripping off gear in South Yarra. He told her so.
‘Thank you, kind sir.’
‘Straight,’ Andy continued, ‘but sexy.’
Eighteen years old, still at school, but she could pass for a yuppie chick out shopping for her yuppie pad in Southgate, where all the yuppies lived, and that’s what mattered to Andy and Natalie.
It went like this: the people they worked for owned pawnshops in the city and a discounted homewares outlet on the Peninsula, which made for a two-way flow of stolen gear. Andy liked the neatness of it: goods from the city ended up on the Peninsula, goods from the Peninsula ended up in the city. The Chasseur frying pan that he and Natalie might shoplift in South Yarra went straight to Savoury Seconds (frying pan, savouries, get it?) in Somerville. The cops weren’t likely to venture outside of the city to look for a stolen frying pan, even if it did cost $300. Meanwhile the pawnbroking stores in the city sold gear burgled from homes on the Peninsula. A retiree down in Penzance Beach isn’t going to stumble by chance on her VCR in a barred shop window in Footscray. The people that Andy and Natalie worked for weren’t too worried by tax audits or CIU inquiries either. They had ‘paperwork’ to prove that the new Chasseur frying pan in Savoury Seconds had come from a bankrupted shop in Cairns, the VCR in Footscray pawned by a waitress in Abbotsford.
Andy’s and Natalie’s first hit today had been Perfecto Coffee, in Chapel Street, the shelves stocked with coffee pots and machines, filters, ring seals, milk frothers, you name it; Bialetti, Gaggia and other big names. Coffee beans, too, but the order was for espresso machines, percolators and plungers. Natalie, in her long, loose woollen overcoat over tailored pants, leather shoulderbag and artfully tousled hair, browsed the shelves while Andy chatted up the shop assistant. No security cameras that he could see. Then Nat was at his elbow, doing her sulky look-’Can we go now?’-as if shopping, and Andy, and this shop, made her dangerously bored, not something you wanted to see in a beautiful woman. Andy slipped the shop assistant a wink-she sympathised-and followed Natalie out of the shop, Natalie’s overcoat barely registering the spacious hidden pockets that were now full of top-end coffee making machines.
They hit a couple more places, had lunch in a bistro, and now, mid afternoon, were nearly home, Waterloo free of fog at last. Andy dropped Natalie outside the tattoo parlour next to the railway line. She had a fistful of money in her pocket: most would go to her mother, but she wanted a new tatt, a butterfly, high on the inside of her right thigh. Then she was going to score some dope. Andy didn’t do dope, or booze, or anything else. He’d saved twelve grand so far, down payment on a BMW sports car.