He told her about his laptop.
‘Oh dear.’
‘I know.’
She stared at him through the steam from her mug. ‘No password protection at all?’
He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t figure out how to set it up.’
‘Dinosaur,’ she said. ‘Have you told anyone else?’
‘My insurance company.’
‘You didn’t tell them what was on the laptop?’
‘No.’
‘You’ll have to tell the super.’
Challis pushed his coffee away as if it were sour. ‘How can I? He doesn’t know about the photos.’
‘But you’ve got case notes stored on it as well.’
‘Yes.’
‘He won’t be pleased.’
‘He’s already pissed off with me. This will reinforce it.’
Ellen sighed. It was a sigh that said she commiserated with Challis, that she wasn’t so different from him, that she’d stuffed up on occasion, too.
‘Damage limitation. He’ll want damage limitation.’
Challis nodded, and they were both silent for a time, picturing McQuarrie, the man’s prim mouth, Rotary and golfing cronies, and air of satisfaction.
‘Will you tell him, or will I?’
Challis was startled. ‘I will, of course.’
‘Into the breach.’
He nodded.
‘How do I play it at the station?’ she asked.
‘Straightforward burglary, for now. Don’t mention that the laptop contained sensitive material until I’ve squared it away with the super.’
‘But if he wants it in my report, I’ll have to-’
‘Amend it. Don’t worry, I’ll cover your back.’
After a pause, Challis went on: ‘Any other break-ins reported in the area today?’
She shook her head. ‘There was one in Penzance Beach yesterday. An empty holiday house, but the next-door neighbour spotted a broken window.’
‘One burglary among many.’
She glanced at him a little coldly. ‘You’ll get the full crime-scene treatment, Hal, don’t worry.’
‘Thanks.’ He knew that simple burglaries generally didn’t attract a concerted level of investigation. ‘Have you any ideas? Does this fit a pattern?’
She shrugged. ‘There are always break-ins, Hal, you know that. Town and rural.’
Challis nodded bleakly. ‘I know.’
‘Look at what was stolen. Small items, easily shifted and stored. We don’t even know if it’s the same gang or individual. A pattern only becomes apparent when specialist goods are taken and we can track where they end up.’ She finished her coffee. ‘Better make a start.’
They went from room to room, Challis indicating the location of each of the stolen possessions, Ellen taking notes for the crime-scene techs who would dust for prints.
Perhaps it was a combination of sensations, images and memories, and the conjunction of the homely with the erotic-a bedroom, the half light, a beautiful woman watching and listening, the particular arrangement of the bones and tendons at her throat and neck, his own months of deprivation-but Challis found himself reaching for Ellen. She reached for him. Out of their clumsy collision came a long kiss and then they parted sufficiently to look each other in the eye, slightly awed.
‘I want you,’ Ellen said simply.
‘Me too.’
‘You want yourself?’
It was the kind of dumb thing you said when the ground was slippery. Challis found the bare skin at her waist and spine, and they continued to stare at each other. ‘Your hands are cold,’ Ellen said, her skin seeming to crawl at his touch and absorb him at the same time. He leaned towards her again, and that’s when a car growled over the gravel outside his window and Ellen said, ‘Crime-scene techs.’
With a ragged sigh Challis said, ‘You called them out before you came here?’
‘Biggest mistake of my life.’
He planted a hungering, regretful kiss and looked at his watch. ‘I’d better get it over and done with.’
‘The super?’
‘With any luck,’ Challis said, ‘I’ll interrupt his golf.’
36
A bummer, Andy thought, getting bogged this morning.
And avoidable, too, if he’d twigged earlier that the day was going to turn out badly. First, Nat had been out of her skull. She’d turned up on time, thanks to a rare good-parenting impulse on the part of her mother, and was even dressed in her school uniform and carrying a packed lunch, but she’d turned up stoned.
Then, when timing and efficiency mattered, she’d been no use at all.
Andy had a special trailer for these Peninsula burglaries, towed each time by a ute or van stolen especially for the job. Andy’s Mowing, like Jim’s Mowing, that franchise operation you saw everywhere these days. High steel mesh sides, the handles of rakes, shovels, pruning shears and a lawnmower showing. A few padlocked aluminium lockers in the well of the trailer: anyone would think they contained secateurs, sprinkler nozzles, lengths of hose, weed poison, bags of blood-and-bone. They wouldn’t think portable TVs, laptops, DVD players, leather coats, jewellery boxes, CD collections.
All that weight on board, he should have thought twice about letting Natalie drive, especially given the rain they’d been having lately. Before he could stop her she’d cut across the lawn on the way out, bogging the van. She’d then proceeded to cack herself laughing as she revved the motor and he pushed, getting himself sprayed with watery mud and grass in the process.
Then a tense moment when a guy delivering leaflets in a big four-wheel-drive had pulled up at the front gate, slipped a leaflet in the letterbox, and noticed their predicament. ‘Need a hand getting out?’
‘Yeah, thanks,’ Andy had said, prattling on nervously about gardening work being slow in winter, and you had to be careful on these rural properties, three times he’d been bogged in the past month, and he’d have to come back tomorrow, do the right thing and patch the owner’s lawn.
‘Tell me about it,’ the guy said, shoving a leaflet at him and hitching a towrope to the front of Andy’s stolen Toyota van. Andy glanced at the leaflet as the guy pulled him out of the mud. ‘Dave’s Farm Drainage,’ with a mobile number at the bottom.
‘Thanks, Dave.’
‘No problems,’ Dave said, and was gone-Andy and Natalie forgotten, with any luck.
Andy took charge after that, grabbing the leaflet from the letterbox outside the gate, then removing copies from every letterbox along the road, and finally driving home to his place. With Natalie’s ‘help’ he shifted the stolen goods to the back of the van and unhitched and stored the trailer. Finally he did what he always did with laptops: he transferred the contents of the hard drive to his PC with its 120 gig hard drive. He’d examine the files later. You got all kinds of stuff, porn, bank account details, sensitive documents. You never knew when it might come in useful.
And now it was mid afternoon and they were heading up to the pawnshops in the city. Nat was bored, restless, so he let her fiddle with the stolen laptop. She always got a kick out of scrolling through the intimate aspects of some stranger’s life.
‘Boring,’ she said, her slender fingers flashing over the keys and rolling the cursor ball. ‘Wait a minute.’
‘What?’
‘Wicked,’ she said.
‘What?’
Natalie was silent, her fingers busy. ‘I think,’ she said in a bright, wry, singsong voice, ‘we hit a cop this morning.’
‘Fuck!’
‘Some case he’s working on.’
Natalie continued to search the contents of the laptop. ‘Hello. Dirty pictures.’
Andy thought a cop was as entitled as anyone to visit porn sites. ‘So?’
‘Not what you’re thinking. These look like they might be evidence.’
‘Evidence. Shit, Nat, I don’t like it.’
Andy felt very tense suddenly. If they had hit a cop, and were in possession of evidence pertaining to a case, they were in deep shit. He wanted to put some distance in between the van and the Peninsula-quickly. They were on Stumpy Gully Road, approaching Eramosa Road, which would take them down to the highway. They could be out of the district and well on the way up to the city in less than thirty minutes. But should they hang onto the gear? He made the turn at Eramosa Road and headed down towards the Coolstores.