6
Scobie Sutton stifled a yawn; he was sitting in the Frankston Magistrates’ Court, a thin man with the look of a mournful preacher. Heather Cobb was appearing this morning on drugs charges and Scobie, who’d arrested her, was there to ensure that she wouldn’t go to jail.
It had started two weeks ago, when he’d been called to a Waterloo primary school. At show-and-tell that morning Sherry Cobb, barely nine years old, had presented the class with a marijuana plant in a plastic pot. Scobie’s interview with the child, and subsequent visit to her home, had uncovered a typical story of poverty, addiction and neglect. There were five children in the Cobb family, ranging in age from three to eighteen; father in jail; mother an alcoholic. They lived in a two-bedroom weatherboard shack between the railway line and a timber yard.
Now, in the Frankston Magistrates’ Court, Scobie glanced at Natalie Cobb. She was the eighteen-year-old, in Year 12, wagging school today to provide moral support for her mother. When he’d first gone to question Heather Cobb, Natalie had been there, dressed in a tracksuit and slumped in front of the TV. She was a fine looking young woman, but it was two o’clock in the afternoon and she should have been at school. Today she looked not eighteen but twenty-eight, and as poised-in her best clothes, not her school uniform-as any of the young female lawyers you saw around the Magistrates’ Court. Natalie smiled at her mother, then gave Scobie a complicated look.
Complicated girl, Scobie thought.
The cases droned by, and then it was Heather’s turn. As expected, the magistrate let her off with a caution. ‘While I accept that you didn’t grow the plant, Mrs Cobb, you nevertheless allowed your premises to be used for the cultivation of marijuana.’
Heather, dressed in a thin summer dress and ragged parka, glanced worriedly at Scobie through pouchy eyes. He smiled at her, nodded, and mouthed the word sorry to her across the courtroom.
Heather brightened, brushed a greasy comma of hair away from her eyes, and looked confidently at the magistrate. She told him how sorry she was, it would never happen again, the man who’d grown the plants was a bully and she’d been scared of him, but he was in prison in Brisbane now, and no way was she going to let him back into her life.
She means it, too, Scobie thought.
Outside afterwards, Heather Cobb trembled as her tensions eased. ‘Mr Sutton, I don’t know how to thank you.’
‘That’s okay,’ Scobie said. ‘It was a good result.’
‘The magistrate listened to your recommendations,’ Natalie said. ‘You swung it for us. Thanks,’ she said, and pecked him on the cheek.
He blushed. ‘My wife knows you. The youth club on the estate?’
Natalie looked guarded. ‘Mrs Sutton, the social worker? She’s your wife?’
Damn, Scobie thought. I should have kept my big trap shut. If Natalie refuses to work with Beth as a result, I’ll have set back community relations and all of my wife’s good work.
A small van pulled into the kerb, the driver tooting. ‘Got to go,’ Natalie said. ‘See ya, Mr Sutton. See ya, Mum.’
‘Boyfriend,’ Heather Cobb said, watching the van peel away.
Somehow Scobie didn’t think the boyfriend was taking Natalie back to school. His mobile rang. It was Ellen Destry. ‘You finished?’
‘Yes.’
‘I need you back here,’ she said, but didn’t explain.
‘Come on,’ he said to Heather, ‘I’ll give you a lift home.’
7
Tessa Kane had heard about the murder at 9.45 a.m., a call from an ambulance officer, one of her many contacts. She’d immediately rung Hal Challis, but he was apparently out of the station and not answering his mobile phone-or not to her, at any rate. Ellen Destry and Scobie Sutton weren’t available. And nobody else at the Waterloo police station would talk to her. She felt frantic for thirty minutes, then asked herself what the point was. She published a weekly paper: the dailies would have all the scoops on this story, and she’d have to be content with an overview in next Tuesday’s edition, when no doubt the case would be long closed.
And then, at 11 a.m., Challis returned her call, suggesting they meet for coffee. Five minutes later she was walking down High Street to Cafe Laconic, where she sat at a window table, looking out at the canopied, unoccupied footpath tables, a public phone booth and a plane tree. There had been a dense fog all morning, but it had lifted here on High Street, as if burnt off by human endeavour. Tessa drew her coat tighter around her shoulders and glanced at the corkboard on the adjacent walclass="underline" this week’s program at the drive-in cinema in Dromana, a couple of garage sales-she loved garage sales-a scattering of business cards and a federal election poster eighteen months out of date.
Then a waiter was standing there, looking appreciatively at her legs, stockinged today, slim and dark under a skirt. She normally wore jeans or trousers, but liked to dress up on Tuesdays, publication day.
‘What can I get you?’
She smiled. ‘Nothing just yet, thanks. I’m waiting for a friend.’
‘Fair enough,’ the waiter said, and went behind the counter again, a slab of jarrah fronted by corrugated iron. There was wood and iron everywhere, she noticed, her eyes alighting on the election poster again. Her vote had made no difference back then. She came from a family of Labor voters, but Labor had long ago sold out on the things that mattered to her: social justice issues and an independent foreign policy. Back when Labor first showed signs of decline, she’d voted Communist a few times, to register her protest, but Communism was a spent force. Now she voted Green, for the Greens actually held values and beliefs, unlike Labor. She’d probably call herself Red-Green, like the political movement in Germany, favouring both social justice reforms and green reforms. Unfortunately the Greens were widely seen as tree-huggers-and indeed there were plenty for whom that was as far as their beliefs extended. She’d never vote Liberal or Democrat, and would never again vote Labor, the party whose ex-prime ministers were now millionaires, its ex-senators and ministers into tax evasion and cozying up to the richest men in Australia.
She was sitting there getting quietly steamed up when the lean frame of Hal Challis passed by the window. Theirs was a complicated relationship. They’d been lovers for a while, things fading away rather than ending convincingly. Now she saw him at press conferences and at times like this, when they exchanged information.
Not that it mattered any more, but she wondered if he felt free of his wife yet. Angela Challis was dead, but that didn’t mean she was dead in Challis’s heart. It had been a huge story at the time, for Challis’s wife had started an affair with another policeman, the pair of them luring Challis to a lonely rendezvous on a back road one night, intending to kill him. The attempt had failed and Challis’s wife had been jailed for conspiracy to murder. But instead of divorcing her, washing his hands of her, Challis had felt obscurely responsible, as if he’d failed Angela, driven her to taking drastic action. He’d gradually stopped loving her-so he said-but for years had let her call and write to him from prison, let her talk out her guilt and regret. ‘Move on, Hal,’ people had said, and God knows Tessa herself had said it often enough, but he’d not moved on, and whenever she was with him he’d seemed disengaged, sad.
And then last year Angela Challis had killed herself in the prison infirmary. Tessa had taken heart. She’d not rushed Challis, not jumped for joy, but been patient, kind and commiserative. Where had that got her? Exactly nowhere. Challis had grown more disconnected, as though the guilt he felt had not disappeared but compounded itself. Eventually she’d stopped seeing him, stopped waiting, but for a long while the whole business had been a permanent ache inside her, composed of loss and emptiness.
She’d known that he was struggling. Back when they’d slept together Challis had too often scurried off home afterwards, or the next morning, as if he had to clear his head. He seemed to want her, then feel crowded, compounded by a desire not to hurt her or lead her on.