‘All I can say is, a young woman was brutally abducted and sexually assaulted. We’ve only just come on board. We have no clear suspect at this stage. Meanwhile, the investigation will be rigorous, without fear or favour.’
‘So, it was a cop.’
‘If you’re relying on hospital porters and ambulance officers for your information, you might want to rethink your methods.’
Porteous held up a warding-off palm. ‘Whoa. That’s why I’m asking you.’
Challis unlocked his car, strapped himself in, lowered the window. ‘We’ll issue a statement when we know more.’
The reporter shrugged, defeated. ‘Suit yourself.’
Challis ground the starter. The engine turned sluggishly. He tried again.
‘Sounds like your battery’s on the way out.’
Challis wasn’t interested in the reporter’s diagnosis. He wanted Porteous to leave. He wanted Pam Murphy to materialise: Murph would have a set of jumper leads in her car.
He sat there.
Porteous wasn’t finished. ‘I’d have thought, inspector level, you’d be provided with an official car and your own driver.’
It was not said to bait Challis, but it was a last straw. Challis got out, leaned his rump on the Triumph.
‘I’m going to take your remark seriously.’
‘Okay,’ said Porteous, wary but game for anything.
‘You wonder why I’m using my old bomb for police work? I’ll tell you. We’re under-resourced. You look at my unit, CIU: there’s only one serviceable unmarked car available to us at present, and if we didn’t use our own cars a lot of the time we’d never get to a crime scene at all. It’s just as bad for uniformed police. Some nights there’s only one marked patrol car or divisional van on the road. Lack of vehicles and manpower. Police resources are pathetic, no matter what kind of spin the government or force hierarchy put on it.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘So far this month I’ve spent over eighty dollars of my own money on police gear-camera batteries, paper for the photocopier, you name it.’
Porteous was scribbling, Challis too electric to care.
‘Waterloo has the lowest ratio of police per population in Victoria, so if you’re burgled or assaulted, you’d better come and talk to us about it-because we haven’t the manpower or resources to come to you. Proactive policing is a thing of the past. Front-line hours have fallen by eighteen per cent; violent crimes have risen by nearly fifty. There’s a population explosion on the Peninsula, for Christ’s sake, complicated by the financial crisis, and they want to strip us of money and manpower?’
‘There’s talk of part-time hours for certain police stations,’ said Porteous.
Challis knew he was being prompted, and gave a sharkish grin. ‘The cutting edge of police work. It’s ten o’clock at night, you’re hurt, frightened, running for your life, too poor to own a mobile phone, there’s no public phone, and outside the darkened doors of the police station is a button to press that plays a recorded message to dial triple zero.’ He had a head of steam up now.
‘Sick leave is at an all-time high, morale is at an all-time low, too many of us are on stress leave. Our computer systems are from the last century. We don’t fight or investigate crime, we file paperwork.’
‘Makes it hard.’
‘Meanwhile, every March, the state government spends fifty million to stage a car race that no one watches.’
They stared at each other. ‘I don’t know what it’s like in the newspaper game,’ Challis said, ‘but I can see police officers of the future signing on as sub-contractors, providing their own handguns, cuffs, vehicles and radios, responsible for their own superannuation, health plans and holiday pay. Words like “mission statement” will be used a lot.’
‘And crime?’
‘Crime prospers,’ Challis said.
He got his car started and returned to the CIU office on the first floor of the police station, wondering what he’d just done.
Headlines next Tuesday, irate calls from Superintendent McQuarrie, disciplinary action?
Or would Porteous count the rape as the juicier story?
He reached for the phone. The head of sex crimes said, ‘We’re pretty stretched, Inspector. I can give you one officer, Monday morning.’
Challis had to be content with that. The Peninsula would have its own sex crimes unit when Ellen returned from her study tour, and in the meantime CIU would have to muddle along. He entered the open plan CIU office and left a note on Scobie Sutton’s desk, asking him to compile lists of local sex offenders, and police who’d reported the loss or theft of their ID or uniforms.
He returned to his office, swivelled in his chair. The clutter was comforting around him: files and folders on the floor and cabinets, and his shelves leaning this way and that with bound regulations, trial transcripts, a book called Written on the Skin by Liz Porter, and a greasy repair manual for the Triumph.
He tried to picture the rapist cop. It wasn’t unknown for policemen to ‘rescue’ intoxicated women from pubs and parties and rape them in their homes, or coerce sexual favours in return for tearing up a speeding ticket. But abduction?
He grimaced: blame it on the job? Staff shortages, doubling up of duties, no public appreciation, and finally someone cracked?
That reminded him: Murph had said she’d e-mailed him a list of her vehicle expenses. He nudged his computer mouse. The monitor blinked into life, showing several new e-mails. Most he deleted, but printed Pam’s and one from Force Command, advising all districts to be on the lookout for a holdup man. Caucasian, aged in his forties, suspected of robbing banks and credit unions along a coastal stretch of south-eastern New South Wales and now believed to be operating across the border in north-eastern Victoria, and, more recently, Gippsland.
He swung in his chair, looked at his watch. Murphy should be back from the hospital soon. He pondered her a little. She seemed off her game lately, a little vague and flat, given to brief, strange gestures, a kind of stiffening and staring into space.
But she was turning into a good detective. Unlike Sutton. Scobie was too credulous to be a good detective, without capacity to understand wickedness. He could read bank records and CCTV footage, but not people.
A voice leaning against his doorjamb said, ‘Miles away, boss.’
Challis swung his feet off the desk, his chair protesting. ‘Always thinking, Murph, you know that.’
‘My mentor,’ Pam Murphy said drily.
‘How’s Chloe?’
‘Her parents are with her, and they’ve brought in a counsellor.’
Challis nodded. ‘Check this out.’ He handed her the bank-robber e-mail and watched her face as she read it.
‘Are we worried, boss?’
‘Us? The Waterloo CIU?’
‘Well, when you put it like that…’
Challis gave her a tired smile. ‘Meanwhile we’d better warn the local banks, so if you could take a wander down the street…’ ‘Sure.’
‘Then we’ll take a drive out to the Chicory Kiln.’
8
Grace had taken her time driving to Waterloo. Lunch first, at a bistro in the bayside suburb of St Kilda. Some window-shopping and then a stroll along the beach, letting the sun seep into her bones. Bright sunlight today, feathered by scudding clouds, a brisk wind that had her wrapping her arms around her breasts.
And so it was mid-afternoon before she was on the road again, glimpsing choppy waters whenever she glanced along the little side streets that laddered the Nepean Highway. Reaching Frankston, she turned left at a beer barn and made her way south-east in stages to the outskirts of Baxter and down into Somerville.
This was a semi-rural world of boutique horticulture, native and indigenous plant nurseries, New Age healers and tradesmen who preferred life on a couple of hectares to life in a town. Vigorous spring grasses and fruit trees, flowering wattle and scabby pines. Dams, post-and-rail fences and horse yards. Signs advertising eggs, horse manure and garage sales. Delivery vans, family station wagons, a Gribbles pathology car, farm dogs braced on the trays of Holden utes. Grace drove sedately. She’d never been booked for any offence in all of her years of driving, and didn’t want to come to the attention of the unmarked highway patrol car-a high-speed blue Holden-that she’d seen lurking around this part of the Peninsula during the past year.