Peter Corris - The Big Drop

Jessie Stevenson of Cammeray was a woman in her late thirties who worked hard at looking ten years younger and did pretty well at it. She came into my office wearing a tailored white suit, high heels and a lot of subtle make up. She slipped into the clients’ chair and put her nice legs nicely on display.

‘I hope it’s not painful to you to mention this,’ she said, ‘but your ex-wife recommended you to me when she heard about our problem. We go sailing together, you see.’

‘It’s not painful. How is Cyn?’

‘Oh, she’s wonderful. She’s married to Simon Theodore, he’s..’

‘In advertising. Yes, I know. If she’s sailing she must have got over her sea sickness. That’s wonderful-I’m glad. Tell me about the problem, Mrs Stevenson.’

‘Jessie, please. After all Cynthia’s told me, I feel I know you.’

I thought Cyn’s version of our marriage would be a tale of bottles and battles, signifying nothing, but perhaps I was wrong.

‘Jessie,’ I said.

‘I’ve got a seventeen-year-old daughter. Her name is Portia. I haven’t seen her for three months. She hasn’t been at school and none of her friends know where she is. There’s been nothing-not a card or a phone call. Nothing. The police have done all the things they do. Nothing.’

‘Any trouble with her? I mean before she went?’

‘Oh, the usual-sulks, squabbles about money and going out. Nothing to speak of. She was a normal teenager. I’ve exhausted myself thinking about what might have made her go. I can’t come up with anything. I’ve been distraught. I’m on medication now.’

There seemed to be an unnatural air to her-a combination of a surface over-alertness and a background dullness. She spoke flatly, without emotion, as if that part of her response had been blocked off or re-routed. I judged her to be very vain and very troubled-not a good combination.

‘I’ll need quite a few things, Jessie. An introduction to someone at her school, a picture of course, a handwriting specimen, and I’ll have to have a pretty thorough session with you and her father to go over her life. Runaway kids usually run back to something-some memory, something like that.’

‘Her father’s dead. He was killed in an accident when Portia was little. I re-married a few years later-Jeff’s been like a father to her for… nearly ten years.’

‘Okay. When can I come out to see you both? Oh, any other kids?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m going sailing this afternoon. I think Jeff’s home tonight. You could come tonight.’

She gave me the address in Cammeray and we fixed on 8.30 for my visit. She got up and moved to the door; she was tall and she moved well but with that same distracted style, as if not all of her was really there. She transferred the leather drawstring bag she carried to her right hand in order to use the left to open the door. Left-handed, I thought, big advantage for tennis. I wondered if the kid was left-handed too; I was already working on the case-but not quite yet.

‘Can I get a cheque from you tonight?’ I asked.

She hesitated and her composed mask dropped momentarily; behind it there was confusion and distress to spare.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, Mr Hardy, Yes, yes, of course. Jeff will give you a cheque. Whatever you ask, anything

‘Cliff,’ I said. ‘There’s a standard rate. I’ll see you tonight.’

She went out and I made a few notes and then picked up the phone. Good manners and good sense required me to contact the missing persons department in the police force. I’ve never encountered a competitive feeling from the cops in these matters; they have too many cases on their files to care about a private enquiry into one of them. Their manpower is stretched thin and a case they can cross off the books is just so many more hours they can put in elsewhere. The case officer on the Stevenson matter was Detective Constable Burns, and she was as nice as pie.

‘Not a whisper,’ she told me. ‘The girl was doing quite well at school.’ She named a north shore private school better known for placing its students in the society pages than the professions. ‘Reasonable student, they said. We tracked down five or six friends, nothing. Just didn’t turn up at school one day.’

‘Boyfriends?’

‘Not really. She went out a couple of times with a kid from Shore. Bit of a wimp. Didn’t know a thing. Wouldn’t have been one of the bunch with an income under a hundred thousand.’

I grunted. ‘You checked the usual?’

‘All negative: horses, drugs, booze, religion-all negative.’

‘What did she take?’

‘Clothes, records, video cassettes.’

‘Diary?’

There was a silence at the other end, then she spoke slowly. ‘No mention of any diary, no.’

‘What did you make of the parents?’

‘Rock solid. The stepfather’s a partner in an ad agency, doing well. The mother…’

‘Fills in her time.’

‘That’s right. Sailing, aerobic dancing, bit of gardening, reads a lot. Looks after herself.’

‘Thanks. Did she have a bank account, Portia I mean. Christ, what a name!’

Detective Constable Burns laughed. ‘Yeah, she hated the name. Called herself Ann. She had a passbook savings account with a couple of hundred bucks in it-didn’t even take the book. It’s a tough one, and you know the toughest part?’

‘Tell me.’

‘She made it in one jump. Usually they have a dry run or two and you can get a line on what’s bugging them and what they’re likely to do. Not Portia. She wouldn’t have spent ten nights away from home in the last ten years, the way they tell it.’

‘ Over-protected?’

‘Could be.’

I thanked her and put the phone down. What she’d told me jelled pretty well with what I knew from the missing persons cases I’d handled over the past fourteen years. Not many of them had been juveniles, but the principles were the same. A high proportion of the runaways just wanted to get attention-the run was a call for help; some had reached a temporary impasse in their lives and used the run to break the log-jam and get some movement going from which they could draw comfort or a course of action. A few go for good; they go a long way off, burrow and pull the hole in over them. A few meet with foul play and it worried me that no one had made any mention of that so far.

I read over a selection of cases including the handful of juveniles, made some notes and put through some calls to get a picture of the Stevensons. Jeff Stevenson was a partner in Armstrong amp; Stevenson, which was a biggish advertising agency with an office in North Sydney. His credit rating was tops, and his firm had good accounts with brewers and distillers and other pillars of our social life like a Japanese car manufacturer and a Taiwan-based toy importer.

It was mid-winter, which meant that Sydney turned on fine, bright days, ideal for tennis-playing in the morning and afternoon, but cold and dark by 5 p.m. In the mid-afternoon I drove out to Castlecrag to take a look at the school. The suburb’s roads have military names like The Ramparts and The Bastion and the area has a defensive, fortressed look. The wealth and property behind the high walls and beyond the deep, verdant gardens would be worth defending.

The school looked like a stately home, somewhat on the large side. It boasted a high wall and massive gate house; the main building was a rambling, pseudo-Georgian affair with enough ivy on it to camouflage Ayers Rock. Playing fields stretched away and flagstoned paths wound between tennis courts, garden beds and an artificial pond.

I took this in from my car which I stopped on the other side of the road from the huge iron gates, and from a stroll along the west perimeter. As I watched, the place came to life. Schoolgirls suddenly spilled out of the main building from a couple of doors and started straggling along the paths-some towards the main gate and others off to two new buildings in the far distance which I took to be dormitories. I wondered if things had changed in the dorm since Anne Of Green Gables, a book of my sister’s which I’d read with guilt and longing.