Garry Disher - The Dragon Man

‘I’m a detective.’

‘No kidding.’

‘Boss of detectives.’

He raised his palm to her. ‘You know how it is, see a cop and immediately feel guilty about something.’

‘I’m flesh and blood,’ she said, to give him something to ponder upon, then tapped the card in his hand. ‘I mean it about the quote. Give me a call.’

‘Will do.’

She entered the station and went immediately to the uniform branch for the previous night’s crime reports. A dozen mailboxes torched, two setting off small fires. Summer’s here, she thought. She flipped through the reports. Three burglaries. A tent slashed at the caravan park. An assault. Three pub brawls. Theft of a car.

Then she logged on to the grid, the Central Data Entry Bureau, a state-wide database which recorded details of crimes, who reported them, victims’ names, who attended, and so on.

There was a knock on the door and Kellock, the station boss, walked in. As usual, he seemed to regard her with distaste: after all, she was plainclothes, and a woman. ‘You left me a note requesting half-a-dozen more uniforms for your door-to-door on the highway.’

‘That’s right.’

‘It’s not on, Ellen. The budget won’t cover it.’

‘Sir, we’re stretched in CIB.’

‘Not my problem,’ Kellock said.

Kellock was a senior sergeant, middle-aged and comfortable-looking with his uniform and his rank. ‘I can stretch it to two uniforms.’

‘Thank you.’

Kellock left the room. Ellen logged off and headed for the stairs, in time to hear Kellock remonstrating with Kees van Alphen about claiming overtime. ‘All you had to do was get a statement from her. You can’t justify a claim for three hours above your normal load last night.’ Van Alphen, she noted, looked exhausted, as if all of his arrogance had been ground away by the long night, and he wore a dressing on one hand. ‘You smell of smoke, Van,’ Kellock said. ‘Go and have a shower.’

Ellen climbed the stairs to the first floor. She glanced out over the car park. Challis wasn’t in yet.

Challis woke at seven and lay listening to a conversation between kookaburras in the nature reserve opposite his house. It sounded like a dispute: sudden eruptions of name-calling, trailing off into muttered hurt feelings. Then he remembered last night, and Angela’s telephone call, and that Superintendent McQuarrie was coming down to Waterloo sometime during the day to discuss the implications of the killer’s letter.

His mood didn’t improve when he opened his mailbox to fetch the Age and discovered that someone had tried to burn it down during the night.

The exterior was intact, the interior charred but serviceable. The S-bend chain-link support was blackened. Challis wiped his fingers and stood regarding the box gloomily. He lived well back from the road, but still, he was a light sleeper, so it was a wonder he hadn’t heard anything. Enough had happened to him in his life to make him alert to the sound of a vehicle at night.

A voice called, ‘I see they got you as well.’

It was his neighbour. He’s been waiting for me, Challis thought. ‘You too?’

‘Mine’s a milk can,’ the neighbour said, ‘but the bastards chucked a burning rag in it just the same. Mrs Gibbs, around the corner? She found her box in pieces out on the main road.’

‘I’ll have a word with the local station,’ Challis said. ‘See if they can send a patrol around for the next few nights.’

‘Appreciated,’ the neighbour said, wandering away.

Challis read the Age over toast and coffee. Wednesday, 20 December. A banner across the top of the front page read: ‘Five shopping days until Christmas.’ News papers don’t exist any more, he thought. They’ve been replaced by lifestyle papers.

He locked the house and eased the Triumph over the ruts outside his driveway. He wasn’t looking forward to Christmas. The world assumed that Christmas Day must be lonely for him, and so set about ensuring that it wouldn’t be. Drinks at Ellen Destry’s house in the morning. Lunch with his parents and siblings. Then at six in the evening, when lunch was barely digested, an early dinner with Angela’s parents. There were those in his family who couldn’t understand why he’d want to see his parents-in-law, couldn’t understand when he explained that he liked them, and they liked him. You’re surely not intending…? No, Challis wasn’t intending to resume his life with Angela when and if she was ever released. Then why haven’t you divorced her? I’ll get around to it, he told them.

He drove on. Christmas Day. With any luck, someone would find a body and free him from Christmas Day.

Challis was on the road that linked with the Old Highway when he saw them, two teenage boys carrying fishing rods, buckets, a net and tackle boxes. His neighbour’s trout-dam poachers? But the trout dam was in the opposite direction. Maybe they were after the fish in someone else’s dam or lake or creek. They looked guilty, whatever their purpose, keeping close under the roadside gums and pines, keeping their faces averted as he went by. Challis mentally flicked his fingers. Saltmarsh, that was their name. They were cousins.

He reached Waterloo at eight-fifteen. The town looked dewy and clean. He parked the Triumph at the rear of the station and climbed the stairs to the incident room.

At ten o’clock an elderly couple entered the station and said, ‘Constable Murphy told us to come in.’

‘Did she indeed.’

‘She came by last night. She calls on us every week.’

The desk sergeant nodded. The station had a register of elderly citizens, old single men and women, and married couples, who were checked on from time to time by the uniformed constables.

‘And why did Constable Murphy tell you to come into the station?’

‘We’ve been robbed.’

When the desk sergeant had the details he took them through to an interview room to make a statement. ‘It’s CIB’s case now,’ he said. ‘Someone will be with you shortly.’

The man who came in a few minutes later was tall and gangly, with protuberant eyes and long, bony hands. ‘I’m Detective Constable Scobie Sutton. A woman robbed you? Can you describe her?’

The husband, his white hair badly combed, stains on his cardigan, said, ‘She was New Australian.’

His wife was sharper. ‘You great galoot.’ She leaned toward Sutton. ‘He means she looked a bit exotic. Darkish skin, wearing bright clothes, lots of gold-rings, earrings, bracelets, neck chains. But she wasn’t foreign. She was Australian, judging by her accent.’

‘How old, would you say?’

‘Hard to tell. Forty-odd?’

‘You said she came in and offered to bless your house.’

The old woman said, ‘Ask him, ask the genius. He let her in. I was in the garden.’

Sutton turned to the old man, who said, ‘I couldn’t see the harm. She said it would bring financial reward. It’s not easy, being on a pension.’

‘Mad. Cracked in the head,’ his wife said.

‘This woman told me,’ the old man continued stubbornly, ‘that whatever she blessed would multiply to our advantage. She said the house was cursed. She could see black smoke coming off it, and it needed cleansing.’

‘Did she ask you for payment?’

‘A donation. I gave her a dollar.’

‘You great galoot.’

‘A dollar,’ Sutton said. He looked incensed for a moment, as if he’d been asked to get a cat out of a tree. ‘And then what happened?’

‘The phone rang. I was at the front door, but the phone’s down the passage, in the kitchen. I was only gone a minute.’

‘She was alone, this woman?’

‘Had a child with her. Couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. Cute little thing.’