Garry Disher - The Dragon Man

‘Right here. In this bed. Been here since yesterday.’

Challis looked around at the wallpaper, the gleaming white built-in wardrobe, the lace curtains. There was an odour of illness and stale air in the little room. The bed was a costly, vulgar monstrosity, fitted with a silvery-gold vinyl headboard. Rows of brass studs dimpled the vinyl, and there was a radio and a pair of speakers set into it.

He turned to Ledwich. ‘You haven’t been in Penzance Beach?’

‘I’m flaming crook, I tell ya.’

‘Okay, let’s try this. Can you account for your movements on the nights of the twelfth and the seventeenth of December, and around dawn on the twenty-third?’

‘I already told this bitch here-’

Ellen stepped close to the bed and neatly clouted him at the hairline.

‘Ow.’ He rubbed his head.

‘Answer the question, Lance.’

‘Like I told you, I was at work.’

‘According to the foreman, you were often liberal with your hours.’

‘Yeah, but not enough to go out and grab and kill someone and stash her somewhere. And if you arseholes done your homework you’d know I started day shift on the twenty-third. Six a.m. start. The wife’s got it written down on the calendar. I know, because I double-checked after you done me over the last time. So I couldn’t of killed whoever it was that time, and I didn’t kill none of the others.’

Challis nodded to Ellen, who left the room.

‘Before your Pajero was stolen, had it ever been used by another person? A friend, neighbour, member of your family?’

‘My sister, my brother-in-law.’

‘I understand your brother-in-law’s been in Thailand for the past month. Who else has had access to it?’

A blush and a twist of sullenness under the red chapped skin. ‘Look, I know it wasn’t registered, I know I’m not licensed at the moment, I’ll cop to that, but I was desperate, I had to get to work.’

‘So you stored it at your sister’s house and drove it from time to time?’

‘Yes. I had to get to work.’

‘Couldn’t your wife have taken you?’

‘She’s got her own work to go to.’

‘You thought that if the police ever happened to check up on you here-checking you weren’t driving around while unlicensed-they’d not see the Pajero, or see you coming and going in it, and they’d assume you were being a good boy.’

‘Something like that.’

‘Not too bright, Lance.’

Ledwich folded his arms sulkily on the bedclothes at his chest.

‘I’ll ask you again, did anyone else drive your Pajero?’

‘No.’

‘What about the station wagon?’

‘The wife’s car.’

‘But you drive it sometimes?’

‘Not often. Not while I was unlicensed. She had this thing about the police confiscating it if I drove it.’

‘Did you take it out this morning?’

‘The wife did. I needed painkillers. She was only gone ten minutes.’

‘Getting back to the Pajero. Did you have occasion to fit another set of tyres to it before Christmas?’

‘No. Why?’

‘Do you own another vehicle?’

‘Do I look like I can afford three?’

‘I’ll come clean with you, Lance,’ Challis said. ‘An investigator found a Cooper tyre track left by your Pajero in Chicory Kiln Road.’

‘Wouldn’t know what tyres I had on it. They were already on it when I bought it.’

‘The vehicle we’re looking for in connection with the murder of Jane Gideon was fitted with a Cooper tyre of the same size and type.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘Can you account for that, Lance?’

‘Account for it? You’re stitching me up. You’re running around like headless chooks getting nowhere, so you think, hang on, let’s frame old Lance.’

‘A Cooper all-terrain tyre, quite uncommon, quite distinctive tread pattern.’

Challis saw Ledwich fight with the information, and then saw his face clear and heard him say, what any good defence brief would say: ‘Yeah, but you’re not saying my tyre’s the exact same tyre that you’re looking for, only that it’s similar.’

‘Where did you have your tyres fitted?’

‘I told you, they were already on it. I didn’t take much notice what they were. A tyre’s a tyre to me. Anyhow, anything could have happened after it was stolen. Maybe those what took it fitted new tyres, or maybe the spare was a Cooper tyre and they had a puncture.’

All good defence brief arguments, Challis thought.

At that point, Ellen came in with the calendar. She looked drawn and pale and defeated. Challis huddled with her in the corridor, where she murmured, ‘According to this, he did have a six o’clock start on the twenty-third.’

‘That could have been written in since,’ Challis said. ‘But check with his employer again.’

‘Meanwhile,’ Ellen said, ‘Lance has been in bed all day and clearly couldn’t have nabbed Larrayne. So where does that leave us?’

Outside, Challis spoke into his mobile phone. ‘Sir, a request. It will need to be quick.’

‘Try me,’ McQuarrie said.

‘I need a team of uniforms and detectives at Penzance Beach. Sergeant Destry’s daughter hasn’t been seen since this morning.’

Silence. Then, ‘Oh, Lord.’

‘It might not be related, but we have to treat it as if it is. It’s panic stations here.’

‘I should have been informed the minute you knew.’

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘Okay, you can have your extra men,’ McQuarrie said. ‘Do you have any leads at all?’ he added peevishly.

‘Some,’ said Challis coldly, ‘and we’re about to crack that arson death.’

‘Keep me informed, Hal, okay? Regularly.’

‘Count on it, sir.’

Challis pocketed the phone.

‘Boss?’

Scobie Sutton had been tugging uselessly on the side door of Ledwich’s steel garage. ‘Locked, boss.’

‘Forget it. We’re going back to the station.’

One of the uniformed constables drove. Challis almost sat in the back with Ellen Destry, but her anxiety was too palpable. She spent the journey talking on her mobile phone, and from his position in the passenger seat he could sense her jittery body, hear her anguish, as she made her calls.

He heard her say, ‘Anything from the hospitals?’

The last three calls had been to her husband. Was this another? No…

‘Constable, I don’t want excuses. Just do it.’

She flipped the phone off, and Challis turned around, about to talk to her, distract her, when she stabbed her fingers at the call buttons again. She had her notebook open in her lap, numbers listed in the back few pages.

‘This is Sergeant Destry. I’m trying to locate my daughter. No, nothing to worry about. Has she been in the shop today? No? She said she might be going in some time to buy a CD. No? Okay, thank you.’

Challis faced ahead again. The calls were serving a useful function, keeping her occupied-if hyper-and, in a way, they constituted police work. Who knows, she might uncover a person or a memory that would lead them to her daughter.

The woman at the front desk had a girl with her, seventeen or eighteen, hostile, sulky. Mother and daughter, the desk sergeant decided, and turned to the mother. ‘Help you, madam?’

‘I need to speak to someone.’

She was thin and careworn. Her hands were veined and knuckled, an old woman’s hands, though she was probably no more that forty-five. ‘Will I do?’

‘It’s about that backpack on TV.’

Orders were that anyone with information on the abductions was to be sent straight through to an interview room. ‘Inspector Challis will be along to speak to you shortly,’ the desk sergeant said.

They waited for five minutes. It was early evening, six o’clock. Challis was deeply fatigued. Ellen Destry had gone home to be with her husband, but he knew she’d be back again. The other detectives were occupied with the search for Larrayne Destry. So that left him to speak to the cranks and time-wasters.