Garry Disher - The Dragon Man

Ellen made a frantic search of the house, then gathered herself and searched again. She kept bumping into the uniformed constable. It was a small house. There was nothing ostensibly wrong about the man who lived in it. He owned a television set, a stereo, a handful of books. His habits were tidy. There was nothing freakish about the lighting, the wallpaper, the items in his cupboards and drawers. There was no pornography, there were no implements of cruelty. There was no body, alive or dead, or signs that one had ever been there.

But the house spoke of an inflexible life. No clutter, no dust, no sign that an ordinary person sprawled there at the end of the day. For just a moment, Ellen caught a sense of Rhys Hartnett, his rigidity and his hatred of disorder.

And, for what it was worth, there was a computer, and a Canon printer.

She remembered the bath. She levered off the side panels. Nothing.

Only an odour of dampness.

But he’d kept one souvenir, Kymbly Abbott’s backpack. Had he kept others? Or had he ceased to do that after Danny had broken in?

‘The ceiling, Sarge?’

There was a manhole. They positioned the hall table under it and she watched the constable haul himself through the narrow gap. She heard the roof beams creak. She heard a sneeze.

Then his face appeared. ‘Nothing, Sarge.’ He sneezed again.

‘Come on down. We need to know if he owns or rents another house somewhere.’

‘We haven’t searched the shed, Sarge. And he might own a lockup somewhere, for his equipment and that.’

Tear her hair out, that’s what she wanted to do. Her hands itched to hurt her own body.

‘Shed, first.’

It was a gardening and tool shed. A rake, a fork, a shovel and a small pick were propped handle-first inside a tall wooden box in one corner. Lengths of dowelling rested across the beams above their heads. Extensive shelving had been erected around three of the walls. Ellen picked up a plastic honey tub. It was full of screws. The fourth wall was hung with hammers, chisels, screwdrivers and wrenches. The spanners were in a toolbox on the floor. She guessed that there would be more tools in the Jeep.

She grabbed the constable. ‘We haven’t checked his van.’

It was careless of her. Hartnett might have doubled back and escaped in it. And there were good reasons why it should have been searched first.

All of the doors were locked. Ellen sent the constable to search for the keys, while she walked around and around the vehicle, tugging on handles and attempting to peer through the darkened windows. A mobile hell, she thought, and began to cry. He’d snatched Larrayne over ten hours earlier. If he was true to form, her daughter was dead by now. She had to expect that, face that. She tugged on the rear door handles again.

The Jeep seemed to give an answering shake, so minute that she almost didn’t register it. She didn’t trust her senses. It could have been the plates of the earth shifting a little, far away, far beneath her, registering as a tiny shake here, in this driveway.

The constable returned, waving keys. ‘In a basket on the kitchen bench,’ he said proudly. He stopped, looked toward the reserve. ‘They’ve brought in the chopper.’

Ellen snatched the keys from him. She wasn’t interested in anything but getting the doors open.

The rear compartment, once so familiar to her, a small, friendly, masculine place that spoke of Rhys Hartnett’s clever hands and efficiency, now seemed to be composed of sharp metal corners and the coldness of metal. Shelves, brackets, tools, offcuts of aluminium, electrical flex, drawers, a large, padlocked cabinet along one side of the tray.

A muffled knock. Another hint of rocking.

They registered it together. The constable fumbled the keys out of the door and searched for the smaller keys on the ring. Ellen made to snatch the keys from him. They performed a small, foolish dance, a playground grabbing contest, before the constable relinquished the keys to her.

The cabinet door swung upwards. Larrayne lay cramped on her side and wrapped in a blanket of thin, high-density foam. Her wrists and ankles had been taped together. There was a strip of tape over her mouth. Her eyes were wide and afraid, and then they began to blink away the tears and she began to thrash her body, thrash it until they’d pulled her out and cut her free.

Challis felt his chest tighten. His mouth tasted sour and his breathing came in tight, strained shudders that barely sustained him. Asthma. He flashed on his childhood. The evenings had always been the worst time. He’d want to run and climb and charge about, anything to avoid bed, anything to fill up the minutes before he was called inside, anything to stay outside, and the attacks would come, so bad sometimes that his panicked parents had called for an ambulance. But that was childhood. He had a more recent memory, of a small town, his wife, the other constable, the affair between them burning unnoticed by him until the anonymous call that had lured him to a patch of trees along a moonless back road. The shots. He’d taken one in the arm, a sleeve-plucking flesh wound. He’d circled around and he’d shot the man who’d wanted him out of the way. Challis stopped now, one hand resting against the trunk of a tree. His breathing rattled and wheezed. So much for silence, he thought.

There were men on the way. ‘Fifteen minutes,’ according to the duty sergeant in Frankston. And a helicopter with a searchlight.

Hartnett had a lead of two minutes. He knew his way through the reserve, presumably. Challis hadn’t sent a car around to the bottom edge of the reserve. There were simply no roads to it. So, all four of them-himself, Sutton, the two constables-were floundering in the twilight, only two torches between them.

He thumbed his radio. ‘Anything?’

The replies came: ‘No, boss.’

‘Everyone keep still a minute, and listen.’

After a while he said, ‘Anything?’

‘No, boss.’

Then Challis heard it, the thud and chop of rotor blades. A voice crackled on his radio. ‘Inspector Challis?’

‘In the reserve. Can you see it?’

Silence, then, ‘Approaching you now.’

‘There are four of us,’ Challis said. ‘Two uniforms, two plainclothes. We’re wearing white shirts.’

‘How’s our target dressed?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Roger. We’ll flush him out, sweeping now.’

Suddenly light was probing the trees near Challis. It flicked like an angry finger, then began to make steady sweeps across the reserve as the helicopter moved slowly down its length.

In the mind-numbing din, Challis felt ill. He realised that he hadn’t eaten for many hours. He thought about following the light, then decided to head in the opposite direction. There were men enough to grab Hartnett if the spotlight flushed him out, but what if it had passed right over him and he was behind the sweep now, safe in the darkness, waiting until he could slip away.

Hartnett shouldn’t have moved, Challis told himself later. Hartnett should simply have waited. But he didn’t wait. He burst from a thicket, screaming unnervingly, swinging a knife. Challis felt the blade slice above his nipple. There was warm wetness at first, then the pain.

He feinted, dropping to one knee with a groan. Hartnett swung around. He was still screaming, fighting the air with the knife. The danger to Challis lay not in Hartnett’s skill and calculation but in that windmilling wild arm. Challis rolled on to his back, jackknifing his knees to his chest. To Hartnett, it must have signalled submission, for he ran forward, bending low, coming around on Challis’s left side, still screaming.

Challis waited. He waited for the upstroke, the moonglint on the knife that told him it was about to swing down and cut him open. Propping on his forearms, he swivelled his trunk around and shot out both feet.