Garry Disher - The Dragon Man

Challis backed her up. ‘Your letter writer might be a crank, Tess. An opportunist. Someone with a grudge against the police.’

He regarded her carefully, and saw that she understood the implications.

‘You’re not holding out on me?’

‘I swear it.’

‘But can I say the police think there may be a link between the first two?’

He sighed. ‘There may not be, but there probably is.’

She muttered, ‘Not that quoting you does me much good if you arrest him before Thursday’s issue.’

‘I can’t help that.’

She looked up at him. ‘People are scared, Hal. This morning I had a call from a real estate agent saying he’s had a couple of holiday cancellations. I checked with the caravan park and the camping ground. Same story. A lot of the locals depend on summer tourists.’

‘Tess, we’re doing everything we can. We’re following leads, checking our databases. As soon as there are any developments, I’ll give you a call ahead of anyone else.’

She touched the tips of her fingers to his chest and very lightly pressed him. ‘Would you? That’d be great, even if you do sound like a police spokesperson.’ She stepped away from him. ‘Well, Christmas soon. Season’s greetings and all that.’

‘You too.’

She turned to Ellen. ‘Someone’s been distributing leaflets about Constable Tankard. Anything you can tell me about that?’

‘No.’

‘Okay. Bye now.’

When Tessa Kane was gone, Ellen said, ‘I hate people who say “Bye now”.’

‘Ah, she’s okay. You just have to know how to handle her.’

‘Hal, don’t get in too deep.’

He frowned. ‘Are you my nursemaid now?’

‘I mean the police-media thing, not your private life.’

Challis was embarrassed. ‘Sorry.’

‘I’ll get this letter off to the lab.’

‘It won’t tell us anything.’

‘I know.’

Canteen gossip soon spread the word about John Tankard’s attempt to book Challis, so he was foul company that afternoon-as if he wasn’t touchy enough already, owing to that leaflet campaign against him. Pam Murphy trod delicately around him during the ground-search of the Jane Gideon abduction site. Being diverted to attend a domestic dispute with him, on their way back to the station, was the last thing she wanted. Tankard’s method of policing domestics was the bellow and the clip around the earhole.

She drove through the late-afternoon heat. A week before Christmas, and four months of hot weather lay ahead of them, the heat giving a particular spin to local crime. Your burglaries increased, as people went on holiday or left windows open to catch a breeze. Cowboy water-haulage contractors stole water from the mains. Brawling increased-in the home, the pub, the street; outside pinball parlours; on the foreshore on New Year’s Eve. Surfies reported thefts from their vans. Weekend farmers drove down from Toorak and Brighton in their BMWs and Range Rovers on Friday evenings and discovered that someone had emptied their sheds of ride-on mowers and whipper-snippers, or their paddocks of cattle, sheep, horses, angora goats. And now another highway murder.

‘Next right,’ Tankard said. He sounded keen, as if he could sense an arrest.

Pam turned the corner. The arrest rate was part of the problem. The sergeant was always urging a higher arrest rate, saying it was too low for the region. It’s not as if we’re in the inner suburbs, Pam thought, tackling knife gangs. Down here a quiet warning should be enough.

Still, she thought, I’m the rookie here, what do I know?

She braked the van gently about halfway along the street. There was no need to peer at house numbers: the focus of the drama was obvious, a gaggle of neighbours on the footpath. She pulled in hard against the kerb, pocketed the keys, and got to the front door of the house before Tankard could.

It was ajar. She knocked. ‘Police.’

The man who came along the corridor toward them wore a bathmat of body hair on a white, sagging trunk. His feet were bare, his knees like bedknobs under threadbare shorts. Someone had scratched his plump shoulders. He’d also have a black eye By the evening. ‘Look, sorry you were called out, but we’ve got it sorted.’

Pam said, ‘I’m Constable Murphy, this is Constable Tankard. Who else is in the house, sir?’

‘Just the wife, also the-’

John Tankard shouldered through. ‘We need to see her, pal.’

The man retreated in alarm. ‘She’s-’

Pam saw worry under the weariness, the poverty and the beer. She touched Tankard’s forearm warningly and said, ‘Constable Tankard and I just need a quick word with your wife, sir, if you don’t mind.’

The man twisted his features at her. ‘Look, girlie, I-’

It had been a long day. Pam pushed her face into his and breathed shallowly. She got ‘girlie’ twenty times an hour at the station; she didn’t need it from some civilian as well. ‘Are you obstructing us in our duty, sir? Because if you are-’

A priest appeared from a back room. ‘It’s all right, it’s all right. I’m talking to them. We’re sorting it out. There’s no need for police intervention.’

‘See? Told ya.’

Pam hooked her finger. ‘Father, could I have a minute?’

She took the priest out on to the lawn at the front of the house. Tankard scowled after her. She ignored him. ‘Father, I’m as anxious as you are to avoid trouble.’

The priest nodded. ‘Everything’s calm now. The fellow’s wife has a history, a personality condition. Sometimes, when it’s been hot for a few days, things get on top of her and she snaps. That’s what all the ruckus was about. She hit him, not the other way round.’

‘How is she now?’

‘Quiet. Ashamed. She hadn’t been taking her pills.’

Pam walked with the priest back to the front door. ‘Sir, we won’t be taking any further action.’

Tankard was furious with her in the van. ‘We should have talked to the wife.’

Pam explained. Tankard said nothing. He said nothing the whole way back to the station, not until he saw Inspector Challis outside the station, getting into his car to drive home.

‘Arsehole.’

There had been a time when Challis wanted to write a book about the things he’d seen and known and done, a lot of it bad. Fiction, because who’d believe it if he tried to pass it off as fact? He’d studied with a novelist at the TAFE College in Frankston, Novel Writing, every Wednesday evening from six until ten-when he wasn’t on call somewhere, staking out a house, feeling for a pulse, arresting someone who didn’t want to be arrested-but soon realised that although he had plenty to say, he didn’t know how to say it. It was locked inside him, in the stiff language of an official report. He couldn’t find the key that would let the words sing on the page. He’d confessed all of this to the novelist, who congratulated him, saying, ‘My other students either have nothing to say or never realise that they haven’t got a voice, so count yourself lucky.’

Challis had smiled tiredly. ‘You mean, you count yourself lucky you’re not stuck with one more bad writer.’

The novelist laughed and invited him to the pub to say goodbye.

But one thing stuck in Challis’s mind-a quote from a writers’ handbook. Georges Simenon, author of the Maigret novels, had said: ‘I would like to carve my novels in a piece of wood’. Challis felt like that now. As he drove away from the Waterloo police station at six o’clock that evening, he thought that he’d like to be able to stand back from this case, his life, and gauge where the shape was pleasing and where it was all wrong.

He turned right at the sign for the aerodrome and splashed the Triumph into a parking bay at the rear of the main hangar. He went in. One end had been partitioned off, and here Challis pulled on a pair of overalls, tuned in to Radio National, and went to work.