Garry Disher - The Dragon Man

Sometimes it felt as if he were prowling the roof of heaven, riding high through the night, the stars close above him, nobody about, the teeming masses with their petty concerns tucked safely into their beds. He was as restless as a fox. He seemed to have a channel through life at times like this, a path through the broad darkness that was the Old Peninsula Highway, nothing and nobody to beset him. Down he went, the whole length of the slumbering hook of land, to where it reached the ocean, and then back again, to the far easterly tip of the city, where there were lights again, and the stench of humankind, and where he lived in a loveless house. He turned at a roundabout, headed on down toward the ocean again.

He came upon her about halfway along the highway. Other cars at night were almost an affront to him, but they were always gone in a flash, just a pair of headlamps, scarcely registering. This car had stopped, parked on the gravel forecourt of a roadside fruit and vegetable outlet, a massive barn-like shape in the night. He slowed to no more than a walking pace as he passed. The car looked forlorn, its bonnet up and steam rising from the radiator. A solitary bulb high on a nearby pole cast a weak cone of grey-yellow light over a telephone box and the young woman inside it. She was speaking urgently, gesturing, but seemed to freeze when she saw him passing, and stepped out to get a better look at him. He accelerated away. The image he had of her was of the loneliest figure at the loneliest spot on earth. World’s end. Amen.

He turned around at the next intersection, and when he reached her again he turned in off the road, steering close to her poor, hangdog car. Good. She was alone. He drove past her car until he was adjacent to the phone box, then wound down his window. He didn’t want to alarm her by opening his door and getting out.

She was hovering in the phone box. He called across to her: ‘Everything okay? Phone working? Sometimes it’s been vandalised.’

He sounded like a local. That would help. He saw her wrap her arms about herself. ‘Fine, thanks. I rang a breakdown service. They’re on their way.’

He happened to glance away from her and at her car. He stiffened, looking back at her in alarm: ‘Did you have someone with you?’

She froze, began to tremble, and her voice when it came was no more than a squeak. ‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s someone in the back of your car, behind the seat.’

She edged toward him. ‘Who? I didn’t see anyone.’

He opened his door, put one foot on the ground. ‘I don’t like it. Did you leave the car unattended at any time?’

‘The station car park. It’s been there all day.’

‘There have been cases…’ he said.

He got out then, keeping his door open. They were both eyeing her car, ready to flee. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘you’d better hop in with me, slide across to the passenger side.’

She weighed it up. He was careful not to look at her but to let her see the anxiety on his face. Then, as she came toward him, he moved away, edging around his own car and toward hers.

Her hand went to her mouth. ‘What are you doing? Come back, please come back.’

‘I want to get a closer look at him. For the police.’

‘No!’

Her fear seemed to communicate itself to him. ‘I guess you’re right.’

‘Just get me away from here!’

‘Okay.’

It was as easy as that. Inspired, really. That first one, last week, she hadn’t been a challenge at all. Drunk, half-drugged, hitchhiking, she’d been too easy. At least he’d got to use his head a little tonight. His headlights probed the darkness as he carried her away, high above the rottenness that was always there under the light of the sun.

Detective Inspector Hal Challis showered with a bucket at his feet. He kept it economical, but still the bucket overflowed. He towelled himself dry, dressed, and, while the espresso pot was heating on the bench-top burner in his kitchen, poured the bucket into the washing machine. Couple more showers and he’d have enough water for a load of washing. Only 19 December but already his rainwater tanks were low and a long, dry summer had been forecast. He didn’t want to buy water again, not like last summer.

The coffee was ready. As he poured he glanced at an old calendar pinned to the corkboard above his bench. He’d bought the calendar by mail order three years ago, and kept it opened at March. The vintage aeroplane for that month was a prototype of the de Havilland DH84 Dragon. Then the toaster pinged and Challis hunted for the butter and the jam and finally took his toast and coffee on to the deck at the rear of his house.

The early sun reached him through the wisteria with the promise of a hot day ahead. He felt bone-tired. A suspected abduction on the Old Peninsula Highway two nights ago-the investigation ultimately dumped into his lap. Frankston uniforms had taken the call, then referred it to the area Superintendent, who’d rung at 1 a.m. and said, ‘Maybe your boy’s struck a second time, Hal.’ Challis had spent the next four hours at the scene, directing a preliminary search. When he’d got home again at 5 a.m. yesterday there hadn’t seemed much point in going back to bed, and he’d spent the rest of the day in the car or on the phone.

A little four-stroke engine was chugging away on the bank of his neighbour’s dam. Cows once drank there. Now the cows were gone and the hillside stretched back in orderly rows of vines. Challis couldn’t spot his neighbour among the vines, but the man was there somewhere. He usually was, weeding, pruning, spraying, picking. Challis thought of the insecticide spray, of the wind carrying it to his roof, where the rain would wash it into his underground tank, and he tossed out his coffee.

He stepped down from the verandah and made a circuit of his boundary fence. Half a hectare, on a dirt lane west of the Old Peninsula Highway, tucked in among orchards, vineyards and a horse stud, and Challis made this walk every morning and evening as a kind of check on his feelings. Five years now, and still the place was his port in a storm.

As he collected the Age from his mailbox on the dirt lane at the front of his property, a voice called from the next driveway, ‘Hal, have you got a minute?’

The man from the vineyard was walking toward him. Small, squint-eyed from the angling sun, about sixty. Challis waited, gazing calmly, as he did with suspects, and sure enough the man grew edgy.

Challis stopped himself. The fellow didn’t deserve his CIB tricks. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘Look, I realise it’s nothing, but you know the ornamental lake I’ve got, over near the house?’

‘Yes.’

‘Someone’s been fishing in it,’ the neighbour said. ‘After the trout. The thing is, they’re scaring the birds away.’

Ibis, herons, a black swan, moorhens. Challis had watched them for half an hour one day, from a little hide the man had constructed in the reeds. ‘Do you know who?’

‘Probably kids. I found a couple of tangled lines and fishhooks, half a dozen empty Coke cans.’

Challis nodded. ‘Have you informed the local station?’

‘I thought, you being an inspector-’

‘Inform the local station,’ Challis said. ‘They’ll send a car around now and then, make their presence felt.’

‘Can’t you…’

‘I’m very sorry, but it would look better if you lodged the complaint.’

Challis left soon after that. He locked the house, backed his Triumph out of the garage and turned right at his gate, taking the lane in bottom gear. In winter he negotiated potholes, mud and minor flooding; in summer, corrugations and treacherous soft edges.