Garry Disher: Blood Moon

Next, accommodation. Last year some kids had trashed a motel room and been thrown out of a bed-and-breakfast joint near the boardwalk. It occurred to Ellen that maybe kids were being ripped off by landlords. The website advised them to check the fine print on their accommodation contracts-would she have thought to do that, when she was eighteen?-and get a receipt for the bond money. She scanned through: complaints procedures, Accommodation Code of Practice, blah, blah, blah.

Ellen rubbed her eyes. She hated computer work. As she continued to follow the links she had to admit that the information was useful and solid-but did the kids read it? She thought of further local information that was sorely lacking. Like where to swim safely, for example. How Western Port Bay emptied treacherously when the tide went out, so that you could find yourself stranded on a mud bank and drown when it came racing in again. The black spots in the mobile phone coverage. The fact that it can be cold at night, and that November can be rainy. The fact that many shops and restaurants in the little burg of Waterloo closed early.

Also, where the town of Lorne offered its schoolies a free clinic, a free shuttle bus and plenty of youth workers wearing distinctive orange T-shirts, Waterloo offered a handful of untrained volunteers from the local church communities operating from a safe haven called the Chillout Zone, in the grounds of the Uniting Church behind High Street. Ellen had called in last night and found herself helping Pam Murphy to dispense drinks and snacks to wasted, lonely, bored and befuddled kids, or those who were simply broke.

And Scobie Sutton’s wife, Beth, had been lurking there. According to Murph, Beth Sutton had been at the Chillout Zone since Friday, handing God-bothering leaflets to the schoolies and murmuring to them in an intense monotone.

Ellen looked up from the monitor and into the distance. The volunteers. Pam Murphy had introduced her to last night’s bunch- she’d vetted them all, she said-but Pam couldn’t be everywhere at once, and wouldn’t it be easy for some pervert to pass himself off as an official volunteer or youth worker?

‘Nothing about this job gets any easier,’ Ellen muttered. She looked at her watch. The others should be returning from the Trevally Street assault soon.

Caz Moon was on Trevally Street. She was walking to work, HangTen, the surf shop up on High Street, where she was the manager. For now, anyway. Caz was no cute surfie chick-suntanned, blonde, mini-skirt, chewing gum snapping in her jaws. Caz couldn’t be bothered with any of that. Her jeans and T-shirt were cheap, her hair and makeup vaguely Goth. She was saving her money. She was slim, quick and clever, twenty-one years old, and very soon she would leave Waterloo far behind, leave her peers to their pregnancies and joblessness.

Caz Moon hadn’t reached the crime scene yet, although she could see the police car, the uniforms and the tape in the distance. She was still down on the stretch of Trevally devoted to seedy boarding houses, run-down motels and faded holiday apartments, all of them facing patchy parkland between the coin barbecues and the boardwalk that ran out into the mangrove swamp. The parkland was Tent City this week, flimsy green and blue nylon structures flapping in the breeze. No one stirring, though. The little dears were still sleeping it off.

It was in front of the Sea Breeze Holiday Apartments that Caz spotted a red Subaru Impreza with a spoiler, racks and customised mag wheels. She swayed, feeling unmoored suddenly. Unwelcome sensations flooded through her, momentarily flattening her capacity to think. A year ago, it had been. Schoolies Week last year. She remembered the sounds of his breathing and her undies ripping, his faintly rotten cocaine and amphetamine skin, the sand packed in hard ripples beneath her spine, the bile in her mouth and the knowing stars high above.

Josh, his name was, one long, rollercoaster night, Josh sweet at first, then the flashes of paranoia, his eyes looking wildly through her, then the sweetness again. She knew more, now, about the mood swings associated with ice. And maybe he carried a whole pharmacy around in his pocket, for the next thing she remembered was feeling dazed, her limbs sluggish, Josh on top of her in the darkest hours of the night.

And here he was, back in town again in his little red car.

Caz Moon closed her eyes and willed it all away, willing raw anger in its place. She breathed in and out. She smiled. She set off again in her unreadable way, down along Trevally Street toward the Villanova Gardens apartments.

A detective watched her and she watched the detective, a young woman with a clipboard, who suddenly veered away from knocking fruitlessly on nearby doors to head Caz off, her face with that cool, blank, unimpressed look they all have.

‘Hi,’ the cop said. ‘My name’s Detective Constable Pam Murphy.’ She paused, cocked her head. ‘I’ve seen you around town. You work in the surf shop, right?’

‘Manager,’ Caz said. She took the initiative and shot out her hand. ‘Karen Moon. Caz.’

‘Hi,’ the cop said, shaking her hand. ‘Listen, we’re investigating a serious incident in Trevally Street last night. Mind if I ask you some questions?’

Caz glanced past the cop to a beefy uniformed guy doorknocking on the other side of the street, and beyond him to one of the apartments, where a slinky guy stood guard, looking bored. ‘Fire away.’

The questions began: ‘Do you live nearby?’ ‘Do you regularly use Trevally Street?’ ‘Did you pass along here late yesterday evening or in the early hours of the morning?’ And so on. It didn’t take long. Caz soon established that she hadn’t seen or heard anything.

All true. But she did lie. The lie was in not informing the young detective with the taut body and probing eyes that she’d been raped last November. At night, on one of the beaches. And that she knew where to find the guy who’d committed it.

Caz Moon was maintaining a very specific, retributive rage about that.

Ludmilla Wishart also saw the police car, the crime-scene tape and the doorknocking officers. She saw them from the side window of her Golf as she passed along Trevally Street on her way to the planning office. Normally she might have been like any other gawking citizen and stored her impressions to share with her workmates around the tearoom table, but felt too low for that. Felt too fat.

Was she fat? Her best friend, Carmen, would say, ‘If anything, Mill, you’re too skinny.’ Sometimes, when Ludmilla was feeling strong, she believed Carmen; the rest of the time she believed Adrian. Why did it matter to him so much? She wanted to look good for him as one does with a lover or husband, but looking good for Adrian was exhausting. The effort and the anxiety wore her out. She relied on little acts of resistance to keep going. Her friendship with Carmen, for example, in which she could be herself, crack jokes, let her guard down. Adrian was wary of Carmen. He probably knew Carmen loathed him. As Ludmilla stopped at a roundabout she thought about hiding or breaking the bathroom scales. But Adrian would only go out and buy another set.

The bad feelings rising in her, she drove on again, finally turning into a side street half a kilometre away from the crime scene and slowing for the entrance to Planning East. The hectic pace of residential and commercial development on the Peninsula had placed an enormous strain on the shire’s planners in recent years, and now-separate and independent planning departments handled applications in the western, eastern and southern zones. Several planners worked at Planning East, Ludmilla was the infringements officer, and their boss was Athol Groot. The only parking spot available was next to his Mercedes, an old white classic, and Ludmilla parked very carefully, very precisely, knowing what he was like.