Felicity Young - Take Out

At last it seemed that Stevie and Fowler were on the same wavelength and neither in the mood for idle gossip. ‘Save the chitchat, Bill,’ Fowler told him. ‘Notify the station and have a team dispatched over here asap. Then call the office and get them to phone the local hospitals, see if anyone’s been admitted matching the parents’ descriptions. The couple might have just ducked out to the shops while the baby was asleep and met with some kind of accident.’

Fowler turned back to Stevie while Trotman carried out his instructions on the car radio. The Pavel house would soon be a hotbed of police activity—though perhaps ‘soon’ was optimistic.

Fowler drew himself up, on full alert since he’d discovered he wasn’t dealing with an easily bullied member of the public. ‘You were at the house next door when we arrived. What were you doing there?’

She could have lied, could have told him she’d been admiring the last of the bulbs in Mrs Hardegan’s front garden, but to hell with self-preservation. Telling the truth and risking an official reprimand was worth every gram of pleasure she’d get from stirring up this self-important prat. ‘I was talking to Mrs Hardegan, the woman who raised the alarm.’

Fowler rubbed his square chin. ‘If you’re involved with the cyber predator team, you must be with Sex Crimes. This is way out of your jurisdiction, Hooper. You’ve already breached police procedure; you should have waited here for me as instructed. How am I to know how you handled the witness, what false memories you might have sown in her mind?’

Stevie sighed—so much for amiable cooperation. ‘I had to do something while I waited; you took long enough. Anyway, you won’t get much sense from her. She’s had a stroke and has trouble talking. I suggest you start with the other people in the street. Get a decent description of the couple and find out if there are any family members who can tell you anything before you start phoning the hospitals and stirring up a media frenzy. And now, if you excuse me, I have a call to make.’

She glared back at Fowler, challenging him to stop her as she punched Skye’s number into her phone. A vanload of cops pulled up alongside the Pavels’ driveway and he was called away.

Stevie listened gravely to Skye’s report on the doctor’s findings and told her a detective was on the way to interview her at the hospital. While they spoke Stevie watched Fowler brief the newly arrived cops and another plainclothes officer.

Toward the end of her conversation, Stevie was hit by a thought that made her laugh out loud.

‘I don’t see what’s so funny. The baby’s condition is serious.’ Skye sounded miffed.

‘Sorry, Skye, I’m not laughing at anything you said, I was just watching the sergeant marshal his troops. I thought I’d seen him before, and now I remember where.’ She pulled herself together. ‘Have you ever seen an Action Man doll?’

Despite Stevie’s intentions of returning home, she felt uneasy about the way the investigation was being handled and couldn’t bring herself to leave. For a while she loitered with the other rubberneckers in the street, trying to glean more information, hoping Fowler would feel her eyes burning into his back.

A TV news van arrived and Fowler gave a stony-faced interview loaded with cop-speak. He made a public plea for news of the whereabouts of Jon and Delia Pavel and briefly mentioned the abandoned ‘male infant.’ The journalist lost interest when Fowler said that, at this stage in the investigation, the parents’ disappearance was not being regarded as suspicious, probably just an unfortunate misdemeanour or accident. Was he understating his suspicions deliberately? Stevie wondered. Was this all part of his procedural tactics, or did he really believe what he was saying? With Action Man wearing his sunglasses again, it was impossible to tell.

Hunger and boredom finally drove her to the corner deli. The family-run corner store was a rarity these days in the more gentrified Perth suburbs. Few owners could compete with the big chains or hack the long hours. Like Mrs Hardegan’s house, this place was a bastion against change. A patchwork of colourful brand names covered the windowless sidewalls; private notices about lost pets, babysitting and piano lessons curled down one pane of the front display window. Toward the back, the battlements of an old brick dunny jutted over the top of a rickety wooden fence, and next to this, a sun-bleached weatherboard garage.

Stevie waited to be served behind a group of chattering landscape gardeners and found her gaze drawn to a rack of classic DVDs near the large front window.

‘How much are the DVDs?’ she asked at the counter when her turn came.

‘Ten dollars,’ the girl said, lisping through her tongue stud.

Stevie jingled through her purse, counting up the change. ‘Damn, I can’t make it.’ She ordered a salad sandwich and an iced coffee, moved to the DVD rack and selected a copy of Gone With The Wind. ‘Mind putting this aside for me?’ she asked. ‘It’s the same collectors’ edition I’ve had my eye on at Amazon.’ Stevie’s passion for old movies had developed with her time in The Job: the more she saw of real life, the less she wanted to see of it on the screen. Modern romantic comedies, especially those starring George Clooney, were the only exception to her nothing-under-fifty-years-old rule.

The girl made no comment and took down Stevie’s particulars with one eye on the clock, no doubt counting down the hours till the end of her shift.

‘I noticed a bunch of cop cars down the street—any idea what’s going on?’ Stevie said. Ancient movies might be of no interest to the girl, but surely this kind of action would.

‘Oh yeah, it’s soooo sad,’ the girl said, brightening immediately. ‘The poor little baby was left alone for days and the police can’t find his parents anywhere—they think they might have been killed in a car crash.’

‘Days?’

The girl shrugged. ‘That’s what everyone’s saying.’

‘That’s terrible. Did you know them?’

‘Kind of, they came in here sometimes. The baby was so cute, but the mum and dad were like really weird.’

High heels clacked across the tiles and a well-dressed woman with tight porcelain skin and a prominent gap between her front teeth appeared from the storage area at the back of the shop.

‘What’s going on out here, Leila?’ the woman said. She might have looked Madonna, but her accent was all Kath and Kim. To Stevie she added, ‘I hope she isn’t holding you up.’

‘It’s fine,’ said Stevie, ‘I was just asking about the missing people down the road.’

‘Oh them, yes—a strange pair.’

Leila rolled her eyes. ‘How would you know, Eva? You’re hardly ever here.’

Eva did not appear bothered by the girl’s insolent tone. She asked Stevie if the couple had been found yet.

‘Haven’t a clue,’ Stevie said, conscious of the woman looking her up and down, glad that today she didn’t look like a cop: maybe she could get something useful out of them.

Eva pointed to the DVD on the counter. ‘I’ve given up on that one, makes me cry too much, ’specially when the little girl dies. When it comes to the oldies, give me something funny over serious any day—the Ealing comedies or the original St Trinian’s movies—remember them? What a great escape they are.’

Stevie agreed. She had a feeling this woman had experienced more reality than she cared to admit to. She paid for her lunch with a clatter of loose change upon the counter.

But Eva wasn’t ready to let Stevie go just yet. It seemed Stevie wasn’t the deli’s first visitor from the Pavel house that afternoon and it soon became obvious that the woman knew far more about what was going on up the street than she ought to. Stevie would have put money on the identity of at least one of the deli’s recent customers—William Trotman, without a doubt.