Peter Temple - Shooting Star

‘Yes. Lots of kids.’ Carmen was moistening her upper lip with a tongue tip, a perfectly pink arrowhead.

‘Often get separated when you’re in the store?’

‘Well, if you’re talking to someone else, you don’t notice what the person you’re with’s doing. But quarter to five’s when Dennis picks us up, so I looked around, couldn’t see her, went all over the place.’ She looked down. ‘I got a bit scared.’

‘That’s being paranoid, is it?’

Carmen sniffed. ‘Bit, I suppose.’

‘Happened before? Couldn’t find Anne?’

Wide eyes on me. ‘No.’

‘What did Dennis do when you went to the car and told him?’

‘Double-parked. We went back in and looked again. Then Dennis got the call on his mobile.’

‘The call?’

‘From Graham. About the kidnap call to Anne’s grandpa.’

I sat back, elbows on the chair arms, fingers interlocked, and looked into her eyes.

‘That’s the chaplain’s look,’ said Carmen. ‘He does that, he’s a spunk, a girl in another class saw him in St Kilda at one in the morning with this like real tart…’

‘On a mission of mercy, no doubt,’ I said, standing, feeling the pain in my leg. ‘Thanks for talking to me, Carmen. Think about Thursday, anything could be important.’

‘You’re a Capricorn, aren’t you?’ she said, head on one side again, all front teeth on show. ‘Can’t be faithful.’

‘Can’t even be hopeful,’ I said. ‘There’s one other thing I just remembered. The school says neither of you has played any sport this term. On Tuesdays or Thursdays. So you’d have to be doing something else on Tuesdays and Thursdays, wouldn’t you.’

I gave her a while to answer, held her eyes, not smiling. Then I said, ‘It’s what you don’t tell me you’ll be sorry about.’

Her pink tongue came out again and licked a lower lip as red and full as a late-season plum.

‘His name’s Craig,’ she said. ‘That’s all I know, I swear.’

The drivers’ quarters were in an overgrown brick cottage ten metres from the stairs leading to the Carsons’ basement carpark. There was always a driver on call, night and day, said Noyce.

Whitton came to the door with his jacket on, ready for work.

‘A few more words,’ I said.

‘Sure, right, come in.’

We went in. ‘This is Michael Orlovsky. He works with me.’

Whitton put out his right hand. Orlovsky kept his hands in his pockets, nodded.

The staff did well in the Carson compound. Whitton’s room looked as if it had been done by a decorator, tweeds and checks and a group of architectural prints on a wall.

‘Sit down,’ I said and I went over to look at the prints, precise drawings of small and elegant buildings, some with domes and pillars and steps, one a tapering tower with a curiously fluted roof. For a time in my early adolescence, I’d had dreams about being an architect, taken books out of the library, tried to copy the illustrations I liked. ‘Don’t be so pathetic, Frank,’ my mother said one day. ‘Only babies copy things.’ I didn’t do any more copying, tore up my drawings, didn’t take out any more books on buildings.

Whitton sat on the edge of a sofa, pale eyes uneasy, blinking rapidly. ‘So what can I…’

‘What can you?’ I said. ‘What can you?’ I moved to look at the view from the window. A small vegetable garden, then a wall. There were brick paths between the dormant beds, dark soil mounded like plump graves and, against the wall, a low lean-to glasshouse.

‘What I told you on Thursday,’ Whitton said, ‘that’s pretty much it.’

I didn’t look at him. Who had lived in this cottage, worked in the kitchen garden? The Carsons had bought up the whole block, all their neighbours and their neighbours’ neighbours, consolidated the properties, taken down the fences, encircled the whole with a barrier, only two entries, gates and cameras. That the Carson family might live here free from fear, immune to the envy and resentment of those beyond the walls. But only here. They still had to leave the sanctuary, go into the world, onto the streets, into the city, see the passing world through windows, pale teenagers with chemical eyes, poor people clutching plastic bags holding a gas-ripened tomato and two hundred grams of fatty mince, sad men with mortuary stubble eking out their days. Even sitting in the Merc at the lights, cool in summer, just right in winter, the Carsons had no choice but to hear the crude and throaty menace of bored-out Holdens beside them, feel the redline bass from eight speakers penetrating their German monocoque, vibrating it, violating it.

‘Pretty much it,’ he said again, voice tight.

I turned and looked at him. His face was tight too, pale, colour gone from the flesh, dying fish colour, blood gone elsewhere, to where it was most needed.

‘Fucked her,’ I said. ‘Fifteen.’

His head was pointed left, he shook it a few times, changed his mind, made a rocking movement with his body, still didn’t look at me.

‘Fucked her,’ I said.

Whitton closed his eyes. He looked much younger that way, spiky eyelashes, spears, a fence of eyelashes. Moisture appeared, a rim of liquid, tears, trembling, a sigh could break the surface tension.

He sniffed, shook his head, the heart’s pure waters broke, rolled down his face, met his lips.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Just once, just once.’

I sat down in a comfortable armchair opposite Whitton, leaned back, stared at him, waited for him.

He kept his gaze down, wiped his cheeks with the back of his right hand. ‘Carmen tell you?’

‘What kind of jobs you going for after this?’ I said.

He put his big hands between his knees, squeezed them with his thighs. ‘You don’t know her,’ he said. ‘It’s not like she’s a little girl. Had two blokes rootin her in her room at Portsea in January, the one’s about thirty, maybe more, rubbish she picked up on the beach, they ring her on her mobile, she let em in the gate at two in the morning.’

‘I don’t want to know her,’ I said. ‘I want to find her. So let’s move on from this What-I-told-you-on-Thursday-that’s-pretty-much-it shit.’

I took the tiny tape recorder out of my inside jacket pocket and put it on the coffee table.

‘Everything,’ I said. ‘Don’t leave out a fucking thing.’

When he’d finished, I said, ‘Draw me a map. Show me exactly where you dropped Anne.’

Whitton was in the kitchen looking for paper when my mobile rang.

‘I’m home, got the slippers on, sitting here with a beer, in about twenty minutes we’re eating octopus. Caught today by my cousin. And where the fuck are you?’

Detective Senior Sergeant Vella. It was Saturday.

‘Is that octopus Italian style?’

‘No. This is octopus cooked in the Mongolian style. You sew it up in a goat’s bladder, full, and…’

‘Say no more. Twenty minutes, I’m there.’

Whitton came out and showed me a piece of paper, neatly drawn map. ‘Here’s the school,’ he said.

I looked, folded the paper, put it in my shirt pocket.

He took a pace backwards, exercised his thick neck. ‘Me and Anne,’ he said, licking his lips. ‘You got to understand, she’s the one…’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t have to understand. I don’t care. I’m not telling anyone. Yet. I might not, depends. Just stay close. I don’t want to have to look for you.’

Orlovsky and I walked back to our quarters in the Garden House, through what resembled a small park, gusty night, oak trees shaking, shedding leaves like big flakes of dandruff. Orlovsky said, deeply scornful, ‘You like this kind of stuff, don’t you? Army, cops, you’re cross-trained in arsehole skills.’