Chain of Evidence

37

Scobie Sutton was obliged to wait for three hours before the shooting board officers-a man and a woman, both youngish and expressionless-took him into an interview room. With a nod and a grunt, they sat him where suspects usually sat, so that he felt like a suspect and almost wanted to add his mark to the scuffs, scratches and graffiti on the tabletop.

‘You want to ask me about the shooting of Nick Jarrett?’ he said, trying to keep his voice unconcerned and accommodating.

The male officer, an inspector named Yeo, gave him a humourless smile. ‘Correct.’

‘I didn’t see what happened.’

‘We know that,’ said the female officer, a sergeant named Pullen. ‘But you were on the scene soon afterwards, you collected evidence, and took that evidence to the lab.’

‘Yes.’

She, like Yeo, smiled without warmth or humour. ‘We were contacted by the lab. Apparently there were irregularities in regard to the way you collected the evidence.’

Scobie swallowed.

‘Are you protecting Senior Sergeant Kellock and Sergeant van Alphen, DC Sutton?’

Scobie shook his head mutely.

‘We understand that there’s a certain culture in this police station,’ said Pullen.

‘Not sure what you mean,’ Scobie said, his voice betraying his nerves. He was quaking. He’d never been in trouble before. He’d never done anything to warrant trouble. An unwelcome thought came to him that this was punishment for his displeasure with his wife and the feelings he’d had for Grace Duyker yesterday. Could God act so quickly?

‘Oh, I think you do,’ said Pullen. ‘A masculinist culture, arrogant, protective. Kellock and van Alphen are running their own little fiefdom, correct? Men like you do their bidding, protect them, cover up for them. A culture that cuts corners, that likes to get a result, whether lawfully or not.’

The whiplash words were somehow worse coming from a woman, and maybe that was the point. ‘You’ve got it wrong,’ Scobie whispered. He wanted his wife’s cuddly arms around him, protective, forgiving.

‘Or maybe it was tunnel vision,’ said Yeo. ‘You went in looking for what you expected to find rather than what was there. You all hated Nick Jarrett, after all. I mean, he was scum, killed the son of one of your civilian clerks.’

‘I followed procedure,’ said Scobie stiffly.

‘I followed procedure, sir,’ said Yeo.

‘Sir.’

‘Don’t make me laugh. Rather than call in bloodstain and GSR experts you gathered evidence and then released the scene before the techs could do their job properly. We lack separate, isolated tests for gunshot residue on Jarrett, van Alphen and Kellock, for example. Too late now. Thanks to your bull-in-a-china-shop methods, we can’t construct a narrative of what happened.’

‘Narrative’ was a new buzzword. Scobie felt a rare anger, but tried to look baffled, an expression he’d seen on the faces of the consummate liars he’d interrogated over the years.

Pullen leaned forward. ‘What did you think you were doing, bundling everything together? Didn’t your training tell you about cross contamination?’

Before Scobie could reply, Yeo hammered another question home to him. ‘And you let the crime-scene cleaners come in the very same morning. Why did you do that?’

‘I didn’t know they’d been ordered to clean up,’ Scobie protested. ‘The others must have arranged it.’

‘We’ve seen the paperwork,’ said Yeo. ‘Your name is on the requisition: Detective Constable Scobie Sutton. Look.’

He showed Scobie a faxed form. ‘That’s not my signature,’ Scobie said.

He swallowed and looked inwards, down long roads of fear and shame brought on by men like van Alphen and Kellock, and their schoolboy equivalents before that. He wanted to admit that he’d been intimidated. But he could picture the scorn and contempt the admission would bring. And he didn’t really mourn Nick Jarrett, he realised suddenly. But van Alphen and Kellock were dangerous. They’d killed a man, after all. So he did what most people did and played dumb.

‘We don’t know who was doing what, or where,’ said Pullen. ‘We can’t verify the sequence of events.’

‘No narrative,’ Scobie muttered.

‘Are you being smart?’

Yeo leaned forward. ‘Why the hell didn’t you photograph the scene, at least?’

‘No camera,’ Scobie muttered. ‘Budget constraints.’

Maybe he could lay all of this at the feet of Superintendent McQuarrie.

‘Oh, that’s convenient.’

A camera, Scobie realised, would have frozen Nick Jarrett in time, his position on the floor, his gloved hands, the knife before it was moved from one hand to the other. Yeo and Pullen had a point, that was for sure.

‘Those cuts on Kellock’s forearm,’ said Pullen. ‘What’s that about, do you know?’

Scobie frowned uncomprehendingly.

‘You didn’t notice the neat grouping? Three shallow, parallel, non-life-threatening cuts?’

‘Defence wounds,’ Scobie said.

‘Defence,’ scoffed Yeo. ‘I’d say van Alphen and Kellock have their defence pretty well sewn up, wouldn’t you, DC Sutton?’

‘Sir?’

Pullen leaned forward. ‘We need your on-scene notes, DC Sutton. Now, please.’

Scobie swallowed and looked at the wall behind her and said, in creaking tones, ‘I lost my notebook.’

‘Lost? Oh, that’s a good one.’

They kept him there until early evening. When he came out he saw Pam Murphy in the corridor. He tried to rally. ‘I thought you were away on an intensive?’

She was young and bright and healthy and he couldn’t stand it. ‘Just finished the first week. They let us go home for the weekend.’

‘Well, good luck.’

‘Thanks, Scobie.’

Pam knocked on van Alphen’s door. ‘Got a moment, Sarge?’

He waved her in. He looked deeply fatigued.

‘Heard about Nick Jarrett, Sarge,’ she said carefully.

He scowled. ‘This afternoon I was chewed on by a couple of shooting board dogs.’

‘Everything okay?’

He shrugged. ‘They’ve got nothing. Take a seat. What can I do for you?’

‘Thought I could pick your brains, Sarge.’

‘About?’

‘Interview techniques.’

‘Interview techniques?’ said van Alphen, faintly mocking.

Normally Ellen Destry would have been Pam’s first choice, but Ellen was snowed under, looked distracted, even miserable. Plus, Pam felt a little guilty because she was leaving the uniformed branch and moving on to plainclothes. She didn’t want van Alphen, her old uniformed sergeant, to think that she was a snob, had no more time for her old colleagues.

‘I have to write an essay,’ she said. ‘Worth twenty-five per cent of my marks.’

‘Essay? You should be out cracking heads.’

Pam smiled at him across his tidy, gleaming desk and said, ‘Well, you’re a dinosaur, Sarge. Me, I’m up-and-coming. Three thousand words by Monday morning, so I’ll have to work all weekend. Questioning witnesses versus questioning suspects. What to ask, what not to ask. Establishing mood and rhythm. Using psychology and body language. Etcetera, etcetera.’

Van Alphen stared at her in disbelief. His expression said that he relied on experience and instinct, techniques learned on the job, not in a classroom, and which didn’t have fancy names like ‘body language’.

‘Murph, you know how to interrogate people,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen you in action. You’re good at it. Just write what you know.’

‘What I know doesn’t add up to three thousand words, Sarge.’

‘Then you shouldn’t have gone to detective school, should you?’ he said, with a sharkish smile.

‘Oh, thanks a lot,’ Pam said, getting to her feet.

He waved her down. ‘Take it easy, take it easy. I realise you have to get on in this game, you don’t want to be stuck behind a desk or the wheel of a patrol car.’

She gave him a sympathetic smile. He must hate being desk-bound. ‘You’ll be cleared for duty soon, Sarge, don’t worry.’

His lean, saturnine face relaxed into what passed for a warm smile. ‘As you say, Murph, I’m a dinosaur. Three thousand words! Jesus.’

‘Exactly,’ said Pam, who was accustomed to writing terse arrest reports, in which narrative flow, tone and even grammatical sentences were a handicap.

‘You said psychology. It’s all psychology.’

Pam wrote the word on her pad and looked at him expectantly.

‘You’re interviewing a suspect,’ said van Alphen. ‘You want him or her at a disadvantage.’

Pam nodded. She knew that but had never labelled it before. It was instinct. ‘How do you achieve that, Sarge?’

‘Little things, and you let them accumulate. For example, use of their first name, not their surname, helps to undermine them. The use of silence-let it build until they’re desperate to fill it. Fire a series of answers to unasked questions at them, your tone frankly disbelieving: “So you say you don’t know how the knife got under your mattress?” for example.’

Pam scribbled to keep up.

‘You used the term “body language”, Murph. Terrible expression, but I guess it explains what one does in an interview room. You let your face and body show contempt, doubt, ridicule, sometimes sympathy. You get in their faces, pat them gently on the wrist, exchange scoffing looks with your partner, slam your palm down hard on the table, stuff like that.’

All things Pam had done. ‘Sarge,’ she said dutifully.

‘And you vary your approach, keep them unsettled. Kind, then cruel.’

‘Sarge.’

In the corridor outside, and in the nearby offices, were the sounds of voices, laughter, footsteps, doors slamming-familiar sounds that Pam badly missed. She glanced at her watch. She’d spend thirty more minutes with the sarge, then drive home and relax in the bath. ‘But what about their body language, Sarge?’

‘What about it?’

Pam flicked back to her lecture notes. ‘If they have their legs together, ankles crossed and hands in their laps they’re protecting their genitals-fending off trouble, in other words.’

‘If you say so,’ scoffed van Alphen, rocking back in his chair and slamming one booted foot and then the other onto the top of his desk, giving her a wry look.

Pam grinned. ‘If they touch their nose and lips, it means they’re stressed. There are many capillaries in the nose and lips. Blood rushes there…’

Van Alphen drew his slender hands down his narrow cheeks comically.

‘Arms folded across the chest is another protective gesture- protecting the heart, concealing powerful emotions,’ Pam said.

‘A little book learning is a fine thing, Murph,’ van Alphen said. He paused. ‘On the subject of psychology: you need to find out what they want.’

‘Their “dominant need”,’ Pam said brightly. ‘Respect, safety, flattery, sympathy. One should stimulate or exaggerate this need, then finally offer to gratify it in return for a confession or co-operation.’

‘So why the fuck are you asking me all this?’ growled van Alphen, not unkindly.

‘It’s questioning techniques, Sarge. I know the psychology: I just need to know how to frame questions.’

‘But it’s all psychology,’ insisted van Alphen. ‘For example, if a suspect’s tired, you fire hard questions at him.’

‘The wording, Sarge.’

‘Apart from who, what, where, when and why?’

‘Yes.’

‘All right, try to get at motive. Ask things like: “Can you think of any reason why someone would want to kill him?” or “Did they argue over money?” or “Was she involved with another man?” Obvious, surely.’

‘Sarge.’

‘Psychology,’ insisted van Alphen. ‘Just when they think an interview is over-you’re going out the door, in fact-you turn back and hit them with what’s really on your mind. Or you ask a series of absurd, grotesque or mild questions to throw them off balance, then hit them with the million-dollar question. Or you give them back their answers twisted slightly, to see what corrections they make.’

Pam scribbled, her head down, commas of hair brushing her jaw.

‘You throw them a series of quick questions requiring short, simple answers, then suddenly lob a difficult one at them, a trick question. Or they answer, but you look at them quizzically until they qualify it to fill the silence. It’s answers that matter, not questions. The absences in answers, their tone, and the specifics that can be challenged or disproved or that contradict other specifics.’

‘Sarge,’ said Pam, still scribbling.

‘You force suspects and witnesses alike to separate what they think they know from what is actually true, you help them through uncertainties and attack their certainties.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘And always, always, you ask earlier questions again, worded differently.’

‘Sarge,’ said Pam, wondering if she had enough for three thousand words. She thought she might look up old case notes and reproduce interview transcripts, generally pad out her essay in the time-honoured way of all students everywhere.

‘Always get their story first,’ van Alphen said. ‘Get them to commit to it. Then you take it apart, detail-by-detail. You’ll find that most people can lie convincingly some or even a lot of the time, but only the good liars remember exactly what they said.’

‘He doesn’t work here any more,’ said the manager of Prestige Autos late that Friday afternoon. ‘I sacked him.’

John Tankard stood there with his mouth open, feeling powerless. He hadn’t felt this bad since that time he’d shot a deranged farmer. He’d gone on stress leave for it, then returned to work and thrown himself into the job, together with coaching a junior football team, and these things had been pretty successful in staving off depression, but it was his new car that he’d been counting on most to make himself feel better.

‘The guy ripped me off,’ he said hotly, ‘while employed by you.’

The manager, a portly older guy with furry eyebrows, made a what-can-I-do? gesture. Plastic pennants snapped in the breeze. A salesman in a sissy-looking suit was putting the hard word to a young guy who was critically but longingly circling a Subaru WRX-drug dealers’ car, thought Tank sourly-while his girlfriend looked on in boredom. A bus belched past. And so life was going on unchanged around John Tankard but he himself was breaking inside. Over a car, but still.

‘I was sold the car on your premises. I bought it in good faith. You’re obliged by law to provide a warranty.’

The manager was unmoved. ‘The salesman who sold you that car was doing so off the books. The car was never possessed by this business. I’m a victim here, too. This is bad for my reputation.’

Tank was incredulous. ‘I have to feel sorry for you?’

‘Look, son, I have no legal obligation to give you your money back.’

‘I’m not your son. Anyway, this does involve you because your finance company financed the deal.’

‘Again, that was done without my authority. As I understand it, your contract is with them. I think you’ll find it’s legally binding. It has nothing to do with me.’

‘I’m out thousands and thousands of dollars,’ Tank said, wiping away tears.

‘Sell the car. You’ll get most of your money back. You might even make a profit.’

‘I can’t. It’s been black-flagged in all states and territories. I can’t register the fucking thing anywhere.’

‘All right,’ the manager said slowly, ‘spend a few thousand to get it in compliance.’

‘Where am I going to get that kind of money?’ asked Tank rhetorically.

‘I could structure a loan for you,’ said the manager smoothly

‘Prick.’

‘There’s no need for that.’

‘Thousands of dollars,’ John Tankard said, his mind shooting in all directions. Had anyone been cheated like he’d been cheated…? Refuse payments to the finance company…Put a bullet through his brain…

That night ‘Evening Update’ floated the idea that a person of interest to the police in the Katie Blasko case had possibly been active for years in Victoria and interstate. It was a good story, kept the level of moral panic raging in the community, and worth a thousand bucks to John Tankard.

But it was more than the money. Tank considered it important to keep people in the loop. Keep them vigilant against the creeps. Protect little kids like his sister. He kept telling himself that.

Scobie came home feeling so hurt and aggrieved that he was curt to his wife. ‘Is this the man?’ he demanded, showing her Duyker’s mugshots.

‘Yes,’ said Beth defensively.

They were in their sitting room, Beth putting aside one of their daughter’s T-shirts, in the act of cutting out the label inside the collar, which Roslyn said was itching her.

‘You paid him money for photographs.’

Beth looked mortified. The house needed airing. She sometimes shut herself in for hours, trying to keep busy. Scobie often found her gazing into space, or in tears. ‘I need to find a job, Scobe,’ she’d say.

‘By cheque or cash?’ he went on furiously. He didn’t like himself for it. It’s the pressure, he told himself. The police shooting board inquiry. His feelings for Grace Duyker. He was confused and lonely and unhappy.

Beth was close to tears, and that made it worse. ‘Cash,’ she said.

‘Damn.’

‘I can show you the receipt.’

She left the room and came back with a receipt torn from a receipt book that had probably been purchased in a stationery store for $2. Scrawled blue ballpoint writing. Maybe the lab could lift Duyker’s prints from it, but so what?

‘Beth, listen carefully, did you ever leave Ros alone with him?’

Beth went very still and turned an appalled face to him. ‘Is this more than fraud? Do you suspect him of, you know, you’re working on the Katie Blasko abduction and you…’

He touched her wrist to stop the panic. ‘Settle down, for God’s sake.’

‘You have to believe I would never knowingly put our daughter at risk like that. He never touched her.’

‘Did he look at her in a certain way?’

‘No!’

‘Good.’

‘He was a bit creepy. Smiled a lot,’ Beth said.

Scobie patted her forearm absently. He prowled around the house and garden, muttering, clenching his fist. He went to the back fence and pulled out his mobile phone. ‘Grace? Scobie Sutton here.’

She sounded pleased to hear from him, and that gave him an absurd little lift, the kind he’d not felt for years and years and one of the first things to go in a marriage. ‘I wondered if I could pop round tomorrow,’ he said. ‘A few more questions.’

‘Of course,’ she said.

That same night, Kees van Alphen went on a prowl of the beaches. He knew them all, the nude beaches, small and tucked away, known only to nudists and a few pathetic peeping toms, the gay beaches, one near the Navy base, another near the huge bayside estate-now carved into a few exclusive house blocks-of an airline magnate. He knew all of the hangouts of the Peninsula’s druggies, street kids, prostitutes, gays and rent boys. He knew that a place could be one thing by day and quite another by night.

He waited until almost midnight, and then he started to make contact. Matches flared in the darkness, briefly lighting hollow cheeks. The susurrations of the sea, the moon glow on it. A drift of marijuana smoke. Feet squeaking on the sand. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked and far away a siren sounded down a long, empty road.

Fifty bucks for a blowjob.

Van Alphen said he could be interested.

Five hundred for the whole night. Or a threesome could be arranged.

He moved on. They were very young, some of them. Barely twelve, and looking younger-older, if you looked at the experiences behind their eyes.

Then he found Billy DaCosta.