Chain of Evidence

42

It was odd having a kid around the place again. Kees van Alphen decided he liked it. His wife and teenage daughter long gone, living up in Melbourne now, he’d spent too many years living alone in this soulless house. Sure, a teenage boy is not the same thing as a teenage girl, especially if he sells his body for a living, but certain factors remained constant-the noisiness, the irreverence, the untidiness. Van Alphen decided that he’d been too obsessed with silence, solitariness and order. Billy DaCosta was doing him good, especially with investigators sniffing around the Nick Jarrett shooting. It could be months before they reported back to the commissioner, and he didn’t know if Scobie Sutton would withstand the pressure.

‘You can’t keep me here forever,’ Billy said.

On this Monday evening they were sitting at the kitchen table, going over Billy’s statement, van Alphen also preparing Billy for the types of questions he could expect from Ellen Destry and others. It was 9 pm, Billy wired, van Alphen weary. Cooking odours hung in the air: roast chicken and potatoes, salad with a sharp dressing. Billy had wolfed down the chicken, ignored the salad. He was extraordinarily thin, and van Alphen suspected that he’d slipped out during the day, maybe taken the train to Frankston and scored dope near the station.

‘I know I can’t keep you here forever,’ he replied, ‘but these are dangerous people.’

‘I can handle them,’ said Billy sultrily. ‘Got any ice cream?’

Van Alphen went to the fridge, passing close to Billy’s chair, Billy stinking a little. You can’t expect a street kid to feel immediately at home and want to shower and launder his clothes regularly. Van Alphen longed to teach him these things, longed to meddle and guide, but he’d lost his wife and daughter that way, so kept his trap shut. Billy’s fingernails were grimy, his jeans torn at the knee, his T-shirt funky. Billy projected a certain look to attract the punters. It was a skinny urchin look, with a touch of cheekiness and vulnerability. Van Alphen was taken by it, but not sexually-although Billy thought he was.

Billy shovelled the ice cream down his throat. ‘When are we going to do this?’

‘First thing tomorrow morning. Sergeant Destry’s getting impatient.’

‘I don’t want to appear in court.’

‘You might not have to.’

‘I could just disappear. You’d never find me.’

That’s what van Alphen was afraid of. ‘Let’s at least get you on record,’ he said. ‘Video and audiotape, and a signed statement. That, together with other evidence we have, will help nail these bastards.’

‘They’re not the ones I’m scared of.’

‘I know,’ said van Alphen gloomily.

His mobile phone rang. He only did police business on it, he never ignored it. He answered, Billy pouting prettily, playing with him.

‘Van Alphen.’

‘You gotta help me, Mr V.’

Lester, one of his informants. ‘That’s not how it works, Lester. You help me, and you get paid to do it.’

‘It’s me brother. He’s bipolar.’

‘I know that.’

‘Well, he’s threatenin’ to kill me sister with a knife.’

‘Call triple zero.’

‘Can’t we do this off the books? Keep the authorities out of it? I’ll see he takes his meds, I guarantee it.’

No one would accept a Lester guarantee, but van Alphen was feeling in the mood to be helpful. He asked for the address, somewhere on the Seaview Park estate. ‘I can’t promise anything.’

‘Thanks, Mr V, you’re a champion.’

‘Meet me there,’ growled van Alphen.

‘Count on it.’

You didn’t count on Lester, either. Completing the call, van Alphen pointed to the papers spread out upon the table and told Billy to go through his statement and the photographs again. ‘I have to go out for a while.’

Billy fluttered his eyes, hung his mouth open, spread his knees wide in the kitchen chair, and stretched to show his slender bare stomach. ‘I’ll wait up for you.’

‘Cut it out, Billy,’ said van Alphen, who had no interest in touching him. ‘Don’t answer the door. Don’t answer the phone.’

‘You’re no fun,’ Billy said.

At about the same time, Ellen Destry was startled to see headlights swoop across the sitting room windows and then she heard tyres crushing Challis’s gravelled driveway. She checked her watch, faintly perplexed. Maybe Challis had enemies she didn’t know about. Ditto vengeful ex-girlfriends. She opened the front door a crack and saw her daughter lumping bags from the back seat of her car. Larrayne saw her, and at once crumpled up her face and said, ‘Oh, Mum.’

‘Sweetheart,’ said Ellen, rushing out.

‘Oh, Mum,’ Larrayne said again.

‘Tell me.’

‘Can I stay for a while? Maybe till after the exams?’

Ellen felt a surge of happiness. ‘Sure you can.’

She helped Larrayne into the house and along a corridor to the spare bedroom, which was musty, sterile. Larrayne stood, diminished looking, in the centre of the room, her backpack over one shoulder, her laptop case beside her on the floor. ‘This is so weird.’

Ellen was careful not to push or probe. ‘If you’d rather go to your father’s, I won’t be hurt,’ she said, knowing she would be.

‘It just feels weird, that’s all,’ Larrayne said, suddenly decisive with the backpack, bouncing it down on the surface of the bed. A little dust rose, Ellen noted guiltily. She mentally retorted to Challis: So, am I supposed to run major investigations and sweep and dust?

‘Dad’s place is too small,’ Larrayne said. ‘It’s right on the highway, so there’s all this noise. I’d never be able to concentrate. I’m packing death over these exams, Mum.’

Ellen got extraordinary pleasure from hearing her daughter say ‘Mum’. It was as though she’d not heard it for months and was parched. ‘I’ll show you where the bathroom is.’

‘I don’t have to shower with a bucket at my feet, do I?’

Challis relied on tank water for his house and garden, not mains water. In a dry season he’d recycle shower, laundry and washing-up water onto his garden. But this was spring, a season of occasional downpours, and so his tanks were full. Why hadn’t Larrayne figured that out? She was a city girl through and through. ‘No,’ Ellen said amusedly. ‘But no tampons down the loo-it’s a septic system.’

Larrayne rolled her eyes. ‘Whatever.’

Mother and daughter glanced at each other uneasily. ‘Want me to help you unpack?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Where’s the rest of your stuff?’

‘In the car. It can wait.’

‘Hungry?’

‘I ate with Dad.’

‘Ah.’

Ellen wondered if ‘Dad’ was going to lurk in the corners of every conversation. She wondered if Challis would lurk, also, leading to snide recriminations from Larrayne.

‘Tea? Coffee? Proper coffee.’

Challis had installed coffee machines at work and at home. He had a special terror of being obliged to drink instant coffee in the homes of witnesses or friends.

‘Coffee. I need to stay awake.’

‘You’re going to study tonight?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’d better use the dining room table.’

When Ellen was in the kitchen, the phone rang. ‘It’s only me,’ Challis said.

Ellen kept it short and murmured, explaining about the dog and the upcoming interrogation of Duyker. ‘Larrayne has just arrived.’

‘To stay?’

‘Do you mind?’

‘Of course not. Is she okay?’

‘Not exactly,’ Ellen said. ‘I’m waiting for her to tell me.’

‘Speak to you soon,’ Challis said, and he was gone.

Ellen carried the coffee with a couple of chocolate biscuits through to the sitting room. Larrayne was pacing the room. At one point she scanned the shelves of CDs and shook her head. ‘There’s exactly nothing here I want to listen to.’ Then suddenly she was sniffing, and looked young and small. ‘Mum, Travis broke up with me.’

‘Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry.’

‘It’s the worst time. Just before exams.’

Ellen hugged her. Larrayne, so unyielding for months, hugged her back fiercely.

Meanwhile van Alphen was heading down to Waterloo and Westernport Bay, ten minutes away. It was out of order for Lester to ask for his help in what was a private, not police, matter, but he had to admit that his informants didn’t often ask him to intervene in their affairs. It was all about balance. As a copper, van Alphen couldn’t operate without a stable of informants, registered and unregistered alike. Sure, they often fed him poor tips about small-time crimes and criminals, but now and then they came up with gold. Lester was unregistered: probably, thought van Alphen now, because the little prick enjoyed informing for several of Waterloo’s finest. Lester was always playing some kind of game. He liked to be seen in public with van Alphen (‘Here’s my tame cop’), and take van Alphen to auction houses and pawnshops that dealt in stolen goods (‘This cop’s on the take’), his intention clear: Mr V, if you ever try to break this partnership, I can make you look dirty.

Van Alphen tolerated Lester, knowing never to sink all of his hopes in just one informant. It was impossible to know how long Lester would be useful to him, however, or even how long Lester would live. Meanwhile Lester was in it for different types of gain: to get money, or revenge, or some hard guy off his back; to feel good about himself; to divert the attention of the police away from his own activities. Van Alphen knew all of this, but he needed guys like Lester. After all, Lester had told him where on the Peninsula he’d find the likes of Billy DaCosta.

Not that Lester went in for young boys, or girls. There was something oddly asexual about the man. He lived with his mother above the betting shop they ran, on High Street in Waterloo. She fed information to van Alphen sometimes, too.

Van Alphen drove. He’d never met Lester’s sister or brother. He’d heard all about them, though: the sister a single mother, on methadone, the brother a head case who kept forgetting to take his medication. A typical Seaview Park estate story…At that moment, van Alphen frowned: he could have sworn that Lester’s sister and brother lived on a housing estate outside Mornington, on the other side of the Peninsula. Still, people like that tended to move around a lot.

He entered Seaview Park estate and crept along the darkened streets. More than half of the overhead lights were out, shards of glass at the base of the poles. The houses watched him mutely, most well kept but others with old cars in the front yards, rusting inside a shroud of dead grass. No one stirred. This was a country of shift workers and young families: any noise would come from people like the Jarretts, or those who had no job or anything to look forward to but blowing the welfare payment on booze and dope every night. And so it was quiet and dark along Bittern Close, Albatross Crescent, Osprey Avenue and, finally, Sealers Road. Van Alphen wound down his window and aimed his powerful torch at the front windows of 19 Sealers Road. It was the last house in the street, deep within a corner of the estate, bound on one side and the rear by the estate’s stained pine perimeter fence, and on the other by an unoccupied house, a For Sale sign on a lean in the dead front lawn. Number 19 looked dead, too, but if Lester’s sister was a junkie, or a recovering junkie, she probably didn’t care about the upkeep of her garden or want light pouring in.

Van Alphen parked his car and knocked on the front door. A dog some distance away barked, but otherwise there was only the wind, and the sensation of the earth whispering through space. Van Alphen had these fancies sometimes-encouraged now by the scudding clouds and the moon behind them. There was no sign of Lester’s little Ford Fiesta, big surprise.

After a while he went around the side of the house, peering through windows, to the back yard, where someone had jemmied open the glass sliding door, buckling the aluminium frame and cracking the glass. He froze. He edged aside the curtain with his torch and went in, to where there was sudden movement behind him and a shotgun exploding, the sound deadened by a pillow, but not the outcome.