The Dragon Man

Fourteen

On Wednesday 27 December, dark cloud masses rolled in from the west and banked up in huge thunderheads above the bay. By lunchtime an electrical storm had brewed. It lurked and muttered through the afternoon, approaching the Peninsula, building with gusting winds into a cloudburst at four o’clock. Challis, in the incident room at Waterloo, wondered how clogged his gutters were. He couldn’t afford to have rainwater overflowing the gutters before it reached the down-pipes that took it to his underground tank. Ellen Destry, also in the incident room, thought of her house, shut up all day in the heat. Would Larrayne have had the sense to open the windows? She glanced out across the car park to the courthouse. Rhys Hartnett, stripped to the waist, was snipping tin vents in the rain. His body glistened. He seemed to sense her there; straightening, lifting his streaming head to the rain, he shook the water from his thick hair. John Tankard, out in the divisional van, switched on the wipers and pulled in to the rear of the Fiddlers Creek Hotel, opened his window, snatched the sixpack of Crown Lager from the manager, and slipped away again, stopping by his flat on the way back to the station. Meanwhile the ground under Clara’s mailbox had turned to blackish mud. Kees van Alphen, exhausted in his bed at home, heard nothing of the storm. Four days had passed since Trina Unger’s abduction. Her body had not been found. Life went on.

On Thursday the Waterloo Progress came out in a small special edition. There was little advertising and only a handful of news items and a page of sports results. The front page was devoted to the second letter, under the banner: KILLER MOCKS POLICE. There was also a sidebar speculating that a four-wheel-drive vehicle had been used for the abductions. And, at the bottom, an item headlined ‘Charges Dropped’:

‘Police this week announced the dropping of charges against Mr Julian Bastian, 21-year-old playboy son of Melbourne and Portsea society matron, Lady Susan Bastian.

‘Mr Bastian was facing charges of driving while intoxicated. When arrested, his companion, Miss Cindy Price, 19, of Mount Eliza, was in the driver’s seat of his BMW sportscar. Arresting police alleged that Bastian persuaded Miss Price to say that she was the driver.

‘Senior Sergeant Kellock of the Waterloo police station said: “There were procedural errors in the arrest.”

‘Lady Bastian’s late husband, Sir Edgar Bastian, was the moving force behind the White Sands Golf Course. Members include Superintendent Mark McQuarrie, of the Victoria Police.

‘Superintendent McQuarrie is superintendent of Peninsula District.’

On Friday, Pam Murphy and John Tankard were back on the day shift, making their regular sweep of the town and the side roads.

‘See the paper yesterday, Murph?’

Pam’s mother had been treated for a blood clot. The treatment was plenty of rest and pills to dissolve the clot, but was she going to get much rest? Not likely, not with the old man the way he was.

‘You see it?’

Pam looked through the windscreen, the side window, alert for kids on bikes and skateboards. ‘See what?’

‘The article about that Bastian prick.’

‘I saw it.’

‘Pretty good, eh?’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, it raises doubts, doesn’t it? If I can get some senior officers to swing behind this, maybe the charges will be reinstated.’

‘And pigs might fly.’

‘You’re a negative bitch, you know that?’

And Tankard folded his arms and leaned, tired and depressed, against the passenger door with his eyes closed.

On Saturday morning Challis noted that the road outside of his front gate was dry and dusty again, almost as if there hadn’t been rain earlier in the week. He made for the Old Peninsula Highway, as he always did. But this week he’d been braking slowly when he reached the Foursquare Produce barn and pulling on to the gravel forecourt. As usual today there were two cars parked hard against the building itself-employees’ vehicles. The main door was open. He could see them, two women, one building a pyramid of apples, the other preparing price labels with a black marker pen. They recognised him and waved. He wondered what they thought of the occupant of the third car, which was parked next to the phone box. Pity? And embarrassment, for when we see such naked grief and desperation we turn away from it.

He got out. As he approached the car, the driver’s door opened and a woman eased out from behind the wheel. ‘Inspector Challis.’

‘Hello, Mrs Gideon.’

There were posters as large as television screens over the rear windows: Did you see who took our daughter? A blurred photograph, Jane Gideon clipped from a group of friends, smiling a little crookedly, a little drunkenly, for the camera. There was a tangle of streamers behind her, the edge of one or two balloons, and a man’s shoulder tucked into hers. A few lines of description under the photograph, and the circumstances of her abduction. If this jogs your memory, please call the police on, and a direct number to the incident room.

There were smaller copies pasted on to the nearby power poles and to the sides of the phone box. Mrs Gideon also kept a bundle in her car and patiently through the long days she handed them to anyone who stopped at Foursquare.

Challis asked what he’d asked every day since Boxing Day: ‘Any nibbles?’

Mrs Gideon smiled tiredly. She hadn’t washed her hair. She was overweight, a heavy breather, which seemed to intensify the desperation that she was showing to the world. ‘People are very kind. They always look closely, and they listen, but they always shake their heads.’

‘You’re doing your best.’

‘But are the police, Mr Challis?’ she chided gently. ‘It strikes me as unusual that there have been no developments.’

‘It’s baffling,’ Challis said. He never liked to hedge or lie. By telling Mrs Gideon that the police were baffled, he was stressing their commonality with her and the man and woman in the street.