The Dragon Man

Twenty-Six

Danny took them to a tract of housing that backed on to bushland between Frankston and Baxter. Challis and Ellen were in the lead car with Danny, Challis driving. Scobie Sutton and three uniformed officers were in the second car.

‘Okay, Danny, show us the house.’

His pinched face screwed up in worry. ‘They all look the same.’

It was true. Small brick houses with tiled roofs, all about thirty years old. Native trees lined the streets. There were no front fences. The cars in the driveways or on the nature strips indicated modest incomes and aspirations. Challis slowed the car for a knot of teenagers playing cricket. Otherwise the streets were deserted.

He turned, completing the block, and started on the next. Then another.

Finally Danny said, ‘It was sort of like that one.’

‘Like that one, or was it that one?’

‘That one.’

Over-long grass and weeds, white pebble-dashed walls and glazed tiles set it apart from the other houses, but only just. ‘What do you recognise about it?’

‘I dunno. The walls, kind of thing. Plus that thing on the roof.’

A satellite dish.

‘Okay, let’s go.’

Fifteen minutes later, Challis said, ‘How sure are you?’

‘Fairly sure. It was night time.’

‘Danny, this house is unoccupied. It’s been like that for some time.’

In fact, Challis had found a To-Let sign lying in the grass.

‘Wasn’t when I broke in.’

‘Then you must have broken into a different house.’

Challis glanced at Ellen. Her face had fallen into lines of frustration and extreme anxiety. She blinked, letting the tears splash. ‘He’s got a new base. He could be anywhere.’

Challis took Sutton aside. ‘Check with the neighbours. And see if you can get an after-hours number for the agency handling the lease. We need to know who owns the place, who last rented it, forwarding address, etcetera.’

‘Right.’

Challis looked at the sky. It was almost dark. He could see the bluish flicker of television sets in a couple of houses. There was a glow on the horizon, the lights of Melbourne.

He returned to the car. ‘Okay, Danny, we’re taking you home.’

‘Home?’

Ellen snarled, ‘Your home for the next little while, unless you get bail, you useless piece of shit.’

Danny sniffed. He sniffed all the way out of the little estate, as Challis took wrong turnings and found himself in dead-end streets and on streets that wound back on themselves like the entrails of a complicated organism. Danny might have kept on sniffing as Challis finally found a street that would take them on to the highway if he hadn’t gone tense and pointed and said, ‘There. That’s the house.’

It was like the other in most details, except that the grass was short, and there was a signboard advertising a business name hammered into the grass, and a Jeep bearing the same sign parked in the driveway. Trees and dense shrubbery screened the house from the neighbours.

‘I remember the sign,’ Danny said.

Rhys Hartnett, Air-Conditioning Specialist.