Caz Moon was on Trevally Street. She was walking to work, HangTen, the surf shop up on High Street, where she was the manager. For now, anyway. Caz was no cute surfie chick-suntanned, blonde, mini-skirt, chewing gum snapping in her jaws. Caz couldn’t be bothered with any of that. Her jeans and T-shirt were cheap, her hair and makeup vaguely Goth. She was saving her money. She was slim, quick and clever, twenty-one years old, and very soon she would leave Waterloo far behind, leave her peers to their pregnancies and joblessness.
Caz Moon hadn’t reached the crime scene yet, although she could see the police car, the uniforms and the tape in the distance. She was still down on the stretch of Trevally devoted to seedy boarding houses, run-down motels and faded holiday apartments, all of them facing patchy parkland between the coin barbecues and the boardwalk that ran out into the mangrove swamp. The parkland was Tent City this week, flimsy green and blue nylon structures flapping in the breeze. No one stirring, though. The little dears were still sleeping it off.
It was in front of the Sea Breeze Holiday Apartments that Caz spotted a red Subaru Impreza with a spoiler, racks and customised mag wheels. She swayed, feeling unmoored suddenly. Unwelcome sensations flooded through her, momentarily flattening her capacity to think. A year ago, it had been. Schoolies Week last year. She remembered the sounds of his breathing and her undies ripping, his faintly rotten cocaine and amphetamine skin, the sand packed in hard ripples beneath her spine, the bile in her mouth and the knowing stars high above.
Josh, his name was, one long, rollercoaster night, Josh sweet at first, then the flashes of paranoia, his eyes looking wildly through her, then the sweetness again. She knew more, now, about the mood swings associated with ice. And maybe he carried a whole pharmacy around in his pocket, for the next thing she remembered was feeling dazed, her limbs sluggish, Josh on top of her in the darkest hours of the night.
And here he was, back in town again in his little red car.
Caz Moon closed her eyes and willed it all away, willing raw anger in its place. She breathed in and out. She smiled. She set off again in her unreadable way, down along Trevally Street toward the Villanova Gardens apartments.
A detective watched her and she watched the detective, a young woman with a clipboard, who suddenly veered away from knocking fruitlessly on nearby doors to head Caz off, her face with that cool, blank, unimpressed look they all have.
‘Hi,’ the cop said. ‘My name’s Detective Constable Pam Murphy.’ She paused, cocked her head. ‘I’ve seen you around town. You work in the surf shop, right?’
‘Manager,’ Caz said. She took the initiative and shot out her hand. ‘Karen Moon. Caz.’
‘Hi,’ the cop said, shaking her hand. ‘Listen, we’re investigating a serious incident in Trevally Street last night. Mind if I ask you some questions?’
Caz glanced past the cop to a beefy uniformed guy doorknocking on the other side of the street, and beyond him to one of the apartments, where a slinky guy stood guard, looking bored. ‘Fire away.’
The questions began: ‘Do you live nearby?’ ‘Do you regularly use Trevally Street?’ ‘Did you pass along here late yesterday evening or in the early hours of the morning?’ And so on. It didn’t take long. Caz soon established that she hadn’t seen or heard anything.
All true. But she did lie. The lie was in not informing the young detective with the taut body and probing eyes that she’d been raped last November. At night, on one of the beaches. And that she knew where to find the guy who’d committed it.
Caz Moon was maintaining a very specific, retributive rage about that.
Ludmilla Wishart also saw the police car, the crime-scene tape and the doorknocking officers. She saw them from the side window of her Golf as she passed along Trevally Street on her way to the planning office. Normally she might have been like any other gawking citizen and stored her impressions to share with her workmates around the tearoom table, but felt too low for that. Felt too fat.
Was she fat? Her best friend, Carmen, would say, ‘If anything, Mill, you’re too skinny.’ Sometimes, when Ludmilla was feeling strong, she believed Carmen; the rest of the time she believed Adrian. Why did it matter to him so much? She wanted to look good for him as one does with a lover or husband, but looking good for Adrian was exhausting. The effort and the anxiety wore her out. She relied on little acts of resistance to keep going. Her friendship with Carmen, for example, in which she could be herself, crack jokes, let her guard down. Adrian was wary of Carmen. He probably knew Carmen loathed him. As Ludmilla stopped at a roundabout she thought about hiding or breaking the bathroom scales. But Adrian would only go out and buy another set.
The bad feelings rising in her, she drove on again, finally turning into a side street half a kilometre away from the crime scene and slowing for the entrance to Planning East. The hectic pace of residential and commercial development on the Peninsula had placed an enormous strain on the shire’s planners in recent years, and now-separate and independent planning departments handled applications in the western, eastern and southern zones. Several planners worked at Planning East, Ludmilla was the infringements officer, and their boss was Athol Groot. The only parking spot available was next to his Mercedes, an old white classic, and Ludmilla parked very carefully, very precisely, knowing what he was like.
Thinking about her boss reminded her of Adrian, and she sat for a few minutes, her heart hammering. It often happened: Adrian would find fault, and her heart would get the wobbles. The only solution was to stumble into her office, Ludmilla Wishart, Planning Infringements on the door, and stretch out on the floor, one hand over her heart, monitoring its erratic progress.
She wanted above everything else to be a cool, collected person. She thought she’d glimpsed that quality, very briefly, in the young woman detective on Trevally Street. What would it take? Leaving Adrian, according to Carmen.
‘What are you doing?’
It was Mr Groot, squat and heavy in her doorway, wearing the kind of expression that said he didn’t care one way or the other if she were ill, so long as he didn’t have to do anything about it.
John Tankard and Pam Murphy finished doorknocking Trevally Street and wandered back to the Villanova apartments, comparing notes. ‘I found one witness who backs up Lachlan Roe’s neighbour,’ Tank said. ‘He heard two men shouting just after midnight and saw a guy wearing a hoodie running along Trevally Street toward the library. Didn’t get a look at his face.’
Pam snorted. ‘A guy in a hoodie.’
‘Bet you’d like a dollar for every time you’ve heard that,’ Tank said.
He bumped shoulders with her. Until a few weeks ago, Murph had been his partner. Now she was in plain clothes, a CIU hotshot, and he was stuck with that prick Andrew Cree. When their shoulders touched, she moved apart from him. Just slightly, almost nothing to it, but Tank knew it was a rebuff.
Meanwhile Cree, God’s gift to women and policing, was watching their approach.
‘How’s it going, Andy?’ called Murph in a voice that made Tank’s antenna go up.
‘Too much excitement in this job,’ Cree said.
Pam laughed.
Bitch, thought Tank. He knew that he was out of shape and hopeless with women. Here’s Cree, fit, assured, an Arts graduate, for fuck’s sake, and not… direct. Saying things between the lines.
He comforted himself with the thought that he knew something Pam didn’t-the great Andrew Cree was afraid of the dark. True. Before their daybreak callout to Trevally Street this morning, Tank and Cree had been patrolling outside the town limits, on duty since 4 a.m. The darkness had been all around them, their headlights picking out the ghostly shapes of dead gum trees and the coal eyes of foxes on the prowl. Nothing unusual but Tank had begun to wonder why Cree was all hunched over the steering wheel, his shoulders up around his ears. Then, suddenly, he got it: the guy was scared. Young Andrew had grown up in some endless tract of Melbourne, where the night was never truly dark and no snakes or spiders lurked. Not like the back roads of the Peninsula. No streetlights out here, old buddy, old pal, old chum. Out here the darkness closes in tight around you. Ghosts and gremlins roam.
‘Okay, guys,’ Pam was saying now, ‘we’re finished here. Thanks for your help. Grab yourselves some morning tea and then return to what you were doing.’
‘Don’t know if I can stand the thrill of it,’ Cree responded, throwing her plenty of eye and mouth work as if to say he could stand the thrill of her.
Prick.