As we swung into the street, a Subaru passed us coming the other way. At the time I didn’t think much of it. We parked on the opposite side of the road, got out and walked across to a driveway that was narrowed by thick old trees on both sides. Don’t ask me what kind of trees they were, botany was of as much interest to me as a bus timetable. The narrow dirt driveway looked rarely used. Certainly there was no car in it now as we approached what some people would call a quaint weatherboard. A tabby cat watched us from the porch near the front door but scrammed when we got close.
‘Does she have a car?’ I asked. It was the first thing either of us had said for minutes.
‘I don’t think so. There wasn’t one here last time.’
I followed Clement up three low steps to the porch and Clement pushed the bell. Nothing sounded inside, so he knocked. When a repeat knocking brought no response, Clement offered the obvious.
‘They must be out.’ He pulled out a card and wrote a note on it to contact him. ‘I’ve got everybody out looking for them. His aunt’s not going to let him skip.’
I had the impression he was attempting to reassure himself as much as me.
Never take anything for granted. That’s been a maxim of mine my whole detective life. If I needed reminding of it, which I didn’t, I learned it again in spades. We were back at the police station.
More than an hour had passed and there was no sign of the aunt or Sidney Turner. Broome is not that big a place you can be out on a street for an hour without the police spying you. If they were here, they were indoors somewhere. The supermarkets had already been checked. I sat on an office chair, my fear growing as inexorably as the nation’s debt. Clement was across the room talking to an attractive young woman in civilian garb, a navy cotton dress, sandals. I saw him hand her the evidence bag with the pendant. She went off with it down the corridor. He walked back to me.
‘Lisa Keeble, our head tech. She’s good. Chances of fingerprints aren’t great but you never know.’
I’d had time to ruminate on Turner and his great-aunt. ‘It’s possible they’re talking to his lawyer,’ I said. Clement made a call to find out who the lawyer was. Whatever he heard turned his face flat and white as an envelope.
‘What is it?’ I asked but he ignored me, dialled and walked off by himself on the phone. I sat there for five minutes. It felt like fifty. Clement returned. His colour had improved to pastel.
‘The aunt is with the lawyer. She’s just leaving. She says she left Turner home by himself. We’re collecting her.’
The lawyer’s offices were five minutes away. They were waiting out the front, the elderly Aboriginal woman and the lawyer who reminded me of Natasha ten years ago, poised, the looks of a newsreader. The body language between her and Clement was easy to translate. If they hadn’t shared a bed they’d thought about it plenty. It was going to gall him, I thought. He’ll be trying not to let it get to him, that she got the kid bail and he’s a flight risk. Maybe he wouldn’t have cared that much before, but he was involved now, like me, I smelled it on him. Nearly twenty years of desert on Autostrada and then you come across a well, sweet water, enough perhaps to get you all the way home. The kid could have slipped out for a minute. He might have been scared to open the door thinking he was going to be arrested again. It really didn’t matter so long as he was at home.
He wasn’t.
The back door was open and nearly fifty dollars was still in a drawer. The aunt said that was almost everything that had been there, maybe a little loose change, under ten bucks. She still believed in the kid. She said he wouldn’t run off and I could see she was genuinely worried. So was I.
On the off-chance, we cruised the surrounding streets but there was no sign of him. So we drove back to the house and were met by two other detectives: the solid guy with the beer gut, Earle, and the young guy who looked like he worked out while standing in front of a full-length mirror. There were two uniforms as well. Clement set them about doorknocking nearby houses while he got a list of names from the aunty – the kid’s friends, people he hung around with. When he finished with the aunt, I sidled up to him.
‘Funny he went out the back door,’ I said. Clement, who looked like a golfer watching his drive curve towards the trees, didn’t offer an opinion. I dressed up the implication. ‘I mean, if he’s just doing a runner why not head out the front? Unless he thought you had eyes on him.’
Clement gave me coal eyes. ‘You’re saying he slipped out the back because he was worried somebody was out the front.’
That accurately represented my position.
‘When you picked him up he had a big bag of eccies on him and grass. I’m guessing he was dealing those to pay for his meth. He have any cash?’
‘Five hundred and sixty dollars.’
‘So, could be somebody is out of pocket. And maybe not happy about that.’
Clement thought it through for all of five seconds. Then he hauled the detective constable from his doorknock to join us and called out to his sergeant.
‘Graeme, I’m heading to Mongoose’s with Shepherd. You run this.’
The older guy nodded. I liked him, a kindred spirit. Somewhere in his past he’d taken back soft-drink bottles for the refund and foraged a golf course for balls to resell to happy hackers, using the cash for bubblegum footy cards. Clement was harder to get a bead on: intense, driven, maybe moody. I could imagine him furiously chopping wood by a Swedish lake-house populated by sparse furniture, Lutheran in the original sense. I’d liked his thoroughness with the CCTV stuff but I guess I was still miffed I’d needed to convince him I wasn’t an aged obsessive, raking over his last case. I didn’t blame him, mind, it was a natural conclusion, but that doesn’t mean I liked it.
‘Shepherd, Snowy Lane.’
I was surprised he’d used that moniker to introduce me. It meant nothing to the young dude.
He was forced to add, ‘He’s a private D.’
We both made for the front passenger door. Shepherd reached it first but his swagger deflated when his boss told him to climb in the back. And that’s how easy it was for me to start liking Clement again.
I don’t know the geography of Broome well enough to describe where we were heading but it seemed to be away from the water. The street we turned into was wide with fewer trees than Turner’s aunt’s place. The front yards were mostly bare, the earth red-brown, though there were a few acacia trees dotted here and there, they’re about the only brand I recognise. There was one house bigger than the others. It sported a long but narrow concrete veranda on which sat a few old chairs. Cars, mainly iridescent utes, dotted the driveway and front yard but it was stark, bare of trees or shrubs, with the absence of any feminine touch; a gang place if ever I’d seen one.
‘His car’s not here,’ commented Shepherd from behind in a thin, cheap voice that could have been manufactured in Guangdong.
‘What does he drive – Merc?’ asked Clement as he parked in the driveway and killed the engine.
‘Na, hotted-up Subaru.’