18. Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chris Knight pushed back the stack of files on his desk and sighed. Honestly, this fucking place. Silverbloom was a backwater town, a poor cousin of the crowd-pleasers, Maleny and Montville; Jesus, even Kenilworth had the bloody cheese factory. What did Silverbloom have, except for fucking cows and trees? Ten years ago he’d been working down at Maroochydore, where he’d been able to take his lunch break gazing out at the waves on any one of a handful of the most beautiful beaches across the Sunshine Coast. He was already well on his way up the ladder when he’d asked for this transfer.

It was a mistake, he could see that now. He’d made it out of a misguided sense of duty and even sentimentality. He’d grown up in Ribbonwood, for better or for worse, and after his mother’s death he couldn’t bear seeing his father alone. All four of his siblings were scattered across the country, none staying for more than a few days after the funeral. Chris was the oldest son, a confirmed bachelor and the one closest to home; it had seemed like he was the one with smallest sacrifice to make, all things considered.

Only Chris’s dad was a grumpy old bastard. The depression he’d plunged into after his wife’s death never truly retreated and frankly he hadn’t been all that cheerful to be around before. Oh, Chris tried, dragging him down the pub for a beer, dropping around to try to make him eat something other than another bloody meat pie, spending agonisingly miserable Christmases trying to cheer him up. By the time he realised the futility of this endeavour, Chris felt trapped here himself by his own growing lethargy. Every time he imagined moving back to the city to revive his stalled career aspirations, his confidence sputtered. Out here in the bush, he wondered if he was de-skilling. It wasn’t like there wasn’t work to be done, but the level of it was… well, it was monotonous.

“Sir?”

Oh for fuck’s sake. Chris took a steadying breath.

“Yes?” he responded shortly.

“Ah, it’s just, um… I’ve finished the report you asked for. On the burned out car out the back of Marblewood.”

“Great. File it then. Close it off.”

“The thing is, sir, I think it’s… important. ”

Chris couldn’t stop his sigh. He looked up. This fucking kid. Was this really the best the police academy could produce? His boots were shined, his trousers ironed, he looked the part. Except Chris was pretty sure the kid’s mother had done the work for him. The face above his neat shirt collar looked a maximum of fourteen years old. And that was despite the outsized muscles the guy had clearly worked hard on. Jesus, Chris was getting bloody old, that was half the problem.

“Spit it out then, Constable Armstrong.” He gave the kid what he hoped was an encouraging gaze. Joe constantly tripped over his metaphorical feet, so pumped to be a police officer that he overcomplicated everything. Send the boy on a welfare check and he’d race back with ideas about mafia hits. Tell him to respond to a broken window report and he’d posit a theory about a potential serial killer. It was exhausting.

“The thing is, the car’s registered to a Dale Winchester,” Armstrong said eagerly.“He’s a Ribbonwood local. His mother reported him missing back in March this year.”

“Good work, Constable,” Chris told him. “File it.”

“But… it could be …you know, a clue?”

“Armstrong,” Chris said firmly. He couldn’t let this guy get carried away again. “Dale Winchester is a scumbag. If there’s trouble in Ribbonwood, he’s behind it. Drugs, petty theft, fights, domestic violence… the guy is a real shit. It’s a wonder he found anyone willing to file a missing person’s report; you’d think even his own mother would be glad to be rid of him. He probably burned his own car on the way out of town.”

“I read the file,” Joe told him, unfazed by Chris’s jaded assessment of the situation. “We didn’t do much-”

“By we, do you mean me? I didn’t do much?”

Joe swallowed, his face going pale at his misstep.

“No. You, er, were very thorough, sir. Interviewed the mother. Interviewed the girlfriend, a Chloe Perkins of Ribbonwood. They both said they were very worried about him. That this was out of character.”

“Well,” said Chris. “That’s women, for you, isn’t it? Apparently willing to believe the best of a man, even a scumbag like Dale. I can tell you, I met the guy any number of times and it’s a bloody shock to me that he found anyone to love him, but here we are.”

“The thing is,” Joe wouldn’t shut up. “There’s some inconsistencies in the girlfriend’s statement. Chloe said she was worried about him, agreed with his mother that it was out of character. She said he’d disappeared two weeks prior, out of nowhere, no warning; she didn’t know he’d left, just woke up one morning and he was gone.Then, when you pressed her, she admitted that they’d fought. That he’d been violent towards her, then stormed out in the middle of the afternoon. Then, when you pressed her for details she said he’d never once been violent before, but there are plenty of reports on file of him abusing his ex-partner and the girlfriend before that, so what are the chances that he changed his stripes with Chloe Perkins?”

“Joe,” Chris finally interrupted the increasingly excited diatribe.“What’s your fucking point? We’ve got a missing scumbag and a burnt out car. Believe me when I tell you that Dale Winchester is more than capable of looking after his damn self.”

“His girlfriend is changing her story about the circumstances of his disappearance,” Joe said. “And his mother specifically mentioned how much he loved his car. There’s something sketchy here, I can feel it.”

Chris took a deep breath in. He tried to remember his doctor’s warning about his blood pressure. He thought of his mother’s sudden death from a stroke. He thought of all the other things that happened to men his age, men he’d grown up with. Ben Wallace, dead of a heart attack at forty-one. Davo Christie, suicide at forty-eight. The bush could be a hard place for blokes, hell, not even just the old ones. He thought of his old mate Josh Rees from the high school football team, dead at just thirty-six, fuelled by desperation and alcohol, wiped out on the road. Chris had seen far too many deaths like that. He looked again at Joe Armstrong, still filled with youthful naivety and misplaced drive.

“Alright, Constable.” He just barely managed not to call him kid. Fuck, he really was getting old. “The case is yours. Make or break time,” he said, just to rev him up a little more, make him feel important. “ If there’s a story here, I want you to dig it up. Not a rock unturned, you hear me? But kid-” oops, that one slipped out as he paused to temper just a little of the damage he could forsee if Joe Armstrong went in, guns blazing, “-keep it on the fucking down low, you hear me? Do it, but be quiet about it. No one should see you coming.”