Challis - 02 - Kittyhawk Down (22 page)

He reached out and rested his hand over hers. She flexed her knuckles and he might have been sheltering a warm small creature there.

'I haven't seen you for days,' she said. It was a way of telling him that he needn't have gone cool and distant on her, that she'd been mad at him for a while but it had blown over, just as it always blew over with her, and he should have known that about her, or at least given her the benefit of the doubt.

Challis nodded, squeezing her fingers hard and wanting her again.

'A bit of decorum, Inspector,' Tessa said, reading his eyes and wryly pulling away from him.

Then the questions: who found the bodies in both cases? Were there any similarities between them? Differences? Did the police have a suspect? Were the shootings linked in any way to the manhunt for Ian Munro? How was that going, incidentally? Was Munro still believed to be hiding out in the Westernport area? Did Challis place any credence in the fact that Munro had been sighted as far afield as Geelong, Sydney and the Gold Coast?

More often than not Challis gave her his half-smile and head-shake, saying, 'You know I can't divulge that kind of information.'

And the more she questioned him the more she stopped being Tessa Kane, his sometime bedmate, and his mind drifted again.

It was always the same with a door-to-door inquiry. Half the time there was no one home and you had to follow it up later. The other half of the time the occupant would come to the door showing wariness, guilt, anxiety—some reflection of whatever was uppermost in their minds or lives at that time. Never innocence or warmth.

Of course, no one had ever seen or knew anything. But once they realised that the knock on the door didn't relate to them, they'd be all helpful and start filling the air with a stream of useless information. Or if they didn't like the cops you'd see it in their faces, an expression that said you were on your own and good riddance.

With this in mind that Thursday, Pam Murphy door-knocked up and down the streets adjacent to the home of the lawyer Seigert, asking if anyone knew anything about his murder. But no one knew anything and after a while it became automatic, the doorknock, the handful of questions, the polite goodbye and the short walk to the next house, and her thoughts returned to what was uppermost in
her
mind.

Money. Or rather, how taking out a loan for thirty thousand dollars hadn't given her the liquidity she'd sought or been promised. 'This will free you up,' Carl Lister had said when he'd co-signed the contract and given her his oily smile, except she'd forgotten about the quarterly bills—phone, electricity, gas—and the on-road costs for the Subaru, and then there was rent to pay every fortnight, and she'd done a stupid thing and booked a holiday in Bali for when she got time off in September. Throwing money around like she had stacks of it.

Now she saw clearly that the thirty thousand
wasn't
hers— or rather, not hers to keep. It was
borrowed
. It had to be paid back. And not paid back just when she felt like it but
weekly
, in instalments. She should have chosen monthly. And now there was
no
money. It was all accounted for. And this week's instalment was due but her salary was
not
due. Not till next week.

How could she have been so stupid? Maybe she could go back and renegotiate the loan. Ask for a grace period maybe, or lower instalments, or monthly or quarterly instalments. Except that Lister had warned her, told her this was a high-interest loan with stringent conditions. 'I lay everything out for my clients, fair and square so there are no misunderstandings,' he'd said. Implying by his words and manner that she was lucky to get this loan and she'd better not abuse it.

'Pardon?'

Pam blinked. She found herself on a front verandah, talking to herself while the householder, an elderly man with a watering can, was watching her from a nearby outcrop of potted ferns. 'My name is Constable Murphy,' she said automatically, 'and I'm investigating…'

John Tankard was doorknocking the Pearce murders, driving up and down the housing estate and wider, into the backroads beneath Upper Penzance. Uppermost in his mind was the replica of the Sig Sauer pistol he'd seen advertised in
Sidearm News
.

He was really sold on this Internet thing. The other day he'd found himself forking out five hundred bucks in Coolart Computers for a used PC. They also signed him up with a local service provider and last night he'd surfed the Web and found a handful of excellent sites devoted to handguns, rifles and accoutrements. Crystal-clear images, descriptions, price lists. And your American sites didn't beat about the bush. They knew what a handgun was for—to protect, to fight back with. Forget about shooting at cardboard targets.

One site even had a tutorial link. Click on and you were in a virtual street, gangbangers, hold-up men and raghead terrorists behind every rubbish bin and power pole.

'Pow,' Tankard would go, a Sig Sauer or a Glock virtually there in his grasp, a classic two-handed stance, snapping shots. Snapping shots at Ian Munro. Always Munro's knowing, sneering face there on the monitor of John Tankard's home computer. Popping Munro right between the eyes. Blood, bone and grey matter spurting from the back of Munro's skull, John Tankard getting the drop on Munro this time.

'If it isn't Bradley Pike.'

Brad Pike waited on the doorstep of the Tully sisters' house, watching Donna Tully's face. She made no move to let him in.

'Lisa home?' he said.

Donna shrugged.

Behind her Lisa called, 'Who is it?'

Donna yelled over her shoulder, 'Lover boy.'

A moment of silence and then Lisa was there with Donna. 'Hi.'

'Hi,' Pike said.

He waited, and then the Tully sisters turned their backs and disappeared, leaving the door open, so he followed. He caught up with them in the sitting room, Donna already on the sofa lighting up a cigarette, Lisa beside her, flipping through a Myer catalogue. Clearly no one had ever taught them good manners and Pike felt a flash of anger go through him.

But he swallowed it. 'Can I bot a smoke off yous?'

Donna shrugged but let her packet of smokes sit there on the glass coffee table, so he helped himself. She didn't snap out her arm and smack his hand away, so that was progress. This time a couple of weeks ago he wouldn't have been allowed through the front door.

'Dwayne in?'

That shrug again. Lisa ignored him, bending her head suddenly at something in the catalogue. 'Interest free for the first six months,' she said.

'What?' Donna said, animated at last.

'DVD and TV package,' Lisa said.

'Gis a look,' Pike said, wanting to be part of this, crouching beside her. The carpet was sticky. He let his arm brush hers. She didn't retreat from the contact. Together they gazed at the catalogue, and he found himself saying, 'If yous are interested, I'll buy it for ya.'

He blew smoke out of the side of his mouth and dared to watch Lisa's face. He saw it soften. 'Brad, that's so sweet,' she said.

Brad Pike grinned. In like Flynn.

He didn't know how he was going to pay for the DVD and TV package. He didn't even know if he'd
have
to. He was in with Lisa again and he could always distract her if she started on about it.

That evening Skip Lister was there when Ellen got home. That made it three times since Easter. Apparently Skip and Larrayne had been to a four o'clock session at the cinema in Rosebud.

Ellen did what she always did now and glanced keenly at his face, watching his movements and listening to his voice. She didn't know if he'd been doped to the eyeballs on the evening of Larrayne's party, or simply drunk, but whatever it was he'd been clean since that time.

'Hello, Mrs Destry.'

'Hello, Skip.'

Larrayne was hanging on to Skip's arm. Fortunately there was nothing mooning, goofy or melting about the gesture so Ellen grinned at the pair of them and said something about rustling up some dinner.

'Take a load off, Mrs Destry,' Skip said. 'It's all taken care of.'

'You cooked?'

'Yep,' he said proudly.

There was a third ring in one of his ears. She wondered when he'd had it done. 'That's very kind of you.' She paused, testing the air. 'I
thought
I smelt something delicious when I came through the door.'

'Ready when you are, Mum,' Larrayne said, and Ellen gazed at them, at their unaffected love and their youthfulness and wondered what would happen to that if Skip's father proved to be dirty and she was obliged to arrest him for it.

Scobie Sutton got home in time to give Roslyn her bedtime bath. Afterwards she curled up in his lap, soft and sweet smelling in her pyjamas. Scobie was overcome: he missed this closeness, and found himself burying his nose into the gap between her collar and her neck, breathing her in, and examining the perfect whorl of her ear. Before long they were examining each other's fingers for splinters, and fortunately he had one at the edge of his right thumb, a souvenir of the search for Ian Munro's marijuana operation, and she fetched the tweezers and more or less pulled it out. Then it was time for her story and finally he sank into the sofa, dinner on his lap, glass of beer on the coffee table.

'You look tired,' his wife said, dressmaker's pins in her mouth.

She was in her armchair, a gooseneck lamp casting a cone of harsh light on a lapful of unravelling hems. He recognised a couple of Roslyn's dresses and his old pair of cords.

'I am,' he said. 'It's these murders,' and he went on to talk about his day. He told her everything. He had always done so. It was a rule of thumb that you should not tell your loved ones anything, but there were gossipy loved ones and unsympathetic loved ones, and Scobie Sutton's wife was neither.

'The worst thing was this morning,' he said, describing the school run. Aileen Munro hadn't been there with her children. He doubted if he'd see them there ever again. The school was a small, fingerpointing community. And of course, the Pearce kid hadn't been there. Senior Sergeant Kellock had tracked down a set of grandparents who'd whisked the child away. Another he wouldn't see at the school again.

He imagined their pain, and said it: 'Imagine their pain.'

His wife shook her head and clicked her tongue. She couldn't imagine the pain. He, on the other hand, imagined everyone's pain, and that was one reason why he'd never make a top-flight copper.

He'd have expected the demands of the job to cure that, for that's what had happened to every cop he knew, but it hadn't happened to him. He swallowed. He tried not to let the tears begin or think of Roslyn all alone in the world, but how can a decent person shake off those sorts of pictures once they've crept into your head?