Challis - 02 - Kittyhawk Down (37 page)

'How's John Tankard?'

'Not too bad,' Pam Murphy said. She was driving, Challis beside her, van Alphen and Ellen in the back seat.

'Is he getting counselling?'

Challis sensed resistance in her. She's protecting her own, he thought. She doesn't like this line of questioning. She drove expertly, at speed, along the coast road toward Penzance Beach and the turnoff for Upper Penzance, and deflected him: 'Will Casement run, sir?'

'He has before. He'll have a contingency plan, new ID to slip into.'

'Do you think he'll be there?'

'I hope so, but drive like the clappers even so.'

'Will he be armed if he is?'

'There's a good chance.'

And so they were armed. And armed backup would follow behind them as soon as Senior Sergeant Kellock could muster some more uniforms. Unfortunately there were officers down with the flu and others attending at a four-car pile-up at the corner of Myers and Coolart roads. The Meddler had been right about that intersection: why the hell had they installed give-way rather than stop signs?

Challis watched Pam Murphy brake and corner with a flick of the wheel onto Five Furlong Road. There was something a little staged about the manoeuvre, something a little self-conscious. She'd driven pursuit cars in her last posting; she was still young enough to want to show off. She wanted to join CIB but the uniform allowed her to do the fun stuff, like drive at speed, siren on, telling the world to step out of her way.

'Damn, there he is,' Challis said.

This part of Five Furlong Road was narrow, rutted, pot-holed, with treacherous gravel verges. Two cars passing from opposite directions were obliged to slow to a crawl and pull over to the side, outside wheels in the ditch if that were shallow enough. If not, you risked bottoming out and scraping away your sump and exhaust system. But Casement, in the familiar Mercedes station wagon that his wife had driven, was not slowing, pulling over, stopping. Pam swung into the bracken between two peppermint gums, bouncing the chassis over clumps of hardened mud cast up by a shire grader, while Challis craned his head around to peer through the rear window at Casement, who had flashed past, churning up a dense blanket of gritty dust. They heard small stones ping against the rear of the police car.

'Quick,' Challis said, immediately regretting the obviousness of it.

'I
am
, sir,' Pam said, showing irritation and anxiety in the face of his scrutiny.

She spurted forward, looking for a farm gate, nosed in, reversed, then a horn brapped sharply. Before she could complete the turn and demand right of way, a Telstra linesman passed, his van top-heavy with ladders. Challis read alarm in his face and then he was past them and they were crawling behind him. He seemed panicked to have the police on his tail, to be hindering them, and slowed to a walking pace; but the edges were soft gravel, and overhanging branches threatened to tear off his ladders. Challis's own road resembled Five Furlong Road. At least once a year he called the shire's emergency number to fetch the tree-removal crew. Why none of the neighbours ever called it in, he didn't know.

'Sound your siren,' van Alphen said from the back seat.

'It's all right,' Challis said. 'He knows we're here, he'll pull over when he can.'

Beside him Pam Murphy flashed him a look of thanks.

Then they were past the van and picking up speed. Dust lingered. They reached the intersection with the coast road and Pam said, 'Sir? Left? Right?'

The answer came to Challis. There was something neat and ironical about it. 'The aerodrome. We know he can fly.'

Pam laughed. 'I've got visions of chasing him up and down the landing strip.'

It should be possible to box him in, Challis thought. The Waterloo airfield was laid out in a simple T-shape, aligned north-south and east-west. Plenty of grass between the strips and the perimeter fence, like a large open paddock, hangars to one side, a couple of gates, cyclone fence.

'And if he's not there?' Pam said.

'Better call it in,' van Alphen said, taking out his mobile phone and murmuring, then shouting to be heard, finally shutting down the phone and pocketing it.

'I can never get a decent signal around here,' he said. 'The Peninsula's full of dead spots.'

They ignored him. Pam hammered the police car along the coast road back to Waterloo. Challis guessed they'd lost about two minutes back there on Five Furlong Road. Casement would have put on speed when he saw them. He would have guessed they were after him. Was two minutes enough time to fire up a plane?

Which
plane?

The Cessna? It was being repaired in a separate hangar. Challis didn't know if it was ready or not.

The Kittyhawk? The Kittyhawk would give him speed, but also stand out everywhere, and you didn't just step into an old war-era cockpit and trundle out onto the strip to take off.

They were there in nine minutes. If Pam Murphy had been driving at the safe—let alone the
legal
—limit it would have taken them at least fifteen minutes to reach the aerodrome. She braked at the dirt road outside the perimeter fence, fishtailed at the gate, swung through.

It was late afternoon by now, the place had almost shut down for the day, and it was apparent that Casement wasn't there.

'Shit. Sorry, sir.'

'Don't stop,' Challis told her. 'He'll have driven into a hangar.'

Pam accelerated, spurting between the hangars to the landing strip itself, and now they could see an open hangar door and the dusty Mercedes deep in the shadows. She braked and they piled out, Challis directing them.

'We can't be sure when our backup's going to arrive, so Van and Ellen, you check the planes,' he said, pointing to a dozen light aircraft parked on an asphalt clearing beyond the hangars. 'Pam, you come with me. All of you be ready to draw your firearms, but warn him first, the usual drill.'

They spread out and began the search. Five minutes passed, then ten, and as the evening light spread from horizon to horizon, filling the aeroplanes and hangars and their hidden niches with tricky shadows, Challis began to wonder whether they were too late, if Casement was already in the air, maybe having hijacked the pilot of a plane that had been about to take off.

Stupid. He should have checked with the ground staff.

And now it was the end of the work day for the ground staff. He could see them driving toward the gate one by one in a motley collection of family station wagons, four-wheel-drives and small Japanese sedans, craning their necks to see what the drama was.

'Blast!' Challis said.

He ran back to the police car, remembered the keys too late, was about to look for Pam Murphy, double-checked the ignition, saw she'd left the keys there.

He got in, fired up the motor, chased after the departing ground staff. They'd left the airfield itself and were driving in single file on the dirt road that led to the main road. Challis gunned the motor and swung out onto the grass to pass them, sideswiping a tree along the avenue of gumtrees before veering across the nose of the first car and braking, effectively cutting them all off.

Piling out with his service revolver held in two hands up next to his head where it could be seen, Challis then motioned for the cars to stop, the drivers to get out. A woman slipped out of the first car, very jittery and, following Challis's gestures, ran for the shelter of the gums. Then a man got out of the second car and scurried away in a half-crouch, and two men got out of a little Daihatsu, but the driver of a Land Rover just sat there staring at Challis, hands fixed tightly to the wheel.

When the other drivers and passengers were free of their cars, Challis advanced on the Land Rover, down the left flank so that the abandoned cars gave him some cover.

He approached until he was behind a Holden a few metres away from the Land Rover and saw that the driver was the head mechanic and that he was trembling. Challis paused, called out: 'Is Casement there with you?'

The man nodded.

'In the back seat?'

Another nod.

'Armed?'

A final nod, the mechanic clenched tight with fear, and it was then that Challis saw the shotgun emerge between the gaps in the seats and press upwards into the hinge of the mechanic's jaw.

'Casement? Can you hear me?'

The window went down, the twin barrels swung away from the driver, and Challis's answer was a blast from the shotgun. He ducked and heard the pellets humming over his head and slamming into the flank of the Holden.

There was no second shot until he raised his head. This time the blast was better aimed, the shot flying low, peppering a rear tyre and zipping about his feet, branding his right shin bone and calf.

Challis ran before the pain could set in, ran before the blood slopped in the bottom of his shoe, ran before Casement could reload or prove to him that he had a magazine full of shells.

In the middle of the questioning, the paperwork, his patching-up visits to the hospital over the next three days, Challis's wife killed herself, and his first thought was: I'm tired of all the dying.

Succeeded
in killing herself, to be precise, sleeping pills this time, stolen and accumulated when she was recuperating in the prison hospital, the pills succeeding where sharpened plastic and half-hearted cutting motions had failed to work.

She left a note blaming him but he didn't feel any responsibility and went to the funeral and stared at the coffin, feeling nothing but pity for Bob and Marg, who clung to his arms and said how sorry they were.

Sorry for their daughter, sorry he'd been shot, holding his arms as much in need of support as to offer support and sympathy to him, with his bandaged leg and hospital crutch.

But that was on the third day. Hours of fruitless questioning had come before that, Challis with a temporary hospital patch-up on the first evening, so that he wouldn't lose the momentum with Casement, then a session in surgery while they removed the pellets, then back for another swipe at Casement.

Who'd had a lawyer right from the start, an overweight, heavily suited, idly contemptuous-looking man who slumped precariously in the plastic interview room chair. 'My client freely admits to attempted abduction and various weapons charges, but he denies killing anyone.'

'Ian Munro shot my wife,' Casement said, looking relaxed. 'For all I know, he also shot the Pearces. As for Trevor Hubble, I don't know anything about that.'

'You admit to knowing him, though.'

'Years ago.'

'Two years, in fact. You were business partners, you took over the business when he returned to England, but then he came back last October and you killed him because you'd taken over his identity and he was a threat to that.'

'It was easier for my client to leave the paperwork in Mr Hubble's name, that's all,' the lawyer said. 'He paid his taxes, he doesn't owe anybody anything.'

But the next day Challis was able to tell the lawyer: 'We sent your client's prints to Interpol and Scotland Yard. His real name is Michael Trigg and he's wanted for theft, fraud and money laundering. We intend to send him back to England as soon as he's served his sentence here.'

'My client will challenge any charge the English police try to pin on him. Meanwhile I doubt he'll serve much time for attempted abduction and firearms charges in this country.'

'You're forgetting murder,' Challis said. 'Four counts.'

'On what evidence?'

They didn't have any. Challis stuck with what he knew. 'According to Scotland Yard your client defrauded a circle of business acquaintances of three or four million pounds. He laundered that money through dozens of bank accounts. He disappeared before his trial and has remained at large by adopting a series of false identities.'

It was easier to say 'your client' than 'Casement', 'Billings' or 'Trigg', yet, in Challis's head, Trigg was Casement.

'As I said, my client is confident that—'

'Does your client have anything to say for himself?' Challis demanded. He was in pain, uncomfortable, irritable.

'I can only repeat what my lawyer has so ably said,' Casement replied levelly. He seemed to be enjoying himself and Challis guessed that he was entirely unmoved by the things that normally move us.