Challis - 02 - Kittyhawk Down (4 page)

It was eleven pm and Challis was slumped in front of the television set, thinking about bed, when Tessa Kane knocked on his door, still dressed in her outdoor gear: hiking boots, jeans, padded jacket. She didn't look angry, exactly, but didn't smile either, her face a little sad under the vivid intelligence that was always there, as if the disappointments she'd been bottling up since yesterday morning had worked their way to the surface.

He fetched her a scotch, walking on eggshells, trying to read her. But she said nothing about his letting her down, running to his mad wife instead of taking a camping walk with her.

He'd lit the fire, for the wind had turned sleety by the time he'd returned from Bushranger Bay, and now the house was warm and safe against the squally night. He didn't know what to say to her. Now and then she sipped at her scotch, very still and silent, but finally a grin chased away the blues and she fished around in her daypack. 'I called in at work on the way here,' she said. 'Lots of letters and messages to catch up on.'

This was better. This was something she did from time to time when she visited him. She liked to read stuff to him.

Soon her lap was full of envelopes, e-mail printouts and slips of paper. She flipped through them abstractedly as he watched.

He said lightly, 'Any mail from the Meddler?'

She'd often told him about the man who bombarded her with anonymous letters and phone calls. The Meddler was an appropriate name: he had an obsessive and insane regard for good manners, law and order, and commonsense. He liked to report bad drivers, rubbish dumpers, lazy shire workers, mulish bureaucrats, vandals, property owners who failed to slash their grass in late spring. Unfortunately, you had to agree with him most of the time. Last summer, for example, he wanted to know what bright spark—'pun intended'—had ordered a controlled burn of the nature reserve on Penzance Beach Road when hot northerlies had been forecast for the next day. The resulting bushfire had burnt out half of the reserve, grassland and fences, and come within a few hundred metres of a weatherboard house.

'Roadside rubbish this time,' Tessa said, not glancing at Challis.

'Uh-huh,' he said.

She waved a letter in her fist. 'Garbage bags dumped on Five Furlong Road, to be precise. He actually hunted around in the garbage bags and found a letter, which he's kindly enclosed.' She wrinkled her nose. 'Smells of rotting fish. It's from the Department of Social Security and addressed to a Donna Tully, inquiring as to the status of her cohabitation with one Dwayne Andrew Venn. The Meddler wants me to denounce Venn and Ms Tully in the pages of the
Progress
as dumpers of rubbish. Says he's also sent a copy to the shire, hoping they'll prosecute.'

Challis nodded. At least she was talking to him now. He wondered if she'd noticed the significance of the Tully name. Surely she had. She'd reported extensively on the disappearance of Lisa Tully's child, and left no doubt in her readers' minds that she thought Bradley Pike was behind it.

As for Dwayne Venn, he wondered if he should tell her about Ellen Destry's stakeout.

No.

'The Meddler's offended by everything,' Tessa said. 'The genius who approved give-way rather than stop signs at the corner of Coolart and Myers roads. The woman at Peninsula FM who says "yee-uh" instead of "year", "haitch" instead of "aitch". The residents of Upper Penzance for not wanting paved roads or mains water and thinking themselves better than anyone else. He seems to live in a state of permanent apoplexy.'

Not that she minded. The Meddler's weekly letter had become an institution in the
Progress
, attracting other letters. Tessa's view was, if you're on a good thing, stick to it.

He watched as she continued to sort through the papers in her lap, and as he watched from the other side of the fire, her dark, clever, mobile face relaxed into a shy, pleased smile. 'What?' he demanded.

She might stay the night. She might not.

She waved a flimsy piece of paper at him. 'This is the proof-sheet of next Tuesday's column.'

He crossed in front of the fire, let his fingers brush against hers as he took the proof-sheet, retreated to his armchair again. She wrote a weekly column for the
Progress
. This time she'd tackled wankers.

Appreciating the wanker and his art, and distinguishing the wanker proper from the wanker accidental, is best undertaken with a close, like-minded friend. Just the other day one such friend and I were shopping in Rosebud and encountered a man walking a ferret on a lead. Our reaction was immediate and simultaneous. We turned to each other and murmured, 'Wanker.'

But wanking is a fluid notion, so to speak. Once upon a time a man with a big bunch of keys hanging from his belt was a wanker. Now only certain tradesmen and misguided old queers clip keys to their belts.

Challis grinned. He'd been the 'like-minded friend' that day. 'Nice one,' he said, attempting to be like-minded again.

Tessa scowled at once, her face sharpening. She straightened her back, folded her arms and looked fully at him. 'How was the little wife?'

'Don't be like that,' Challis said, immediately feeling sulky and small.

'Like what?'

He turned his face to the flames in the grate.

Tessa continued: 'Big emergency, was it? Is she in intensive care by any faint chance?'

Challis flushed angrily. 'If you must know, she had cut herself.'

'Yes, but to what extent, and with what?'

He hesitated fatally.

She pressed her advantage. 'Barely a scratch?'

He shrugged.

'Not a full-blooded attempt, so to speak. Not a proper deep slice down the length of the wrist.'

He sighed. 'No.'

'A cry for help, maybe?'

Challis snarled, 'Something like that.'

Tessa's voice softened. 'It's time you gave her up, Hal.'

Challis crossed the room to the whisky bottle. 'It's not as easy as that.'

'Of course it is. Your wife pulls the strings and you jerk into action. She says "jump" and you say "how high?".'

'
She
didn't call me the second time, her parents did. So why don't you just shut the fuck up?'

The 'fuck' didn't sound quite right. It struck a false note, sounded forced rather than genuine. But he saw the hurt it caused, and then Tessa was turning away from him, staring at the dark shadows in the corners of the room, solitary and chafing. Her voice when it came was low and hollow. 'I was so looking forward to our walk. Mostly perfect weather, perfect company. Well, we all know about that, don't we?'

Challis said nothing. He sipped his scotch miserably and stared down the years to a time and a place that wouldn't let him go. He'd been one of four CIB detectives in a town in the old goldfields country north of Melbourne. His wife, restless and easily bored, had taken up with one of his colleagues. The colleague had become infatuated with her and lured Challis to a deserted place and tried to kill him. Now the colleague was shuffling around a prison yard with a bullet-shattered femur and Challis's wife was serving eight years for being an accessory to attempted murder.

She would phone him from time to time and say she was sorry, then say she
wasn't
sorry and would gladly do it again. She needed him, she hated him. He was too good for her, he was a shit. Most of the time she was full of longing for him and what he'd represented and the times they'd had before it all went wrong. Challis didn't want her back and no longer loved her, but he did feel responsible, as though he should have been a better man or at least the kind of man she wouldn't want her lover to kill. As Tessa Kane kept saying, it was time he shook her off. Time he
divorced
her, in fact.

'I suppose her parents were there?'

'Yes.'

In fact, Challis liked his wife's parents. They were bewildered, apologetic, as tortured with notions of responsibility as he was, and sorry to think that their daughter could do such a thing to so nice a man.

Tessa snorted. Challis read it not as contempt but obscure pain and envy, as though she felt she had no claim on him at all. He put down his scotch. 'Tess—'

'Something unusual happened on my hike. Do you want to hear about it?' She looked at him, brightly blinking her moist eyes.

Relief flooded through him. 'Of course.'

'I was walking along an empty stretch of beach near Flinders this afternoon. There was a lot of seaweed and kelp on the beach, strong winds, waves, you know how windy it was today.'

Challis nodded. Had she seen him? No.

'Anyway, I'm trudging along when a four-wheel-drive appears, roaring straight at me across the sand.'

Challis's nerve endings tingled. 'Go on.'

'White Toyota traytop ute, to be exact. Two men inside. The driver starts shouting at me. What am I doing there? Who else is with me? Have I found some boxes on the beach? Maybe I've hidden them? He was quite aggressive. Then he just sped off further down the beach. I was too surprised to take down the number.'

'Shipment of drugs,' Challis said flatly.

'I'd say so.'

Challis worked homicide, not drugs, but the trade in drugs often leads to homicide, so naturally he was interested. 'There was a gale last night,' he said.

She nodded. 'Either the stuff was tied to a buoy and got dislodged, or it was thrown or washed overboard from some ship or yacht.'

'Or the shipment was ripped off.'

'That too. Or it's entirely innocent. But it didn't
feel
right, you know?'

Things not feeling right is a common instinct in the police and the press, Challis thought. 'What did they look like?'

Tessa shrugged. 'I only saw the driver clearly. Generic Peninsula male, late thirties, beanie, shades, footie jumper, needed a shave. I can't be more specific than that.'

'Even so, it's worth reporting. Our collators can feed it into the system.'

She saluted. 'Yes, sir.'

A silence opened between them. It was clear to Challis now that they were not going to make love and he'd been deluded to think that a reunion after what he'd done to her— as she saw it—could have been passionate. If he reached out and touched her now she'd flinch and say, it's not as easy as that, Hal.

She seemed to read his confusion and unhappiness and got to her feet. 'I'd better go.'

She almost walked out on him coldly but at the last moment stopped and briefly touched his cheek.

She'd left her scotch unfinished.

At one am, with Dwayne Venn questioned and remanded and most of the paperwork done, Ellen packed up and drove home to Penzance Beach, still dressed in her baggy stakeout cargo pants and cotton windcheater. The Destry family home was a fibro holiday house on stilts in a hollow between the beachfront and hilly farmland. Penzance Beach was a fifteen-minute drive but a world away from Waterloo, with its depressed estates and idle light industry. In summer, Penzance Beach crawled with the four-wheel-drives and German saloon cars of the well-heeled Melbourne families whose fairytale cottages and architect-designed bunkers would one day replace the fibro shacks of families like the Destrys.

Melbourne was just over an hour's drive away so Penzance Beach crawled with outsiders at Easter too. She slowed the car and looked for somewhere to park. The street was full of cars of the holidaying families and the kids attending Larrayne's party. She drove down two adjacent streets before finding a gap large enough to fit her Magna, and walked back. Good: the party was winding up. There were shouts goodbye as kids tumbled out of her front door and away.