Whispering Death (9 page)

He didn't get a chance to say why. The old man disappeared into the gloom, returning a moment later with a spiral-bound notebook. ‘What day?'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘Night time? Day time?'

He'd scribbled vehicle make and registration numbers in his notebook, together with times and dates. ‘Thursday night,' Challis said.

‘Thursday, Thursday. Sorry, I was at me daughter's.'

It didn't matter, Chloe Holst had been driven to the reserve in her own car. But her rapist might have scouted around in the days and weeks before snatching her, so Challis said: ‘Your notebook could be very useful to the police. May we borrow it? I'll make a photocopy and return it on Monday.'

He was expecting resistance, but the man stuck out his chest and firmed his chin. ‘Happy to help, happy to help.'

Challis took the proffered notebook, flipped through the pages, frowned and looked more closely at the scribbled information. ‘These are all trucks and vans, not cars.'

‘Well, obviously.'

‘I don't follow.'

The old man couldn't believe Challis's ignorance. ‘You don't think them people smugglers come into Western Port Bay with just one or two people aboard, do you?'

14

Meanwhile Pam Murphy had awoken feeling jittery, close to panic. That was nothing new. Some deep breathing helped; she avoided coffee.

But the dizziness was starting to bother her. She went on-line, Googling the withdrawal symptoms of her antidepressant, recalling the advice of her GP: ‘I don't think you should quit, but I can see that's what you want, so make sure you phase out slowly, over several days.'

Several days? Hell, according to the Internet, that should have been several weeks, even months. Even then some chat-page respondents reported long periods of dizziness, mild auditory and visual hallucinations, something screwy with their eyes, itchy skin. And the special kind of dizziness she'd been feeling was called a ‘brain zap'. Exactly right, she thought.

As for some of the antidepressants recommended by her doctor, some had been associated with suicides and murders in various parts of the world. The things the doctors don't tell you, she thought. The things they don't
know
.

She switched off and thought about the day. Challis wanted her to interview Chloe Holst again—but not at six-thirty in the morning. Checking the tide times, she strapped her surfboard to the Subaru and headed to Point Leo, where she pulled on her wetsuit and paddled out to catch a few waves. The brain zap got her a couple of times, making her misjudge, spoiling her run into shore, but the surf, the sand and the air itself were a tonic. And although she didn't speak to the other surfers, she felt a bond with them, with their boards under their ropy arms, sand on their powerful feet, a crusting of saltwater on their slender jaws.

By late morning she was starving. As she headed back to her rented house in Penzance Beach she ran her mind around the contents of her fridge and considered the Balnarring supermarket on a Saturday morning. The obvious solution was: a smoked salmon baguette from the Merricks General Store, before the car park filled with Melbourne Porsches and Audis.

The food settled her. She drove aimlessly for a while, thinking of her parents, thinking she should drive up to the city tomorrow, spend the afternoon with them. But when the time came would she have the energy? They were old, querulous, stubborn, didn't know why she'd become a cop, wondered why she—unlike her high-achieving brothers—wasn't married.

Never in a million years would she tell them she'd been on antidepressants.

Then Dido was singing
White Flag
on her CD of illegal downloads and she felt like crying. The only solutions were work and love. And given that she didn't have any love in her life, she thought it was time she did some work.

By twelve-thirty she was at the Waterloo Community Hospital, a small place, low and sleepy under gumtrees. Busy today, for some reason, with individuals, couples and families walking to and from the car park, grouping in the foyer.

‘It's often like this on weekends,' said the admissions clerk, a small, round, slyly humorous woman with frizzy hair, ‘Rachel' on the badge pinned to her breast pocket. ‘They get drunk and wake up on Saturday or Sunday morning with a broken arm or a shredded ear and no memory of how it happened.' She snorted with laughter. ‘Or they wake thinking “Look! A sunshiny spring morning, I must do some mowing or slashing or chain sawing. I must climb onto the roof and clean out the gutters.”' She shook her head. ‘And don't get me started on Fathers' Day, Christmas Day…' The woman was a tonic to Pam. They grinned at each other, kindred spirits. They both had jobs helping people in distress, and therefore a full repertoire of stories of stupidity and ingratitude.

Just then a man staggered in. A huge, white, hairy apparition of tiny bum-crack shorts, a wife-beater singlet and rolls of porcine flesh, holding a bloodied hand to his chest. His face was petulant and demanding. ‘Need some help here,' he bellowed. His family pressed in behind him. A cowed wife; hot, avid children.

Rachel and Murphy leaned automatically towards each other. ‘Chainsaw,' Pam murmured.

‘Pruning shears.'

‘Not the bloke's fault.'

‘Of course not,' Rachel said. ‘His tool's to blame.'

A quick, shared snigger, then Rachel worked a vivid smile onto her face and called across the foyer, ‘Yes, sir, let's get someone to take a look at you.'

Pam nodded goodbye and headed down the corridor to Chloe Holst's room. She found a middle-aged woman sitting beside the bed, handing the girl a tissue. ‘I'm sorry, I'll come back another time.'

Holst managed an exhausted laugh and sank into her pillow. ‘It's not what you think. Wherever I was the other night, it's given me hay fever.'

Pinkly damp around the nose and eyes, she went on: ‘Pam, this is my mum.'

‘Chloe suffers dreadfully from hay fever,' the woman said, ‘just like her dad. I remember…'

Pam had been in situations that played out like a cheap novel, the anguished parent demanding, ‘Have you found the monster who did this to my daughter?' but Chloe's mother was content to prattle on about her daughter's allergies until Chloe said, ‘Mum, for God's sake, it's not important.'

Finally, responding to her daughter's cues, Mrs Holst gathered her bag. ‘I'll just be in the cafeteria.'

‘Thanks, Mum.'

The younger women watched her go, then looked at each other smilingly.

‘Sorry, she always talks a lot when she's upset.'

‘She has plenty to be upset about, and so do you.'

‘I'm okay. I'm alive.'

But looking exhausted and diminished, Pam thought. She pondered the damage she couldn't see.

Chloe was racked with sneezes again. ‘Remind me never to get a job outdoors. The tiniest bit of pollen and I—' Pollen. Pam made a mental note, then they talked for a while. But Chloe added nothing new to her account of the attack, or the man who had done it.

15

Challis checked in with the crime-scene officers at the reserve, then headed for the little airport a few kilometres north of Waterloo.

He ruminated on the past ten years, all that had been transitory and permanent. He'd been a solitary figure, a little lonely and probably sad, when he'd taken up the position of CIU head at Waterloo. New to the Peninsula, and still stunned by the knowledge that his wife and her lover had wanted him dead.

A chance visit to the local air show had rekindled an interest from his childhood—a time of balsawood kit planes and spotting for the crop dusters on the hilly paddocks of the South Australian wheat country. Dreams in which he floated above the ground.

Entranced by the vintage aeroplane display, he'd let it be known that he'd like to buy one, preferably unrestored. Six months later, he bought a 1930s Dragon Rapide which was gathering dust and a colony of rats and mice in a hayshed outside Toowoomba.

In the years that followed he spent his spare time, his blessed quiet hours, tracking down missing parts, engineering others. Ten years of snatched afternoons and weekends, ten years of hangar and machine-tool hire, ten years of outlaying all his spare cash.

But ten years of mental and physical relief from the dirt he walked in every day. As he'd restored the Dragon, the Dragon restored him. And she was beautiful, an elegant silver dragonfly.

Now he simply saw the Dragon as a phase of his life that had come to an end.

A truck load of timber held him up outside Waterloo. It was turning into a low-lying paddock on the left, a housing estate named Copley Downs, still under construction and at this stage just an open mire of culverts, heavy tyre tracks, concrete slabs and skeletal house frames on senseless curved streets. Challis thought about what he'd said to the reporter yesterday afternoon. Young, cash-strapped families would move in to Copley Downs and put pressure on the local services, including the police. As for the name, Copley had been a stalwart of the football club, a man who spent his time drinking and bashing his wife. Having played half a season of League football however, he was a local celebrity. The world we live in, Challis thought.

He drove through a stretch of farmland to the outskirts of Tyabb: some straggling pine trees, a weather-beaten girl-guide hall, a sad strip of shops, a solitary traffic light. A bus and half a dozen cars were stopped for the red. Challis braked gently and the Triumph stalled. He started it, nursed the accelerator. The old car shuddered and then he was at the intersection, turning left.

Now he was passing a scattering of bungalows, the airfield beyond that, rambling antique shops on his right. Tyabb owed some of its reputation to the airfield and the annual air show, but was better known as a Mecca for anything old. Most of the dealers operated out of a massive converted railway workshop, others out of houses, sheds and barns situated on the main roads of the town. Challis slowed the car and pulled into the driveway of an old church. A sign on the picket fence said ‘The Doll's House Collectibles Fine Art Antiques W. & M. Niekirk Prop.' Beneath it was another sign: ‘Niekirk Classics', with stylised images of an old plane and an old car.

He got out. He could hear a distant aero engine. A young woman appeared in the doorway, slightly plump, cheery, under-dressed, jiggling a three-year-old girl on one hip. ‘Can I help you?'

‘Are you Mrs Niekirk?'

The girl got a kick out of that. ‘I'm Tayla, the nanny. Mrs Niekirk's over at the airstrip.'

She didn't know about Mr Niekirk, so Challis thanked her and headed to the airfield, entering via a slip road that led to a gate and a collection of admin buildings and hangars. He was tempted to check on his Dragon, but resisted. He steered around the perimeter, passing a dozen parked Cessnas and Pipers, to a couple of hangars on the far side. He pulled up against the side wall of the first hangar. A wooden sign above a small door read ‘Niekirk'.

He got out, yawned, stretched the kinks out of his spine, consciously holding back. He was a tall man, probably underweight, and still wore the tired pallor of a long winter and longer hours. Part of him wondered, as he spotted a Beechcraft make a banking turn above farmland at the far end of the landing strip, if he was about to take a step that he might regret. The plane flattened out, came in shallowly over the access road and touched down neatly. Nothing new, yet Challis watched with a childlike pleasure.

He stepped around to the front of the building and halted in his tracks. Two flatbed trucks were parked there, a front-end loader. Beyond them, in the dim interior, a huddle of overall-clad men were scratching their heads beneath a looming World War II warplane. Bristol Beaufighter, thought Challis automatically, admiring the stubby, menacing shape. Long-range fighter-bomber, designed in Britain and built in Australia, deemed ‘whispering death' by the Japanese.

The Beaufighter claimed most of the space, both engines thrusting forward of the bulbous snout like a crab's claws. He walked along the left flank, overhearing one of the men say, ‘Dismantle the wings first? Tailplane?'

Challis could see an office in the corner. Behind the plane, stacked here and there against the walls were old wardrobes, colonial-era sideboards, antique chairs with moth-riddled upholstery. The hangar was a useful space if you were a second-hand dealer with an overflow of stock.

The office door was open, a woman standing at a filing cabinet. Hearing his footsteps on the cold concrete floor, she turned to face him. She was tall, angular, about forty, wearing a loose white shirt over black tights, a little harried-looking as she peered at him over maroon designer frames. ‘May I help you?'

‘Mrs Niekirk?' he asked, conscious that he sounded like a policeman.

She seemed to flare up. ‘I've had it with you people. We're complying with that order.'

Challis held up both hands. ‘I'm sorry, I'm not here about any order.'

She went very still and waited, tense under the surface. ‘What can I do for you,' she said flatly.

‘My name is Hal Challis and I own an old aeroplane and I'm thinking of—'

A narrow hand went to her throat. Challis saw small chips of gold there, gold on her fingers and earlobes, too. And a flicker of dark emotions. ‘Sorry to disappoint you,' she said, barely moving her mouth, ‘but my husband is going out of the aircraft business.'

‘Oh. That's a shame.'

With an effort, the woman shook off whatever had been affecting her. Her voice a low, pleasant rasp leavened with a smile, she offered her hand and said, ‘Mara Niekirk. Please forgive me, I sounded harsh.'

‘That's okay.'

‘The thing is, we had our fingers burnt recently. Do you see that heap of junk out there? The men and the trucks?'

And Challis thought at once: the Beaufighter's being repossessed. ‘Yes.'