Kittyhawk Down ic-2 Page 14

  '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?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  On Thursday night Munro's battered Toyota was found in a pub carpark from which a Ford F100 pickup had been stolen, and so on Friday morning Challis and Sutton drove to the farm to question Aileen Munro. Challis was tiring of Sutton a little but Sutton knew Aileen Munro; his presence there would help to ease what was bound to be a fraught situation.

  Aileen took them through to the sitting room, the carpet and upholstery oppressively floral in styles that had disappeared from every corner of the world except backroad farmhouses. A wedge of grimy sunlight illuminated one corner of the floor; otherwise the light was dim. But there were incongruous touches here and there: a massive entertainment unit in one corner housed a flatscreen television set, VCR and sound system, and the torso of a Barbie doll peeked from beneath the nest of tables under the window. A CD case cracked faintly behind a cushion when Challis sank into the sofa. He fished it out. Strawberry Kisses by Nikki Webster. It meant nothing to him beyond the fact of the Munro children reaching for life beyond this lifeless house.

  Aileen Munro sat heavily in an armchair opposite Challis. Scobie Sutton sat beside him. Challis didn't like the arrangement, for it reinforced a sense of two ranged against one, but it was too late to change that now. He relaxed, tried to look unobtrusive, and let Sutton begin.

  'First, Aileen, I'm really sorry this has happened.'

  Aileen Munro's gaze darted from Sutton to Challis and back again. She opened and closed her mouth as though to moisten it. 'Thank you,' she muttered.

  'It must he hard for you.'

  'Yes.' Barely a whisper.

  'Remember, if there's anything I can do…'

  A tinge of hysteria this time. 'You can get those reporters off my back!'

  John Tankard had been at the front gate when Challis and Sutton arrived. He was there to keep the media away from the house and looked sour about it. 'They'll lose interest after a while,' Sutton assured her.

  Tessa Kane hadn't been in the media pack, or not that Challis could see. She hadn't contacted him for another follow-up, but would do so. She'd have Munro's photo by now, one taken when he was arrested for assault two years ago, and passed out to the media by the public relations clerk.

  'Meanwhile, I'm afraid we have to ask you some questions,' Sutton said gently.

  A curt nod.

  'First, have you had a chance to think of likely places where your husband might be?'

  'No.'

  'Any buildings or scrubland on the Peninsula that he knew well, or once owned, or was fond of visiting?'

  Her voice when it came was shrill. 'You say he shot three people dead. Do you really think he'd just hang around the district? He's long gone.'

  'But where, Mrs Munro?' Challis interrupted. His voice was low and calm but Aileen Munro was still agitated.

  'How should I know? We never went anywhere. We always stayed at home-or I did, anyway. How should I know where he's gone?'

  Challis nodded. Sutton said, 'As you know, we think Ian was growing marijuana over in the far corner of the farm last year. There's no crop there now, and we've found nothing in any of the sheds to suggest he was cultivating it-no plants drying, no packets of dried leaf-but perhaps you could tell us who he-'

  She brought her fists down hard on her lap. 'I don't know anything about that. Why don't you listen?'

  Challis believed her. She looked genuinely perplexed. He said, 'Did Ian have anything to do with the Pearces, Aileen?'

  'No. Far as I know, he never knew them, never talked to them.'

  'He didn't say anything about getting even with Pearce for reporting him to the RSPCA?'

  Aileen Munro gasped. 'It was him?'

  'We have reason to believe he called them anonymously.'

  'But how would Ian know it was Pearce who dobbed him in if it was anonymous?'

  Good point, Challis thought.

  'And the lawyer?' he asked gently.

  Aileen scowled and looked away. 'Ian had business with him in the past. Hated his guts. He used to talk about getting even with him for letting him down.'

  They were silent. Challis noticed for the first time that Aileen Munro's cardigan was buttoned crookedly, the buttons themselves a mismatched array of shapes and colours.

  Scobie cleared his throat. 'Anyone else your husband disliked, Aileen?'

  She looked at him with contempt-contempt for the situation, not Sutton himself-and said, 'Give me a name, any name. Ten-to-one my husband had something against him. He was a good hater. Is a good hater.'

  'Getting back to the marijuana, Aileen, I-'

  'I told you, I don't know anything about that. I wouldn't know a marijuana bush if I fell over one.'

  'I believe you,' Challis said. 'But presumably your husband harvested the crop and sold it. Who did he get the seeds or seedlings from? Who bought the crop? Were there any unusual visitors at any time? Phone calls? Letters? Mysterious trips away?'

  She shrugged. 'No one visits.' Her voice grew hollow. 'People used to visit us once upon a time. Not anymore.' She glanced in the direction of the front gate and the reporters gathered there. 'Now we've got hundreds of visitors, only not the kind you'd want. Bloody vultures, I can't hack it anymore.'

  Challis grew aware of the ticking silence of the house. 'Mrs Munro, where are your children?'

  She looked at him in surprise. 'In their rooms. The kids at school…' She grew hard. 'You're not asking them questions. No way.'

  'No, no,' Challis said. He paused. 'Do they know what's happened?'

  'Leave them alone.'

  'They're very quiet,' Challis said, and a stillness settled in him. He glanced at Sutton, got up, and swiftly left the room.

  He heard Aileen wail behind him, 'Where's he going?'

  'He'll be back in a moment, Aileen,' Sutton said soothingly.

  Challis found the children in a large room, three beds against the walls. The older two were playing a computer game in furious silence, only their breathing and the clack of keys betraying them. The youngest was sitting quietly, drawing. But she glanced up cringingly when Challis stepped through the door. Who beat her, disciplined her? Challis wondered. Had she thought for a moment that it was her father filling the doorway?

  Conscious of his size, Challis crossed to the little girl, sat on the bed and tried a smile. 'Hello. My name's Hal. Do you know Mr Sutton? Scobie? He's Roslyn's dad. Roslyn's in your class at school, I think.'

  She nodded. 'I see him in the mornings,' she said in a high, thin voice.

&nbs
p; 'That's right. He's here with me at the moment. We're talking to your mum.'

  The girl sorted through her crayons. Most were greasy stubs, and several bore bite marks. She selected one and unconvincingly ran it back and forth across the page of her sketchbook. Challis said, 'Is your dad home today?'

  After a moment, the child shook her head. She stopped drawing, her chin dropped to her chest, and Challis sensed shame and bewilderment. One more question: 'Has your dad been home to see you?'

  The girl said, 'He runded away.'

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Tankard wasn't going to quit. Maybe if he made her a bit jealous? So he told her a story that was half true about a party he'd gone to back when he was in the police academy.

  'I crack on to this chick, things hot up, I take her home, she goes, "Lose the threads," so I start getting my gear off, and then she goes-'

  'Stop the car!'

  Startled, he braked sharply. They were patrolling at the bottom end of High Street. The shops were sparser here. There was a bank, a pub, a real estate agency, an anonymous two-storey building with Lister Financial Services painted on the window. Even though it was Friday there was almost no one around.

  'What?' Tankard said, glancing up and down, looking for the problem.

  Nothing that he could see. 'What's got your bloomers in a twist? Or do you call them knickers? Scanties?'

  'I need to see someone,' Pam said.

  'Who?'

  'Just someone,' she said irritably. 'I'll only be five minutes.'

  And she got out, leaving him double-parked. He watched her dart across the road and into Lister Financial Services.

  Tankard sank back into his seat. Tattered, sun-faded Christmas decorations still clung to a power pole. A gritty wind was gusting. The manhunt for Ian Munro was three days old but no one in Waterloo seemed bothered about it. An old man pedalled by on a bicycle hung with string bags crammed full of plastic shopping bags. Two teenagers were slumped, smoking, on a bench outside a struggling record shop, a sign saying 'This Business For Sale Inquire Within' pasted to the glass. A little red Golf drove carefully around the police van, an elderly woman at the wheel, disabled-parking sticker on her windscreen. He saw her brake in the street ahead of him and look with apparent longing at the disabled-parking bay outside the bank.

  It was occupied.

  'Stiff titty, love,' Tankard murmured, and he began to crack his knuckles for want of anything better to do.

  Something niggled at him, somewhere in the back corner of his consciousness…

  He turned toward the bank again. The vehicle parked in the disabled-parking bay was a chunky-looking Ford pickup. Nothing immediately remarkable about it except it didn't feel right, for some reason. Then he knew: your disabled person usually drove something a bit easier and tamer, like your little Jap job, or your Golf. For your average disabled person, driving an F100 would be like driving a truck.

  Check out the disabled-parking spots, Kellock had said, and John Tankard, who had scoffed at the time, now thought there was something in the senior sergeant's theory of the self-selecting crim.

  He backed up, waited for another parked car to leave, and swung the police van in next to the F100.

  That had been a mistake, he realised later. A lot of grief might have been saved if he'd had the brains to pull in behind the F100 and block it in.

  He got out, sauntered toward the rear of the big pickup, and noted the numberplate. Then he wandered around to the front, checked out the windscreen.

  No disabled-parking sticker.

  'Right, I'll have you, mate,' he muttered with satisfaction, returning to the van to call it in.

  That's when he noticed a movement in the pickup. He paused, turned toward it for a closer look, and saw what he hadn't seen earlier, owing to the high sides of the vehicle's cab: a man stretched out along the seat, apparently reaching down for something in the passenger-side footwell. The window was partly open. Tankard came closer and tapped on the glass.

  'Sir? Excuse me, sir?'

  The man stiffened. What the hell was he doing? His back, his reaching arm, the bulky overhang of the dashboard, Tankard couldn't see clearly.

  Maybe he was handicapped. Maybe his walking stick had fallen off the seat.

  'Sir, my name is Constable Tankard and I'd like to talk to you about-'

  That's when he saw a metallic gleam, some stray beam of autumn sunlight reflecting coldly off the twin barrels of a shotgun.

  Tankard gasped, stepped back, trying to think. He couldn't think. He'd been trained to think in these sorts of situations, he'd learnt how to advance on an armed suspect, draw his weapon, fire two rounds, and reholster. He'd been taught to walk backwards, kneel, turn and fire without sighting, first with the right hand, then with the left.

  He'd learnt how to aim at the largest body mass: trunk, shoulders, head. Your first shot could be your last, so make it count. Out at the shooting range, Tankard had regularly hit twenty-seven or twenty-eight targets out of thirty. Not very many officers could beat that kind of shooting.

  He'd also been taught to at least take his revolver out of its holster…

  God. Seconds were passing and his hands and mind weren't working. His mouth felt dry. He wondered if he should shout a warning. Finally his hand did find its way to the leather strap that held his revolver in its holster.

  His fingers refused to find it, fumbling so that he had to look away to see what he was doing. By the time his nerveless hand was around the butt and he'd returned his gaze to the man in the F100, the open mouths of the shotgun were trained on his face and he was looking into the steady eyes of Ian Munro.

  Hadn't even unsnapped his own gun.

  'Take it out,' Munro said.

  'What?' Tankard's voice was dry, a croak. He tried again. 'What?'

  'Your gun. Take it out, two fingers, give it to me.'

  Tankard swallowed. He complied, dropping his gun through the open window as if it were a dead mouse.

  'Keys.'

  'What?'

  'Walk backwards to your van, reach in, take the keys out of the ignition or I'll blow your fucking head off.'

  Tankard did as he was told. He had no choice but to obey the man's contemptuous, whipping voice. He felt sick to his stomach and knew that he was going to die now.

  'Give them to me,' Munro said. He was actually snapping his fingers.

  A kind of petulance came over Tankard. 'No,' he said, and he dropped the keys through a stormwater grate.

  Munro laughed. 'I wasn't going to steal the van, you stupid prick.'

  He laughed again and started the F100, slamming it into reverse. The tyres squealed briefly and he was gone.

  Tankard supposed that the pickup was stolen but it took him some minutes to call it in and find out for sure, and meanwhile he had to run across to the men's room in the pub and sit there for a while, and when Pam Murphy reappeared he couldn't get the words out. It was she who went into the bank, expecting to find blood. There was none: Munro had had dealings with the manager there, but Tankard had apparently interrupted him before he could go in shooting. And it was Pam who asked Tankard where his service revolver was. That's when the shame really began to settle through him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Special Operations police had questioned John Tankard first, meaning that by the time Challis had talked to him, the afternoon was almost gone. Challis drove home and, feeling unsettled in the dwindling light, began to rake leaves. His liquidambar wore a beautiful canopy of green in spring and summer, and was no less beautiful when hung with red and gold in autumn, but now the leaves were beginning to fall, forming a dull yellow mat on the grass, and he had a month of raking ahead of him.

  First he circled the tree clockwise on his ride-on mower, letting the blades rake the leaves for him, pushing them in toward the trunk until he was at risk of jamming the blades, and then he resorted to raking the leaves into discrete piles. Finally he wheelbarrowed the leaves to the compost heap in the
back yard, cursing when the top layers slithered off the barrow and marked his progress across the lawn and gravelled driveway.

  Then an idea crept into his head: ask Kitty Casement to come to the opening of the footie season with him tomorrow, the Tigers versus the West Coast Eagles at the MCG. She'd once said that her husband rarely took her anywhere, he was always glued to his screen. Then, almost immediately, he abandoned the notion. She'd never say yes. She'd wonder why he'd asked, his intentions would look naked and obvious, the husband's first thought would be what's going on?

  Ask Tessa instead. The way he was going, he would lose her.

  And then he thought of the long drive and the traffic. And asked himself did he really want to go to the football? There'd been a time when your roots meant something. You barracked for the Tigers because you had direct links to Tigerland and so did the players. Not anymore. The players followed the money and you barracked for hybrid teams.

  Plus, Challis knew that he was never good company at a football match. Partly it was his hatred of the herd instinct, but mainly his mind would drift and he'd lose himself in old or current murder cases. He'd even solved one or two in that dreamy state, but he was hardly a cheery companion.

  Faintly he heard the telephone on his kitchen wall ring five times and cut out for the answering machine. He didn't follow it up but waited, and sure enough, a minute later his mobile vibrated in his pocket.

  'Challis.'

  'Hal? It's Marg.'

  Marg Quinlan, his mother-in-law. 'Hello, Marg,' he said cautiously.

  'It's about Angela.'

  'I thought it might be.'

  'She's not well.'

  He said nothing, knowing he was making it difficult for his mother-in-law, who didn't deserve that, but unable to help himself.

  'I think,' Marg said desperately, 'a visit from you would cheer her up.'