Challis - 02 - Kittyhawk Down (12 page)

'Yeah,' Tankard said. 'He's stupid.'

'I think it's more than that,' Pam said, but before she could expand on it, Tankard stretched elaborately and managed to drape his arm along the top of her seat. The next best thing to embracing her. She could feel his arm there, a pinkish hairy slab, millimetres from her neck and shoulders.

She said dangerously, 'Don't.'

'What?' he said, full of false innocence, but removed his arm anyway, turning the gesture into one long, getting-comfortable pantomime.

'That's better.'

'What is?'

She changed the subject. 'Know anything about this Munro character?'

He shrugged. 'Nup.'

She could never be sure how much John Tankard took in during the briefings at the start of every shift. According to Sergeant van Alphen, an RSPCA inspector had been investigating a report of distressed sheep on a farm up near Upper Penzance. There was a suspicion that the farmer, Ian Munro, had assaulted the inspector and put him in hospital.

'Check out the inspector's story,' van Alphen had said, 'see if he wants to press charges, then have a word with Munro.'

There hadn't been time to run Munro's name through the computer, but one or two of the other uniforms in the briefing room clearly knew Munro, and had said to Pam, their voices full of mock direness, 'Well, good luck,' as though she was going to need more than luck on her side.

'A thankless job,' she said now.

'Being a cop?'

'Well, that too, but I meant it'd be thankless being an RSPCA inspector.'

'How come?'

Why did John Tankard never engage with a topic? Why wasn't he musing over her remark right now and responding to it one way or the other? She wanted to say think about it, but they had reached the entrance to the hospital and she was forced to brake for an old man in an elderly Holden, nothing showing but his hat and his hands clutching the wheel as he contemplated his next move in the exact centre of the gate pillars.

'Dozy old bugger,' she said, intending Tankard to see himself as ending up like that dozy old bugger one day.

He said nothing. Then, as if to assert his masculinity, said, 'Footie season starts next Saturday.'

She knew that he barracked for Essendon and had a head-banging regard for the game. So did she, for that matter. Hawthorn, of course, owing to where she'd more or less grown up. And the fact that she loved football in the first place owed plenty to the type of family in which she'd grown up: remote, university-intellectual father and brothers who had no time for athletic achievements—
her
achievements, to some degree. Her father was especially scathing about 'footie professors', particularly professors of Australian history, who liked to think they were at one with ordinary people but were in fact effete poseurs. She shook off the memory—she, for one, loved footie—and settled into a vigorous argument with John Tankard.

Then they were inside the hospital grounds and parking in a 'visiting surgeons' bay and walking through glass doors into air scented with new paint, carpeting, concrete and steel. A woman at the reception desk directed them upstairs to a ward overlooking the carpark. Here the air was hot, sluggish, medicated, and Pam wanted to curl up and sleep.

Clive Fenwick lay glumly looking at the pink venetian blinds on his sun-struck window. There were no cards or flowers, nothing to cheer him or his nurses or visiting police officers. He turned his head stiffly, saw their uniforms through glasses too big for his face, and closed and opened his eyes.

The disapproving face of a born inspector, Pam thought. His hair had bunched up from hours of lying on a hospital pillow and he looked profoundly aggrieved and disappointed. She introduced Tankard and herself, and said, 'We'd just like to ask you a few questions regarding the incident at Ian Munro's farm, Mr Fenwick.'

Fenwick closed his eyes. His forehead was cut and bruised; one arm and one ankle were in plaster. A broad strip of cotton bandage showed at the collar of his pyjamas, as though his ribs had been tightly bound.

'Munro really laid into you, old son,' Tankard said.

Fenwick shook his head and croaked, 'No.'

'No?'

'Accident.'

'You want to wake up to yourself, mate,' Tankard said, ignoring Pam, who glared at him to tone it down. 'You went to check on this guy's starving sheep and he flattened you.'

'Crashed my car.'

Pam cocked her head at Fenwick in doubt. 'You told the doctor who treated you that you'd been beaten up.'

'Misunderstanding.'

'Yeah, sure,' Tankard said. 'Munro went ballistic, right?'

Fenwick closed his eyes. If his face hadn't been so stiff and sore, he'd have pursed his disapproving mouth, Pam thought. 'Mr Fenwick, tell us what happened. Start at the beginning.'

'Anonymous call,' Fenwick said. 'Starving sheep, no water in the paddock. I drove out to the address given. It was borderline. The sheep had been shorn, so they looked skinny. And there was water for them, in a trough in the far corner that couldn't be seen clearly from the road. The paddock slopes,' he explained, looking fully at Pam for the first time. 'But I wasn't entirely happy. The sheep were hungry, though you could see where hay had been spread for them a few days earlier.'

'What did you do?'

'Went to the house, said who I was—'

'Who did you speak to?'

'Mrs Munro.'

'And?'

'Then her husband comes charging over from one of the sheds, shouting abuse at me. He thought I was from his bank or the shire or something.'

'Go on.'

'When I said I was from the RSPCA it was like the last straw,' Fenwick said, more animated now. 'I've heard it all in my time, but this was shocking, absolutely shocking. I feel sorry for the wife, quite frankly.'

'Mr Fenwick,' Pam said, 'how did you get the injuries?'

Fenwick looked away. 'Accident.'

'How?'

'Rolled my car at the bottom of the hill.'

'So Mr Munro didn't touch you?'

In a voice she could scarcely hear, he said, 'Kicked me.'

'He kicked you? Where?'

Fenwick wouldn't look at her. 'Seat of my pants,' he said, as if he couldn't bring himself to say 'buttocks', or wanted to downplay the incident.

'So he
did
assault you,' Tankard stated.

Fenwick said hurriedly, 'I don't want to press charges.'

Pam gazed at him. In her mind's eye she saw the way it had played out, the chain of events that put Clive Fenwick in Waterloo hospital.

The visit to the property. Munro, beside himself with fury at the intrusion by another bureaucrat. Worse, a bureaucrat who has come to investigate his farming practices, based on an anonymous tip-off. Fenwick sent packing with a kick up the bum. Deserved, at one level, because he's such a tightarse. Fenwick drives away, badly panicked, and rolls his car. Is hospitalised. Frightened, outraged, ashamed, he declares his injuries to be the result of an assault. Then reconsiders, not wanting a man like Munro to come gunning for him.

He's telling the truth now, Pam thought—or some of it, leaving out the panicky drive down the hill and rolling his car on the first bend.

Still, Munro warranted a hard talking to before he caused serious harm to somebody.

Today the Meddler was driven more than usually by sourness. Not that the day had started badly. He was on the four pm to midnight shift this week, leaving the mornings free to take Jessica to school, and yesterday and today he'd thought it would be good to have the ferret with him, watch the kids jostle nervously, wanting to touch but fearful of sharp teeth. He'd even dared them a little. He got a kick out of it—their fear, his difference from the other parents: drones, most of them.

Then he'd gone home via the bakery, where he'd grabbed milk, escargot and the local paper, the
Progress
, and settled with a milky coffee on the front verandah, overlooking bracken and blackberry canes and across to the strangled peppermint gums on Five Furlong Road. Sipped his coffee and chewed his escargot—stale, probably yesterday's—and flipped through the paper, stopping to read his weekly letter, the one they called The Meddler Report, getting a little glow and rekindling his general outrage. He moved on to Tessa Kane's own weekly column, right next to his. Read a few lines and a deep shame settled in him. Nothing like it in his life before.

The bitch had seen him walking the ferret that time in Rosebud and here she was writing about it, calling him a wanker. He thought he'd got a few funny looks at the school this morning. Clearly some people had already seen the article and put two and two together.

The general mirth at his expense. The fingerpointing behind his back:
wanker
. Mostyn Pearce burned. 'Wanker'. 'Meddler'. His skin was superheated with embarrassment and he could scarcely breathe.

He stumbled away from the house, along the Crescent and then onto Five Furlong Road, where he walked like a zombie, burning, burning. How could he deflect or defuse the sneering? Never be seen with the ferret again, obviously. God, he'd like to sort her out, that Kane bitch. What kind of name was that? Jewish? God, what a bitch. One part of him had always wanted her to know who he was, what his real name was, this man she called the Meddler and published every week. But if he made himself known she'd recognise him as the man with the ferret, the wanker, and his weekly raging at shire ineptitude and nose-thumbing citizenry would lose all force. She'd chortle, point her finger and say, '
You're
the Meddler?' and stop publishing him.

He stomped down the centre of the road feeling powerless. The dead gums formed a web of twisted grey fingers over his head. There was an old orchard on the other side of the blackberry-choked fence, the leaves yellowing. Half a kilometre ahead of him was Upper Penzance, like a gated community without the gate, smug on its hilltop. To his left was Ian Munro's place. No sign of the distressed sheep this morning. Had the RSPCA investigated? Bet they hadn't. Nobody gave a stuff about anything anymore.

He came abreast of the American-style letter box. Unbelievable. The little red flag was up. Pearce flicked it to the down position.

Just then he heard a soft motor behind him and the growl of tyres and then a brief brap of a horn. He stepped off the road into dead grass. A police van, a female cop in the passenger seat giving him the evil eye, like she thought he was up to no good just because he was walking and wasn't a cop.

Well fuck you, he thought. It might interest you to know that I'm in law enforcement myself and always have been. Kind of.

Pearce had been a physical education teacher for years, a strict disciplinarian until that business where they said he'd been too rough. Now he was a corrections officer for Ameri-Pen, the private company that had won the contract for the Westernport Detention Centre. Designed to hold five hundred detainees, there were almost eight hundred and the numbers were growing. You had four to six men in two-man cells. That was a problem, the overcrowding. You immediately thought of unnatural practices of a kind your Arab type condoned. Plus they were would-be terrorists, half of them. You saw them huddled, their dark liquid eyes watching you, their hawk noses sniffing you out. The other half were just depressed. You saw them beating their heads against brick walls, rocking and wailing on their haunches, crying inconsolably.