Challis - 02 - Kittyhawk Down (20 page)

'Hello, Skip.'

'Mrs Destry.'

The boy was thin, nervous, untidy, unshaven, and therefore no different from a hundred thousand other male students in their late teens. Cargo pants, square-toed shoes and short-sleeved shirt worn loose, all in black. Chopped-about short hair with blonde tips. Nicotine on his fingers. Hollow cheeks, a hint of facial sores, restless: maybe genes, maybe the effects of long-term ecstasy use. Or maybe he's simply freaking out about his university work, Challis thought. And he remembered his own late teens, the mutual wariness and sizing-up between himself and the parents of the young women he dated.

It would have been worse if any of those parents had been coppers. Poor Skip Lister had a
pair
of coppers to contend with, so a little edginess was excusable.

'Anything wrong?' Challis heard him say.

'I'm afraid so,' Ellen replied, and the boy froze.

'Nothing to do with you,' Ellen hastened to add. 'Is your dad home?'

That seemed to make it worse. Skip Lister swallowed and glanced back along the driveway to the big house. 'Er, no, he's at work.'

So Ellen told Skip about Ian Munro. 'Call your father and let him know,' she went on. 'I'm sure there's nothing to worry about, but don't let anyone in, and call the police if you see anyone roaming around or signs that anyone's broken into one of the outbuildings. Better keep your doors locked at all times.'

Skip Lister's face cleared, as though a burden had been lifted from his shoulders rather than dropped onto them. 'No dramas,' he said. 'We've been careful anyway—you know, those escapees from the detention centre.' And then he was backing away from her, waving and turning to hurry back to his house.

'He's a nice enough kid,' Ellen said a moment later as she strapped herself in. 'He comes around a couple of times a week, often stays for a meal. Lonely, I'd say.' She sat there, one hand poised to turn the ignition key. 'Pearce worked at the detention centre. Do we know how he treated the inmates?'

'A bully, you mean? This was a revenge killing?'

Ellen nodded.

Challis said, 'We have to check it out, obviously, but it doesn't seem likely, surely?'

'I agree. But once the media starts to put two and two together—Pearce's job, two escapees from the detention centre still at large—they'll start to speculate and everyone will go into a panic.'

Challis knew she didn't mean Tessa Kane. 'I'll have a word with our public relations people,' he said.

The next two properties were unoccupied, and then they came to a driveway with the name 'Casement' stencilled on a milk-churn mailbox. No wall or locked gate or intercom system this time. 'Kitty's place,' Ellen said, glancing at Challis and stopping the car.

He nodded.

'You don't want her to be mixed up in anything,' Ellen went on. It was a statement, not a query.

'Are you questioning my judgement?'

Ellen smiled and shook her head. She seemed reluctant to drive in but kept the motor idling. Then she said offhandedly, 'Have you met the husband?'

'Yes.'

Challis read many things into the question and tone of voice. Ellen Destry had a normal curiosity about his love life—or lack of it—but also cared enough to want him to be happy. The unspoken questions were: do you fancy Kitty Casement? Is that because you've fallen out with Tessa Kane? Is your mad wife keeping you from committing yourself? Are you falling for Kitty Casement because it's a safe thing to do, because she's married and therefore unattainable, yet you're incapable of committing yourself to her anyway?

He saw Ellen shift in her seat. They exchanged a long, complicated glance that asked and evaded all of these questions. She sighed and accelerated slowly along the driveway. 'Hal, we're going to have to push a little harder on her connection with Munro.'

'Yes.'

'You don't mind?'

'It's our job,' Challis said.

The Casements lived in an old but well-kept weatherboard farmhouse—one of the original houses along the ridge above Penzance Beach, Challis guessed. It was painted a vivid white and set amongst weeping willows, umbrella trees and small flowering gums. They parked behind Kitty's Mercedes and got out. A winding stone-chip path lined with herbs and lavender led them to a glossy blue front door and a gleaming brass knocker.

Kitty answered. She seemed puzzled and mildly flustered to see them but stepped back with a smile to usher them into a huge kitchen. It had been renovated: stainless steel benchtops and appliances, waxed hardwood floor, an old freestanding chopping block, copper-bottomed pots and pans on hooks. The late-afternoon sun streamed in and lit the room and Kitty's hair, and the hair on her forearms, and for a moment Challis felt an appalling need to reach out and stroke her bare skin.

'Tea? Coffee? Something stronger? Beer? Gin and tonic?'

The atmosphere in that bright kitchen was friendly and Challis, smiling disarmingly, said, 'I think we could manage a small gin and tonic.'

Ellen shot him an amused look and said, 'Sounds lovely.'

Kitty went out and came back with her husband and a bottle of gin. Rex Casement looked sleepy and dazed, and stretched hugely before shaking their hands and joining them around the table. He wore a tracksuit and Nike running shoes but was otherwise neat and trim where another man might not have bothered to shave or comb his hair if he shut himself at home in front of a computer screen all day.

'Been on the Net,' he said. 'Sometimes I forget what hour it is.'

'What
day
it is,' Kitty said.

'That too.'

Challis was watching Kitty carefully. Her face and manner were flat and neutral: there was not the indulgent smile of the put-upon but loving wife, nor the scowl of the neglected one. He glanced away.

When the drinks were poured, Kitty said, 'I don't think I can add anything to what I've already told you.'

Ellen glanced at Challis. He nodded for her to start.

'Actually, that's only partly why we're here,' she said, and briefly told Kitty and her husband about the murders and the incident at Munro's farm.

Challis was watching, and saw Kitty's eyes widen in alarm, her hands go to her face. 'Oh no.'

Rex Casement swallowed, looked stricken. He turned to Kitty and rubbed her back, his palm audible against the fabric of her shirt. 'It's all right, sweetie,' he said lamely.

'Is he coming after me?'

Ellen cocked her head. 'Do you think he might be?'

All of Kitty's gestures were extravagant. She flung out her hands. 'How should I know? I only met the man once. I've had nothing to do with him since. Did you question him about the marijuana crop?'

'Yes.'

'Marijuana crop?' her husband said.

She glanced at him apologetically. 'It's complicated. You were on-line so I didn't get around to telling you.'

'Telling me what?'

She placed her hand over his in a manner that was warm but firm. 'I'll tell you in a moment,' she said, then glanced at Challis. 'Does Munro think I told you about the marijuana? Is he going to come after me?'

'We don't know. He's heavily armed and he did fire a shotgun at us.'

'Shotgun,' Rex Casement said, staring at the table in bafflement and shaking his head.

After a day on the Internet, a healthy dose of reality is what you need, Challis thought. It was a small and churlish thought, but he didn't retract it.

'So keep your doors locked and eyes open,' Ellen said.

'Sweetheart, what marijuana crop?' Casement asked.

Kitty told him.

'Oh.' He thought about it, then took in Challis and Ellen with a glance around the table. 'You think this guy first tried to silence her by ramming her plane, and now might try to shoot her because he thinks she went to the police?'

Challis shrugged. 'We're keeping an open mind. We don't know what he's thinking or what he's got planned.'

Casement sat there, shaking his head.

Tessa Kane had tried to interview the director and staff of the detention centre for material on Mostyn Pearce—was there any truth in the rumour that Pearce bullied the inmates?—but didn't get past the front gate, and when she approached a table of Ameri-Pen guards in the Fiddler's Creek pub, she was thrown out.

But she heard running footsteps behind her as she made for her car afterwards, and a woman who introduced herself as a receptionist at the detention centre said, 'I'll have to be quick, they think I've gone to the loo. Look, if the detainees were going to kill anyone it wouldn't have been Pearce. He was a creep, but not a bully in the sense that some of the other guards are. I just can't see it, myself.'

Tessa thanked the woman and drove to the dismal housing estate where Pearce lived. As so often happened, she found herself going over ground trodden by Hal Challis. She didn't have many reporters on the payroll and this story was big, two separate murder incidents following hard on the heels of the manhunt for Ian Munro—and in fact possibly committed by him—and so she was doing a door-to-door along the ugly crescent where the Pearces had lived, and kept meeting people who'd been interviewed by the police and seen the tall, dark-haired, sad-faced homicide inspector coming and going.

Now she was knocking at the home directly opposite. A brisk, cheerful but harried woman with grey hair answered, listened to Tessa's opening remark, and said, 'I was in the middle of something, so come in and we can talk in the kitchen.'

Tessa followed her down a short hallway to a kitchen as neat as a pin, full of natural light, nothing like another kitchen she'd seen only hours earlier, through a grimy window— Aileen Munro's, Aileen ordering her off the property just as a call had come on the mobile, the switchboard operator at the
Progress
telling her about the murders.

'Cup of tea?'

In fact, a cup of tea was just what she wanted. 'Thanks. Weak black.'

It was one pm by the clock on the electric oven, and a grey-haired man shuffled into the kitchen, looked in bewilderment at her and then in faint irritation at his wife, and said querulously, 'What's for lunch?'

The woman, reaching for teabags in an overhead cupboard, threw Tessa a look and turned to her husband. 'Water,' she said, pointing at the tap over the sink.

Then at the bread crock: 'White sliced bread.'

And the refrigerator: 'Cheese, sliced ham, gherkins, tomatoes.'

His face went sulky. He wore slippers, a white business shirt and the trousers of a grey suit.

'And while you're at it,' the woman went on, 'make me a sandwich too. And if our young visitor… ?'

Tessa smiled. 'No thanks.'

'Or,' the woman said to her husband, 'you could take me somewhere nice for lunch.'

Grumbling, he wandered off to another part of the house. 'He retired recently,' the woman explained, 'and he doesn't know what to do with his time. Never had to do anything for himself. He'll be dead within five years,' she added, in exasperation and not a little sadness.

Tessa found herself thinking about Hal Challis and what he'd be like when he retired. God, that was twenty-five years away. Would she still be in the picture? At least he knew how to fend for himself domestically and he had outside interests, his bloody aeroplane. Obscurely reassured, and quite unable to see Challis as old or frail but forever young and lithe in her mind's eye, she began to ask the woman about the couple who lived across the way, their awful deaths.