Challis - 02 - Kittyhawk Down (28 page)

'Oh, no reason,' Tessa Kane said, and Ellen knew at once that there was a very good reason for the question.

Challis worked until four on Tuesday afternoon and then drove to the aerodrome, intending to work on the Dragon's cockpit for a couple of hours before he went home. Home these days meant early- or late-evening darkness, his answering machine full of his wife's hysteria, a comfortless instant meal— for he was often too tired to care about cooking—and a barely refreshing sleep before he got up to a chilly morning, the sun weak through the leafless trees in his back yard.

Home could also mean Tessa's place. The opening was there, but he still felt vaguely disconnected from her. And in today's
Progress
she'd been scathing about the community's selective hysteria, its focus on the asylum seekers and blindness to the things that really affected the local community, like the increased dealing and pushing of drugs. She was on the warpath and when she was like that, seeing the world in black-and-white terms, he felt that his lack of fire would show, and she'd be disappointed in him.

Oddly enough, she'd published the Meddler column— probably hadn't had time to pull it before going to press, he thought.

At the aerodrome he could forget himself for a while. Draw comfort from working with his hands. Maybe Kitty would be there.

What did he think he'd do—save her from a loveless marriage? Who said it was loveless? He
wanted
it to be loveless. A big difference. Or they could have an affair. That would suit a man who has good reasons to shy away from commitment.

But it's all in my head, Challis thought, when he walked into the hangar and saw Kitty Casement and got a preoccupied smile and wave from her and nothing more. 'Catching up on paperwork,' she called, waving an invoice at him, her voice losing itself in the hollow reaches of the high steel walls and oil-stained concrete floor.

'Have fun,' Challis called back, climbing into his overalls and hauling himself onto the Dragon's bottom wing.

And slowly he felt better. He managed to forget himself for a while, one part of his mind absorbed in mapping out the stages of a physical task, the other dreaming of a time in history, 1942, when this very aeroplane had helped ferry Dutch refugees, who were fleeing the Japanese invasion of Java, from Broome to Perth. Or earlier, 1934, when a Vacuum Oil Company geologist had flown it over tricky magnetic country in the remote desert region of central and northern Australia.

That's where the history stopped. Challis had no idea how the Dragon had subsequently come to be a wreck in a barn near Toowoomba in Queensland.

They called it synchronicity, didn't they? Or something like that. For just at that moment Kitty rapped her knuckles on the fuselage and when he'd uncoiled himself from beneath the instrument panel and poked his head out, he saw her waving a book at him. 'This came in the post,' she said.

Challis straightened the kinks in his back and climbed out to join her. The book was evidently self-published, everything about it looking amateurish, rough and ready, including the photograph on the front cover.

'A few weeks ago I got Rex off the computer long enough to search the Internet,' Kitty said with a laugh. 'I couldn't believe it when I found sites devoted to the Kittyhawk. Apparently the man who flew my plane died a few years ago, but one of his friends sent me this.'

The cover photograph showed a Kittyhawk fighter on an airstrip in the hot sun, a young man in shorts, boots and dogtags grinning at the camera. Challis guessed that he was the author as a young man, Lt Andy H. Ludecki, from New Jersey.

'Darwin?' Challis guessed, pointing at the photograph.

'Yes.'

Kitty couldn't control her pleasure. Her face was wreathed in smiles. 'He even mentions my plane and the man who flew her.'

But Challis felt only an unwarranted chill. 'I don't understand the title,' he said.

'
Kittyhawk Down
? Oh, that's just a quote from a radio transmission the day Darwin was bombed.'

'Shot down?'

'Yes.'

'Kitty,' Challis said, 'be careful, won't you?'

She looked at him oddly for a moment, touched his sleeve with a brief grin, and turned away, saying she'd better get back to work.

Shortly after that Challis's mobile phone rang. It was Tessa Kane, sounding less strained now, saying she had some information for him. Challis, feeling an obscure loneliness and pain, suggested a drink and bar snacks at the Heritage in Balnarring.

Six o'clock. A dewy evening was settling and the moon hung in the skeletal trees. Challis could smell chimney smoke as he got out of his car; good, they'd lit the open fire in the side room. Tessa Kane's car was already there, parked in a corner under a tree. No other cars yet. They'd have the place to themselves for a while. A glass of red and a plate of nachos by the open fire. Get a glow on and forget about Kitty Casement.

Challis found Tessa on the massive leather couch. She got lightly to her feet and kissed him affectionately. 'Sorry I got mad at you last time,' she said. 'I know you're under pressure and can't always divulge things when you want to.'

Challis felt a rush of affection and gratitude tinged with guilt: she didn't warrant his neglect. His heart lifted: the firelight, the beautiful woman, the promise.

'I ordered a bottle of Elan,' she said.

'Good.'

'Nachos, and guacamole and chilli dip.'

'Great.'

She turned a wicked, full-voltage grin on to him. 'Chilli dip prepared by someone else, you'll be glad to know.'

Challis snorted, blushed, shifted about, suddenly embarrassed. A few days before Easter he'd prepared a curry meal for them, and was slicing hot fresh chillies on his chopping board when she arrived. They kissed, and found themselves stripping, then making love, and afterwards, prone on the sitting-room rug, had felt a burning sensation in their genitals.

Tessa laughed. 'Sit, Hal.'

She swung her slim knees toward him when they were seated, and immediately began to speak. 'Remember I told you about the Easter walk and the men in the four-wheel-drive looking for something on the beach?'

Challis stiffened, then relaxed. This wasn't an attack. She was generous and forgiving by nature, and this was plainly business. 'Yes.'

'I saw one of them again.'

'Where?'

'The Munro place.'

Challis watched her carefully. 'Do you know who he is?'

'Lister. Carl Lister.'

'Are you sure?'

'Fairly sure. He was the passenger, not the driver, that day on the beach. At the time, I didn't think I'd seen him clearly, but I must have, subconsciously. I remember the scarring on his neck.'

'How do you know his name?'

'I was hoping to get an interview with Aileen Munro— you know, local paper, sympathetic hearing, not some hotshot from the
Age
or the
Herald Sun
—when this Lister character drives out. Almost ran over a couple of reporters. Anyway, I recognised him as the man in the passenger seat of the Toyota.'

Challis frowned. Toyota. Ian Munro owned a Toyota. 'But how do you know his name?'

She touched his wrist. 'Hold your horses. Drink your wine. Eat your nachos.'

He breathed out, grinned, swallowed his wine.

'That's better. The reason I know his name is that Ellen Destry arrived at that moment, and she helped Lister avoid the scrum, and told me his name.'

'Carl Lister,' Challis said to himself. Then: 'But the driver, that day on the beach. Could he have been—'

'Ian Munro? Yes, possibly, though he wore a beanie and shades and his face was distorted with all the shouting he was doing.'

Challis stared into the flames, losing himself in them. Lister and drugs, Munro and a drug crop…

'Hal?'

He turned to Tessa.

'What are you thinking?'

She wasn't asking it as a lover—or only partly—but as a journalist. She had that intent, narrowed gaze. But he found that she was holding his hand, so he told her that he was thinking not about the past but the here and now.

Larrayne was subdued, teary, on Wednesday morning. She didn't want to get up, and for the past two days had taken to wandering around with her mobile phone in her hand.