Kittyhawk Down

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Pam Murphy was driving this time, but only because she'd beaten Tank to the keys and the driver's door. There was a corner-admittedly a pretty wide corner-of John Tankard that didn't hold with women drivers or women's driving ability. She kept her eyes on the road while beside her he stamped on an imaginary brake and braced his meaty hands against the padded dash. She edged up the speed a little, threw the van around the curves that would take them toward the Waterloo hospital. He must have forgotten that she'd driven pursuit cars at her last station and passed all of the advanced driving courses they'd thrown at her.

Then they were off the main road and on streets too narrow and curved to risk putting the wind up John Tankard, so she settled into a gentler pace and rhythm. She felt him begin to relax. Then his overheated gaze settled on her.

'You've got your pointy bra on today.'

'Careful you don't impale yourself on it,' she said.

Impale. He didn't like it. He knew what it meant but it wasn't an everyday word and she knew he took it as a subtle put-down of his intellect. 'Get off my case,' he said.

They drove on in silence. She had a sense of his mind working overtime, trying for a way to flatter and charm her, put her onside. To steer him away from that she said, 'Do you think Kellock's right?'

'About what?'

She resisted saying about what he was talking to us about not five minutes ago, and said, 'Do the bad guys self-select?'

'Sounded like bullshit to me.'

'I think he had a point,' Pam said.

There was a primary school on one side of the road, a church on the other. She slowed for a speed hump and the school crossing. 'I mean,' she went on, 'if you pull someone over for a broken brake light, ten-to-one he's also drunk or doped to the eyeballs or hasn't got a licence or his car's unroadworthy or he hasn't paid a swag of parking fines. As far as he's concerned, things like speed limits and working lights don't apply to him.'

'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.