Kittyhawk Down

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

It was nerve-wracking, sure, but somehow liberating at the same time. The old Meddler would have made an anonymous call, tipping off the police to see justice done, but receiving none of the glory and certainly not profiting in any way.

Like cash in hand.

Stung by the 'wanker with the ferret' article, Mostyn Pearce was shaking off the old Meddler. No more lurking in the bushes or selflessly standing by. The meek shall inherit the earth? Fuck that for a joke. The strong shall inherit the earth. The strong take action. The strong take.

So, before going to work that afternoon, Pearce grabbed his shotgun, fully licensed, no problems with the paperwork given that he worked in law enforcement, and knocked on the guy's front door.

The guy opened the door and saw the shotgun and the Meddler saw a flicker in the guy's eyes, no mistake. Fear? Acknowledgement that the Meddler wasn't to be trifled with? Resignation? All of the above.

Anyway, he had the guy's immediate attention, and said, without preamble: 'I know who you really are.'

The guy said nothing.

'Your real name is Michael Trigg.' No reaction.

'I was thinking a one-off payment of a hundred grand,' the Meddler said. Nothing. Then: 'You'd better come in,' the guy said.

After his run-in with the cops in the library, Bradley Pike walked back up High Street via Coolart Computers. Last week they'd had a second-hand trade-in there. Five hundred bucks got you a PC with a monitor, internal modem, sound card, speakers, keyboard, a couple of gigs on the hard drive, Windows 95 already installed. Surf the Web in the privacy of your own home.

Better than some easily shocked sheila peering over your shoulder in the library and dobbing you in to the cops.

Except he didn't have five hundred bucks. Went via the shop anyway and discovered they'd sold the trade-in and didn't have another.

'But keep dropping in,' they told him.

Or the young guy serving said it. He didn't know Brad Pike from a bar of soap. But the manager of the shop recognised Pike, and Pike could tell from the dirty look that he, like the rest of the good citizens of Waterloo, thought that Bradley Pike was guilty of murdering Lisa Tully's little girl.

So on the way out of the shop, Pike made a point of getting in the manager's face and saying, 'Charges were dropped, okay?'

Without batting an eyelid the manager replied, 'That's not the same as being found not guilty, though, is it?'

That hurt Pike and he continued up High Street punching his fist into his palm.

And saw Dwayne Venn and the Tully sisters on the other side of the street. His first thought was to run and hide. But then he realised that would look bad. He had to tough it out like he'd toughed out the past few months in this town, all the whispers and slights and bad-mouthing he'd had to endure.

Besides, if he ran now it would look suspicious. It was he who'd tipped off that female cop, Murphy, about Venn and the lovers' lane rapes. Venn had been doped to the eyeballs around at the Tully sisters' house, bragging about this sheila he'd done over in the Stony Point carpark one night and flashing this matchbox full of pubic hair. Genuine blonde, too.

The Tully sisters-also on dope and giggling-getting a kick out of hearing the sicko brag about it.

It was an on-again, off-again thing, Pike's relationship with Lisa Tully. Sometimes she'd let him visit, other times she'd scream at him, 'I know you killed my baby, you bastard,' and not let him through the door. So that was another reason why he couldn't run and hide. He wanted to keep sweet with her.

He crossed the street breezily and said hello and tried to gauge from their faces whether or not he'd made a big mistake.

'So I usually cut her nails when she's asleep,' Scobie Sutton said.

'Uh-huh.'

'I mean, she's into clothes and hair and makeup, traditional female stuff, you'd think she'd take an interest in her fingernails, let me trim them for her, but no way, Jose. Toenails are even worse.'

They were climbing the stairs to CIB, Ellen beside him with an armful of files.

'Was Larrayne like that as a kid?'

'Like what?'

'Interested in clothes and hair,' Sutton said.

'Not particularly.'

'Is she now?'

Ellen had been distracted, but now mention of her daughter snapped her out of it. 'She's got a boyfriend so, yes, she's into clothes and hair and makeup.'

That reminded Scobie of another of his daughter's quirks and he laughed and said, 'Apparently Roslyn's the main pusher of stick-on earrings in Prep.'

'Uh-huh.'

Scobie Sutton knew that he sometimes bored the others with his stories of his daughter. It was just that she was the biggest thing to have happened to him, and she was endlessly new, an endless revelation. He could sense Ellen drifting away so he tried a different tack, asked for advice.

'I don't know how to help her cope with this triangular relationship she has with two other little girls,' he said. 'She can't bear to be separated from them even though they sometimes gang up on her.'

But Ellen's mobile rang as they entered CIB and she motioned him away and went into her cubicle to take the call.

'DS Destry.'

An immature male voice said, 'Mrs Destry?'

'Yes.'

'It's Skip.'

'Hello, Skip.'

'I just wanted to thank you for returning my jacket. Sorry I wasn't home.'

'That's okay, Skip.'

He paused, then said slowly, 'I'm sorry I vomited and everything.'

'These things happen,' Ellen said, wanting to ask him about ecstasy tablets and amphetamines and whatever else he might have taken at Larrayne's party, or even been pushing to her friends.

'And if my father was a pain I'm also sorry about that.'

Skip seemed decent, plausible, and Larrayne was clearly fond of him, so Ellen wished she could tell him not to burden himself with guilt for what his father had done. Instead she asked if he'd like to come to dinner. There was a pause, then he said yes in a rush and hung up.

She sighed, poured herself a mug of coffee and called to see if the search warrant for Ian Munro's farm was ready.

Tessa Kane had seen the unmarked police car leave the Waterloo aerodrome, Challis in the back seat, Ellen Destry and Scobie Sutton in the front. They'd been conversing animatedly and failed to see her or recognise her car. It had given her a quite peculiar feeling to see Challis like that, unexpectedly, with his colleagues, working, talking about the things he talked about when he worked. When last she'd seen him he hadn't been animated but miserable-looking. Her fault, kind of.

And kind of not her fault. It wasn't as if she wanted to move in with him or anything. She wasn't putting pressure on him. She was simply tired of the baggage he carried around with him, that's all. It seemed to make him a degree or two remote from her when they were together, and she was tired of it. Though God knows it wasn't simple baggage he was carrying around. His own wife had connived with her lover to murder him, after all, and it had almost happened. He was trying to put it behind him but had a way to go yet. She was prepared to wait, but only up to a point.

All in all, she felt put upon today. Just before she'd left the office there'd been an angry caller who'd said he'd been the man with the ferret and until then a loyal friend to the Progress, but now it was no holds barred and she'd better watch her step. It could come at any time, day or night, but it would come, and it wouldn't be pretty. She'd flung the phone down as if it had bitten her.

And more flack about her asylum seekers article. In part she'd been arguing about the power of labels to create and channel public opinion. When an 'asylum seeker' became a 'terrorist', a 'queue jumper', an 'illegal immigrant' or a 'fanatic' he was no longer seeking shelter but an opportunity to destroy, undermine or cheat. He didn't deserve pity but fear and hatred. And now she was learning about labels at first hand. Just a few months ago she'd been an admired critic of the authorities' inability to jail Bradley Pike, a 'seeker-out of the truth', a 'champion' of the Peninsula. Now she was a 'traitor', a 'do-gooding bitch', a 'dyke', a 'fucking intellectual' and too big for her boots.

However, a couple of friends-not Challis, or not yet- had called to say she was 'fearless', so that was all right, though being fearless had nothing to do with it. She was just doing what was right, that's all.

But at the forefront of her mind now, as she drove away from the aerodrome, was the interesting deviation her taped interview with Janet Casement had taken. She'd been after a simple human interest story about a local woman whose plane had unaccountably been rammed by a drunken maniac, putting said woman's life in danger, and at the end, out of nowhere, had come the remark: 'It's not as if I even know this Munro character.'

And then she'd clammed up.

Anne Jeffries lived on two acres of dog kennels on a back road inland of Penzance Beach. It took Challis ten minutes to drive there from the Waterloo police station, and he found himself in familiar territory, a dirt road full of potholes and erupted tree roots. Even with his window up he could hear the kennelled dogs, an ever-present yip and yelp and deeper barking. He pulled up at a box hedge and got out. The property was in an airless hollow and the smell of caged dogs hung heavily around him. He stretched his back. He could see the distant ridge that was Upper Penzance, and orchards, vines and grazing cattle in the middle distance.

In the foreground was Anne Jeffries, coming through an old paint-caked wire gate in the hedge.

'You must be Inspector Challis.'

They shook hands. She was aged about sixty, weather-beaten, white-haired, in overalls, rubber boots and an army surplus forage hat. He couldn't see her eyes, for she wore Anti-Cancer Council wraparound sunglasses with very dark, almost black, lenses.

Then, as if she'd read his mind, she removed the sunglasses, wiped pink-rimmed watery eyes with a handkerchief, and hid behind the lenses again.

'Trouble with the old eyes,' she said. 'Can't stand bright lights of any kind.'

Challis nodded. He had an answer now for the dark tint that had been applied to all of the Land Rover's windows. Convenient for whoever had rammed Kitty's Cessna, he thought. No way of knowing if it had been a man or a woman or even someone known to Kitty.

He got down to business. It didn't take long. Anne Jeffries was in the habit of never locking the Land Rover.

'I mean, this is the Peninsula,' she explained.

Challis wanted to tell her that the old Peninsula was long gone.

She'd gone to bed on Saturday night, heard nothing, woken to find the Land Rover gone.

Hadn't reported it because she tended to be forgetful. Might have left it somewhere and taken a taxi home. Wouldn't have been the first time. Last month she'd parked it at the Bittern railway station and taken a train to Frankston and from there up to the city, and on the way back had got off in Frankston and taken the bus home. 'I'm a silly old moo,' she said. 'Short-term memory all over the place.'

'The dogs didn't alert you?'

She put her head to one side and regarded Challis amusedly, as if to say: use your noggin, Inspector. 'The flaming dogs bark twenty-four hours a day,' she said.

That was all. He drove back to Waterloo.