Kittyhawk Down

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

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.

She learnt little but the tea was refreshing and the woman bright, wry company.

'He worked at the detention centre, you know.'

Tessa stiffened inwardly. 'Yes.'

'My husband thinks those escapees shot Mr Pearce and his wife.'

'I see.'

The woman cocked her head and examined Tessa. Tessa waited, expecting a tirade of nasty opinions, but the woman said, 'Absolute nonsense, of course.' She leant forward across the little kitchen table and clasped Tessa's wrist. 'You keep up the good work, dear. We're a community of narrow minds and empty hearts and shallow pockets where the asylum seekers are concerned.'

Tessa went away thinking that the world wasn't all bad and what a great line that was about minds, hearts and pockets, she should use it, a way of acknowledging and thanking the woman with the grey hair.