Kittyhawk Down

CHAPTER FORTY

'A bit nipple out,' Tankard said, shoulders hunched against the chilly wind. Four-thirty in the afternoon, a warmish autumn, how come it was so cold here on the beach?

He trudged on with Pam Murphy, glancing at her chest for a glimpse of hardened nipple-too much clothing-then looking at her face to see how she'd taken the nipple comment. Didn't even crack a smile. She was restlessly scanning the ti-trees for signs of Ian Munro. Like, was he going to pitch a tent in the bushes? Tankard had hoped, after his tearful visit to her place the other day, that she'd chill out a bit with him today. He could still feel her comforting arm around his shoulders, smell the talc in her dressing gown before she'd changed into jeans and a windcheater.

Now here she was in a uniform as stiff and impractical and out-of-place as his own, ploughing along getting sand in her shoes, cursing occasionally, ignoring him. The thought came into his head from nowhere: what would it take to get you to love me?

Love? Going a bit far there, mate.

So Tankard hunched his shoulders a little more, plunged his hands into his pockets, tried to avoid the kelp and the dog shit.

He'd never been a beach person, never been to this stretch of sand before. Penzance Beach seemed to merge with Myers Point, yet on the map they were separate places. A handful of costly holiday houses ranged up and down the cliffs, but mostly he was looking at the flat areas in between, where tiny fibro shacks, nestled in ti-tree clumps, sat right on the edge of the sand.

Their job was to doorknock and look for signs of life or break-and-enter in the apparently empty houses, search any caves they might see in the sides of the cliffs, check out the yacht club, see if anyone was camping, talk to people. Other uniformed police were scouring the empty stretches toward Point Leo in one direction and the navy base in the other. According to Sergeant van Alphen at the briefing, CIB had urged Special Ops to search the beachfront but these requests had been shrugged off, so this was purely a Waterloo operation. There was backup in the form of two patrol cars in radio contact.

Autumn, a chilly wind blowing in off the bay, the place was practically deserted. Every single holiday house was shut up, there was a geezer sewing a torn sail at the yacht club, the ti-trees were impenetrable, one or two retirees walked their dogs, but that was it.

'Everyone else has more sense than to be walking on the beach today,' Tankard said. 'A bloody long shot, if you ask me.'

Pam ignored him. She was treating the exercise as if it was a dead certainty that they'd find Ian Munro and return to the station as heroes.

Come to think of it, she'd hardly said boo since they came on shift. Charging along as though obsessed, face set in an unyielding expression, not interested in talking.

'Cat got your tongue?'

A seagull slipped down the channels in the sky above him and shat at his feet.

'Did you see that? Christ, we need danger money.'

She forged on as if he'd not spoken. He had to hurry to keep pace with her, and his vast inner thighs chafed, his breathing was laboured, he felt sweaty despite the cold wind. 'Oi, slow down, will ya?'

She ignored him.

'What's got your knickers in a twist?'

He hoped he hadn't got her knickers in a twist. Hoped she didn't regret taking him in and comforting him. His eyes pricked with tears to remember the pain he felt that day, and still felt sometimes, and which she'd kindly soothed away.

'How's the new car?' he called, knowing that was a safe topic.

If anything, she increased her pace, her back stiffened, her swinging arms positively punched the air around her.

Christ, what had he said wrong now?

Maybe she'd pranged it already. Maybe it was a lemon and kept breaking down. Piece of Japanese shit, give him a V8 Holden any day.

Suddenly she stopped. 'What?' he demanded.

They were at the base of a sheer cliff. On either side of it there was scrub, but the cliff-face itself was yellowish stone and clay. Behind them the sea frothed over rocks that would sandpaper your skin off, the Penzance Beach shop lay to the east, Myers Point around a headland to the west. Tankard and Murphy were alone now, and for the first time he felt spooked.

'What?' he said again.

She pointed at a narrow bit of farmland separating the two townships. 'There's a house up there. Abandoned. Overgrown with creepers and stuff.'

He didn't know of any house on the cliff-top. 'You sure?'

'There's a path here somewhere,' she said, and she veered away from the stony face of the cliff and into the dense ti-tree and bracken thickets at the base. He followed her, and soon they were swallowed up in cool, mysterious hollows and cut off from the sounds of the wind and the sea. The path zigzagged, slowly traversing a gentler slope of the cliffs. The only sound was their breathing, and the sunlight, heavily filtered by the dense canopy of leaves, lay like coins at their feet. Tankard was taken back to the dim recesses of bedtime stories, and shivered.

At the top they broke out into a blackberry thicket and there was the house, of grey, weathered, mouldy fibro and rusted corrugated iron, choked by ferns and bracken. Torn flyscreens on the windows, a torn flyscreen door, bricks missing from the chimney. Tankard glanced again at the chimney. Munro wouldn't be stupid enough to light a fire. The smoke would be a dead giveaway that someone was staying in the house.

But Munro was there. Tankard could feel it in his bones and whispered, 'You stay here, I'll circle around the back.'

'And?'

He hadn't thought that far ahead. He was prepared for events to find their own course, but glanced at his watch and said, 'Allow two minutes, then we both knock and shout, "Police, open up".'

She shrugged. 'It's a plan. But we were told not to approach but to call it in.'

'No time,' Tankard said. He held up his finger, whispered, 'Two minutes,' and began to circle to his right, where the undergrowth was less dense.

And came upon Ian Munro outside the back door of the house, standing waiting for him on a patch of hard-packed, grassless dirt, apparently amused as Tankard blundered around the corner. 'Blundered' was how Tankard replayed the scene in his head later, but right now Munro had a shotgun pointed fair and square at his chest and was full of lean, muscular contempt.

'Hello, copper.'

Tankard froze.

'Don't learn real quick, do you, sunshine?'

Tankard found that his hands were in the air.

'How many of you?'

Tankard swallowed and managed to say, 'A whole heap.'

Munro considered this. 'I don't think so. One other, maybe. Take your gun out-I see they gave you another one.'

That was when Pam rapped her fist on the door at the other end of the house and called, 'Police,' but it all sounded impossibly far away to John Tankard. Had it really been two minutes? He seemed to inhabit a dream. He saw Munro, momentarily startled, swing the shotgun toward the house, and he seemed to watch his own hands stop clawing at the sky and drop to his holster to unstrap his service revolver. It was smooth, by-the-book, but impossibly slow, and the shotgun swung round on him again to fix on his defenceless chest.

Tankard got his gun out and fired, then dropped it because it kicked so much and numbed his fingers. The shotgun roared, the shot spraying with a whump above his head, and then Munro was collapsing.

When Pam Murphy found him, Tankard was standing over Munro, streaked with tears, asking her over and over again: 'What have I done?'