Challis - 02 - Kittyhawk Down (26 page)

'I tried calling you at the station,' Carl Lister said on Monday morning. 'I was told it was your day off.'

'Not exactly,' Pam Murphy said. 'I worked on the weekend, so today I go on at four.'

She was strapping her surfboard to the roof rack of her new Subaru, mobile phone to one ear, listening to him with a lump of apprehension settling inside her.

Lister went on chattily: 'Though how they can let any of you have time off at the moment, I don't know. Have you caught Munro or those escapees yet?'

Lister had a battery of smiles: cheerful, blokish, winking, conniving. Pam could picture his smile now, probably sharkish and bearing no relation to what he was saying. 'I'm not at liberty to say.'

Lister laughed. It came at her harshly through the mobile phone. 'Now, Pam, a little matter that might have escaped your attention, what with manhunts and murders.'

Pam glanced guiltily at her new car. She knew what Lister wanted. She'd gone in to explain her side of things to him the day that Munro had bailed up Tankard in the street, only Lister had been with a client. She'd waited for almost ten minutes then left without seeing him. Still, she said, 'Yes?' in a puzzled voice.

'A little matter of your first weekly loan instalment. It was due last Thursday.'

'Oh.'

'Oh, indeed. Now I must insist on payment by the end of business today, understood?'

It was ten o'clock on a Monday morning, a lovely autumn day, the surf was up, and she was broke.

She began to stammer something when Lister interrupted her. 'If you can't manage payment then perhaps we can renegotiate the terms of your loan to make it easier for you. I'm not an unreasonable man, and you are a police officer, after all, and I have a lot of respect for the police, always have had.'

That was another line she got from time to time. If she wasn't called 'girlie' she was told she was respected because she was a copper. She got it from her landlord, she got it from shopkeepers, and now Lister was at it. For all they knew, she was corrupt, a rowdy tenant, a bad driver, chronically light-fingered.

She certainly couldn't manage her finances.

'When?' she said. She looked lovingly at the waxed surface of her board.

'No time like the present.'

And so she stacked the surfboard in the hallway behind her front door again and drove in to Waterloo, parking the Subaru where Lister wouldn't see her arrive or leave. She didn't know how reasonable he was. He might even commandeer the Subaru, though she doubted he could do that legally. Even so, he could make waves for her, like a quiet word to Senior Sergeant Kellock—for all she knew, they both belonged to Rotary—or an anonymous call to Ethical Standards.

At the street door to Lister's building she glanced across at the bank where Tank had encountered Munro. How would
she
have managed that situation? The way she was feeling now, butterflies in her stomach, she'd have wet her pants.

She pushed through the glass door stencilled with the words 'Lister Financial Services' and went up the stairs. The same receptionist was there, a blonde with big hair and hooked red nails the size of paperclips. God knows how she managed a keyboard or the telephone.

'Yes?' the receptionist said, staring at Pam as if she'd never seen her before.

'Mr Lister is expecting me.'

'And you are… ?'

'Father Christmas,' Pam said, stalking by her into Lister's office, expecting a protest, but the woman was silent.

Lister's office overlooked the street. Lister himself sat with his back to the window, the sunlight, banded by the slats of a venetian blind, falling across his head and shoulders and into her eyes, so that she couldn't see him clearly, and she immediately lost some of her resolve.

He didn't stand for her but gestured airily, 'Sit down, Pam.'

The only other chair was directly in front of his desk. Pam shaded her eyes with one hand and watched him, hoping he'd take the hint.

'Now, your interest payment,' he said.

'I've had a lot on,' Pam said. 'This Munro business, the mur—'

He halted her with his hand. 'I'm afraid that's irrelevant, sweetheart. You entered into an obligation and—'

'Surely I'm not the first one late with a payment?'

She'd heard things about Lister since she'd taken out the loan. How he targeted the battlers, giving loans to hopeless cases and subsequently repossessing their cars and houses; how he'd change pay cheques on the spot, but take a hefty percentage. Not quite a loan shark, no whispers of coming round with a baseball bat to get what was owed him, nothing the police could act on, but there was a strong impression of the predator about Lister nevertheless.

'No, Pam, you're not the first to miss a payment. And you won't be the last. But I—'

'I get paid this Thursday.'

'Do you now?' he said mildly. 'But you'll be a week behind by then and be obliged to make
two
payments, plus your penalty.'

'Penalty,' Pam said numbly.

'It was there in black and white in the contract. You did read the contract?'

Pam mumbled something. She hadn't read the contract, and he knew she hadn't. Tears came unbidden then. She could have been a child again, called into her father's study about something. Her brothers had never been called into his study. They were high achievers, university academics now, like their father. Pam had been good at sport, hopeless at all kinds of other things, and often found herself in her father's study, her father's voice quiet and full of reason, subtly putting her down.

'Pam, I'm a reasonable man,' Lister said. 'I don't like to see you get into a mess.'

She gulped and nodded, willing away the tears, hoping that with the sun banded across her face, he hadn't seen the wetness.

'We can come to some arrangement.'

'Thanks,' she said. 'What kind?'

'Would it help you to go onto a monthly schedule?'

'I don't know…'

And she didn't know. When she'd first negotiated the terms of the loan, the monthly instalment amount had seemed enormous, the weekly instalment much more palatable. But she couldn't even manage the weekly…

'Or you could pay less.'

She glanced at him. 'Over a longer period of time, you mean?'

She thought she could manage that, but to be beholden to Carl Lister for years and years was a terrible thought.

'Quid pro quo,' Lister said, lacing his fingers together over his chest.

'I don't understand.' 'I scratch your back, you scratch mine.' She sat upright. 'I'm not going to sleep with you.' He seemed genuinely astonished. 'God, no, sorry, didn't mean that at all.'

Now she felt bad for offending him. 'Oh. Sorry.' 'No, what I'm getting at is, I'm a businessman, right? I have fingers in lots of pies, I lend money to individuals at all rungs of society, I contribute to the community. Which all boils down to one thing: I'm vulnerable.' She didn't understand.

He flashed her one of his grins, lopsided owing to his facial burns. 'Let's say I lend a young house painter ten thousand dollars to help him over a slump in business. Only he spends the ten thousand to… I don't know, buy stolen goods or finance a drug deal. What happens to my ten grand if he gets busted? Clearly I would have needed to know more about that young man before I lent him money.' 'A private detective could do more than I could.' Lister shook his head. 'I'd need to know if the police were interested in my mythical young man.'

The world went still for a while. Pam Murphy, snitch, mole, spy, informant.

She coughed and said, 'I don't know if I can do that.' Lister gestured, playing it down. 'Piece of cake, Pam. Nothing to it. I'm a discreet man. I won't use the information, I won't say where I got it from, I won't put anything in writing.'

In a small voice she said, 'What do I have to do?' 'Just keep me up to date. Who the police are interested in, whispers, advance notice of raids, that kind of thing.'

Her jaw dropped. 'Sounds like you want to know a lot.'

He shook his head. 'Just where it concerns drugs. That's my main fear, as a lender of money. I like to know what my money is being used for. So, keep me informed of who you're keeping your eye on. I'll make it worth your while.'

'How?'

'Let's say that for the first year your instalments are a measly fifty dollars a week. Think you can manage that?'

She nodded. Fifty? Piece of cake. Relief flooded through her.

'Okay then.'

A search of immigration and airline records on Monday morning showed that a Trevor Hubble, travelling on a British passport, had arrived in Australia a week before the body of the Floater was found. He'd not been reported missing in the UK and was not known to Interpol or Scotland Yard.

Nothing remarkable there. What
was
remarkable was that Trevor Hubble had a credit record in Australia and in fact had been making purchases by credit card for at least a year before he died—purchases in Australia, when apparently he'd been living in England.

But no spending since the Floater was found. Challis had just updated the file on Tuesday morning when the phone rang and Superintendent McQuarrie said, 'All eyes are upon you, Hal.'

Why did McQuarrie always bark down the phone? Challis held the receiver away from his ear. 'Yes, sir.'

'Munro shoots three people,' McQuarrie went on, 'and steals a policeman's gun—it's like he's running rings around us.'

'Sir,' Challis pointed out, 'I've nothing to do with the manhunt. My job is investigating the murders.'

'One and the same, Hal, one and the same.'

Well, no, they weren't, and it wasn't Challis's job to soothe his superintendent. 'Sir, I don't think the murders are related.'

'Have to be. Have to be. What's forensics tell you?'

'It's difficult with shotgun shootings, sir.'

Surely McQuarrie knew that? Ordinarily, the superintendent thought that forensic evidence was everything. In Challis's experience, forensic evidence was often imprecise and forensic experts were rarely expert enough, and in some instances had little or no training, or tried to do CIB's work for them. He didn't say any of this to McQuarrie, but went on to deflect the man, saying he'd seen him on television the night before.

'I thought you handled it well, sir. Impressive. Struck the right note.'

And in his mind's eye saw the man swell and beam on the other end of the telephone.

But he felt the pressure and called a briefing. The Special Operations commander reported first, brief and clipped as if he were a busy man and wanted to get this wrapped up so he could return to Melbourne where the air didn't smell of fishermen and orchardists.

'No sightings of Munro lately, but we did find those illegals,' he said with satisfaction. 'They were camping out at the tip.'

He said it as if he'd expected nothing less, and Challis was pleased to notice distaste in the faces of Ellen, Scobie and a couple of the others.

When the man was gone, Challis asked for updates from the CIB detectives investigating the shooting. 'Scobie?'

Sutton's lean, mournful face grew longer. 'I've been concentrating on Pearce's correspondence with the
Progress
and the shire. Both kept a file of his letters and I've been contacting those people he'd reported for littering, etcetera, etcetera. They were all puzzled, said, "How did you learn about that?" or "I'd forgotten about that". No one seemed pissed off enough to want to kill Pearce.'