Challis - 02 - Kittyhawk Down (6 page)

Alan was working from eight until four today, otherwise she might have done her block and shouted, 'Didn't you keep an eye on them
at all
last night?'

She glanced at her watch. Four in the afternoon. He'd be driving home about now. She sighed: she simply felt too fatigued and dispirited to contemplate a row with him later. Besides, in a sense he wouldn't be there but shut inside the dining room to study for another shot at the sergeants' exam. Meanwhile sex had become an infrequent and complicated transaction. Their lives sometimes collided in angry knots but mainly withered in isolation.

She drove on. She could simply have telephoned the Listers and told Skip to call around for his jacket, but she wanted to see where he lived.

Upper Penzance. It was visible from her back yard in Penzance Beach, floating above Five Furlong Road, which marked the top of the ridge above the slope of farmland that separated Upper Penzance from Penzance Beach. Upper Penzance spelt money and a kind of stubborn-yet-stupid exclusivity in the minds of most of the local people. There had been a letter to the
Progress
from one resident, a woman who'd brayed that she and her husband had spent 'a lot of money' establishing their property, and were 'not about to see it spoilt by paved roads, bulldozers gouging out sewage channels or the lopping of more of the Peninsula's magnificent pine tree avenues'.

So that's where Skip Lister lived, in a half-million dollar house with a fantastic view across to Phillip Island, and that's where his father had taken him last night.

There had been another man with Skip's father. No introduction: he'd emerged from Carl Lister's Mercedes, slipped through the cloud-obscured light of the moon into Skip's car, and driven it away. As for Skip's father, he'd slammed the door of his Mercedes in a businesslike way and shaken her hand and gently chastised his son and generally behaved like a responsible, apologetic father. None of the offhandedness that had so angered Ellen when she'd phoned him.

She'd taken one look at Carl Lister and disliked him on the spot. That was why she was delivering his son's leather jacket to his door instead of asking someone to come and collect it.

It wasn't Lister's manner, glossy Mercedes or Upper Penzance address. It wasn't that he was shifty or smelt wrong in any criminal sense, either, for he didn't. And he wasn't like some South Africans she'd met, who'd given off a palpable sense of wanting to firebomb Asians or regretting they no longer had coloured servants to bitch about. No, it was his energy, confidence and general oiliness at that ungodly hour of the morning. She'd watched him stride from his car, throw a stern, bucking-up arm around his son's shoulders and generally take charge, and she'd felt irrelevant and taken for granted. And Skip hadn't liked that arm either. She'd seen the way he cringed beneath the weight and chumminess of it.

Or perhaps she—and Skip—recoiled from the man's impairment. For he'd suffered burns to his face and hands at some stage. They were not particularly disfiguring, but did give a faintly skewed cast to his head, as though he had limited neck movement, and one hand was clenched in a permanent claw-like spasm.

On another man those burns might have elicited sympathy. On Carl Lister they imparted a faint cruelty, encouraged by a grin fit to bruise his face.

Ellen thought that he was probably the kind of man who placed great demands on his son. Not much love there, she concluded as she left Five Furlong Road and made her way along a narrow, potholed track that wound between pottosporums, gumtrees and wattles. There were big houses set well back from the track on either side. Most were two-storey, architectural wet-dreams with tricky bits of modular concrete slabs, corrugated iron or radially sawn weatherboards here and there on the angular walls.

At least the Listers lived in a standard-looking house, even if it did belong more to Toorak or Brighton than the coast. It was Georgian baronial, she supposed, squat and box-like, and reached via a driveway that hooked around a grassy slope set behind an avenue of golden cypresses. The words 'Costa del Sol' had been picked out in mosaic chips on a board fastened to the front gate. Costa Packet, Ellen thought, remembering an old
Punch
cartoon.

The front gate was locked. No answer when she pressed the buzzer next to the intercom.

Ellen crammed Skip's jacket into the letter box then walked along the fenceline until she had a partial view of the rear of the house. Plenty of lawn, mown to within an inch of its life, well-kept shrubs, garden sheds, two vast white concrete rainwater tanks partly buried into an incline, and some other kinds of fancy landscaping, which gave the rear slope a terraced look.

She sniffed. You were always getting the odd unpleasant whiff on rural properties. Weed killer, sheep dip, fuel, creosote.

When Ellen drove back to Waterloo ten minutes later, coming down from the top of Five Furlong Road to where it separated open paddocks from a dismal new housing estate in the middle of nowhere, she thought she saw the man who'd earlier been looking at the sheep. He was standing in the front yard of a new, unfinished-looking brick veneer house, dressed in some kind of uniform and urging a small child to pat a rat-like creature on a lead.

Lunch for Challis on Easter Sunday had been a ham and pickle sandwich washed down by peppermint tea. He let it settle and then took a bucket to gather rotting fruit under the pear trees, but angry bees were feasting inside the shells of the fruit, and the repeated motions of his arms failed to ease his mind, so he wandered down to his front gate in search of a different distraction: his eroded driveway entrance. He lived on an unsealed road. The topsoil had long since washed away, leaving sand and gravel, which in turn was pushed to the verges whenever the shire grader, making its perfunctory sweep, sliced off the tops of the corrugations to create more sand and gravel. The road also sloped uphill from Challis's front gate, and was lined with needle-shedding pines and bark-shedding gums. Whenever there was a downpour the bark and the needles combined with the sand and the water to form dense, clotting mats that blocked the open ditches and stoppered the concrete culvert pipe under Challis's driveway. As a consequence the floods sought new channels of escape, ultimately cutting deep trenches across his driveway and along the road itself.

No one at the shire offices in Waterloo seemed to know who was responsible for his blocked pipe and ditch. Certainly no one was about to admit responsibility for either. He supposed that he'd have to shovel the matted sand out himself. But where should he put it? He was tempted to spread it across the road as a kind of speed trap and invite the shire engineer and the mayor to pay a visit. He was feeling more and more like Tessa Kane's Meddler.

The neighbours were no help. 'You're a police inspector,' one of them said. 'Make use of that. Make the bastards listen.'

The neighbour had pronounced 'bastards' as though wondering, as he said it, whether or not he'd be arrested for swearing.

Challis knew he wouldn't trade on his job to get results. The police were constantly relying on shire officials for information to help their investigations into the citizens of the Peninsula.

He went to work, first shovelling the sodden matter out of the ditch and dumping it under the trees, and then shovelling sand into the washaways. He paused from time to time as cars crept past, nodding hello to the locals. At last the rhythmic motions eased his irritation, and his wife and his lover receded from the forefront of his mind.

By mid-afternoon he'd finished. His hands were blistered. His head pounded. But the sunlight was soft and languid, the air still, and the bellbirds were calling. Then he heard a loud, chaffcutter rattle overhead and looked up. It was a 1942 Kittyhawk fighter. Challis knew the plane, knew the woman who'd restored it. He watched as it banked overhead and turned south-east, presumably for the little aerodrome at Waterloo, and that's when Challis decided to pack in his Sunday afternoon's pottering and head there too, thereby placing himself right at the centre of most of what followed that autumn.

Challis showered, dressed, then set out in his rattly Triumph, steering among the channels and potholes of the road that went past his house. At the Old Peninsula Highway he turned toward Waterloo, passing through a region of orchards, vineyards and ostrich farms which gave way to a scattering of plant nurseries and riding schools, which in turn gave way to the drab housing estates, car yards, furniture barns, pump suppliers and junkfood palaces that lined the outskirts of Waterloo. Just before the police station he turned right, travelling for five kilometres to the aerodrome, where he drove in, passing a Land Rover that was parked on the track outside the entrance gate.

Kitty's Mercedes was parked behind the main hangar. He pulled in beside it and got out. As he approached the metal side door a Cessna began to head along the runway, finally lifting from the ground and clawing skywards. He'd glimpsed the words Peninsula Aerial Photography Services stencilled on the fuselage, and that meant that Kitty had landed and parked her Kittyhawk and taken off again in her Cessna. She made a bread-and-butter income from the cameras fixed to the underside of the Cessna, taking low-altitude shots of farmhouses to be laminated and later hung on study walls, high-altitude shots for the shire's planners and surveyors, and oblique shots of the coastline for publication on postcards and calendars.

Challis stepped into the hangar, making for a partitioned corner that had been set aside for the restoration of old aeroplanes. His 1935 Dragon Rapide was at the far end. He had to pass a wrecked Wirraway, Kitty's latest project, to get to it. Everyone called her Kitty because of the Kittyhawk. Her real name was Janet Casement, and although Challis had a companionable relationship with her they were not close in any sense. There was an air of solitariness about her. Tinged with loneliness? Unlikely, given that she'd got married only six months ago. Perhaps he was reading his own loneliness into her.

He pulled on a pair of overalls, found an FM station on the greasy transistor radio that was strapped to a rusty hook on the wall, and went to work. He didn't mind working alone. He too was guilty of solitary habits and intentions.

Six years earlier he'd found the Rapide lying in pieces in a barn north of Toowoomba, bought it and had it trucked down to Waterloo. So far he'd replaced the splintered, rotted and worm-eaten sections of the airframe and rebuilt one of the motors. He rarely had time to work on the Dragon, but believed that time didn't matter when you were restoring something of beauty. He admired the way the Dragon sat there with its flimsy upper and lower wings outspread and its questing, rounded snout testing the air.

Today he'd work in the cockpit. Most of the instruments needed to be replaced or recalibrated. This was better than gardening or cleaning ditches, and his mind began to sift and refine the clutter of his life, bringing him by degrees to the Floater again.

Specifically, the Rolex watch. Frozen at ten o'clock on the second of the month. Morning or afternoon? He stopped suddenly, screwdriver poised in one hand. Why was he getting bogged down in questions of time? Perhaps he should be considering the watch itself. How rare was the Rolex? Could it be traced?