by Garry Disher
'He said the police don't have to know all my dirty wash Aileen Munro said sulkily. Then: 'Will I have to give it back?'
Challis shook his head. 'Keep it.'
'Good, because it'd be useful. For the bills and that.'
In the car afterwards, Ellen said, 'They were growing marijuana together, or Munro was growing it on Lister's behalf. Then the aerial photograph turns up and they destroy the crop in a hurry, or at least remove the plants and put them somewhere to dry, assuming the plants were ready for drying and processing.'
'But now they can't risk growing another crop,' Challis said, taking up the narrative, 'in case it's spotted from the air again.'
'So they switch to something else: ecstasy, cocaine, amphetamines, heroin, dropped off at sea.'
'But there's rough weather and one of their shipments is washed away or destroyed.'
They fell silent. Scobie was driving, and now he said, 'But how long have they been doing it? Was this the first time? For that matter, was the stuff washed away, or were the goods maybe snatched by someone else?'
Challis pictured Tessa Kane on her Easter walk, trudging along a lonely beach, a strong wind kicking sand into her eyes. A Toyota pickup appears, Munro and Lister inside, clearly angry and suspecting that their drugs shipment had been stolen.
Had the marijuana crop been stolen from them too?
Had Kitty Casement recognised the crop and harvested the plants under the cover of darkness? Had she then monitored Munro's and Lister's movements and got to the seaborne drugs first?
Challis was not surprised to hear Ellen ask, 'Have we got a turf war on our hands?'
Or to hear Sutton ask, 'Do we know anything about Kitty Casement's husband?'
'The smell,' Ellen said suddenly.
'What smell?' Challis said, even as his skin tingled and the hairs stood up on his neck, responding to her.
'There's a distinct chemical smell in the air around Lister's place.'
Challis continued to register the stirring of his skin. 'You're right, I noticed it too.'
'A lab?' Scobie said. 'He's cooking speed in a hidden lab?'
'Cooking something,' Ellen said.
They had reached High Street and the roundabout. 'But where's his lab? I didn't see any sheds there the other day,' Challis said.
'If you walk further along the fenceline you can glimpse part of the grounds at the rear of the house,' Ellen said. 'It's been landscaped, sort of terraced, with cement structures set in the ground. I'd assumed they were retaining walls or underground rainwater tanks, but they could be a laboratory.'
Scobie Sutton mused on it as he parked the car. 'These guys like to steal sinus tablets and process them in labs.'
Challis nodded. They crossed the asphalt surface to the back door of the station.
Sutton went on: 'So was Lister leaving the finished product to be collected, or was he taking delivery of sinus tablets?'
'Don't really know, Scobe,' Ellen said. She grew tired of Sutton sometimes.
Challis stopped suddenly. The others collided with him. 'Hal?' Ellen said, steadying herself, one hand on his upper arm.
'The beach.'
'What about it?'
'Miles of coastline,' Challis said, 'and none of it's been searched. We've been looking for Munro in the wrong place.'
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 cu
t 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?'
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Pam Murphy called it in and detectives and senior uniformed police took control of the scene—and thank God for that, because John Tankard had fallen in a heap. She gave a brief verbal report, then asked if she could take him back to the station.
'You'd be better off taking him to see a doctor,' Sergeant van Alphen said, glancing critically at Tank, who sat weeping on the back porch of the shack. 'Get him tranquillised. Later on he'll have to see a psychologist.'
He looked at Pam then, kindness there somewhere under his wintry features. Not for the first time, Pam was struck by his external resemblance to Inspector Challis: the same stillness and sense of economy, the same dark, intense, considering scrutiny. Except Challis seemed stable where van Alphen had shown last year that he could go off the rails a little. So he should know it when he saw it. Pam watched him look again at Tank and shake his head minutely.
'Sarge?' she said. 'He'll be okay, won't he? I mean, there'll be an inquiry, but there was nothing dirty about the shooting.'
Van Alphen grinned like a shark at her. 'Hell, this is Munro here, dead. They'll give John a medal.'
'Thanks, Sarge.'
'Take him home. No, take him to the station first, familiar surroundings, maybe he'll be up to giving a statement. When the investigators turn up tomorrow, I'll keep them sidetracked for a day or so, give him time to recover.'
'Thanks, Sarge.'
Pam very briefly and discreetly hugged van Alphen, who after a moment's hesitation squeezed her shoulders awkwardly and stared at the ground.
Then she got John Tankard to his feet and begged a lift back to their car from Scobie Sutton, who said, 'Good result, guys.'
He prattled on, praising, talking about the importance of counselling now. Pam knew there was another side to Scobie Sutton, but right now he was a long streak of sweetness and light, as if he should have been a clergyman. 'Thanks,' she said, glad to get herself and Tank out of the CIB car and into their divisional van.
Then back at the station there was more backslapping. She took Tank through to the lockers, telling him to get changed. He was looking stunned, watery eyed, practically had to be led by the hand. Forget giving a statement: she was taking him home.
Except Senior Sergeant Kellock came in then, said, 'Good result, you two,' and took Tank away to make a statement.
So Pam sat there for a while, and thought about Lister, and realised how she could make the loan go away: simply sell the car.
But back out in the corridor she ran into Sergeant Destry, who gave her a cracking smile full of warmth and said, 'Good result today,' and Pam, badly in need of a confessor, found herself saying, 'Sarge, could I have a quick word?'
Ellen Destry was always reminded of her younger self whenever she saw Pam Murphy. Murphy was keen, sharp, ambitious, obliged to put up with lechers and Neanderthals, apt to be secretive and not above stuffing things up.
What she didn't expect to hear was this thing about money: the constant anxiety about it, the lack of it, the hopelessness with managing it. Ellen shook her head, thinking unaccountably of her daughter at that moment, thinking: we keep failing to teach our kids how to live their lives.
Then bad memories came flooding in. Money's going to get me into trouble one day too, she thought, and flushed to think of that time last year when she'd pocketed five hundred dollars that she'd found at an arson scene. It was something she did every once in a long while, usually small amounts belonging to crims and never missed. But it was wrong and she liked to think she'd got on top of her problem. Last year she'd given the five hundred dollars to charity: it had been too hard to take it back to the arson scene. It was a kind of light-fingeredness that lingered from childhood, when she'd lifted lollies and comics from the corner shop after school.
She shook off the memories. 'But I thought Lister was an accountant,' she said now, looking intently at Pam Murphy in the hard chair on the other side of her desk.
'He is,' Pam said, apparently surprised not to get bawled out, her head bitten off. 'But he loans money too.'
'And he loaned you thirty thousand.'
'Yes, Sarge.'
'A lot of money.'
'Yes, Sarge.'
'If you'd borrowed something more manageable, like ten thousand—you can get a decent car for under ten thousand— you wouldn't be in this bind.'
Ellen saw Pam bow her head. 'Yes, Sarge.'
'But you don't want a lecture from me. How are you going to repay the loan?'
Pam looked up and with a crooked grin said, 'I'm going to sell the car.'
'You'll lose money on the deal.'
Pam shook her head. 'Not necessarily. It was newish second-hand, so it had already depreciated in value when I bought it. There's a big demand for Subarus, and with any luck I'll get my money back or make a small profit. If there's any shortfall, I'll borrow it from my mother. Once the debt is cleared, Lister can't touch me.'
You're naïve, Ellen thought, giving the younger woman a pitying look. She turned harsh. 'As soon as we arrest him or even question him about anything he'll say he's had his hooks into you. He'll say you gave him sensitive information in exchange for money and you'll face discipl
inary action and possibly lose your job.'
Her mind drifted as she spoke, so that she was unmoved by Pam's crestfallen face and hot spurt of tears. She was thinking that Ian Munro borrowed money from Lister because no one else would lend to him, got behind in his repayments, and found himself agreeing to grow marijuana for the man.
But was Skip involved? Had Skip been a spy for his father, urged to visit the Destry household and learn all he could of local police intelligence? The thought was too terrible to contemplate. It would absolutely devastate Larrayne.
'Oh, Christ,' she muttered, and came back to reality only when Pam Murphy said, 'Sarge?'
'So, what are we going to do with you?'
'Don't know, Sarge.'
'How much information did you give to Lister?'
'Nothing that wasn't already public knowledge,' Pam said, clearly trying to make light of it.
'The thing is, Constable, you gave him information for gain. That's how it's going to be seen. Doesn't matter how sensitive or worthless that information was.'
Pam Murphy hung her head. 'Sarge.'
'Did Lister say why he wanted that information?'
'He said he didn't want to lend money to people the police were interested in. He was afraid they'd get arrested and he'd never get his money back.'
'Convenient story.'
'Yes, Sarge. The thing is, he only wanted to know about who was involved with drugs, who the police had their eye on locally, the dealers and pushers.'
Ellen nodded. If Lister was setting up or moving in or manufacturing and selling, or even fighting a turf war, he'd want the kind of information that only the police had.
She didn't say any of this to Pam Murphy. Instead: 'The thing is, Lister's name has cropped up in relation to another matter. Your experience with him helps round out the picture for us. Let's keep this under wraps for now. If asked, I will say that you came to me immediately Lister tried to recruit you, and that we decided to go with it and feed him innocuous information until we could see what he intended to do with it.'
