by Garry Disher
'Do you know where he is?'
'No.'
'Can you tell us anything about him? Movements, habits… any photographs?'
She was thinking glumly, holding her chest and wheezing a little. She glanced up. 'I've got a mobile phone number somewhere.'
In the end it was Sutton who got up and went into the kitchen for her, coming back with a buttery address book. He looked up 'Billings' and wrote the number in his notebook.
'Try it,' Challis said.
'He's probably changed the number by now, people do that, they chop and change companies.'
'These days you can keep your number even if you change companies,' Louise Cook said, watching them with brightening eyes. She's enjoying this, Challis thought.
'Let me try it,' he said, fishing for his mobile phone.
Scobie read him the number, he dialled, and a calm English voice crackled in his ear immediately: 'Rex Casement.'
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Back in the Displan room in Waterloo, Challis called Ellen at home, saying he needed her for an urgent briefing, and when they were all gathered he took them through the Casement story as he saw it. 'So,' he concluded, 'we got him because he kept his old mobile phone number.'
They shook their heads. They'd seen it time and time again. This was a variation on Kellock's illegal parking theory. Ellen said, 'He simply announced his name?'
'Yes.'
'How does he keep track of who he's supposed to be?'
'This guy is focused. He has to be.'
'Except he kept his old phone number.'
'Except for that.'
'What did he say?'
'Very cagey. Wanted to know how I'd got his number. I'd thought of hanging up, saying wrong number, but I thought that would look more suspicious.'
And so Challis had improvised, telling Casement that he was simply doing his job, that he was sitting in a call centre full of similar operators, going down a list of mobile phone numbers on behalf of a charity. Who gave you the list of numbers? Casement had demanded. Challis had said he didn't know, he was just doing his job, but maybe the phone company itself had sold the list. 'Bastards,' Casement had said.
'So I apologised and got off the phone quickly.'
'He didn't recognise your voice?'
'Don't think so. Not in that context.'
'So who is he?'
'I've contacted Scotland Yard, asked them to look into the names Casement and Billings. Given that he used original documents to pass himself off as both names, it's possible they're actual people—who might or might not be dead now.'
'So we're looking at him for killing his wife?'
'And Trevor Hubble,' Challis said, perching on the table next to the whiteboard. 'Let's deal with Hubble first. Suppose Casement is on the run. He comes to Australia using the name Billings, meets Hubble, and takes on Hubble's identity when Hubble gets homesick and returns to England. But then Hubble gets restless again and returns to Australia, so Casement/ Billings feels threatened. He takes Hubble out on his boat, kills him, leaves the St Kilda house and moves down to the Peninsula. He meets Kitty and they get married. Being married was good cover and gave him some badly needed legitimacy.'
He paused. 'We need hard evidence. His boat, for starters. We know from Louise Cook that he had one. Does he still have it? Where is it moored? Can we get a warrant to search it? Hubble's fingerprints would be nice.'
'Global positioning system,' Scobie said suddenly.
'What's that when it's at home?' asked van Alphen, who was there on loan from Kellock.
'Something to do with navigation. It can tell us where the yacht has been, and when.'
Challis pointed to van Alphen. 'Van, I want you to find the yacht and get a warrant to search it and examine its global positioning gizmo. There's also the matter of the anchor used to weigh down Hubble's body. Has it turned up yet?'
They shook their heads, unsurprised by the world. Cops stole or misplaced or borrowed evidence all the time. Who would miss an anchor? Why would it ever be needed again?
'Next, Janet, his wife,' Challis went on. 'It's possible that she got too nosy, or twigged to who he was, or maybe she'd been in on the deal from the start and had become a liability. Either way, it was an opportunistic killing because it could be blamed on Munro.'
'Maybe she was bringing unwanted police attention home with her,' Ellen said. 'First when Lister rammed her plane, then when we found the photograph.'
Van Alphen scoffed. 'So why kill her and guarantee police attention?'
'Sympathy, not suspicion,' Challis said. 'And it could be that he stands to gain in other ways. Scobie, I want you to look into their finances. Does Casement have money of his own? Did Kitty? Does Casement inherit? How much? Did he take out any insurance policies on her life lately? And so on.'
Scobie and the others made to close their folders and go, but Challis held up his hand. 'Not yet. There's the matter of the Meddler and his wife.'
He could see sceptical faces watching him. 'Bear with me. Lister told us that he didn't shoot them or order them shot, and I believe him. He also said that Munro talked of killing the lawyer, but not of killing the Meddler and his wife. Why be coy about them? He also said nothing to Lister about shooting Janet Casement. I think Rex Casement goes to the top of the list for the Meddler shootings as well.'
'Motive?'
'This is the Meddler we're talking about. He got up people's noses. He dobbed them in or threatened to. What if he found out who Casement really was?'
'If he did, why didn't he report him to the police?'
'Frustration?' Challis said. 'Greed? Perhaps he thought he could profit from it in some way, try a bit of blackmail. He's not going to try blackmailing someone who dumps rubbish or doesn't feed his sheep, but Casement was a different kettle offish. If he's living under assumed names then it's probably for something big, like fraud—something worth blackmailing for.'
'So we need to hear back from Scotland Yard?'
'And we need to go back and search the Pearce house again,' Challis said. 'Ellen, you come with me. The rest of you, you know what to do.'
They were crossing the carpark when his mobile phone rang.
'Inspector Challis? You gave me your number just in case.'
'Who's talking?'
'Louise Cook.'
'Yes, Louise.'
'Um, I think I did something stupid. But I was that mad.'
Challis clenched inside, knowing what to expect. 'What did you do?'
'I rang that mobile phone number I gave you. Billings answered and it definitely was him, even though he gave a different name.'
'And?'
'And I got mad at him. Told him I knew he killed Trevor.'
'Christ.'
'Look, I'm really sorry. It's just I felt—'
'When?'
'What?'
'When the bloody hell did you call him?'
'There's no need to be like that. I did the right thing, I called you straightaway, soon as I realised it was him.'
'But you warned him, and now he'll run and now your own life is in danger. Christ.'
'What? What do you mean?'
Challis forced himself to be calm. 'I hope you didn't tell him where you live. Tell him you wanted money in return for silence.'
'If that's the thanks I get for—'
'Goodbye,' Challis said, snapping his phone into his pocket and telling Ellen, run.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
'How's John Tankard?'
'Not too bad,' Pam Murphy said. She was driving, Challis beside her, van Alphen and Ellen in the back seat.
'Is he getting counselling?'
Challis sensed resistance in her. She's protecting her own, he thought. She doesn't like this line of questioning. She drove expertly, at speed, along the coast road toward Penzance Beach and the turnoff for Upper Penzance, and deflected him: 'Will Casement run, sir?'
'He has before. He'll have a contingency plan, new ID to slip into.'
'Do you think he'll be there?'
'I hope so, but drive like the clappers even so.'
'Will he be armed if he is?'
'There's a good chance.'
And so they were armed. And armed backup would follow behind them as soon as Senior Sergeant Kellock could muster some more uniforms. Unfortunately there were officers down with the flu and others attending at a four-car pile-up at the corner of Myers and Coolart roads. The Meddler had been right about that intersection: why the hell had they installed give-way rather than stop signs?
Challis watched Pam Murphy brake and corner with a flick of the wheel onto Five Furlong Road. There was something a little staged about the manoeuvre, something a little self-conscious. She'd driven pursuit cars in her last posting; she was still young enough to want to show off. She wanted to join CIB but the uniform allowed her to do the fun stuff, like drive at speed, siren on, telling the world to step out of her way.
'Damn, there he is,' Challis said.
This part of Five Furlong Road was narrow, rutted, pot-holed, with treacherous gravel verges. Two cars passing from opposite directions were obliged to slow to a crawl and pull over to the side, outside wheels in the ditch if that were shallow enough. If not, you risked bottoming out and scraping away your sump and exhaust system. But Casement, in the familiar Mercedes station wagon that his wife had driven, was not slowing, pulling over, stopping. Pam swung into the bracken between two peppermint gums, bouncing the chassis over clumps of hardened mud cast up by a shire grader, while Challis craned his head around to peer through the rear window at Casement, who had flashed past, churning up a dense blanket of gritty dust. They heard small stones ping against the rear of the police car.
'Quick,' Challis said, immediately regretting the obviousness of it.
'I am, sir,' Pam said, showing irritation and anxiety in the face of his scrutiny.
She spurted forward, looking for a farm gate, nosed in, reversed, then a horn brapped sharply. Before she could complete the turn and demand right of way, a Telstra linesman passed, his van top-heavy with ladders. Challis read alarm in his face and then he was past them and they were crawling behind him. He seemed panicked to have the police on his tail, to be hindering them, and slowed to a walking pace; but the edges were soft gravel, and overhanging branches threatened to tear off his ladders. Challis's own road resembled Five Furlong Road. At least once a year he called the shire's emergency number to fetch the tree-removal crew. Why none of the neighbours ever called it in, he didn't know.
'Sound your siren,' van Alphen said from the back seat.
'It's all right,' Challis said. 'He knows we're here, he'll pull over when he can.'
Beside him Pam Murphy flashed him a look of thanks.
Then they were past the van and picking up speed. Dust lingered. They reached the intersection with the coast road and Pam said, 'Sir? Left? Right?'
The answer came to Challis. There was something neat and ironical about it. 'The aerodrome. We know he can fly.'
Pam laughed. 'I've got visions of chasing him up and down the landing strip.'
It should be possible to box him in, Challis thought. The Waterloo airfield was laid out in a simple T-shape, aligned north-south and east-west. Plenty of grass between the strips and the perimeter fence, like a large open paddock, hangars to one side, a couple of gates, cyclone fence.
'And if he's not there?' Pam said.
'Better call it in,' van Alphen said, taking out his mobile phone and murmuring, then shouting to be heard, finally shutting down the phone and pocketing it.
'I can never get a decent signal around here,' he said. 'The Peninsula's full of dead spots.'
They ignored him. Pam hammered the police car along the coast road back to Waterloo. Challis guessed they'd lost about two minutes back there on Five Furlong Road. Casement would have put on speed when he saw them. He would have guessed they were after him. Was two minutes enough time to fire up a plane?
Which plane?
The Cessna? It was being repaired in a separate hangar. Challis didn't know if it was ready or not.
The Kittyhawk? The Kittyhawk would give him speed, but also stand out everywhere, and you didn't just step into an old war-era cockpit and trundle out onto the strip to take off.
They were there in nine minutes. If Pam Murphy had been driving at the safe—let alone the legal—limit it would have taken them at least fifteen minutes to reach the aerodrome. She braked at the dirt road outside the perimeter fence, fishtailed at the gate, swung through.
It was late afternoon by now, the place had almost shut down for the day, and it was apparent that Casement wasn't there.
'Shit. Sorry, sir.'
'Don't stop,' Challis told her. 'He'll have driven into a hangar.'
Pam accelerated, spurting between the hangars to the landing strip itself, and now they could see an open hangar door and the dusty Mercedes deep in the shadows. She braked and they piled out, Challis directing them.
'We can't be sure when our backup's going to arrive, so Van and Ellen, you check the planes,' he said, pointing to a dozen light aircraft parked on an asphalt clearing beyond the hangars. 'Pam, you come with me. All of you be ready to draw your firearms, but warn him first, the usual drill.'
They spread out and began the search. Five minutes passed, then ten, and as the evening light spread from horizon to horizon, filling the aeroplanes and hangars and their hidden niches with tricky shadows, Challis began to wonder whether they were too late, if Casement was already in the air, maybe having hijacked the pilot of a plane that had been about to take off.
Stupid. He should have checked with the ground staff.
And now it was the end of the work day for the ground staff. He could see them driving toward the gate one by one in a motley collection of family station wagons, four-wheel-drives and small Japanese sedans, craning their necks to see what the drama was.
'Blast!' Challis said.
He ran back to the police car, remembered the keys too late, was about to look for Pam Murphy, double-checked the ignition, saw she'd left the keys there.
He got in, fired up the motor, chased after the departing ground staff. They'd left the airfield itself and were driving in single file on the dirt road that led to the main road. Challis gunned the motor and swung out onto the grass to pass them, sideswiping a tree along the avenue of gumtrees before veering across the nose of the first car and braking, effectively cutting them all off.
Piling out with his service revolver held in two hands up next to his head where it could be seen, Challis then motioned for the cars to stop, the drivers to get out. A woman slipped out of the first car, very jittery and, following Challis's gestures, ran for the shelter of the gums. Then a man got out of the second car and scurried away in a half-crouch, and two men got out of a little Daihatsu, but the driver of a Land Rover just sat there staring at Challis, hands fixed tightly to the wheel.
When the other drivers and passengers were free of their cars, Challis advanced on the Land Rover, down the left flank so that the abandoned cars gave him some cover.
He approached until he was behind a Holden a few metres away from the Land Rover and saw that the driver was the head mechanic and that he was trembling. Challis paused, called out: 'Is Casement there with you?'
The man nodded.
'In the back seat?'
Another nod.
'Armed?'
A final nod, the mechanic clenched tight with fear, and it was then that Challis saw the shotgun emerge between the gaps in the seats and press upwards into the hinge of the mechanic's jaw.
'Casement? Can you hear me?'
The window went down, the twin barrels swung away from the driver, and Challis's answer was a blast from the shotgun. He ducked and heard the pellets humming over his head and slamming into the flank of the Holden.
There was no second shot until he raised his head. This time the blast was better aimed, the shot flying low, peppering a rear tyre
and zipping about his feet, branding his right shin bone and calf.
Challis ran before the pain could set in, ran before the blood slopped in the bottom of his shoe, ran before Casement could reload or prove to him that he had a magazine full of shells.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
In the middle of the questioning, the paperwork, his patching-up visits to the hospital over the next three days, Challis's wife killed herself, and his first thought was: I'm tired of all the dying.
Succeeded in killing herself, to be precise, sleeping pills this time, stolen and accumulated when she was recuperating in the prison hospital, the pills succeeding where sharpened plastic and half-hearted cutting motions had failed to work.
She left a note blaming him but he didn't feel any responsibility and went to the funeral and stared at the coffin, feeling nothing but pity for Bob and Marg, who clung to his arms and said how sorry they were.
Sorry for their daughter, sorry he'd been shot, holding his arms as much in need of support as to offer support and sympathy to him, with his bandaged leg and hospital crutch.
But that was on the third day. Hours of fruitless questioning had come before that, Challis with a temporary hospital patch-up on the first evening, so that he wouldn't lose the momentum with Casement, then a session in surgery while they removed the pellets, then back for another swipe at Casement.
Who'd had a lawyer right from the start, an overweight, heavily suited, idly contemptuous-looking man who slumped precariously in the plastic interview room chair. 'My client freely admits to attempted abduction and various weapons charges, but he denies killing anyone.'
'Ian Munro shot my wife,' Casement said, looking relaxed. 'For all I know, he also shot the Pearces. As for Trevor Hubble, I don't know anything about that.'
'You admit to knowing him, though.'
'Years ago.'
'Two years, in fact. You were business partners, you took over the business when he returned to England, but then he came back last October and you killed him because you'd taken over his identity and he was a threat to that.'
