by Garry Disher
'Hal.'
'Published any scoops lately?'
'Scoops is a relative term in a weekly paper, Hal.'
'Boss, I said you were busy and—' 'That's okay, Ellen,' Challis said.
'She says she's got information.'
'Got it, or want it, Tess?'
Tessa Kane's voice was low and deep and faintly amused. 'Both.'
'When's your next issue?'
'Thursday. Then we miss an issue between Christmas and the New Year, and publish again on 4 January.'
Challis said. 'A lot can happen.'
'Hal, a lot has happened.'
Challis watched her stand and smooth her skirt over her thighs. She was shorter than Ellen Destry, always full of smiles, many of them false and dangerous, others lazy and uncomplicated. He liked her plump cheeks. Women disliked her. Challis had no opinion on the matter, beyond knowing that he had to watch what he said to her.
'This information you say you've got,' he began.
She cut him off. 'Can we do this in there?'
'The incident room? Tess, please.'
She grinned. 'Just a thought. An office, maybe, instead of here in the corridor?'
Challis turned to Ellen. 'Sergeant, let's take Miss Kane into your office, if that's okay by you?'
He saw Ellen sort out the implications. He was including her, not giving her the shove, so she said, 'Fine with me, sir.'
The office was a plasterboard and frosted-glass cubicle further along the corridor, and once they were inside it Tessa Kane turned and said, 'I was hoping—'
'This is Sergeant Destry's station, her office, her investigation— as my offsider. So, whatever it is you want to tell me, you tell her, too.'
'Suit yourself.'
They watched her take a clear plastic freezer bag from her briefcase and lay it on the desk. 'This came in the post this morning.'
A few lines of crisp type on a sheet of A4 printer paper. Challis leaned over to read through the plastic:
This is an open letter to the people of Victoria. I would be loosing faith in the Police if I were you.There running around in circles looking for me. What have they got? One body. But where's the second?Gone to a watery grave? And now there's going to be a third. She's in my sights.
'Oh, God,' Ellen said.
Are you scared yet? You ought to be.
'Envelope?' Challis said.
Tessa Kane took out a second freezer bag. He poked at it with a pencil, turning it so that he could read it. He sighed. Block capitals. There would be no useful prints, and no saliva, for the envelope was pre-paid, with a self-sealing flap, and available at any post office. He saw the words, 'Eastern Mail Centre', but no other indication of where it had been posted.
'You got it this morning, and you waited until now to show us?'
'Hal, I was out all day. It was left on my desk and I didn't open it until a few minutes ago.'
He looked at her closely. 'Have there been any others?'
'No.' She hooked a wing of hair behind her ear. I think the spelling tells us a little about him.'
Ellen had been itching to say something. 'Not necessarily. He's probably trying to muddy the waters. Look at the tone, the way he uses short sentences for effect, the way his constructions are uneven, the words "a watery grave", the apostrophes. I'd say he's had a reasonable education and trying to make us think he hasn't.'
Sniff. 'You're the expert.'
Challis stepped in. 'We'll need to examine the letter, Tess.'
'No problem. I made a copy.'
'You're not going to publish, I hope.'
Her voice sharpened. 'He's talking about a third body, Hal. People have a right to be warned.'
'We haven't even found the second body yet,' Ellen said. 'Jane Gideon might be alive, for all we know.'
Challis backed her up. 'Your letter writer might be a crank, Tess. An opportunist. Someone with a grudge against the police.'
He regarded her carefully, and saw that she understood the implications.
'You're not holding out on me?'
'I swear it.'
'But can I say the police think there may be a link between the first two?'
He sighed. 'There may not be, but there probably is.'
She muttered, 'Not that quoting you does me much good if you arrest him before Thursday's issue.'
I can't help that.'
She looked up at him. 'People are scared, Hal. This morning I had a call from a real estate agent saying he's had a couple of holiday cancellations. I checked with the caravan park and the camping ground. Same story. A lot of the locals depend on summer tourists.'
'Tess, we're doing everything we can. We're following leads, checking our databases. As soon as there are any developments, I'll give you a call ahead of anyone else.'
She touched the tips of her fingers to his chest and very lightly pressed him. 'Would you? That'd be great, even if you do sound like a police spokesperson.' She stepped away from him. 'Well, Christmas soon. Season's greetings and all that.'
'You too.'
She turned to Ellen. 'Someone's been distributing leaflets about Constable Tankard. Anything you can tell me about that?'
'No.'
'Okay. Bye now.'
When Tessa Kane was gone, Ellen said, 'I hate people who say "Bye now".'
'Ah, she's okay. You just have to know how to handle her.'
'Hal, don't get in too deep.'
He frowned. 'Are you my nursemaid now?'
'I mean the police-media thing, not your private life.'
Challis was embarrassed. 'Sorry.'
'I'll get this letter off to the lab.'
'It won't tell us anything.'
'I know.'
Canteen gossip soon spread the word about John Tankard's attempt to book Challis, so he was foul company that afternoon— as if he wasn't touchy enough already, owing to that leaflet campaign against him. Pam Murphy trod delicately around him during the ground-search of the Jane Gideon abduction site. Being diverted to attend a domestic dispute with him, on their way back to the station, was the last thing she wanted. Tankard's method of policing domestics was the bellow and the clip around the earhole.
She drove through the late-afternoon heat. A week before Christmas, and four months of hot weather lay ahead of them, the heat giving a particular spin to local crime. Your burglaries increased, as people went on holiday or left windows open to catch a breeze. Cowboy water-haulage contractors stole water from the mains. Brawling increased—in the home, the pub, the street; outside pinball parlours; on the foreshore on New Year's Eve. Surfies reported thefts from their vans. Weekend farmers drove down from Toorak and Brighton in their BMWs and Range Rovers on Friday evenings and discovered that someone had emptied their sheds of ride-on mowers and whipper-snippers, or their paddocks of cattle, sheep, horses, angora goats. And now another highway murder.
'Next right,' Tankard said. He sounded keen, as if he could sense an arrest.
Pam turned the corner. The arrest rate was part of the problem. The sergeant was always urging a higher arrest rate, saying it was too low for the region. It's not as if we're in the inner suburbs, Pam thought, tackling knife gangs. Down here a quiet warning should be enough.
Still, she thought, I'm the rookie here, what do I know?
She braked the van gently about halfway along the street. There was no need to peer at house numbers: the focus of the drama was obvious, a gaggle of neighbours on the footpath. She pulled in hard against the kerb, pocketed the keys, and got to the front door of the house before Tankard could.
It was ajar. She knocked. 'Police.'
The man who came along the corridor toward them wore a bathmat of body hair on a white, sagging trunk. His feet were bare, his knees like bedknobs under threadbare shorts. Someone had scratched his plump shoulders. He'd also have a black eye by the evening. 'Look, sorry you were called out, but we've got it sorted.'
Pam said, 'I'm Constable Murphy, this is Constable Tankard. Who else i
s in the house, sir?'
'Just the wife, also the—' John Tankard shouldered through. 'We need to see her, pal.'
The man retreated in alarm. 'She's—'
Pam saw worry under the weariness, the poverty and the beer. She touched Tankard's forearm warningly and said, 'Constable Tankard and I just need a quick word with your wife, sir, if you don't mind.'
The man twisted his features at her. 'Look, girlie, I—'
It had been a long day. Pam pushed her face into his and breathed shallowly. She got 'girlie' twenty times an hour at the station; she didn't need it from some civilian as well. 'Are you obstructing us in our duty, sir? Because if you are—'
A priest appeared from a back room. 'It's all right, it's all right. I'm talking to them. We're sorting it out. There's no need for police intervention.'
'See? Told ya.'
Pam hooked her finger. 'Father, could I have a minute?'
She took the priest out on to the lawn at the front of the house. Tankard scowled after her. She ignored him. 'Father, I'm as anxious as you are to avoid trouble.'
The priest nodded. 'Everything's calm now. The fellow's wife has a history, a personality condition. Sometimes, when it's been hot for a few days, things get on top of her and she snaps. That's what all the ruckus was about. She hit him, not the other way round.'
'How is she now?'
'Quiet. Ashamed. She hadn't been taking her pills.'
Pam walked with the priest back to the front door. 'Sir, we won't be taking any further action.'
Tankard was furious with her in the van. 'We should have talked to the wife.'
Pam explained. Tankard said nothing. He said nothing the whole way back to the station, not until he saw Inspector Challis outside the station, getting into his car to drive home.
'Arsehole.'
There had been a time when Challis wanted to write a book about the things he'd seen and known and done, a lot of it bad. Fiction, because who'd believe it if he tried to pass it off as fact? He'd studied with a novelist at the TAFE College in Frankston, Novel Writing, every Wednesday evening from six until ten—when he wasn't on call somewhere, staking out a house, feeling for a pulse, arresting someone who didn't want to be arrested—but soon realised that although he had plenty to say, he didn't know how to say it. It was locked inside him, in the stiff language of an official report. He couldn't find the key that would let the words sing on the page. He'd confessed all of this to the novelist, who congratulated him, saying, 'My other students either have nothing to say or never realise that they haven't got a voice, so count yourself lucky.'
Challis had smiled tiredly. 'You mean, you count yourself lucky you're not stuck with one more bad writer.'
The novelist laughed and invited him to the pub to say goodbye.
But one thing stuck in Challis's mind—a quote from a writers' handbook. Georges Simenon, author of the Maigret novels, had said: 'I would like to carve my novels in a piece of wood'. Challis felt like that now. As he drove away from the Waterloo police station at six o'clock that evening, he thought that he'd like to be able to stand back from this case, his life, and gauge where the shape was pleasing and where it was all wrong.
He turned right at the sign for the aerodrome and splashed the Triumph into a parking bay at the rear of the main hangar. He went in. One end had been partitioned off, and here Challis pulled on a pair of overalls, tuned in to Radio National, and went to work.
When he'd first moved to the Peninsula, he'd joined the Aero Club and learned of a Dragon Rapide lying in pieces in a barn north of Toowoomba. He'd paid ten thousand dollars to buy the wreck and a further fifteen hundred to have it trucked down to Victoria. There was a serial number, A33-8, as well as an old VH registration, but Challis knew nothing else of the particular history of his aeroplane. He knew that in 1934 de Havilland had flown the prototype at Stag Lane, in the UK, as a faster and more comfortable version of the DH84 Dragon, with Gipsy Queen 6 motors instead of the Gipsy Major 4s, but who had imported his Rapide, and what had she been used for?
He turned on a lathe. Several pieces of the airframe had been damaged, sections of the plywood fuselage casing were lifting away, the six passenger seats had rotted through, and both motors would need to be rebuilt. He was also attempting to find new tyres, and had asked a machinist to manufacture a number of metal parts to replace those too rusty to be restored. It could all take years. Challis was in no hurry.
A woman came in, smiling a greeting. 'The dragon man.'
'Kitty.'
Challis knew that Kitty wasn't her real name, but derived from Kittyhawk. They exchanged pleasantries, then Kitty fetched overalls from a hook on the wall and went to the other end of the partitioned space, where the fuselage of a 1943 Kittyhawk fighter sat on the concrete floor, next to an engine block. The only other restoration project in the room was a 1930 Desoutter, which was close to completion.
Challis returned to his lathe work. Behind him, Kitty began to remove the sludge from the engine block. It was companionable working with her. Challis felt some of the blackness lift away. He didn't have to account for himself here. He didn't have to apologise for, or hide, his obsession with the Dragon. Here it was as if he didn't carry his whiff of people who had died terribly or committed terrible things. He was simply Hal Challis, who liked to fly aeroplanes and was restoring a 1930s Rapide.
The moon was out when he finally drove home. The eyes of small animals gleamed in his headlights. The telephone was ringing in his hallway.
'Yes.' He never said his name.
'Hal?'
His sense of calm left him. Some of the day's badness came leaking in to take its place. He dropped onto the little stool beside the phone. 'Hello, Ange.'
She didn't speak for a while. 'An early Merry Christmas, Hal.'
'You, too.'
'I thought, I might not get an opportunity to ring you next week. Everyone here will be hogging the phones on Christmas Day, so I thought, why not call you tonight, get in early.'
'Good thinking,' Challis said. He wished he had a drink. 'Look, Ange, I'll take this in the kitchen, okay?'
'If this is a bad time I'll—' 'No, now's fine, just wait a moment while I go to the kitchen.'
He poured Scotch into a glass, stood the glass on the bench top, stared a moment at the wall phone next to the fridge, then let out his breath.
'I'm back, Ange.'
'I'm trying to picture your house.'
'It's just a house.'
A catch in her voice. 'Not that I'll ever see the inside of it.'
'Ange, I—'
'I imagine somewhere peaceful and quiet. I miss that.'
'Yes.'
'I'm not a bad person, Hal. Not deep down inside.'
'I know you're not.'
'Temporary madness.'
'Yes.'
'I can't really believe it all happened like that. Like a bad dream.'
'Yes.'
'You do forgive me, don't you?'
I forgive you.'
The answers came automatically. He'd been giving them for years.
She said, in a wondering voice: 'You're an unusual man, Hal. Other husbands wouldn't forgive their wives, not for something like that.'
Challis swallowed his drink. 'So, Ange, will your mum and dad come on Christmas Day?'
'Change the subject, why don't you? Mum will, Dad won't. He doesn't want to know me.' She broke down. 'God, seven years, and he hasn't been once to see me.'
Challis let her cry herself out.
'You still there, Hal?'
'I'm here.'
The night was still and dark. The house was like an echoing shell around him.
'You don't say much.'
'Ange—'
'It's okay, Hal, I have to go anyway. My phonecard's almost used up.'
'Take it easy, Ange.'
I shouldn't be here, Hal. I don't belong, not really.'
Challis said gently, I know.'
'It's not as if I did anyt
hing. Conspiracy to murder, God, how did I know he'd try it?'
'Ange—'
She sighed. 'Spilt milk, eh?'
'Spilt milk.'
'Get on with my life.'
'That's the spirit.'
I can't believe I wanted him instead of you.'
Challis drained his glass. He said, 'Ange, I have to go now. Take it easy, okay? Keep your spirits up.'
'You're my lifeline,' his wife said.
THREE
That same night, a woman on Quarter horse Lane jerked back her curtain and saw that her mailbox was burning. Now the pine tree was alight, streaming sparks into the night. God, was this it, some twisted way of telling her that she'd been tracked down?
She'd been briefed carefully, eighteen months ago. Never draw attention to yourself. Keep your head down. Don't break the law—not even drink driving or speeding, and especially nothing that will mean you're ever fingerprinted. Don't contact family, friends, anyone from the old days. Change all of your old habits and interests. Dress differently. Learn to think differently. You liked collecting china figurines in the old days, right? Went to auctions? Subscribed to magazines? Forget all of that, now. Switch to sewing, cooking, whatever. It's good to give people a box to put you in—stereotype you, in other words, so that their minds fill in the gaps in your new identity. Above all, don't go back, not even if you get word that your mum's dying. Check with us, first. It could be a trap. You make one mistake, or ignore what we've been telling you, they'll find you and they'll kill you. You've got a new ID; it's pretty foolproof; you'll do all right. You'll be lonely, but plenty of people start over again. Just be wary. Watch what you tell people. But you'll be okay. Plenty of New Zealanders in Australia, so you won't stand out too much. Meanwhile we'll do what we can to keep you alive from our end.
That's what they'd told her. She hadn't made much of an effort. There hadn't seemed much point, because the situation had begun to unravel even before the plane that was to take her out of the country had left the ground.
She'd been in the departure lounge of Christchurch airport, eighteen months earlier, seated with the detective assigned to escort her across the water and into a new life, when two men from her old life had waltzed in and sat down nearby. The detective tensed. He knew who they were, all right.
