Kittyhawk Down ic-2

by Garry Disher

  She sighed and shoved the files to the other side of her desk. Refugees, asylum seekers, queue jumpers, fanatics, terrorists: the inmates of the detention centre were called many things and were hated and feared, but to Ellen they were starved-looking, psychologically frail wretches. The good locals had been outraged when the old Navy barracks were converted, even as the Chamber of Commerce welcomed a shot of federal money and renewed life for the worthless, empty buildings on the piece of marshland beside a mangrove swamp on Westernport Bay. As far as Ellen could see, the detention centre had provided only half a dozen jobs for the locals, lined the pockets of the American corrections company that operated it, and stirred up the local bigots. It had brought no joy to anyone.

  She worked desultorily through the morning, breaking for coffee she made using Challis's espresso pot and stock of Lavazza grounds. Plenty of burglaries and a couple of robberies at ATMs; the thing was, they could be traced back to drugs, to the income needed to feed a drug habit, and they were on the rise, which to her was further evidence of increased drug activity on the Peninsula. She made notes, wondering if they would ever be useful: for example, ecstasy tablets had brand names, the preferred brand was the Euro Dollar, everyone said the Snoopy was no good.

  Around midday, discouraged, she wandered down across the railway line to the High Street shops, looking for something to eat. Most of the shops had shut for the Easter break. There were one or two more empty shop windows, with 'Support Your Local Traders' pasted across the glass. A new $2 bargain shop had opened, making three in two blocks.

  Cafe Laconic was open, three women at an outdoor table talking raucously over the squalls and complaints of half a dozen toddlers and babies. As Ellen passed them, a two year old climbed into his mother's lap, undid her buttons and latched on to one of her breasts. The mother shifted automatically to improve his access to her nipple and kept on talking, scarcely registering that he was there.

  Ellen crossed to the other side of the street. The bakery was open. Next to a rubbish bin outside it was a wood and metal seat, occupied by a gaggle of teenage girls dipping into potato cakes wrapped in butcher's paper. Just then a lowered Valiant crawled by, teenage boys inside, headbanging music detonating in Ellen's ears.

  The car stopped. The boys pressed a pornographic magazine against the rear passenger-side window, a gynaecological close-up pasted to the glass.

  The girls tittered, hid their smiles behind fistfuls of greasy chips, and called out to the boys.

  Not a good look. Those girls would fall pregnant at seventeen to no-hopers like Brad Pike and end up grieving like Lisa Tully, or sitting around like slovenly cows in the main street.

  Ellen sighed. She was being unfair. What was happening to her? What was happening to the Peninsula? Maybe the reminder of Lisa Tully's missing daughter was getting her down. Some cases affect you more than others. When it was a little kid it hollowed you out. You don't forget them but reflect on them at odd moments-in the car, at dinner, with your own kid, watching TV When a kid is raped or murdered it turns everything around. All the goodness leaks away. In fact, you almost stop believing in goodness.

  Scobie Sutton was at home with Beth and Roslyn that day, combing nits out of Roslyn's hair. The TV was on to keep his daughter calm while he did it.

  The best way was to use hair conditioner, really slapping it on like axle grease, then run a special nit comb through it, wiping the gunk off onto tissues. You had to do it several times. You were after not only the lice themselves but also the eggs, which clustered at the roots, often behind the ears or at the back of the neck.

  Roslyn had been infected four times now. It meant that Scobie and his wife had to wash and treat everything each time-towels, bedding, clothing, their own hair. They were fed up. They did the right thing, treated their kid and didn't send her back to school if there was any doubt, but still she got infected. Got infected because the other parents couldn't believe that their own precious little darlings could have nits. Couldn't believe that clean, wholesome families such as theirs could have nits. Dirty people got infected with lice, not them. Well, have I got news for you, Scobie thought, wiping the comb onto a sodden tissue.

  It was worse with girls. They had long hair and liked to lean forward over their little classroom tables, their heads resting against one another's companionably, the lice cheerfully jumping from one little head to the next.

  He wondered who kept reinfecting his daughter. Someone from a slapdash, hard-pressed or ignorant family. Like the Pearce kid, or the youngest Munro kid. Roslyn played with them at school, shared a desk with them, had them over after school. Strange, troubled kids. The Munro kid lived on a farm, the daughter of a bully. The Pearce kid's father kept a ferret. Somehow, it seemed to Sutton, both sets of home circumstances suggested neglect, and therefore head lice.

  He paused for a few minutes, caught by an animated character on TV Why was it that British children's television was obsessed with vehicles that talked and adult characters like Bob the Builder, Postman Pat and Fireman Sam? And what did the dully decent, lower middle-class, nice-cup-of-tea, socks-and-sandals tone of British children's television have to do with childhood?

  'Dad? Daddy?'

  'Mmm?'

  'Daddy?'

  'Mmm.'

  'Daddy?'

  'I said yes.'

  'No you didn't.'

  Scobie breathed out. 'Sweetheart, tell me what you want.'

  'Who do you go for?'

  Scobie didn't understand. 'What?'

  'Jessie Pearce goes for the Bombers,' his daughter said. Her voice rose, growing anxious. 'I don't know who to go for. Who do you go for?'

  She's talking about football, Scobie realised. He loathed football, knew nothing about it, was relieved when a daughter and not a son had been born to him. But now this. 'If Jessie goes for the Bombers,' he said, 'you could too.'

  She absorbed this. She didn't seem satisfied, as though she wanted guidance from him, not Jessie Pearce. Then: 'Can Jessie come over to play?'

  Scobie thought of the strange, silent child of the ferret man and said, 'Sorry, sweetheart, not today.'

  Easter Monday and John Tankard had to fucking work. They were short-staffed because it was Easter, so he was cruising the streets of Waterloo alone, feeling stiff and sore, giving the local hoons the evil eye from the driver's seat of the divisional van.

  He was making short forays into the housing estates and industrial park and down High Street-where he saw Sergeant Destry; now, she had a good set of tits on her-but mostly he kept close to the Fiddler's Creek pub, (a) because he had an arrangement with the bottle-shop manager for one slab of beer a week, and (b) because he'd seen Bradley Pike's car in the carpark.

  He tried to picture it but couldn't. Everyone hated Pike. Who would want to sit with him? Who would want to drink with him? Everyone knew he'd offed his girlfriend's kid and hidden the body. Probably raped the poor little brat as well.

  Tankard intended to follow Pike when he came out, stick hard on his tail all day, thoroughly rattle the useless prick till he made a mistake, broke the law and could be arrested.

  But the next time Tankard swung by the pub, Pike's car was gone. And it was a different guy working the bottle shop. Fuck it all. Tankard slammed his fist on the dashboard in frustration. At times like this he knew why men went bananas with a gun.

  He was driving along a rutted lane behind the industrial estate when he found a Land Rover, doors open, tinted windows, loose wires hanging underneath the dash.

  Pam Murphy had Easter Monday to herself. She could have gone to Point Leo to surf but the buses were infrequent because of the holiday and the surf beach would have been packed with maniacs, so she stayed in Penzance Beach. Anyway, she didn't like the look of the sky. Squally wind, darkening clouds, pretty choppy out on the water.

  Tomorrow with any luck the cheque from Lister Financial Services would clear and she'd have access to $30 000. One of the community policing officers at Waterloo was sellin
g a Subaru Forester with roof rack, air-con, power steering, genuine 50 000 km on the clock. No more taking the bus to surf beaches.

  Except she had a problem with money. A problem holding on to money. The police credit union had turned her down for a loan and so had a couple of banks, so she'd gone to Lister Financial Services and borrowed thirty grand. Fifteen per cent interest instead of the ten per cent a bank would have charged for a personal loan, so not too bad, could have been worse. The trouble was, she'd agreed to weekly repayments and, even though the loan cheque was still to clear, she'd signed the papers last Thursday, so the first repayment was almost due.

  Time to manage herself better. For example, she could cut down on buying something each time she went to Ikea or Freedom, stop flying to places like Bali for holidays, stop buying CDs and books for a while.

  The Meddler, Mostyn Pearce, walked along Ian Munro's fenceline to see if the starving sheep were still there. They were. He hoped the RSPCA would get their act together soon. Its being Easter shouldn't stop them from investigating.

  He made to go on but two things changed his mind. First, the electronic bird-repelling gun was booming about once every two minutes in the orchard at the bottom corner of Ian Munro's property, and it was getting on his nerves. Two, there was a small car parked by the road, a man and a woman with plastic buckets walking head down beneath the pine trees on either side of the road. They were ethnics. Somewhere from Europe, judging by their features and the shape of their heads. Suddenly the woman stooped, flashed a knife and straightened holding a pine mushroom, which she dropped into her bucket. That figured.

  So he turned and went back down Five Furlong Road, passing the estate where he lived and heading toward an intersection where Five Furlong Road met four other roads. One curved downhill into Penzance Beach, one went to Waterloo, one to Mornington and the other was a dirt lane that skirted farmland and gave rear access to Upper Penzance.

  It was a bad intersection. It needed a roundabout. Pearce liked to stand there sometimes and watch the idiots endanger themselves through careless driving or failing to heed the give-way signs.

  He was there for five minutes when the car coming down the track from behind Upper Penzance swerved and instead of slowing for the give-way sign actually skittled it, snapping it off at the base and running right over it, the sign bashing and scraping against the underside of the car.

  Then it braked violently and a man he recognised from one of the big houses in Upper Penzance tumbled out of the driver's seat, brushing agitatedly at his clothing.

  The Meddler was close enough to see the spider fly off and land in the grass. A big one, too. Probably dropped onto the guy's lap from behind the sun visor.

  Then the car drove off again and Pearce took out his pad, noted the time, date, registration number and other details. He'd go to that big house and get the guy's name from his letter box or the mail in the box itself. Then he'd write a letter to the shire-which must, he thought, spend thousands of ratepayers' dollars each year replacing signs because it never knew who to fine.

  He was halfway home and the driver's face kept swimming into his consciousness. He was sure he'd seen him in another context recently. The face was a bit different and it was in connection with something dark or unpleasant.

  Then he remembered where. On that 'International Most Wanted' program he'd taped on pay TV.

  An Easter Monday afternoon in early autumn. Early fall.

  Challis watched a red persimmon leaf fall to the grass like a clumsy butterfly. On the tree they glowed like paintings but on the ground or pasted to his gumboots they merely looked lifeless. He glanced around his yard. Buttery sunlight, the air drowsy and still, but an autumn storm was brewing and this morning when he'd gone to collect the paper from his mailbox he'd seen strips of bark all over the road.

  He put away the rake. He drove to the aerodrome at Waterloo, wondering at his motives.

  Kitty wasn't there.

  In fact, as he was working on the instrument panel of the Dragon a man and a teenage girl wandered in, asking where they could find 'the lady who gives joyrides'.

  'We had an arrangement,' the man said, his face shiny, hard, stubborn. 'My daughter turns sixteen today.'

  'Sorry,' Challis said, 'but she had a bad scare yesterday, and her plane's been damaged. She probably won't be coming in today.'

  No gasps of concern. No is-she-all-right? Just irritation.

  'But I paid a deposit. I want a refund.'

  'Try calling her next week.'

  'We came down here from Dandenong special,' the man said.

  Challis shrugged, wiped his hands on a rag. 'Sorry.'

  The man glowered. After a while he fished in his wallet and said, 'This is my card. Could you give it to her, ask her to call me?'

  Challis didn't want to climb out of the cockpit of the Dragon so nodded his head toward Kitty's workbench on the other side of the hangar. 'Leave it over there,' he said, and went back to work.

  When next he looked he was alone again and the man's business card had fallen onto the oily floor.

  Challis sighed, climbed down and retrieved the card. Kitty had always pinned invoices, business cards, brochures and photographs to the pinboard above her bench. He looked for an unused thumbtack and his eye was drawn to a cluster of aerial photographs that Kitty had taken for one of her clients. They were curled and dusty and poorly composed. Presumably they'd been rejected by the client.

  But one photograph in particular attracted a closer look. It showed a patchwork of pine plantation, open farmland, dam and vineyard, stitched together with roads and tracks. A typical Peninsula landscape, in fact.

  Except for the cannabis plants, showing deeply and richly green under a dun-coloured canopy of eucalyptus trees.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Tuesday. School and work again for most people. The morning school-run served to anchor Scobie Sutton, reminding him that he was more than a CIB detective. He was one of the other parents, a citizen of the district and, most importantly, Roslyn's dad. He'd sing along to a Hi-5 tape with her as they drove to school, walk her to the Prep I classroom ('I' for Inger, Roslyn's prep teacher), natter with the other parents, make sure that Roslyn recognised the hook for her blue, surely-too-big backpack, then exchange a hug and kiss with her and a cheery goodbye with the other parents before returning to his car and the drive to Waterloo.

  The other parents. Mums, mostly. April now, relatively early in the year, and they were still sussing him out. Scobie forced them to acknowledge him. He learnt their names, made sure they knew his (though not that he was a copper), made eye contact with them and engaged them in conversation. Most were thawing to him, but they still had unvoiced questions for him. He could read it in their faces. Are you a single father? If so, why? Why aren't you at work? Are you unemployed? A male parent, alone with a female child. Is it safe to let my daughter go to your house to play with your daughter after school?

  He'd got to the school early one morning and a classmate of Roslyn's had said, 'Come and see the koala.' So they'd made their way along the path, red-brick pavers winding between tan-bark islands, shrubs, gumtrees and classrooms, to a solitary gum beside the After School Care room. There was a pink hair tie at the base of the tree, a dewy school windcheater draped over a pine rail nearby.

  Scobie looked up. Sure enough, there was a koala halfway up the tree. And sure enough, the mother of the other child was soon hoofing it toward him, darting suspicious looks at him, as though he might spirit her kid away.

  Scobie wanted to say nastily, 'Is there a problem?' but felt small and mean. That mother-any mother-was right to be wary. Even so, he was in no hurry to inform them that he did have a wife, and if not for her job up in the city, which obliged her to leave home at seven-thirty am and get home at six-thirty pm, she'd gladly be sharing the school run with him.

  You didn't usually get fathers making the school run but one was there this morning, Mostyn Pearce, a thin, narrow-faced, agitated-lookin
g individual, dressed in jeans, trainers and a Collingwood football jumper. His daughter, Jessie, pale, weedy, undernourished-looking, stood clutching his leg, ducking her face away when Scobie caught her eye. In any other child it might have been an appealingly shy gesture, but by some twist of heredity it was unappealing in Jessie Pearce.

  Leaning against the man's other leg was a ferret on a lead. The child and the ferret were perfect reproductions of the man: slight, edgy, sly, quick, a mass of nerve endings.

  The other children were drawn to but afraid of the ferret, and stood watching in a cluster some distance away. Scobie heard Pearce say, 'It's all right, he won't bite.' There was impatience in his tone, as though he spent his life explaining things to people who were slow, obtuse or careless. His gaze skittered over Scobie's, taking in everything, settling on nothing.

  Scobie stood alone for a few minutes, smiling and nodding as mothers arrived with their children. He said a breezy hello half a dozen times, but no one approached him. Eight-fifty am… Inger would be opening the classroom door soon. Older children raced past, yelling. It was a cheerful, nourishing sort of school, but there were no black or Asian faces, no round veiled faces, and-judging by the tone of the weekly newsletter and other take-home notices-no sign that a feminist perspective had reached this far south.

  He listened to the conversations around him. Did you go away for Easter? Footie season soon. The kids dragged their heels this morning. How would the blooming mayor feel if he had a detention centre on his doorstep, that's what I'd like to know…