by Garry Disher
However, a couple of friends-not Challis, or not yet- had called to say she was 'fearless', so that was all right, though being fearless had nothing to do with it. She was just doing what was right, that's all.
But at the forefront of her mind now, as she drove away from the aerodrome, was the interesting deviation her taped interview with Janet Casement had taken. She'd been after a simple human interest story about a local woman whose plane had unaccountably been rammed by a drunken maniac, putting said woman's life in danger, and at the end, out of nowhere, had come the remark: 'It's not as if I even know this Munro character.'
And then she'd clammed up.
Anne Jeffries lived on two acres of dog kennels on a back road inland of Penzance Beach. It took Challis ten minutes to drive there from the Waterloo police station, and he found himself in familiar territory, a dirt road full of potholes and erupted tree roots. Even with his window up he could hear the kennelled dogs, an ever-present yip and yelp and deeper barking. He pulled up at a box hedge and got out. The property was in an airless hollow and the smell of caged dogs hung heavily around him. He stretched his back. He could see the distant ridge that was Upper Penzance, and orchards, vines and grazing cattle in the middle distance.
In the foreground was Anne Jeffries, coming through an old paint-caked wire gate in the hedge.
'You must be Inspector Challis.'
They shook hands. She was aged about sixty, weather-beaten, white-haired, in overalls, rubber boots and an army surplus forage hat. He couldn't see her eyes, for she wore Anti-Cancer Council wraparound sunglasses with very dark, almost black, lenses.
Then, as if she'd read his mind, she removed the sunglasses, wiped pink-rimmed watery eyes with a handkerchief, and hid behind the lenses again.
'Trouble with the old eyes,' she said. 'Can't stand bright lights of any kind.'
Challis nodded. He had an answer now for the dark tint that had been applied to all of the Land Rover's windows. Convenient for whoever had rammed Kitty's Cessna, he thought. No way of knowing if it had been a man or a woman or even someone known to Kitty.
He got down to business. It didn't take long. Anne Jeffries was in the habit of never locking the Land Rover.
'I mean, this is the Peninsula,' she explained.
Challis wanted to tell her that the old Peninsula was long gone.
She'd gone to bed on Saturday night, heard nothing, woken to find the Land Rover gone.
Hadn't reported it because she tended to be forgetful. Might have left it somewhere and taken a taxi home. Wouldn't have been the first time. Last month she'd parked it at the Bittern railway station and taken a train to Frankston and from there up to the city, and on the way back had got off in Frankston and taken the bus home. 'I'm a silly old moo,' she said. 'Short-term memory all over the place.'
'The dogs didn't alert you?'
She put her head to one side and regarded Challis amusedly, as if to say: use your noggin, Inspector. 'The flaming dogs bark twenty-four hours a day,' she said.
That was all. He drove back to Waterloo.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
This wasn't a homicide, so what was Challis doing there? That's what Ellen Destry read in the faces of Pam Murphy and John Tankard as the two police vehicles met at the entrance to Ian Munro's farm. They were only uniformed constables, so it wasn't a question she was obliged to answer, but it was a useful reminder to her that this was her case and Challis was along for the ride.
The driveway, a narrow track between fenced paddocks, opened onto a broad, flat area scattered with gumtrees, hedges and farm outbuildings. The house itself was set further back in the dank, gloomy shade of massive pine trees. The driveway was the only apparent exit, so Ellen directed John Tankard to seal it off with the divisional van.
Scobie Sutton knocked on the screen door. The man who opened it had the coiled look that many men get when cornered. He eyed them assessingly his gaze flicking from one to the other then resting on Challis as the senior man. 'What do you want and why send in an army?'
Ellen saw Challis shake his head and step to one side. She took over. 'Ian Munro?'
Munro ignored her. He turned to Pam Murphy and John Tankard and said, 'Let me guess-you two stuffed up earlier, so your bosses had to come along and show you how it's done.'
'Are you Ian Munro?' Ellen said.
He shifted his gaze to her with an air of weariness and contempt for her gender. 'So what if I am?'
'I have here a warrant to search your property. That includes all-'
He plucked it from her hands, screwed in into a ball and tossed it underhand to John Tankard. 'Catch, fat boy.'
Ellen stiffened. She didn't want Munro to take control or distract her in any way. She said, 'You have been properly served with a copy of the warrant and now my officers and I will search your property. Do you understand?'
But she felt a tightness inside her and perhaps they all did, for Munro was lithe and full of barely contained power. His eyes glittered, looking for the core of her and easily dismissing it. She read a kind of animal intelligence in him and knew she shouldn't trust or attempt to outguess him.
He grinned. And, grinning, stepped back into the house, slamming the screen door in their faces.
Ellen immediately turned to the others. 'Take out your weapons. He may have a gun in the house. Pam, stay here with Inspector Challis. Tank, around the back. Scobie, come with me.'
She opened the screen door. The interior of the house smelt closed-in and stale. No sun ever penetrated the windows and the walls and linoleum floors looked dingy. No dirt anywhere, just an atmosphere of unhappy use and disappointment. No toys or childish crayons displayed, though she knew there were children in the family. Ellen scoped the front room on the right, Scobie the one on the left, and they met in the hallway again with brief headshakes before proceeding in the dim light to other empty rooms. In the kitchen they found a tired-looking woman who was slumped at the table like a sackful of river stones, moodily playing with a cup of tea and a cigarette in an ashtray. She barely registered their presence.
'Mrs Munro, where did your husband go?'
She didn't answer. She was rawboned and sullen and stared at the window above the sink. An incongruously brand new Miele dishwasher sat white and gleaming under the bench. The benchtop was a dark, pitted laminate, scarcely visible in the weak light coming through the window above the sink. Pine needles hung here and there in the insect screen.
'We know he's somewhere inside. Is he armed?'
Then Ellen heard a shout somewhere at the rear of the house.
It was an old place, the style reminding Ellen of her childhood. The back door opened onto a screened porch, with sleepout bedrooms at either end behind fibro walls. A screen door on a return spring opened onto a couple of mossy concrete steps and a back yard choked with oleander bushes. It was the kind of backroads farmhouse that needed bulldozing, and the Peninsula was full of them.
But what mattered right now was John Tankard. He lay curled up on the ground, gasping for breath.
Ellen crouched with Scobie. 'Tank? You all right?'
'The bastard come at me with a shotgun. Never saw him coming.'
'He shot you?'
'Clubbed me in the guts with it.'
Ellen glanced up and across the yard, trying to spot Munro. A rickety hayshed, an implement shed, a chook shed, a bulk-fuel tank on steel legs, a rusting truck cabin, splintered pallets, bricks, empty apple crates, an incinerator, two bony, chained dogs hurling themselves at her on their chains across the ravaged yard.
Her gaze returned to the implement shed and a hint of movement from the shadowy reaches inside it. A starter motor ground once, twice, and a heavy engine snarled into life.
A Toyota traytop utility fishtailed out of the shed, solid-looking, its heavy steel tray swinging as the big tyres bit into the dirt. An empty drum bounced on the tray and toppled out, and in watching it Ellen almost lost her life, for Munro held the shotgun out of the open win
dow with one hand and fired it at her.
There was nothing they could do. The Toyota disappeared around the front of the house, there was a grinding crash and then another crash, and when Ellen got there and began mentally preparing for a manhunt, she found that the divisional van had been rammed and pushed against the fence.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Ellen got home late, roast dinner warming on a covered plate in the oven, her husband shut away with his books and notes, her daughter and Skip Lister at opposite ends of the sofa as if they'd spun apart when they heard her car in the driveway. The TV was on. After a while Ellen realised that they were watching the 'Movie Show' on SBS, of all things. In this household, that was a first.
She stood there for a while, watching from the doorway, her meal getting cold on the kitchen table behind her. Sensing her interest, Skip said, half apologetically, 'I wanted to see what they had to say about the latest Todd Solondz.'
Never heard of him, Ellen thought. She fetched her plate of congealed roast chicken and vegetables, and a glass of white wine, and perched on the armchair next to the sofa. Skip and Larrayne, she noticed, had edged a little closer to each other. Well, good, she didn't want them to be afraid of her.
'Are you a film buff, Skip?'
'Is he ever, Mum,' Larrayne said warmly. 'Aren't you?' she said, turning her knees toward Skip and touching his wrist fleetingly.
Go on, Ellen urged, cuddle up to him, I don't mind.
Then she saw that Skip was wearing short-legged cargo pants, revealing his shins and a series of bruises. Knocking into things? Falling down? Falling down stoned, or drunk? Beaten by his father, maybe?
At least the 'Movie Show' had him absorbed, his habitual edginess at bay. He was leaning forward, lips slightly apart, and Ellen found herself thinking that Larrayne needed a boy who had a passion about something. She continued to watch him, musing: Skip, I hope you straighten out; I hope you don't let her down or lead her astray.
When the 'Movie Show' was over and Skip had flicked off the TV, she told them about Ian Munro and the arrival of Special Operations police from the city. 'It's in their hands now.'
Skip closed his eyes briefly. Ellen felt an absurd desire to hug him and make everything better, whatever it was, the poor, motherless kid.
Where was the mother, incidentally?
She discovered the answer sooner than she'd expected to. An innocuous question did it. She said, 'Some people at work are going to the opening of the footie season. I can get tickets, if you're interested. Skip?'
He shook his head violently. 'I hate the game.'
And that's when it came out, a much-loved older brother, running around with an undetected heart defect, dies playing football. 'Mum blamed Dad, Dad blamed Mum, they weren't getting on anyway, so she cleared out on us.'
He was nine years old. 'I see her once or twice a year.'
And clearly believed that she'd let him down. Larrayne, overcome, hearing the story for the first time, scooted across the sofa and held him tightly.
And the thought crept into Ellen's head: are Skip and Larrayne close because they feel neglected, taken for granted, loved only absent-mindedly?
To change the subject she poured them each a glass of wine and asked Skip as non-pointedly as possible what he intended to do when he graduated. Chemical engineer, he said, eyes alert suddenly, as though she'd given him a conversational opening. Soon they were talking about drugs and she had some old war stories for them, crimes she'd worked on where drugs were involved. Skip was all ears, a good audience, full of questions, and seemed not to notice the gentle warning she was trying to impart in everything she said: don't buy, don't sell, don't use.
'The better rave parties,' she found herself saying, 'have plenty of water on hand.'
'Yeah, Mum,' Larrayne said scornfully, 'at three dollars a bottle. Some kids can't afford that and when they're high on ecstasy they feel so good they forget to drink water anyway.'
Glancing out of the corner of her eye at Skip, Ellen wondered if rave parties had once been his scene, but he was putting that behind him now. It was something about the way he was nodding sagely as Larrayne talked, Larrayne well and truly worked up.
'The conversations, God, they're so banal,' she was saying. Adopting a dopehead pose and accent, she said: 'I'm so off my face… Yeah, me too, I'm so, like, wasted… '
They laughed.
Encouraged, she went on: 'This kid at school, a dealer offered her five hundred dollars to take ecstasy into a rave party for him-get this, in her knickers.'
They laughed again. The wine was mellow and the outside world far away. Ellen had turned off the ceiling light and in the dim glow of a floor lamp watched her daughter add: 'The security guard wouldn't let the dealer in and he was desperate, had all these clients lined up inside.'
'What did your friend do?' 'She said no.'
Ellen wondered about all the ones who'd say yes and all the security guards who'd turn a blind eye.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
When Pam Murphy arrived for work at eight on Wednesday morning the air was taut with purpose. Special Operations police had reached Waterloo from Melbourne in the fading light on Tuesday, uncommunicative and faintly ludicrous in their square-jawed grimness and brisk, clattering boots- almost, she thought, as though they thought they were in a Mel Gibson film. She passed a couple of them as she walked through the station and wondered how it went. Did the officer in charge of outfitting the different sections of the police force go to see the latest Hollywood cop film and come back with ideas? 'What we need, sir, are those cool baseball-style caps and…'
She attended the morning's roll-call and learnt that she and Tank would not be required to help in the hunt for Ian Munro. They'd been questioned brusquely by the Special Operations commander last night but now it was clear to everyone that the local coppers were expected to return to their small-town, backwoods concerns. Don't call us; we'll call you.
So Sergeant van Alphen assigned her to work the phones and Tank to drive around in the patrol car.
But first she slipped into the canteen, found the guy selling the Subaru, and paid a deposit of one thousand dollars. A new battery fitted, the crack in the windshield repaired, and the car would be hers. Probably later today, all right?
Then to the phones.
The first call came at ten am.
'Waterloo Police Station, Constable Murphy speaking.'
'Is this the cop shop?'
Pam said again, 'Waterloo Police Station. How can I help you?'
'I've just shot my wife and now I'm gonna shoot myself.'
Pam reached for the switch that activated the digital recording. 'Your name and address, please, sir?'
The voice had begun feverishly; now it was manic. 'Didn't you hear what I said? I shot my wife and now I'm gonna shoot myself.'
When they played the tape back later, they heard Pam Murphy pause. You'd be weighing up your options, too. If you tell the guy to calm down, you risk inflaming him. If you go by the book, name and address before anything else, ditto. Treat it like a hoax call, ditto again.
So Pam tried all three approaches at once, saying, 'Come on, sir, take it easy, tell us who you are and we'll sort it out one way or the other.'
It worked. 'The name's Pearce, all right? I live on the estate up near Upper Penzance. Just off Five Furlong Road.'
He gave her his street and number. Pam scribbled furiously, passing it to another dispatcher, adding the words: 'suspected shooting'.
Then she said, 'Sir, Mr Pearce, the gun. Where is it now?'
'In my hand. Where do you fucking think it is?'
'Sir, why don't you put it down somewhere. Take it outside, then go back inside and wait. Someone will be with you shortly. Are there friends or family you could call?'
Later, listening to the tape, someone would note how sustained Pearce's hysteria was, when sudden mood shifts might have been expected. And the list of grievances was too pat: 'Fuck that! The wife tells me she'
s walking out on me, she's spent all my savings, I'm in a shit job. I've had enough.'
'Don't be hasty, Mr Pearce. Now, how badly hurt is your wife? Perhaps she needs an ambulance?'
The voice was incredulous. 'An ambulance? Sweetheart, I've just blown her fucking head off.'
Then the phone went dead.
After that it was out of her hands. CIB were dealing with it-Challis, Sutton and Destry. Pam handled a couple more calls-a lost wallet; kids reported on the railway line-took a tea break and generally daydreamed about her new car. She hoped she could afford the repayments.
The second call came at eleven-twenty. A frail, elderly woman's voice. 'Is that the police station?'
'It is. How can I help you?'
Pam detected embarrassment now. 'It sounds absurd, I know, but I've just had a strange conversation with a little girl.'
Thinking flasher or molester, Pam said carefully, 'I see.'
'On the telephone,' the woman said. 'About an hour and a half ago.'
'The telephone. I don't quite see-'
'I was going to let it pass,' the old woman went on, 'but the more I thought about it the more it seemed that something was wrong.'
'Start at the beginning,' Pam said, tapping the end of her pen on the desk.
'Well, as I said, just before ten this morning the phone rang. I answered and a little voice said, "Hi, Gran, it's me, Clare." And she talked and talked and talked.'
'Yes?'
'I don't have a grandchild called Clare.'
'You don't?'
'No. This little voice says thank you for the birthday present, Gran, I'm looking forward to my party on Saturday, but I've got ballet first, do you want to come and watch me? On and on she went, the dear little thing.'