Last year someone had gone around placing anonymous leaflets on windscreens complaining about John Tankard's Nazi stormtrooper tactics. He flushed. 'Can I come in?'
'No. Why?'
'Pammy please, I'm falling apart here.'
And she must have seen something in his face and manner that convinced her, for she gave him a subtle look of understanding and stood back as he stepped past her into the house. She was wearing pyjamas. Half of him was thinking, God I want a piece of that, and the other half wanted to grab hold of her for dear life and cry his heart out.
'Five minutes tops, okay?' she demanded.
'Okay,' he mumbled, and he watched her disappear into her bedroom and come back wearing a dressing gown guaranteed to kill all desire.
So he talked to her mate-to-mate about his bewilderment, his shame, his loss of nerve, and how it was all down to Ian Munro.
And she listened, mate-to-mate.
This time Dwayne Venn was there when Brad Pike called round to see Lisa Tully.
'If it isn't little Bradley.'
'Gedday.'
'Come in, son, come in.'
Two o'clock on Tuesday afternoon and the house was doped up, curtains drawn, air dense, Lisa and Donna sprawled on the floor, high as kites.
He had a lot of catching up to do, hadn't had a hit of anything since yesterday, and eyed the bowl on the coffee table. You had your speed there, your ecstasy, your hand-rolled joints, even-if he wasn't mistaken-a baggie of coke and heroin in a twist of aluminium foil.
Plus your bottles of Southern Comfort.
It all felt right, somehow. All of a piece with the Native American posters and the Confederate flag and Dwayne's Harley Davidson parked in the hallway.
'Got something to chill me out?' Pike asked.
'Have we ever,' Venn said, and slowly, over the next hour or so, Brad Pike began to unwind and talk and enter into the spirit of things. The last time he'd had the undivided attention of anyone in this town was when the cops had grilled him about Lisa's kid.
After lunch on Tuesday Ellen rang her husband and said, 'Alan, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said what I did.'
He didn't respond and she pictured him there in the kitchen, heavy jaw set hard against her, swotting for the sergeants' exam. It was not that she owed him an apology. It just made sense to apologise. She figured that if she could keep things sweet at home until after the exam, then he'd manage the exam better and life would be easier on everyone.
Then he coughed and said, 'Okay.' Not 'Thank you' or 'It was all my fault,' just 'Okay,' so she put some brightness into her voice and asked, 'Did Skip call?'
'No.'
Overnight, it seemed, Skip had dumped Larrayne. He'd not called her, taken her out over the weekend, or responded to the messages that Larrayne had recorded on the Listers' answering machine. Larrayne was distraught. 'What did I do wrong?' she'd wailed. 'Has he met someone else?' The dialogue out of a bad romance novel, but heartfelt and anguished even so.
'Okay, just checking in, hope it goes well today,' Ellen babbled, still playing the guilty one, and she hung up, almost banging the phone down.
And now it was the afternoon and she wanted a word with Aileen Munro.
She got to the farm in time to see Carl Lister trying to shake off a handful of journalists. He was in his car and looked ropeable enough to ram them but recognised her and called her name. 'Ellen, can't you do something?'
She got out of her car and approached them. 'Come on, guys, let the man leave.'
'But what is he doing here?' they wanted to know. 'Is he a friend of the family? Does he know where Ian Munro is?'
All good questions, Ellen thought. She cleared a path for Carl and was about to ask him how Skip was, had he gone on a trip, Larrayne would appreciate a call, but he sped away before she could get the words out. She gave a wry shrug to the waiting journalists, who mobbed her good-naturedly.
'Sergeant Destry, any news on Munro?'
'Any chance of an interview, Sergeant?'
'Is there a reason why you're calling on Mrs Munro at this time?'
And so on.
She grinned and turned away from them. As she did so she came face to face with Tessa Kane, the editor of the Progress. Ellen nodded. 'Tessa.'
'Ellen.'
There was a pause; then, to let Tessa know that she sympathised with her position on the asylum seekers, Ellen said, 'Did you hear? They found those poor Iraqi men camping at the tip.'
Tessa flashed a bleak smile of thanks. 'They'll go into solitary confinement and eventually be deported.'
Ellen didn't know why, but she said, 'I don't know where Hal is today. Following up something, somewhere.'
Tessa shrugged. She didn't seem to care. Instead, she said, 'Who was that man in the car just then?'
Ellen considered the question. There seemed to be no harm in saying, 'Carl Lister. He's more or less a neighbour. Why?'
'Oh, no reason,' Tessa Kane said, and Ellen knew at once that there was a very good reason for the question.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Challis worked until four on Tuesday afternoon and then drove to the aerodrome, intending to work on the Dragon's cockpit for a couple of hours before he went home. Home these days meant early- or late-evening darkness, his answering machine full of his wife's hysteria, a comfortless instant meal- for he was often too tired to care about cooking-and a barely refreshing sleep before he got up to a chilly morning, the sun weak through the leafless trees in his back yard.
Home could also mean Tessa's place. The opening was there, but he still felt vaguely disconnected from her. And in today's Progress she'd been scathing about the community's selective hysteria, its focus on the asylum seekers and blindness to the things that really affected the local community, like the increased dealing and pushing of drugs. She was on the warpath and when she was like that, seeing the world in black-and-white terms, he felt that his lack of fire would show, and she'd be disappointed in him.
Oddly enough, she'd published the Meddler column- probably hadn't had time to pull it before going to press, he thought.
At the aerodrome he could forget himself for a while. Draw comfort from working with his hands. Maybe Kitty would be there.
What did he think he'd do-save her from a loveless marriage? Who said it was loveless? He wanted it to be loveless. A big difference. Or they could have an affair. That would suit a man who has good reasons to shy away from commitment.
But it's all in my head, Challis thought, when he walked into the hangar and saw Kitty Casement and got a preoccupied smile and wave from her and nothing more. 'Catching up on paperwork,' she called, waving an invoice at him, her voice losing itself in the hollow reaches of the high steel walls and oil-stained concrete floor.
'Have fun,' Challis called back, climbing into his overalls and hauling himself onto the Dragon's bottom wing.
And slowly he felt better. He managed to forget himself for a while, one part of his mind absorbed in mapping out the stages of a physical task, the other dreaming of a time in history, 1942, when this very aeroplane had helped ferry Dutch refugees, who were fleeing the Japanese invasion of Java, from Broome to Perth. Or earlier, 1934, when a Vacuum Oil Company geologist had flown it over tricky magnetic country in the remote desert region of central and northern Australia.
That's where the history stopped. Challis had no idea how the Dragon had subsequently come to be a wreck in a barn near Toowoomba in Queensland.
They called it synchronicity, didn't they? Or something like that. For just at that moment Kitty rapped her knuckles on the fuselage and when he'd uncoiled himself from beneath the instrument panel and poked his head out, he saw her waving a book at him. 'This came in the post,' she said.
Challis straightened the kinks in his back and climbed out to join her. The book was evidently self-published, everything about it looking amateurish, rough and ready, including the photograph on the front cover.