Garry Disher - Kittyhawk Down

Challis shook his head. 'Keep it.'

'Good, because it'd be useful. For the bills and that.'

In the car afterwards, Ellen said, 'They were growing marijuana together, or Munro was growing it on Lister's behalf. Then the aerial photograph turns up and they destroy the crop in a hurry, or at least remove the plants and put them somewhere to dry, assuming the plants were ready for drying and processing.'

'But now they can't risk growing another crop,' Challis said, taking up the narrative, 'in case it's spotted from the air again.'

'So they switch to something else: ecstasy, cocaine, amphetamines, heroin, dropped off at sea.'

'But there's rough weather and one of their shipments is washed away or destroyed.'

They fell silent. Scobie was driving, and now he said, 'But how long have they been doing it? Was this the first time? For that matter, was the stuff washed away, or were the goods maybe snatched by someone else?'

Challis pictured Tessa Kane on her Easter walk, trudging along a lonely beach, a strong wind kicking sand into her eyes. A Toyota pickup appears, Munro and Lister inside, clearly angry and suspecting that their drugs shipment had been stolen.

Had the marijuana crop been stolen from them too?

Had Kitty Casement recognised the crop and harvested the plants under the cover of darkness? Had she then monitored Munro's and Lister's movements and got to the seaborne drugs first?

Challis was not surprised to hear Ellen ask, 'Have we got a turf war on our hands?'

Or to hear Sutton ask, 'Do we know anything about Kitty Casement's husband?'

'The smell,' Ellen said suddenly.

'What smell?' Challis said, even as his skin tingled and the hairs stood up on his neck, responding to her.

'There's a distinct chemical smell in the air around Lister's place.'

Challis continued to register the stirring of his skin. 'You're right, I noticed it too.'

'A lab?' Scobie said. 'He's cooking speed in a hidden lab?'

'Cooking something,' Ellen said.

They had reached High Street and the roundabout. 'But where's his lab? I didn't see any sheds there the other day,' Challis said.

'If you walk further along the fenceline you can glimpse part of the grounds at the rear of the house,' Ellen said. 'It's been landscaped, sort of terraced, with cement structures set in the ground. I'd assumed they were retaining walls or underground rainwater tanks, but they could be a laboratory.'

Scobie Sutton mused on it as he parked the car. 'These guys like to steal sinus tablets and process them in labs.'

Challis nodded. They crossed the asphalt surface to the back door of the station.

Sutton went on: 'So was Lister leaving the finished product to be collected, or was he taking delivery of sinus tablets?'

'Don't really know, Scobe,' Ellen said. She grew tired of Sutton sometimes.

Challis stopped suddenly. The others collided with him. 'Hal?' Ellen said, steadying herself, one hand on his upper arm.

'The beach.'

'What about it?'

'Miles of coastline,' Challis said, 'and none of it's been searched. We've been looking for Munro in the wrong place.'

'A bit nipple out,' Tankard said, shoulders hunched against the chilly wind. Four-thirty in the afternoon, a warmish autumn, how come it was so cold here on the beach?

He trudged on with Pam Murphy, glancing at her chest for a glimpse of hardened nipple-too much clothing-then looking at her face to see how she'd taken the nipple comment. Didn't even crack a smile. She was restlessly scanning the ti-trees for signs of Ian Munro. Like, was he going to pitch a tent in the bushes? Tankard had hoped, after his tearful visit to her place the other day, that she'd chill out a bit with him today. He could still feel her comforting arm around his shoulders, smell the talc in her dressing gown before she'd changed into jeans and a windcheater.

Now here she was in a uniform as stiff and impractical and out-of-place as his own, ploughing along getting sand in her shoes, cursing occasionally, ignoring him. The thought came into his head from nowhere: what would it take to get you to love me?

Love? Going a bit far there, mate.

So Tankard hunched his shoulders a little more, plunged his hands into his pockets, tried to avoid the kelp and the dog shit.

He'd never been a beach person, never been to this stretch of sand before. Penzance Beach seemed to merge with Myers Point, yet on the map they were separate places. A handful of costly holiday houses ranged up and down the cliffs, but mostly he was looking at the flat areas in between, where tiny fibro shacks, nestled in ti-tree clumps, sat right on the edge of the sand.

Their job was to doorknock and look for signs of life or break-and-enter in the apparently empty houses, search any caves they might see in the sides of the cliffs, check out the yacht club, see if anyone was camping, talk to people. Other uniformed police were scouring the empty stretches toward Point Leo in one direction and the navy base in the other. According to Sergeant van Alphen at the briefing, CIB had urged Special Ops to search the beachfront but these requests had been shrugged off, so this was purely a Waterloo operation. There was backup in the form of two patrol cars in radio contact.

Autumn, a chilly wind blowing in off the bay, the place was practically deserted. Every single holiday house was shut up, there was a geezer sewing a torn sail at the yacht club, the ti-trees were impenetrable, one or two retirees walked their dogs, but that was it.

'Everyone else has more sense than to be walking on the beach today,' Tankard said. 'A bloody long shot, if you ask me.'

Pam ignored him. She was treating the exercise as if it was a dead certainty that they'd find Ian Munro and return to the station as heroes.

Come to think of it, she'd hardly said boo since they came on shift. Charging along as though obsessed, face set in an unyielding expression, not interested in talking.

'Cat got your tongue?'

A seagull slipped down the channels in the sky above him and shat at his feet.

'Did you see that? Christ, we need danger money.'

She forged on as if he'd not spoken. He had to hurry to keep pace with her, and his vast inner thighs chafed, his breathing was laboured, he felt sweaty despite the cold wind. 'Oi, slow down, will ya?'

She ignored him.

'What's got your knickers in a twist?'

He hoped he hadn't got her knickers in a twist. Hoped she didn't regret taking him in and comforting him. His eyes pricked with tears to remember the pain he felt that day, and still felt sometimes, and which she'd kindly soothed away.

'How's the new car?' he called, knowing that was a safe topic.

If anything, she increased her pace, her back stiffened, her swinging arms positively punched the air around her.

Christ, what had he said wrong now?

Maybe she'd pranged it already. Maybe it was a lemon and kept breaking down. Piece of Japanese shit, give him a V8 Holden any day.

Suddenly she stopped. 'What?' he demanded.

They were at the base of a sheer cliff. On either side of it there was scrub, but the cliff-face itself was yellowish stone and clay. Behind them the sea frothed over rocks that would sandpaper your skin off, the Penzance Beach shop lay to the east, Myers Point around a headland to the west. Tankard and Murphy were alone now, and for the first time he felt spooked.

'What?' he said again.

She pointed at a narrow bit of farmland separating the two townships. 'There's a house up there. Abandoned. Overgrown with creepers and stuff.'

He didn't know of any house on the cliff-top. 'You sure?'

'There's a path here somewhere,' she said, and she veered away from the stony face of the cliff and into the dense ti-tree and bracken thickets at the base. He followed her, and soon they were swallowed up in cool, mysterious hollows and cut off from the sounds of the wind and the sea. The path zigzagged, slowly traversing a gentler slope of the cliffs. The only sound was their breathing, and the sunlight, heavily filtered by the dense canopy of leaves, lay like coins at their feet. Tankard was taken back to the dim recesses of bedtime stories, and shivered.