Whispering Death by Garry Disher Page B

just be in the cafeteria.’
    â€˜Thanks, Mum.’
    The younger women watched her go, then looked at each other smilingly.
    â€˜Sorry, she always talks a lot when she’s upset.’
    â€˜She has plenty to be upset about, and so do you.’
    â€˜I’m okay. I’m alive.’
    But looking exhausted and diminished, Pam thought. She pondered the damage she couldn’t see.
    Chloe was racked with sneezes again. ‘Remind me never to get a job outdoors. The tiniest bit of pollen and I—’ Pollen. Pam made a mental note, then they talked for a while. But Chloe added nothing new to her account of the attack, or the man who had done it.

15
    Challis checked in with the crime-scene officers at the reserve, then headed for the little airport a few kilometres north of Waterloo.
    He ruminated on the past ten years, all that had been transitory and permanent. He’d been a solitary figure, a little lonely and probably sad, when he’d taken up the position of CIU head at Waterloo. New to the Peninsula, and still stunned by the knowledge that his wife and her lover had wanted him dead.
    A chance visit to the local air show had rekindled an interest from his childhood—a time of balsawood kit planes and spotting for the crop dusters on the hilly paddocks of the South Australian wheat country. Dreams in which he floated above the ground.
    Entranced by the vintage aeroplane display, he’d let it be known that he’d like to buy one, preferably unrestored. Six months later, he bought a 1930s Dragon Rapide which was gathering dust and a colony of rats and mice in a hayshed outside Toowoomba.
    In the years that followed he spent his spare time, his blessed quiet hours, tracking down missing parts, engineering others. Ten years of snatched afternoons and weekends, ten years of hangar and machine-tool hire, ten years of outlaying all his spare cash.
    But ten years of mental and physical relief from the dirt he walked in every day. As he’d restored the Dragon, the Dragon restored him. And she was beautiful, an elegant silver dragonfly.
    Now he simply saw the Dragon as a phase of his life that had come to an end.
    A truck load of timber held him up outside Waterloo. It was turning into a low-lying paddock on the left, a housing estate named Copley Downs, still under construction and at this stage just an open mire of culverts, heavy tyre tracks, concrete slabs and skeletal house frames on senseless curved streets. Challis thought about what he’d said to the reporter yesterday afternoon. Young, cash-strapped families would move in to Copley Downs and put pressure on the local services, including the police. As for the name, Copley had been a stalwart of the football club, a man who spent his time drinking and bashing his wife. Having played half a season of League football however, he was a local celebrity. The world we live in, Challis thought.
    He drove through a stretch of farmland to the outskirts of Tyabb: some straggling pine trees, a weather-beaten girl-guide hall, a sad strip of shops, a solitary traffic light. A bus and half a dozen cars were stopped for the red. Challis braked gently and the Triumph stalled. He started it, nursed the accelerator. The old car shuddered and then he was at the intersection, turning left.
    Now he was passing a scattering of bungalows, the airfield beyond that, rambling antique shops on his right. Tyabb owed some of its reputation to the airfield and the annual air show, but was better known as a Mecca for anything old. Most of the dealers operated out of a massive converted railway workshop, others out of houses, sheds and barns situated on the main roads of the town. Challis slowed the car and pulled into the driveway of an old church. A sign on the picket fence said ‘The Doll’s House Collectibles Fine Art Antiques W. & M. Niekirk Prop.’ Beneath it was another sign: ‘Niekirk Classics’, with stylised images of an old plane