When Ellen drove back to Waterloo ten minutes later, coming down from the top of Five Furlong Road to where it separated open paddocks from a dismal new housing estate in the middle of nowhere, she thought she saw the man who'd earlier been looking at the sheep. He was standing in the front yard of a new, unfinished-looking brick veneer house, dressed in some kind of uniform and urging a small child to pat a rat-like creature on a lead.
Lunch for Challis on Easter Sunday had been a ham and pickle sandwich washed down by peppermint tea. He let it settle and then took a bucket to gather rotting fruit under the pear trees, but angry bees were feasting inside the shells of the fruit, and the repeated motions of his arms failed to ease his mind, so he wandered down to his front gate in search of a different distraction: his eroded driveway entrance. He lived on an unsealed road. The topsoil had long since washed away, leaving sand and gravel, which in turn was pushed to the verges whenever the shire grader, making its perfunctory sweep, sliced off the tops of the corrugations to create more sand and gravel. The road also sloped uphill from Challis's front gate, and was lined with needle-shedding pines and bark-shedding gums. Whenever there was a downpour the bark and the needles combined with the sand and the water to form dense, clotting mats that blocked the open ditches and stoppered the concrete culvert pipe under Challis's driveway. As a consequence the floods sought new channels of escape, ultimately cutting deep trenches across his driveway and along the road itself.
No one at the shire offices in Waterloo seemed to know who was responsible for his blocked pipe and ditch. Certainly no one was about to admit responsibility for either. He supposed that he'd have to shovel the matted sand out himself. But where should he put it? He was tempted to spread it across the road as a kind of speed trap and invite the shire engineer and the mayor to pay a visit. He was feeling more and more like Tessa Kane's Meddler.
The neighbours were no help. 'You're a police inspector,' one of them said. 'Make use of that. Make the bastards listen.'
The neighbour had pronounced 'bastards' as though wondering, as he said it, whether or not he'd be arrested for swearing.
Challis knew he wouldn't trade on his job to get results. The police were constantly relying on shire officials for information to help their investigations into the citizens of the Peninsula.
He went to work, first shovelling the sodden matter out of the ditch and dumping it under the trees, and then shovelling sand into the washaways. He paused from time to time as cars crept past, nodding hello to the locals. At last the rhythmic motions eased his irritation, and his wife and his lover receded from the forefront of his mind.
By mid-afternoon he'd finished. His hands were blistered. His head pounded. But the sunlight was soft and languid, the air still, and the bellbirds were calling. Then he heard a loud, chaffcutter rattle overhead and looked up. It was a 1942 Kittyhawk fighter. Challis knew the plane, knew the woman who'd restored it. He watched as it banked overhead and turned south-east, presumably for the little aerodrome at Waterloo, and that's when Challis decided to pack in his Sunday afternoon's pottering and head there too, thereby placing himself right at the centre of most of what followed that autumn.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Challis showered, dressed, then set out in his rattly Triumph, steering among the channels and potholes of the road that went past his house. At the Old Peninsula Highway he turned toward Waterloo, passing through a region of orchards, vineyards and ostrich farms which gave way to a scattering of plant nurseries and riding schools, which in turn gave way to the drab housing estates, car yards, furniture barns, pump suppliers and junkfood palaces that lined the outskirts of Waterloo. Just before the police station he turned right, travelling for five kilometres to the aerodrome, where he drove in, passing a Land Rover that was parked on the track outside the entrance gate.
Kitty's Mercedes was parked behind the main hangar. He pulled in beside it and got out. As he approached the metal side door a Cessna began to head along the runway, finally lifting from the ground and clawing skywards. He'd glimpsed the words Peninsula Aerial Photography Services stencilled on the fuselage, and that meant that Kitty had landed and parked her Kittyhawk and taken off again in her Cessna. She made a bread-and-butter income from the cameras fixed to the underside of the Cessna, taking low-altitude shots of farmhouses to be laminated and later hung on study walls, high-altitude shots for the shire's planners and surveyors, and oblique shots of the coastline for publication on postcards and calendars.
Challis stepped into the hangar, making for a partitioned corner that had been set aside for the restoration of old aeroplanes. His 1935 Dragon Rapide was at the far end. He had to pass a wrecked Wirraway, Kitty's latest project, to get to it. Everyone called her Kitty because of the Kittyhawk. Her real name was Janet Casement, and although Challis had a companionable relationship with her they were not close in any sense. There was an air of solitariness about her. Tinged with loneliness? Unlikely, given that she'd got married only six months ago. Perhaps he was reading his own loneliness into her.
He pulled on a pair of overalls, found an FM station on the greasy transistor radio that was strapped to a rusty hook on the wall, and went to work. He didn't mind working alone. He too was guilty of solitary habits and intentions.
Six years earlier he'd found the Rapide lying in pieces in a barn north of Toowoomba, bought it and had it trucked down to Waterloo. So far he'd replaced the splintered, rotted and worm-eaten sections of the airframe and rebuilt one of the motors. He rarely had time to work on the Dragon, but believed that time didn't matter when you were restoring something of beauty. He admired the way the Dragon sat there with its flimsy upper and lower wings outspread and its questing, rounded snout testing the air.
Today he'd work in the cockpit. Most of the instruments needed to be replaced or recalibrated. This was better than gardening or cleaning ditches, and his mind began to sift and refine the clutter of his life, bringing him by degrees to the Floater again.
Specifically, the Rolex watch. Frozen at ten o'clock on the second of the month. Morning or afternoon? He stopped suddenly, screwdriver poised in one hand. Why was he getting bogged down in questions of time? Perhaps he should be considering the watch itself. How rare was the Rolex? Could it be traced?
Challis pondered this as he unscrewed the back plate of the airspeed indicator in order to clean it and replace the cracked glass, and as he worked he grew aware of two distinct sounds outside the hangar: an aeroplane was throttling back as it made its approach, and a noisy vehicle had entered the aerodrome and was roaring past the hangars toward the landing strip.
Then there was a shout, the brap of a horn and a squeal of tyres. Challis raced outside. The Land Rover that had been parked on the track outside the perimeter fence was now at the far end of the airstrip, gathering speed and heading straight for Kitty's Cessna, which had just touched down. He watched helplessly. So did a handful of weekend pilots, mechanics and aerodrome staff. Kitty swerved left. The Land Rover swerved, cutting it off. Kitty swerved right; the Land Rover leaned hard in anticipation, tipping dangerously, leaving commas of rubber on the landing strip. Finally Kitty took the only avenue available to her: she opened the throttle, waited for lift, and skipped over the Land Rover, clipping it with her tailwheel. But she hadn't the speed to sustain a takeoff, and bounced onto the strip again, the tailwheel breaking away and sending the Cessna into a twitching skid past a row of Aero Club planes parked on an asphalt apron between a hangar and the perimeter fence. Finally it skewed around, halted, leaned, and Kitty got out shakily. She stood bent over for a moment, her hands on her knees as though gasping for breath. Then she straightened her back, gazed at Challis and the others, stuck her thumb in the air. A ragged cheer went up around the airfield.