Read Challis - 02 - Kittyhawk Down for Free Online Page A

sometimes collided in angry knots but mainly withered in isolation.
    She drove on. She could simply have telephoned the Listers and told Skip to call around for his jacket, but she wanted to see where he lived.
    Upper Penzance. It was visible from her back yard in Penzance Beach, floating above Five Furlong Road, which marked the top of the ridge above the slope of farmland that separated Upper Penzance from Penzance Beach. Upper Penzance spelt money and a kind of stubborn-yet-stupid exclusivity in the minds of most of the local people. There had been a letter to the
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from one resident, a woman who'd brayed that she and her husband had spent 'a lot of money' establishing their property, and were 'not about to see it spoilt by paved roads, bulldozers gouging out sewage channels or the lopping of more of the Peninsula's magnificent pine tree avenues'.
    So that's where Skip Lister lived, in a half-million dollar house with a fantastic view across to Phillip Island, and that's where his father had taken him last night.
    There had been another man with Skip's father. No introduction: he'd emerged from Carl Lister's Mercedes, slipped through the cloud-obscured light of the moon into Skip's car, and driven it away. As for Skip's father, he'd slammed the door of his Mercedes in a businesslike way and shaken her hand and gently chastised his son and generally behaved like a responsible, apologetic father. None of the offhandedness that had so angered Ellen when she'd phoned him.
    She'd taken one look at Carl Lister and disliked him on the spot. That was why she was delivering his son's leather jacket to his door instead of asking someone to come and collect it.
    It wasn't Lister's manner, glossy Mercedes or Upper Penzance address. It wasn't that he was shifty or smelt wrong in any criminal sense, either, for he didn't. And he wasn't like some South Africans she'd met, who'd given off a palpable sense of wanting to firebomb Asians or regretting they no longer had coloured servants to bitch about. No, it was his energy, confidence and general oiliness at that ungodly hour of the morning. She'd watched him stride from his car, throw a stern, bucking-up arm around his son's shoulders and generally take charge, and she'd felt irrelevant and taken for granted. And Skip hadn't liked that arm either. She'd seen the way he cringed beneath the weight and chumminess of it.
    Or perhaps she—and Skip—recoiled from the man's impairment. For he'd suffered burns to his face and hands at some stage. They were not particularly disfiguring, but did give a faintly skewed cast to his head, as though he had limited neck movement, and one hand was clenched in a permanent claw-like spasm.
    On another man those burns might have elicited sympathy. On Carl Lister they imparted a faint cruelty, encouraged by a grin fit to bruise his face.
    Ellen thought that he was probably the kind of man who placed great demands on his son. Not much love there, she concluded as she left Five Furlong Road and made her way along a narrow, potholed track that wound between pottosporums, gumtrees and wattles. There were big houses set well back from the track on either side. Most were two-storey, architectural wet-dreams with tricky bits of modular concrete slabs, corrugated iron or radially sawn weatherboards here and there on the angular walls.
    At least the Listers lived in a standard-looking house, even if it did belong more to Toorak or Brighton than the coast. It was Georgian baronial, she supposed, squat and box-like, and reached via a driveway that hooked around a grassy slope set behind an avenue of golden cypresses. The words 'Costa del Sol' had been picked out in mosaic chips on a board fastened to the front gate. Costa Packet, Ellen thought, remembering an old
Punch
cartoon.
    The front gate was locked. No answer when she pressed the buzzer next to the intercom.
    Ellen crammed Skip's jacket into the letter box then walked along the fenceline until she had a