Whispering Death (10 page)

‘My husband has a sideline business, brokerage. He puts people who have a classic car or aeroplane to sell in touch with people who want to buy one. But
this
time'—she gestured at the plane beyond the office door—‘he thought he'd be buyer and seller himself. More profit, you see. He even had a UK client lined up, prepared to pay a hundred thousand pounds sterling. The next thing you know, the federal government steps in and says the deal can't go ahead. Fifty thousand dollars down the drain.'

‘Ouch.'

‘Needless to say, I'm a little cross.'

Challis didn't ask where the husband was. In the doghouse somewhere. Instead, he asked why the Beaufighter couldn't be exported.

‘According to the officious little bureaucrat who slapped the order on us, that damn plane has cultural heritage significance. If Warren tries to ship it overseas it will be confiscated and he'll be hit with a heavy fine, even jail time.'

Challis jerked his head at the trucks. ‘So you've found a local buyer?'

Mara Niekirk grimaced. ‘It doesn't rain but it pours. It seems the man who sold us the plane may not have had rightful ownership of it.'

‘It's being confiscated?'

Mara Niekirk held up a finger. ‘
Repatriated
is the word they used. It's going to the War Memorial in Canberra and when the ownership issues are thrashed out, we'll get a tax break under the cultural gifts program. Did you know such a thing existed? I didn't.'

Challis stored the information, Mara Niekirk watching him steadily over the rims of her glasses. ‘Which is not the same thing as getting our money back.'

‘Can't you sue?'

‘Hah!'

So the man who'd sold it to them can't be found, or he's broke, guessed Challis. He eyed the metal walls, hung with a number of prints and drawings: a Charles Blackman schoolgirl, a Brian Dunlop print of an open, curtained window. A matched trio of Brett Whiteley artist's proofs, an homage to Van Gogh.

Mara Niekirk, watching Challis appraise them, blew a tendril of brown hair away from her nose. ‘This room needed a certain something.'

‘So, no more dealing in aeroplanes.'

‘Or vintage cars, my husband's other side interest.'

Challis gave her a crooked smile. ‘Pity. I also have an old Triumph sports car I want to get rid of.'

She returned the smile. ‘Can't help you.'

16

Until a year or two ago, Sundays had been a sacred day for Scobie Sutton—sacred in the holy-day sense and sacred in a family-spending-the-day-together sense. A bit of a sleep-in, late morning church— Sunday School for Roslyn—and the afternoon for visiting his wife's mother and sister, or an excursion to Healesville animal sanctuary, or catching up on household chores, gardening and homework—hoping that God didn't mind.

But Beth had lost her job and with it, it seemed, something of herself. Their church being less than helpful, she'd turned to a crackpot sect known as the First Ascensionists. She'd tried to gather Scobie and Roslyn to the fold, and when that failed she'd turned her back on her little family for a while.

She was better—a lot better than she had been—but now she spent her days abjectly saying, ‘Can you ever forgive me?' and ‘You must hate me.' It was wearisome. She phoned Scobie at work several times a day, she hovered in the doorway whenever Roslyn did her homework or practised on the electric piano in the evenings.

Father and daughter had the patience of saints; and at least they were out of the house during the daytime hours of the working week. Weekends were different. There was absolutely no escaping the heavy weight of Beth's presence. And so it came as a great relief to them when Beth's mother and sister had stepped in, offering to take her off their hands on Sundays.

And
this
Sunday, alone with his daughter at last, Scobie mopped up the maple syrup with the remains of his Sunday morning pancake and said, ‘Thought we'd go to the zoo today, see the new baby elephant.'

Roslyn was thirteen and her face sometimes—often?—fell into the disobliging lines of young adolescence, but right at that moment she was a little girl. Her eyes lit up. ‘Yay!'

She was a light in his murky world. Sutton knew that he wasn't like Challis or Murphy, could never be like them. Yeah, they probably found some crimes upsetting, but they'd long stopped revealing it, and he was certain that many police officers didn't get upset with any of it. Never had, never would. Their attitude was simple: some humans are scum, and it's our job to put them away, not save, understand or heal them. Not bleed as the victims have bled. A victim was a statistic, that's all. But Sutton, arresting a Mornington man for inserting a beer bottle and a pool cue into an elderly woman's vagina last week, had wept. Would he be better off
not
coming face to face with murderers and rapists, thugs and bullies? He'd spent Friday afternoon and most of yesterday with the crime-scene officers, conducting a line search of the reserve and signing for and transporting the evidence to the forensics lab. He'd enjoyed that. But he was a front line detective, and working the Chloe Holst case was bound to sink him further into the mire.

Driving his daughter around was the cure he needed, and half an hour later they were heading towards the city, Scobie steering his sensible Volvo up through Somerville and Baxter. But you can't control everything. Before he could do a thing about it, they were alongside a gateway freshly defaced with the words,
AN ERECTION TO MATCH MY
IMAGE OF MY DICK
.

Too late, he said, ‘Don't look,' and his daughter said, ‘Da-a-ad' as if she'd grown up quite suddenly when he wasn't paying attention and left him behind.

*

Challis had spend the night in Ellen's house so that he could get an early start on his list of odd jobs.

Stained the deck first. This time on Friday he'd been sitting out here with Ellen, feeling a kick of desire.

Painted the laundry.

Aching muscles stopped him at lunchtime. He stepped outside to stretch the kinks in his back, saw the garden hose lying there, and decided to wash the dust off his car. The Triumph's soft top was cracked, the rear Perspex milky, and Challis realised halfway through that he'd find water on the floor and seats when he got behind the wheel.

He stood for a while, his gaze roving from the droplets on his car to the glassy bay. He liked standing here, in the mild sun. He didn't want to leave. There was a ship on the water, sharp and motionless as if snipped from tin.

He went inside, showered, changed and locked Ellen's doors and windows. Just as he was climbing into his car, he heard the shudder of poorly tuned suspension behind him, the crush of tyres. He got out. A tired, sun-faded green Hyundai was nosing into the driveway, something about it seeming to express indignation with his presence, his car's presence, even before he recognised the driver. Eventually the little car spurted close to the front steps, leaving him barely enough room to back out.

The driver got out and scowled. ‘Mum didn't say you'd be here.'

‘How are you, Larrayne?'

He'd never quite warmed to Ellen's daughter, perhaps because he seemed always to put her in a bad temper. He didn't know if she hated him, resented him, wanted her mother to have no private life or wanted her parents back together again. The last was unlikely to happen.

The passengers were piling out of the Hyundai: a young man from the front seat—Larrayne's boyfriend?—and a young couple from the rear. All four looked bleary, the men unshaven and the women streaked and bruised with mascara and lipstick. The men wore stained jeans and tight shirts over T-shirts, the buttoning hit-and-miss, and the women wore crumpled, tugged-about little dresses over holed tights. As they stood, stretched, yawned and looked around at the house, the view, Challis caught an eddy of alcohol, cigarettes and dope.

‘Long night?'

‘Any of your business?'

The boyfriend touched Larrayne's forearm as if to calm her. He was a tall, skinny, sweetly smiling boy, probably good for Larrayne and probably doomed. ‘Semester break,' he told Challis.

Challis nodded.

‘We
were
hoping,' Larrayne Destry said, ‘to spend a few days here.'

Meaning what did Challis think he was doing there, and did he intend to stick around all week, and, generally, what gave him the fucking right?

Challis gave her a high-wattage smile for the pleasure of it and said, ‘I'll be out of your hair in just a moment.'

‘Are you living here now or something?'

Challis shook his head, still with the smile. ‘Just doing some odd jobs around the place. Be careful of wet paint.'

Larrayne frowned over his words as if looking for lies and loopholes. Finding none, she wheeled around and opened the boot of the car. Without the scowl, she was simply a twenty-one-year-old student, ordinary in a fair-haired, fine-boned, Ellen-Destry's-daughter kind of way.

Challis stuck one of his cards under her windscreen wiper. ‘If you need anything.'

‘We won't.'

Sunday was not a day of rest for Grace. She'd spent the afternoon at an Internet café in Geelong, downloading a few megabytes of Google Earth onto a flash drive. Inconvenient, but untraceable. Now, late afternoon, she was at home in Breamlea, examining the maps on her own laptop. By dusk she knew the exact location of a house in South Australia's Clare Valley owned by a man named Simon Lascar, knew it in relation to his neighbours and the town itself, knew her best escape routes.

As for knowing about Lascar and his house, she thanked her collection of clippings from
Home Digest
,
Home Beautiful
,
Décor
and similar magazines. In her view, these publications existed to allow people with more money than sense to tell the world about how much money they had in the house they'd built, bought or refurbished—in full colour, over several pages, including close-ups of small, pricey belongings.

What
Home Digest
didn't say—but various websites did—was that Mr Simon Lascar had built his Clare Valley monstrosity on the site of a colonial-era cottage of historical importance, using two million dollars embezzled from pensioners' savings. The magazine did say that he was an eclectic collector of Australiana: an Adelaide gold pound worth $300,000; a 1930 penny—unfortunately not one of the six proof pennies still in existence but one of the two thousand that had found their way into circulation—worth $25,000; a 1620 Dutch
rijksdaalder
worth $1500 from the wreck of the
Batavia
; a third watermark, two shilling stamp (a kangaroo superimposed upon a map of Australia) worth $4000; a first edition of J. J. Keneally's 1929
The Inner History
of the Kelly Gang
, worth $2000; a two shilling note issued for use in the Hay internment camp during the Second World War, worth $5000; and a $30,000 Holey Dollar struck from a 1794 Spanish dollar.

And his wife liked to collect silver. Sterling, not plate: flatware, teaspoons, demitasse spoons, toddy ladles, fish servers, sugar bowls, napkin rings and candlesticks. Grace was betting there'd be some crap too—mass-produced plate, or pieces with no maker's mark—but she knew how to separate it from the good stuff. In the past two years, since escaping from Galt, she'd spent hours on the Internet and in libraries, studying makers' marks, vintages, hallmarks and other distinguishing features of antique sterling silver.

Some of Grace's magazine clippings went back months, even years. Some she might never act on; a clipping was rarely enough, in itself, to give her all the information she needed. As for the Lascar story, she'd clipped it out two years ago, and was only moving now because she'd spotted another Lascar story: according to the latest
Who Weekly
, the Lascars were in Honolulu for the marriage of their daughter to a minor American actor, and would be away for three weeks.

As afternoon faded that Sunday, Grace walked along the beach at Breamlea and planned the hit on Lascar. She was alone, and the waters raced towards her flank and the wind howled hard against her back. She reversed direction. Now the wind was gritty, stinging her face and hands. The seabirds fought it, wheeling like paper scraps. She altered course to avoid a dead seal, then veered inland, up and down a canyon in the dunes, finally emerging near the general store at the entrance to the caravan park before walking back along the road towards her house. Drive to South Australia on Wednesday, she thought, hire a car in Murray Bridge on Thursday, clean out the Lascars that night, return to Victoria early Friday morning. Fence some of the gear to Steve Finch around lunchtime, stow the best in her safe-deposit box in Waterloo that same afternoon.

And, as she walked, Ian Galt's harsh voice scraped across her mind: ‘Always know that you can walk away from a job, even if you've invested a lot of time and money in setting it up.'

Rules, rules…

17

Eight a.m. Monday, Challis checking his pigeonhole for mail. A shift was going off duty, another coming on, so the main corridor was hectic, uniformed and plainclothed police and civilian staff shouldering in and out of doors, balancing files, equipment belts, canteen tea and coffee. Since Friday he'd received several memos and a handful of flyers, most of which he tossed into the recycle bin before heading upstairs. An officer from the sex crimes squad was due, but she was coming down from the city and Challis had no idea when she'd arrive.

As always, he brewed coffee in the tea room, making enough for Scobie Sutton and Pam Murphy, who were not in yet. After that he sat, thinking, in his corner office.

The Triumph had been difficult to start that morning, and the idea of selling had grown firmer in his mind. There was bound to be a Triumph nut somewhere in Australia, willing to fork out for an elderly TR4—but the car was probably worth very little, and if, like the Niekirks, he wasn't allowed to sell his plane, he'd never be able to afford a new car.