Whispering Death (31 page)

Challis began to tune her out. York was thinking about the hostage-taker in an immediate sense, he was thinking about the man's long-term intentions. He wasn't dealing with a nutter but a planner. The man had found himself trapped, but knew to wait for the cloak of darkness. And he'd asked for blankets and twine because he was a planner, not some volatile schizophrenic or speed freak.

Challis reached forward and turned on the van's TV set, channel surfing for a while. The siege was receiving extensive air time, viewer interest teased by constant replays of the gunman on the steps of the bank, shielded by the woman known as Mrs Grace. It had everything: a gun, a masked man, a beautiful victim, a heavily-armed cordon of police.

He muted the sound track and stared at the empty car park between the rear of the bank and the Safeway supermarket. Almost all of the cars were gone now, part of the evacuation plan, but some drivers had still to be located. Meanwhile, according to a number-plate check, only two of the cars were not local: a white Nissan, which had been reported stolen in Gippsland four days ago, and a burgundy Commodore, rented in Rosebud earlier that day. He'd wanted to play it safe and place a tracking device on both cars, but owing to budget cuts, only one tracker was available, so he'd selected the stolen Nissan, figuring it was the gunman's.

The darkness deepened, the underside of the evening sky lit queerly by the street and parking lot lights. York sat back in her swivel chair and frowned at her monitors and said, ‘I mean, ideally you guide the dialogue until the guy talks his own way out, and along the way you get him to release some or all of the hostages…This guy, zilch.' She reached for one of her phones. ‘I'll try again.'

Challis stepped out of her booth, sealing her in, and watched her make the call, knowing the gunman wouldn't answer. Presently she came out again, gesturing in frustration. ‘I don't like it,' she said. ‘What have we got here? Suicide by cop, except he's going to shoot his hostages first?'

Challis shook his head. ‘This guy's given no indication he's suicidal. He's too collected. He's got a plan.'

‘Yeah, well, maybe,' York said. She chewed on her bottom lip. She didn't want a breakout, she wanted to be able to say she'd sweet-talked a nutcase into giving himself up.

In silence they watched the bank. 10 p.m. and the onlookers were beginning to drift away. The force response officer ambled over from Café Laconic and his clutch of body-armoured and visored men and said, ‘What gives? My boys are getting antsy.'

‘Antsy?' said York. ‘You mean they're not well trained?'

Challis laughed. The FR man's face tightened. ‘They put a media hound like
you
in charge?' he scowled, sauntering back to his team.

‘It's important to let them flex their egos,' York said.

‘Guys like Loeb?'

York shook her head. ‘Sorry, I mean your average hostage-taker. You let them think they have the upper hand, when ultimately it's the negotiator who holds all the cards, the negotiator who denies and delays gratification.'

‘Uh huh.'

‘A personal relationship, that's the first step.'

Blankets, Challis was thinking. Cord to bind them together into one big invisibility cloak.

The image took hold in his head, as York continued to explain the intricacies of her job. ‘In the end, you learn to recognise the signs, what we call a surrender ritual, a handing over to the nego—'

‘They're coming out,' Challis said.

An apparition emerged from the bank. It resembled a lumpy tent or a knobbly creature with a rounded back and many legs. The range made it difficult to see clearly but he was betting the holdup man was under there, together with the bank staff and Mrs Grace. The creature moved on mincing, shuffling legs across the car park. No way can we take a shot, he thought, glancing at the armed response team, shaking his head at them.

They all watched as the huddled figures passed the Nissan and paused at the burgundy Commodore. Damn, thought Challis. Wrong car. Then the cloak shifted shape as if it were a sack full of kittens and, one by one, the gunman and the hostages slipped into the front and rear of the car. He couldn't tell who had got behind the wheel; the cloak still covered them.

Then a passenger door opened as the car began to creep away. A young woman tumbled out, falling to her knees. The car stopped again, fifty metres away.

Challis waited a moment, expecting a trap, then ran, trailed by Pam Murphy. With one eye on the Commodore, he helped the woman to her feet. ‘You're Maddie?'

She gulped and hiccoughed. ‘Yes.'

‘It's okay, you're safe now.'

She shook her head violently. ‘He told me to give you a message. He'll release the others as soon as he feels safe. But if he sees anyone follow him, he'll shoot to kill. No cars, no helicopters, that's what he said.'

The Commodore crept a short distance, stopped again. Challis's mind raced with counter plans. He held up a hand, took out his phone, waved it at the car. He got his answer: the car accelerated towards the dark edge of the night.

Ian Galt was in a city motel, at the end of a fruitless day, propped against the headboard of a lumpy bed, unwinding before the TV set bolted to the wall. Days of wearing out good shoe leather, he thought, and what happens? I find her on the evening news. In a place where I can't get at her.

The best he could hope for now was the man with the shotgun would blow her pretty little head off.

And he thought: What was she doing in that bank?

50

‘I guess I wasn't making much sense last night,' said Rowan Ely in the Waterloo police station the next morning.

Last night he'd wandered dazed and disorientated on to the South Gippsland Highway, near a drainage channel beyond the township of Tooradin, where a truck driver stopped to pick him up, calling the police and an ambulance. Now Ely looked pale and doughy in his banker's suit, his hands scratched, his forehead bruised where he'd been clubbed by the shotgun.

‘It wasn't a night for making sense,' Challis replied, thinking that the bandit had in fact made plenty of sense.

Eight-thirty, and because forensics officers were still poking around in the bank, Challis was conducting this interview at the station. The victim suite, because it was kitted out like a family den—albeit the den of a family without taste or character—but better than an interrogation room.

‘He freed Maddie in the car park. Who was next?'

‘Erin, then me,' Ely said. ‘Mrs Grace was still with him, the last I saw of them.'

Challis tapped the front page of the
Age
, the upper fold filled with a now-famous photograph of the gunman on the steps of the bank, his forearm around a woman's throat. ‘Just to be clear: Is that Mrs Grace?'

‘Yes.'

‘When you were released, what direction did they take? Still heading east?'

‘Yes.'

Challis plotted the route mentally. Did the gunman intend to head deeper into Gippsland—where he'd already come from, robbing two banks along the way—and then up the coast, or would he head inland, north into the alpine country and up into regional New South Wales? Or had it been a bluff, he'd connected with the M1 and doubled back to lose himself in Melbourne?

‘How are the others?' Ely asked.

‘Fine. Like you, a bit shaken and scared, but fine.'

‘They'll need counselling,' Ely said. ‘I hope they realise they're not needed at work today.'

Challis didn't bother to reply. ‘Tell me more about Mrs Grace.'

‘Such as?'

‘Anything.'

Ely stared into the distance, a curious loosening around his eyes and mouth. Love, desire? ‘A businesswoman,' he said, ‘well off, always very friendly and polite. Private. Lovely woman,' he concluded, uttering a little cough.

‘Is there a Mr Grace?'

‘I understood she was divorced.'

‘Her accent: German? Danish?'

Ely shook his head. ‘What accent?'

‘She was accosted in the street two weeks ago by a man who claimed to know her. One of my officers intervened, and heard her speak with a strong European accent.'

‘Different person. Had to be.'

Challis grunted. ‘Did you get a sense that Mrs Grace knew the gunman?'

‘Good grief no.'

‘Nothing about her manner, her voice, things she said or did? Nothing that hinted of a previous connection?'

The pinkness of health and outrage had returned to Ely's face. ‘I saw nothing to suggest that.'

‘Okay, then what kind of interaction
did
they have—apart from this?' Challis said, tapping the front page photograph again.

Ely narrowed his pouchy eyes. ‘Are you suggesting Stockholm syndrome? She started to sympathise with him?'

Challis knew there hadn't been time for Stockholm syndrome to develop. He said, ‘Did she resist? Was she scared? Did she talk to him, try to get him to let you all go or give himself up? Did she try to keep him calm, give him suggestions of any kind?'

But Ely seemed to swell mulishly, as if his image of his favourite client were being sullied, so Challis held up his hands placatingly. ‘I'm sure she was only interested in saving lives, avoiding bloodshed.'

Ely gave him a suspicious frown and said stiffly, ‘I didn't see or hear anything untoward.'

‘She's the only one unaccounted for.'

‘One hostage is easier to manage than several,' Ely retorted.

‘True.'

‘Or he's killed her,' Ely said, his features cracking a little.

‘Or she's wandering along a back road somewhere.'

Both men visualised it. The little room was stuffy, the generic framed prints no longer comforting, the armchairs too soft. Outside, in the corridor, life went on, police officers and civilian staff elbowing past each other with reports and car keys in their hands.

‘Why that car?' said Challis.

Ely shuffled about to get comfortable. ‘He asked which of us had driven to work. The girls were smart, they lied, said their husbands had driven them. I said I walked as usual—which is true. So he asked Mrs Grace where she was parked.'

‘He was agitated when he asked it?'

‘Quite calm, actually.'

‘So you could see his face all this time?'

‘No, he kept the balaclava on.'

‘So he
sounded
calm.'

‘Yes. And his body language.'

‘Do you think Mrs Grace was trying to calm him down by offering her car?'

Ely said stoutly, ‘I think it was a brave thing to do. For all we knew, he'd go off the rails and start shooting us if he thought there wasn't a way out. She wanted an end to it. She offered her car so he'd leave.'

‘What can you tell me about his height, build, voice?'

Ely eyed Challis. ‘Your overall build.'

Challis was tall, a little stooped sometimes, medium build. He said, ‘How much cash did he get away with?'

‘Being as it was a Monday, not a lot. Ten thousand?'

There was a knock and Pam Murphy stuck her head around the door. ‘Forensics have finished inside the bank, and we've found the car.'

Challis smiled at Ely. ‘It's all yours.'

Ely was staring at Murphy's retreating figure. ‘I wanted to ask her if Mrs Grace was in the car.'

Meaning: Mrs Grace's dead body.

Eight-forty-five now, and they made a rapid trip north and east of Waterloo, Murphy driving the CIU car, Scobie Sutton in the passenger seat, Challis lounging in the rear, where he could think and dream.

Koo-Wee-Rup was a pretty town between the South Gippsland Highway and the broad fast ribbon that was the M1 motorway, many kilometres to the north. Flat farming country scored, to the north-east of the town, by deep drainage channels. That's where the Commodore had been spotted, on a track beside a drain one hundred metres in from the road. A woman delivering her children to an isolated school-bus stop had called it in, worried it might be another rural suicide. As the CIU car passed the bus stop, Challis could see her point: a lonely spot, swept by ever-present winds, speaking of lost hopes and chances.

The local policeman had created a broad perimeter around the car, using wooden stakes and crime-scene tape. Challis got out, stretched his back, noting the wind, the sun warmth and the water birds wheeling over his head, above the empty stretches of land.

‘A good place to dump a body,' Pam Murphy said.

The local constable hadn't seen a body, but Challis shared Murphy's concern. He thought of the water running high in the drain, he thought of the closed boot of the Commodore. Yet he stood with the others outside the tape and scanned the scene for a while, noting these details: both front doors were open; he could see the keys in the ignition; a cup of takeaway coffee sat on the roof above the driver's door. He didn't know what any of that meant except that since the cup hadn't blown away, there was coffee still in it, and he thought: DNA.

He pulled on latex gloves. ‘Let's look inside the boot, but don't touch anything else until the crime-scene people get here.'

No body in the boot, but there was a small suitcase. Challis opened it: women's underwear, two T-shirts, jeans, a plain skirt, tights, a travel pack of toiletries.

No handbag, but Scobie Sutton, wandering fifty metres along the drain, called out: ‘Over here.'

Challis joined him. The grass was damp, the air laden with moist earth smells and the murmur of water rolling by. Below them, at the edge of the stream, was a red satchel.

‘I recognise it from the news footage,' Sutton said.

Challis scrambled down the bank, clasping tussocks of grass to save him from falling, and grabbed the bag by the broken strap. Then, braced on the acutely angled slope, he poked at the contents with a pen from his pocket. ‘No purse or wallet.'