Whispering Death (34 page)

‘He confessed.'

‘Fantastic. Terrific job.'

‘When he heard about the pollen evidence, he just gave it up.'

Challis smiled at her. ‘You trusted your instincts. They're good instincts.'

She stretched like a cat under his gaze. Meanwhile Sutton had slipped a DVD into the machine and pressed the play button. The main stretch of High Street appeared on the screen.

Challis took over, pointing a remote at the AV unit.

‘This,' he said, ‘is footage from the closed circuit TV system operated by Nerds-R-Us.'

An electronics store two doors south of the bank, one of its gimmicks was a hidden camera monitoring everyone who passed by the main window. Challis pressed the pause button, catching a pedestrian in mid-stride. Slight build, close cropped hair, narrow features, well dressed—almost dapper.

‘That man,' Challis said, ‘entered the VineTrust bank this morning waving a warrant to search the safe-deposit box of the woman we know as Mrs Grace. He showed AFP identification in the name of Andrew Towne and was granted access to the box. Neither the warrant nor the ID was challenged by the VineTrust manager.'

‘Who is he?' Pam asked.

‘We don't know, but he left a partial print on a memory card for a digital camera.'

‘Not wearing gloves?'

‘He was, but I think he removed them because they hampered his movements. The card was in a tiny plastic case, which he'd have found difficult to open. He wiped the case but not the card.'

‘The partial matches someone in the system?'

Challis nodded. ‘Red flagged, so I doubt his real name is Towne and I doubt he's a federal policeman.'

He pressed another button and the famous photograph of Mrs Grace filled the screen, her features clear despite the arm around her throat, the gun to her head.

‘This is the woman known to the bank staff as Mrs Grace. We believe she's a professional thief. We found three sets of ID in her safe-deposit box and valuable coins, stamps and paintings. We need to track down who owns these items and who this woman is. It's probable that she operates Australia-wide, so Scobie, I want you to confer with the various squads around the country, looking at high-end burglaries, especially where a woman was thought to be involved.'

‘Boss.'

‘And compile a list of anyone known to fence stolen artwork.'

‘Boss.'

‘Meanwhile, does the second flagged print belong to Mrs Grace? We don't know, so Pam, I want you to spend the afternoon following up both sets of prints. Who do they belong to? Why are they flagged? Are they connected? How do they connect to this Corso character?' He paused. ‘The guy walking past the electronics window: not Corso, by any chance?'

Pam gave him a deadpan look. ‘What we trained detectives call a long shot, boss.'

‘My specialty,' Challis said.

He inserted a CD into the machine. The screen flickered, then a washed-out image appeared, two vases on a little table. Other images unfurled slowly as Challis set the machine to slide-show. ‘Scobie, these photos were stored on the memory card in the safe-deposit box. I imagine they're a record of the houses that this woman has robbed, and may help you track down the owners of the various items in the box.'

‘Boss.'

‘Meanwhile we don't know where our mystery Fed is. Did he take anything from the box? Does he know where the woman is? How did he know to come here?'

Pam sprawled in her chair and said, ‘Saw her on TV?'

‘Could be. Anyhow, I want you to find out who he is.'

She nodded gloomily. ‘What's the betting I get stonewalled?'

‘Do your best. I'll be out of the station for most of the afternoon seeing what the Monash fine arts department can tell me.'

‘Some people get the good jobs,' Murphy said.

‘Some people,' said Challis airily, ‘are bosses, others are drudges.'

56

Grace had to run now.

But first she had to go home. Retrieve the icon, then run.

Home. She caught herself. The word aroused complicated feelings of achievement and loss, impermanence and security. She'd attached it to too many houses over the years. An orphanage and several foster homes, every one of them run by strangers; some cruel, none warm. They'd been where she lived, and so she'd used the word home.

But the Breamlea home she'd bought fair and square—admittedly from the proceeds of crime, but she alone had selected it. She alone had decorated, managed and lived in it.

Yet the moment she drove her Golf onto the ferry at Sorrento, that Tuesday afternoon, she knew that the Breamlea house was just that, a house, a shell, like all the others back along the short, tumultuous years of her life. All she'd have when she left Breamlea, ninety minutes from now, would be the Golf, a pocketful of cash and the icon. Not the lovely little Klee painting. Not her fake ID, her coins, her stamps, her photos of the houses she'd intended to burgle again, the Harbin photograph.

She queued to buy coffee on board, and there was her face, front page of the
Age
and the
Herald Sun
, heaped beside the cash register. Grace went cold and her skin prickled.

The man behind the counter saw the direction of her gaze and performed a kind of flirting, comical double-take. ‘Gorgeous, if I didn't know different, I'd say that was you.'

Managing a light laugh, Grace said doubtfully, ‘You think I look like her?'

Together they examined the photograph of the woman held hostage by a man with a shotgun. ‘Yeah, a bit.'

‘I guess so,' Grace said, knowing better than to deny it vehemently. She could feel the gunman's meaty forearm at her throat, almost smell him. And her jaw ached, bruised by the twin barrels. ‘Poor woman,' she said. ‘Must have been scary.'

‘I'll say,' the man said. He shook his head. ‘And it's not going to end good, is it?'

‘No.'

‘No.'

Grace bought coffee and a copy of the
Age
and, trembling a little, took them to a table under a starboard window. She felt scrutinised, trapped, no way out of this steel box until it reached its destination. Galt would see the photograph. He would come.

In fact, she thought bitterly, I've been living in a fool's paradise for two years; I've been living on borrowed time.

Think how easily he'd found her that first day.

Grace forced herself to sip her coffee and read her newspaper. She lingered over a sidebar story on the front page, about the senior cop at the siege. His name was Challis. Apparently highly regarded, currently in hot water for speaking out publicly against a lack of police resources, incurring the wrath of force command and the police minister. He looked hunted to Grace, a man casting repressive, vigilant looks at the probing cameras on High Street last night.

On page two was a grainy snap of the escape to the car, captioned
Gunman outwits police.

No,
I
did, thought Grace. The blanket idea was mine.

She turned the pages.

Steve Finch was at the bottom of page three. Gunned down outside his home, known to police, no apparent motive.

Grace stared out at the choppy waters of the bay. The Niekirks? Looked like. Thieves
and
murderers.

She climbed the stairs to the upper deck and stood where she'd not be heard over the booming of the exhausts. Taking her iPhone from her bum bag, she looked up the phone number for CIU in Waterloo.

‘Inspector Challis's phone, Constable Sutton speaking.'

‘I'd like to speak to the inspector, please.'

‘I'm sorry, he's out. Can I take a message?'

‘Could I have his mobile number?'

A pause. Sutton said, ‘I'm afraid not. What's this about?'

‘I have information that will interest him.'

‘About what?'

‘What happened at the bank.'

‘You can tell me.'

‘Could I have his e-mail address? I want to send him some photos.'

‘I'm sorry, I'm not prepared to do that. Why don't you—' She cut the connection and sat for a while. What she wanted to do was tell the sad-faced policeman named Challis about the gunman, the contents of her safe-deposit box, the connection between Steve Finch and the Niekirks. She wanted to e-mail him her photos of the Klee and the icon
in situ
, the close-ups of the Niekirks' dodgy invoices, deeds and provenance papers…

It could wait. Right now they were calling drivers to their cars. She headed down to the Golf and waited for the ferry to dock and unload.

Finally to Breamlea. Slowing at the outskirts, she crawled along the little main street, eyeing the houses in a mental goodbye. The place probably wouldn't have remained a haven anyway. Lifestyle writers had discovered it and that always brought doom.

She stepped inside her front door and into the sitting room and Ian Galt said, ‘Hello, Neet.'

57

Pam Murphy had been eating lunch at her desk when Scobie Sutton took the call meant for Challis.

A miserable-looking salad from the canteen. A canteen meal because she couldn't afford to lunch at Café Laconic very often, and the High Street deli was now a Youth Initiative drop-in centre, serving cheap food prepared and sold by kids she'd arrested, questioned or reprimanded.

Scobie had been eating at his desk, too, a sandwich from a plastic lunchbox. That's all he ever ate, sandwiches lovingly prepared by his wife—except for that period when the wife had a meltdown. The sandwiches resembled the wife—small, neat, bland—and Scobie pecked and nibbled neatly, blandly, patting his rubbery lips with a paper serviette after every bite.

As for Challis: who knew what Challis was eating, or where? She glanced at her watch: 1 p.m. He was meeting the Monash academic at 2 p.m., so maybe he would snatch a meal at a uni caf. Why was she thinking about any of this? Going off the anti-depressants had brought her some uncomfortable symptoms but also a crazy kind of clarity about random things, irrelevant to life and police work.

She watched Scobie as he took the call in Challis's office, listened to his stiff proprieties, watched him return to his desk.

‘What was that about?'

‘Crank call.'

‘What kind?'

‘A female wanting to speak to the inspector. I said he was out. She said could I give her his mobile number? No. Could I give her his e-mail address, she wanted to send him some photos? No.'

‘What kind of photos?'

Scobie shrugged, his skinny arms emerging from the sleeves of his white shirt. ‘She said it had to do with the siege at the bank.'

‘Scobie!'

‘A crank call, Pam.'

‘How can you be sure? What if it's the woman we're looking for?'

‘Face it, she's dead. The woman on the phone just wanted some attention, you know how it is.'

‘If she calls again, give her the e-mail address. We know she takes photos, and these could be important.'

‘Suit yourself,' Scobie Sutton said, and he ate his sandwich and continued to search the database for high-end burglaries.

Then Pam's phone rang, an AFP inspector returning her call— through the switchboard, checking that she was who she'd claimed to be. He had some news.

‘We don't have an Inspector Towne working for us.'

‘How about the man in the CCTV footage? Do you recognise him?'

‘No.'

‘Maybe our witness misheard the name and the rank. The man we're keen to speak to claims to be attached to a task force, something to do with investigating an international operation.'

There was the kind of silence that says:
Did you not hear what I just
said?

‘Okay,' Pam said finally, ‘so it seems we have a man running around impersonating a federal police officer.'

‘Then you'd better catch him,' the AFP man said.

She'd also sent information on Corso, Mrs Grace and Towne to the New South Wales police, with a request for identities behind the two flagged fingerprints. Until someone responded, she could do little but go to the tea room and prime Challis's espresso machine. Short black, double shot.

Thirty minutes later, the phone rang. It was a sergeant in the New South Wales major crimes unit. ‘What's your interest in Bob Corso?'

She told him about the incident on High Street.

‘Is he still in your neck of the woods?' the sergeant asked.

‘Don't think so,' Pam said. ‘He was on a road trip with his family when I saw him.'

The sergeant grunted. ‘That accords with our intel. He went off the radar a few weeks ago. Basically, the guy's a standover merchant, bodyguard and bouncer at a few strip clubs in the Cross, loving husband and father the rest of the time.'

‘He called the woman he accosted “Anita”. Do you know her?'

‘I'm looking at a picture of her even as we speak,' the sergeant said, ‘front page of the
Australian
.'

‘So you know who she is.'

‘Anita Sandow—or that was the name she was using, there's no independent record of anyone, anywhere, with that name—and to answer your next question, one of the partials you found belongs to her.'

‘But why was she red-flagged?'

‘A long story. The short version is, she was offered witness protection by the New South Wales police a couple of years ago.' He paused. ‘Then she disappeared.'

‘Went feral, you mean. She's been breaking into houses all over the country, as far as we know.'

‘Yeah, well, we thought she was dead, but it seems she was up to her old tricks.'

‘I'm sorry, sir, but you're not giving me much information here.'

‘I'm wondering how much to tell you. Who's your boss?'

‘Inspector Challis,' said Pam distinctly, ‘and he's busy and he asked me to track down who left those prints in the bank.'