Whispering Death (38 page)

He stared mulishly at the paperwork. It seemed to him that police duties at inspector level consisted more of admin than catching thieves and murderers. But clearing the decks like this would be a distraction from glancing at his watch all the time. His flight left at midnight. He'd work through the day, endure the little wake—celebration?—his colleagues would throw for him, be at the airport by ten o'clock. He flipped over the tray of correspondence and started on the top sheet of the upside-down pile. A memo regarding the car park at the rear of the station: police members were reminded that space was at a premium and the parking bays narrow, so please position your vehicle carefully between the painted lines, thus avoiding damage to other vehicles. Why the fuck had he kept it? But he did swivel around in his chair and look through the window at the car park and his new car, a 2003 BMW 318i with only 47,000 km on the clock. $18,999 and it had cruise control. Not all BMWs of that era did, apparently.

Ellen, after he'd told her: ‘I'll say it again: do I want to be with a man who drives a BMW?'

‘Heated seats.'

‘Well, in that case.'

It was parked snugly between Pam Murphy's Subaru and someone's Kia.

He binned the memo.

Next were e-mail printouts, outdated, their subjects resolved, so in the bin they went. Crime scene reports, which he filed with the relevant case notes, witness statements, officer-attending reports, other bumf.

An old memo from Superintendent McQuarrie regarding the spraycan vigilante. The tone was peevish, indicating that pressure had been applied by the kinds of people he golfed with. The kinds of people who put up huge, defaceable gate posts outside their Peninsula pads, in fact. Challis e-mailed a reply:

Re: offensive graffiti

Dear Supt McQuarrie,

I am pleased to report that a man has been arrested in connection with
this crime.

Yours sincerely,

H. Challis (Inspector)

One man, but Challis suspected that three or four men and women were involved. John Tankard had made the arrest, a young architecture student found loitering outside a Main Ridge property in possession of a spraycan—but not in the act of defacing its gate posts, and he had airtight alibis for the previous incidents. So, a gang was at work, and the guy would skate, probably. Challis pictured them: young, mobile, educated and angry. Good luck to them.

He raced through the paperwork, binning most of it. A letter approving Detective Constable Scobie Sutton's transfer to a new crime scene unit based in Frankston. Scobie had been told of the appointment but hadn't seen the official notification, so Challis made a copy and placed it in an envelope on his desk.

He was nearing the more recent correspondence now, and found a letter unrelated to his police work. Postmarked Darwin, it was from the Pioneer Aircraft Museum.

‘I am writing to advise you,' it began:

that our archivist has examined various government and commercial archives and concurs with your belief that your Dragon Rapide did in fact play a significant role in outback mail delivery, geological survey work and minerals exploration in the 1930s.

For that reason, we are delighted to accept your kind donation of the aeroplane for our permanent collection. As you know, we are a not-for-profit institution, reliant on the goodwill of the public, and rarely in a position to make outright purchases, but I am pleased to inform you that your donation has been approved under the Commonwealth Government's Cultural Gifts Program, entitling you to claim a tax deduction. It is common to apportion twenty per cent of the total allowed per year for five financial years.

They'd already sent an expert to examine the Dragon, run the motors, take it for a short flight. And now it was in pieces again, on the back of a truck somewhere, inching up the red centre of the continent.

Then newspaper clippings from the
Age
: the arrest of Mara Niekirk attempting to flee Sydney Harbour in a yacht, and the shotgun death of a disgraced ex-NSW policeman in the sleepy coastal town of Breamlea. According to witnesses the shooter, a local man unknown to the dead man, had acted in self defence. Police were looking for a young woman who had fled the scene.

Good luck with that, thought Challis.

Next was a print-out of the Human Resources e-mail ordering him to take long-service leave. It didn't say ‘Don't hurry back', but Challis was reading it that way.

Finally, two reports that had been niggling at him since landing in his pigeonhole on Monday. They were the DNA results from the coffee cup and the blood found on the ground beside the abandoned Commodore. There was no way of knowing who'd been drinking the coffee. Certainly not the shotgun bandit. Challis was betting that the woman now calling herself Nina had swiped a stranger's half-finished coffee from a takeaway joint after escaping from the VineTrust bank.

The blood DNA, that was quite different. Challis didn't know how Nina had shed the blood drops, but he was betting it was deliberate, perhaps a razor nick to a finger pad, and intended to confuse the police. What she didn't know—or did she?—was that the blood contained sufficient DNA markers to suggest a familial connection to the victims of a vicious unsolved triple homicide dating back to 1990. The victims were Pyotr Saranin, his wife Grace, and their nineteen-year-old daughter, Nina.

Saranin, the son of White Russian parents, was born in Shanghai, China, in 1948 and had come to Australia as a toddler in 1950. His parents died in a car accident when he was seventeen, by which time he was an apprentice electrician and engaged to Grace Owens, born Sydney, 1951. They married in February 1970; Nina was born in December 1970.

All three were shot dead in a house in Sydney's west in May 1990, shot in the back of the head, execution style, with a 9 mm pistol. Given that neither Saranin nor his wife and daughter had a criminal record or known criminal associates, police were baffled. Saranin belonged to a social club for White Russian émigrés, but efforts to find leads in that direction had failed.

The thing was, a three-year-old girl had been found in a back room of the house. When it was discovered that her father was unknown, and no close or extended family existed for Owens or Saranin, she was placed into foster care.

That three-year-old grew up, Challis thought. She bounced around in the system; she learned and honed certain skills; and one day a crooked policeman found her.

And through it all she kept a memento, an old photograph.

But who had murdered her mother and grandparents? Challis was betting it had something to do with the icon. He knew a lot about the Krasnov family now. Mara's arrest had generated a great deal of publicity. People had come forward with information and accusations. A nasty piece of work, the old patriarch from a brutal dynasty. And the granddaughter had learnt her ways at his knee.

The likely scenario, he thought, was that the Saranins had lost the icon to the Krasnovs back in Harbin, a grievance that lingered and festered and was passed down through the generations. Then one day maybe Pyotr Saranin heard something, saw something, picked up a rumour around Sydney's White Russian émigré community. He'd approached the Krasnovs and it got him killed.

Challis heard Pam Murphy in his doorway: ‘Just scribble your signature on everything, boss. It could be my promotion, a salary upgrade, approval to study policing on the Riviera…'

Challis rocked back in his chair, gave it a squeaky swivel. ‘Or an invitation to address the kindergarten kids at St Joseph's…'

‘Bring it on,' Murphy said, looking clear-eyed and ready for a challenge. Rubbing her wrists unconsciously, where Warren Niekirk had ratcheted the handcuffs tight.

‘How did it go?'

He'd sent her west of Melbourne to bring back a prisoner. The shotgun bandit hadn't left the state but gone to ground in the goldfields country, where he'd held up a lottery agency in suburban Ballarat and been stopped for failing to wear a seatbelt. Nina had been telling the truth, she hadn't left him lying dead in a drainage channel. Just another one of her smokescreens.

Murphy snorted. ‘He asked me where the siege chick was, he wanted to thank her, maybe she could get him out.'

When the phone rang, Challis stared at it. If he answered, would it jinx his flight plans? Challis on Skype that evening: ‘Sorry, Ellen, something came up.'

It was the front desk. ‘Inspector, someone from the DPP is here. He needs all the evidence for the Niekirk committal hearing on Monday.'

‘It's in the safe.'

‘We looked. It's incomplete.'

At once Challis felt a prickling along his arms and over his scalp. He stood, feeling electric and alert. ‘I'll be right down.'

He rounded his desk and jerked his head at Pam Murphy. ‘Come with me.'

They clattered down the stairs. The evidence safe was no more than a large locked cupboard inside a storeroom located along a side corridor between interview rooms. A cupboard, but securely locked. You'd need to know the key code. It was used to store evidence from on-going cases: dusty packets of cocaine and heroin, pill presses, bundles of cash, knives, pistols, shotguns, knuckledusters, the occasional samurai sword—and the loot from Nina's safe-deposit box. And that loot was somehow appealing to Challis, as he opened a large cardboard box labelled
Niekirk/Grace
and peered in. No blood streaks or brain matter attached. A hint of taste and history.

And incomplete. The Sydney Long was there, the coins and stamps, but not the Klee, not the photograph.

Challis stared at Pam Murphy and she at him and somehow the knowledge passed from one to the other. It would have happened in the deepest hours of the night, a young woman arriving at the front desk, looking like a lawyer, waving a convincing subpoena. Convincing manner, too. Whoever she was.