Whispering Death (6 page)

Challis had to be content with that. The Peninsula would have its own sex crimes unit when Ellen returned from her study tour, and in the meantime CIU would have to muddle along. He entered the open plan CIU office and left a note on Scobie Sutton's desk, asking him to compile lists of local sex offenders, and police who'd reported the loss or theft of their ID or uniforms.

He returned to his office, swivelled in his chair. The clutter was comforting around him: files and folders on the floor and cabinets, and his shelves leaning this way and that with bound regulations, trial transcripts, a book called
Written on the Skin
by Liz Porter, and a greasy repair manual for the Triumph.

He tried to picture the rapist cop. It wasn't unknown for policemen to ‘rescue' intoxicated women from pubs and parties and rape them in their homes, or coerce sexual favours in return for tearing up a speeding ticket. But abduction?

He grimaced: blame it on the job? Staff shortages, doubling up of duties, no public appreciation, and finally someone cracked?

That reminded him: Murph had said she'd e-mailed him a list of her vehicle expenses. He nudged his computer mouse. The monitor blinked into life, showing several new e-mails. Most he deleted, but printed Pam's and one from Force Command, advising all districts to be on the lookout for a holdup man. Caucasian, aged in his forties, suspected of robbing banks and credit unions along a coastal stretch of south-eastern New South Wales and now believed to be operating across the border in north-eastern Victoria, and, more recently, Gippsland.

He swung in his chair, looked at his watch. Murphy should be back from the hospital soon. He pondered her a little. She seemed off her game lately, a little vague and flat, given to brief, strange gestures, a kind of stiffening and staring into space.

But she was turning into a good detective. Unlike Sutton. Scobie was too credulous to be a good detective, without capacity to understand wickedness. He could read bank records and CCTV footage, but not people.

A voice leaning against his doorjamb said, ‘Miles away, boss.'

Challis swung his feet off the desk, his chair protesting. ‘Always thinking, Murph, you know that.'

‘My mentor,' Pam Murphy said drily.

‘How's Chloe?'

‘Her parents are with her, and they've brought in a counsellor.'

Challis nodded. ‘Check this out.' He handed her the bank-robber e-mail and watched her face as she read it.

‘Are we worried, boss?'

‘Us? The Waterloo CIU?'

‘Well, when you put it like that…'

Challis gave her a tired smile. ‘Meanwhile we'd better warn the local banks, so if you could take a wander down the street…' ‘Sure.'

‘Then we'll take a drive out to the Chicory Kiln.'

8

Grace had taken her time driving to Waterloo. Lunch first, at a bistro in the bayside suburb of St Kilda. Some window-shopping and then a stroll along the beach, letting the sun seep into her bones. Bright sunlight today, feathered by scudding clouds, a brisk wind that had her wrapping her arms around her breasts.

And so it was mid-afternoon before she was on the road again, glimpsing choppy waters whenever she glanced along the little side streets that laddered the Nepean Highway. Reaching Frankston, she turned left at a beer barn and made her way south-east in stages to the outskirts of Baxter and down into Somerville.

This was a semi-rural world of boutique horticulture, native and indigenous plant nurseries, New Age healers and tradesmen who preferred life on a couple of hectares to life in a town. Vigorous spring grasses and fruit trees, flowering wattle and scabby pines. Dams, post-and-rail fences and horse yards. Signs advertising eggs, horse manure and garage sales. Delivery vans, family station wagons, a Gribbles pathology car, farm dogs braced on the trays of Holden utes. Grace drove sedately. She'd never been booked for any offence in all of her years of driving, and didn't want to come to the attention of the unmarked highway patrol car—a high-speed blue Holden—that she'd seen lurking around this part of the Peninsula during the past year.

Rather than head down through Tyabb she took Eramosa Road to the Waterloo road, the long way around but this was habit and instinct, too. She didn't see the unmarked pursuit car but along a stretch of farmland she did see a police car parked inside an elaborate new gateway, a beefy-looking uniformed cop and a scarecrow in plain clothes standing in contemplation of the words
I'M COMPENSATING FOR
A SMALL DICK
that were spray painted across the face of a concreted column. Grace slowed the car and gawked, as anyone would, and pulled away again.

As she neared Waterloo, the landscape grew a little untidier: lower incomes, some light industry, gorse and blackberry jungles on vacant lots, a couple of abandoned businesses. Waterloo's Cheapest Cars, nylon flags snapping on a line that stretched from an unpainted shed to a power pole. But, closer in, the town was more prosperous, boasting five banks.

One bank in particular. Grace had come to Waterloo for her safe-deposit box. She had other banks and bank accounts throughout the country, escape funds of a few thousand dollars in each, but only one safe-deposit box. She knew there was usually no call for rural banks to supply these boxes. Local businesses were small, individuals' tastes modest. The idea of spending $50,000 on a necklace, let alone wearing it to the Football Club Annual Ball, was absurd. If a farmer here, or a shopkeeper there, did own a $100,000 bearer bond or a handful of Krugerrands, it was considered a canny investment and stored in a city bank or a lawyer's office safe.

But the Peninsula was different from many rural areas. Grace had smelt money as soon as she'd driven through the area one weekend two years ago. Some of the money was old, discreet and family-based, bound up in land and sweeping sea views, but most of it was new, and often on vulgar display locally, at garden parties, wine vintage launches, twenty-firsts and charity balls. Hence the VineTrust Bank and its little back room full of safe-deposit boxes.

Perfect for Grace. A safe-deposit box in a town where she wasn't known but wouldn't stand out, in a region that was nowhere near where she lived, and in a state where she was not active. Where Galt wouldn't think to look for her. And so, on that October day two years ago, she'd walked into the VineTrust on the main street of Waterloo and rented one of their biggest boxes. ‘I sometimes need to store folios,' she explained, and paid for five years in advance.

They understood. They were very discreet. They didn't know what a folio was or what it might contain but from time to time they did see Grace with a large flat folder or binder. They thought she might have been an artist or an architect. They didn't think ‘thief', stowing a stolen painting. She was known as ‘Mrs Grace' to the young and middle-aged women who took her to the windowless back room furnished only with a plain chair and a table.

Today Grace parked in a street parallel to High Street and slipped into the women's room at the Coolart Arms hotel, where she dressed up, and a little out: black tights under a short purple skirt, dark glasses with purple frames, a narrow purple hair band, oversized scarlet hoops in her ears. All of it intended to shift attention away from her face. Then she left the pub through a side door and cut across to the bank, the Sydney Long aquatint and the cash from Steve Finch in her briefcase.

‘Mrs Grace,' said Rowan Ely, who happened to be passing the help desk, wearing a smile that Grace read as genuine, a smile she'd earned over the past two years.

She gave the manager a dazzling smile and said, in her low voice, ‘Hello, Rowan.'

‘What can we do for you today?'

Grace murmured that she was thinking of setting up an Advance Saver account.

‘We can do that for you,' Rowan Ely said, asking a teller for the forms and a brochure.

Grace had no intention of opening any such account but it was the kind of business a client might want to transact. ‘Let me take the paperwork home with me,' she said, glancing at her watch. It was cool inside the main room of the bank, a little grave and hushed, as if the people at VineTrust dealt exclusively with old money.

Still looking at her watch, she said, ‘If I could have access to my safe-deposit box briefly?'

‘Of course.'

Ely picked up his phone and murmured into it. Brisk seconds later, a slight, middle-aged woman appeared. Joy, Senior Teller, said her nametag and she beamed in recognition. ‘Mrs Grace.'

‘Please call me Susan.'

They conducted the preliminaries—register consulted, signature, both keys produced, the box located and removed to the little back room—and when she was alone, Grace drew on cotton gloves and lifted the lid. In a corner of her mind was the usual nagging fear that the treasures she'd acquired—with Galt and without him—might have vanished since her previous visit. But everything was intact: bundles of cash, a gold ingot, coins and stamps. There were also three sets of false ID and two digital holdings: a photographic record of her burglaries on a memory card, and her house deeds and other personal documents on a flash drive. Finally, there was an old photograph, dated 1938, that she believed was a link to her past. She added Steve Finch's $2000 and the Sydney Long, closed the lid, and got out of there.

She hesitated for a moment on the footpath, thinking that she'd forgotten something. Unease flooded in, followed by the thousand calming distractions of ordinary life. She was low on tampons: maybe that's what it was.

But as she emerged from the pharmacy next to the VineTrust Bank and turned towards her car, a voice said, ‘Anita?' and a current shot through her.

She hoped it didn't show, hoped she didn't falter. Her heels snapped past the little shops as she continued walking to the laneway that led to her Golf.

‘Oi! Anita!'

She walked on, the laneway about five metres away now.

She heard him come in hard behind her but knew it would be a mistake to run or respond. She was innocent. This was an innocent mistake. Her name was Grace, and she had no reason to stop or flee just because someone had hurled the name Anita at her back. A tourist bus belched past, ‘Winery Express' scrolled along its flank. Cars trailed it. Two women emerged from a hair salon; a man tested a telescopic lens outside a camera shop; a pair of schoolboys emerged from a bakery, sausage rolls in their fists.

Grace felt fingers clamp her shoulder and spin her around.

She let astonishment, then alarm, flood her face. Consternation, a touch of irritation. Her eyes behind the dark lenses assessed the man, then flashed to where he'd been standing when he first called her name. A bug-smeared campervan, a woman stowing bags of groceries at the open side door, and two small children licking ice-cream cones. A long camping holiday, guessed Grace.

Back to the man, his hand now manacling her forearm, his knocked-about boxer's face fixed intently on her. ‘Please, I am knowing you?' she said.

He hesitated. He'd known Anita in Sydney, three, four years ago. Anita had been on the fringe of things. So had he. Still was, but he was also a family man, presently touring the country with his wife and kids.

Since last seeing Anita, he'd idly wondered if she was in jail, or on the bottom of Sydney Harbour, given the people she moved with. No, she was here, in Victoria, a little coastal town south-east of Melbourne. With a foreign accent.

‘Anita?'

‘Please, you are hurt me, my arm,' Grace said.

‘Come off it, Anita.'

Grace tugged and attempted to attract the attention of the people going about their business in Waterloo. She stumbled, seemed to hang from the man's hand, which was broad and scarred. His name came to her, from her old life: Corso.

‘Leave her alone,' an old woman said.

‘Mind your business,' snarled Corso.

People seemed to melt away. Grace was alone. ‘Please, you hurt me very badly,' she said.

A woman said, ‘Excuse me.'

‘None of your business lady, okay?'

‘I'm afraid it is. Let the woman go or I'll arrest you.'

Grace felt the fingers unlock. Corso stepped away from her. ‘Look, mistaken identity, that's all. No harm done.'

‘Ma'am?'

Plain clothes and a Crime Investigation Unit ID. About thirty, quizzical but tense, with the compact grace of an athlete. ‘Ma'am?' said the cop again.

‘Is nothing.'

‘Was this man hurting you?' persisted the cop. ‘Do you wish to press charges?'

‘Look, I got the wrong person, okay?' said Corso, backing away.

‘Stop right there, please, sir,' the cop said.

She turned to Grace. ‘Are you all right? Are you hurt?'

‘Is nothing. This man he is mistake me.'

‘Is this true, sir?'

By now Corso's wife and children were hovering. ‘Corse, for God's sake,' the wife said.

‘Misunderstanding,' Corso said, holding up both palms to the detective, eyes sliding away.

She nodded at the campervan. ‘Is that your vehicle, sir?'

‘Er, yep.'

‘Passing through?'

‘That's right.'

‘Heading for…?'

‘Across to Perth, then up the coast to Darwin and across the Top End,' said Corso, swelling a little at his own intrepidity.

‘Where in New South Wales are you from?'

The question let Corso know that his registration plate had been noted. He toed a crack in the footpath and said, ‘Sydney.'

The cop said nothing for a while but watched him. ‘Have a safe trip, sir.'

Corso sauntered to the campervan, his family buzzing around him, the cop still watching, Grace watching the cop, who seemed alert, restless, unimpressed by the things that came her way. And before Grace was quite ready, the cop had swung around and subjected her to the same scrutiny. ‘Are you sure you don't know that man?'