Whispering Death Page 5

  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?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Grace said, with the dismissive shrug and hand gestures of a foreigner.

  The cop watched Corso drive away. ‘Do you need a doctor? A glass of water? Somewhere to sit?’

  ‘Like old woman?’ scoffed Grace.

  The cop gave her a nice half grin, nodded and headed towards the bank.

  9

  Pam Murphy had noticed these things about the woman: a slight, ill-defined foreign accent, as though she spoke English at work but another language at home, or had lived for long periods in different English-speaking countries; a beautiful face, once you looked past the dark glasses and showy purple; a trace of fear under the bewilderment and indignation.

  Now, in the VineTrust foyer, she jotted time, date, location and Corso’s name, description and New South Wales registration number in her notebook, together with a short narrative of the incident. Then she pocketed the notebook, showed her ID to a teller and was taken to a partitioned office. The sign on the door said: ROWAN ELY: MANAGER.

  ‘Take a seat,’ Ely said with an amused frown, shutting the flimsy door on them. In fact, all of the fittings looked cheap to Pam, prefabricated out of artificial materials of a pastelly nothing-colour, possibly grey.

  ‘Now,’ said Ely, ‘what can I do for the police?’ He paused, winked roguishly. ‘I can assure you I paid that parking fine.’

  Pam smiled. Ely was the kind of town politician who knew whose hands to shake. When Waterloo had become more popular as an end-of-school-year party destination, he’d cajoled her into addressing the town council on safety and security measures, and had even invited her to a Christmas barbecue last year. ‘It’s not the speeding fine,’ she said, ‘it’s the embezzlement.’

  At the expression on Ely’s face, Pam grinned and held up a placating hand. ‘Joke, sorry. I’ve come about this.’

  She handed Ely the Force Command e-mail, explaining about the bank robber’s inexorable move south and west.

  The manager listened, frowning. He was about fifty, soft-looking, face and forehead smooth and gleaming. Crisp white cuffs, a thin gold watch strapped around one narrow wrist by a strip of black calfskin. His clean fingers played a tune on the pristine desk blotter.

  ‘Naturally we’re always advised of recent holdups,’ he said, when Pam finished, ‘but never in terms of—’ he rolled one wrist, searching for the words ‘—of mapping one fellow’s movements. I can see why you think he’s headed this way.’

  ‘We’re advising local banks to take extra precautions,’ Pam said. She glanced about her as if taking the measure of the VineTrust’s corner location, on High Street’s main roundabout. Too exposed to tempt a hard man with a sawn-off shotgun?

  ‘I’ll certainly warn my staff to be on the lookout,’ Ely said.

  Pam nodded, staring past Ely’s shoulder to the louvred window and High Street beyond the darkened glass, traffic and pedestrians passing by, unconcerned. ‘We’ll see if we can provide extra uniformed patrols. Meanwhile you could empty the tills more regularly during working hours, or whatever it is you do.’

  ‘Well,’ said Ely, the jokester, ‘that would be in the order of secret banker business.’

  Pam gave him an empty smile, shook his hand goodbye, and stepped out on to High Street. A late afternoon in September, a warm wind and cloud wisps above, shoppers parting around her, some even saying hello. She visited each of the other banks, then began her walk back to the police station, passing the Thai restaurant, the women’s fitness centre, the new bookshop.

  As she drew alongside the father-and-daughter barbershop, Janis spotted her through the glass and clacked her scissors inquisitively. Pam pantomimed maybe next time, and continued past the welfare office and over the railway line, her thoughts returning to the attack on Chloe Holst. She recited an old police mantra: What do I know? What don’t I know yet? How can I find out?

  10

  As she steered the Golf down the other side of the Peninsula, Grace thought hard about the incident with Robert Corso, weighing it up, consciously resisting paranoia. Paranoia could undo you just as certainly as a pointing finger, a hand clamping your shoulder, a voice saying, ‘Got you.’

  First, what would the detective recall of the incident? A faintly exotic-looking foreign woman was being accosted by a tough-looking man, but so what? Plenty of strangers passed through Waterloo, tourists attracted by the Peninsula’s coast and hinterland, wineries and bed-and-breakfast cottages. She’d be more inclined to remember the man who posed the threat, not the victim.

  So, Corso.

  Grace thought there was a good chance that she’d fooled Corso: the wig, the accent, the unlikely location. Plus, it seemed he hadn’t been in Waterloo looking for her but passing through, a driving holiday with his family. He might say nothing. But the incident would be imprinted on his mind—he’d accosted her, and she’d denied her old name, and a cop had intervened—and one day he might fall into conversation with someone who’d known her in Sydney, a bouncer or a barman or someone connected to Galt. Or he’d make the kind of phone call that begins, ‘This might be nothing, but today I thought I saw…’ and the people around Galt would send in some goons, or ask Corso to stick around and investigate.

  Had he seen her come out of the bank? Even if the tellers or the manager did talk to Corso, or to Galt’s goons, they wouldn’t connect a mysterious woman with a foreign accent to the woman they knew as Mrs Grace. And for the past two years Grace had altered her appearance each time she visited the bank: mini-skirt one day, scruffy jeans or business suit the next. Cropped black hair, blonde wig, tennis hat. Flashy cheap earrings, tiny diamond studs. To the tellers and the manager, she was a woman with the means and the time to dress as she liked. Beholden to no boss. A lucky woman, warm, arty, a little extroverted. Nothing like the woman Galt had spent two years looking for.

  Besides, Grace didn’t live in or near Waterloo. Nowhere near. She rarely visited the place.

  But…

  But she had been spotted there. Grace chewed that over as she drove. She’d be well advised to clean out the box and find another bank like the VineTrust, in another town like Waterloo. And she did need such a box, a secure place for her valuables and her keepsakes. A place she could visit and daydream about, a place for her secrets as much as her treasures. The box represented who she was. If the police ever searched her home, they wouldn’t find a thing to tell them anything about her.

  This was Grace’s reasoning as she neared Sorrento, the lowering sun flashing in the waters of Port Phillip Bay. Only 60 km/h here, almost a crawl, and she felt a little panicky at that speed. Then 50 km/h, then 70, 60 again, and finally she was at the ferry terminal, too early for the 6 p.m. sailing. She parked outside the pay station and stretched her back. Mild air, the water barely lapping the coarse sand and the awed feet of a toddler and his crouching mother. A dog racing to catch a Frisbee, gulls wheeling. Stretching behind her were the Sorrento cliffs and the cliff-top houses. Who knew what riches they held? And she’d forbidden herself to touch a penny of it.

  Grace needed coffee for the final stage. And something to read on the ferry. She walked back along the short branch road that led from the Nepean Highway to the ferry station, and climbed the hill to the main street, which was busy with the kinds of cars driven by the kinds of young women who married doctors and real estate agents. Cliché, Grace. Yeah, but clichés were useful in Grace’s line of business. They helped her to analyse a place, helped her to decide if it was worth her while. Sorrento was—but the rules were clear: Never operate in your own back yard.

  She asked for a double-shot latte and sat at a table
beneath a plane tree. Five-thirty-five. The 6 p.m. ferry to Queenscliff would dock at about 5.45. And as she sipped and allowed the late sunlight to warm her bones, she gazed at the passers-by, trying to place them. Retirees, tourists, local business people. And vaguely arty twenty-somethings, who ran the bistros, made jewellery, sold boutique wines and nasty clothing. There were reaches in the lives of people that Grace had never known or comprehended, and she swallowed a lump in her throat.

  She drained her coffee, crossed the street, and entered a newsagency. Here she browsed the magazine racks until she’d located the latest Home Digest.

  The ferry crossed the Bay and Grace read her magazine. She read intently. Home Digest was one of her bibles. It helped her work out who to rob next.

  When the ferry docked in Queenscliff, she drove down the clanging ramp and over the sand drifts on the exit road, curving past some unlovely light industry before reaching the old part of the town. The cops were always vigilant here, especially about this time on a Friday, when the tourists got an early start on the weekend.

  Then she was out the other side and heading for Ocean Grove and Barwon Heads. After that, Breamlea, a tiny town off the beaten track which few people knew existed.

  Tourists, if they weren’t going to Queenscliff or Barwon Heads, headed for the Great Ocean Road, not some slumbering strip of houses tucked into a bank of high dunes and serviced only by a general store in the caravan park. The people from her old life would never think of holidaying there. They liked casinos, resorts, glitzy shops. They liked to fork out on overpriced accommodation, T-shirts and sunglasses; trawl around like extras in The Sopranos. Breamlea wasn’t the place to do that.

  Grace drove into the carport of an ungainly house on stilts, as pedestrian as any beach house in Australia, retrieved her luggage and climbed the steps to the deck, some of the tension leaking away. She had a four-cornered life: thieving, selling to fences like Steve Finch, banking the proceeds, home. It was a life of movement and corners, and she couldn’t see any other way to run it. A shut-away life, ordered, solitary, built on habits that kept her below the radar.