Whispering Death (14 page)

After making a couple of passes through the town, Grace took out her Google Earth maps and made her way along a snaking dirt road that took her above the valley, into a knot of pretty hills, with tall gums, secluded farmhouses and wineries on winding side tracks. And the eyesore built by Simon Lascar.

There were no indications that the Lascars had returned from attending their daughter's wedding in Honolulu. The gates were locked, the curtains drawn. Winding down her window, Grace scoped the house and grounds with binoculars. Drifts of leaves on the driveway and garden paths. The lawn needed mowing.

She was tracking across the windows and walls when three cars appeared, two heading for the wineries or farms farther along the road, an electrician's van approaching from the other direction, raising dust. Grace needed time to finish her inspection but knew that someone might remember a woman parked on the side of the road in a white Camry, a Hertz sticker on the rear window. That's when she noticed a ‘For Sale' sign on the property opposite the target house: five acres, with a main house, a self-catering cottage licensed for bed-and-breakfast use, sheds, fencing, tall, pale gums and a muddy dam.

Forty minutes later, she was riding around in the passenger seat of a bulky black BMW, with a real estate agent named Brent, who was saying regretfully, ‘The recession's hit everyone hard.'

But not Brent. Brent owned four agencies in the mid-north of South Australia, and the BMW was worth over a hundred grand.

She guessed boy wonder also owned a matching sedan for the pretty wife, maybe a boat, a Ducati, jet skis, home theatre, swimming pool, a paddock for the horses. And he wasn't yet forty. Good-looking, in that adolescent way of men who've never been obliged to struggle. He drove his BMW as if he wanted to run small Korean cars off the road. The aftershave was classy but overdone. Grace could scarcely breathe. The aircon ruffled the wispy hem of her skirt and drew his gaze from the road.

‘At least interest rates are down,' Grace said.

He ignored her. In his Clare office, thirty minutes earlier, he'd been led to understand that she had money and wanted to buy a secluded rural property, one or two hectares. That had got his juices going: Brent had five such properties on his books.

Now, as they drove, she saw doubts creep in. He wasn't a man skilled at hiding his thoughts. ‘A lot of city folk head up this way,' he said carefully, ‘and after they've sunk their savings into wineries, bed-and-breakfast joints, alpacas, Christmas tree farms, lavender, roses, back road bistros, you name it, along comes the recession and they go belly-up.' He paused. ‘Or they can't afford to run two places, have to offload the country weekender.'

Meaning,
Can this chick afford a winery, a back-road bistro, a
weekender
? He shot her a look. She gazed at the unwinding road, rich and bored.

He sighed. ‘First on the list,' he said, powering the BMW onto a dirt road, ‘is a winery.'

They were at the gates moments later; the sign outside said twenty hectares. ‘Not really what I'm looking for,' Grace murmured. She'd clearly said one or two hectares. Had he listened? Did he ever listen?

Unperturbed, he took her to a craft gallery attached to an architect-designed corrugated-iron house. The house was probably cool inside but looked hot in the sun. The iron flashed blindingly. ‘Sorry, no,' she said.

‘Terrific views,' he pointed out.

‘Not really what I'm after,' she said.

‘Right,' he said, wheeling out of there.

They drove on, across the faces of the little hills, the vines orderly on the down slopes and in the valley below, Grace gazing out of her window, Brent—well, Brent was interested in two things, a sale, and a better sense of her thighs under the summery cotton.

‘This next one's a beauty,' he said, barrelling down a sealed road. ‘Just come on the market, too.'

After a short distance he turned off and followed a dirt track through crowding trees above the Hutt River, to where a low-slung house commanded valley views. Rendered hay-bale walls, rainforest timber decks, a clever shutter system to harness sunlight and repel heat. ‘And your neighbour across the road,' said Brent, giving her some eyebrow work, ‘is a Channel 9 newsreader.'

‘Really,' said Grace, as if her life depended upon it.

‘No lie,' said Brent.

Grace asked a few questions that had nothing to do with how much the place cost then asked to see the next place on his list. ‘Don't give up on me yet,' she said brightly.

‘A bed-and-breakfast,' he said. ‘Very solid property, very solid. Lovely location.'

They drove, Grace gazing out, Brent flicking the steering wheel, flicking his gaze to her crotch. She didn't care. Scoping out the area with a real estate agent was good cover. Everyone seemed to know old Brent. He'd acknowledged waves from pedestrians and oncoming drivers half a dozen times since they'd set out from his office.

‘So, what do you reckon?' he said, pulling into the bed-and-breakfast property opposite the Lascar house. ‘Quite something, eh?'

Grace let herself be dragged around for twenty minutes. She met the vendors, even met the retired couple staying in the bed-and-breakfast cottage. She walked, looked, asked questions, casually scoped the views with her binoculars, until she believed she knew exactly how she would rob the house on the other side of the road.

‘Look, sorry to hassle you, but I've got another client,' said Brent, looking at his watch.

Grace smiled warmly. ‘Thanks, I've seen enough to make a decision.'

Music to Brent's misshapen ears. He wouldn't rush her. He'd take her mobile number and call her, maybe tonight.

They drove out, Grace glancing idly at both sides of the road. A couple of little creeks, dry now, rose in the hills and crossed the road. She noted where the culverts were, their size and accessibility. Meanwhile the verges were typical for a country road, with graded runoffs, tufts of grass, stone reefs and broken glass, the shards blinking here and there in the dappled light.

Back at his office in the main street of Clare, Brent held her dry hand in his damp one for a long beat, putting plenty of meaning into the squeeze and the eye contact. This kind of thing happened often to Grace. As always she was fascinated yet deeply fatigued by it. Promising to give the bed-and-breakfast property her deepest consideration, she slipped through a laneway to the clinic behind the main street, where she'd parked the Camry. The time was 4 p.m.

By 4.30 she was standing under the shower in a motel bathroom, eyes closed, letting the jets pummel her back, neck and shoulders. It helped her to think about the job. If she didn't think about the job, she'd think about the messiness of life, and that would paralyse her.

Then she stretched out on the bed and slept. She'd told herself to wake at 9.30 and, on the dot, she returned to the world fully alert, her heartbeat slow and even.

By midnight Grace was tramping around in the soft dirt between the Lascars' garden shrubs wearing size 11 shoes over her canvas slip-ons, cotton gloves on her hands. As Galt had said, the night he nabbed her: ‘We can lift prints from inside latex gloves, you know.'

Completing the forensic misdirection, she removed the shoes and broke into the house. First she hovered at the entrance to every room, assessing the black holes, the areas where the ambient light failed to penetrate—behind doors, partitions and furniture. When she was satisfied, she masked her torch and probed further, now comparing the layout of each room with the
Home Digest
images stored in her camera.

Most of the rooms had not been altered in the two years since the article had appeared. Then she photographed the rooms that had not been featured in the magazine. There was a medium-sized John Perceval oil hanging on a wall in the sewing room and an Imari vase on the hallstand. If Steve Finch thought he could offload them, she might come back one day for another go.

Finally she went to work with her prise bar and lockpicks, placing Mary Lascar's silverware into one of the empty duffle bags and Simon Lascar's coins, stamps and banknotes into the other. No $300,000 Adelaide gold pound, unfortunately: in a safe-deposit box, she guessed, or sold to pay for the daughter's wedding. The silverware was easy to locate: bureau, sideboard and behind glass doors. The collectibles were in a floor safe under a shoe rack in the main closet. She more or less went straight to it. Using the same reasoning, she more or less went straight to where Lascar had made a note of the combination: in pencil, on the rear panel of his sock drawer. Not all of Grace's jobs were this easy, but many were.

Then she slipped out of the house, dressed in her dark clothes, carrying her treasures.

She spent the rest of the night in the motel, having arranged an early check-out with the manager. By five a.m. Friday she was on the road, heading south along the valley, back through the little towns. At Tarlee, on the Barrier Highway, she cut across country to the Barossa Valley. Here there were more vines, and old wine-making names, and, in the dawn light, a greener, more Europeanised landscape. The Barossa was her back road to Murray Bridge and her Golf. In this way, she avoided the city. Adelaide was small and efficient, but it was a city. She thought that cities, in their stop-start way, chopped you up; they'd certainly done it to her.

She came to the back end of the Adelaide Hills. Green now from the spring rains, the hills would be bare by mid-summer, the grass dead, sparse and brittle, the eucalypts dusty and heat-struck, losing limbs and waiting mutely for a bushfire wind. Yet the hills were also formed of folds and clefts suggesting the slack limbs of entwined lovers, townships, orchards and hobby farms forming pubic shadows. Grace felt elated, as if floating high above the world, beneath a sky that stretched from treeless horizon to treeless horizon, the river a green scribble below. Then she descended to the river flat and returned the Camry. She drove the Golf east, across the border into Victoria.

22

‘Are you a team player, Inspector?'

Early Friday afternoon, and Challis was not in McQuarrie's office at regional headquarters but a conference room at Waterloo police station. He'd been about to drive to HQ, as ordered in the superintendent's SMS, but time and location had been altered at the last minute.

To keep me off balance, he thought. He gazed at the three senior officers ranged opposite him, their heads and torsos reflected in the gleaming table top. One man, an Ethical Standards inspector, wore a plain dark suit. Superintendent McQuarrie and the third man, an assistant commissioner named Laughlin, wore full uniform, as though off to a funeral. All three had come striding in attended by a handful of junior officers. The tactic had been clear to Challis: intimidate my friends and allies at Waterloo, and make my denunciation more public.

‘Inspector?' said McQuarrie. ‘A team player?'

Feeling that he'd wandered onto the set of a bad film, Challis tried to read the mood of his fastidious, slightly built boss. McQuarrie had reason both to thank and to resent him. Challis's clear-up rate was high, and he'd investigated the murder of the super's daughter-in-law with tact. But he knows I don't respect him, thought Challis, and hates to be reminded that I know his son was active in a sleazy sex-party scene; or that it was Ellen who broke a paedophile ring involving police under his indirect command.

‘I'm waiting,' McQuarrie said.

Challis didn't answer but spent a moment watching the man in the suit. The Ethical Standards officer, yet to speak, looked resentful and ill at ease, and Challis relaxed minutely. After all, it wasn't as if he'd been selling drugs from the station safe or drinking with gangsters.

Unless the man was there as back-up, for when they needed to press trumped-up charges against him.

He turned to McQuarrie again. ‘Depends, sir. Do you mean am I a team player no matter what? Or only when the team's worth playing for?'

The superintendent blinked. He'd expected an automatic ‘yes'.

Laughlin could see this going nowhere. Casting McQuarrie a fed-up look, barely disguised, the assistant commissioner leaned solid forearms on the table and said, ‘What the superintendent means is, what the hell are you playing at, Inspector? Hmm?'

Laughlin reminded Challis of his first high-school headmaster, a man similarly tall, bespectacled, scowling, similarly prim and outraged, similarly vain about his cap of thick, tightly combed hair. The headmaster had been an unimaginative desk thumper, loathed and feared; an unimpeachable man of authority who dragged his wife and children from one rural posting to another, leaving behind stressed staff, depleted church congregations and demoralised football and cricket teams.

‘Sir?'

Irritable now, Laughlin said, ‘Do we need to give you the benefit of the doubt?'

Challis waited, wondering why the big guns? Why an assistant commissioner? Did anyone really care that he'd complained about shortages and budgetary matters? Everyone did that, in all professions. But government employees are expected to keep their mouths shut, and he'd gone a step further and taken a swipe at the State Government for propping up the Grand Prix every year. The Premier and his ministers were sensitive about it, probably knew the race was wasteful, unpopular and environmentally unsound, yet were obliged to appease powerful people, and so they played up the tourist dollars that flowed to a handful of cafés and hotels and dismissed the critics as disgruntled residents and greenies. Less easy to dismiss the views of a detective inspector, he supposed.

Christ, thought Challis, maybe I'll become a folk hero.

He gazed evenly at Laughlin, wondering who had put the hard word on him, and how. ‘Sir?'

‘Don't “sir” me. Are you aware that crime data is only one factor when apportioning resources across a Division?'

This is coming down to statistics? thought Challis incredulously. He said nothing.