‘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.