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. Cliche, Grace. Yeah, but cliches 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.
Dusk was deepening. Grace turned on the lights, the radio, tipped leftover stew into a saucepan and lit the gas under it. There were always leftovers in her fridge, and she always heated them properly, not by microwave. Tomorrow she’d cook.
She showered, stepped out with a towel wrapped around her head, pulled on tracksuit pants and a T-shirt, no underwear. She was home, there were no protocols to follow. Home: well, it had been for two years; she didn’t know if she’d ever find anywhere she could put down deep roots. Home, and fully paid for.
But hers was a day by day, week by week kind of life, and there was a better than even chance she’d have to walk away from it one dayaway from the warm light on the slate floor, the comfortable sofa, the patchwork bed cover made by a local woman, the local jams and chutneys in her fine dresser. The tiny Hans Heysen watercolour (legitimate) on the wall. The ground-cover plants clinging to the dunes, the windy beaches and the wheeling gulls.
She’d bought an Elan shiraz and a Merricks Creek pinot in Waterloo. Shiraz with the stew, she thought. The pinot tomorrow with salmon, maybe. She drank half of the bottle, and mused, but the itch was upon her. Grace took her wine glass to her study, powered up the computer, and gambled away $7600 in a little under thirty minutes.
11
Grace’s Sandy Bay break-ins might have gone unnoticed until early evening, except that the owner of the Sydney Long aquatint happened to slip home at lunchtime. He worked in downtown Hobart, he told the attending police constables, and discovered, late morning, that he’d left his mobile phone on the kitchen bench. ‘Still plugged into the charger,’ he said. ‘Normally I wouldn’t have bothered, but I needed a couple of numbers.’
He told the story again when the detectives arrived, taking their sweet time about it. Eventually those detectives arranged a door knock, and so a second break-in was discovered, and the owner was notified, and, in halting and not very urgent stages, an investigation was mounted as the day progressed, a detective senior constable named Wilmot in charge.
Wilmot was making a sketch of the loft house grounds late that afternoon, the front door in relation to the driveway, garden beds and street, and noticed a man watching him from the other side of the road. A thin, taut wire of a man. Contained, snidely amused. Charcoal jacket, white shirt, jeans, walking shoes. Casual, but costly, and worn with assurance. Wilmot was thinking Sandy Bay toff, someone idle and pointless, when the stranger headed towards him across the road and came through the gateway, not a care in the world.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ Wilmot said, ‘this is a crime scene. I must ask you to leave.’
‘She was wearing a tennis dress,’ the man said, ‘carrying a gym bag.’
Wilmot’s mind scouted around for guidance and direction. ‘Er, who was?’
‘Your burglar.’
Before he could tell himself not to engage, Wilmot said decisively, ‘Sorry to disappoint you, but it was a guy, he trod all over the garden in size elevens.’
The man offered a mild grin but there was a snake in it. ‘It’s what our girl does.’
‘If you know anything about a crime, sir, I must ask you to-’
The newcomer wasn’t listening. He turned side-on and gestured towards the end of the street. ‘Check the pub on the corner. Their car-park camera. It catches her walking past the entrance at 8.37 this morning, wearing tennis gear and carrying a gym bag. The cute, bouncy type. At 9.15 she came by again, heading out.’
‘You checked their CCTV? On what authority?’
The guy spun around, shot out his hand. ‘Andy Towne. Got in at four-thirty.’