Last night he’d wandered dazed and disorientated on to the South Gippsland Highway, near a drainage channel beyond the township of Tooradin, where a truck driver stopped to pick him up, calling the police and an ambulance. Now Ely looked pale and doughy in his banker’s suit, his hands scratched, his forehead bruised where he’d been clubbed by the shotgun.
‘It wasn’t a night for making sense,’ Challis replied, thinking that the bandit had in fact made plenty of sense.
Eight-thirty, and because forensics officers were still poking around in the bank, Challis was conducting this interview at the station. The victim suite, because it was kitted out like a family den-albeit the den of a family without taste or character-but better than an interrogation room.
‘He freed Maddie in the car park. Who was next?’
‘Erin, then me,’ Ely said. ‘Mrs Grace was still with him, the last I saw of them.’
Challis tapped the front page of the Age, the upper fold filled with a now-famous photograph of the gunman on the steps of the bank, his forearm around a woman’s throat. ‘Just to be clear: Is that Mrs Grace?’
‘Yes.’
‘When you were released, what direction did they take? Still heading east?’
‘Yes.’
Challis plotted the route mentally. Did the gunman intend to head deeper into Gippsland-where he’d already come from, robbing two banks along the way-and then up the coast, or would he head inland, north into the alpine country and up into regional New South Wales? Or had it been a bluff, he’d connected with the M1 and doubled back to lose himself in Melbourne?
‘How are the others?’ Ely asked.
‘Fine. Like you, a bit shaken and scared, but fine.’
‘They’ll need counselling,’ Ely said. ‘I hope they realise they’re not needed at work today.’
Challis didn’t bother to reply. ‘Tell me more about Mrs Grace.’
‘Such as?’
‘Anything.’
Ely stared into the distance, a curious loosening around his eyes and mouth. Love, desire? ‘A businesswoman,’ he said, ‘well off, always very friendly and polite. Private. Lovely woman,’ he concluded, uttering a little cough.
‘Is there a Mr Grace?’
‘I understood she was divorced.’
‘Her accent: German? Danish?’
Ely shook his head. ‘What accent?’
‘She was accosted in the street two weeks ago by a man who claimed to know her. One of my officers intervened, and heard her speak with a strong European accent.’
‘Different person. Had to be.’
Challis grunted. ‘Did you get a sense that Mrs Grace knew the gunman?’
‘Good grief no.’
‘Nothing about her manner, her voice, things she said or did? Nothing that hinted of a previous connection?’
The pinkness of health and outrage had returned to Ely’s face. ‘I saw nothing to suggest that.’
‘Okay, then what kind of interaction did they have-apart from this?’ Challis said, tapping the front page photograph again.
Ely narrowed his pouchy eyes. ‘Are you suggesting Stockholm syndrome? She started to sympathise with him?’
Challis knew there hadn’t been time for Stockholm syndrome to develop. He said, ‘Did she resist? Was she scared? Did she talk to him, try to get him to let you all go or give himself up? Did she try to keep him calm, give him suggestions of any kind?’
But Ely seemed to swell mulishly, as if his image of his favourite client were being sullied, so Challis held up his hands placatingly. ‘I’m sure she was only interested in saving lives, avoiding bloodshed.’
Ely gave him a suspicious frown and said stiffly, ‘I didn’t see or hear anything untoward.’
‘She’s the only one unaccounted for.’
‘One hostage is easier to manage than several,’ Ely retorted.
‘True.’
‘Or he’s killed her,’ Ely said, his features cracking a little.
‘Or she’s wandering along a back road somewhere.’
Both men visualised it. The little room was stuffy, the generic framed prints no longer comforting, the armchairs too soft. Outside, in the corridor, life went on, police officers and civilian staff elbowing past each other with reports and car keys in their hands.
‘Why that car?’ said Challis.
Ely shuffled about to get comfortable. ‘He asked which of us had driven to work. The girls were smart, they lied, said their husbands had driven them. I said I walked as usual-which is true. So he asked Mrs Grace where she was parked.’
‘He was agitated when he asked it?’
‘Quite calm, actually.’
‘So you could see his face all this time?’
‘No, he kept the balaclava on.’
‘So he sounded calm.’
‘Yes. And his body language.’
‘Do you think Mrs Grace was trying to calm him down by offering her car?’
Ely said stoutly, ‘I think it was a brave thing to do. For all we knew, he’d go off the rails and start shooting us if he thought there wasn’t a way out. She wanted an end to it. She offered her car so he’d leave.’
‘What can you tell me about his height, build, voice?’
Ely eyed Challis. ‘Your overall build.’
Challis was tall, a little stooped sometimes, medium build. He said, ‘How much cash did he get away with?’
‘Being as it was a Monday, not a lot. Ten thousand?’
There was a knock and Pam Murphy stuck her head around the door. ‘Forensics have finished inside the bank, and we’ve found the car.’
Challis smiled at Ely. ‘It’s all yours.’
Ely was staring at Murphy’s retreating figure. ‘I wanted to ask her if Mrs Grace was in the car.’
Meaning: Mrs Grace’s dead body.
Eight-forty-five now, and they made a rapid trip north and east of Waterloo, Murphy driving the CIU car, Scobie Sutton in the passenger seat, Challis lounging in the rear, where he could think and dream.
Koo-Wee-Rup was a pretty town between the South Gippsland Highway and the broad fast ribbon that was the M1 motorway, many kilometres to the north. Flat farming country scored, to the north-east of the town, by deep drainage channels. That’s where the Commodore had been spotted, on a track beside a drain one hundred metres in from the road. A woman delivering her children to an isolated school-bus stop had called it in, worried it might be another rural suicide. As the CIU car passed the bus stop, Challis could see her point: a lonely spot, swept by ever-present winds, speaking of lost hopes and chances.
The local policeman had created a broad perimeter around the car, using wooden stakes and crime-scene tape. Challis got out, stretched his back, noting the wind, the sun warmth and the water birds wheeling over his head, above the empty stretches of land.
‘A good place to dump a body,’ Pam Murphy said.
The local constable hadn’t seen a body, but Challis shared Murphy’s concern. He thought of the water running high in the drain, he thought of the closed boot of the Commodore. Yet he stood with the others outside the tape and scanned the scene for a while, noting these details: both front doors were open; he could see the keys in the ignition; a cup of takeaway coffee sat on the roof above the driver’s door. He didn’t know what any of that meant except that since the cup hadn’t blown away, there was coffee still in it, and he thought: DNA.
He pulled on latex gloves. ‘Let’s look inside the boot, but don’t touch anything else until the crime-scene people get here.’
No body in the boot, but there was a small suitcase. Challis opened it: women’s underwear, two T-shirts, jeans, a plain skirt, tights, a travel pack of toiletries.
No handbag, but Scobie Sutton, wandering fifty metres along the drain, called out: ‘Over here.’
Challis joined him. The grass was damp, the air laden with moist earth smells and the murmur of water rolling by. Below them, at the edge of the stream, was a red satchel.
‘I recognise it from the news footage,’ Sutton said.
Challis scrambled down the bank, clasping tussocks of grass to save him from falling, and grabbed the bag by the broken strap. Then, braced on the acutely angled slope, he poked at the contents with a pen from his pocket. ‘No purse or wallet.’