But the Breamlea home she’d bought fair and square-admittedly from the proceeds of crime, but she alone had selected it. She alone had decorated, managed and lived in it.
Yet the moment she drove her Golf onto the ferry at Sorrento, that Tuesday afternoon, she knew that the Breamlea house was just that, a house, a shell, like all the others back along the short, tumultuous years of her life. All she’d have when she left Breamlea, ninety minutes from now, would be the Golf, a pocketful of cash and the icon. Not the lovely little Klee painting. Not her fake ID, her coins, her stamps, her photos of the houses she’d intended to burgle again, the Harbin photograph.
She queued to buy coffee on board, and there was her face, front page of the Age and the Herald Sun, heaped beside the cash register. Grace went cold and her skin prickled.
The man behind the counter saw the direction of her gaze and performed a kind of flirting, comical double-take. ‘Gorgeous, if I didn’t know different, I’d say that was you.’
Managing a light laugh, Grace said doubtfully, ‘You think I look like her?’
Together they examined the photograph of the woman held hostage by a man with a shotgun. ‘Yeah, a bit.’
‘I guess so,’ Grace said, knowing better than to deny it vehemently. She could feel the gunman’s meaty forearm at her throat, almost smell him. And her jaw ached, bruised by the twin barrels. ‘Poor woman,’ she said. ‘Must have been scary.’
‘I’ll say,’ the man said. He shook his head. ‘And it’s not going to end good, is it?’
‘No.’
‘No.’
Grace bought coffee and a copy of the Age and, trembling a little, took them to a table under a starboard window. She felt scrutinised, trapped, no way out of this steel box until it reached its destination. Galt would see the photograph. He would come.
In fact, she thought bitterly, I’ve been living in a fool’s paradise for two years; I’ve been living on borrowed time.
Think how easily he’d found her that first day.
Grace forced herself to sip her coffee and read her newspaper. She lingered over a sidebar story on the front page, about the senior cop at the siege. His name was Challis. Apparently highly regarded, currently in hot water for speaking out publicly against a lack of police resources, incurring the wrath of force command and the police minister. He looked hunted to Grace, a man casting repressive, vigilant looks at the probing cameras on High Street last night.
On page two was a grainy snap of the escape to the car, captioned Gunman outwits police.
No, I did, thought Grace. The blanket idea was mine.
She turned the pages.
Steve Finch was at the bottom of page three. Gunned down outside his home, known to police, no apparent motive.
Grace stared out at the choppy waters of the bay. The Niekirks? Looked like. Thieves and murderers.
She climbed the stairs to the upper deck and stood where she’d not be heard over the booming of the exhausts. Taking her iPhone from her bum bag, she looked up the phone number for CIU in Waterloo.
‘Inspector Challis’s phone, Constable Sutton speaking.’
‘I’d like to speak to the inspector, please.’
‘I’m sorry, he’s out. Can I take a message?’
‘Could I have his mobile number?’
A pause. Sutton said, ‘I’m afraid not. What’s this about?’
‘I have information that will interest him.’
‘About what?’
‘What happened at the bank.’
‘You can tell me.’
‘Could I have his e-mail address? I want to send him some photos.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m not prepared to do that. Why don’t you-’ She cut the connection and sat for a while. What she wanted to do was tell the sad-faced policeman named Challis about the gunman, the contents of her safe-deposit box, the connection between Steve Finch and the Niekirks. She wanted to e-mail him her photos of the Klee and the icon in situ, the close-ups of the Niekirks’ dodgy invoices, deeds and provenance papers…
It could wait. Right now they were calling drivers to their cars. She headed down to the Golf and waited for the ferry to dock and unload.
Finally to Breamlea. Slowing at the outskirts, she crawled along the little main street, eyeing the houses in a mental goodbye. The place probably wouldn’t have remained a haven anyway. Lifestyle writers had discovered it and that always brought doom.
She stepped inside her front door and into the sitting room and Ian Galt said, ‘Hello, Neet.’
57
Pam Murphy had been eating lunch at her desk when Scobie Sutton took the call meant for Challis.
A miserable-looking salad from the canteen. A canteen meal because she couldn’t afford to lunch at Cafe Laconic very often, and the High Street deli was now a Youth Initiative drop-in centre, serving cheap food prepared and sold by kids she’d arrested, questioned or reprimanded.
Scobie had been eating at his desk, too, a sandwich from a plastic lunchbox. That’s all he ever ate, sandwiches lovingly prepared by his wife-except for that period when the wife had a meltdown. The sandwiches resembled the wife-small, neat, bland-and Scobie pecked and nibbled neatly, blandly, patting his rubbery lips with a paper serviette after every bite.
As for Challis: who knew what Challis was eating, or where? She glanced at her watch: 1 p.m. He was meeting the Monash academic at 2 p.m., so maybe he would snatch a meal at a uni caf. Why was she thinking about any of this? Going off the anti-depressants had brought her some uncomfortable symptoms but also a crazy kind of clarity about random things, irrelevant to life and police work.
She watched Scobie as he took the call in Challis’s office, listened to his stiff proprieties, watched him return to his desk.
‘What was that about?’
‘Crank call.’
‘What kind?’
‘A female wanting to speak to the inspector. I said he was out. She said could I give her his mobile number? No. Could I give her his e-mail address, she wanted to send him some photos? No.’
‘What kind of photos?’
Scobie shrugged, his skinny arms emerging from the sleeves of his white shirt. ‘She said it had to do with the siege at the bank.’
‘Scobie!’
‘A crank call, Pam.’
‘How can you be sure? What if it’s the woman we’re looking for?’
‘Face it, she’s dead. The woman on the phone just wanted some attention, you know how it is.’
‘If she calls again, give her the e-mail address. We know she takes photos, and these could be important.’
‘Suit yourself,’ Scobie Sutton said, and he ate his sandwich and continued to search the database for high-end burglaries.
Then Pam’s phone rang, an AFP inspector returning her callthrough the switchboard, checking that she was who she’d claimed to be. He had some news.
‘We don’t have an Inspector Towne working for us.’
‘How about the man in the CCTV footage? Do you recognise him?’
‘No.’
‘Maybe our witness misheard the name and the rank. The man we’re keen to speak to claims to be attached to a task force, something to do with investigating an international operation.’
There was the kind of silence that says: Did you not hear what I just said?
‘Okay,’ Pam said finally, ‘so it seems we have a man running around impersonating a federal police officer.’
‘Then you’d better catch him,’ the AFP man said.
She’d also sent information on Corso, Mrs Grace and Towne to the New South Wales police, with a request for identities behind the two flagged fingerprints. Until someone responded, she could do little but go to the tea room and prime Challis’s espresso machine. Short black, double shot.
Thirty minutes later, the phone rang. It was a sergeant in the New South Wales major crimes unit. ‘What’s your interest in Bob Corso?’
She told him about the incident on High Street.
‘Is he still in your neck of the woods?’ the sergeant asked.
‘Don’t think so,’ Pam said. ‘He was on a road trip with his family when I saw him.’