Grace swiped at the perspiration beading her face. Then she jumped, hearing his voice nearby, calling, ‘Anita! I just want to talk!’
She didn’t move. Scarcely let herself breathe.
‘No hard feelings, Neet!’
Sure.
Grace climbed out of the channel and crouched in dense shrubbery to glance both ways along the road. She jerked back: Galt stood on the far side, scanning the undergrowth as if aware she’d come out sooner or later, a half amused expression on his lean face.
How had he known she was here in Victoria? Mates all over the country, she supposed. Keeping their eyes and ears open. He probably knew her MO by now, knew about the Hobart job, the Clare job, all the others.
She saw him tip back his head again. ‘You probably think I want to pop you, do you Neet? Look I just want to talk, okay?’
Grace slithered back into the ditch, his amused face in her head. ‘Pop you.’ They had their own language, Galt and his gang. ‘Chow practice’ was an all-day, all-night drinking session, ‘paying for shoe leather’ was petty pilfering, to recoup what they’d spent on petrol and phone calls.
They’d been untouched for so long, they thought they could get away with everything, but in the meantime had got greedy and careless. All that money coming in, but for Galt it was never enough. Then the market crashed, and he’d say, drunk and mercurial, ‘I need you, Neet’. And, his lean mouth twisting, ‘If I can’t be with you, no one can.’
The road into Breamlea was deserted and Grace, prone on the grass in a thicket of stunted trees, sprang up and darted across. Another sharp noise as the bullet scorched across her shoulder blade. The pain came moments later, then the blood, trickling down to her waistband.
She scuttled back.
‘Anita!’ he yelled.
He didn’t seem to care who saw or heard him. The shadows were closing in, a time for men and women to return from their office jobs in Geelong and Queenscliff. Time to drive up, park, empty the letterbox, walk the dog, drag out the garbage bin for tomorrow morning’s collection. See a stranger with a gun walking down the crown of the road like a character in a western.
Well, he had a gun and a badge, who would challenge him? And the real law was thirty minutes away. Grace knew he wouldn’t give up. He’d kill her. She’d turned on him, transgressed some precious, insane code.
Grace retreated further. Here, between the road and a creek, the soil was marshy. Shallow pools dotted miserably with stunted plants and miasmic with mosquitoes. She was in the open and if Galt came parting the branches he’d spot her immediately.
So Grace sloshed back the way she’d come, welcoming the shadows but wishing she had a pond to hide in. A treacherous marsh, that’s all she had here. She scrambled up to the tree line again, thinking she could be living in happy, witness-protected anonymity instead of fleeing a madman in the mud.
No. Who was she kidding? Galt would have found her somehow; he’d have found a way to get hold of her file. It had made sense to run-run with all of the Galt money and valuables she could scrape together-and create her own new identity.
She would never have tolerated witness protection anyway, even if they could have guaranteed her safety. She needed this; she needed to steal. To climb, bend, flex, balance and coordinate; to visualise spaces, the arrangement of objects, traps and escape routes. She couldn’t have given any of that up.
And now she’d made a stupid mistake and allowed Galt to find her.
As Grace darted across the road again, heading for the houses huddled where the dunes shielded them from the swamping sea, a man shouted at Galt: ‘I’m armed and I’ve called the police.’
Grace hugged the grass, her shoulder blade on fire, her clothing wet with blood.
‘Fuck you,’ Galt said, barely interested, his gaze on Grace and a flat smile showing.
He was standing in the middle of the road again, taking aim, and didn’t care at all about citizens who cried out in fearful, wavering voices that they were armed, citizens who were badly frightened but trying to be brave, who simply wanted the bad guy to go away and not come back. Didn’t care at all, and Grace huddled to make herself smaller on the ground.
‘I mean it,’ the voice wobbled. ‘I have a shotgun.’
When the shot didn’t come, Grace lifted her head. Galt had turned away from her. He’d been challenged, and it irritated him. He stood and faced the man who’d made the challenge and said, ‘Really, really mean it?’
‘Leave us in peace,’ the man said, and Grace recognised him, Kim…Tim? An engineering lecturer who lived most of the week in Melbourne but had evidently decided to stay on for a few days. A duck shooter, she recalled, seeing him kitted out for a trip to the wetlands one day.
She stood. ‘Get back,’ she urged him, ‘go inside, he’ll hurt you.’
‘Damn right,’ Galt said, grinning at the lecturer, grinning at her.
Grace didn’t know how to fire a gun. She’d never tried it. But there was a sudden calmness, a needle-like appreciation of sound, light, colour and texture as she lifted and aimed her little pistol.
She fired as Tim fired.
59
Romona Ludowyk told Challis that she was a jack of all trades.
‘Curator of the University’s permanent collection, but also chief conservator if any item we own or buy is damaged in any way. And sometimes,’ she said, ‘I even lecture.’
She smiled. They were on an upper floor of the Arts Faculty building at Monash University’s Clayton campus. The unlovely outer suburbs complemented the unlovely university buildings and stretched as far as Challis could see, through the window behind Ludowyk. The sun beat against the glass and the room was stuffy. The wind howled around the building, too, shaking it minutely.
‘You get used to it,’ the academic said with a smile, seeing his body register the movement.
She was short, slight as a bird, her greying dark hair in a roll at the back of her head. Half-lenses perched on the end of her nose, and she glanced down through them now, at the Paul Klee and the little Sydney Long aquatint resting side by side on a long bench.
She tugged at a powerful light on a counter-balanced arm, positioning it above the art works. The air around her was scented with oils and cleaning agents, and the available surfaces were littered with cloths, brushes, bottled chemicals. Challis had also noted plenty of books, a couple of grubby computers, a colour laser printer, lab coats on wall hooks, packets of latex gloves, microscopes, a large contraption that he supposed might be a dehumidifier.
Ludowyk screwed a jeweller’s lens into her eye socket, leaned over and began to examine the Klee and the Long more closely, angling them to the light, peering at the frames and backing. She straightened, removing the lens. ‘We’d need to run chemical tests to be sure, but I’m confident that both are genuine.’
A knock on the door and a young man entered, as ravaged as a crack addict, dressed in torn jeans and a T-shirt. He said immediately, ‘Any chance of an extension on the essay, Romona?’
She waved her hand at him. ‘Friday at the latest.’
‘You’re a doll,’ he said and disappeared.
Ludowyk eyed Challis with amusement. ‘The dope-head look is an affectation. I doubt he takes anything stronger than aspirin. Clever, too.’
‘You like teaching?’
Another smile. ‘Frankly, I’d rather work with the art than those who profess to study it.’
Challis wondered where he stood. He’d rather work with the evidence than the people who left it? ‘I’m glad you’re not teaching this afternoon.’
She snorted. ‘Not that universities teach anymore. Revenue farming mostly.’
Challis nodded. ‘I can see a day when the police force is less about solving crimes than running workshops.’
Ludowyk bent her head over the Klee again, and murmured, ‘This was stolen.’