Whispering Death

by Garry Disher

  ‘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 call— through 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.’

  The sergeant grunted. ‘That accords with our intel. He went off the radar a few weeks ago. Basically, the guy’s a standover merchant, bodyguard and bouncer at a few strip clubs in the Cross, loving husband and father the rest of the time.’

  ‘He called the woman he accosted “Anita”. Do you know her?’

  ‘I’m looking at a picture of her even as we speak,’ the sergeant said, ‘front page of the Australian.’

  ‘So you know who she is.’

  ‘Anita Sandow—or that was the name she was using, there’s no independent record of anyone, anywhere, with that name—and to answer your next question, one of the partials you found belongs to her.’

  ‘But why was she red-flagged?’

  ‘A long story. The short version is, she was offered witness protection by the New South Wales police a couple of years ago.’ He paused. ‘Then she disappeared.’

  ‘Went feral, you mean. She’s been breaking into houses all over the country, as far as we know.’

  ‘Yeah, well, we thought she was dead, but it seems she was up to her old tricks.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, but you’re not giving me much information here.’

  ‘I’m wondering how much to tell you. Who’s your boss?’

  ‘Inspector Challis,’ said Pam distinctly, ‘and he’s busy and he asked me to track down who left those prints in the bank.’

  A long pause. So Pam said: ‘Did you get a chance to look at the video clip?’

  ‘I did,’ the sergeant said, his voice freighted with meaning.

  ‘And?’

  Another long pause. It was almost 2 p.m. and Murphy felt wired from the coffee and from an investigation that now seemed to be teasing at the edges of something nasty and dark.

  ‘Sergeant?’ she prompted. ‘I take it he left the other fingerprint, and his name isn’t Towne?’

  The major crimes officer made up his mind. ‘His name is Ian Galt. Ex-New South Wales police sergeant, arrested two years ago on corruption charges.’

  ‘Let me guess: the charges didn’t stick.’

  ‘I’m embarrassed to say.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Let’s start with what he’s doing now.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I think he’s probably on a mission to kill Sandow. She was a registered informant, and Galt was her handler and sometime boyfriend.’

  ‘She informed on him,’ Pam guessed. ‘You turned her, you promised her witness protection—she got spooked before it went to trial.’

  The sergeant didn’t contradict her. ‘It all started when Galt arrested her. She was a cat burglar, very good at it, too. Worked alone, but on the fringes of a few organised networks, so she was useful. Had access to information he could use—money laundering, movement of stolen goods, break-ins, stuff like that.’

  ‘She was never charged?’

  ‘Correct. After that, he owned her. He’d supply the intel—security patrol routines, cameras, roadblocks—and she’d go on a spree, break into four or five North Shore houses in the one night. He’d give her a cut.’

  ‘Galt was already dirty?’

  The sergeant’s voice took on a tone of disgust. ‘Galt and his mates had their own thing going long before Anita appeared on the scene. Kickbacks from dealers and brothel owners. You name it. They’d lose evidence, stand up in court and give character references to scumbags. And they had an arrangement with bent officers in Victoria and Queensland. One of your guys—cop in a suburban station or one of the squads, like the armed robbers—would send through word about a payroll, say, and Galt and his mates would make a fast trip over the border, grab the payroll, head home again. The bent locals’d run interference for them. Meanwhile it didn’t occur to the good guys to look for an interstate crew.’

  ‘What happened? Galt got careless? Greedy?’

  ‘They all did. We were monitoring their phones, bank accounts and movements by then, and the upshot was, Galt and the others were arrested, and the girlfriend was offered a deal: go to jail, or give evidence against them and go into witness protection. Apparently Galt used her as a punching bag sometimes.’

  ‘But he spooked her, so she ran.’

  ‘Took the money too, what we heard. Meanwhile he got himself a good lawyer and it turned out our case was a bit leaky…’

  ‘Now he wants revenge.’

  ‘Wants it badly,’ the NSW officer said.

  Pam thanked him and was hanging up when a probationer appeared at the entrance to the open-plan CIU office. ‘Excuse me, there’s a woman downstairs, got a little girl with her and she needs to speak to someone in CIU.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘People called Newkirk? Some name like that.’

  Pam glanced at her watch. Two-fifteen and she needed to contact the New South Wales ethical standards department for more on the man named Galt. But a call like that took patience, tact and determination; she’d do it later when she had a free half hour. She followed the probationer downstairs and stuck her head around the door of the victim suite.

  Tayla, the nanny, was holding Natalia on her knee. ‘They lied to you,’ she said. ‘Stuff was stolen.’

  58

  At that moment, Galt was trying a let’s-talk-this-over approach.

  ‘Actually, I don’t think I ever knew your real identity, Neet. According to the title deeds for this place—and that was foolish, by the way, storing them in your bank—you’re going by the name Susan Grace, but—’

  Grace dived through the sitting room window.

  She hadn’t tested this as a means of escape, but she had planned it and spent money on it, knowing that someone like Galt would come for her one day. Hence, shatter-proof glass on all the windows, secured by beading designed to pop out of the frame when pressure was applied.

  Like now. ‘Jesus, Neet,’ Galt said, as Grace’s body described a tidy parabola through to the lawn on the other side. In the three or four seconds it took for him to cross the room and fire her own Glock at her through the empty window frame, she was feinting left and right into a thicket of garden trees and bushes.

  From there she scuttled around to the back wall where the land sloped down, leaving a gap under th
e house. A useful space, somewhere to store timber offcuts, a chewed-up surf board, her extension ladder. And her backup gun, which was a Beretta. Grace located the concrete stump that supported the laundry floor, slid her hand in, felt around for the shallow wooden box she’d nailed there, retrieved the little pistol.

  She worked a shell into the firing chamber then extended her arm, sighting along it: the left-hand corner of the house, then the right, then the garden trees and finally the back door, trying to anticipate what Galt would do.

  He was here to kill her, of course—but he could have done that without chewing her ear off, so he was also here for his money.

  Except it wasn’t his. He and his mates had put her to work, but she had succeeded beyond their expectations. By rights, the money was hers. Not that any of it was left. She’d spent the lot: this house, her car, the guns, the fake ID, the clothes, the travel…

  The online poker.

  Grace exploded away from the wall, ducking and weaving to the neighbour’s fence, clearing it at a run as the next bullet buried itself in the soft pine beside her, missing her thigh by a whisper. A Tuesday afternoon in spring, nobody around, a wind rising from the sea beyond the dunes.

  Grace ran along the far side of the neighbour’s house, an old-style dwelling on stilts, and darted across the street. A sizzling sensation, a tiny shock wave, as a bullet singed the air beside her ear. Grace whimpered, ducked, sidestepped down into a ditch.

  Was Galt shooting to wing her? He’d won pistol-shooting awards. She’d seen the trophies in his Bondi flat, seen the loving way he handled his guns, and almost been jealous.

  Grace doubled back along the drainage channel, towards the caravan park, which was screened from the road by scraggly trees.

  She stopped for a while, listening, wondering what Galt would do. He was generally quite direct. She’d asked him once what he wanted, and he’d said, ‘Simple. I want money, I want you.’

  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.’

  ‘You can tell by looking?’

  She straightened her back. ‘See here in the corner, flecks of—at a guess–—watercolour paint.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I’ll check the stolen art register in a moment, but my guess is this was stolen from a regional gallery somewhere in Europe. Little or no security. The thief snatched it off the wall and walked out with it, and smuggled it out of the country by posing as a tourist on a painting holiday. He or she painted an inept watercolour over the Klee and concealed it among an armful of other inept watercolours.’