Whispering Death (18 page)

With a flick of her slender wrist she tapped a head-and-shoulders photograph. ‘Chloe Holst, twenty years old, worked part-time at the Chicory Kiln restaurant here—' she tapped the map ‘—and abducted here—' another tap ‘—when a man dressed in a Victoria Police uniform, and carrying police ID, stopped her car. He got into her car, and forced her to drive around at knifepoint. She was sexually assaulted several times in the hours that followed, and finally dropped at this nature reserve.'

This time Schiff slapped the wall map. It swung as if caught in a gale.

‘Forensics?' a voice called.

Challis shook his head. ‘Nothing much. According to Miss Holst, her attacker used a condom, and when he was finished with her he washed her down and combed out her hair.'

‘The second victim,' announced Schiff, into the pause that followed. ‘Delia Rice, twenty-six years old, from—' she hesitated over the word ‘—Moo-roo-duc.'

‘Moorooduc,' half-a-dozen voices said fluently, some helpful, others with a faint sneer. There was little that Challis could do about the sneers. Jeannie Schiff would be watched and assessed over the next few days. If she passed, the eye rolling would cease.

‘From Moorooduc,' Schiff said. ‘Recently divorced and back living with her parents—who reported her missing yesterday afternoon, about the time her body was discovered in the boot of a crashed and abandoned Holden sedan found
here
.'

The map swayed again. ‘Now, similarities between the two cases. Both were found naked, with bruising around the neck and on the stomach, thighs and genital area. Signs of forced intercourse, with condom lubricant found in the vagina, anus and throat. Both women were washed in a bleach solution and it's likely that Delia Rice's hair was combed out, just as the first victim's was.'

‘Pubes, too?' said Neil Staines, a Frankston detective. He was young, a smirker.

Schiff said, ‘Since you find the genitalia of even a dead woman arousing, perhaps you're not the right person for the job.'

There was a stunned silence, then laughter, but Staines's two colleagues hooted, as if to say that Jeannie Schiff was being overly sensitive, couldn't take a joke. One of them muttered, ‘Pre-menstrual.'

Schiff indicated both men, and Staines, with the pointer. ‘You, you and you, you're off the case. Frankly, you're a dead weight and a disgrace to the force.'

They gaped, looking around for support and finding none. ‘Yeah, well, good luck,' Staines said, climbing out of his chair in his lazy, fatalistic way.

As he sauntered out, Schiff whacked his backside with the pointer. He was shocked. ‘You hit me.'

‘You bet.'

‘I'm reporting you.'

‘Go right ahead.'

Challis looked on with amusement and faint alarm. If this became an administrative headache, he wanted no part of it, not on top of everything else. And he wondered if he could afford to lose three investigators, even bad ones.

When the three had gone, Schiff said, ‘Yes, I will get into trouble for that. But that doesn't matter. What matters is catching a rapist and a killer.'

There was a ripple of intensity in her voice and body.

‘To recap: there are similarities between the two cases. But Delia Rice died as a result of the attack on her, and we don't know if she was abducted or went willingly with her attacker, and, if she
was
abducted, we don't know if he'd posed as a police officer. The man seen running away from the scene was not wearing a uniform. Now, how do we read this? One, it wasn't our man but a random hitchhiker who for some reason strayed onto the driveway of the house around the time the accident occurred, and I doubt very much that that is the case. Two, he was an accomplice of the main offender. Three, the cases are not related, this is a different offender. Four, he changed into ordinary clothes before dumping the body, fearing the uniform would be noticed.'

Challis stirred. ‘Our man is forensically aware, by the way. He'll have burnt the clothes.'

With grim authority, Schiff said, ‘But not the uniform. He needs it, it's his main tool, it's not something he can buy off the rack at K-Mart.'

‘But what if we're dealing with an actual policeman?' Scobie Sutton said.

‘Then we keep an open mind. Now, another difference. The first victim was driven around in her own car, attacked in her own car, dumped from her own car, which was returned to the abduction site. We have nothing like that in the case of Delia Rice. She'd encountered financial difficulties after her divorce and sold her car.'

‘So where was she abducted?' asked a Mornington detective. ‘How did she get there?'

Schiff looked to Challis, who uncoiled from the wall. ‘Miss Rice was driven to the Frankston station by her father on Thursday afternoon. She was to take a train to the city and stay overnight with friends. They'd made dinner reservations and had tickets to a Missy Higgins concert. She didn't arrive.'

Schiff stepped in again, saying, ‘The friends didn't think anything of it when she didn't show. Thought she'd changed her mind. It all came out yesterday morning when Delia's mother phoned, wanting to speak to her. After that the parents dithered a bit, rang around all of her friends, spoke to the ex-husband—who lives in Sydney, incidentally, we can rule him out—and finally called us. By which time Delia had been dead for several hours.'

She glanced at Challis. He said, ‘Returning to the car business: Chloe Holst states that she was stopped by a man driving a late model white Falcon. She could be excused for thinking it was an unmarked police car. We doubt he was driving his own car. Scobie?'

Scobie Sutton felt the strain of the collective gaze. He coughed, tapped files and folders into neat piles. ‘We looked at the theft of white, late-model Falcons, Holdens and other family-sized cars going back four weeks. Forty-one in Victoria, five on the Peninsula. Most were found quickly, probably stolen by joy riders. Four were torched, two damaged. As for the others, I expect they've been through a chop shop.'

‘If it's the same man,' Challis said, ‘he used the same tactic. Delia Rice was found in the boot of a white sedan, a Holden this time, stolen from the car park behind the TAFE College in Frankston.'

Schiff gave a bright, hard smile. ‘Which raises the issue of time. Chloe Holst was snatched at night, Delia Rice we're not sure of. But we do know that it was daylight when her killer was driving around looking for somewhere to dump her. What does that tell us?'

Pam Murphy lifted a hand. ‘Her attacker is unemployed, or he works irregular hours.'

‘Very good. And so we come to the fun part of the proceedings, divvying up the work load.' She pointed, moving swiftly from person to person. ‘You, get hold of the CCTV coverage in and around the TAFE college. You, Frankston station, ditto—and nearby streets and shops, in case Delia decided to take a later train. You, drive to the city, talk to the friends. You, track down her Peninsula friends. You, another word with the ex-husband. Constable Murphy, you're with me.'

Challis watched, trying to read the shifts in Pam Murphy's face and demeanour to tell him if she needed a break from the high-powered sergeant. He saw Pam Murphy give Schiff a little punch to the shoulder as if to say, ‘Loved the way you sorted out that prick from Frankston.'

29

No
Home Digest
or
Décor
this time. Grace had pictures in her head.

She dressed down that Saturday morning—a broad-brimmed green cotton hat, cheaply elaborate sunglasses, shapeless T-shirt and outmoded cargo pants—and drove to Geelong, where she bought time at an Internet café. She needed to find out more about the Niekirks without leaving the search record on her own gear. The disguise was for the CCTV cameras.

First she Googled ‘Warren Niekirk', assuming he was the main player, but quickly learned that he'd been no more than a vaguely competent real estate salesman who'd had the brains, or luck, to marry into the Krasnov family, prominent Sydney art dealers. Under their patronage he'd become a vaguely competent second-hand dealer, specialising in vintage and veteran motorcars and aircraft.

So Grace concentrated on Mara Niekirk. According to the official Krasnov website, Marianna was the daughter of Peter (born Pyotr) Krasnov and granddaughter of the late Theodor (Feodor) Krasnov, the man behind Cossacks, a successful gallery and art dealership on Sydney's North Shore. It was all froth and bubbles, so she searched other sites, finding whispers and murmurs of Krasnov dodginess. Fake and stolen art, forged catalogues and provenance, and artists ripped off.

Grace returned to the Krasnov website and a moment later was reading something that made her scalp prickle. Mara's grandfather came from a White Russian family in the city of Harbin, on the wild and sparsely settled Manchurian steppes. That explained why she'd been so riveted by the icon she'd seen hanging inside the Niekirks' glassed-in walkway.

She closed her eyes. She hadn't journeyed through life with much of a past to anchor her, only a couple of names—‘Harbin', ‘Nina'— lurking in her consciousness, and one old photograph.

The photograph, currently stashed in her safe-deposit box, showed an old man and an old woman posed against a whitewashed interior wall, a hint of sturdy peasantry in their squat shapes, their shapeless coats, the old woman's headscarf. And, hanging behind the old man's shoulder, was the Niekirks' icon. And, inked on the back of the photograph, were the words:
Nadezhda and Pavel, Harbin, 1938
.

Who were Nadezhda and Pavel to her?

What was Mara Niekirk doing with their icon?

If it was the same icon.

The town of Harbin linked them, so Grace Googled it.

Harbin had started life as a collection of tents erected by Russian railway engineers in the late nineteenth century. It remained a railway outpost for thirty years and then, almost overnight, became home to tens of thousands of White Russians who had fled from the Red Army after the 1917 revolution. By the Second World War, Harbin was a bustling regional city of some grace and culture: opera and ballet companies, a symphony orchestra, a conservatorium, a technical college, many fine Russian Orthodox churches, Churin's department store and exclusive schools in the old St Petersburg style. But if Harbin's White Russian refugees were preserving pre-revolutionary Russian life and culture in Harbin, they were also waiting for anti-monarchist and anti-Christian Soviet Russia to fail. When that happened, they would return. ‘We are temporarily deprived of our Motherland,' one man wrote, ‘but the battle for the true Russia has not ceased, merely taken on new forms.'

Grace glanced around the Internet café. A couple of backpackers, one or two poor-looking students, some elderly men and women. No one was interested in her. They were reading their e-mails, looking for aristocrats or convicts in their family trees. She returned to the history of the Krasnovs.

Mara's grandfather Theodor was born in 1920, the son of a White Russian colonel who had escaped from Vladivostok in 1919 and married a young woman named Tatiana, a true
Harbintsy
, born and raised on the outpost, the daughter of a engineer on the Chinese Eastern Railway. The family had servants, wealth, influence. They prospered even during the Great Depression and the occupation by Japanese forces.

Wealth, thought Grace. Influence. How did they get it? How did they keep it? They even survived the Red Army liberation of Harbin in 1945, the year Mara's father was born, although according to the website they were passionate anti-Reds. There were plenty of stories of treachery in Harbin. Some White Russians collaborated with the Japanese, others spied on and harassed anyone with Soviet citizenship or sympathies, and a handful robbed and kidnapped wealthy Jews, and even made their way west to help the Waffen SS fight the Red Army.

But at the war's end the Krasnovs slipped through the net, and by 1949 were living in Shanghai.

So who did they pay off? Where did the money come from? Grace pictured the old couple in her photograph; nothing to their names but a few treasures from the motherland, some jewels, an icon. An old couple like that might fall into debt to a family like the Krasnovs.

What was the true story of the Krasnovs in Manchuria? She Googled a range of words and phrases but found only references to the family website and the North Shore gallery.

And the sugar-coated story of how, in the emigration wave of the 1950s, with time running out for the White Russians in China and most headed for Europe, Canada and the United States, the Krasnovs chose Australia. Theodor, by then in his early thirties, thrived as an art and antiques dealer—using valuables stolen from fellow Russians, guessed Grace—and set up the gallery, Cossacks. When he died his son, Peter, built on his success.

Not only that: Peter's daughter, Mara, true to the traditions of her family, had branched out to establish a successful art and antiques business on the beautiful Mornington Peninsula in Victoria.

Blah, blah, blah.

It was almost 1 p.m. Grace paid for another half hour and gave herself a crash course in icons. Strange tingles went through her as she searched, ghost memories, trace emotions from her childhood, echoing the punch to the heart she'd felt yesterday, when she'd peered through Mara Niekirk's glass wall.

First she tried to date the icon. More modern than the Kiev and Novgorod schools of the thirteenth century; smaller, too. Grace thought the icon hanging in the Niekirks' walkway, like the one depicted in her heirloom photograph, was about 20 cm x 30 cm. Most of the icons she found pictured and described on the Internet were three or four times that size, but the later ones seemed to get smaller. She found a Simon Ushkarov from 1676,
The Archangel Michael
Trampling the Devil Underfoot
that was 23 cm x 20.5 cm.

Subject matter. Usually the Virgin, or the Madonna and child. Painted on wood, the halo in gold leaf, sometimes the face and background too. Considered to be the Gospel in paint.
Praises to the
Mother of God
, they were titled.
The Softening of Cruel Hearts
.