Whispering Death (29 page)

She got out, looking jittery yet annoyed. ‘Who was that? He gave me this really strange look, kind of smug.'

‘He thought you'd come to buy my car,' Challis said, explaining what had happened. ‘You should have come a few minutes earlier, he might have offered more money.'

Larrayne looked doubtfully at the Triumph. ‘If you say so.'

Challis laughed. ‘I'm glad to get rid of the thing, frankly.' He toed the gravel with the tip of his shoe. ‘Everything all right?'

‘Fine.'

‘The boyfriend?'

‘Dumped. Kind of.'

Challis nodded. The boyfriend hadn't seemed too bad; just an idiot. ‘Have you heard from your mother?'

‘She e-mails me like every day.'

Challis, too. A phone call, a text message or a Skype conversation every two or three days.

Larrayne Destry blurted, ‘I was wrong about you.'

Challis opened and closed his mouth warily.

‘I mean, I didn't like what was happening with Mum and Dad and I took it out on you.'

He shrugged. ‘Oh, well.'

She said fiercely, as though she were a fierce small child, ‘You're not my father.'

‘I know that.' Challis didn't even want to be her friend, really. Just civilised with her, that's all.

‘Are you the real deal? As far as Mum is concerned?'

‘I'll try to be.'

‘You're supposed to reassure me.'

‘I'm supposed to be truthful,' he told her. ‘Your mother and I, we're getting to know each other. No pressure, a lot of kindness, a reasonable amount of companionship.'

Larrayne Destry chewed her bottom lip, looking for loopholes in what he'd said. After a while she shrugged. ‘Okay.'

Pam Murphy arrived at her parents' house in Kew with a roast chicken, supermarket coleslaw and a head of broccoli—three minutes in the steamer for the broccoli. Make that five, she thought, thinking of their elderly teeth. If she were not so helpless in the kitchen she might have offered to cook everything from scratch, but this was easier, and she didn't want to burden her mother. She didn't want a fuss, that's what it boiled down to. Or an
unnecessary
fuss. There was going to be some fuss, no matter what she did.

The fuss started the moment she walked in the back door, the mild astonishment that greeted her.

‘Weren't you expecting me?'

When they realised that they had been, her father cocked his head at her. ‘You're a bit later than usual.'

There was no usual time, her visits had become rare and sporadic, but she said, ‘Had to stop for petrol.'

Her father looked at her cunningly. ‘I suppose you know they always put the price up on Sundays. It's best to fill up on Tuesdays.'

‘I'll try to remember that.'

‘Car running well?'

‘Fine,' she told him.

Since she'd got into trouble with the repayments a couple of years ago and borrowed the money from him, it was as if he owned the damn thing.

‘I hope you're servicing it regularly, sweetheart. Every five thousand kilometres no matter what the book says.'

Pam said nothing, hoping a smile would suffice, and after a while her father harrumphed a little and they went through to the sitting room. Rain clouds were gathering above Melbourne but it was still warm outside and boiling inside. ‘Let me open a window. Or at least turn the heating down.'

That caused more fuss and she mentally smacked her forehead. They were old and they felt the cold.

She'd barely sat on the sofa to catch up, when her father said, ‘Let's eat.'

Another mistake: the time was 1 p.m. and her parents always ate lunch at 12.30. ‘I'll serve up,' she told him. ‘Back in a minute.'

Pam glanced at the sideboard and mantelpiece as she left the room. Both surfaces were crammed with photographs of her brothers: graduating, receiving awards, basking in the love of their wives and children. As far as Pam knew, the one photograph marking her achievements, the police academy passing out parade, was collecting fly spots on the side table of the spare bedroom.

She found her mother in the kitchen, boiling the broccoli to death. Giving the frail shoulders a quick hug, she spooned the coleslaw into a shallow bowl and cut up the chicken, her mind drifting. Should she have poured her heart out to Challis over a drink after the Friday briefing, explained exactly what she'd meant by saying she'd done something stupid? He didn't strike her as the kind of man to flounder in embarrassment if a woman friend said she'd slept with another woman. He was straight, but not that straight. So why her reticence? Because it was private, she told herself. Because he's not my friend. Because I've always had to solve things myself.

And the reasons for that stem from my childhood in this house.

They were eating within fifteen minutes of her arrival. She'd bought a couple of Peninsula wines along, a Merricks Creek pinot and the Elan gamay, her father opening the pinot with a flourish. ‘Let's save the gamay for summer.'

Then they told her all about her brothers, their wives and children, their university positions. They asked nothing about her life and work. She didn't mind, not really, the story of her life. The boys, and her father, were the brains of the outfit. She was just a girl. Good athlete, topped her class at the police academy, promising young detective, etcetera, etcetera, but her parents didn't begin to know how to talk to her about any of those things.

‘It would be nice if one of these days you brought someone with you,' her mother said.

For a brief second, Pam imagined Jeannie Schiff in the fourth chair at the table.

The image didn't hold.

Meanwhile Scobie and Beth Sutton had settled themselves onto stiff metal chairs with vinyl seats in the hall of their daughter's school. Located in paddocks inland of Dromana, it offered views to the sea in one direction and vines and hills in the other. A longish bus ride for Roslyn, and Waterloo Secondary College was closer, but a policeman didn't send his kids to school in the town he served in. Scobie didn't want the psycho sons or daughters of someone he'd arrested taking it out on Roslyn, a kicking behind the toilet block, a shafting in a dim corner of the library.

He glanced at his wife. As usual, Beth was subdued, a bit foggy in the head, but seemed generally more engaged with the world and their daughter than she had been earlier in the year. Back then it would have been impossible to get her to accompany him to something like today's school musicale.

He'd paid a gold coin for a copy of the program and searched it for Roslyn's name. There it was, correctly spelt. He ran his gaze down the other names, noting that his daughter went to school with a Jarryd, a Jarrod, a Jared and a Jarrold. Oh, wait: and a Jhared.

First up was a Year 7 four-piece, who didn't quite mangle the obligatory
Smoke on the Water
. There's more talent in a high school than a primary, he decided. The afternoon progressed. A sweet alto solo of
Danny Boy
. A six-piece woodwind version of
Scarborough Fair
. And an incredibly funny extract from
Tubular Bells
, the final section where different instruments are introduced in turn, one overlaying the other, until the final, rousing explosion of the tubular bells—except that the boy who announced each instrument really camped it up, and the instruments didn't quite match. ‘Glockenspiel,' he said solemnly, but what you got was a piano accordion, and when he cried ‘Tubular bells!' Roslyn came out shaking a wind chime.

Scobie thought his face would split from grinning.

The final act was an all-school orchestra and choir version of
Bohemian Rhapsody
, and what made the day perfect for Scobie Sutton was Beth giving him a sly nudge and asking:

‘In what way is a drum solo like a sneeze?'

Scobie eyed her carefully. She was making a joke? ‘Don't know.'

‘You know it's about to happen, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.'

He wanted to laugh and cry, wanted to celebrate the return of his wife, even as a tiny corner of his mind wondered if she'd entered some final stage that, like a sneeze, couldn't be halted.

46

By 3 p.m. on Monday, Grace was back on the ferry, wearing one of her going-to-the-bank outfits, a slim-line black skirt, charcoal tights, cream silk shirt, bright red waisted jacket. The glasses with the purple rims, hair in a French coil, and carrying a cheap red leather satchel on a shoulder strap, large enough to hold the Paul Klee painting and everything else. Flat shoes; she never wore heels. You can't run in heels.

Leaving the Golf near the Rosebud police station, she rented a Commodore and by 4.30 was parked behind the K-Mart in Waterloo. The Safeway car park was closer to the VineTrust, but a corner of her mind said: Don't park too close to the bank.

Then she was in the foyer. Monday, close to closing time, so she was expecting a busy, distracting atmosphere, but the bank was quiet, two tellers finalising the day's figures, the financial planner closing the venetian blinds, and one customer, a young guy in painter's overalls, paint dotting his boots and the toolbox at his feet.

Suddenly Rowan Ely was crossing the grey carpet, wearing his I'm-so-glad-you-bank-with-us and I-wish-I-could-peel-your-clothes-off smile. ‘Mrs Grace! Always a pleasure.'

‘Mr Ely.'

‘Please, please, it's Rowan. Now, what can we do for you today?'

Grace had thought about this. She'd had a similar encounter with the manager on Friday, when she'd stowed the Klee in her safe-deposit box. Today it was her intention to clean out the box, never to return. She'd be missed eventually; Ely and his staff would scratch their heads over her—but that would be later, maybe weeks later, when it didn't matter. Arousing their curiosity
today
was quite different. So she said she wondered if they could sit in his office and discuss some of the VineTrust's business banking opportunities.

‘Certainly. Follow me.'

Grace followed. Behind her the housepainter was saying, ‘…open a business account for, you know, me painting business.'

The words faded to nothing as Ely shut his door. Grace sat erect on the chair facing Ely's desk. She was never coquettish. She never flirted or signalled, consciously or unconsciously, but men always responded to her as if she did these things. Rowan Ely beamed at her as if his assistance to this beautiful woman had been special, and especially noted by her. It gave him a peculiar glow.

They talked for a while. He showed her brochures, swung his computer monitor around to show graphs full of brightly coloured lines. They settled on one of his ‘products' and then he was escorting her out to the foyer, chatting away, saying she should come earlier next time, they were about to close, and if she came earlier they could have a cup of tea and a chat, even a proper drink, his eyes on her chest the whole time.

That's why she noticed the shotgun before he did.

She shifted her gaze to the man holding it, and recalled that the housepainter had been wearing dark glasses, a black beanie and a bristly moustache earlier, when she'd entered the bank. The beanie was over his face now, but the point was, she'd stuffed up. After all, she was the hiding-in-plain-sight expert, and should have been able to tell when someone else was doing it. Instead, like an idiot, she'd been concerned for the bank's carpet, hoping the guy didn't have paint on the bottoms of his boots. And now he was waving some kind of sawn-off shotgun in her face.

47

It was Joy, the senior teller, who'd activated the silent alarm. The gunman had ordered her to step back from her window, but then he was distracted by the sudden emergence of Mr Ely and Mrs Grace from the manager's office, so she'd darted forward, pressed the red button, darted back again.

But Challis didn't learn this until many hours later. Right now all he knew was an alarm had sounded at the police station, a handful of Waterloo uniforms under Jeff Greener had responded, and he and Murphy had a siege on their hands.

The first thing he did was try the bank's back door. Locked. He went around to the High Street entrance. Also locked. Then someone on the inside opened the venetian blind briefly. He saw a huddle of people in the middle of the main room, controlled by a man wearing a balaclava and pointing a shotgun. The blind was closed again.

So he phoned the bank. Rowan Ely answered, sounding frightened, and Challis said, ‘Rowan, I need to talk to him.'

He heard muffled sounds, as though Ely was holding the phone to his chest, then the manager was back, his voice crackling in Challis's ear: ‘He says you don't call him, he calls you,' and the connection was cut.

This was the heart-in-the-mouth stage, adrenaline fuelled, a sense of sand running out, and Challis's chest tightened. He turned to Pam Murphy and ordered the closure of High Street and its side streets and alleyways for two hundred metres in each direction. ‘Nobody allowed in, and shopkeepers and shoppers to be screened before being allowed out.'

‘Boss.'

Then he made a number of phone calls. First, the Force Response Unit; second, a hostage negotiator; third, reinforcements from other Peninsula stations; fourth, the superintendent.

‘Just in case you feel tempted to complain to the press about resources, Inspector,' said McQuarrie, ‘how about I put a bomb under Force Response and the negotiators?'

‘I've already contacted them, sir,' said Challis.

Wondering if he'd redeem himself today, he pocketed his phone and walked into the middle of High Street with a megaphone. There was movement in the bank's front window again, a hooked finger twitching the blind slats. Then the gap disappeared, the blind trembling briefly behind the glass.

He raised the megaphone to his mouth.

A small window, set high in the wall above the ATM, blew out.