Whispering Death (30 page)

Glass and shotgun pellets flew over his head. He jolted in fear and retreated to the police line.

‘Boss?' Pam said, grabbing at his arm. ‘You all right?'

‘Back to the drawing board,' Challis said shakily. He glanced around, his gaze alighting on Café Laconic. ‘Command post,' he said, and strode across to negotiate with the owner.

Then nothing. Late afternoon edged into evening. The Force Response Unit arrived, a dozen men and one officer, armed with assault rifles and dressed like extras in an American cop film. And acting like it, too: they were rarely called upon to do anything but take part in training exercises, and now here was the real thing. Their eyes gleamed and their forefingers twitched.

The commander was a man named Loeb, sculpted out of blonde hardwood. ‘We can use that busted window,' he said. ‘Toss in a teargas canister, stun grenade, the guy's disorientated, my guys rush in and take him down.'

‘He has a shotgun, determination and an itchy trigger finger,' Challis said. ‘We wait for the hostage negotiator.'

‘I say we consider—'

Challis shook his head. ‘We give the hostage negotiator a chance, you know the drill.'

‘It's getting dark.'

‘I can see that.'

‘Could take hours for the negotiator to get here.'

‘Could do,' agreed Challis.

He was saved by the Café Laconic staff, who brought out trays of coffee and sandwiches. Challis gulped his latte. Strong, as he liked it.

His mobile phone rang. He answered, listened, pocketed the phone again. ‘The negotiator's about ninety minutes away.'

‘Jesus.'

Challis shrugged. He was in charge and, as far as he could see, that meant saying ‘no' to everything. He didn't tell the FRU officer that the hostage negotiator had only just touched down at Melbourne airport. Her name was York and she'd been attending at a hostage situation in Shepparton. A fruit grower, burdened by debts and claiming that a Mafia standover man was bleeding him dry, had shot the family dog and threatened to shoot his family.

In the end, he'd shot himself.

I can't see that happening here, Challis thought. Meanwhile it was his job to tell the gunman that a hostage negotiator was on the way. He swallowed a few times and walked out into the intersection again. ‘I need to speak to you,' he called, hunching to present a smaller target.

Nothing.

Challis turned around on the spot, a quick reconnaissance of the intersection and nearby streets. The town seemed to be filling rapidly, an avid crowd of locals and strangers forming behind the barriers, possibly drawn to Waterloo by the TV images. Plenty of media, Challis noted: reporters, cameramen, the Channel 7 helicopter, four or five women holding microphones to their flawless mouths. They were all hungry and, like the crowd—and indeed the police—would be swapping guesses, black humour and misinformation.

He wasn't fired upon. He walked back to the command post.

Then Jack Porteous was blocking his way into Café Laconic. ‘Quick update, Inspector?'

‘How did you get though the cordon?'

‘Is it true you were fired on from inside the bank? Are the police properly resourced for a siege situation?'

Challis nodded to Greener, who came forward from the shadows. ‘Senior Constable Greener will escort you back behind the line.'

Then more stasis.

Movement, when it came, was quick and clean. The main door of the bank opened and three figures appeared. Challis recognised the senior teller, just as she lurched forward as if shoved in the back, stumbled, fell to her hands and knees in the street. Now he could see that another woman was behind her. Young, dark-haired, attractive, scared. Scared because a powerful forearm was choking her windpipe and a shotgun was tucked into the hinge of her jaw. Of the gunman, all Challis could see was the forearm and a black woollen head.

And just as quickly they were gone, disappearing inside the bank, and Challis and Murphy were scuttling across the road to help the teller. Her knees were scraped. ‘It's all right, you're safe now,' Pam said, and Joy staggered, almost a dead weight, as the detectives guided her into the café.

‘I say we go in,' said the FRU officer, hovering over them.

‘And to hell with collateral damage, right?' said Pam, elbowing him aside.

‘My boys are trained…'

They ignored him, Challis asking, ‘You up for a few questions, Joy?'

She smiled shakily. ‘A stiff drink would help.'

Challis glanced at the café proprietor, who nodded and reached for a brandy bottle and a glass. When it had been delivered and the teller had swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, Challis began:

‘First things first: we need to know who's in there.'

‘Apart from the hold-up man?'

‘Yes.'

‘Mrs Grace, Mr Ely, Erin and Maddie.'

‘Who was the woman in the doorway with you?'

‘Mrs Grace. Susan Grace. She has a safe-deposit box with us.'

‘Erin and Maddie are staff members?'

‘Yes. Erin's our financial planner. Maddie's just a trainee, only been with us a month, poor thing.'

Another gulp of the brandy. ‘Sorry, I'm all shaken up.'

She was a slight woman with a cap of red-blonde hair, and she began to cry. Pam hugged her, giving Challis a look that he couldn't decipher. He raised a questioning eyebrow, but she turned to the teller and said, ‘Joy, about the customer, Susan Grace—are you sure that's her name?'

‘Yes.'

Challis cocked his head at Murphy. The question hadn't been frivolous. ‘Do you know her from somewhere, Murph?'

‘There was an incident a couple of weeks ago,' Pam said, going on to describe it, a woman with a foreign accent being accosted in the street.

‘You're sure it's the same woman?'

‘Positive.'

‘She'd been to the bank?'

‘I think so.'

Joy was swinging her gaze from one to the other. ‘Mrs Grace isn't foreign.'

This was a side track they didn't have time for, so to cut it short, Challis said, ‘Is she local, this Mrs Grace?'

‘Oh yes.'

‘Did she give you the impression of knowing the man with the shotgun?'

‘Good God, no.'

He turned to Murphy. ‘You made a note of the time, date, description, car rego?'

‘Of course.'

‘Follow it up later.'

‘Boss.'

He turned to the teller. ‘Have you seen the gunman before?'

‘Never.'

‘Can you describe him?'

‘Not very well. He's wearing a beanie and sunglasses and has a moustache. Average height.'

‘Is there a reason why he let you go, Joy? Does he intend to let the others go soon?'

‘No. He was very clear. He wants blankets and clothesline twine.'

‘What?'

‘Four or five blankets, huge ones,' the teller said.

48

Mara and Warren had been shadowing Steven Finch since Saturday night, hoping he'd meet with the bitch who'd robbed them, but all he did was move between his house and his business.

Now it was early Monday evening and they were parked half a block from Finch's house, watching it through the side mirrors of the Mercedes van, the air ripe around them. Nothing was happening, so Mara said, ‘To hell with this,' and fished out her phone.

‘Steven? I thought we had a deal?'

His voice croaked, betraying fear. Fear was good. ‘I was about to call you, honest.'

‘And tell me what, precisely?'

‘It's not my fault. How was I to know this would happen?'

Mara shook her head as if to clear it but wasn't about to admit she had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Indeed.'

And soon she'd teased it out of him: it was all over the TV, a bank siege in Waterloo, and one of the hostages was the woman who had stolen the Klee. ‘I mean,' Finch said shakily, ‘what if she's arrested? She'll spill to the cops.'

‘It's definitely her?'

‘Turn on your TV. They keep running the same footage.'

Mara weighed it all up. ‘This is what you do, Steve: grab anything incriminating in your house, then do the same at the shop, and disappear for a few years.'

She terminated the call and immediately started Safari on the iPhone. She found a news report and, indeed, there was the woman who'd robbed them.

She turned to her husband. ‘Let's do it. He'll be coming out his front door pretty soon.'

‘Do what?'

Mara ignored him, climbed into the rear of the van. Finch's house was as heavily secured as his shop but from tailing him she knew that he was vulnerable for a short period as he walked between his front door and the driver's side door of his car. An Audi coupe, mind you, funded in part by Niekirk money, parked in the street because the houses were renovated workers' cottages a hundred years old, no garages or carports.

Everything was going swimmingly for Mara now, after days of twiddling her thumbs. She opened the van's rear door a crack, saw that she had a clear line of sight to the junk dealer's front step, and removed her Steyr rifle from its slipcase.

When Mara was a teen, she'd spent school holidays on Grandfather Krasnov's farm in New England, and the old émigré had taught her how to fire a rifle fitted with a telescopic sight. Tin cans, usually, plus the occasional watermelon—just like the assassin in
The Day of the
Jackal
, Mara enjoying the satisfying, pulpy explosion as the bullet hit. Sometimes kangaroos, foxes and rabbits, and, once, a neighbour's stray sheep dog—a spectacular shot, 500 metres at least.

She stretched out on the camping mattress, propped the rifle on a small tripod, sighted the German lenses, and waited, unseen, the van's fittings and metal skin ideal for deadening sound. Was that a shot? people would say. They wouldn't be sure.

She wiggled about until she was comfortable, and after that was absolutely still, breathing shallowly, feeling nothing, not even anticipation. She didn't even register the jittery presence of her husband.

Finch stepped out of his front door and for a moment remonstrated with someone within the house, then the door was slammed and he presented himself to Mara, there was no other way to describe it. He stood there for a couple of seconds too long, carrying a black holdall, a panicky look on his face as he scanned the street, his gaze passing over the van. Mara placed the cross hairs on the centre of his chest and breathed out in one long, slow exhalation and squeezed the trigger.

‘You must squeeze, never pull,' Grandfather Krasnov had taught her, and Mara, packing the rifle away now, folding the tripod, shutting the rear door, telling Warren to drive away slowly, realised anew that there had never been a man in her life like the Krasnov patriarch.

‘Another loose end cleaned up,' she told her husband as he drove in his nervy way out of Williamstown and back to the Peninsula. ‘Now it's time we all took a long overseas holiday.'

49

The blankets and clothesline were delivered to the bank, and time passed.

McQuarrie called. ‘Well, inspector?'

‘Wait and see, sir.'

‘Can't you go in?'

‘Still waiting for the hostage negotiator.'

‘I don't want any loss of life, Hal.'

‘Nor do I, sir.'

So I'm ‘Hal' now? And you want me to send the marines in
and
avoid loss of life? He paused. ‘Got to go, the negotiator's here.'

Senior Constable York was a forthright, large-boned woman, reminding Challis of the rural women he often encountered on the Peninsula, who worked with horses and married cheerful, open men. He outlined the situation quickly, and she said, ‘Huh. You'd expect something concrete by now. Deadlines, demands, a lot of panicky to and fro…'

Challis shrugged. ‘Well, this guy hasn't said a word.'

‘Okay, let's get squared away,' York said.

She'd arrived with a special van fitted with digital recorders, phones, camera monitors, a TV set, scrap paper, pens and a whiteboard and markers. There was also a small, soundproofed inner compartment fitted with a chair, a monitor and a telephone. ‘The throne room,' she grinned, ‘so I can talk to him without distraction.' She gestured at the white board. ‘And this is for intel.'

Challis grunted. There was no intel, only supposition. ‘For what it's worth, I think we're dealing with a hold-up man who's been robbing banks along the coast south of Sydney and more recently in Gippsland. Those robberies were quick and smooth, in and out, no hostage situations.'

‘And he's said nothing,' said York flatly, bending to a keyboard and watching one of the monitors.

‘Not directly.
In
directly he's asked for blankets and clothesline.'

York shook her head. ‘Don't like the sound of that. What if he's planning a murder-suicide and doesn't want to see the faces of his victims when he shoots them?'

‘Could be some kind of shield.'

‘Either way, I've got to get him talking,' York said.

Challis gave her phone numbers for Ely and the bank and she shut herself inside the small compartment. After a while, she came out again, shaking her head. ‘When they talk, I'm on firm ground.'

Challis nodded. He couldn't help her.

‘Normally,' she said, ‘I walk into a situation that's volatile, not calm, and it's my job to talk the hostage-taker down, even if it takes hours. And it's surprising what you can learn in that time. You know, personal information—he's upset or depressed because he's been sacked from his job or his wife's got a lover or he's stopped taking his pills—and environmental.'

‘Environmental?'

‘Like he's got a gun, or the room's too hot, or one of the hostages is pregnant, stuff like that.' York shook her head. ‘But
this
guy…'