Whispering Death

by Garry Disher

  He hadn’t looked up; wouldn’t have heard her above the radio, set to a thrash station and marked down to $15. But he would have seen her on the security monitors. Cameras covered all the corners and overlooked the street, side paths and back yard. In fact, Grace had advised him what to install where.

  Hadn’t looked up, and hadn’t used body language to warn her either, meaning there were no cops behind a wardrobe or lurking in his office. She studied him. Finch’s face was crammed with large features slapped onto a narrow skull, nose and chin hooking forward, ears like sails. He wore his hair long as if to bulk up the narrowness. He was about forty, tall, well-dressed in a cotton shirt and trousers. His grimy fingers were probably from tinkering inside the guts of the turntable lying in pieces beside the computer.

  ‘Needs a new motor and rollers,’ he said, reading her mind. Still not looking at her.

  He tapped a few more keys and peered at the screen. ‘Place in California can ship them to me.’

  ‘Worth it?’

  Now he looked at her. ‘Is it worth it? Collector’s item, Suze.’

  Susan was as good a name as Grace, or any of the others she used. She also had passports, credit cards and driver’s licences in names she hadn’t used yet, names of babies that had died around the time she was born. And there was an old name, Nina, lurking in her dreams that seemed real where the others didn’t. But just now, with Steve Finch, she was Suze, short for Susan.

  He grinned at her as a thought entered his head and raised one finger. ‘Something to show you.’

  A photograph of his baby son, the child clutching a chair and looking outraged. ‘Took his first steps about ten seconds later,’ Finch said.

  ‘How gorgeous,’ Grace said.

  The new young wife, the pregnancy, the maternity ward and now the first footsteps, recorded in photographs that Steve insisted on showing her whenever she came to do business.

  ‘How’s your little one?’ he said now. ‘Any new photos?’

  ‘Steven Finch, dealer in stolen property and sentimental family man,’ said Grace, opening her wallet to a series of small photographs in clear plastic sleeves, the first a toothy blonde three-year-old.

  Finch grabbed the wallet and peered. ‘Cute,’ he said, then flipped through.

  ‘Awww, look at her in her tutu.’ He peered again, read aloud— ‘Hurstbridge Community Childcare Centre’—and glanced worriedly at Grace. ‘Your sister’s out there, right?’

  Grace let pain show fleetingly, evidence of an old heartache, a heroin habit to feed, trying to get back on track but you know how it is. She swallowed, coughed, and managed to say, ‘I see her whenever I can.’

  Steve nodded, still doubtful. ‘Who’s this? Your parents?’

  Grace leaned over the counter, cocked her head at the opened wallet. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Autumn Years…Where’s that?’

  ‘Out in Lakes Entrance.’

  He frowned. ‘Not exactly close by.’

  ‘Can we get on with it?’

  Finch was still looking at the image of Grace and an elderly couple posed before a home unit in a series of home units. ‘You look too young to have parents in a retirement village.’

  Grace shrugged.

  ‘Sorry, none of my business,’ said Finch, who liked to make her well-being his business. ‘What have you got for me?’

  She described the morning’s takings.

  ‘Let’s have a look-see.’

  She left the shop first, and drove the Golf to a car park behind an abandoned factory. When Finch arrived in his van, she opened the boot. His face emotionless, he drew on cotton gloves and sifted through the items. ‘No coins, stamps? Those I can always handle.’

  ‘Not this time.’

  He ran an ultraviolet light over laptop, iPod and cameras. When a name and a phone number showed on the Canon, he thrust it away as if scorched. ‘Get rid of this.’

  She would. Several grands’ worth, into the sea.

  He was frowning at the ground, working out costs and disbursements. ‘I can go two grand,’ he said.

  His tone was always apologetic, but, in Grace’s mind, $2000 was pretty good for an hour’s work, and sometimes he paid a lot more, depending on what she had. The apology also said that he knew how soon she’d run through the money, feeding her habit, but what could he do? He had a business to run.

  She showed him her photographs of the vases and the Whiteleys. ‘I might go back for them one day.’

  Finch gave her a half nod as if to say yeah maybe, if she lasted that long, then counted out her cut in crisp $100 notes. ‘Stay in touch, okay?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Grace had a landline, an iPhone and several cheap pre-paid mobiles, but no one ever called her, she called them. If someone wanted her, they used the Hotmail account.

  Then Finch glanced around at the cracked concrete wastes and said, ‘Can’t stay, can you?’

  She never had stayed. She didn’t want to have sex with him, or listen to his crap. Clean yourself up, spend time with your daughter, family’s important…

  ‘What’s the time?’ she asked, as if she wasn’t rejecting him out of hand.

  ‘Noon.’

  ‘I’d better go,’ she said. ‘I’m having a new fridge delivered.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  She pointed the Golf at the city, up and over the West Gate Bridge, but wasn’t going home. Home was in another direction, and she didn’t need a new fridge. She was on her way to the Peninsula town of Waterloo. Out of habit and instinct, she would avoid the toll-roads and drive sedately for the speed and intersection cameras.

  3

  The best place for lunch in Waterloo was Café Laconic. Detective Constable Pam Murphy fronted up to the counter and ordered her usual, focaccia and take-away green tea. Grab a napkin, she told herself, you’re wearing a white T-shirt.

  She was walking back to the car when her mobile phone rang. ‘Murphy.’

  It was the duty sergeant, something about a naked woman seen in bushland along a back road north-east of Waterloo. ‘Sorry to do this to you Murph, but I don’t have any uniforms available.’

  ‘All right, I’ll deal with it.’

  Her Subaru was parked outside the camping shop. She got behind the wheel, demolished her lunch with some nifty finger-and-napkin work, then crawled up High Street, mindful of the new speed bumps and the 50 km/h signs, mentally plotting her route to the back road where someone had seen a naked woman.

  It wasn’t her job, first response. In a perfect world, the duty sergeant would have sent a patrol car to investigate. Then, if they’d found a crime, a victim, the machine would kick into gear: crime-scene examiners, more CIU detectives, a police surgeon, a pathologist, an ambulance…

  But this was life in the age of budget cuts. She was often obliged to use her own car on police business. Coming to the roundabout at the top end of High Street, she turned right and found herself stuck behind a muddy Land Rover, which was stuck behind the Frankston bus. The little cavalcade lumbered north past tyre outlets, paint shops, furniture barns and car dealers, the small-town commerce soon giving way to modest factories, storage depots and rural suppliers.

  At the outer edge of the town, the Land Rover pulled into a timber yard, and now she was directly behind the bus, which was behind a shire mower, the blade-head at the end of its yellow articulating arm buried in the high grass and bracken that lined the road. Sparks flew; pebbles, shredded plastic, glass and aluminium were kicked up. Pam flinched, thinking of the hassle if she had to claim for a new windscreen. She still owed her parents $5000 on the Subaru. She was due to visit for Sunday lunch soon, and her father would grill her about the car, and was she taking good care of it?

  She planted her foot and swung out. The road ahead was clear as she passed bus and mower, and at the next roundabout she took a side road into an unlovely region north-east of Waterloo.

  The municipal tip was out here, among unexplained shed complexes and failed yacht b
uilders, their blighted yards crammed with rusted hulls. Dead gumtrees stood in untended paddocks on both sides of the road, etching the sky like pencil strokes. Weeds choked the wire fences, flags of smoke flew from the distant smokestacks on Western Port Bay.

  It was a corner of the world that always seemed damp to Pam: mould crept, trees dripped and small animals died in ceiling cavities. It was a dumping ground, a good place to die.

  She came to a small brick house in a weedy stretch of farmland. Crouching close to the road, it was crowded with rose bushes and lavender, a couple of gumtrees overhanging the roof tiles. Otherwise there was nothing, only untended paddocks and a ragged stand of pittosporum, wattles, bracken, blackberry thickets and mostly dead gumtrees a hundred metres behind the house.

  She got out, watched by two women. The one standing in the driveway next to a grimy Daihatsu van was middle-aged, wearing a monocular on a strap around her neck, faded brown overalls, a woollen cap and work boots. The other, much older, watched from the veranda, her legs frail in baggy stockings, her lips working, her hands trembling on a walking frame.

  Pam smiled, raised her hand hello, locked her car and entered the driveway. ‘Police,’ she announced, giving her name, observing the scratches on the overalled woman’s arms and across one cheek, the licheny bark and twigs snagged in her cap. ‘You reported a—’ ‘Body. Over in the reserve.’

  The woman turned to point, and Pam saw that something odd was attached to the crown of her cap: a pair of cloth eyes, staring heavenwards, large white ovoids with creepy black pupils.

  She dragged her attention away. ‘A body?’

  ‘Didn’t they tell you?’

  As Pam glanced around uneasily, she saw the van was stencilled with the words ANIMAL RESCUE, meaning the woman spent time outdoors. At this time of year the magpies were nesting and would swoop if you got too close. Pam had been pecked as a child. A swooping magpie would still freak her out. Did a pair of cloth eyes on your head really repel magpie attacks?

  ‘Someone reported seeing a naked woman, not a body. Perhaps you could give me your name?’

  ‘Jan Overton,’ the woman shook hands briskly.

  ‘So, you found a body?’

  ‘Young woman, naked, very dead,’ Overton said. ‘Come on, I’ll take you.’

  Even standing she was restless, an outdoors woman who hated stasis, and now she strode with pumping arms to the side gate. Pam called out to stop her. ‘Perhaps you could give me the details first.’

  ‘As you wish.’ Overton swung back to rejoin Murphy, the monocular bouncing on her chest. She halted, plucking a twig from her hair, the action oddly domestic and intimate, as though she’d found a split end. ‘So here’s the story. Mrs McIntosh—that’s her on the veranda—called me about a sick koala.’ She paused with a hint of challenge. ‘That’s what I do, rescue and nurse sick and injured wildlife.’

  Pam nodded.

  ‘She’d had a young koala in her garden for a few days,’ Overton said. ‘This morning she noticed it had mange. That’s a sure sign of low immunity, maybe chlamydia. The poor things are starving half the time, what with the drought. Not to mention their habitat being bulldozed for all the ugly great McMansions going up everywhere.’

  Overton was younger than Pam had first thought, about thirty-five, but baked by the sun, and she carried an air of grievance. Maybe she thought no one appreciated her years of toil on behalf of the animal kingdom.

  ‘The koala had gone by the time I got here,’ Overton went on, ‘but it was no mystery where.’ She pointed to the tattered tree reserve behind the old woman’s house. ‘So I headed over into the fray. Mosquitoes and blackberries…you get the picture.’

  Pam nodded, indicating the woman’s arms. ‘So those aren’t koala scratches?’

  Overton shook her head. ‘The poor thing’s still in there somewhere. To get to the point, I came to a clearing and you know the rest.’

  She waited until Murphy obliged: ‘A naked body?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Phoned the police.’

  Tense, inquisitive, Pam said, ‘Did you touch the body?’

  ‘No.’ Overton squared her shoulders. ‘I didn’t want to contaminate the crime scene.’

  Pam left it at that. She gazed across at the knot of trees. ‘I’d like you to take me there, but not into the clearing itself.’

  Overton nodded. Their route was not fully a walking track but a path of least resistance where the undergrowth was thinnest. Blackberry canes snatched at their clothing and ground moisture seeped into their shoes. Twigs snapped; the air was heavy with drowsy mosquitoes and vegetation rot. Overton stopped and froze. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  The clearing was empty.

  4

  It was a patch of dank grasses and bracken no bigger than a backyard swimming pool, the undergrowth partly flattened near the centre where it abutted a stone reef. Pam remained standing on the rim of the clearing and glanced around. Clearly the body wasn’t dead but had got to its feet and wandered off. Or someone had retrieved it.

  Or the story was bullshit. She turned mildly to Overton. ‘The light’s tricky. You’re sure you saw a body?’

  ‘I swear, lying by that rock,’ Overton said, hands on belligerent hips.

  It was unfortunate, but Pam loathed her. The reaction had begun more or less on sight and was growing as they stood there. She didn’t try to fight or understand it. It happened to her once or twice a year, an instantaneous reaction to face, voice, body and manner, the whole package. She used to tell herself she must be a bad person, or perhaps was sensing inherent badness in someone, even that it was chemical. Now she accepted there was no logic to it.

  And it didn’t necessarily mean Overton was lying. The dismay struck Pam as genuine. She glanced around the clearing again, reluctant to enter. ‘Perhaps if I could use your telescope thingy.’

  ‘Monocular,’ said Overton, lifting the strap over her head.

  The device was warm from her body. Pam put it to her eye and the clearing swam and then the rock sharpened and filled her vision, the surface a pattern of fissures and lichen. There was staining, but if it was vegetable, animal or mineral, she couldn’t tell. She scoped out the surrounding dirt and grass and still nothing. If there was blood, and, more to the point, a blood trail between the clearing and the back road on the other side of the little reserve, then only Luminol spraying at night would map it. Without a body she wasn’t about to authorise that.

  ‘I need to hunt around for a while, so perhaps you could go back and keep Mrs McIntosh company?’

  Overton scowled and retreated, stumping through the gloomy trees.

  When she was gone, Murphy made a notebook sketch of the clearing and the rock. If a crime had been committed here, a stills photographer and a videographer would make a more accurate and permanent record. Then she circled the clearing, keeping to the far edge of it, looking for drag marks, blood, anything at all. It was pointless. She couldn’t tell. Overton had probably seen something, though.

  The clearing lurched as she was hit by a wave of dizziness. Another one: the attacks had started a week earlier, and occurred a few times a day. Sudden movements seemed to cause them, but so did no movements at all. She lost a second of her life. It left her opening and closing her mouth and blinking her eyes for a few seconds. A side effect of coming off citalopram? Lisa, her GP, hadn’t warned her it might happen—had wanted her to go on to a higher dose, if anything, not stop.

  Pam took her time walking back to the house, and followed the voices to the kitchen. A chilly place, the domain of an old woman who has little money and failing eyesight. Dust, crumbs, crusty forks, low wattage light bulbs, greasy smears across the table and benches. Jan Overton and Mrs McIntosh sitting amid it, waiting as tea steeped in a dented aluminium pot and biscuits staled on a chipped plate.

  The old woman was astounded to see her. ‘Are you the meals-on-wheels?’

  Pam smiled. ‘Poli
ce, Mrs McIntosh.’

  ‘Never. Where’s your whatchamacallit?’

  ‘My uniform? I left it home today.’

  Jan Overton sniffed. The old woman worked her mouth. ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Pam said. ‘I was wondering if you’d seen anyone wandering around in the trees behind your house.’

  Mrs McIntosh stared wonderingly. ‘Who?’

  Overton took a frail hand and stroked it. ‘ A young woman, perhaps? Or anyone at all?’

  Distress showed in the old woman’s eyes. ‘Are you from the council?’

  ‘The council? No. You had a koala in your garden, remember?’

  ‘I use tank water,’ the old woman said, turning her attention to Pam Murphy. ‘I’m not on mains water. So you can put that in your pipe and smoke it.’

  Pam had been told that her smile didn’t always reassure, but she tried it now, pulling up a chair. ‘It’s okay, we know you’re not wasting water. But you do have a lovely garden, must take a lot of upkeep. Does anyone help you with it, Mrs McIntosh? Granddaughter, niece?’

  ‘Where?’ Mrs McIntosh said, staring about.

  Pam tried a new tack. ‘Perhaps you can help me, I’m not that familiar with this area. There’s a dirt road over there, beyond the trees, Waterloo’s in that direction, the council rubbish tip is over there…Do you have any close neighbours, Mrs McIntosh?’

  ‘Eric and I owned a thousand acres here, once upon a time. All gone now.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘I won’t sell. You can tell them that.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Pam said. ‘It’s lovely and quiet out here. You most probably know all your neighbours, what kinds of cars they drive?’

  She bristled. ‘Where?’

  ‘Mrs McIntosh, did you hear or see anything suspicious last night or this morning? Someone in the trees, strange lights or sounds or cars?’

  ‘We had a little .22 rifle. We gave it up in the amnesty.’

  ‘Very wise. What about your neighbours, do you think they might have seen or heard anything?’