Whispering Death

by Garry Disher

  44

  Mara Niekirk was a good hater.

  And she really hated Steven Finch.

  Late Saturday afternoon: he’d driven down from Williamstown all excited, saying, ‘Guess what?’

  Warren was somewhere in the house, her daughter and the nanny somewhere else in the house, so Mara was obliged to deal with the grubby little man. She wasn’t in the mood for games, merely stared at him.

  ‘That chick you showed me a picture of, she was in the shop this afternoon. Definitely her, and she definitely has the painting.’

  ‘Really,’ said Mara flatly.

  ‘I know,’ said Finch, shaking his head at the wonder of it. ‘Couldn’t believe it myself.’

  ‘It’s just as well we notified you,’ Mara said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  Mara watched him wander around her sitting room as though he owned it, tilting a vase to read the maker’s mark on the bottom, peering into her china cabinet, cocking his head at her Howard Arkley.

  He pointed his chin at it. ‘Original?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mara, wondering what his game was. Had he bought the Klee from the thief? And she wasn’t entirely convinced that he hadn’t commissioned the theft in the first place.

  Meanwhile the moron continued to examine her Arkley, his face dubious. ‘Easy to fake, that airbrushed-suburban-house-in-a-riot-of-fluorescent-colours schtick.’

  Mara recalled the Dickerson. ‘You would know.’

  ‘Now, now.’

  Mara said, ‘You want a finder’s fee? Is that it?’

  ‘The woman who stole it wants a fee. I’m happy to be the middleman.’

  ‘Expecting that we’ll be appropriately grateful.’

  Finch shrugged, still looking at the Arkley painting. ‘Opportunity knocks, and all that.’

  Mara watched him from her fat round armchair. If she sat there long enough, addressing his scrawny back, maybe it would dawn on him what a rude bastard he was. ‘Leaving aside the money for the moment, what if we said we’d changed our minds, didn’t want the painting returned? What then?’

  Finch swung around on her with a sharkish smile. ‘You’d just give it up? A beautiful painting like that? Maybe worth millions?’

  And, without invitation, he was sprawling in the chair opposite, his bony knees too close. Mara’s skin crawled. Somewhere in the depths of the house, delighted laughter broke out, and she glanced at the diamond encrusted Cartier on her wrist: Natalia’s bath time. She also heard the deeper note of adult laughter. Two adults, Warren and the tart who called herself a nanny.

  ‘I have things to do. Get to the point, then get out.’

  A flash of something nasty in Finch’s face. ‘It’s not all about you, Mara. There are other people who might be interested.’

  ‘How much?’

  Finch shifted on the expensive fabric of her armchair. ‘Twenty thousand,’ he said. ‘I managed to beat her down from fifty.’

  ‘That was big of you,’ Mara said.

  The seconds ticked by and she watched him expressionlessly. Emanated a chill, perhaps, but that was normal. Shadows were gathering beyond the window, populating her garden with lumpish shapes. A young woman perhaps known to this awful man had stood out there one afternoon and chatted about the beauty of the landscape, the headiness of the perfumed air, blah, blah, blah. And then had come back and robbed her.

  Playing for time, she said, ‘It is a beautiful painting.’

  The relief was palpable. ‘It is, it really is.’

  It was as if he needed to act now, before his luck slipped away. ‘Twenty thousand?’ she asked.

  He leaned forward until their knees touched and she wanted to gag. ‘Look on it as good-will money, Mara.’

  ‘You get the money only when we get the painting.’

  Steven Finch held his arms wide. ‘Not a problem. I can get it to you after work on Monday.’

  When evening deepened into night, Mara sought out the nanny. ‘We’ll be gone tomorrow and Monday.’

  Feeling super responsible, she added: ‘I don’t want Natalia to wake up in the morning and wonder where we are.’

  Tayla, reading in bed after an exhausting day, blinked at Mara, who was a forbidding shape backlit by the hallway light. ‘But tomorrow’s my day off.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Mara snarled. ‘Triple pay. Satisfied?’

  ‘I mean, what about Natalia?’

  ‘What about her?’

  Tayla tried and failed to find a common moral, ethical and commonsensical ground with her boss. ‘She was looking forward to Mummy and Daddy taking her to the pirate ship playground tomorrow.’

  ‘She’ll…have…you,’ said Mara, and Tayla saw the warning signs: rapidly blinking eyes, heightened colour and clenched jaw and fists.

  She thought hard about the triple pay, and swallowed. ‘I guess I could take her.’

  ‘What a good idea,’ said Mara, hugely bored already, heading back down the hallway to her husband’s room. ‘Aren’t you ready yet?’

  ‘Almost.’

  But he wasn’t, and she told him what she thought about that for a while. That had him shoving clothing and toiletries into an overnight bag, until, at long last, Mara was able to drive the Mercedes van out onto Goddard Road.

  ‘I didn’t say goodbye to Natalia.’

  ‘I said it for you,’ Mara said, wondering why on earth he wanted to say goodbye to a sleeping child. What was the point?

  They set off in the moonlight. After a while she relaxed, and, with almost sleepy nonchalance and sensual grace, steered the big van up through Frankston and on to Eastlink. What they were about to do, use Finch to find the woman who’d robbed them, gave her a peculiarly sexual tug deep inside. She fondled the bulge in Warren’s trousers for a while, until he gasped and folded over his lap and said, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  The road unwound all the way up to the tunnel and across to the city’s northern exits and finally into downtown Melbourne and out the other side to Williamstown.

  45

  Only one person had responded to Challis’s advertisements, a man in Albury named Hopgood. He’d e-mailed Challis to expect him late on Sunday morning, and now it was 11.30 and Challis was reading the Sunday Age at his kitchen table, waiting for a knock on his door. Would long-service leave be like this, a lot of sitting around, waiting?

  When the knock came, he found a grey haired man on the veranda, a restored Mk II Jaguar in the driveway—British Racing Green, wire wheels, a lovely car.

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Mate, I’m in a bit of a hurry.’

  So Challis took him around to the rear of the house, and the first thing Hopgood said was an incredulous, ‘Twenty-five grand?’

  ‘There’s one in Canberra going for thirty-five grand,’ said Challis mildly.

  ‘Bud, I’ve seen that car. Overpriced, and in a lot better nick than this one.’

  Challis glanced at the sky. Warmish, a slight threat of rain by nightfall, and when it came it would bucket down. Typical spring weather, in fact, and he wanted the sale to go through before it rained. It had to go through, didn’t it? The guy had driven a long distance to be here, and owned an outfit named Brands Hatch Classic Cars.

  He gave Hopgood a quick once-over. About sixty, wiry, weather-beaten, inclined to be impatient and self-important. Challis saw a man who bullied his male employees, fondled the female, and over-charged his clients.

  His mind drifted. It often occurred to him that criminality was closely bound up in motor vehicles. Transport, getaway, an expression of personality, a weapon, a tomb. A payoff. Cars could be tied to everything he’d ever investigated, yet were taken for granted. They deserved their own science.

  ‘Rust, bottom of both doors.’

  Challis knew that. You could see it with the naked eye and he’d said as much in the ads.

  ‘Yes.’

  Hopgood took a fridge magnet from his pocket and, with a no-flies-on-me air, tes
ted every square inch of the car. It seemed to cringe under so much scrutiny: ‘Sorry, getting old, got a few flaws…’

  Then the guy was poking around in the engine bay. ‘New hoses.’

  And new spark plug leads, thought Challis, new coil leads, new everything that had been chewed by the rats. ‘Yes.’

  After that, Hopgood took the car for a test run. He was gone for twenty minutes, and when he returned he stood in Challis’s driveway with his hands on his hips and fired a summary:

  ‘She’s burning oil, so she’ll need a new set of rings. Rides the bumps rough, so new suspension. I’ll need to replace the windscreen and offside turning light, both import items. Goodish tyres. Seat fabric’s okay but stretched. New soft top needed, get one of these made up in Sydney, bloke who does a lot of work for me.’

  So, are you making me an offer? thought Challis. He glanced at his watch and said nothing. He’d told Hopgood that another buyer was coming, which was an outright lie.

  ‘Fifteen grand.’

  ‘Twenty-two fifty,’ Challis replied.

  ‘Come on, you must be joking. Sixteen.’

  ‘Twenty.’

  ‘Don’t arse me about. Look, I’ll give you eighteen.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Challis with his heart in his mouth, ‘twenty.’

  And after the restoration you’ll sell for thirty, thirty-five.

  ‘Eighteen. Take it or leave it.’

  Challis sighed and said he’d take it. Hopgood fished a thousand dollars in hundreds from his wallet and promised the rest when he picked up the car. ‘I’ll come back with a flatbed truck this evening.’

  ‘Sure.’

  And Hopgood left, the Jag purring down Challis’s driveway. Just before reaching the gate it braked suddenly for a sickly-green Hyundai which sped in from the road, saw Hopgood and swerved onto the grass. A moment later, the Jaguar slid unfussily out onto the road and Larrayne Destry jerked back onto the driveway and in erratic surges towards Challis.

  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, an
d 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.