Whispering Death

by Garry Disher

  ‘Was anyone home when you got here?’

  Tayla shook her head.

  Challis contemplated the Niekirks’ daughter. Natalia stood like a lost child on the echoing floorboards, an almost sentimental pose; she looked like a painting in a community art show.

  ‘When did you last see Mr or Mrs Niekirk?’

  ‘Earlier this afternoon.’

  ‘Before you visited the police station?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did they know you were going to Waterloo?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They didn’t see you leave?’

  ‘They had something to do at the shop, so I waited till they’d left.’

  ‘What exactly did you tell Constable Murphy?’

  Tayla’s face twisted in concentration. ‘I told her this, like, little religious painting was stolen.’

  ‘An icon.’

  ‘Whatever. She seemed interested.’

  ‘Did she say she was coming here?’

  ‘I had to take Natalia to the toilet.’

  It was going to be one of those conversations. ‘Do you know where Mr and Mrs Niekirk are?’

  ‘I think they came home and went out again. Both the cars are gone.’

  Tayla glanced uneasily at Natalia, who seemed to take fright at Challis and sprinted back into the emptiness of the other rooms. The nanny, torn, said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ and stumbled after her charge.

  Challis followed and found them in the vast sitting room, where the massive items of furniture remained and the walls were flat and empty. ‘I’m worried about Constable Murphy.’

  The statement was difficult for Tayla to get her head around. ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.’

  ‘Did something happen this afternoon, Tayla?’

  In a rush, the nanny said, ‘They were like burning all this nice stuff, paintings and that, plus Mrs Niekirk was really mean to me.’ She blushed. ‘Plus I think she’s been spying on me with a hidden camera.’

  So you got your own back, Challis thought. He reflected that it was a variation on the tail light phenomenon. Every year a criminal genius would pull some undetectable murder or robbery, only to be stopped for a vehicle check or failure to wear a seatbelt, whereupon the cops would find the body or the loot. Mara Niekirk had been dealing in stolen art with impunity for years, only to be let down by her own cruel mouth.

  Scobie Sutton came in from one of the rear or side doors, calling, ‘Hello!’

  ‘In here.’

  He appeared in the doorway, and Challis asked, ‘Find the car?’

  ‘What car?’

  Challis said heavily, ‘Pam’s Subaru.’ If Scobie Sutton did become a crime scene investigator, he’d tear the arse out of identifying, cataloguing and collecting what was there, and never give a second’s thought to what wasn’t.

  ‘No car, boss. Signs of a bonfire.’

  Challis nodded. Three vehicles unaccounted for. Three drivers— unless one of them had come back for the third vehicle?

  He said, ‘The Niekirks have an antique shop in Tyabb and a shed at the airstrip. Call for backup and have a poke around.’

  ‘You’re staying here?’

  ‘Yes. And I want you to put out a general alert for Pam’s car and the Niekirks’ van and car.’

  ‘I don’t like it, boss. What if they come back, you know—’ he shielded his mouth with his hand ‘—for their daughter?’

  ‘I’ll deal with that if and when it happens.’

  Scobie Sutton left in the CIU car and Challis glanced at his watch. Six o’clock. The roads of the Peninsula would be choked with wage earners, heading straight into the westering sun, some at speed, some running into trees or the car in front of them. A busy time for the uniforms, and no money in the budget to back up a CIU inspector who’d found himself alone with no one to watch his back. But he called anyway, the duty sergeant confirming his fears. ‘Can’t send you anyone for the next hour, Hal, sorry.’

  So he’d wait. He pocketed his phone, smiled at the nanny. ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’

  She nodded incuriously and he wandered down to the cypress hedge lining Goddard Road. He found the Subaru wedged in a dark, overgrown corner. He wandered back to the house.

  The nanny and the child hadn’t moved. ‘Let’s go to the kitchen.’

  A marginally nicer place to be, stools around an island bench, a huge window looking out onto the sloping lawns, coppery pots on wormy black hooks above the sinks and stovetops. And food, if the child got restive. Fruit in a bowl, ice-cream in the freezer.

  ‘You told Constable Murphy that an icon was stolen when the house was broken into.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘I heard them arguing about a painting.’

  ‘Did a man named Steve Finch ever come to the house?’

  Tayla frowned prettily. ‘Sometimes they spoke to a Steve on the phone. Who is he?’

  Challis ignored the question and searched for the right way to ask his next. In the end, he simply put words in the nanny’s mouth. ‘Did your employers ever have business dealings, or visitors, or phone calls or mail or courier deliveries, which struck you as odd? Valuable items in the house one day, gone the next? Conversations that you walked in on? Paperwork you might have seen on a desk or a table?’

  ‘I’m here to look after Natalia, that’s all.’

  ‘Guns,’ said Challis gently. ‘Rifles. Is there a gun cabinet anywhere?’

  Tayla gaped at him, badly frightened. ‘Guns?’

  Challis probed and tweaked as the minutes passed, and got nowhere. His phone rang. Sutton.

  ‘I’m out at the airfield, boss.’

  Challis waited and Sutton waited.

  ‘I’m not getting any younger, Scobie.’

  ‘The shop was empty, and so’s the shed on the airfield here.’

  ‘The van? The BMW?’

  ‘No sign.’

  ‘Did you question anyone? Mechanics, pilots?’

  ‘Everyone’s gone home, boss.’

  ‘Okay, come back here, eyes peeled.’

  ‘Boss.’

  Suddenly Natalia was standing beside Challis’s knee. Her bewilderment had fled and she seemed to want comfort. Without thinking he hoisted her onto his lap, noting how heavy she was, for someone so slight and small-boned. Then she began to talk and didn’t stop.

  Tayla deciphered. ‘She’s talking about her favourite movie.’

  Challis heard an engine revving outside, and to his ears it wasn’t Sutton in the CIU car. ‘Stand back from the window,’ he said, lifting Natalia to the floor. ‘Better still, take Natalia somewhere safe. Is there a room…?’

  Tayla didn’t answer. She whimpered and gathered Natalia and clattered away with her. Challis walked through to the front room and peered around a window edge. A Mercedes van stood at a slewed angle in the driveway, driver’s door open, and then a horn protested, loud and prolonged. A head jerked up from the steering wheel and the horn stopped.

  Warren Niekirk stepped out. He was bleeding, one shoulder useless and blood dripping from his fingers. Challis watched, as Niekirk went to the rear doors of the van. Time passed and he reappeared, unsteady on his feet, lurching towards the house, falling to his knees over a garden rock as he tried to high-step over it.

  Then he was in the house, stumbling down the hallway to the kitchen, while out on the driveway the van stood empty.

  Challis followed in time to see Niekirk cross the kitchen floor like a drunk man and reach his good hand to the block of knives while the bloodied hand dripped.

  ‘I don’t think you want to do that,’ Challis said, clamping his fingers around a trembling forearm.

  Niekirk rocked where he stood, blinked. ‘I can’t untie her.’

  ‘Who can’t you untie?’

  ‘The policewoman.’

  Challis removed the knife from Niekirk’s fingers. ‘Constable Murphy?’

  ‘She’s in the van,’
replied Niekirk.

  ‘Alive?’

  ‘I told Mara I couldn’t do it. She just turned around and shot me.’

  ‘Did she also shoot Constable Murphy?’

  ‘Almost. I said, “Mara, you can’t shoot a cop,” and she shot me and drove away.’

  Then Niekirk fainted, a dead weight dropping to the floor. Challis turned him onto his side, called triple zero, and went out to the van. He supposed he did everything swiftly, but it was like trudging over heavy sand.

  He paused at the door to the van. Looked inside. ‘Murph,’ he said, with a kind of giddy relief, ‘unless you’re tied up at the moment, maybe you could help me search the house?’

  ‘With respect, sir,’ she said, ‘get stuffed.’

  62

  On his last day, Detective Inspector Hal Challis set about clearing his heaped in-tray of files, memos and correspondence. Start at the bottom and work your way to the top, one of his old sergeants had told him. His mobile was switched off. He hoped his desk phone wouldn’t ring.

  He stared mulishly at the paperwork. It seemed to him that police duties at inspector level consisted more of admin than catching thieves and murderers. But clearing the decks like this would be a distraction from glancing at his watch all the time. His flight left at midnight. He’d work through the day, endure the little wake—celebration?—his colleagues would throw for him, be at the airport by ten o’clock. He flipped over the tray of correspondence and started on the top sheet of the upside-down pile. A memo regarding the car park at the rear of the station: police members were reminded that space was at a premium and the parking bays narrow, so please position your vehicle carefully between the painted lines, thus avoiding damage to other vehicles. Why the fuck had he kept it? But he did swivel around in his chair and look through the window at the car park and his new car, a 2003 BMW 318i with only 47,000 km on the clock. $18,999 and it had cruise control. Not all BMWs of that era did, apparently.

  Ellen, after he’d told her: ‘I’ll say it again: do I want to be with a man who drives a BMW?’

  ‘Heated seats.’

  ‘Well, in that case.’

  It was parked snugly between Pam Murphy’s Subaru and someone’s Kia.

  He binned the memo.

  Next were e-mail printouts, outdated, their subjects resolved, so in the bin they went. Crime scene reports, which he filed with the relevant case notes, witness statements, officer-attending reports, other bumf.

  An old memo from Superintendent McQuarrie regarding the spraycan vigilante. The tone was peevish, indicating that pressure had been applied by the kinds of people he golfed with. The kinds of people who put up huge, defaceable gate posts outside their Peninsula pads, in fact. Challis e-mailed a reply:

  Re: offensive graffiti

  Dear Supt McQuarrie,

  I am pleased to report that a man has been arrested in connection with this crime.

  Yours sincerely,

  H. Challis (Inspector)

  One man, but Challis suspected that three or four men and women were involved. John Tankard had made the arrest, a young architecture student found loitering outside a Main Ridge property in possession of a spraycan—but not in the act of defacing its gate posts, and he had airtight alibis for the previous incidents. So, a gang was at work, and the guy would skate, probably. Challis pictured them: young, mobile, educated and angry. Good luck to them.

  He raced through the paperwork, binning most of it. A letter approving Detective Constable Scobie Sutton’s transfer to a new crime scene unit based in Frankston. Scobie had been told of the appointment but hadn’t seen the official notification, so Challis made a copy and placed it in an envelope on his desk.

  He was nearing the more recent correspondence now, and found a letter unrelated to his police work. Postmarked Darwin, it was from the Pioneer Aircraft Museum.

  ‘I am writing to advise you,’ it began:

  that our archivist has examined various government and commercial archives and concurs with your belief that your Dragon Rapide did in fact play a significant role in outback mail delivery, geological survey work and minerals exploration in the 1930s.

  For that reason, we are delighted to accept your kind donation of the aeroplane for our permanent collection. As you know, we are a not-for-profit institution, reliant on the goodwill of the public, and rarely in a position to make outright purchases, but I am pleased to inform you that your donation has been approved under the Commonwealth Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, entitling you to claim a tax deduction. It is common to apportion twenty per cent of the total allowed per year for five financial years.

  They’d already sent an expert to examine the Dragon, run the motors, take it for a short flight. And now it was in pieces again, on the back of a truck somewhere, inching up the red centre of the continent.

  Then newspaper clippings from the Age: the arrest of Mara Niekirk attempting to flee Sydney Harbour in a yacht, and the shotgun death of a disgraced ex-NSW policeman in the sleepy coastal town of Breamlea. According to witnesses the shooter, a local man unknown to the dead man, had acted in self defence. Police were looking for a young woman who had fled the scene.

  Good luck with that, thought Challis.

  Next was a print-out of the Human Resources e-mail ordering him to take long-service leave. It didn’t say ‘Don’t hurry back’, but Challis was reading it that way.

  Finally, two reports that had been niggling at him since landing in his pigeonhole on Monday. They were the DNA results from the coffee cup and the blood found on the ground beside the abandoned Commodore. There was no way of knowing who’d been drinking the coffee. Certainly not the shotgun bandit. Challis was betting that the woman now calling herself Nina had swiped a stranger’s half-finished coffee from a takeaway joint after escaping from the VineTrust bank.

  The blood DNA, that was quite different. Challis didn’t know how Nina had shed the blood drops, but he was betting it was deliberate, perhaps a razor nick to a finger pad, and intended to confuse the police. What she didn’t know—or did she?—was that the blood contained sufficient DNA markers to suggest a familial connection to the victims of a vicious unsolved triple homicide dating back to 1990. The victims were Pyotr Saranin, his wife Grace, and their nineteen-year-old daughter, Nina.

  Saranin, the son of White Russian parents, was born in Shanghai, China, in 1948 and had come to Australia as a toddler in 1950. His parents died in a car accident when he was seventeen, by which time he was an apprentice electrician and engaged to Grace Owens, born Sydney, 1951. They married in February 1970; Nina was born in December 1970.

  All three were shot dead in a house in Sydney’s west in May 1990, shot in the back of the head, execution style, with a 9 mm pistol. Given that neither Saranin nor his wife and daughter had a criminal record or known criminal associates, police were baffled. Saranin belonged to a social club for White Russian émigrés, but efforts to find leads in that direction had failed.

  The thing was, a three-year-old girl had been found in a back room of the house. When it was discovered that her father was unknown, and no close or extended family existed for Owens or Saranin, she was placed into foster care.

  That three-year-old grew up, Challis thought. She bounced around in the system; she learned and honed certain skills; and one day a crooked policeman found her.

  And through it all she kept a memento, an old photograph.

  But who had murdered her mother and grandparents? Challis was betting it had something to do with the icon. He knew a lot about the Krasnov family now. Mara’s arrest had generated a great deal of publicity. People had come forward with information and accusations. A nasty piece of work, the old patriarch from a brutal dynasty. And the granddaughter had learnt her ways at his knee.

  The likely scenario, he thought, was that the Saranins had lost the icon to the Krasnovs back in Harbin, a grievance that lingered and festered and was passed down through the generations. Then one day maybe Pyotr Saranin heard so
mething, saw something, picked up a rumour around Sydney’s White Russian émigré community. He’d approached the Krasnovs and it got him killed.

  Challis heard Pam Murphy in his doorway: ‘Just scribble your signature on everything, boss. It could be my promotion, a salary upgrade, approval to study policing on the Riviera…’

  Challis rocked back in his chair, gave it a squeaky swivel. ‘Or an invitation to address the kindergarten kids at St Joseph’s…’

  ‘Bring it on,’ Murphy said, looking clear-eyed and ready for a challenge. Rubbing her wrists unconsciously, where Warren Niekirk had ratcheted the handcuffs tight.

  ‘How did it go?’

  He’d sent her west of Melbourne to bring back a prisoner. The shotgun bandit hadn’t left the state but gone to ground in the goldfields country, where he’d held up a lottery agency in suburban Ballarat and been stopped for failing to wear a seatbelt. Nina had been telling the truth, she hadn’t left him lying dead in a drainage channel. Just another one of her smokescreens.

  Murphy snorted. ‘He asked me where the siege chick was, he wanted to thank her, maybe she could get him out.’

  When the phone rang, Challis stared at it. If he answered, would it jinx his flight plans? Challis on Skype that evening: ‘Sorry, Ellen, something came up.’

  It was the front desk. ‘Inspector, someone from the DPP is here. He needs all the evidence for the Niekirk committal hearing on Monday.’

  ‘It’s in the safe.’

  ‘We looked. It’s incomplete.’

  At once Challis felt a prickling along his arms and over his scalp. He stood, feeling electric and alert. ‘I’ll be right down.’

  He rounded his desk and jerked his head at Pam Murphy. ‘Come with me.’

  They clattered down the stairs. The evidence safe was no more than a large locked cupboard inside a storeroom located along a side corridor between interview rooms. A cupboard, but securely locked. You’d need to know the key code. It was used to store evidence from on-going cases: dusty packets of cocaine and heroin, pill presses, bundles of cash, knives, pistols, shotguns, knuckledusters, the occasional samurai sword—and the loot from Nina’s safe-deposit box. And that loot was somehow appealing to Challis, as he opened a large cardboard box labelled Niekirk/Grace and peered in. No blood streaks or brain matter attached. A hint of taste and history.