Whispering Death

Garry Disher
1

Grace was as good a name as any, and this morning Grace was in Hobart, strolling through a well-heeled corner of Sandy Bay, casing the secluded houses. A Friday morning in spring, a sea fret receding to Storm Bay and the Tasman Sea, it was good to be alive, and she attracted no attention in her tennis whites worn over tracksuit pants, sunglasses, Nike trainers and perky billed cap. A racquet handle poked out of her gym bag, telling you she was an idle young wife, maybe a young professional on her day off, even-if you were the suspicious type-an adulterer wearing a cover story.

But no warning bells. No cause for a stop-and-search. She belonged there.

In fact, it was hide in plain sight, Grace hiding behind the cap and shades, hiding the fact that the tennis skirt was Velcroed to the bodice and the gym bag held burglary tools, gloves and heavy-duty vinyl sacks. One shouted accusation, one query, and she’d be gone. Rip away the skirt, ditch it together with the cap, bag and shades and she’d be transformed into a jogger, and who looks twice at a jogger?

‘Always expect the worst,’ Galt had drummed into her, ‘and you’ll never be caught off guard.’

Another thing Galt told her was to avoid apartment buildings. Well, there were none here. There’s always someone at home in an apartment block, Galt said, always a sad soul sitting at a window all day long, hoping for a diversion to brighten the unvarying hours.

Next, Grace checked for children: toys, bikes, skateboards, even a little pink gumboot, discarded in a front yard. Yes, kids go to school, Galt would say; but not if they’re a toddler or they’ve got the chickenpox, not if it’s a curriculum day for their teachers. And a kid at home means an adult at home.

Vehicles were on Galt’s checklist too. Grace knew she was in a land of two-car households, two adults working nine to five in highly paid jobs. No shift workers here. Play it safe, Galt always said. If there’s a vehicle in the driveway, the carport, move on. Or a closed garage door. Doesn’t mean the garage is empty.

Finally, choose your targets to minimise the nosy-neighbour problem. The people worth stealing from paid top dollar to block an outsider’s line of sight, Galt said. She should look for high hedges, sloping land, tree density and curved streets.

The rest Galt hadn’t taught her. ‘I can show you how to stay under the radar,’ he’d said. ‘I can keep my people off your back, but you were the break-in queen long before I found you.’

Grace made a rapid pass through the little neighbourhood. Trees and bushes crowded most of the houses. No one about, only a workman bolting a gate to a picket fence, another rolling a lawnmower off a ute. The houses ranged from weatherboard bungalows to sharply modern glass and concrete structures, with Tudor houses, Tuscan villas and small, tiled, steeply-gabled 1930s mansions in between. She mentally selected four targets and went to work.

The first was a nightmarish arrangement of interconnected concrete cubes, set well back from the street behind a high fieldstone wall. She entered the grounds briskly as she always did, as if her best friend lived there and they’d arranged to play tennis. When she was halfway to the front door she blew a high-frequency whistle, the kind audible only to dogs. She was answered at once by frenzied barking, one deep-chested, the other a high yap.

She retreated.

In the next street was a low 1970s ranch house set among gumtrees. No dogs. She made a quick circuit of the building, testing knobs and handles and peering through windows. Occasionally she found unlocked doors and windows, fake alarm boxes or no security at all, but often those places had nothing worth stealing. Grace circled the house again, this time running a small camping compass around the door and window frames. The compass needle dipped to indicate a live current at all but the front door. People had a misplaced faith in the security of their front doors, perhaps because most front doors face the street. Grace tested it again. A slight deflection of the needle near the latch.

It was a glass door, comprising a single pane secured around the edges by narrow wooden beadings. Grace fished a metal bar from the gym bag and prised away the beadings, stacking the strips neatly beside her, until the whole pane was revealed. Then she removed it using a pair of glazier’s suction caps and propped it against the wall beside the entryway.

She slipped into the house, and into the smell of money. The building itself was ugly, a throwback, but the interior was starkly modern, with polished floorboards, minimalist glass and leather, a pair of Brett Whiteley bird drawings on one wall. The Whiteleys might bring a few grand but their size ruled them out. She photographed them. She might come back for them, in a year or so, when the owners had recovered from their shock and dismay. Meanwhile she’d show the images to Finch, see if he knew a potential buyer. She also snapped a pair of Fuzan Satsuma vases. Turn of the last century, she thought. Worth about $5000. A few hundred bucks from Finch, but they were too big to go in the gym bag without risk of damage.

After a quick assessment of the house, Grace settled on the main bedroom and the study. The starkness was modified here by everyday clutter: in the bedroom a cracked-spine paperback, a foil strip of painkillers, an errant sock; in the study a couple of chewed ballpoint pens, an in-tray stacked with invoices and letters, a set of golf clubs and a water pistol. It all said something about home life, family life, neither of which interested Grace. She began to tug open the drawers.

She was out of the house within five minutes. In the bag were a pair of emerald earrings, a Bulova watch, an iPod Classic, a Toshiba laptop and some unused AutoCAD software, still in the box. The software alone was $6000 new, the computer $3000.

In the next street was a plain weatherboard cottage with a modern extension at the rear, vast and airy. No dogs, another easy front door, but at the last moment she saw a cornice-mounted red light blinking through a gap in the sitting-room curtain. She checked another room: another red light. She had no intention of going in against motion detectors. She moved on to the fourth and last target on her list, a pretty loft house with a steeply pitched roof and cathedral ceilings. Again, dog-free. No motion detectors that she could see, and a front door that was alarmed only at the latch. Every part of the door was wooden: an outer frame, a cross member, and plywood panel inserts secured by thin beadings. She decided to remove the bottom panel and crawl through.

But first, a diversion. She took a pair of shoes, size 11, from her bag, slipped them over her runners and walked through the loamy soil against the side wall. Something to occupy the detectives who would be called to investigate.

Then she went to work. Prise away the beadings, fasten two eyehooks to the panel-wiped clean and sprayed with bleach to screw with her DNA. When the fumes cleared she jerked the panel out of its seating and put it aside.

She crawled in. Her hip caught in the narrow opening, snagging a tiny white thread. She always incinerated her outfits after a jobclothing, gloves, footwear-but she paused to remove it anyway. Why give the cops a chance to add ‘possibly wears tennis whites’ to her profile?

This house was fussy and careworn. The carpeting was expensive but the pattern varied from room to room and never quite matched the walls or curtains. There were too many knicknacks: porcelain shepherd girls, nests of wooden bowls, glass paperweights threaded with colour, family photographs in heavy silver frames (plate, she noticed), and someone liked elephants. Herds of them-wood, glass, papier-mache-trampled and trumpeted along window ledges and corner tables.

But there was a little Sydney Long aquatint on one wall, possibly a family heirloom. Grace removed it from its ugly frame, rolled it into a narrow tube and slid it into a hollowed-out racquet handle.

She checked all of the rooms and settled on some easy-to-move electronics-a portable hard drive, a video camera and the prize, a top-flight Canon digital SLR worth over ten grand.

Grace strolled back to the pub on the corner and then down the hill to her rental car, parked outside a gym beside the water. No one stopped her and if they looked, it was at the arrogant way she loped along. All the young women loped here. They felt entitled. Grace liked messing with that.