Whispering Death

10

As she steered the Golf down the other side of the Peninsula, Grace thought hard about the incident with Robert Corso, weighing it up, consciously resisting paranoia. Paranoia could undo you just as certainly as a pointing finger, a hand clamping your shoulder, a voice saying, ‘ Got you. ’

First, what would the detective recall of the incident? A faintly exotic-looking foreign woman was being accosted by a tough-looking man, but so what? Plenty of strangers passed through Waterloo, tourists attracted by the Peninsula’s coast and hinterland, wineries and bed-and-breakfast cottages. She’d be more inclined to remember the man who posed the threat, not the victim.

So, Corso.

Grace thought there was a good chance that she’d fooled Corso: the wig, the accent, the unlikely location. Plus, it seemed he hadn’t been in Waterloo looking for her but passing through, a driving holiday with his family. He might say nothing. But the incident would be imprinted on his mind-he’d accosted her, and she’d denied her old name, and a cop had intervened-and one day he might fall into conversation with someone who’d known her in Sydney, a bouncer or a barman or someone connected to Galt. Or he’d make the kind of phone call that begins, ‘This might be nothing, but today I thought I saw…’ and the people around Galt would send in some goons, or ask Corso to stick around and investigate.

Had he seen her come out of the bank? Even if the tellers or the manager did talk to Corso, or to Galt’s goons, they wouldn’t connect a mysterious woman with a foreign accent to the woman they knew as Mrs Grace. And for the past two years Grace had altered her appearance each time she visited the bank: mini-skirt one day, scruffy jeans or business suit the next. Cropped black hair, blonde wig, tennis hat. Flashy cheap earrings, tiny diamond studs. To the tellers and the manager, she was a woman with the means and the time to dress as she liked. Beholden to no boss. A lucky woman, warm, arty, a little extroverted. Nothing like the woman Galt had spent two years looking for.

Besides, Grace didn’t live in or near Waterloo. Nowhere near. She rarely visited the place.

But…

But she had been spotted there. Grace chewed that over as she drove. She’d be well advised to clean out the box and find another bank like the VineTrust, in another town like Waterloo. And she did need such a box, a secure place for her valuables and her keepsakes. A place she could visit and daydream about, a place for her secrets as much as her treasures. The box represented who she was. If the police ever searched her home, they wouldn’t find a thing to tell them anything about her.

This was Grace’s reasoning as she neared Sorrento, the lowering sun flashing in the waters of Port Phillip Bay. Only 60 km/h here, almost a crawl, and she felt a little panicky at that speed. Then 50 km/h, then 70, 60 again, and finally she was at the ferry terminal, too early for the 6 p.m. sailing. She parked outside the pay station and stretched her back. Mild air, the water barely lapping the coarse sand and the awed feet of a toddler and his crouching mother. A dog racing to catch a Frisbee, gulls wheeling. Stretching behind her were the Sorrento cliffs and the cliff-top houses. Who knew what riches they held? And she’d forbidden herself to touch a penny of it.

Grace needed coffee for the final stage. And something to read on the ferry. She walked back along the short branch road that led from the Nepean Highway to the ferry station, and climbed the hill to the main street, which was busy with the kinds of cars driven by the kinds of young women who married doctors and real estate agents. Cliche, Grace. Yeah, but cliches were useful in Grace’s line of business. They helped her to analyse a place, helped her to decide if it was worth her while. Sorrento was-but the rules were clear: Never operate in your own back yard.

She asked for a double-shot latte and sat at a table beneath a plane tree. Five-thirty-five. The 6 p.m. ferry to Queenscliff would dock at about 5.45. And as she sipped and allowed the late sunlight to warm her bones, she gazed at the passers-by, trying to place them. Retirees, tourists, local business people. And vaguely arty twenty-somethings, who ran the bistros, made jewellery, sold boutique wines and nasty clothing. There were reaches in the lives of people that Grace had never known or comprehended, and she swallowed a lump in her throat.

She drained her coffee, crossed the street, and entered a newsagency. Here she browsed the magazine racks until she’d located the latest Home Digest.

The ferry crossed the Bay and Grace read her magazine. She read intently. Home Digest was one of her bibles. It helped her work out who to rob next.

When the ferry docked in Queenscliff, she drove down the clanging ramp and over the sand drifts on the exit road, curving past some unlovely light industry before reaching the old part of the town. The cops were always vigilant here, especially about this time on a Friday, when the tourists got an early start on the weekend.

Then she was out the other side and heading for Ocean Grove and Barwon Heads. After that, Breamlea, a tiny town off the beaten track which few people knew existed.

Tourists, if they weren’t going to Queenscliff or Barwon Heads, headed for the Great Ocean Road, not some slumbering strip of houses tucked into a bank of high dunes and serviced only by a general store in the caravan park. The people from her old life would never think of holidaying there. They liked casinos, resorts, glitzy shops. They liked to fork out on overpriced accommodation, T-shirts and sunglasses; trawl around like extras in The Sopranos. Breamlea wasn’t the place to do that.

Grace drove into the carport of an ungainly house on stilts, as pedestrian as any beach house in Australia, retrieved her luggage and climbed the steps to the deck, some of the tension leaking away. She had a four-cornered life: thieving, selling to fences like Steve Finch, banking the proceeds, home. It was a life of movement and corners, and she couldn’t see any other way to run it. A shut-away life, ordered, solitary, built on habits that kept her below the radar.

Dusk was deepening. Grace turned on the lights, the radio, tipped leftover stew into a saucepan and lit the gas under it. There were always leftovers in her fridge, and she always heated them properly, not by microwave. Tomorrow she’d cook.

She showered, stepped out with a towel wrapped around her head, pulled on tracksuit pants and a T-shirt, no underwear. She was home, there were no protocols to follow. Home: well, it had been for two years; she didn’t know if she’d ever find anywhere she could put down deep roots. Home, and fully paid for.

But hers was a day by day, week by week kind of life, and there was a better than even chance she’d have to walk away from it one dayaway from the warm light on the slate floor, the comfortable sofa, the patchwork bed cover made by a local woman, the local jams and chutneys in her fine dresser. The tiny Hans Heysen watercolour (legitimate) on the wall. The ground-cover plants clinging to the dunes, the windy beaches and the wheeling gulls.

She’d bought an Elan shiraz and a Merricks Creek pinot in Waterloo. Shiraz with the stew, she thought. The pinot tomorrow with salmon, maybe. She drank half of the bottle, and mused, but the itch was upon her. Grace took her wine glass to her study, powered up the computer, and gambled away $7600 in a little under thirty minutes.