Whispering Death

21

Thursday morning, Grace woke up in the South Australian town of Murray Bridge.

She’d arrived Wednesday afternoon, driving the Golf, and paid for four nights’ accommodation in an on-site caravan. Now, showered and dressed, she walked to the main street and rented a white Camry. Three hours later she was in the Clare Valley wine country north of Adelaide, where small, humped hills concealed wineries and tiny historic towns. Vines lay over the hill folds and along the valley floor, presided over by old stone houses with sun-faded corrugated iron roofs and verandas.

The farms gave way to suburban blocks as she entered the town of Clare. Here there were more stone dwellings but a greater number of bland brick veneer houses dating from the 1970s. A Shell station, an irrigation outfitter, a stone hall, a stone church, a K-Mart, some cafes, and everyday shops, pedestrian crossings, a handful of banks. For a largish town, there wasn’t much of a main street, but when Grace explored some of the side and parallel streets she found hardware barns, supermarkets, a medical clinic, a high school, a municipal pool, and a mostly-dry creek set with barbecues and benches under massive, silvery gums.

After making a couple of passes through the town, Grace took out her Google Earth maps and made her way along a snaking dirt road that took her above the valley, into a knot of pretty hills, with tall gums, secluded farmhouses and wineries on winding side tracks. And the eyesore built by Simon Lascar.

There were no indications that the Lascars had returned from attending their daughter’s wedding in Honolulu. The gates were locked, the curtains drawn. Winding down her window, Grace scoped the house and grounds with binoculars. Drifts of leaves on the driveway and garden paths. The lawn needed mowing.

She was tracking across the windows and walls when three cars appeared, two heading for the wineries or farms farther along the road, an electrician’s van approaching from the other direction, raising dust. Grace needed time to finish her inspection but knew that someone might remember a woman parked on the side of the road in a white Camry, a Hertz sticker on the rear window. That’s when she noticed a ‘For Sale’ sign on the property opposite the target house: five acres, with a main house, a self-catering cottage licensed for bed-and-breakfast use, sheds, fencing, tall, pale gums and a muddy dam.

Forty minutes later, she was riding around in the passenger seat of a bulky black BMW, with a real estate agent named Brent, who was saying regretfully, ‘The recession’s hit everyone hard.’

But not Brent. Brent owned four agencies in the mid-north of South Australia, and the BMW was worth over a hundred grand.

She guessed boy wonder also owned a matching sedan for the pretty wife, maybe a boat, a Ducati, jet skis, home theatre, swimming pool, a paddock for the horses. And he wasn’t yet forty. Good-looking, in that adolescent way of men who’ve never been obliged to struggle. He drove his BMW as if he wanted to run small Korean cars off the road. The aftershave was classy but overdone. Grace could scarcely breathe. The aircon ruffled the wispy hem of her skirt and drew his gaze from the road.

‘At least interest rates are down,’ Grace said.

He ignored her. In his Clare office, thirty minutes earlier, he’d been led to understand that she had money and wanted to buy a secluded rural property, one or two hectares. That had got his juices going: Brent had five such properties on his books.

Now, as they drove, she saw doubts creep in. He wasn’t a man skilled at hiding his thoughts. ‘A lot of city folk head up this way,’ he said carefully, ‘and after they’ve sunk their savings into wineries, bed-and-breakfast joints, alpacas, Christmas tree farms, lavender, roses, back road bistros, you name it, along comes the recession and they go belly-up.’ He paused. ‘Or they can’t afford to run two places, have to offload the country weekender.’

Meaning, Can this chick afford a winery, a back-road bistro, a weekender? He shot her a look. She gazed at the unwinding road, rich and bored.

He sighed. ‘First on the list,’ he said, powering the BMW onto a dirt road, ‘is a winery.’

They were at the gates moments later; the sign outside said twenty hectares. ‘Not really what I’m looking for,’ Grace murmured. She’d clearly said one or two hectares. Had he listened? Did he ever listen?

Unperturbed, he took her to a craft gallery attached to an architect-designed corrugated-iron house. The house was probably cool inside but looked hot in the sun. The iron flashed blindingly. ‘Sorry, no,’ she said.

‘Terrific views,’ he pointed out.

‘Not really what I’m after,’ she said.

‘Right,’ he said, wheeling out of there.

They drove on, across the faces of the little hills, the vines orderly on the down slopes and in the valley below, Grace gazing out of her window, Brent-well, Brent was interested in two things, a sale, and a better sense of her thighs under the summery cotton.

‘This next one’s a beauty,’ he said, barrelling down a sealed road. ‘Just come on the market, too.’

After a short distance he turned off and followed a dirt track through crowding trees above the Hutt River, to where a low-slung house commanded valley views. Rendered hay-bale walls, rainforest timber decks, a clever shutter system to harness sunlight and repel heat. ‘And your neighbour across the road,’ said Brent, giving her some eyebrow work, ‘is a Channel 9 newsreader.’

‘Really,’ said Grace, as if her life depended upon it.

‘No lie,’ said Brent.

Grace asked a few questions that had nothing to do with how much the place cost then asked to see the next place on his list. ‘Don’t give up on me yet,’ she said brightly.

‘A bed-and-breakfast,’ he said. ‘Very solid property, very solid. Lovely location.’

They drove, Grace gazing out, Brent flicking the steering wheel, flicking his gaze to her crotch. She didn’t care. Scoping out the area with a real estate agent was good cover. Everyone seemed to know old Brent. He’d acknowledged waves from pedestrians and oncoming drivers half a dozen times since they’d set out from his office.

‘So, what do you reckon?’ he said, pulling into the bed-and-breakfast property opposite the Lascar house. ‘Quite something, eh?’

Grace let herself be dragged around for twenty minutes. She met the vendors, even met the retired couple staying in the bed-and-breakfast cottage. She walked, looked, asked questions, casually scoped the views with her binoculars, until she believed she knew exactly how she would rob the house on the other side of the road.

‘Look, sorry to hassle you, but I’ve got another client,’ said Brent, looking at his watch.

Grace smiled warmly. ‘Thanks, I’ve seen enough to make a decision.’

Music to Brent’s misshapen ears. He wouldn’t rush her. He’d take her mobile number and call her, maybe tonight.

They drove out, Grace glancing idly at both sides of the road. A couple of little creeks, dry now, rose in the hills and crossed the road. She noted where the culverts were, their size and accessibility. Meanwhile the verges were typical for a country road, with graded runoffs, tufts of grass, stone reefs and broken glass, the shards blinking here and there in the dappled light.

Back at his office in the main street of Clare, Brent held her dry hand in his damp one for a long beat, putting plenty of meaning into the squeeze and the eye contact. This kind of thing happened often to Grace. As always she was fascinated yet deeply fatigued by it. Promising to give the bed-and-breakfast property her deepest consideration, she slipped through a laneway to the clinic behind the main street, where she’d parked the Camry. The time was 4 p.m.

By 4.30 she was standing under the shower in a motel bathroom, eyes closed, letting the jets pummel her back, neck and shoulders. It helped her to think about the job. If she didn’t think about the job, she’d think about the messiness of life, and that would paralyse her.

Then she stretched out on the bed and slept. She’d told herself to wake at 9.30 and, on the dot, she returned to the world fully alert, her heartbeat slow and even.

By midnight Grace was tramping around in the soft dirt between the Lascars’ garden shrubs wearing size 11 shoes over her canvas slip-ons, cotton gloves on her hands. As Galt had said, the night he nabbed her: ‘We can lift prints from inside latex gloves, you know.’

Completing the forensic misdirection, she removed the shoes and broke into the house. First she hovered at the entrance to every room, assessing the black holes, the areas where the ambient light failed to penetrate-behind doors, partitions and furniture. When she was satisfied, she masked her torch and probed further, now comparing the layout of each room with the Home Digest images stored in her camera.

Most of the rooms had not been altered in the two years since the article had appeared. Then she photographed the rooms that had not been featured in the magazine. There was a medium-sized John Perceval oil hanging on a wall in the sewing room and an Imari vase on the hallstand. If Steve Finch thought he could offload them, she might come back one day for another go.

Finally she went to work with her prise bar and lockpicks, placing Mary Lascar’s silverware into one of the empty duffle bags and Simon Lascar’s coins, stamps and banknotes into the other. No $300,000 Adelaide gold pound, unfortunately: in a safe-deposit box, she guessed, or sold to pay for the daughter’s wedding. The silverware was easy to locate: bureau, sideboard and behind glass doors. The collectibles were in a floor safe under a shoe rack in the main closet. She more or less went straight to it. Using the same reasoning, she more or less went straight to where Lascar had made a note of the combination: in pencil, on the rear panel of his sock drawer. Not all of Grace’s jobs were this easy, but many were.

Then she slipped out of the house, dressed in her dark clothes, carrying her treasures.

She spent the rest of the night in the motel, having arranged an early check-out with the manager. By five a.m. Friday she was on the road, heading south along the valley, back through the little towns. At Tarlee, on the Barrier Highway, she cut across country to the Barossa Valley. Here there were more vines, and old wine-making names, and, in the dawn light, a greener, more Europeanised landscape. The Barossa was her back road to Murray Bridge and her Golf. In this way, she avoided the city. Adelaide was small and efficient, but it was a city. She thought that cities, in their stop-start way, chopped you up; they’d certainly done it to her.

She came to the back end of the Adelaide Hills. Green now from the spring rains, the hills would be bare by mid-summer, the grass dead, sparse and brittle, the eucalypts dusty and heat-struck, losing limbs and waiting mutely for a bushfire wind. Yet the hills were also formed of folds and clefts suggesting the slack limbs of entwined lovers, townships, orchards and hobby farms forming pubic shadows. Grace felt elated, as if floating high above the world, beneath a sky that stretched from treeless horizon to treeless horizon, the river a green scribble below. Then she descended to the river flat and returned the Camry. She drove the Golf east, across the border into Victoria.