Whispering Death

34

During the passing of the days, Grace had walked the beach at Breamlea and argued with herself. The tides and the wind raced, dog walkers nodded hello, gulls slid through the layers of salty air, and Grace argued that she should never break her cardinal rule. Don’t rob the Niekirks, she told herself. Too close to home.

In counterargument she pointed out that a one-off robbery would be okay since she wasn’t known in Victoria, and the local cops had no MO to compare. Besides, the house behind the cypress hedge was tucked out of sight, the security could be bypassed, and her VineTrust safe-deposit box was close by. And it was clear, according to Google Earth, that plenty of escape routes were open to her. And the clincher? It was personal. In robbing the Niekirks she’d be righting an old wrong.

And then Grace would finish her walk, return home, and log in to online poker and lose money.

By Tuesday, she was running out of time. A week’s holiday in Sydney, Mara Niekirk had said. What if they came home early?

So after breakfast she caught a bus to Geelong and hired an eight-year-old Camry from WreckRent, 95,000 km on the clock but V6 power and the gearbox still tight. Fitting it with false plates, she caught the Queenscliff ferry and was on the Peninsula by noon, wearing a charcoal grey pencil skirt and plain white blouse.

The Niekirks’ alarm system was a Messer. Grace headed up the freeway to Mornington, a new industrial estate outside the town, where there was a Messer agency in a security installation firm. Using a clipped, professional woman’s voice, she said, ‘My mother has a Messer system in her house, and I was thinking I might get one installed, but I couldn’t make head nor tail of her owner’s manual.’

The salesman drank her in. She knew he would. He actually rubbed his hands together. ‘We have a good deal on Messer at the moment.’

‘Yes, but that’s no good to me if I can’t understand the technology. Can you explain it?’

‘Sure can,’ the salesman said.

He dug out a few catalogues, called in an installer, and together they told her how the system worked. Grace nodded in all of the right places, but with an overlay of doubt. They tried harder. Her doubts receded. Another doubt, another reassurance…

Finally she reached a decision, blessing them with a smile. And when she offered to pay a deposit of $100, any reservations they had flew right out the window.

‘All righty. Address?’

Grace was a mite embarrassed. ‘I’ve bid on two townhouses on the Esplanade,’ she said, ‘I won’t hear until the weekend which one’s mine. When I find out, I’ll call with the address and arrange access for you.’

That was fine with them, and she drove out of the industrial estate and up to Frankston. When she failed to contact them again, they wouldn’t follow up very strenuously: after all, they were $100 ahead on the deal.

From Frankston she headed north-east to Dandenong, buying a can of insulation foam in a hardware store. Then out to a chain motel on the Princes Highway in Berwick. The remainder of the afternoon stretched ahead. She ate sparingly but kept hydrated and filled in the hours with a walk, junk TV and a booklet of Sudoku puzzles. She wondered how many more times she’d find herself in a nondescript motel room like this one. It seemed to her that rooms like this had become a big part of her life, a living-from-day-to-day life, with one sad, simple goal, to stay one step ahead of Ian Galt.

Once upon a time she’d dismissed the aims and achievements of ordinary people. It wasn’t that she’d thought herself extraordinary. A family, a home, a job, holidays, a circle of friends and someone to love and be loved by-they were extraordinary. They weren’t the kinds of things she’d be allowed to have.

But now…

She blamed the icon for unsettling her. The icon gave her hope, and she wasn’t sure she wanted that.

By late evening she was scouting around in Lowther, a little town outside Waterloo and only three kilometres across country from the property known as ‘Lindisfarne’. She made a trial run, on foot, in the moonlight, then drove back to her anonymous motel.