Whispering Death

48

Mara and Warren had been shadowing Steven Finch since Saturday night, hoping he’d meet with the bitch who’d robbed them, but all he did was move between his house and his business.

Now it was early Monday evening and they were parked half a block from Finch’s house, watching it through the side mirrors of the Mercedes van, the air ripe around them. Nothing was happening, so Mara said, ‘To hell with this,’ and fished out her phone.

‘Steven? I thought we had a deal?’

His voice croaked, betraying fear. Fear was good. ‘I was about to call you, honest.’

‘And tell me what, precisely?’

‘It’s not my fault. How was I to know this would happen?’

Mara shook her head as if to clear it but wasn’t about to admit she had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Indeed.’

And soon she’d teased it out of him: it was all over the TV, a bank siege in Waterloo, and one of the hostages was the woman who had stolen the Klee. ‘I mean,’ Finch said shakily, ‘what if she’s arrested? She’ll spill to the cops.’

‘It’s definitely her?’

‘Turn on your TV. They keep running the same footage.’

Mara weighed it all up. ‘This is what you do, Steve: grab anything incriminating in your house, then do the same at the shop, and disappear for a few years.’

She terminated the call and immediately started Safari on the iPhone. She found a news report and, indeed, there was the woman who’d robbed them.

She turned to her husband. ‘Let’s do it. He’ll be coming out his front door pretty soon.’

‘Do what?’

Mara ignored him, climbed into the rear of the van. Finch’s house was as heavily secured as his shop but from tailing him she knew that he was vulnerable for a short period as he walked between his front door and the driver’s side door of his car. An Audi coupe, mind you, funded in part by Niekirk money, parked in the street because the houses were renovated workers’ cottages a hundred years old, no garages or carports.

Everything was going swimmingly for Mara now, after days of twiddling her thumbs. She opened the van’s rear door a crack, saw that she had a clear line of sight to the junk dealer’s front step, and removed her Steyr rifle from its slipcase.

When Mara was a teen, she’d spent school holidays on Grandfather Krasnov’s farm in New England, and the old emigre had taught her how to fire a rifle fitted with a telescopic sight. Tin cans, usually, plus the occasional watermelon-just like the assassin in The Day of the Jackal, Mara enjoying the satisfying, pulpy explosion as the bullet hit. Sometimes kangaroos, foxes and rabbits, and, once, a neighbour’s stray sheep dog-a spectacular shot, 500 metres at least.

She stretched out on the camping mattress, propped the rifle on a small tripod, sighted the German lenses, and waited, unseen, the van’s fittings and metal skin ideal for deadening sound. Was that a shot? people would say. They wouldn’t be sure.

She wiggled about until she was comfortable, and after that was absolutely still, breathing shallowly, feeling nothing, not even anticipation. She didn’t even register the jittery presence of her husband.

Finch stepped out of his front door and for a moment remonstrated with someone within the house, then the door was slammed and he presented himself to Mara, there was no other way to describe it. He stood there for a couple of seconds too long, carrying a black holdall, a panicky look on his face as he scanned the street, his gaze passing over the van. Mara placed the cross hairs on the centre of his chest and breathed out in one long, slow exhalation and squeezed the trigger.

‘You must squeeze, never pull,’ Grandfather Krasnov had taught her, and Mara, packing the rifle away now, folding the tripod, shutting the rear door, telling Warren to drive away slowly, realised anew that there had never been a man in her life like the Krasnov patriarch.

‘Another loose end cleaned up,’ she told her husband as he drove in his nervy way out of Williamstown and back to the Peninsula. ‘Now it’s time we all took a long overseas holiday.’