Whispering Death

53

Denise Rodda was tired.

The crime-scene officer had dusted the whole bank for prints, and now the local CIU inspector wanted her to dust the contents of a safe-deposit box.

She’d already dusted the exterior, e-mailed the prints to the Fingerprint Branch in Seaford to be compared to those of the bank’s staff, wasn’t that enough? ‘Sir,’ she pointed out, ‘I’ve been here half the night already.’

‘Won’t take long,’ he said.

And then the man smiled, a transformative smile, the air of fatigue and prohibition vanishing from his face. A thin face, she noticed, a little too sharp-edged for her taste, but warm and quite attractive when he smiled. Overworked and underpaid, she thought. Like the rest of us.

Except the rest of us don’t have the guts to complain to the media about being overworked and underpaid.

So she returned his smile, said, ‘Just as well I adore my job,’ and watched as the manager opened the box.

Challis watched, too. It was a sizeable box, deep, broad, long. ‘Heavy,’ Rowan Ely had said, as he’d slid it out of the wall. Utilitarian grey metal. Challis glanced at the battery of similar boxes and wondered what secrets and wealth they contained.

‘Voila!’ Ely said.

Challis stepped forward and peered in. Immediately under the lid was a flat object wrapped in white tissue paper. With one gloved hand, he folded back the paper to reveal a small painting. Splashes of vivid colour, random shapes. On closer examination the shapes resolved into rocks and he recognised the signature.

‘Paul Klee.’

Ely said dubiously, ‘Who?’

‘European artist of the first half of last century. If this is an original it’s very valuable.’

Challis lifted out the painting and turned to Rodda. ‘I need you to dust this, please.’

He returned to the box. The next item was a small aquatint signed ‘Sydney Long’ with a Hobart gallery label on the back. He made a mental note to contact the gallery and see who had bought it.

Under the Long were many smaller items: gold coins, individually wrapped in a small drawstring chamois bag; a matchbox containing a 1930 penny wrapped in tissue paper, another an old gold coin dated 1620; a small gold ingot; rare stamps and banknotes in individual plastic sleeves; a paperback history of the Kelly gang; and three sets of ID: passports, licences, credit cards, Medicare cards. Lying on the bottom were an old photograph, a tiny digital camera and a memory card encased in clear plastic.

Challis placed each item on the table for Rodda to test, and examined the sets of ID. The same face appeared in each, the woman known to Rowan Ely and his staff as Mrs Grace. Are you still alive? he wondered. Her face was young but her gaze old, as if she’d seen and felt a lot in her short life.

‘Quite a collection of keepsakes,’ Ely said.

Challis nodded absently. He didn’t think he was looking at keepsakes but at stolen goods. He peered at the photograph. It was small, washed out, reminding him of the family snaps he’d seen as a child, long-dead aunts and grandparents caught awkwardly by Kodak box cameras. A room in a cottage, a white-washed wall, a man and a woman in the bulky, stiffly formal clothing of an earlier era. Stolid-looking people, barely smiling. A respectable peasant couple, maybe. Slavic appearance. He was pretty sure the setting wasn’t Australia.

Then he peered more closely, straightened his back. An icon. Valuable? Also stolen? But the photo seemed to be a family keepsake. Would it help him find the woman known as Mrs Grace?

Rodda’s phone rang. She turned away from the table, phone to one ear, hand to the other, as though the little room was full of discordant sounds. ‘Yep. Uh huh. Thanks. Did you get the batch I just sent? Yeah, chop chop. Bye.’

She finished the call and said, ‘The prints on the outside of the box belong to bank staff only.’

The federal cop had worn gloves. ‘And this stuff?’ Challis asked, gesturing at the items arranged across the surface of the table.

‘So far all I’ve been able to lift are two partials, one on the memory card case, the other on the battery of the camera. I’ve asked the lab to put a rush on them, but there could be more partials that aren’t so evident. You want a thorough job, I’ll need to take everything to the lab.’

Challis nodded. ‘Do what you can for now,’ he said, knowing that even if they found Mrs Grace’s prints, it meant nothing if they weren’t on record.

Ely pointed at the memory card. ‘We should plug it in and see what she’s been photographing.’

‘Soon enough,’ Challis said.

Some time later, Rodda’s phone rang again and she took the call and he watched her. And then she was casting him a complicated look, handing him the phone.

‘Challis.’

‘Sir,’ a voice said, ‘those two partials: they’re both in the system, both flagged.’