Whispering Death

57

Pam Murphy had been eating lunch at her desk when Scobie Sutton took the call meant for Challis.

A miserable-looking salad from the canteen. A canteen meal because she couldn’t afford to lunch at Cafe Laconic very often, and the High Street deli was now a Youth Initiative drop-in centre, serving cheap food prepared and sold by kids she’d arrested, questioned or reprimanded.

Scobie had been eating at his desk, too, a sandwich from a plastic lunchbox. That’s all he ever ate, sandwiches lovingly prepared by his wife-except for that period when the wife had a meltdown. The sandwiches resembled the wife-small, neat, bland-and Scobie pecked and nibbled neatly, blandly, patting his rubbery lips with a paper serviette after every bite.

As for Challis: who knew what Challis was eating, or where? She glanced at her watch: 1 p.m. He was meeting the Monash academic at 2 p.m., so maybe he would snatch a meal at a uni caf. Why was she thinking about any of this? Going off the anti-depressants had brought her some uncomfortable symptoms but also a crazy kind of clarity about random things, irrelevant to life and police work.

She watched Scobie as he took the call in Challis’s office, listened to his stiff proprieties, watched him return to his desk.

‘What was that about?’

‘Crank call.’

‘What kind?’

‘A female wanting to speak to the inspector. I said he was out. She said could I give her his mobile number? No. Could I give her his e-mail address, she wanted to send him some photos? No.’

‘What kind of photos?’

Scobie shrugged, his skinny arms emerging from the sleeves of his white shirt. ‘She said it had to do with the siege at the bank.’

‘Scobie!’

‘A crank call, Pam.’

‘How can you be sure? What if it’s the woman we’re looking for?’

‘Face it, she’s dead. The woman on the phone just wanted some attention, you know how it is.’

‘If she calls again, give her the e-mail address. We know she takes photos, and these could be important.’

‘Suit yourself,’ Scobie Sutton said, and he ate his sandwich and continued to search the database for high-end burglaries.

Then Pam’s phone rang, an AFP inspector returning her callthrough the switchboard, checking that she was who she’d claimed to be. He had some news.

‘We don’t have an Inspector Towne working for us.’

‘How about the man in the CCTV footage? Do you recognise him?’

‘No.’

‘Maybe our witness misheard the name and the rank. The man we’re keen to speak to claims to be attached to a task force, something to do with investigating an international operation.’

There was the kind of silence that says: Did you not hear what I just said?

‘Okay,’ Pam said finally, ‘so it seems we have a man running around impersonating a federal police officer.’

‘Then you’d better catch him,’ the AFP man said.

She’d also sent information on Corso, Mrs Grace and Towne to the New South Wales police, with a request for identities behind the two flagged fingerprints. Until someone responded, she could do little but go to the tea room and prime Challis’s espresso machine. Short black, double shot.

Thirty minutes later, the phone rang. It was a sergeant in the New South Wales major crimes unit. ‘What’s your interest in Bob Corso?’

She told him about the incident on High Street.

‘Is he still in your neck of the woods?’ the sergeant asked.

‘Don’t think so,’ Pam said. ‘He was on a road trip with his family when I saw him.’

The sergeant grunted. ‘That accords with our intel. He went off the radar a few weeks ago. Basically, the guy’s a standover merchant, bodyguard and bouncer at a few strip clubs in the Cross, loving husband and father the rest of the time.’

‘He called the woman he accosted “Anita”. Do you know her?’

‘I’m looking at a picture of her even as we speak,’ the sergeant said, ‘front page of the Australian.’

‘So you know who she is.’

‘Anita Sandow-or that was the name she was using, there’s no independent record of anyone, anywhere, with that name-and to answer your next question, one of the partials you found belongs to her.’

‘But why was she red-flagged?’

‘A long story. The short version is, she was offered witness protection by the New South Wales police a couple of years ago.’ He paused. ‘Then she disappeared.’

‘Went feral, you mean. She’s been breaking into houses all over the country, as far as we know.’

‘Yeah, well, we thought she was dead, but it seems she was up to her old tricks.’

‘I’m sorry, sir, but you’re not giving me much information here.’

‘I’m wondering how much to tell you. Who’s your boss?’

‘Inspector Challis,’ said Pam distinctly, ‘and he’s busy and he asked me to track down who left those prints in the bank.’

A long pause. So Pam said: ‘Did you get a chance to look at the video clip?’

‘I did,’ the sergeant said, his voice freighted with meaning.

‘And?’

Another long pause. It was almost 2 p.m. and Murphy felt wired from the coffee and from an investigation that now seemed to be teasing at the edges of something nasty and dark.

‘Sergeant?’ she prompted. ‘I take it he left the other fingerprint, and his name isn’t Towne?’

The major crimes officer made up his mind. ‘His name is Ian Galt. Ex-New South Wales police sergeant, arrested two years ago on corruption charges.’

‘Let me guess: the charges didn’t stick.’

‘I’m embarrassed to say.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Let’s start with what he’s doing now.’

‘Okay.’

‘I think he’s probably on a mission to kill Sandow. She was a registered informant, and Galt was her handler and sometime boyfriend.’

‘She informed on him,’ Pam guessed. ‘You turned her, you promised her witness protection-she got spooked before it went to trial.’

The sergeant didn’t contradict her. ‘It all started when Galt arrested her. She was a cat burglar, very good at it, too. Worked alone, but on the fringes of a few organised networks, so she was useful. Had access to information he could use-money laundering, movement of stolen goods, break-ins, stuff like that.’

‘She was never charged?’

‘Correct. After that, he owned her. He’d supply the intel-security patrol routines, cameras, roadblocks-and she’d go on a spree, break into four or five North Shore houses in the one night. He’d give her a cut.’

‘Galt was already dirty?’

The sergeant’s voice took on a tone of disgust. ‘Galt and his mates had their own thing going long before Anita appeared on the scene. Kickbacks from dealers and brothel owners. You name it. They’d lose evidence, stand up in court and give character references to scumbags. And they had an arrangement with bent officers in Victoria and Queensland. One of your guys-cop in a suburban station or one of the squads, like the armed robbers-would send through word about a payroll, say, and Galt and his mates would make a fast trip over the border, grab the payroll, head home again. The bent locals’d run interference for them. Meanwhile it didn’t occur to the good guys to look for an interstate crew.’

‘What happened? Galt got careless? Greedy?’

‘They all did. We were monitoring their phones, bank accounts and movements by then, and the upshot was, Galt and the others were arrested, and the girlfriend was offered a deal: go to jail, or give evidence against them and go into witness protection. Apparently Galt used her as a punching bag sometimes.’

‘But he spooked her, so she ran.’

‘Took the money too, what we heard. Meanwhile he got himself a good lawyer and it turned out our case was a bit leaky…’

‘Now he wants revenge.’

‘Wants it badly,’ the NSW officer said.

Pam thanked him and was hanging up when a probationer appeared at the entrance to the open-plan CIU office. ‘Excuse me, there’s a woman downstairs, got a little girl with her and she needs to speak to someone in CIU.’

‘What about?’

‘People called Newkirk? Some name like that.’

Pam glanced at her watch. Two-fifteen and she needed to contact the New South Wales ethical standards department for more on the man named Galt. But a call like that took patience, tact and determination; she’d do it later when she had a free half hour. She followed the probationer downstairs and stuck her head around the door of the victim suite.

Tayla, the nanny, was holding Natalia on her knee. ‘They lied to you,’ she said. ‘Stuff was stolen.’