Whispering Death 

               

                                        (the sixth Challis and Destry crime novel, due August 2011, Text Publishing, Melbourne, Australia, later USA and Germany)

 

 

 

 

Chapter 1

 

 

 

 

Grace was as good a name as any, and this morning Grace was in Tasmania, strolling through a well-heeled corner of Hobart’s Sandy Bay, casing the secluded houses.  A Friday morning in spring, a sea fret receding to Storm Bay and the Tasman Sea, it was good to be alive, and she raised no warning bells in her tennis whites worn over tracksuit pants, her sunglasses, Nike trainers and perky billed cap, her shouldered gym bag.  A racquet handle poked out of the bag, telling you she was an idle young wife, maybe a young professional on her day off, even – if you were suspicious or censorious – an adulterer wearing a cover story.

            But no warning bells.  No cause for a stop-and-search.  She belonged there.

In fact, it was hide in plain sight, Grace hiding behind the cap and shades, hiding the fact that the tennis skirt was Velcroed to the bodice and the gym bag held burglary tools, gloves and heavy-duty vinyl sacks.  One shouted accusation, one query, and she’d be gone, ripping away the skirt and ditching it together with the cap, bag and shades.  Transform herself into a jogger, and who looks twice at a jogger?

            ‘Always expect the worst,’ Galt had drummed into her, ‘so you’ll never be caught off guard when it happens.’

            Another thing Galt liked to say was avoid apartment buildings.  Well, there were none here.  There’s always someone at home in an apartment block, Galt said, always a sad soul sitting at a window all day long, hoping for a diversion to brighten the unvarying hours.

            Next, Grace checked for the presence of children: toys, bikes, skateboards, even a little pink gumboot, left discarded in a front or side yard.  Yes, kids go to school, Galt would say, but not if they’re a toddler, or suffering from chickenpox, not if it’s a curriculum day for their teachers.  A kid at home means an adult at home.

            Vehicles, another item on Galt’s checklist.  Grace’s homework had told her she was in a land of two-car households, two adults working 9 to 5 in highly-paid jobs.  No-one worked shiftwork here.  Play it safe, Galt always said.  If there’s a vehicle in the driveway or carport, move on.  And a closed garage door is no guarantee the garage is empty.

            Finally, choose targets that minimise the nosy-neighbour problem.  As Galt said, the people worth stealing from paid top dollar to block an outsider’s line of sight, so she should look for high hedges, sloping land, tree density and curved streets.

            The rest Galt hadn’t taught her.  ‘I can show you how to avoid detection,’ he’d said, ‘I can keep my people off your back, but you were the break-in queen long before I found you.’

            Grace made a rapid pass through the little neighbourhood.  Trees and bushes crowded most of the houses.  No one about, only a workman bolting a gate to a picket fence, another unloading a lawnmower.  The houses ranged from weatherboard bungalows to sharply modern glass and concrete structures, with Tudor houses, Tuscan villas and small, tiled, steeply-gabled 1930s mansions in between.  She mentally selected four targets and went to work.

The first was a nightmarish arrangement of interconnected concrete cubes, set well back from the street and behind a high fieldstone wall.  She did what she always did and entered the grounds briskly, exactly as if her best friend lived there and they’d arranged to play tennis together.  When she was halfway to the front door, she blew a high-frequency whistle audible only to dogs.  She was answered at once by frenzied barking, one deep-chested, the other a high yap.

            She retreated.

            In the next street was a low, 1970s ranch house set among gumtrees.  No dogs, so she made a quick circuit of the building, testing knobs and handles and peering through windows.  Occasionally in her career she’d found unlocked doors and windows, fake alarm boxes or no security at all, but often those places had nothing worth stealing.  Grace went around the house again, this time running a small camping compass around the door and window frames.  The compass needle deflected – proof of a live current – at all but the front door.  Grace knew that people had a misplaced faith in the security of their front doors, perhaps because most front doors face the street.  She tested it again.  A slight deflection of the needle near the latch.

            It was a glass door, comprised of a single pane secured around the edges by narrow wooden beadings.  Grace fished a metal bar from the gym bag and prised away the beadings, stacking the strips neatly beside her, until the full extent of the pane was revealed.  Then she removed it using a pair of glazier’s suction caps and propped it against the wall beside the entryway.

            She slipped into the house and smelt money.  The building itself was ugly, a throwback, but the interior was starkly modern, with polished floorboards, minimalist glass and leather, a pair of Brett Whiteley bird drawings on one wall.  The Whiteleys might bring her a few grand but their size ruled them out today, so she photographed them.  She might come back for them, maybe in a year from now, when the owners had recovered from their shock and dismay.  Meanwhile she’d show the images to her fence, ask if he had a potential buyer.  She also photographed a pair of Fuzan Satsuma vases from around 1900.  Worth about $5,000, she’d get a few hundred bucks from her fence, but the pair would crowd her gym bag and risk being damaged.

            After a quick assessment of the house, Grace settled on the main bedroom and the study.  Here the starkness was modified by everyday clutter: in the bedroom a cracked-spine paperback, a foil strip of painkillers, an errant sock, and in the study a couple of chewed ballpoint pens, an in-tray stacked with invoices and letters, a set of golf clubs and a water pistol.  It all said something about home life, family life, that’s all, and Grace hadn’t had much of either.  She began to tug open the drawers.

            She was out of the house within five minutes.  In the gym bag were a pair of emerald earrings, a Bulova watch, an iPod Classic, a Toshiba laptop and AutoCAD software, unused, still in the box.  The software alone was $6,000 new, the Toshiba $3,000.

            In the next street was a plain weatherboard cottage with a modern extension at the rear, vast and airy.  No dogs, another breachable front door, but at the last moment she saw a cornice-mounted blinking red light through a gap in the sitting-room curtain.  She checked another room: another blinking red light.

            She had no intention of going in against motion detectors and moved on to the fourth and last target on her list.  It was a pretty loft house with a steeply-pitched roof and cathedral ceilings.  Again, no dogs.  No motion detectors that she could see, and a front door that was alarmed only at the latch.  But every part of the door was wooden: an outer frame, a cross member, and plywood panel inserts secured by thin beadings.  She decided to remove the bottom panel and crawl through.

            But first, a diversion.  Taking men’s size 11 shoes from her bag, she slipped them over her runners and walked and crouched in the loamy soil against the side wall, leaving imprints to occupy the detectives who would be called to investigate.

            Then she went to work.  After prising away the beadings, she took out a tiny electric drill and fastened two eyehooks to the panel, first wiping them clean and spraying them with bleach to screw with her DNA.  When the fumes cleared she jerked the panel out of its seat and propped it against the wall.

            She crawled in.  Her hip caught on the narrow opening, snagging a tiny white thread.  She always incinerated her outfits after a job – clothing, gloves, footwear – but she paused to remove the thread anyway, not wanting the police to add ‘possibly wears tennis whites’ to her profile.

            This house was fussy and careworn.  The carpeting was expensive but varied in pattern from room to room and didn’t quite match the walls or curtains.  There were too many knickknacks: porcelain shepherd girls, nests of wooden bowls, glass paperweights threaded with colour, family photographs in heavy silver frames (plated silver, she noticed), and someone liked elephants.  Herds of wood and papier-mâché elephants trampled and trumpeted along window ledges and corner tables. 

            But there was a little Sydney Long aquatint on one wall, possibly a family heirloom.  Grace removed it from its ugly frame, rolled it into a narrow tube and slid it into a hollowed-out racquet handle.

            She checked all of the rooms and settled on a Logitech universal remote ($300 new), a Western Digital portable hard drive ($330), a Panasonic video camera ($799) and the prize, a top-flight Canon EOS digital SLR worth over ten grand.

            Grace strolled back to the pub on the corner and then down the hill to her rental car, which was parked outside a gym beside the water.  No one stopped her, and if they looked it was at the way she loped along.  Then again, all of the young women loped here.  They felt entitled.  Grace liked messing with that.