‘Explain, please,’ the dispatcher said.
The voice might have been writing a formal report. ‘Constable Wright and I approached the premises. We observed that a front window had been broken. On closer examination, we discovered a rolled-up newspaper lying on the ground under the window. Constable Wright obtained entry to the premises through the broken window. The premises are furnished but empty and intact. We await further instructions.’
The sergeant came on the line. ‘Knock off the fancy talk. You reckon the paper boy got a bit vigorous?’
‘Looks like it, sarge.’
‘Okay, go back in, turn off the alarm, and shoot over to the highway. There’s been a pile-up.’
‘Right, sarge.’
‘Meanwhile I’ll give the security firm a bell and get them over to seal the window.’
‘Right, sarge.’
Wyatt continued to wait. When he saw the patrol car leave along Carlyle Street, he reversed into an alleyway, got out, and pasted HomeSecure transfers over the Rapido name. Finally he pulled on overalls stencilled with the name HomeSecure and drove around to number 29, spinning into the driveway with a convincing show of urgency. Pulling up at the front door, he got out, cleared the remaining shards of glass from the window frame with his gloved hand and climbed over the sill and into the house.
He made straight for the main bedroom. It was a curiously flattened room: a futon bedbase and mattress at ankle height, low chest of drawers, squat cane chair in one corner, built-in closet, no pictures on the walls. Only curtains existed above waist level and they admitted the blurry light of early morning onto the bed. It was also an asexual room, as though Wintergreen spent all of her passion brokering deals somewhere else, for her profit or for the profit of those who might one day help advance her career.
The safe was under a heavy Nepalese rug at the foot of the bed. Wyatt lifted the floorboard panel, keyed in the combination, heard a hum as the electronic lock disengaged.
He opened the door and looked in on a cavity the size of a small television set. There were papers and files stacked in there, but not the fifty grand that Jardine had promised. Wyatt emptied the safe and knocked against the sides and base with his knuckles. He snorted. The bottom was false.
Wyatt pushed experimentally at the corners. The base lock was a simple push-pull spring-loaded catch. He swung it open.
The fifty thousand was there all right, bundled in twenties, fifties and hundreds. Wyatt stacked them into slits in the lining of his overalls. Twenty-five for Jardine, twenty-five for himself.
He paused. There was something else down there in the darkness, a small, soft, black velvet bag. Wyatt reached down, pulled it out.
The object that tumbled into his palm gleamed softly in the light of his torch. It was a butterfly, 1930s Deco style, with an eight-centimetre wingspan. The body consisted of 2-carat diamonds set in gold. The wings were also gold, set with flowing rows of baguette diamonds in channels alternating with rows of round diamonds. He turned it over. A thin line stamped in the gold read Tiffany amp; Co.
Wyatt added the butterfly to the fifty thousand dollars. Jardine would know someone who’d know what to do with it-sell it overseas as it was or melt the gold setting and sell the stones separately. A local buyer was out: the larger stones could be identified and traced too easily-they’d be on record somewhere, able to be matched to an X-ray or a photograph.
He was out of the house and easing down the driveway five minutes after he’d gone in. He paused for a moment at the gate, then eased the Mazda onto the street. There were more people about now: children walking to bus stops, men and women heading to work in glossy foreign cars. They looked scrubbed clean and well fed, that’s all Wyatt knew or cared about them.
Two
Wyatt’s tooth was giving him hell by the time Ansett’s early breakfast flight from Sydney touched down in Melbourne on Wednesday morning. He always travelled light, knowing that if anyone intended to grab him it would be while he waited around for his luggage to tumble onto the carousel. He had an overnight bag with a change of clothing in it, wrapped around the Tiffany and the fifty thousand dollars. And where possible he avoided leaving a paper trail, even with fake ID, so he walked past the hire-car booths and caught a taxi.
Thirty minutes to Brunswick Road, and even on the exit ramp it was bumper to bumper. He checked the time: 8 a.m. They should be awake in the Coburg house.
The cab driver turned left off the exit ramp and headed east along Brunswick Road.
‘I’d like to give Sydney Road a miss,’ he said, ‘if that’s okay by you?’ Wyatt nodded his assent. Sydney Road was the most direct route into Coburg but he knew that it would be bad, locked with peak-hour trams and heavy transports. The driver turned left a couple of streets before Sydney Road and wound his way deep into Coburg, a region of hot little streets and weatherboard houses, finally delivering Wyatt at the entrance to a dead-end strip of asphalt ten houses long. Wyatt got out, paid the man, let his senses register that he was safe, then headed for the white weatherboard where Jardine was maybe slowly dying.
Jardine’s sister opened the door. She was careworn, thin, a spasm of emotion pulling her mouth down at one corner when she saw it was Wyatt at the door. It was a look Wyatt knew well, so he said her name carefully, softly, barely murmuring it: ‘Nettie.’
Sourness became exasperation and she said, ‘Why don’t you leave us alone? We’re managing. You’re just bringing back bad memories.’
‘Did he say that?’
She looked away stubbornly. ‘It doesn’t do him any good, seeing you.’
‘Let him be the judge of that, Nettie.’
Jardine’s sister bit her lower lip. Then she shrugged, closed the screen door in Wyatt’s face and disappeared down the gloomy hallway to a room at the back. The house was in need of restumping and the interior smelt of cooped-up humans and dampness. The house was rented. The wallpaper, carpets, light fittings and laminex benches were left over from the dismal end of the 1950s, and Wyatt looked forward to the day when he could rescue Jardine and the sister and place them somewhere better.
Nettie materialised from the shadows, hooking limp strands of hair behind her ears. She resembled an Oklahoma dustbowl survivor, etched cheekbones and eyes wide, dark and long-suffering. ‘I just want you to know,’ she said, opening the screen door to admit Wyatt into the house, ‘he doesn’t blame you but the rest of us do.’
Wyatt stopped and stared at her. His voice was cold, factual and remote, with no detectable emotion in it: ‘Nettie, he knew the risks.’
Jardine came from a family of half-bent secondhand dealers and back-of-a-truck merchants. They were careful and stayed out of trouble. Jardine’s getting head-shot six months ago on a job with Wyatt had been unaccountable, the kind of thing that could have happened to anyone, but it was a first for Jardine’s family and Jardine was the only one who wasn’t blaming Wyatt for it.
‘He knew the risks,’ Wyatt repeated.
What Wyatt wasn’t admitting was that he did feel some responsibility-not for the fact that he’d put Jardine at risk, but for what had happened since. When he’d first seen Jardine again after the job, Wyatt had been shocked by the change in the man with whom he’d pulled a dozen successful jobs over the years, a man he liked and trusted-as much as Wyatt liked and trusted anyone. Six months earlier, Jardine had come out of retirement as backup on the hit on the Mesic compound looking fit and alert, a man with a slow-burning good humour, but they’d been ambushed after the Mesic job and Jardine had been head-shot, a graze above one ear. Wyatt had paid Jardine his fee, taken him to a doctor who didn’t ask questions, and gone to ground in Tasmania, a base where the wrong people would never find him.
He’d assumed that Jardine had gone back into peaceful retirement, but the Jardine he’d seen in Sydney a few weeks later was partly paralysed along one side, kilos lighter, a few IQ points slower and duller. Jardine tended to forget things. He owed two months rent. Pizza cartons and styrofoam coffee cups littered his pair of rooms at the Dorset Hotel in Newtown, and it was clear that he wore the same clothing for days at a time.