‘Sorry, Mrs Niekirk, of course.’
The nanny wheeled around and trotted with the child towards a distant swing set.
‘Hasn’t the sense she was born with,’ Mara Niekirk said apologetically.
‘Uh huh,’ said Challis. ‘Shall we go inside?’
‘If you think it will do any good.’
They entered the house. Challis found himself walking through a series of sterile rooms. It was as if the decorators had looked at a set of plans and phoned in some suggestions. Not even the presence of a child had softened the place. He could feel the hand of absolute control at work, admonishing, whisking away crumbs, allocating chores.
Meanwhile the Niekirks were looking about keenly: at walls and shelves, into drawers and cabinets.
‘Nothing’s missing.’
‘No damage anywhere.’
Then the bedrooms, and Challis realised that husband and wife slept apart. ‘You had something hanging on that wall,’ he said, in Mara Niekirk’s bedroom.
An empty hook. ‘Oh, that? We’re always hanging and rehanging things. I don’t like static decorations, do you? I’m still wondering what to hang there.’
Then they were back on the veranda. ‘What about small items? Jewellery, iPods?’
‘As far as I can tell, nothing was taken,’ Mara Niekirk said.
‘Even so, my officers will need to dust for prints.’
The last straw for Warren Niekirk. ‘Is that really necessary? Whoever it was would have worn gloves, and they were disturbed before they could take anything.’
Ignoring him, Challis said, ‘The back door is down this way, I believe?’
He led the way around the veranda, glancing at windows and doors, glancing up, leaving eddies of frustration in his wake. Reaching the alarm box, he asked, ‘Does this bench belong here?’
With an air of reluctance, Mara Niekirk said, ‘Well spotted. It used to be over there.’ She pointed to a spot further along the veranda.
‘Dust it,’ Challis told the crime scene technicians. ‘Dust the alarm box, the front door and the most likely interior surfaces.’
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ Warren Niekirk said. ‘That’ll take hours.’
39
It did take hours. When the Niekirks were alone again and Tayla was somewhere in the house, doing whatever it was that nannies did, Mara Niekirk slapped her husband’s face. ‘Are you out of your tiny mind?’
He screwed up his handsome features in concentration, but the question defeated him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Mister Lord of the Manor, antagonising the cops. Do you want them to suspect us of something?’
‘But you said yourself the Arkley might be a fake,’ said Warren, sulky and aggrieved, ‘and that inspector guy noticed straight off the Klee was missing. What, do you want them poking their noses in?’
Mara closed her eyes, rocking with pain. The Klee. A twenty-first birthday present from Grandfather Krasnov and her most treasured possession. She knuckled away the tears and fed the rage. ‘Wouldn’t normal people want the police to investigate if they’d been burgled? Moron.’
They were in the kitchen, the coffee pot bubbling. Mara had been dying for coffee all morning but no way was she going to make any while the cops were present, obliging her to offer them some. She especially hated the young detective, Murphy. She had that lithe, sporty look Warren liked. I bet she wears a jogging bra and white Bonds, thought Mara. I bet she drinks after-work beers with her male colleagues, and she calls them ‘mate’.
‘Something happened here,’ she continued. ‘There was a break-in. Witnesses, a formal report. The police have to investigate, it’s what they do. And what we do is play the role of victims. But no, you have to antagonise them.’
A gorgeous fuckwit, her husband. It always felt good giving him a tongue-lashing, and God knows she’d done it often enough over the years. Mara’s eyes filled with tears again, pain and rage. Late morning, and she wondered if coffee was going to do the trick. What she needed was a stiff drink.
Thinking about it further, she saw one central reason why the police had made a big deal of the break-in: Warren and his damn plane. He’d tried to play the big shot wheeler-dealer, and where had it got them? Unwelcome attention not only from the Federal Government but now also a local police inspector. Of course the man was going to prick up his ears when he heard the name ‘Niekirk’ again. Otherwise the break-in wouldn’t have attracted much police attention at all.
She scowled at her husband. Be careful what you wish for, she told herself, for the millionth time. She’d wished, five years earlier, for a good-looking hunk to hang on her arm, and that’s exactly what she’d got-but God, the brains of a gnat.
She paused. What had Warren wished for, back when he was courting her? Her family connections, a whiff of the arts? He should have stuck to real estate and sleeping with teenage girls. He had absolutely no eye for quality, only cheap effects. For example, she’d slaved to create a garden that would be visited by tourists, talked about, photographed for the glossy magazines, and did he know the name of a single plant?
‘Sorry, Mar,’ he said now, reading her face.
‘So you should be.’
That fucking plane. Well, the man who’d sold it to them was feeding the sharks off Sydney Heads now. Whispering death indeed- he hadn’t seen or heard a thing, before she conked him on the head.
‘Tell me, Warren, here and now, are there any more cock-ups on the horizon? Any more little surprises for me? Any more messes for me to clean up?’
He flushed. She realised he was standing close to a block of sharp knives, and moderated her tone and manner. ‘You can tell me, sweetheart. Forewarned is forearmed.’
‘Didn’t you notice? We lost more than the Klee.’
She was genuinely puzzled. ‘Like what?’
‘That icon in the walkway.’
She had to think for a moment. She had found it in her grandfather’s effects. Just an old relic, religious nonsense, worm-riddled timber, worth maybe a few hundred dollars, not the kind of thing that interested her one way or the other, but Warren had fallen in love with it. He said it was haunting, beautiful, peaceful-wank words like that.
So she’d hung it where she’d rarely have to see it. ‘No loss.’
A squeaky little voice came from the doorway:
‘Excuse me, Mrs Niekirk.’
‘Oh, what?’ she snarled.
Tayla blanched. ‘Excuse me, but I can’t find Natalia’s inhaler, I think we left it in Sydney.’
‘ We?’
‘ I. I did. She’s wheezing quite badly.’
Dripping acid, Mara said, ‘Well, why don’t you hunt out the prescription, and get into the car, and drive out onto the road, and point the car towards Waterloo, and go into the chemist, and get a new one? Think you can do that?’
‘Yes, Mrs Niekirk.’
Tayla seemed to evaporate from the doorway rather than scuttle or even walk away. Warren watched her go and Mara wanted to wipe the look off his face. ‘Put your eyes back in your head and your dick back in your pants,’ she said.
The look he shot her was a mix of guilt and triumph. Yes, she’d caught him ogling the nanny again, but why? Because Mara didn’t satisfy him. And never had.
A fly on the wall could watch all this and wonder how I got pregnant, Mara thought, with almost a pang.
Speaking of ogling the nanny…
‘Is the teddy bear cam working?’
He gave her a cruel, concupiscent look. ‘Why? Want to look at Tayla getting her gear off?’
‘I want to look at our burglar, you fool.’
His face cleared. Pennies dropped. ‘Oh, right.’
Horror stories from other married couples had persuaded them to install a teddy bear spy camera in the nursery. How do you know your nanny isn’t a drug addict? What if she’s got a temper and takes it out on the baby? What if she sneaks her boyfriend in to have sex while your baby smothers to death? Hence a pinhole lens concealed as one of the teddy bear’s bead eyes, a digital feed recorded on a hard drive.