Her eyes spilled a couple of tears.
‘Hey, hey,’ he said, moving towards her but stopping short.
‘I did something stupid.’
‘We all do that.’
She blinked at him, a look of fury on her face, but directed inwards, and he remembered the love bite and guessed that she’d entangled herself with the wrong person. Who, though? He was only human; he’d like to know.
‘Want to talk about it?’
She didn’t hesitate or prevaricate. ‘Nope.’
So they went their separate ways and Challis thought Lost opportunity, and so did Murphy.
‘I’d rather discuss your breasts,’ Challis informed the webcam.
‘Not going to happen,’ Ellen Destry said in her no-nonsense way. ‘McQuarrie’s forcing you to take long-service leave?’
‘Yes.’
A pause and she said, ‘Starting when?’
‘End of next week.’
‘The alternatives?’
‘They sack me, demote me, send me to a station way out in the Mallee somewhere.’
‘Put your thinking cap on,’ Ellen said.
42
On Saturday Ian Galt drove out through Gippsland to Lakes Entrance and the Autumn Years Retirement Village.
The little town and the coastal waters were vivid in the sunlight, and another man might have drawn an appreciative breath after his long drive and admired the gumtree leaves, variously dun-coloured, olive toned and silvery, the municipal flowerbeds splashed yellow, red and blue. Another man might have stopped for coffee, sat at a sidewalk cafe to sip and watch the locals buying the Saturday papers, the women in their springtime dresses, but Galt had no interest at all in the beauty of his surroundings.
He found the retirement village along a leafy side road behind the main street. The lakeside charm was absent here, away from the tourist beat. The houses were pale brick scabs from the 1970s, mute and disappointed, as if ashamed of the men who’d designed them. The admin building and cottages of the retirement village were in keeping with the neighbouring houses. Everything was pink and grey inside the foyer and the air was stale, redolent of industrial solvents and urine.
This time he kept his Andrew Towne ID in his pocket, unable to think of a good reason for a federal policeman to pay a formal visit to a retirement home in a small coastal town. During the long drive from Melbourne, he’d settled on an honest-citizen story, and with his teeth bared in a smile, eyes crinkled, explained to the receptionist that he’d been overseas for twenty years, returning recently because his last surviving relative, his aunt, had died. ‘The thing is, among her effects there was this photo.’
An elderly couple standing with a young woman outside Autumn Years. ‘That’s my half sister,’ he said, tapping the image. ‘We lost contact a long time ago, and I don’t know how to find her, and thought maybe the old people standing with her could help me, whoever they are.’
The receptionist was delighted to help, but had bad news: Mr Ingles had died. ‘But Mrs Ingles is still here, bless her.’
Galt glanced down the corridor, at the rows of doors, old men and women inside them, pissing their beds. ‘Well, that is good news.’
‘Mind sharp as a tack, too.’
To Galt’s relief, he was shown to a cottage in the grounds. The receptionist knocked on a glossy red door. The woman who answered was frail, stooped over a walking stick, but recognisably the woman in the photograph. Her gaze spent very little time on the receptionist and even less on the spring sunshine, but fixed hard on Galt.
What are you staring at, you old bag? he thought.
The receptionist said, ‘Eileen, this young man has come a long way to see you, isn’t that exciting? He needs help finding his sister.’
Eileen’s face seemed to say, I’m not a child. ‘Is that so?’
Sensing that the ruse was going to unravel, Galt said, very quickly, ‘Thank you, I can take it from here,’ and when the receptionist was gone, said, ‘I’m trying to get hold of your daughter, Mrs Ingles. This is Susan, I believe?’
Eileen Ingles regarded him for so long that Galt wanted to snatch away her walking stick and beat her with it. ‘Mrs Ingles?’
‘I don’t have a daughter.’
Galt shook the photograph under the old bag’s face. ‘Explain this.’
‘That is certainly me, and that is my late husband, but who the young woman is I couldn’t tell you.’
‘So why the hell is she in the photo with you?’
‘Don’t you get narky with me. As I recall, she simply materialised one day, claiming she was writing an article on regional facilities for the aged, and wanted her photograph taken with us. If I remember correctly, she said her name was Grace.’
Galt curled his lip. ‘If you remember correctly.’
Mrs Ingles cocked her head. ‘There’s grace,’ she said, ‘and there is the absence of grace.’
Galt didn’t say, ‘Break a hip’, but he thought it.
43
On Saturday, Grace nailed a hook to her sitting-room wall and positioned the icon and stepped back and tried to flow into it, as if it might tell her something about herself. Deep peace, she thought, losing herself in the gold leaf virgin and baby. Healing light.
But she didn’t have the patience for too much of that. She scrolled through her Niekirk photographs again. Perhaps the little Klee painting might tell her something about the Niekirks that would fill in the gaps.
She drove to Torquay, found an Internet cafe, and logged into a couple of stolen artworks sites: Art Loss, on which galleries and individuals listed stolen and lost works of art, and Trace It, which aimed to trap thieves offering stolen paintings to auction houses and dealers.
She ruminated as she searched. There’d been enough dodgy invoices and other documents in the Niekirks’ study to indicate they were crooked, so what was the story with the Klee? Stolen, presumably. From a collector? A gallery? Here? Europe or America? She knew that small galleries were notoriously under-protected. Even if they could afford first rate security systems, they couldn’t afford the staff to monitor them. Or they switched their systems on only at night. Meanwhile, art thieves were often well organised. They stole to order, or had buyers in mind, and were able to forge impressive pedigrees- provenance papers, sales and auction records, catalogue entries.
She froze.
She’d found the Klee.
Felsen in der Blumenbeet, stolen from a gallery in the Swiss town of Liestal, in 1995.
How had it found its way to Australia? Where had it been since 1995? Had the Niekirks commissioned the theft? Did Mara drool over it in private every night? Maybe the Niekirks were intermediaries. Or the Klee was a means to an end-collateral in a loan, for example, or finance for a drug deal. Or a ransom was being sought from the gallery or the insurance company. But so many years later? And would the Niekirks risk auctioning the painting in Australia? If it came with convincing papers, would anyone check? Maybe they had a Japanese collector in mind. Grace had sometimes sold small paintings and art deco jewellery to collectors in Japan, where it was possible to claim legal title to stolen works after only two years of possession.
It was pointless to speculate. The beautiful little Klee was hers now.
In a safe-deposit box on the other side of Port Phillip Bay.
Perhaps she could ransom it back to the Niekirks?
No. It was beautiful. She wanted it.
Out of curiosity, she Googled ‘theft of Russian icons’ and learned that customs officers at Sheremetyevo Airport seize 6000 icons each year-maybe only a tenth of those being smuggled out of Russia in suitcases, diplomatic bags and general cargo. The Russian Mafia was involved, too. In the upheavals of the 1990s it wasn’t only nuclear arms that were stolen but also icons and paintings from the country’s galleries.