And just as quickly they were gone, disappearing inside the bank, and Challis and Murphy were scuttling across the road to help the teller. Her knees were scraped. ‘It’s all right, you’re safe now,’ Pam said, and Joy staggered, almost a dead weight, as the detectives guided her into the cafe.
‘I say we go in,’ said the FRU officer, hovering over them.
‘And to hell with collateral damage, right?’ said Pam, elbowing him aside.
‘My boys are trained…’
They ignored him, Challis asking, ‘You up for a few questions, Joy?’
She smiled shakily. ‘A stiff drink would help.’
Challis glanced at the cafe proprietor, who nodded and reached for a brandy bottle and a glass. When it had been delivered and the teller had swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, Challis began:
‘First things first: we need to know who’s in there.’
‘Apart from the hold-up man?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mrs Grace, Mr Ely, Erin and Maddie.’
‘Who was the woman in the doorway with you?’
‘Mrs Grace. Susan Grace. She has a safe-deposit box with us.’
‘Erin and Maddie are staff members?’
‘Yes. Erin’s our financial planner. Maddie’s just a trainee, only been with us a month, poor thing.’
Another gulp of the brandy. ‘Sorry, I’m all shaken up.’
She was a slight woman with a cap of red-blonde hair, and she began to cry. Pam hugged her, giving Challis a look that he couldn’t decipher. He raised a questioning eyebrow, but she turned to the teller and said, ‘Joy, about the customer, Susan Grace-are you sure that’s her name?’
‘Yes.’
Challis cocked his head at Murphy. The question hadn’t been frivolous. ‘Do you know her from somewhere, Murph?’
‘There was an incident a couple of weeks ago,’ Pam said, going on to describe it, a woman with a foreign accent being accosted in the street.
‘You’re sure it’s the same woman?’
‘Positive.’
‘She’d been to the bank?’
‘I think so.’
Joy was swinging her gaze from one to the other. ‘Mrs Grace isn’t foreign.’
This was a side track they didn’t have time for, so to cut it short, Challis said, ‘Is she local, this Mrs Grace?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Did she give you the impression of knowing the man with the shotgun?’
‘Good God, no.’
He turned to Murphy. ‘You made a note of the time, date, description, car rego?’
‘Of course.’
‘Follow it up later.’
‘Boss.’
He turned to the teller. ‘Have you seen the gunman before?’
‘Never.’
‘Can you describe him?’
‘Not very well. He’s wearing a beanie and sunglasses and has a moustache. Average height.’
‘Is there a reason why he let you go, Joy? Does he intend to let the others go soon?’
‘No. He was very clear. He wants blankets and clothesline twine.’
‘What?’
‘Four or five blankets, huge ones,’ the teller said.
48
Mara and Warren had been shadowing Steven Finch since Saturday night, hoping he’d meet with the bitch who’d robbed them, but all he did was move between his house and his business.
Now it was early Monday evening and they were parked half a block from Finch’s house, watching it through the side mirrors of the Mercedes van, the air ripe around them. Nothing was happening, so Mara said, ‘To hell with this,’ and fished out her phone.
‘Steven? I thought we had a deal?’
His voice croaked, betraying fear. Fear was good. ‘I was about to call you, honest.’
‘And tell me what, precisely?’
‘It’s not my fault. How was I to know this would happen?’
Mara shook her head as if to clear it but wasn’t about to admit she had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Indeed.’
And soon she’d teased it out of him: it was all over the TV, a bank siege in Waterloo, and one of the hostages was the woman who had stolen the Klee. ‘I mean,’ Finch said shakily, ‘what if she’s arrested? She’ll spill to the cops.’
‘It’s definitely her?’
‘Turn on your TV. They keep running the same footage.’
Mara weighed it all up. ‘This is what you do, Steve: grab anything incriminating in your house, then do the same at the shop, and disappear for a few years.’
She terminated the call and immediately started Safari on the iPhone. She found a news report and, indeed, there was the woman who’d robbed them.
She turned to her husband. ‘Let’s do it. He’ll be coming out his front door pretty soon.’
‘Do what?’
Mara ignored him, climbed into the rear of the van. Finch’s house was as heavily secured as his shop but from tailing him she knew that he was vulnerable for a short period as he walked between his front door and the driver’s side door of his car. An Audi coupe, mind you, funded in part by Niekirk money, parked in the street because the houses were renovated workers’ cottages a hundred years old, no garages or carports.
Everything was going swimmingly for Mara now, after days of twiddling her thumbs. She opened the van’s rear door a crack, saw that she had a clear line of sight to the junk dealer’s front step, and removed her Steyr rifle from its slipcase.
When Mara was a teen, she’d spent school holidays on Grandfather Krasnov’s farm in New England, and the old emigre had taught her how to fire a rifle fitted with a telescopic sight. Tin cans, usually, plus the occasional watermelon-just like the assassin in The Day of the Jackal, Mara enjoying the satisfying, pulpy explosion as the bullet hit. Sometimes kangaroos, foxes and rabbits, and, once, a neighbour’s stray sheep dog-a spectacular shot, 500 metres at least.
She stretched out on the camping mattress, propped the rifle on a small tripod, sighted the German lenses, and waited, unseen, the van’s fittings and metal skin ideal for deadening sound. Was that a shot? people would say. They wouldn’t be sure.
She wiggled about until she was comfortable, and after that was absolutely still, breathing shallowly, feeling nothing, not even anticipation. She didn’t even register the jittery presence of her husband.
Finch stepped out of his front door and for a moment remonstrated with someone within the house, then the door was slammed and he presented himself to Mara, there was no other way to describe it. He stood there for a couple of seconds too long, carrying a black holdall, a panicky look on his face as he scanned the street, his gaze passing over the van. Mara placed the cross hairs on the centre of his chest and breathed out in one long, slow exhalation and squeezed the trigger.
‘You must squeeze, never pull,’ Grandfather Krasnov had taught her, and Mara, packing the rifle away now, folding the tripod, shutting the rear door, telling Warren to drive away slowly, realised anew that there had never been a man in her life like the Krasnov patriarch.
‘Another loose end cleaned up,’ she told her husband as he drove in his nervy way out of Williamstown and back to the Peninsula. ‘Now it’s time we all took a long overseas holiday.’
49
The blankets and clothesline were delivered to the bank, and time passed.
McQuarrie called. ‘Well, inspector?’
‘Wait and see, sir.’
‘Can’t you go in?’
‘Still waiting for the hostage negotiator.’
‘I don’t want any loss of life, Hal.’
‘Nor do I, sir.’
So I’m ‘Hal’ now? And you want me to send the marines in and avoid loss of life? He paused. ‘Got to go, the negotiator’s here.’
Senior Constable York was a forthright, large-boned woman, reminding Challis of the rural women he often encountered on the Peninsula, who worked with horses and married cheerful, open men. He outlined the situation quickly, and she said, ‘Huh. You’d expect something concrete by now. Deadlines, demands, a lot of panicky to and fro…’