Read Online Whispering Death by Garry Disher - Free Book Online

Paranoia could undo you just as certainly as a pointing finger, a hand clamping your shoulder, a voice saying, ‘ Got you. ’
    First, what would the detective recall of the incident? A faintly exotic-looking foreign woman was being accosted by a tough-looking man, but so what? Plenty of strangers passed through Waterloo, tourists attracted by the Peninsula’s coast and hinterland, wineries and bed-and-breakfast cottages. She’d be more inclined to remember the man who posed the threat, not the victim.
    So, Corso.
    Grace thought there was a good chance that she’d fooled Corso: the wig, the accent, the unlikely location. Plus, it seemed he hadn’t been in Waterloo looking for her but passing through, a driving holiday with his family. He might say nothing. But the incident would be imprinted on his mind—he’d accosted her, and she’d denied her old name, and a cop had intervened—and one day he might fall into conversation with someone who’d known her in Sydney, a bouncer or a barman or someone connected to Galt. Or he’d make the kind of phone call that begins, ‘This might be nothing, but today I thought I saw…’ and the people around Galt would send in some goons, or ask Corso to stick around and investigate.
    Had he seen her come out of the bank? Even if the tellers or the manager did talk to Corso, or to Galt’s goons, they wouldn’t connect a mysterious woman with a foreign accent to the woman they knew as Mrs Grace. And for the past two years Grace had altered her appearance each time she visited the bank: mini-skirt one day, scruffy jeans or business suit the next. Cropped black hair, blonde wig, tennis hat. Flashy cheap earrings, tiny diamond studs. To the tellers and the manager, she was a woman with the means and the time to dress as she liked. Beholden to no boss. A lucky woman, warm, arty, a little extroverted. Nothing like the woman Galt had spent two years looking for.
    Besides, Grace didn’t live in or near Waterloo. Nowhere near. She rarely visited the place.
    But…
    But she had been spotted there. Grace chewed that over as she drove. She’d be well advised to clean out the box and find another bank like the VineTrust, in another town like Waterloo. And she did need such a box, a secure place for her valuables and her keepsakes. A place she could visit and daydream about, a place for her secrets as much as her treasures. The box represented who she was. If the police ever searched her home, they wouldn’t find a thing to tell them anything about her.
    This was Grace’s reasoning as she neared Sorrento, the lowering sun flashing in the waters of Port Phillip Bay. Only 60 km/h here, almost a crawl, and she felt a little panicky at that speed. Then 50 km/h, then 70, 60 again, and finally she was at the ferry terminal, too early for the 6 p.m. sailing. She parked outside the pay station and stretched her back. Mild air, the water barely lapping the coarse sand and the awed feet of a toddler and his crouching mother. A dog racing to catch a Frisbee, gulls wheeling. Stretching behind her were the Sorrento cliffs and the cliff-top houses. Who knew what riches they held? And she’d forbidden herself to touch a penny of it.
    Grace needed coffee for the final stage. And something to read on the ferry. She walked back along the short branch road that led from the Nepean Highway to the ferry station, and climbed the hill to the main street, which was busy with the kinds of cars driven by the kinds of young women who married doctors and real estate agents. Cliché, Grace. Yeah, but clichés were useful in Grace’s line of business. They helped her to analyse a place, helped her to decide if it was worth her while. Sorrento was—but the rules were clear: Never operate in your own back yard .
    She asked for a double-shot latte and sat at a table beneath a plane tree. Five-thirty-five. The 6 p.m. ferry to Queenscliff