Whispering Death Read Free

headed over the West Gate Bridge, high winds buffeting the little car, and down into Williamstown, where the mean grind of old Melbourne co-existed with bright young mortgages. Factories and workshops sat next to pastelly little townhouses with cute, candy-coloured cars in the driveways. Grace wound down her window. The air, dense and still, was faintly salted from the Bay. The trees, branches barely moving, seemed dazed from the years-long drought.
    She parked in a cramped yard behind a corner pub. She’d dressed down at the airport, and now her demeanour was down, too, a little defeated-looking as she trudged with a plastic shopping bag down the block to Steve Finch’s second-hand shop. Leaning on his display window as if to remove a stone from her shoe, she scanned the area for stakeout vans, cameras behind curtains or cops inside the shop. Nothing. She went in. If the cops came now, she was just a punter with a few bits of rubbish to pawn.
    Nothing ever changed in Finch’s shop. Open seven days a week, dusty TV sets and VCRs in the window, boxy computer monitors on card tables, cartons of vinyl records, cassette tapes and paperback books. Islands of unloved and unlovely furniture to negotiate before she found Steve at an ink-stained counter, working the keyboard of a sleek new Mac. He reeked of aftershave. It fought the mustiness and won.
    â€˜Be with you in a minute.’
    He hadn’t looked up; wouldn’t have heard her above the radio, set to a thrash station and marked down to $15. But he would have seen her on the security monitors. Cameras covered all the corners and overlooked the street, side paths and back yard. In fact, Grace had advised him what to install where.
    Hadn’t looked up, and hadn’t used body language to warn her either, meaning there were no cops behind a wardrobe or lurking in his office. She studied him. Finch’s face was crammed with large features slapped onto a narrow skull, nose and chin hooking forward, ears like sails. He wore his hair long as if to bulk up the narrowness. He was about forty, tall, well-dressed in a cotton shirt and trousers. His grimy fingers were probably from tinkering inside the guts of the turntable lying in pieces beside the computer.
    â€˜Needs a new motor and rollers,’ he said, reading her mind. Still not looking at her.
    He tapped a few more keys and peered at the screen. ‘Place in California can ship them to me.’
    â€˜Worth it?’
    Now he looked at her. ‘Is it worth it? Collector’s item, Suze.’
    Susan was as good a name as Grace, or any of the others she used. She also had passports, credit cards and driver’s licences in names she hadn’t used yet, names of babies that had died around the time she was born. And there was an old name, Nina, lurking in her dreams that seemed real where the others didn’t. But just now, with Steve Finch, she was Suze, short for Susan.
    He grinned at her as a thought entered his head and raised one finger. ‘Something to show you.’
    A photograph of his baby son, the child clutching a chair and looking outraged. ‘Took his first steps about ten seconds later,’ Finch said.
    â€˜How gorgeous,’ Grace said.
    The new young wife, the pregnancy, the maternity ward and now the first footsteps, recorded in photographs that Steve insisted on showing her whenever she came to do business.
    â€˜How’s your little one?’ he said now. ‘Any new photos?’
    â€˜Steven Finch, dealer in stolen property and sentimental family man,’ said Grace, opening her wallet to a series of small photographs in clear plastic sleeves, the first a toothy blonde three-year-old.
    Finch grabbed the wallet and peered. ‘Cute,’ he said, then flipped through.
    â€˜Awww, look at her in her tutu.’ He peered again, read aloud— ‘Hurstbridge Community Childcare Centre’—and glanced worriedly at Grace. ‘Your