28

GRACE WAITED UNTIL she heard sirens and saw the unnerving pulse of red and blue lights coming in and out of view on the dark hills, then she gave the policeman’s hand a final squeeze. She’d rolled him onto his side and checked that he was breathing freely. Anxious about concussion, she’d continued to talk to him, urging responses. Blotted the blood from his eyes. Squeezed his hand between her gloved hands. She supposed she was doing some good. He didn’t pass out exactly, but nor did he seem to be conscious of her, outside this old church at a crossroads in the middle of nowhere. ‘Forty-two years,’ he murmured at one point. And: ‘Pete fucking Patmore.’

And now, police and ambulance. Squeezing his hand, slipping his phone back into his pocket, she rushed to his car, leaned in, yanked the dashcam from his windscreen. Raced to the Triton, took a moment to check for damage—nothing: thank Christ for the bull bar—and sped away with a spurt of gravel as the lights and sirens grew more pronounced behind her.

How soon before the policeman recovered his wits? Was able to describe her? Galt’s voice returned to Grace again: Know when to walk away. She didn’t want to overreact, but nor did she want to be complacent. She’d attacked two men who were bashing a policeman. They might want to know who she was, even as the police surely would. Alerts would go out, roadblocks go up.

She began to map out her next few seconds, her next few hours and days. First, she reduced her speed from a panicky 130 km/h to a lawful 90 km/h. A few minutes later she reached the outskirts of Angaston and dropped to 60 km/h, then took the first empty side road and swapped the NSW plates for a Victorian set. Trundled through the town. Saw no action at her motel. Didn’t pause.

She drove for an hour, keeping her speed below the official limit, and by 10.15 was standing at the check-in counter of a motel in Medindie, a stone’s throw from the Adelaide CBD. She told the receptionist that her phone was playing up, or she’d have called ahead to reserve a room. She said she’d have reached Adelaide from Melbourne a lot earlier in the day but had had to visit her grandmother in a nursing home. And wasn’t that drive between Melbourne and Adelaide the most boring in the world?

The receptionist’s eyes glazed over. She could barely summon the interest to say she didn’t know; she’d never driven it.

At 10.45 Grace hid the Britton haul under the motel room’s spare blankets and pillows, put on the overalls and bucket hat from her backpack and walked three kilometres to an alleyway behind a strip of shops on Main North Road. Destroying the policeman’s dashcam, then discarding it with its SD card in one dumpster and her break-in clothing in another, she walked back onto Main North Road, where she tried a handful of convenience stores and service stations before finding a payphone. Called triple zero and reported the presence of child pornography in Jason Britton’s house. Her face averted, her voice a low, rasping monotone, with long pauses between each word, she said no, she would not give her name.

Then pausing to stuff the overalls and hat in a charity bin, she set off back to the motel in her tights and hoodie. Her head was full as she walked. The hours until tomorrow morning. The yawning hours until tomorrow evening, when Erin would expect her home again.

Expect her to have attended the auction…

A night alone, somewhere unknown, is a long night. Headlights washed the curtains of the depressing motel room through the unrelenting hours and Grace tossed in the bed, challenged by voices that lobbed proposals, counterproposals, suggestions and accusations. Erin saying, I believed in you. Adam snarling, Found you. The bloodied policeman looking up at her and saying, I know what you did. Galt and his rules for thievery and escape. And she dreamed of running, but obstacles mired and tangled her feet. ‘All I want is a normal life,’ she said, but no one was listening.

She woke in the early hours of Sunday morning with that claim in her head, a normal life, and lay on her back watching the mottled creep of light across the ceiling, thinking of her life in the hills. She was an immigrant there, just as she’d been an immigrant everywhere else. No birthplace roots to give her a sense of identity—let alone bring her comfort. No maternity ward that she could name, no kindergarten, no primary school. No café where she’d first waitressed. No first driving lesson. She couldn’t name parents, cousins, kindergarten friends or high-school sweethearts either—only Adam. Her old country had been a place of bleak foster homes and volatile affiliations with carers, foster siblings and policemen—not to mention crooks, all posturing like they were in an episode of The Sopranos. Nothing had been home-like in any of that. And—who was she kidding?—home also wasn’t her life in the Adelaide Hills. She was rootless, disconnected. Whenever she did connect it was fleeting, and entailed different deceptions for different situations.

I’m not whole, she thought, I’m split. Split between the present and the past; split between who she wanted to be and who she, inescapably, was.

Sunday, 7.30 a.m. Dressed now in the skirt and top, Grace restored the Triton’s original plates and headed back to Gawler, driving with an unresolved notion of herself and not coming to her senses until after she’d dropped the keys in Off-Road Paradise’s return box and discovered that the Angaston bus didn’t run on Sundays. The kind of everyday hiccup endured by everyday people, she thought, logging into her fake Uber account. A bulky, cheerful man picked her up five minutes later, subjected her to a sustained explanation of the adjustments a person makes when he’s retrenched at fifty, and dropped her off outside the Lutheran church in Murray Street. Settling her backpack of Jason Britton treasures on the footpath, he wished her a good day. Called her ‘love’. She hoped he wouldn’t notice how tense she was.

But Angaston that morning was merely content to sleep in, drive to church or walk the dog. The sun was mild. No one looked at her sideways. So she walked up the church steps, gave the Uber guy a vigorous wave goodbye, watched until he was out of sight, and cut around the side of the building. Then out across the yard at the rear and through side streets to the Vigneron Motel.

No one had been in her room. And no one cared as she returned the keys and checked out, having first rumpled the bedclothes and run the shower. She would find somewhere to lie low for a few days, then disappear. Or get as far away as possible. But her head was full of loose threads. Erin would soon contact the police. And the police, learning of a Barossa Valley connection, would make a further connection, to the Britton break-in. She’d be better off attending the auction.

She was halfway to Runacre Hall when her mobile rang. ‘Only me. I’ll…quick, I know the…about to start.’

‘Sorry, you’re cutting in and out again,’ yelled Grace. ‘I’ll call you on my way home this afternoon, hopefully where the reception’s better.’

A crackle. ‘…luck!…dinner?’

She parked behind the hall again and went in. No browsers today. A more hard-nosed crowd, experienced auction bidders, seated in ranks of chairs in the great hall, facing the auctioneer and the items he was spruiking. She settled in, took part in the bidding, and so the day passed. Outbid on the cedar chiffonier and other items Erin had wanted, she shifted tack and came away with a 1961 first edition Julia Child cookbook with an intact dust jacket for $1,850 and an unmarked 1962 Gibson Dove acoustic guitar—a mother-of-pearl dove inlaid in the pickguard—for $8,500.

She was paying with the Mandel’s Collectibles credit card when Erin called. ‘Can you hear me okay?’

‘Loud and clear this time.’

‘How did it go today?’

Grace told her.

‘A guitar? Huh.’

‘Don’t worry, it’s collectible.’

‘Fair enough. You did well.’

‘It all came to a bit more than ten thousand dollars, so let me pay the extra amount,’ Grace said. It was what a normal person—in a normal relationship with a friend or a boss—would do.

‘We can work that out. I tried to ask you before, if you get home in good time, would you like to pop in for dinner?’

Say yes. That’s what a normal person would do. Return to your life in the hills. Grace plotted the drive. Roadblocks? But she had the perfect cover story, she’d spent both days buying stuff at Runacre Hall. ‘Sounds lovely. I should be there by early evening,’ she said, which was vague enough to account for anything that might fuck her up in the next little while.