5

ALICE

Darwin’s last ride would be his third trip inside Valkyrie. The first time was in spring the year before, when Alice had a job driving a minor politician ninety minutes from his Mornington home to Darwin’s house for a party – which he called a ‘meeting’ the whole time to justify his constituents paying for it. He liked talking about classic cars and that, combined with the easy charisma many politicians rode on, meant the drive was pleasant enough. When Alice pulled into Darwin’s long brick driveway the politician gave a low whistle and said, ‘Some place, isn’t it?’

Despite the beautiful home that Alice had picked him up from – a two-storey beachside Californian bungalow – she had to concede that Darwin’s house sure was Some Place: a sprawling art deco mansion that rose up with the land and went back so far Alice couldn’t tell where it ended. There had been other cars parked in the driveway, some with drivers, some without. None as nice as Valkyrie, but some that looked familiar. Maybe, she’d thought, she would have someone to knock back a drink with while they waited for their Dear Leaders to finish whatever disaster they were organising.

Stopping at the foot of the front stairs, Alice asked the politician if he wanted her to open the door for him – some men would fall out of the car rather than have a woman open it for them – but before he could answer, somebody else had popped the handle. Alice got out, and Darwin Weiss was shaking the politician’s hand, saying, ‘Matthew, Matthew, so glad you could come.’

Darwin was about forty, with salted dark hair, a wide, white smile, and a navy-blue suit not too far off in colour from Valkyrie herself. He turned to Alice and said, ‘This is the most beautiful car I’ve ever seen. They call it Oxford Blue, don’t they?’

‘They do,’ said Alice.

‘Would you mind if I just get this gentleman settled and return, in just a moment?’

She did not. Alice waited by Valkyrie’s bonnet, wondering what Darwin Weiss was returning to do. Sometimes rich people tried to buy the car, and Darwin was the kind of rich for whom Alice’s yearly salary was equal to what he’d spend on drinks at dinner, though reports were that he was, in fact, a genuinely good guy.

He had earned his first thousand dollars as a nine-year-old who took his mother’s dustbuster down to the beach over summer and got two dollars a pop to clean sand out of tourists’ cars. It escalated from there: he spent high school importing hard-to-get American products and selling them out of his garage, then a storefront, then a few more storefronts; in his early twenties, he made a few choice early tech investments that gave him the capital to invest in niche things that went well, like the magazines Informal Attire and Dash. Later, he produced local television, started a line of menswear, and opened a cologne factory in the warehouse space of a cordial company that had just gone bust and hired all the workers back. In his thirties, he bought into cryptocurrency when it started, sold it all for a huge amount before it blew up, and then came out against the environmental impacts of it and invested in electric cars instead. There was something about Elon Musk for a while, then there was a fight with Elon Musk. It went on: an extensive list of successes and delights that snowballed into unfathomable money and business deals.

When Darwin returned after only a minute, Alice stood back and let him look at Valkyrie while she watched him. He looked good, she thought, for his age.

He walked around her admiringly and said, ‘Would you take me for a ride? I’ll pay extra.’

‘No need,’ Alice said. ‘Your friend in there has paid for the whole day. I can take you around the block.’

‘He won’t be out until after three,’ Darwin said. ‘Can we go further than around the block?’

He got into the front passenger seat and laid his hand gently on Valkyrie’s dashboard.

‘Aren’t you supposed to be at your party?’ Alice asked.

‘I couldn’t imagine anything worse,’ he said. ‘I’m letting them use my house for whatever bullshit they’re doing, and they can drink all of my second-best whisky and fall into my plants, and then I’ll be there at the end, saying goodbye, and they’ll all just think I was talking to someone else the whole time.’

They ended up driving along the Warburton Highway, looking over expansive pastures and pointing out if they saw a horse or an alpaca in the fields. They stopped at a bakery, and Darwin bought two vanilla slices, each as large as a brick. They ate them leaning against Valkyrie’s grille and watching the birds swoop over the orchards. Alice waited the whole trip, there and back, for him to put his hand on her knee, and he never did.

~

Once she was on Banks Road, a one-lane road that bisected the peninsula inland parallel to the Nepean Highway and gave fewer opportunities for people to notice them, Alice called Choker.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Pickup was successful, I take it?’

‘Darwin fucking Weiss?’ Alice asked. ‘What happened?’

‘I think you’ll find that three thousand dollars is the going rate for no questions.’

‘Should I be worried?’

‘That’s an acceptable question. And I don’t think so.’

‘You don’t think so?’

‘This is all on the down-low, obviously. He just wants to return from whence he came, and be buried in the family cemetery, and then the news can get out. I’m sure you’ll hear all about it then.’

‘So nobody else knows?’

‘I’m sure some people know. But they will be people who are very good at keeping secrets, like you.’

‘You trust Sadie Quentin, though?’ Alice asked. ‘She seemed … agitated.’

‘She’s bitter because she wanted to buy Valkyrie, but I got her instead, and now you’ve turned up all wide-eyed, without knowing who you have the honour of carrying. She is trustworthy, regardless, and will keep quiet – like you will, by taking the back roads and not the highways, like we drew up for you.’

‘Whatever you say, boss.’

‘If anything really does go awry, Pia put a Beretta under your seat.’

Alice was incensed. ‘You fucking what? I told you not to put a goddamn gun in my car without checking in first.’

‘Consider this the check-in. And don’t worry. Your fingerprints won’t be on it until you touch it.’

‘Jesus fucking Christ.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘There’s no reason you’ll have any problems. Two days of driving, then you can go back to your family, three thousand dollars richer and with a story you can sell to That’s Life if you never want to work for me again.’

‘Don’t tempt me.’

‘Keep in touch,’ Choker drawled, and hung up.

Alice sighed and looked behind her at Darwin’s coffin. The flowers were beautiful: red bursts of banksia, fist-sized cups of burnt-amber protea, sunshine-yellow billy buttons, lush green native leaves tucked between them all.

‘What happened to you?’ she asked, but he did not reply.

She drove on, watching the road, watching the rear-view mirror. Darwin’s first stop was two and a half hours away, in Gippsland. A direct route would take her less than two hours clean, but it was easier to tell if somebody was tailing you if you took as many side roads as you could. Alice had memorised the route from the printed and highlighted map inside Choker’s sealed envelope; now she popped a mint, rolled down the window and settled in for the drive.

For the next twenty minutes, they passed wineries, bushland, signs telling her to watch out for koalas. A car honked while overtaking and she looked over at a family: two happy kids, two beaming parents. She smiled back at them – don’t do anything to make them remember you badly – and slapped Valkyrie’s side out of the window as if she was patting the flank of a horse. A kid in the back, maybe a touch older than Cherry, yelled out something she couldn’t hear, and she waved, and let them pull away. Cute kid, Alice thought, then: I wonder if Cherry has seen any nice cars yet today.

‘I hope you get along with your family,’ Alice said to Darwin. ‘They can be complicated. My father is dead too,’ she added. ‘If you see him, tell him I said hi. He might not say much, though, and I feel like you prefer talkers. If you see Teddy’s dad, you should definitely talk to him. He’s much more fun. Don’t tell my father I said that, though; it’d hurt his feelings.’

She checked her rear-view mirror again, and the surety that she was being followed was there before she saw it. A white Subaru Impreza, on a normal day, might not have been the same one she had seen and noted outside Sadie’s funeral home, but while she was in possession of Australia’s richest dead body, she knew that it was. She reached under the seat and felt for the gun Pia had left for her. Then she called Teddy, who didn’t pick up.

Alice had been driving for a long time, and had lived on the peninsula for longer. She knew the roads around the next turn-off were too isolated, with nowhere to hide from anyone in pursuit. She waited, watching her mirrors, passing exits, thinking, until her best chance to get off the road. She couldn’t take an exit ramp in a hurry in Valkyrie – especially with a body in the car – so she simply did not indicate when she turned, and the Impreza, also not indicating, followed.

‘So you’re telling me I can’t even drive out of the peninsula before somebody knew about all this?’ she asked Darwin. ‘Who’s following you, buddy? Is it friend or foe?’

Two minutes after the turn, Alice pulled in to a strip of shops and parked in the first bay she saw. The Impreza and its tinted windows passed slowly behind her, and she reversed out and went back the way she came, swung down a residential side street, and wound her way along until she found something: a narrow, stone-paved laneway between two houses.

‘Sorry, Valkyrie,’ she said. ‘You know I hate to take you off-road.’

The Impreza wasn’t behind her when she turned in. The laneway ended on another residential street, and she turned again, and again, until she ended up in an industrial estate and thought: yes.

In there, watching carefully for the tail, she parked out of sight behind a ute loaded with cable jacks. She got out of the car and stood between the cab and the load, watching the road.

After a minute a guy with a pair of sunglasses on his head and another hooked into his embroidered polo shirt came out of the building she’d parked in front of and said to her, ‘Nice ride.’

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘She’s a real classy lady.’

‘Are you here to pick something up?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Some guy has been following me around, trying to get a ride in the car, so I’m trying to hide from him.’

He took his sunglasses off his head like they’d been impeding his vision and watched the road from the back of the ute. ‘What a fucken prick.’

‘Tell me about it,’ she said. ‘Some guys just lose their heads over a car, like there’s not a real person driving it.’

‘Shameful,’ he said knowingly.

‘Do you mind if I just wait out a few more minutes to make sure? I can move if somebody needs a spot.’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Can I get you a drink or something?’

‘I’ve got water in the car,’ she said, ‘but that’s so generous of you. Thank you for understanding.’

The guy went back into the building, filled up enough with his heroism that he didn’t look in the window of the car to see what Valkyrie had inside.

Alice waited another ten minutes, watching the road. The car didn’t come by. She sent a message to Choker and Teddy letting them know about the tail and updated her Drive notes so Rusty was across the car’s make and model – she’d been too far away to catch the licence plate – then drove Valkyrie out of the estate and, dismissing her notes, headed towards the freeway. The Impreza was nowhere in sight.

‘Darwin,’ Alice said, after a while, ‘this might be a long fucking day.’