Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing (3 page)

He nodded and she made him another one, then brought her coffee mug out and curled up on the floor, leaning against his legs. He smoothed her hair and sipped his drink.

‘How’s it all going?’ she finally asked, knowing that he wouldn’t say much.

‘I think it’s going to be okay,’ he said. ‘I got through the first meeting with the person we’re targeting.’

‘Stevie, I hope you’re being really careful,’ she said, looking up at him, suspecting already whom he meant. Steve squeezed her shoulder. Still looking at him, she put her hand over his. ‘Is that squeeze supposed to be reassuring?’ she asked.

‘It is,’ he said.

‘You might have to do better than that,’ she said. ‘I know you can’t say much but I happen to know already that you’re working with Terry Litchfield’s widow—’

‘How do you know that?’ Steve asked too quickly, and she realised she’d caught him off-guard.

She looked at him more closely. ‘You’re rattled,’ she teased. ‘Have I touched on a sensitive issue?’ He was looking hard at her, obviously not pleased that she knew so much. ‘Steve,’ she said, ‘you must have known I’d guess. I’m an investigator too, remember.’

He grunted noncommitally.

Gemma laughed at his discomfort. ‘Oh come on,’ she said. ‘What’s the worry? I’m discreet. And I can’t imagine you’d be doing anything you shouldn’t with that woman.’ She paused. ‘Unless the widow’s a cradle-snatcher or you’re looking for a mother figure.’

Steve frowned, taking his hand away from her shoulder. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh Steve.’ She was irritated by his unusual denseness. Normally, Steve was right there with her. ‘Lorraine Litchfield must be old enough to be your mother! And
you’re
forty-five.’

Steve said nothing, leaving an odd silence. ‘You know I can’t say much, Gems,’ he said, after drinking more of his Scotch.

‘But
I
can,’ she said, taking his hand back again. ‘I can put two and two together.’

‘Yes, but does it add up to four?’ He put his glass down. ‘Hey’—he took her hands in his—‘come to bed.’

She loved Steve’s solid body, strong from his daily work, and the way he fitted into and around her. ‘Listen, you,’ she said as they snuggled together, ‘I’m not kissing you with that bloody charm around your neck.’ She took it off, flinging it and the other woman with it over the edge of the bed. She melted into his kisses, aware that he smelled different somehow. He was wearing a sultry aftershave she didn’t recognise and when she closed her eyes, she could have been lying with a stranger. It was as if the miasmas of the dens and dives he’d been in over the last few months had seeped into his skin.

Later, she snuggled up to his back and stroked his arm, wondering where he’d spent last night. On the lounge or in the spare bedroom of another woman’s house?

‘What is it?’ he asked, feeling the silence.

‘I was wondering,’ she said, not wanting to own up to where her thoughts really were, and using the acronym for deep undercover work, ‘why you wanted to be a DUC. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea.’

Steve settled himself on his back and she resettled her head on his chest. ‘I suppose it’s because I’m an action man,’ he said. ‘I was never much of a scholar. I knew I’d be hopeless inside, stuck at a desk all day, always wanting to be outside doing something.’

‘You could have been a gardener,’ she joked.

He gave her a soft slap. ‘I need to keep on the go,’ he said. This sort of life suits me.’

‘But the danger—’ she started to say.

‘Greatly overrated,’ he said, ‘by guys who want to look like heroes. And television drama. Like most investigative work, it’s slow and boring. Mixing with dickheads all day.’ He laughed. ‘Just like working at the Police Centre.’

‘No, but—’ Gemma started to argue.

‘Do the job properly,’ Steve interrupted, ‘follow procedures, keep alert and it’s okay. Safer than going to work in the traffic every day.’ He stroked her hair. ‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘What did you want to be when you were growing up?’

Gemma considered. ‘I wanted to be safe,’ she said, remembering a household filled with menace. ‘And I wanted to have an ordinary mother and father like I thought other people had.’

‘No mothers or fathers are ever ordinary,’ said Steve, and she kissed his chest, loving how he just knew things.

‘I didn’t want any of the usual things that my girlfriends wanted. I wasn’t attracted to further study. And I certainly didn’t want to ever have children.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ he said. ‘I’m talking career. Why you ended up in the game you’re in. You know what I mean. First the cops, now this. Stalking people.’

She pounced and pulled his pillow out from under his head. ‘I’ll stalk you!’ she said, beating him with it. She resettled and considered. ‘Law and order,’ she said. ‘The order part of it appealed to me. After a crazy childhood, the thought of order is quite appealing.’

‘You never talk about what you liked doing when you were a kid,’ he said.

Gemma pulled the covers up over them; it was cold in here, she thought. ‘Not much to tell,’ she said. ‘Aunt Merle, who practically brought us up, had a couple of art books. I used to love looking through those with Kit. She used to make up stories about the people in the paintings and sculptures. I wanted to make things too—people, animals. I liked the idea of making something beautiful out of a lump of clay or stone.’

‘I used to make things out of tins,’ said Steve, ‘and then pot them with my air rifle.’

Gemma laughed and snuggled closer. ‘You’re such a
bloke
, Steve.’

‘Yes,’ he said, grabbing her, ‘and you wouldn’t have it any other way.’

‘I used to make things with plasticine,’ said Gemma. ‘I felt I could somehow make something mine, really own it—if I could get its essence down in something solid.’

‘You’ve ended up doing that,’ Steve pointed out. ‘Getting the essence of people. On video, in your reports. Some of their essence, anyway.’

They lay together in silence a while, and Gemma wondered if making copies of another artist’s work would ever really satisfy her.

The scent of the foreign aftershave brought her attention to the present and she leaned up on an elbow and looked down at him. ‘What’s Lorraine Litchfield like?’ she asked.

Steve turned towards her, gathering her in.

‘She’s tough,’ he said. ‘But you’d have to be, to be married to a crim like Terry Litchfield. If she’d had a few decent breaks, she might have really made something of herself.’

Gemma settled down to sleep, aware that Steve had turned and was now lying on his back where she could sense his eyes open in the darkness. She rolled back to him.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘I can’t sleep,’ he said. ‘You know what it’s like.’ Gemma did know. The life of an undercover operative was adrenaline-charged day and night, the agent always being fearful of making the one tiny slip that would give him away. The silence of late night was filled with the crashing of the sea on the rocks below her place. ‘Your target,’ she said. ‘It’s George Fayed, isn’t it?’

It hadn’t taken Gemma long to work out that Steve must have been targeting the new ‘king’ of Kings Cross. Why else would he be working with Lorraine Litchfield, widow of the deposed and murdered ex-king? The personal introduction of Steve, Gemma knew, coming via Lorraine Litchfield to this criminal, would help Steve make contact with George Fayed, and then, if all went well, effect penetration of the drug lord’s empire.

‘Ssshh,’ he said, kissing her. ‘Go to sleep.’

‘He’d be toey as hell,’ she said. ‘And paranoid about security. Angie told me he’s got his own counter-surveillance team.’

She thought about the bodies of two dealers, rumoured to have tried to brass Fayed, who’d been found in abandoned scrubland recently, dead from heroin overdoses. She took his hands and held them tightly. ‘I wish you weren’t doing this job,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t they get one of the young cowboys to do it?’

‘Listen here, woman. I know how to handle myself,’ he said. ‘I don’t need you to be worrying about me.’

She considered further. ‘If I knew where you were going to be each day,’ she said, ‘I could get Spinner or Mike to hang around where you are. That way, you’ve always got some sort of back-up if something goes wrong.’

‘Gems, it’s a crazy idea. And it wouldn’t work. I’m all over the place. I have to move fast sometimes and the people I’m dealing with don’t give much warning of a meeting. And I certainly don’t want you hanging around. You know how that could compromise things for me.’

‘Well,’ she said a moment later, ‘maybe I could keep an eye on Fayed for you. Keep you posted.’

Steve squeezed her hands gently. ‘Gemma, get real. Physical surveillance is useless with someone like him anyway.’ He kissed her again. ‘After those Royal Commission tapes men like Fayed are paranoid.’ This was the first time he’d mentioned Fayed’s name, Gemma noted. He put one of her hands to his lips and kissed it. ‘Now go to sleep,’ he said. ‘Stop asking questions.’

‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this job,’ she said. ‘Something’s been hanging over me for the last few weeks. A premonition or something .
 
.
 
.’

‘You’re sounding like a copper’s wife,’ he said. ‘Don’t.’

‘And I get the feeling,’ she said, ‘that you don’t want me anywhere near you.’

‘Too right I don’t,’ he said. ‘You know my rule.’

‘Yes, I do. The less I know, the safer you are,’ she quoted like a good girl.

‘And the safer
you
are,’ he said, leaning up on his elbow, looking down at her sternly.

•

Steve’s side of the bed was empty when she woke an hour later than usual. She lay there, sure she’d been woken by someone who had just that second left the room.

‘Steve?’ she called. There was no answer. She was alone in the apartment. An awful sense of dread immobilised her; the smoky aftershock of a nightmare still fogged her mind. She pulled the blankets tighter around her naked body, remembering the tail end of the dream. A huge meteorite, its jewel-like facets gleaming in the anti-light of deep space, was rushing at her. Then she was standing in some windy place, an avenue of lions stretching behind her, looking to the heavens through the immensity of light years of distance, sensing the meteorite’s presence as it raced through time and space in her direction. Ahead lay a dark lake in which the moon swam. She recalled the lions from the dream, their bleached features blunted by aeons of erosion.

Finally, she got up and as she made coffee, she pulled out her book on the isles of Greece and flicked through it until she found the subject of her dream, Delos and the Avenue of Lions, beside the Sacred Lake. A series of lions like the one sitting on the bench in the boatshed, stretched away into the distance. I must have seen this picture and forgotten it, she thought to herself. She recalled another lake somewhere, renowned for the huge meteor that had plunged into it. Feeling she’d explained the dream to herself, she closed the book.

When she was making the bed, she trod on something. Bending down, she saw the heavy gold zodiac charm on the floor. In the bright light of day, the curled stylised scorpion merely looked gaudy. Lions and a scorpion, she thought, all before breakfast. She picked it up and put it away in a drawer. I’d better let Steve know it’s here, she thought. His ‘girlfriend’ will be cranky that he’s lost her gift to him. And, despite herself, she couldn’t help smiling in satisfaction.

She had breakfast inside because, although the rain had stopped, the wind had swung into a gusty south-easter, churning the ocean into white tips. Out to sea, she could see several rain showers and a long container ship sliding along the murky horizon. She put the gas heater on, loving to see the red-gold filigree it formed on its ceramic grid, and munched on Kit’s cumquat marmalade with her toast and coffee. She looked around her living area: a large, open space with lounge, dining table and chairs, the cedar sideboard—the only piece of furniture from her childhood home—polished floorboards partly covered in a Persian rug and, opening out from that, the long timber deck where she often sat in good weather with her laptop under a striped beach umbrella, overlooking the sea. Her bedroom, once the formal dining room of the original house, from the days when people had family dinners, was tucked away with the bathroom, behind another door to the right of the long blue lounge. She had everything necessary for contentment, she told herself in an effort to dislodge the last of the nightmare’s influence, but she jumped as Spinner’s voice crackled on the two-way down the hall, past the door that signalled her private domain.

She took the last of her toast into her office.

‘Tracker Three,’ Spinner’s voice filled her office. ‘Tracker Three,’ he repeated. ‘Copy please, Base.’ From time to time Gemma still liked to get out on the road herself. She unhoused the radio. ‘Good morning, Spinner. What’s happening?’

‘The target is still with his girlfriend,’ said Spinner. ‘I’ve been sitting off her place now for two hours. He arrived here a couple of hours ago, she came out to greet him, he pulled her into the car and they couldn’t wait. I can wrap this one up. You should see what I got on video!’

Gemma thought of the target’s wife who would also receive a copy of the action tomorrow.

‘I won’t bother taking it to her workplace today,’ said Spinner. ‘I’ll drop in on the Rock Breaker instead and see what’s cooking there. Then maybe the Big Limp this arvo.’

These were insurance company jobs. Both the Rock Breaker and the Big Limp were collecting compo payments because, according to their medical reports, they couldn’t get out of bed without help. Over the last two days, Spinner had obtained excellent footage of the Rock Breaker building an elaborate fishpond and waterfall in his backyard. Spinner had also followed him up to the Blue Mountains—despite the fact that the Rock Breaker maintained that driving a car was impossible—where he’d obtained clear evidence on video of the Rock Breaker pilfering large slabs of bush rock as well. National Parks and Wildlife might have something to say about that, Gemma thought. They had him cold, lifting and arranging rocks that must have weighed nearly as much as he did. Spinner also by now had good film of the Big Limp doing endless laps of his swimming pool and bench presses in his timber and glass living room. But when anyone knocked, the Big Limp could only hobble painfully to open the door, limping and lurching as if one leg was inches shorter than the other. Insurance work was the bread and butter of her business.