Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing (4 page)

‘Spinner, you’re a legend,’ she said.

‘I know,’ was his modest reply. ‘Are you coming to Mike’s party tonight?’ he asked. ‘I’d like to introduce Rose to you.’ Spinner had been cautiously dating a woman whose Greek Orthodox practice was a challenge to his fundamentalist position. For Spinner, coffee with full cream milk was decadent.

‘I doubt it,’ she said. ‘I want an early night tonight. I’ll be late up tomorrow.’ There was a silence and Gemma could feel Spinner’s disapproval over the ether.

‘Look, Boss,’ he said, his voice revealing concern. ‘It’s not my business, but you should tell Steve about that job you’re doing for Shelly. He’d hit the roof if he knew. You can’t have a relationship that’s based in dishonesty.’ Spinner had a righteous edge to him, honed, Gemma felt sure, by his adherence to the charismatic church he attended far too often in her estimation. She wished now she hadn’t told him about her friend Shelly’s approach to her on behalf of the street girls to investigate the recent spate of violent attacks.

‘It’s not dishonesty,’ she said, feeling defensive. ‘It’s discretion. I don’t have to tell him everything I do. He doesn’t tell me everything.’

‘No,’ Spinner agreed. ‘But what you’re planning tomorrow night is dangerous, ma’am.’ Spinner only called her ‘ma’am’ when he was pissed off with her.

‘I’ve spent years working with dangerous,’ she said. ‘It’s my job.’

‘
Was
your job. You turned in your badge and your gun years ago. What if he attacks you?’

‘We want him to do that,’ she said. ‘Then we’ve got him. We’ll match him to the physical evidence—’

‘What physical evidence?’

‘The Analytical Laboratory’s got a nice little amp of seminal protein and a DNA profile of this particular brute. All they need is something to match it against and snap! We take another nasty piece of work off the streets for a while.’

‘And just who’s this “we”?’ said Spinner in a lofty tone. ‘
I’m
not licensed to take on an armed man and neither are you.’ Spinner was barely five feet tall. ‘You could be dead before I get to you. I could lose you in traffic. Anything could go wrong. That’s why you really shouldn’t do this. What if you get in the car and he pulls a knife?’

‘He’s a basher, not a slicer,’ she said, trying to laugh over the chill she felt. ‘He doesn’t use a knife.’

‘
Yet
,’ said Spinner. ‘But like you say, it’s not my business.’

Gemma was trying not to remember a time on the street years back when a man struck out at her with a knife and how terrifying it was despite her uniform and handy service pistol.

‘Once you get in a car with a stranger,’ Spinner was saying ‘you’ve lost control of the situation. I don’t have to tell you that. It’s crazy.’

‘I’ll have Mike,’ she said.

‘What’s he supposed to do? Wave goodbye? Once you get into that vehicle you could have the SAS surrounding the area and
still
get into trouble.’

‘Speaking of Mike,’ she asked, wanting to change the subject ‘What do you think of him?’

‘I’ll call you,’ he said, signing off, not wanting to say too much over the radio. Gemma rehoused her receiver.

Mike Moody, the new operative she’d hired not long ago, until recently an agent with the Australian Federal Police and broodily good-looking, seemed to be shaping up well. His reports, although never a match for Spinner’s clear and succinct contemporaneous notes, were intelligent and well observed. Mike had worked on computer crime and was up to date with the latest in electronic surveillance and counter-surveillance. As a rule, Gemma was very wary about employing ex-police, knowing from her own experience of eleven years in the job how slack they could be, golfing instead of sitting in hot cars all day, watching some small-time fraudster’s house. But Mike had been personally recommended. Just like the crims, Gemma thought with a smile. Everyone wants personal introductions these days. It’s the only way in anywhere—and that goes for any milieu, she knew. Her phone rang.

‘Mike’s good.’ Spinner’s voice brought her back to the present, picking up where their radio conversation had left off. And alerted her. After working with him for years, Gemma had a sixth sense for what Spinner was thinking.

‘I can hear a qualification in your voice,’ she said. ‘Spit it out.’

‘Maybe I’m too suspicious,’ said Spinner, ‘but I can’t help wondering why an ex-federal cop with his experience would want to do this sort of work.’

Spinner’s words mirrored her own thoughts exactly. She’d asked Mike Moody this very question during the initial interview.

‘Why did he leave the job?’ Spinner asked.

‘Personal reasons. His marriage was in trouble.’

‘So it helps a marriage to leave your job?’ Spinner’s voice was dry with disbelief.

‘Apparently,’ said Gemma, ‘the missus wasn’t happy about being married to a mere federal agent. She felt he should be grander by now—at least an inspector or a chief.’

‘She’s going to be even less happy married to a sneaky private eye. Did you check him out good?’ said Spinner whose grasp of grammar had been curtailed by becoming apprenticed as a jockey when he was under fifteen.

‘Of course I did,’ returned Gemma, a trifle peeved. ‘I checked him out real good. I know his ex-boss in Canberra.’

Working on the road as a surveillance operative is a very special calling, she knew, and although Spinner was a natural and she was blessed to have him, she was realistic enough to know that only a few people were really suited to it. Mike Moody, despite his good references and solid work so far, still had to prove himself. He’d done some routine jobs with insurance frauds for her but Spinner was still the man for anything delicate. Or difficult. Or Gemma did it herself. She was hoping both Mike and her other new operative, Louise Chapple would train up to be as good as the little ex-jock. It was the sort of work that required affability, ease with people of every sort, an understanding of human nature, a sharp flexibility for when things went arse-up, as well as the capacity to remain unseen day after day if need be, while the target is tracked.

‘Okay, okay,’ said Spinner. ‘We’ll see how he goes with the Wicked Black Swan.’

Fourteen-year-old Belinda Swann was neither wicked nor black, but Spinner’s penchant for interesting nicknames for his targets overrode the facts of the matter. In this case the girl’s ex-boyfriend, now an ex-police officer as well, was facing charges of sexual intercourse with an underage person. He had requested Gemma’s aid.

‘She told me she was twenty,’ he’d said. ‘And I believed her. Why the hell wouldn’t I? She told me she worked for Qantas. She’s nearly as tall as me and takes a C cup. Now I find out she’s fucking
fourteen
! Her father’s a superintendent and he wants my balls. You know what they’ll do in court. Dress her in short socks and pigtails. And I’ll look like a bloody child molester.’

Gemma had given Mike Moody the Belinda Swann brief to see what he could find and Mike had sat off the Swann household every night for the last week, waiting to get something—anything—on Belinda that might help the defence. But either the girl had found renewed interest in schoolwork or, as was more likely, she’d been ‘gated’ by her overbearing father, because all he’d got so far was Belinda doing her homework, watching television and throwing leaves, sticks and dirt into her father’s swimming pool.

‘Mike Moody’s references are the best,’ she told Spinner.

‘Okay, okay,’ he said again. ‘I’m only wondering. Now tell me. What’s on your mind lately?’

‘Lions and scorpions and outer space calamities,’ she joked. ‘I dreamed of a black meteorite heading my way.’

‘That’s one way of putting it.’

‘What are you talking about, Spinner?’ She was sometimes irritated by his tendency towards the gnomic or scriptural or both.

‘Something’s troubling you. Something’s going on.’

‘You know I’ve got a lot on my mind at the moment,’ she said, as if he was merely stating the obvious.

‘That’s not what I mean.’

‘What
do
you mean?’

‘How long have I been working for you now?’

‘Spinner. I don’t need this discovery learning crap. Tell me straight.’

‘You can’t hide it from me. Something’s haunting you.’

A long time later, she remembered those words and wondered if things might have gone differently if she’d told Spinner and investigated earlier.

‘
You
are,’ she said, ‘with your fundo bullshit.’ That phrase usually stopped him in his tracks. ‘We were discussing Mike Moody.’

‘Like I said,’ he said after a pause, ‘maybe I’m too suspicious.’

‘Stay too suspicious, Spinner,’ she said, smiling. ‘It’s what makes you a great operative.’ She was about to ring off but thought of something else. ‘What about Louise? How’s she shaping up?’ Louise had joined the business a few months before Mike.

‘She’s good,’ he said. ‘She’s persistent. And she doesn’t stick out in a crowd. That’s a good quality to have in our game. Only time will tell if she’s suited in the long term.’

Spinner rang off and Gemma put more coffee to perk, setting up the cups, the milk and sugar, and poured herself a big mug before switching on the computer. For a while, she couldn’t shake Spinner’s words about haunting out of her mind. It was good, she thought, to have work to take her mind off nightmares and electronic pests.

She rang Minkie Montreau and made an appointment to visit her at her house next morning. Then she walked into her office and logged on. She typed in her password. Her heart sank—she had eighty-nine new emails. ‘Shit!’ she said out loud. No wonder Spinner reckons I’m haunted. He’s right on the money there. This hostile electronic assault, combined with her concern for Steve, was too much. She needed to work off the resulting unease with a good sweat.

Back in her bedroom, she put on her joggers, deciding on a quick run around the cliffs to work off the emotions she could feel tightening her body. She trotted outside, stretching her arms and doing lateral bends to each side, warming up, then started jogging up the steps to the roadway. Something moved at the very edges of her peripheral vision and she thought she heard a faint sound, making her stop and frown. Mid-step she’d turned, looking back down to the front garden. It was damply innocent. Just the trees dripping and the lawn sodden after the rain, a long rose cane that needed pruning moving slightly against the window of her office. Maybe it had only been that. The suspect cane grew in front of the dense, polished greenery of the coprosma or looking-glass bush that covered the lower half of the window in her office. She waited a few moments more, but the garden remained exactly as it had been, cold and still. She turned back to the steps and continued on her way, looking up at a grey and featureless sky. The nightmare was still haunting her.

A thin drizzle started as she left the footpath and ran down to the cliff walk. Because of the damp and the relative lateness of the hour—most people were at or on their way to work—there were only a few other joggers. Beneath her, the gunmetal sea exploded on the rocks, pushed by strong southerly gusts and a rolling swell. The horizon itself was invisible, hidden by curtains of squalls and showers.

Gemma glanced behind her, thinking she heard footsteps. But there was no one on the track and now the drizzle turned to real rain. She puffed up the rise through the old tram cutting, reflecting on her general level of fitness and her ability to defend herself. Although the unarmed combat she’d learned in her time in the police had been very basic, like many women these days she’d taken it further, enrolling in a martial arts course, building up her strength and stamina with gym work and circuit weights. Great for preventing osteoporosis, and for general wellbeing, but when it comes to self-defence, Gemma discovered, nothing beats dirty old-fashioned street tactics.

At the top of the hill, she paused, catching her breath and taking in the spectacular southern headlands, the misty shrouds, part ocean spray, part rain, that veiled them. She quickly made the descent to the boatshed in Phoenix Bay she’d been renting since the beginning of the year. Although many people had heard of the Phoenix Bay rip, notorious for taking swimmers on long detours, and responsible for several deaths over the decades, the beach itself was not well known, tucked away as it was between Tamarama and Bronte. The rip normally ran off the northern end of the beach, just past the old surf club building, and went out to sea for a mile or more. Today, she could see its curve—a denser, darker texture on the surface of the sea. Dinghies in rows bleached on the boat racks built on the sloping rise to the coastal path and at the southern end of the bay lay a large launch, beached some weeks ago after an accident. Gemma went over to it, noticing the large, padlocked outboard motor. It’s a wonder someone hasn’t tried to knock that off, she thought, as she headed back to the boatshed.

Although she kept nothing of value down here, the double doors that faced away from the sea were secured with a small padlock. Gemma unlocked and went inside, shivering in the cold, still air, pleased all over again when she pulled the damp cloths off her lion. His poised presence seemed to charge the atmosphere of the boatshed, and because his position on the bench made him a little taller than her, she had to look up at him. She wasn’t quite sure what to do about his open-jawed head. The blunted face of the original had no features save this ancient, silent roar. Beside him, also under damp fabric drapings on a square of timber, crouched the unformed lump of his potential brother. She pulled the sheets off and picked up a clay tool, cutting it through the embryonic lump. When she had time, she’d start modelling his back legs and haunches, the place she’d started with the other one. Then the forequarters and head. She put the tool down and re-covered the clay.

Her surroundings were very simple—a tiny fold-up bed she’d stowed under the bench on the southern side of the shed, the ‘kitchen’ area, a cold water sink and a power point for a jug. Next to it was the ‘bathroom’—merely a shower head on a rubber hose that attached as required to the tap—and an old-fashioned toilet, a rope replacing the original chain flush. Her dream was to buy this place, renovate it into a beautiful space and spend a lot more time here. She glanced at her watch. Time to go.