Feeding the Demons (10 page)

‘Thanks,’ she said, taking the envelope from him. ‘I don’t suppose they’re the sort of thing anyone would want to keep really,’ she found herself saying. ‘Not the family album sort of thing.’ The attempted joke did nothing to settle the agitation she was experiencing, and the envelope lay on the table between them like a letter bomb.

‘I’ve gone over my notes, too,’ he said. ‘I hate to have to say this to you of all people, but my feeling is the jury were one hundred per cent right.’ He compressed his lips in a gesture of regret. Gemma looked at the envelope. She couldn’t bear to open it just now, especially not in the company of a man who believed her father was a vicious murderer.

‘Tell me what makes you say that,’ she said, practising her professional skill and keeping her voice neutral.

‘It’s not just the bloodstain evidence,’ he said. ‘Although that was very damning. Both the government analyst and the scientific squad agreed that the pattern of blood on the jacket could only have been made by impact spatter and arterial spurting while the murder was taking place.’ He paused and Gemma experienced an odd feeling of unreality, as if they were talking about something that had happened in a movie or a book and that the blood he was referring to had not come from the body of the woman who had been her mother. Philip Hawker continued in a quieter voice. ‘There was also another woman involved.’

Gemma felt as if someone had kicked her in the stomach and Hawker noticed. ‘You didn’t know that?’ he asked, then answered it himself. ‘Of course you wouldn’t have. It’s the sort of thing that families don’t tell children. And maybe no one in the family knew.’ He paused. ‘What happened to you and your sister afterwards?’

Gemma was relieved at the chance to change the subject. ‘We lived with my grandmother and an aunt for a while. Then we were sent away to boarding school.’

The old bitter memories swirled, the years of knowing that no one really wanted them, that they were a problem and a burden to everyone, the lies she and Kit concocted about their diplomat father and mother who were always ‘overseas’, the terrifying and constant threat of exposure, despite their new name, the shame, the almost unbearable shame that not only did they have no mother, but the community believed that she had been slaughtered by their father. What are you giving your dad for Father’s Day? school friends would ask. And Mother’s Day? A file in a cake for one, she’d think bitterly, and flowers on the grave of the other. And now, increasing her retrospective anger, was this other damn woman. She felt an absurd hatred for her. This was a severe jolt. What else don’t I know? she wondered.

‘They were very difficult days,’ she finally said. ‘We didn’t dare let anyone get too close to us. We had to stay apart from everyone. Thank God we had each other.’ She looked at him. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this,’ she said. ‘I never talk about it. Not to anyone.’

Philip Hawker smiled. ‘People tell me things,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s because I’ve learned how to listen after nearly forty years in the job.’

‘And the other woman?’ Gemma asked, finding it difficult to say the phrase.

‘She was another doctor,’ said Philip. ‘I spoke to her a few times. Good style of a woman. She lived at Pymble in a big house. Funny how some places you never forget.”

‘What was her name?’

‘Wylde. Dr Rowena Wylde. She had a practice in the northern suburbs. I talked to her and she would have made a statement but I can’t seem to find it anywhere. I may never have had it. You could try the court archives, or maybe the DPP.’

‘Wasn’t the evidence that convicted my father based on bloodstain interpretation rather than around his extra-marital interests?’

Hawker considered. ‘Yes. Expert opinion argued that the pattern across his jacket was the same as that on the wall of the room, that of impact splatter.Your mother’s blood splashed onto him and the wall during the time of the attack.’ Gemma winced, hearing the reference to her mother, remembering the geyser of arterial blood that had fanned out of a man’s arm while she struggled to apply a tourniquet when she’d been first on the scene at a knifing. ‘There was also a footprint found next to the body that was never accounted for,’ Philip Hawker continued. ‘The prosecution argued it was one of your father’s shoes but that he’d somehow disposed of them and his bloodstained clothes before the police came. The defence said it was the real killer’s because none of your father’s shoes matched it.’

‘But surely the place was searched thoroughly?’ Gemma asked.

‘Yes. But there was a delay of nearly twenty minutes before the ambulance and the first of the police arrived. The prosecution argued that that gave him time to dump them away from the house, have a shower and clean himself up.’

He’d have to be moving, thought Gemma. In her imagination, the past was reactivated. The dining room french doors stood open to admit a killer and her father cradled his dying wife in his arms. She swallowed hard; she wanted to go, to digest all this new information. She wouldn’t bother with chasing Dr Wylde’s statement, she thought, she’d trace the woman herself. She stood up. ‘Thanks for all of this,’ she said, indicating the envelope.

‘I don’t have anything else to do these days except to spread peace and light,’ said Hawker, smiling. He walked her down to her car.

Gemma turned to him at the gate. ‘I’m involved in another investigation,’ she found herself telling him. ‘The murder of that woman at Maroubra?’

Philip Hawker nodded. ‘How are you involved?’ he wanted to know, and Gemma told him about her connection with Angie. ‘The man we’re after might have visited a prostitute,’ she said. ‘A girl was nearly attacked with a knife.’

‘I’m glad I’m out of all that these days,’ he said. ‘It seems light years away since I was in the job.’

‘You’ve made a good life here,’ she said. ‘You must be a contented man.’

He nodded. ‘It’s not a bad life. Anything more I can do to help, just let me know.’

‘One day,’ she said, only half joking, ‘I might come back and ask you how it’s done.’ She thanked him and left.

•

She drove back to Sydney, bought two powerful sensor lights for Richard Cross’s place, rang him for his Sydney address and made a time to install the lights with Noel, who had his ticket in electrical engineering, then spent some hours filing reports and catching up with letters and other paperwork.

Her mind processed her father’s case. A footprint that was never accounted for. And a sound that made the next-door neighbour look out the window almost half an hour before her father arrived back at the house. Now that I’ve got these photos, she thought, I can present them to Dr Zelda Fireworks and maybe she’ll see something the so-called experts missed all those years ago. If she can cast serious doubt in any way on the original interpretation, Gemma thought, I could submit an application to the Supreme Court requesting a Section 475 inquiry. And if a judge then directs that there
are
grounds for such an inquiry, my father’s name might be cleared.

This thought, with all its implications, started Gemma’s mind whirling. Massive publicity, massive compensation; a huge re-ordering and reshuffling of the known; documents destroyed and remade, archives altered, statements changed, a verdict overturned. The clearing of my father’s name will clear my own, Gemma thought. And Kit’s too. No longer would we be the children of a killer, with the mark of Cain on us. Maybe then I’ll be able to settle into an ordinary life, instead of being considered the daughter of a murderer and his victim. Her mind kept turning compulsively to the memories of her slashed clothing and Bo Bayliss’s account of the skinny man with the knife. She went to the hi-fi and turned up Triple M, hoping the noise and beat would drive her thoughts away.
‘High voltage, high voltage, high voltage rock and roll,’
she sang. Her mind remained too agitated to allow her to do any but the most mundane clerical work.

Half an hour later the envelope of photographs sat still unopened on her desk. Several times she almost opened it, but pulled back; she knew the time had come for her to tell Kit everything and she wanted her sister with her when she opened the envelope. She grilled herself a piece of salmon and drank two glasses of chardonnay, then said ‘Fuck it’ out loud to Taxi, who was curled up on a chair, and picked up the bottle again. Taxi blinked at her a couple of times then closed his eyes again.

‘Okay,’ she said, ‘I won’t.’ She put the bottle down again. The sadness about Steve overwhelmed her and she grabbed the heavy old cat, taking him out to sit on the deck with her looking at the dark sea with tears running down her face. I shouldn’t have had even those two drinks, she told herself, while my heart is so fragile. But that didn’t stop the tears. She rang Kit and said she needed to talk to her and would be over later for a nightcap.

•

As she swung her car around the corner to Kit’s, the headlights lit up the remains of a flattened ring-tailed possum on the road, paper thin, his perfectly curled tail scrolled around like the lower half of a treble clef.

Kit opened the door smiling and Gemma followed her into the house, carrying the large envelope. ‘You’ve got it looking good already,’ Gemma said. ‘Have you done any more out the back?’

The two sisters walked through the house and into the back garden, where Gemma examined the breaks in the Boston ivy. ‘Did you ring that bunch about security grilles?’

‘I did,’ her sister said. ‘What’s wrong? Why have you been crying?’

Kit could always tell, thought Gemma. She shook her head. ‘Me and Steve,’ she said. ‘I think it’s over.’ She paused. ‘I would have mentioned it earlier except I felt—’ She stopped. The feeling she was baulking at expressing to her sister was shame. She put the envelope on the ground next to the pond and stirred up the water, running her hands through its murkiness. It’s now or never, she thought, turning to look at her sister.

‘Did you know our father was involved with another woman at the time of our mother’s death?’ she asked Kit.

Kit, who had been sitting near her sister on the sandstone coping of the pond, now suddenly stood up. Her face was like a mask and Gemma prayed for her to soften. Finally, Kit answered. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t. And I’d like to know how come you know.’

Gemma took a deep breath and stood up herself. ‘I visited the detective who was on our father’s case in 1967.’ She indicated the envelope. ‘I’ve got some crime scene photos,’ she said, ‘of our mother’s body. And our father’s clothes.’ She saw Kit inhale in shock. She continued. ‘Kit, I’m going to work to have his case re-opened. There have been a lot of changes in blood pattern interpretation over the last fifteen years.’ She paused before saying the last bit. ‘You also should know I’ve been visiting him.’ She found it hard to say ‘our father’.

Kit seized the envelope and walked back into the house, leaving Gemma sitting alone outside. ‘I don’t believe he did it,’ she heard Gemma call, as she pulled the photos out in the bright light of the kitchen. Kit looked through the shots quickly, shoving each one roughly behind the other. A terrible blackness covered the image of her mother’s broken face and upper body, and more of the glinting blackness pooled near her smashed head. The starkness of the blood against the whiteness of her mother’s broken skin and features destroyed Kit’s defences. She was aware of her own breathing and the pumping of her heart. A bloody footprint on the carpet near her mother’s crushed profile showed crepey tracks from the sole. Kit focused on these, but it was too late. Suddenly she couldn’t see properly and it was the tunnel vision of shock. She swung round with the pictures still in her hand and strode back outside to where Gemma was hunched by the pond.

‘This is what he did!’ she heard herself say to her sister in a low, tight voice. ‘Here are the pictures of what that man did to our mother. With a bloody hammer. She was so, so—’ The word stuck in her throat.
‘—little
.’ She stood there, frozen to the spot. ‘And you want to start it all up again. You want to save him. Why, Gemma? Why?’

Gemma looked at her with stricken eyes. ‘Because, Kit—’ she started to say.

‘Look what he did to her!’ Kit interrupted. ‘He smashed her face. Her head. Look! Look at this and see what he did to her!’ She shoved the picture in Gemma’s face. ‘Take a look!’ Gemma sat clenched with the picture too close for her to see. ‘Why do you want to go back into all this horror again? Leave it in the past where it belongs. You’re nearly thirty-five. You’re not the baby any more. Face the fact that he was found guilty of an atrocious crime. I have. You must too.’ Kit suddenly stopped, pulled the photograph back from her sister’s face, and stood silent, hesitant and distressed. The two of them remained frozen a second in a white-hot silence. Then Kit threw the photos down, swung round and went back inside, where she started banging the kettle onto the stove, lighting the gas, swearing when the match burnt out and the gas wouldn’t ignite. Gemma followed her in, unsure of what to say or do. She waited, standing by the doorway.

Finally Gemma took a deep breath. ‘Kit,’ she said to her sister’s back, ‘I knew you wouldn’t be in agreement with this. But at least I hope you will respect my right to do it even if you can’t be with me. Even if you’re against what I’m doing.’

She was stunned to see Kit suddenly cover her face with her hands and start sobbing. Immediately she went to her, hating to see her sister so distressed, but Kit shrugged her off. ‘I’ve got to get a handkerchief,’ she said, disappearing for a moment. Gemma heard the sound of noisy nose-blowing. ‘Okay,’ Kit said, reappearing from the bedroom, her voice trembling with emotion. ‘You are quite within your rights to do what you think is best. But I just want you to consider my position in this. You were five. I was twelve. I remember the terrible fights, the screaming, the abusive language. I can’t forget what I saw. We were all frightened of him. I saw him hit her once and I have never forgotten the horror that caused me. You don’t remember any of that.’

Gemma stared at her sister. She had never seen her in such a state before.

‘The person who is our father was a brutal man who could not contain his rage and he killed our mother because of that. He might have been a highly qualified psychiatrist to some people, but he was a very rotten husband and lousy father. I know our mother was a depressed person, and not easy to live with. Any child brought up in that awful Methodist household would have been depressed. She’d have had the life squeezed out of her.’ She lowered her voice a little. ‘I refuse to go into any moralising about it; I’m a therapist, not a priest or a magistrate. And it’s not my business to investigate
his
childhood either, even though the answers would undoubtedly be there.’