Feeding the Demons (26 page)

Later in the morning Gemma sat in Angie’s office, staring at Angie’s photos of her cat, Sabrina, pinned onto a grey locker near the wall. Her heart ached for her own Taxi. She’d had a shower in the Women’s bathroom, and when she got back the day shift was arriving. Gemma had to wait in her friend’s office while Angie took it on the chin in a nearby glassed-in area. Gemma couldn’t hear any words—just the occasional muffled roar. It reminded her of lions at Taronga Park, the sound which came floating across the water to Aunt Merle’s place as their keepers attended to them at 4 am. And it wasn’t difficult to work out what had been said from Angie’s white face and demeanour as she came out and closed the door behind her. She looked as if she were about to cry, but jumped instead when Senior Constable Sheila Stanton suddenly appeared. ‘That white Toyota you wanted checked.’

Angie turned expectantly.

‘We drew a blank. We went to the address on the rego but the guy there said he’d sold the vehicle weeks ago. Reckoned he sent in the transfer. I’ve got the RTA chasing it up right now.’ She shrugged, seeing Angie’s disappointment. ‘We’ll keep on it, and we’ve got everyone looking out for that vehicle.’

They were interrupted by Ian who followed Angie into her office. ‘Sign this for me? Jack at the Institute made me promise to see you got this in person as soon as possible.’

Angie took the packet from the Institute of Forensic Medicine and ripped it open. The colour came back into her cheeks and her eyes widened. ‘Holy shit!’ she said, striding round the back of her desk, her face flushed with triumph. ‘Got him!’ Gemma, alerted by the energy in her friend’s voice, felt a surge herself. ‘Those pink panties we found in Clive Mindell’s car,’ Angie was saying. ‘They belonged to—or at least were worn by—Bianca Perrault. They got a DNA match. We’ve got physical evidence now that links him to Bianca. We’ve
got
him!’ She raced straight back into the boss’s office.

Gemma felt as if she’d been kicked by a horse. Clive Mindell, Kit’s client. Kit had been so wrong. I’ve been so wrong. There weren’t two killers. It was Clive all the time. Angie came back into her office area and tossed the test results in front of Gemma on the desk. ‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘All the time. My guts told me it was him.
Her
panties in
his
car. How’s he going to explain that?’ Angie was suddenly furious. All the pent-up frustration from the carpeting she’d just been given spilled out of her. ‘I had him!’ she said. ‘I had the mongrel right here! If your bloody sister had just said a few words—a few measly words that I could’ve used for the Bail Magistrate, he’d be under lock and key! I had him in my hands and then he slips away—because of bloody Kit. Now he’s gone missing and I’ll tell you why. Because he’s grabbed Amy Perrault!’

She ran out with the test result and Gemma tried to make sense of it, put it all together. The bulletin would be going out right now, over all the police airwaves. A statewide search would be underway within hours. Clive Mindell’s face as well as the face of the missing Amy Perrault would stare out from the evening newspapers as the man ‘wanted by the police in connection with the murder of Bianca Perrault and the disappearance of her younger sister’. Something occurred to Gemma. If Clive Mindell knew that everyone was looking for him and Amy, he’d dig in even deeper, hide even harder. If Amy were still alive, this could sign her death warrant.

‘Angie, wait!’ She ran outside after her friend, but it was too late. Angie had already dispatched the bulletin to the media unit. Gemma was aware of the huge distance separating them. Angie was a serving cop, getting on with business, connecting with all the appropriate units of the police service, responding to the murder–abduction with all the force at her command. And all Gemma could do was stand helplessly and watch as the police machine geared itself up and into action. She’d been completely wrong, none of her assistance on this case had been helpful and she’d never felt more like an ex-cop in her life. The old agitation was rising in her belly, undermining her. She wanted to go downstairs to a basement club, a dive, where the smoky atmosphere was filled with the whisky voice of a club
chanteuse
, where strangers sat around tables in dim pools of light and drank too much. Where she could approach a man without a name and dance with him, hot and close, until they were naked back at a motel and she was grinding up against his weight, losing her mind and its pain in the best way she knew.

•

She drove to Glebe and parked opposite her father’s flat, sitting in the car a while, wondering what she was doing there. Finally, she got out and walked around the side of the old mansion, to the garden flat at the back. She knocked on the door and a neat, balding man with a lean face and sharp eyes opened it.

‘You must be one of Archie’s daughters,’ he said. ‘I’m Paul Lestrange, your father’s flatmate. Come in.’ The solicitor who’d overreached himself, she thought.

Gemma stepped inside, looking around at the kitchen with its bachelor notes: bottles and jars in neat rows on the table, the absence of curtains or blinds on the window, the row of small tools hanging next to the kitchen utensils. ‘I’ve just made a pot of tea,’ he said, with a quick gesture of his long fingers. ‘Would you like one?’

Gemma nodded. ‘Dad’s not in,’ she said, more a statement than a question.

‘He’s gone out. He’s given me some of his papers to read. Your father was a very eminent man. A friend of mine went to him for years. She said he was the leader in his field.’

‘Did she get better?’

‘Not really,’ said Paul. The sharp eyes clouded and Gemma saw that he was older than she’d first assumed. He poured her a tea and she took it from him. She sipped it.

‘Do you think something’s worrying my father,’ she asked ‘or frightening him?’

‘That’s a funny question,’ he said after a while. ‘But it did seem odd that he was all gung-ho about clearing his name and then suddenly changed. He’s talking now of writing his memoirs, but as a text. A personal yet academic account of his studies in narcotherapy. He’s boning up on the new wave of drugs that weren’t available in the ’sixties. He’s all fired up about that now.’ Paul Lestrange indicated the piles of folders and cartons of material visible through the kitchen door across the hallway, stacking the walls of her father’s bedroom. Gemma could see from here that her father’s desk was covered with piles of notes and sheaves of printed matter.

She walked over and stood at the door, aware that Paul Lestrange was busying himself in the kitchen behind her. Suddenly, she was assailed by the memory of her father swinging out of the dark timber door of his study at Killara, towering over her, terrifying her. She brought her attention back to the present. She cupped the mug in her hand, looking around the room. It was neat and orderly but crammed with his records and papers. The little bunch of flowers Kit had brought him were already dried out and Gemma noticed that he’d failed to put them in water, just propped them in a pen and pencil jar. Feeling as if she were walking on forbidden ground, Gemma went to her father’s desk. Incomprehensible tracts from pharmaceutical companies about the action of various drugs made up the top layer, mixed in with his almost illegible handwritten notes concerning multiple dosages. It was the name that drew her attention because she already knew it. ‘Arik Kreutzvalt’ she saw, heading a folder.

She opened it. There was the north Sydney address she’d remembered from Philip Hawker’s notes. She glanced at the notes under his date of birth in 1947. ‘Presents with severe depression, almost total absence of affect punctuated with rage attacks,’ she read. ‘Fixation with mother, castration complex. Schizophrenic episodes of delusion. Fantasises the murder of the mother .
 
.
 
.’ Gemma closed the folder, feeling guilty about reading this old account of another human being’s wretchedness. Tears welled up in her eyes. Some ancient heavy grief burdened her and with it the desire to pick up a stranger evaporated. She turned away and went back to the kitchen. ‘Thanks for the tea,’ she said. ‘I’d better go.’

Paul Lestrange took the cup from her hand. ‘I’ve been on the outside for a while,’ he said without any embarrassment. ‘Maybe you don’t understand how it is.’

‘Tell me.’

‘When you first come out, it’s huge. The adjustment, I mean,’ said Lestrange. ‘You swing from one extreme to another. Big mood swings, I remember. It’s like being born again, except this time you’re an old man, and not a child. It’s very tricky. Very uncomfortable. Your father was away for thirty years. He’s bound to seem, well, unstable for a while. Changeable. Maybe even seem capricious. Don’t take it personally.’

‘But I do,’ said Gemma. ‘I do take it personally that he’s no longer concerned about proving his innocence.’

‘He’s served his time. It’s all over. Can’t you just put it behind you?’

‘I’m still serving my time,’ she said, her voice just a fraction away from wobbling. ‘Either I’m the daughter of a vicious killer or I’m not. That’s what people who know me must think. I’ve got an expert who is willing to give evidence that the bloodstain pattern interpretation that put my father away is completely wrong and that the stains actually
support
his story. I want
that
made public. I want people to know that. I want the papers to print that with just the same amount of publicity as they gave to my father’s disgrace. My sentence won’t be over until they do. Then, maybe I can think of putting it behind me.’ She remembered her grandmother hiding the newspapers, suddenly switching off the radio or the television as soon as the case was mentioned. She brought her mind back to this moment and felt the defiance in her gaze.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’ He was awkward now, not knowing where to put his long fingers. ‘I’ve forgotten how to talk to women. That’s another thing that gets lost.’ Finally he tucked his fingers in his belt. Gemma walked towards the door. ‘I’ll tell your father you dropped in,’ he said.

•

She just made it to the car before crying. She sat with the windows wound up and the radio turned up loud.
‘Suicide
blonde
,
suicide blonde,’
the singer screamed while Gemma sobbed and sobbed as the traffic moved around her. When she’d calmed down she drove round to Kit’s but couldn’t make herself heard at the front door, so she walked around the lane at the back and pushed the back gate of the garden open. She looked through the new grilles of the kitchen window and saw her sister sitting at the kitchen table, with several pens lying around, copying something from one book to another.

‘What’re you doing?’

Kit almost jumped out of her seat. ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘You nearly gave me a heart attack.’ She came to the back door and let Gemma in. ‘I just heard the news. I’m rewriting my notes on Clive Mindell. It’s completely illegal but some things are worse than others,’ she said. Gemma noticed she was using different pens for the entries.

‘I’m terrified the police will be here any minute with a warrant,’ her sister was saying. ‘I can’t help convict him with his own honesty and frankness. It’s unthinkable.’

‘But, Kit. Think what he did. Some things
are
worse than others.’ Kit didn’t answer for a few minutes, but finished copying the last session. She threw down the pen, stood up and took a large cooking pot from under the stove, threw the original exercise book of notes into it, and went outside with a box of matches. Gemma followed her out. The garden looked neat, and sweet peas were starting to climb a lattice next to the pond.

‘I still don’t believe he’s the one they’re looking for,’ Kit said as the book started to burn, sending up thin transparent daylight flames. ‘I don’t know how he came to have those panties. Perhaps he did just souvenir them. He
is
drawn to violence. But so is the entire reading and cinema-going population of the West.’ When the fire had died down, Kit took the remaining bits of burnt paper and crushed them up, throwing them in the pond. ‘There. Now they can subpoena all they like.’

Not long after Gemma had left, Kit’s doorbell rang. She patted her hair and tucked the blue skirt in neatly around her waist. She wondered who it might be. Gemma always yelled. Gerald always rang. Puzzled, she opened it and stood there. It was a thin, sick-looking boy in a black shirt and black jeans and an earring in his right eyebrow.

‘Mum?’

Kit stood, transfixed. She couldn’t speak for a few seconds. The shock sent her mind spinning. So many emotions flooded her. Disbelief, fear, love, anger, helplessness. Her heart started pounding as she searched the lined face in front of her for signs of the son she loved. He was still there somewhere, she saw, although three more years of heroin had ravaged his eyes, skin and hair. He looked like an old man, and he was stooped, his body drained of energy, collapsing into defeat and death. She swallowed. The moment she’d longed for. Then came the dread. More heroin-driven demands, more hatred, more insanity. More conversations that got crazier until someone smashed the phone down or slammed the door shut. ‘Will,’ she said. ‘My dear, dear son.’

He couldn’t talk for a moment, but stood, compressing his lips, controlling himself. ‘I wanted to tell you I’m in Rehab, Mum,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t really be here. I got permission to leave to do some business.’

Kit’s heart and mind took that in. ‘Permission?’ she repeated. Will was asking permission? Subjecting himself to some other authority than the drive for more heroin? Automatically, she examined the energy level of his breath as it appeared in his voice, hearing the exhaustion; the tremor of fear, of sickness close to death. But there was an aliveness in his eyes that she couldn’t remember having seen since he was a boy.

She stood aside. ‘Come in. Please come in?’

He shook his head. His hair was clean and in need of a good cut. She thought of Hunca and Munca, the two bad mice. But they weren’t bad at all. They were frustrated by deception. Just as Will had been, living in the lie of a marriage without love or mutual respect, living with his parents’ words about love while manipulation and control were the actuality.

‘I can’t stay. I got a lift with my counsellor. I just wanted to say thank you for your letter.’

‘My letter,’ Kit repeated.

‘It made me look at everything,’ he said. ‘As I was reading it, I felt something happen deep down in me. Like I really knew that I didn’t want to live the life of an addict any more and I realised I was the only person in the world who could bring that about. I couldn’t blame you and Dad any more for how I was living my life. You took responsibility for your part and that made me see that I had to take responsibility for my part too. I don’t know how I’m going to do it. I feel so helpless. So smashed up. I don’t know the first thing about living.’ The first thing about living, he said. The professional part of her mind marked it.

‘Did you detox properly?’

‘Yes. At Basement 82. Then I got referred on to Riverside House. I said I needed help to stay clean.’

They looked at each other. Kit put her arms out and Will moved into them. Kit felt the tears running down her face as she held her son’s thin, shaking body; shoulder blades felt like sharp knives under her fingers. She could feel the fine tremor that ran through his every cell. He had almost died, she sensed. ‘Will,’ she said. ‘You’ve made the choice to live.’

He laughed his old laugh; a quick, short exhalation and pulled away from her, looking for something to blow his nose on, taking the proffered tissue from her. ‘You were just about to say something then, weren’t you. Like “It’s not going to be easy”?’ She smiled. He was right. His instincts had always been good until the drugs had numbed them. He paused. ‘It hasn’t been real easy the last few years. It’s been a fucking nightmare.’

‘Can I come and see you?’

‘Yes,’ he said, then, ‘No. Leave it a bit longer. Visitors are discouraged in the first weeks.’

Kit nodded. ‘Okay, darling. I’ll ring in a day or so. See how you’re going. If that’s okay with you.’

He nodded. ‘How’s Dad?’

‘He’s okay. He’s seeing someone professionally for his depression.’ She decided not to mention the divorce just now. So many changes to deal with. So many changes to tell him about. He wasn’t the grandson of a murderer, his mother and father had divorced. But not now. ‘I notice a change for the better in him already.’

His voice changed. ‘I’ve gotta go. Group’s on this evening. We’re not allowed to miss it.’ This was very different, Kit knew, from the old defiance; the addict’s bravado of ‘I’ll do what I want and fuck the consequences.’

‘Oh, Will,’ she said, her heart full.

There was a silence.

‘I’ll ring you,’ he said, and he was gone.

She stood in the doorway a while, unable to move. Then she walked inside in a daze like a young girl in love, turning into the therapy room where her son’s photograph stood on the mantelpiece. She lit the candle beside it. The beautiful youth in the photograph was no longer discernible in the face of her son. The conflict with Angie and the concern for Clive Mindell, the murders of two women, all now were pushed to a faraway position in the field of her mind. The phrase ‘the first thing about living’ kept repeating itself like a mantra. What is the first thing about living, she asked herself? For me? For Will? She sat in meditation and asked the question again. Gradually, her heart rate slowed and returned to normal. The trembling in her body, which she knew would also be occurring in every cell, also came to stillness. What is the first thing about living? The question became a mantra as she breathed with it.