Feeding the Demons (4 page)

‘You make me sound so
pathological.
Girls just wanna have fun.’ In the silence that followed, with her slashed clothing shimmering in freeze frame, Gemma wished she could unsay the flippant remark.

‘How’s Steve?’ Kit asked after a silence.

Gemma scooped up a drop of ice-cream on her finger and licked it. ‘He’s good. He’ll be back next week. He managed to make a phone call to me. He’s doing one of his cloak and dagger numbers.’

Steve was a cop with a laid-back, casual nature, thought Kit, an energy that knows how to blend in and merge with others. But there was something in him that troubled her; an evasiveness, something not quite right. She knew he did undercover work quite frequently. Are people who are drawn to that sort of work people of secrets, undercover people with undercover souls? At present, Steve was interstate, having infiltrated a group who made and dealt amphetamines and other designer drugs. ‘You care about Steve, don’t you?’ said Kit, watching her younger sister. ‘You like him a lot. I can tell.’

Gemma grinned. ‘I do,’ she said, ‘but don’t ever tell him.’

‘Oh Gems.’

‘Don’t “Oh Gems” me,’ said the other, standing up, getting ready to go.

‘With our history,’ said Kit very carefully, ‘with our father, we both of us need to be very careful about the men we’re drawn to—or who are drawn to us. The relationship we had or, in our case, couldn’t have, with the father is how we will attempt to relate with the man.’

‘Stop
therapating
at me. I know all that.’ Gemma was irritated.

‘No,’ said Kit. ‘You
don’t
know. You only know in your head.’

Gemma walked to the front door and Kit followed. ‘So what
did
you hear from one of your clients today?’ Gemma asked.

‘His mother used to force him to eat food that he hated and when he vomited it up, she beat him to make him eat the vomit.’ She glanced at her younger sister. ‘You did ask,’ she added.

‘Mother love,’ said Gemma.

They walked up to the roadside at the front of the house and, behind them, the Pacific swung in and out of Gordon’s Bay, resonating up the road.

Kit blew her sister a kiss through the window as Gemma pulled away from the curb. She watched the car turn the corner and then returned to her house, locking the door behind her. The house felt even stranger at night and the high ceilings held shadows that crowded in the corners. Mother love, she was thinking, and the memory of her own mother came to her. The work she’d put in during the last few years had greatly diminished the power of the monstrous event that had so dominated the sisters’ early lives. Memories of her mother ambushed her with a great rush of tears. She found herself hunched over the sink, suddenly sobbing hard into the washing up. My poor family, she thought. Poor us.

She made her way through the maze of still unopened boxes. So far, she’d unpacked most of the kitchen and the spare furnishings for the therapy room. On the mantelpiece she’d placed a few bodywork books for clients to borrow, a vase made by a potter friend, some pieces of coral and the perfectly smooth egg-shaped marble rock she’d picked up on a beach in Cyprus. Its pristine and natural perfection always pleased her. The photograph of Will went into her bedroom together with the candle she lit in front of it every night. Before she went to bed Kit checked that all the windows and doors were secure.

Next morning, Gemma went for a walk around the beach to Bronte. She was so preoccupied she hardly noticed the sea swirling in layers of aqua and dark green brocade along the rocky cliffs. She had a coffee at one of the several cafes, read the paper and came home. As she walked down the steps towards her front door, she barked her shin painfully on something and looked down to see the Ratbag’s bike sprawled across the path. She grabbed it angrily and wheeled it to his front door, propping it up against the wall.

Inside, she slid the doors to the timber deck open and then half closed them because the southerly was strong and the Ratbag was standing out on the grass near the bushes. He didn’t notice her; his skinny ten-year-old body was slightly hunched forward as he watched something closely. ‘Hey,’ she yelled out to him through the half-closed sliding door, ‘I fell over your damn bike again.’

He turned around and looked at her, then his eyes ducked away from her furtively.

‘I could have broken a leg.’

‘But you didn’t,’ he replied reasonably, returning her gaze now, the dark fringe over his eyes lifting in the strong wind.

‘No thanks to you,’ she yelled, slamming the sliding door shut as Taxi skittered across the floor, frightened by the sudden noise. Bloody kid, she thought. Last Christmas she’d found a year’s supply of plastic-wrapped school lunches rotting in the bushes at the edge of the cliff. ‘What do you do for lunch?’ she’d asked him one afternoon when they’d met on the steps. ‘Don’t tell Mum,’ he’d said, twigging immediately. I’ve still got that over him, she thought as she went in. Two hundred rotting lunches must be worth something at the negotiating table.

She had a shower, dressed and was eating toast and ginger marmalade when Spinner knocked on the door. It was very rare that he or Noel came to the office; their work was on the road. She let him in, poured him a coffee and gave him the details on Andrew Georgiou and the two photographs. Gemma often gave thanks that Spinner had grown too big to be the jockey he’d trained to be. Instead, he rode the highways and the byways in his nondescript grey utility, armed with his video camera and his laptop, watching and waiting, writing down his sharp reports.

‘You okay?’ he asked, studying her with his shrewd eyes.

Gemma shrugged. ‘Bad night last night. I didn’t sleep too well.’

Spinner shook his head. ‘There’s something going on with you lately. You’re up to something.’

Gemma frequently wished that the men around her were more like the average bloke—unseeing, unobservant, unaware. It was difficult to hide anything from the likes of Steve, Noel and Spinner. These were men who listened and noticed closely.

‘What do you mean “up to something”?’ she asked. Spinner just raised a thin eyebrow, looked away and started studying the photographs again.

They had coffee on the balcony. The Ratbag had vanished, possibly to school, and it was a glittering morning with the sea and sky blinding blue ahead of them; in the southwest, towering cumulus was already gathering.

Spinner put the photos in a folder Gemma had given him. ‘I’ve tracked down Imelda Moresby for you,’ he said, and a note of pride alerted Gemma that there was something else going on.

‘Oh really?’ she asked casually, to hide a beating heart. ‘And what have you found?’

‘I’ve found it’s a very small world,’ said Spinner, teasing her. ‘And there’s a healing service on tomorrow night.’ Spinner belonged to a charismatic church where they praised the Lord and spoke in tongues and did a lot of healing and clairvoyance, whether you liked it or not. He enjoyed quoting scripture in his good-humoured way and Gemma usually didn’t mind.

‘Some other time, Bede,’ she said, the rare use of his name a warning.

‘Some other time never comes,’ said Spinner, grinning wickedly. ‘The time of the Lord is at hand.’

‘Tell me more about Mrs Moresby.’

‘I am,’ said Spinner, ‘and you’re not listening. What I’m telling you is that the woman who lived next door to you when you were a kid turns out to be a very well-known spiritual healer and she’s appearing tomorrow night at the Lindfield church.’

For a moment, Gemma had a wild image of an apparition, floating on a cloud in a grotto with a gold rose on each foot, like the Virgin of Fatima. ‘What on earth does all that mean?’ she asked. ‘Appearing? You’ll need to break it up into sections for me.’

Spinner nodded, grinning. ‘I knew the Lord would get you. He moves in mysterious ways. Now you’ll have to come and watch her in action. She’s terrific. She’s got a very good reputation.’ He was suddenly serious. ‘So what’s your interest in her?’

Gemma excused herself and returned with the yellowing news clipping. Spinner read it and then looked up at her; he already knew the outline of her family history. He looked down at the news item again. ‘You want to talk to her about that night.’ Gemma nodded. ‘But like she said,’ stated Spinner, indicating the clipping, ‘it might have just been a possum.’

‘Or the real killer forcing the dining room doors. They were french doors with an old-fashioned box lock. They’d been gemmied.’

‘Thirty years later, she mightn’t remember much.’

‘That’s what I want to find out,’ said Gemma. ‘I want to talk to her.’ She couldn’t really explain to Spinner, because she couldn’t understand herself, why she had this strong desire to meet with anyone connected to that night. No doubt Kit would have some ideas, she thought impatiently.

They finished the coffee and she stood, looking out to sea. ‘Could be a storm later,’ she said, noting the haze on the horizon and the cumulus building like massive cauliflowers in the southeast as she gathered up the coffee cups.

Spinner left to start work. Bede McNamara, one of the best, she thought. She was rinsing the cups when the phone rang.

‘Mr Brian Bates, who so kindly donated some very nice cheek cells to us yesterday,’ said Lance, ‘has only one chance in nineteen million of belonging to that semen.’

‘Thanks, Lance. That’s a relief,’ said Gemma. I didn’t bring a loony back to the hotel with me after all, she thought. Relief softened her.

She rang off and dialled Angie McDonald, who wasn’t in, so she left a message for her at Homicide. Then she locked up, went outside, got into her car, turned the radio on very loudly to Triple M and started the drive into town.
‘It’s a long way to the top,’
she screamed along,
‘if you wanna rock and roll.’
Across the green of Queens Park, she could see the towers of the city through a scumble of pollution. Her unease increased; the horrible memories of her slashed underwear and skirt and the secret she was hiding from her sister circled round in her mind. She sang louder.

•

Kit drove home from a visit to Alexander Covell, her erstwhile therapist and now supervisor. She’d told Alexander about her new client, Clive Mindell, mentioning his structure, the way he swung between arrogance and something that was almost a cringe. They’d talked of ways of dealing with this client’s structural rigidities and defences. Alexander’s last words were going through her mind. ‘Practise being aware of your blind spots. That’s where we get into trouble as therapists. Not to mention as human beings.’ Kit went over the conversation again. ‘Watch that new client of yours,’ he reminded her. ‘Pay special attention to the moment before the cringe,’ he said. ‘And remember the safety rules.’

She’d laughed and started to recite them. ‘Never let the client place himself between me and the door,’ she said.

‘And?’

‘And always watch the hands. The hands move first,’ she’d recited as Alexander patted her own before she drove away.

Now as she turned onto the road that would take her back to her place, a memory from thirty years ago tried to push itself into her consciousness. Kit switched the radio on and distracted herself by singing along, quite badly, to the last of the ‘Four Last Songs’ and noticing the run-over body of a ring-tailed possum on the road near the corner to her place. The aloneness, she thought. It is almost like a companion. A great silence and stillness, surrounding my life, running through it, echoing in the empty rooms of another empty house. Apart from Alexander, she was thinking, I have no deep relationships with men.

Gemma waited in the foyer by the security desk at the police centre until Angie appeared in her neat dark suit and white blouse, smoothing her gleaming auburn hair, to take her through the metal detectors and upstairs. ‘You look good,’ Gemma replied, glancing at the polished clear skin, the thick lashes.

‘I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t eat and I don’t root,’ said Angie. ‘I do weights and circuit training and Tai Chi. I should look good. But sometimes I ask myself what’s it all for.’ They were almost at the lifts. ‘I’ve just got back from an accidental shooting,’ Angie continued. ‘He’s cleaning the trigger and there’s one up the spout.’ She paused. ‘He looked surprised,’ she laughed, ‘as you would.’

She pressed the lift button and stepped back, turning to her friend. ‘Last week, we went out to a fellow’s place where he’d used the shottie to take his head off. His brain was just sitting there on the bedspread beside him like a surgical prosection. Perfect. Not damaged at all. Must’ve just popped out sideways when his head came off.’

Gemma recalled the effects of a shotgun discharged under the chin—nothing left except a scooped-out pink neck stump. The two women stepped into the lift and Gemma put the image of the headless torso out of her mind, briefly remembering that in the early days in the job she’d looked at people and couldn’t help imagining how they’d look when they were dead, faces destroyed by beatings or head wounds, or lying on slabs at the morgue with their chins in the air. It had been a passing phase.

‘I want to show you something,’ she said to Angie as the lift arrived at the fifth floor. ‘A video recording.’

‘What’s it about?’ Angie asked as the two of them walked along the corridor, passing people who sometimes looked hard at Gemma as if trying to remember if she were familiar, and she felt the truth of the saying that there’s nothing as ‘ex’ as an ex-cop.

‘A man,’ Gemma said. ‘A loony,’ and she rattled the cassette in its housing. Angie raised an eyebrow.

‘How
is
your business going?’ she asked Gemma.

Gemma sighed. ‘Bit quiet at the moment but the insurance work keeps me going. Mandate is starting to generate some money.’

‘If I ever meet someone,’ said Angie, ‘I’ll get you straight on to him. Wish I’d done it with the last bloody mongrel bastard arsehole dickhead. How’s Steve?’ Gemma grunted something non-committal and the two women turned into a room filled with banks of video screens almost to the ceiling, and a library of cassettes along one wall. Angie switched on one of the monitors and took the cassette from Gemma.

‘What have we got here?’ she said, frowning. ‘One of your surveillance tapes?’ She slid the cassette into the housing and pressed Play.

‘Fast forward it,’ said Gemma, ‘until I tell you where to stop.’ Angie did so, waiting for her friend’s instructions.

‘Stop!’ said Gemma. ‘Right there.’ The picture suddenly froze, the slashed crutch of the pantyhose, the knifed skirt shimmering in freeze frame, then Gemma started the tape rolling again.

Angie stared at it, then she looked at Gemma. ‘When did this happen? Where is this?’ she asked.

‘Night before last. At the Tusculum Hotel, Potts Point. The clothes are mine.’

‘Jesus Hell,’ said Angie. She watched as the close-up of the slashed pantyhose paused over the semen stain. Then she turned to her ex-colleague. ‘Don’t go away. Wait here. I’ve got something to show you.’

Angie left, then returned a few moments later with another cassette. She slid it home and switched it on. ‘Authorised Police Personnel Only’ Gemma read, then Angie fast-forwarded it; when the tape stopped, Gemma’s eyes widened. There, on another carpet, on another floor, with different clothes, was the same thing. Another skirt and underwear slashed, other shoes laid out either side of the sheer nylon feet, another pretty blouse ripped apart with knife cuts, talcum powder sprinkled at the opening of the sleeves and over the crutch.

‘It’s the same thing!’ said Gemma. ‘What happened to me.’

‘No. It’s not the same thing,’ said Angie. ‘It’s much worse.’

Gemma felt a chill of horror as she watched the police video pull slowly away from the clothes and start its slow, methodical recording. She gasped in horror as the picture panned over the carpet towards an open doorway where the splayed bare legs of a woman, knees and nightie covered with blood, came into view. The inexorable slow pan continued. The woman’s lower body, bloody fabric stuck to her belly, the terrible, gaping wounds in the upper chest and throat, revealing the complex muscles and tendons, hacked and exposed. Gemma stared. The woman’s face was turned away from the horror of her death, but her long glossy hair fanned out behind her, partly covering her upper arms. Near one of her open hands, graceful as a ballerina’s, was a golf club.

‘Oh Jesus,’ said Gemma, one hand almost covering her mouth. ‘Looks like she heard him while he was doing his gig. She arms herself with the golf club and creeps out to see what’s going on. She disturbs him. He attacks her with the knife he’s using to cut up her clothes.’ She leaned against the wall, knowing that everything pointed to the fact that the person who did this had been only metres away from her sleeping figure in a motel room less than forty-eight hours ago.

‘That’s how we read it, too. Are you all right?’ her friend asked. ‘You’ve gone very white.’

Gemma nodded. ‘Now,’ said Angie, ‘you’d better tell me all about your incident.’

She stepped forward and turned the video player off, gathered up the cassettes, then automatically started running off a copy of Gemma’s video. They both went back to the kitchen area of the Homicide unit. As they passed, a few people looked up from desks then returned to their work. Angie made two coffees just like the old days, using too much instant coffee.

‘Who’s the woman? Where was that?’ Gemma asked, as the jug boiled.

‘You tell me your story. Then I’ll tell you mine.’

Gemma did, as Angie made coffee. She told Angie about the DNA result on the man she’d spent the night with. Angie heard her out, passed her a cup of coffee and sat down at the large white table, taking it in.

‘Potts Point,’ said Angie, ‘where your hotel is, isn’t very far away from what happened last night,’ she said, touching the crime scene video. ‘Maroubra. A twenty-four-year-old accounts clerk. Single, living alone in a ground floor unit. But it was a hot night last night and she left a window partly open.’ Angie paused. ‘How anyone can lie down at night with a window open, let alone go to sleep, I just don’t follow. Don’t people realise it’s a highway out there? They should go out on the perv patrol one night and see what it’s like.’

‘Maybe accounts clerks think differently,’ said Gemma. ‘Did anyone else hear anything? See anything?’

‘A shift worker in the top unit said he heard screams at about two in the morning but he thought it was someone’s television. Do you have any idea what time it was when your visitor was there?’ Gemma took a sip of the strong coffee. She stirred sugar in, needing something sweet in her mouth after what she’d just seen.

‘I was having a bath at about five-thirty in the morning when the door slammed shut. My companion left at ten to four. So I’m thinking he came in between then and when I woke up at five twelve.’

‘So he’s operated between about two and five. I’m waiting on the Physical Evidence people to get back to me. And Fingerprints. Will you send your clothes over to me? And I’ll need to talk to the man you were with. Just in case he saw or heard anything on the way out. I’ll get someone to go to the hotel, see if anyone saw or heard anything. Also check their staff. It could easily be someone who works there.’

‘I’ll do that,’ said Gemma, handing Angie Brian Bates’s card. ‘It was on my list of things to do yesterday.’ She took another mouthful of coffee and swallowed hard. Her throat seemed to have contracted. ‘And I’ll check out the brothels as well. The girls may have heard something.’ She paused. ‘Did you notice anything about the pattern of the attack?’ she asked her friend.

‘Yes,’ said Angie. ‘Where he’d stabbed was the same. Your clothes, the woman’s clothes, then the woman herself.’ Gemma shuddered again. Once, in an attack, she’d had to deal with a knife-wielding offender and it had been the most terrifying incident in her police career. She remembered the police trainer telling them in a session that a person who knows how to use a knife is faster and more dangerous than a person with a gun. ‘By the time you’ve drawn your weapon,’ he had told them, ‘you’re already dead.’

‘You’re still white as a ghost,’ Angie said. She disappeared and Gemma sat down again. She was just starting to comprehend fully how very near the horror had come. That’s what you do, Kit had said. You leave cracks and the hell beings slip in.

Angie returned with Gemma’s video. ‘Do you want to leave the original here?’ Angie asked. But Gemma shook her head.

As they made their way back to the lifts, a good-looking woman in a cream suit and pearl earrings, dark blonde hair upswept in a french roll and flanked by two high-ranking officers, walked past. The woman nodded at Angie and continued along the hall, back towards the Physical Evidence section.

‘Who’s Sharon Stone?’ Gemma asked.

‘Dr Zelda someone or other,’ said Angie. ‘Visiting American expert. She’s been doing the rounds for the last few days. She’s done nothing but examine the nature and action of blood and bloodstains for the last twenty years. She’s the best in the world. On a lecture circuit.’

Gemma suddenly deserted her friend and raced after the vanishing cream suit, catching her just as the trio were about to make their entrance into the secured office area.

‘Excuse me!’ Gemma called. The woman turned to Gemma.

‘Sorry to interrupt,’ said Gemma. ‘I only just heard about you. I wonder if I can have your card.’

The woman frowned. She had pale, intelligent eyes behind glamorous red-framed spectacles and full lips.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Gemma. ‘Gemma Lincoln. I used to work here five years ago.’ She extended her hand and the American shook it.

‘You said “used to”,’ she drawled. ‘What about now?’

‘I have my own business,’ Gemma said. ‘Mercator Business Services.’ She pulled out a business card. ‘I would very much like to have a contact number for you.’

‘You do a lot of bloodstain work?’ The American looked up from the business card, incredulous. Gemma shook her head.

‘But you never know,’ she said. ‘I like to keep my list of experts up to date.’

The woman pulled a flat wallet out of her briefcase and found a card. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘That’s my address back home and my email. But I’ll be here for another two weeks. Visiting other states and Canberra. I’ll be collecting messages on this number.’ She scrawled a number on the back of the card and passed it to Gemma. Gemma saw that her surname was ‘Firestone’. On one of her fingers, large diamonds winked and Gemma noted the red ink favoured by the expert. ‘Thanks,’ she said, and the American smiled then walked back to rejoin her companions, now chatting in a group with some of the Physical Evidence staff.

A few minutes later, Angie walked down with her to the foyer. ‘What was all that about?’ she asked Gemma.

Gemma shrugged. ‘Private business,’ she smiled, tucking the card into her own wallet. Just before the double doors to Goulburn Street, Gemma turned to her friend, no longer smiling. ‘Angie,’ she said, ‘what if he knows who I am? He might have gone through my things.’

Angie patted her on the arm. ‘Let’s hope the Physical Evidence people can give us something useful,’ she said. ‘Did Lance do the DNA analysis?’ Gemma nodded. ‘Then he can give the Institute a sample to match. Although there’s no doubt in my mind it’ll turn out to be the same offender.’ The doors opened automatically and Gemma left, waving goodbye.

‘I’ll be in touch,’ Angie called after her.

•

Late afternoon sun slanted through the plane trees as Gemma went back to her vehicle and drove to Potts Point and the Tusculum Hotel. She showed her ID to a bored woman at Reception. No, she was told. She’d have to come back at night if she wanted to know about the night staff. She herself only worked office hours and she’d heard nothing. Gemma left and crossed the road to the front courtyard of number 34. She rang the bell on the wrought-iron gate. A small fountain played in the tiny garden, splashing into a miniature pond. From the dark interior, an elegant woman in her fifties appeared. ‘Can I help you?’ she asked, her voice slightly forced, like a bad actor’s.

‘I was hoping Shelly might be here,’ said Gemma. ‘I’m a friend. Gemma Lincoln.’ The woman unlocked the wrought-iron grille door and stepped back to let Gemma inside, then relocked it behind them. ‘I’ll see. She may be with a client.’

‘There’s no hurry,’ said Gemma.

The woman raised an eyebrow and smiled. ‘Take a seat,’ she said. She disappeared up a narrow flight of stairs and Gemma looked around the bar and lounge area. The large front room was comfortably furnished wth leather lounges and occasional tables, vases of flowers, ashtrays and magazines. A bad painting of a nude woman hung on the far wall.

Gemma turned as Shelly, wrapping a shortie black satin robe and tying it with a gold rope, hurried down the stairs and came over to kiss her.

‘Want to earn some extra money for Christmas?’ Shelly teased.

Gemma laughed. ‘Not right now, Shelly.’

Shelly twisted her tawny hair up into a knot and clipped it in a tortoiseshell comb, lit a cigarette then sat back on one of the leather armchairs with her legs stretched out on a smokey glass table. Her scuffed gold sandals and the brilliant, chipped nail polish on her toes reflected in the tabletop. She cocked her head inquiringly towards Gemma.

‘I was wondering if you’d heard anything about a weirdo,’ Gemma asked. ‘A man who does things with women’s clothes.’ Shelly inhaled deeply and blew smoke out of her nostrils in two jets like a small dragon.

‘Take your pick,’ she said. ‘Most of them are weirdos. What sort of things?’

Gemma told her about the incident at the Tusculum Hotel and the Maroubra murder. Shelly stood up, agitated. ‘You’d be better off asking around the street girls. We get a nicer type of client here.’ Her voice dripped with irony. ‘But I’ll certainly keep my ears open. I’ll ask Jasmine too. She’s working the streets now. She got busted for using and Lorraine threw her out.’ Shelly examined a spot on her chin in the mirror opposite the nude painting, and pushed some wayward hair behind her ear. She suddenly looked very young.