‘You’ll have to if you want to get into his car.’ Shelly laughed.
‘I’m not getting into a car until Mike’s here to follow,’ Gemma said.
‘Then just say you suddenly feel sick, hand back the money and move on. Keep smiling. Make sure he doesn’t think that he’s the reason for your change of mind. He might get ugly.’
Gemma looked at a car with four noisy young men in it. One of them leaned right out the window and spat at the women on the corner.
‘Or you could ask for too much,’ Shelly suggested, ignoring them. ‘Robyn said he kept talking up the payment. So ask for double the usual fee. That way, the honest punters will tell you to piss off. The only one who’ll agree is the one who already knows he’s not going to pay anything because he has other services in mind.’
Gemma shivered, looking round again, hoping to see Mike’s bulky figure striding towards her. She was already feeling scared, alone and unsure. I don’t like this, a little voice was saying in her mind.
‘And if he starts singing,’ Shelly added, ‘move fast.’
•
By midnight, Gemma’s feet were numb and she was furious with Mike Moody who hadn’t turned up. It was clear something had happened to him. But what if she’d been on a stake-out depending on back-up? She could be dead by now. She’d already left three messages on his voice mail and checked her own. There was nothing from him. She even wondered briefly if she should ring Spinner. But the thought of his moralising was too much. Fortunately, business was quiet with most of the kerb crawlers just looking. Occasionally, a girl would get into a car and be away half an hour or so, then return and wait again. Several men had approached her on foot, but her outrageous price list had sent them on their way. ‘In your dreams, darling,’ one of them had said, and her blood had suddenly boiled. She wondered how a woman could stand to do this, night after night, month after month, year after year, dealing with the insults, the abuse, the constant threat of danger. She heard the contempt in the men’s voices, the unctuous pet names. The false smiles, the lying, the dishonesty, the hatred. She saw it reflected back at the mugs by the girls in a bitter cycle of suspicion and distaste. She came to see the service these women do as one for all women: taking the heat off, providing a safety valve for the rage of men. Deflecting hatred and sexual poison from us, she thought, from women like me. She saw Shelly once at about eleven-forty talking to a small group of workers and tottered over to join them.
‘No one’s heard anything tonight,’ Shelly said. ‘I’ve checked with the other girls. It’s a quiet night. Looks like he’s lying low for the time being.’
‘Too quiet,’ said one of the others, a gorgeous, fake-tanned brunette in mauve shorts and thigh-high black boots. ‘How’s a girl to live?’ It was in that question that Gemma realised the beautiful brunette was a tranny.
‘Where’s your security?’ Shelly asked. ‘You didn’t introduce me.’
‘He was a no-show,’ said Gemma.
‘Typical man,’ said the tranny. ‘Never there when you want them. Darling, they’re all the same.’
‘How long are you staying around?’ Shelly asked.
Gemma looked at her watch. She was cold, uncomfortable and her feet were killing her. ‘I’ll give it another hour,’ she said with resignation. ‘Then I’m going home.’
•
An hour later, she’d had more than enough of deflecting the mugs and she was hurrying down Oxford Lane, taking a short cut back to the safe house when the headlights of a car behind her lit the walls of the buildings ahead. She turned but had to flinch away again because the lights were on high beam. Ahead, her shadow loomed. She kept walking, aware that the car had stopped, lights still on, and that the door had slammed shut. Now she quickened her pace. The lane seemed very isolated and the man’s footsteps were coming fast behind her. Another huge shadow merged with her own, turning it into a monstrous two-headed creature. No point in turning around because he had the advantage of the blinding light behind him. Gemma tried to run and nearly went over on her ankle, hobbled by her high heels.
Now she was starting to feel really afraid. The footsteps were getting closer and she couldn’t run, nor could she afford the time it would take her to remove the crippling shoes. She kept walking as fast as she could, aiming for the corner of the L-shaped lane where the lights would no longer be a problem and there would be at least a view of the busy street at the lane’s other end. But she went over on her ankle again, this time painfully. She wasted precious moments ridding herself of the interfering shoes. She started to run, not caring that the road surface cut into her feet. She opened her little beaded bag and fished around for the capsicum spray, grasping it tight. I’m ready for you, you bastard, she told herself. The road was hard and cold to her feet. Now she had turned the corner and could look back because the harsh lights no longer blinded her. The shadow, huge on the walls, was following fast. In a split second she made a decision and started running again, wanting to lead him nearer the more populated Francis Street. She increased her pace, aided by the slight downhill slope. Then a voice behind her made her skin crawl. ‘Hey, you,’ his raspy whisper, jerked out in time with his thudding feet, echoed in the dark. ‘What’s your hurry, bitch?’
She heard him turn the corner. Gemma barely had time to think this is it! and brace herself. She heard him closing in behind her, stopped suddenly, turned and swung round with the spray can hissing. She was about to give him a good faceful when something came at her, partly deflecting the spray—thunk—and hit her. It couldn’t have been a fist. It felt like a long metal tentacle whipping around her body, burning and smashing her to the ground. For a second, she thought she’d been hit by a car. Time and her mind seemed to slow right down. The capsicum spray, the little beaded bag and her mobile lay next to her on the ground. Get up, she ordered herself. In order to live, you must be upright. If he gets you down here, you’re gone. In the tiny dazed space of time before autonomic shock shut her systems down, Gemma forced herself to stand. She couldn’t see properly: some of the spray had found its way to her eyes. But she could hear the voice of her trainer from the Academy: this person means you ill—don’t underestimate him—you don’t know what his plans for you are—presume they are not pleasant—fight for your life.
So that when she felt the arm grapple her from behind and apply a choke hold, she reacted as if her life depended on it, instinctively elbowing down and hard with all her strength, targeting his soft lower belly. She heard his shocked grunt, felt his clutch loosen enough for her to swing out and around. He fought to maintain his hold on her, head down as he sought to regain balance and wind. Gemma seized the opportunity with more instinct than training and, bending her right leg, she raised her knee as fast and hard as she could. She felt the sharp impact of his jaw and teeth against the bones of her knee as his own momentum collided with all the upward force concentrated in her knee. The impact threw her off-balance but in the dim light, as she stumbled to regain her footing, ignoring the pain in her knee, she saw him falling backwards, his clothes swirling around him in strips.
Then her knee buckled and she went over again, this time on her ankle. She struggled to her feet but found she could barely use her left foot. Half-hopping, half-falling, bumping along a wall, she stumbled towards the lights and people of Francis Street. She made it to the corner and tried to call out, but she had no wind. She propped herself against the wall, her breath screaming through her throat, trying to recover. It wasn’t until she could breathe again that her brain kicked in. She looked behind her. She couldn’t see anyone in the dimness. Leaning against the wall, she realised that her legs could barely hold her up right.
It took several minutes for her to retrace her footsteps, hoping she’d find him on the ground, hoping she’d knocked the stuffing out of the bastard. She knew that a good knee to the head could do this, and she wished she’d been able to fo
llow that up with another kick to the windpipe. With a blow like that, there’d be no way he’d get up quickly. She hobbled back to where the lane turned, where the headlights had shone on the walls. It only seemed a few seconds since she’d stumbled out of there. But there were no headlights, no car. The lane was empty. The bastard had got away.
•
‘I didn’t get a look at him,’ she told Tim Conway at Kings Cross police station. She’d hobbled into a restaurant where a superior maître d’ had looked her up and down but had let her ring the police. A nearby squad car had picked her up.
‘All my attention was on survival. I didn’t think or feel anything in the moment except to get him off me and get out of there.’
Gemma had worked with Tim years ago and remembered him as a decent man. She felt her bruised side with a tentative hand, wincing at any pressure. She realised her whole left side was hurting painfully where he’d whacked her in the first few seconds of impact.
‘You know what it’s like in a blue. All mixed up and crazy. I only saw the top of his head, really. When I kneed him. I don’t remember getting this,’ she said, wincing as she touched a nasty cut that ran across the backs of her left fingers. ‘He uses a horrible aftershave.’ She suddenly remembered Steve and how he’d smelled like a stranger the last time he’d been in her bed.
‘You might need a stitch or two,’ said Tim, peering at the deepest cut. Sitting in the almost deserted office of the police station, drinking the coffee made for her by Tim’s workmate, Debbie, Gemma became aware of a deep cellular trembling. Her whole body was shaking from the bones out. She saw Tim staring at her short skirt, the transparent blouse.
‘And don’t say a bloody word. I was asking for trouble.’
She told Tim about working for Shelly and the street girls.
Tim looked away, keeping his thoughts to himself. ‘Are you sure you can’t remember anything else about him?’ he asked.
‘All I can say,’ she said, while Tim recorded the details, ‘is that he was about five eleven. I think he was dark but that might have just been the night, and he had a nasty, whispery voice. Oh, and awesomely bad aftershave.’ The trembling in her legs increased and her knee and left ankle, twisted as she stumbled after the knee-butt, throbbed a warning. ‘And,’ she added with satisfaction, ‘he’d have a very sore face right now.’ Now her knee was swelling up, and a deep graze oozed blood. ‘There was something else. Something odd.’
Tim waited.
‘When he went flying, I had the impression that he was wearing ribbons all over his jacket.’ She noticed the look on Tim’s face and leaned forward, searching her memory. But it was all so distorted and weird that she couldn’t refine it further. ‘What time was it that I rang you from the restaurant?’ she asked.
Tim checked the report. ‘Your call was logged 1.28 a.m.’
‘He grabbed me only a few minutes before that,’ she said. ‘It didn’t take me all that long to get back into Francis Street, although it felt like an eternity at the time. In spite of this,’ she added, indicating her left leg. ‘Have you got a rape kit here?’ she asked. ‘I want to get these clothes bagged as soon as possible. If he’s a shedder, there might be something on my blouse.’ She remembered how his grip round her neck had loosened when she’d elbowed him. Now she was glad that Shelly had buttoned her up to the neck, going for the ‘classy’ look. But she had a sudden realisation. ‘How could he have got away so quickly?’ Gemma wondered. ‘Maybe there were two of them?’
Tim made a note. ‘We’ve only been told about a lone attacker.’
‘Yes, but you know how sometimes there’s a second man hiding in the back seat,’ said Gemma. ‘Big thrill to trick a sex worker out of her money. Two men against one little girl.’
‘Deb?’ Tim called out. ‘Get a rape kit for us. And have you got anything Gemma could wear home?’ He looked down at her leg. ‘You’d better go straight up to Casualty,’ he said. ‘Get someone look at your cut and that bit of two-by-four you’ve got for a leg.’ Gemma saw that now the ankle joint had began to puff up too, matching her knee, so that her leg was starting to look very swollen.
‘Here,’ said Debbie. ‘One rape kit and you can borrow my tracksuit top.’ She handed Gemma both items.
In a couple of minutes, Gemma had bagged and labelled the transparent black blouse, donned the grey tracksuit top and was making her way painfully towards the main counter.
‘Send this off to the Lidcombe Analytical Laboratory, will you?’ she asked. ‘Ask Ric Loader to check it against the DNA sample they took from the Robyn Warburton assault. I want to nail this bastard.’
‘We’ve got to catch him first,’ said Debbie. ‘We need his name and address.’
‘You might just have it,’ said Gemma. ‘Have a look through the records. Ten years ago, I remember an offender who used to tamper with the inside passenger door handle when he picked up sex workers.’
Debbie looked blank.
‘It was before your time,’ said Gemma, feeling a hundred and ten and aching all over. ‘If you find him, and there’s any physical evidence associated with his file, will you send it over to Ric?’
‘Of course,’ said Debbie. ‘It just might be our lucky day.’
‘I need to get to Casualty,’ said Gemma.
‘I can’t really leave here,’ Tim said, ‘or I’d run you up to St Vincent’s myself. Maybe Debbie might?’
Shortly afterwards Gemma and Debbie were driving down Victoria Street, past the cafés and the restaurants. They were almost at the intersection of Burton Street, and the entrance to St Vincents when the call came over the radio. Gemma listened, imagining the scene sketched in by the terse police call. Some poor bloody woman had been found dead. Debbie turned to Gemma as she grabbed the handset.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I’ll have to go. I’m the closest.’
‘Be my guest,’ said Gemma with a generosity she didn’t feel. Her left ankle was hurting like hell now. ‘I’ll grab a cab.’
‘Car 141,’ Debbie called. ‘I’m one minute away from the scene.’
She turned left, only a street away from the hospital. Gemma saw an empty cab drive by and tried yelling out the window. It was only a couple of hundred metres from Cas, but she didn’t want to try walking. Maybe the cab driver had a guilty conscience or maybe he was on his way home at this late hour. Either way, he didn’t stop for the woman yelling out of the passenger window of the squad car.
Debbie turned into Womerah Avenue, and they drove past the dark shape of the school. Gemma could see a small group of people further along the narrow road, and an ambulance parked halfway on the footpath. Debbie parked the car behind it and climbed out, leaving the lights on.
‘Step back, please,’ she said to the gathering. ‘There’s nothing you can do so I suggest you all go home and let us get on with our work.’ The onlookers moved further away and Gemma managed to wriggle out of the passenger side door. She tried putting some weight on her left leg and nearly screamed out loud in pain. Using the police car as a support, she stumbled round the back of the car, glancing behind her, aware that the crowd was moving away, revealing a dark green plastic council recycle bin. The lid wasn’t completely closed. The bastard had just shoved her in the bin, Gemma was thinking, and then she recognised with horror to whom the matted dark hair at the top of the bin and the graceful arm that hung down one side belonged, her delicate fingertips already starting to darken and her broken golden fingernails shining in the lights.
•
Debbie and Gemma waited, fending off the curious, till the Crime Scene people arrived and taped off the street.
‘I know who she is,’ Gemma told them as they set up their cameras. But then she realised she’d forgotten Shelly’s second name. Finally it came to her. ‘Glover,’ she said, ‘Michelle Glover.’ She gave what details she cou
ld, including the fact that Shelly had a daughter, Naomi, a stepfather and a boyfriend, Kosta.
Debbie dropped her off at the hospital. It was a typically busy Saturday night and seemed a long time before she was seen. She waited in a timeless limbo with strangers with bloody noses, a little girl who whimpered constantly and a man who’d lost most of his last three toes riding barefoot on a motorcycle. Images of Shelly in the wheelie bin kept her mind going round and round. Did the same man who attacked me, she wondered, also attack Shelly? Would he have had time to recover if the capsicum had reached his eyes?
Finally, her knee and ankle were cleaned, bandaged and strapped, and the bruising on her flank checked. Her left side was red and swollen in odd-shaped, plait-like weals.
‘Good heavens,’ the young resident doctor exclaimed. ‘What did he hit you with?’
She winced at his touch. ‘I don’t know. Some bloody thing. Whatever it was knocked me for six,’ she said, straightening up from trying to see the marks.
It was nearly six in the morning before she rang Steve’s mobile and left a message. Then she ordered a cab. Her head was spinning with exhaustion, anger and grief. She needed to sleep and the painkillers the doctor had prescribed, picked up by the cab driver, made everything seem a long way away.
She limped up the steps to her apartment as the sun was rising behind a bank of opalescent cloud, fell onto her bed, and slept for five hours without stirring.
•
She woke with what felt like a hangover, thankful it was Sunday. Her injured knee and foot felt heavy and dead this morning, the pain now only a dull ache. She hobbled out to the kitchen, trying to put no weight on the leg, pleased that the sun was shining brightly now. At least she didn’t have a murky day closing around her, worsening her mood.
Taxi whinged around her, demanding food. She found the last chicken wing, thawed it under hot water and hoped it wouldn’t give him a tummy ache. Then the full awfulness of the previous night overwhelmed her—Shelly dead and jammed into a rubbish bin, the violence she herself had suffered, and her sense of betrayal that one of her operatives had let her down. Mike Moody, she thought to herself, you’re dead. You’ll never work in this town again. She leaned against the counter, staring through the sliding glass doors with sightless eyes. Hot tears took her by surprise and she quickly pushed them away. Shelly was one of those friends who didn’t quite fit in anywhere else, but with whom Gemma liked to catch up a couple of times a year, hear the word from the street. Now there would be no catching up ever again. She felt a surge of anger through her tears. No one should die like that, she thought. Dumped contemptuously in a rubbish bin.
Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing Page 14
