‘They were all business friends of Benjamin’s,’ Minkie was saying. ‘I barely knew any of them except to say hullo. I’d welcome them, offer them drinks, then they’d go into my husband’s inner sanctum’—she indicated the study upstairs—‘and I’d either go out, or go to my sitting room. They were stag nights, boys’ nights. You know what I mean.’ Minkie rolled her green eyes heavenwards. ‘Gambling with cards is so vulgar,’ she said.
Gemma was on the verge of saying something about stocks and shares but she controlled herself.
‘If your husband always won, and he would have done, given the advantage he had,’ she said, ‘he must have made a lot of money over the years. Were you aware of any angry losers?’
Minkie shook her head.
‘You told me you needed money,’ Gemma reminded her, ‘so money is a motive.’ She wriggled up from her sitting position, testing her leg on the ground. It held up to some weight. She applied a little more and stood, feeling a bit like a resting horse, with one fetlock bent. Minkie rose with her and they stood a moment together, eyes on the same level. ‘The insurers and the police,’ she went on more gently, ‘know enough about human nature to know that sex and money are two very powerful motives for just about every crime. And when you get the two together like you do in this case’—she saw that register on her companion’s face, saw the green eyes flinch—‘it’s not realistic to expect them not to be very, very suspicious about you.’ And you can’t expect me not to be, either, she thought to herself. ‘And it’s a fact that someone who knows the code at the beach house deactivated the alarm. Have you and Mr Love spent time at Nelson Bay?’ She felt absurd saying the name of Minkie’s boyfriend.
Minkie nodded. ‘But Anthony didn’t know the code,’ she said.
‘How do you know that?’ Gemma said. ‘He could easily have watched the numbers you pressed.’
Her crestfallen hostess helped Gemma towards the grand front entrance. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Stay on my side. You must discover what really happened. I can’t possibly be suspected of murder and arson. It’s not possible for me to go to prison.’ Gemma watched the pale face closely. This dialogue, at least, was genuine. ‘I’m used to having a lot of money,’ Minkie was saying. ‘Just having enough will not do.’
Gemma raised an eyebrow. Poor baby, she thought. Just having enough is most people’s dream. ‘I’ll need Anthony Love’s address and details,’ she said firmly.
‘He’s between flats at the moment,’ was Minkie’s response. ‘It’s best to contact him through the gallery that shows his work.’
Gemma looked hard at the woman standing opposite her. Again, she had the strongest feeling Minkie was lying through her little white teeth. ‘Are you trying to tell me you don’t have your lover’s home address?’
‘Look,’ said Minkie plaintively. ‘It’s better not to go there. Please. It’s a very delicate situation. Anthony’s tipped to win the Stanford Macquarie Prize and any scandal might affect that.’
‘Miss Montreau,’ said Gemma, irritated by her duplicity, ‘we’re living in the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth. Scandal can only make an artist’s prices higher. Especially in the art world.’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Minkie.
Gemma decided to leave this line for the moment. ‘You’d better give me the gallery’s address, then,’ she said.
•
As Gemma drove to Gallery Europa, she thought over the interview. She wasn’t so sure now of Minkie Montreau’s involvement in the death of her husband. The woman had seemed guileless, even naive, and her manner and revelations about her lover were convincing. But, Gemma reminded herself, she’s very smart and there’s something she’s not telling me. She could be playing both sides against the middle: hiring me as a sort of devil’s advocate to find the weak links in her story, so as to develop the necessary alibis and defences. She’s married to a cheat. Like attracts like, she thought to herself. Was this the biggest cheat of his life? Had he staged his own disappearance? She knew there’d be close scrutiny of Benjamin Glass’s financial affairs and if large sums of money had vanished it would certainly look as if the missing man had gone underground. Or it could also imply that his affairs were going bad. Maybe it was suicide. There were many possibilities. Because if Minkie had a secret life, why not her husband? But someone had set off the alarm at Nelson Bay. It was possible Benjamin Glass himself might have done it inadvertently. Though, if I were Minkie, she thought to herself, and I wanted to set things up so that it looked as if an outsider had broken in, the best way to do that would be to deliberately engage the alarm and leave it that way. And not then switch it off. Her mind was going round in circles. This investigation had too many possibilities. Give me a simple case like the Rock Breaker or the Big Limp anytime, she thought. But her mind drew her back to the Nelson Bay puzzle. If the house had been empty and the alarm on when the fire started, where was Benjamin Glass? She turned ideas over and over in her mind, trying to fit the facts of the case with various criminal scenarios. If he hadn’t staged his death, then maybe Minkie and Benjamin were in this together, with him disappearing until the insurance was paid out. And that’s why the HTA was used, so that a case could be made for the absence of human remains. Someone with his sort of money could access rocket fuel and smart electronic circuitry.
She found Gallery Europa in a small Paddington side street. The stern concierge who sat in the reception area of the gallery raised bored, pencilled eyebrows under lacquered hair as Gemma limped in.
‘How may I help you?’ she asked with a tone that implied she found someone of Gemma’s appearance beyond any help. She looked her up and down with her enamelled eyes.
‘An artist,’ Gemma said, ‘called Anthony Love. I want to talk to him.’
‘Oh,’ said the woman. ‘And how do you suppose I can help you with that?’ She raised her perfect arched eyebrows to the ceiling.
Gemma pulled out her ID and pushed it at the woman. ‘I need to ask him a few questions. About a homicide. The police will be asking, too,’ she added for emphasis.
That had some effect. ‘How very colourful,’ said the receptionist, finding a card with a number scribbled on it. ‘I believe he can be found on this number,’ she said, copying it onto a gallery business card and handing it to Gemma. ‘But a person like that could be anywhere. Doing anything. Being anything. Creating anything.’
‘What’s the Stanford Macquarie?’ Gemma asked.
The woman looked at Gemma as if she were a knuckle walker. ‘It is the art prize,’ she said, ‘for amateur artists.’ She sniffed. ‘Which Monsieur Love most certainly is. Winning the Stanford is the difference between eating pasta in a Darlinghurst flatette and entertaining politicians in a waterfront at Birchgrove.’
Gemma was getting the picture.
‘If he should drop in,’ she said, ‘please tell him to ring this number.’ She passed her card over. The woman’s interest level rose a little, she put the card somewhere in a drawer and Gemma turned and walked out, steeling herself against the pain in her leg.
•
By the time she got home, she had to almost hop because the ache in her leg was starting to throb again. She checked in the operatives’ office and saw that Spinner had been in and that Louise’s laptop was sitting on a shelf near the large desk. They’d been and gone, she surmised. She went into her room and sat at her desk. She rang the artist first and, while waiting, noticed that Spinner had dropped in his reports, neatly printed out and filed, in the ‘completed’ basket on her desk, together with the diskette to go into her records.
The phone was answered. ‘Hullo?’ a woman’s voice said.
‘Is Anthony Love there?’ Gemma asked.
There was a long pause. Finally, the woman spoke. ‘He’s not here just now,’ she replied. ‘Who are you?’
‘My name is Gemma
Lincoln. Please ask Mr Love to ring me as soon as possible. It’s an important matter in connection with a fire investigation.’
The woman made an odd noise.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Gemma said, frowning.
‘Yes, yes,’ the woman said, still sounding peculiar. ‘I’ll ask him to do that.’ Then she rang off.
Gemma sat there, fiddling with Spinner’s diskette. Was that Mrs Love? His mother? His wife? His girlfriend? She turned her attention to the diskette she was absentmindedly flicking: the final report on the Big Limp and next to that, old Rock Breaker, both badly sprung, she thought, as she scanned Spinner’s results. Each report to the insurance companies included the indisputable video footage, timed and dated and destined to end up in a serious fraud charge for two dishonest citizens.
She was about to ring Mike, but was curious to see what Spinner might have captured on video, so she took the cassette of Big Limp’s exploits into her lounge area and shoved it in the VCR, flopping back gratefully, her injured leg propped up on the other arm of the deep lounge. Taxi appeared from under the sideboard and jumped up to make bread on her stomach. She hugged him and watched the grainy footage. It wouldn’t win any Oscars, but it would definitely mean the end of Big Limp’s free-loading on other people’s premiums. Spinner’s invisible digital video camera invaded the man’s half-drawn blinds to show him striding round the house like Arnie Schwarzenegger, then hunching and shuffling like Christopher Skase the minute he opened the front door. And there he was limp-free in his fancy home gymnasium, pumping iron. Gemma lay back, watching his regimen. He was smart, too, she concluded, after a few minutes. He was doing twice or three times the work on one leg than he did on the other. This would make it nicely smaller than the so-called ‘normal’ leg, so that a doctor could see the obvious difference in size and give him the benefit of the doubt. Cheats, she thought. The world is full of cheats.
She rewound the Big Limp cassette, lifted Taxi off and struggled to her feet again, going back to her office to remind herself of the phone number of the local Thai and order take-away chicken curry.
She put the reports and the cassettes away, and switched on her computer system. Her heart lifted when she saw there were only four emails. Maybe I won’t sack Mike after all, she thought.
The first two were from friends, the third a spam which she deleted. She opened the final one and the smile left her face instantly. It was very brief. ‘Hullo Dirtygirl, I’m closer than you think,’ it read. ‘I look forward to our meeting very much. It won’t be long now.’ Her blood ran cold. There was no signature and the sender was JollyRoger@hotmail.
Gemma immediately deleted it, wishing it and its writer to cyberhell. It was just a bluff, she knew. There was no way someone could discover a person’s physical address purely from an email. He probably said that to all the girls. Even so, she shut down her system and felt like unplugging it at the power point, wishing she’d never switched it on. She didn’t like the feeling that her home was an open conduit for this sort of pestilence. The dark sense of dread rose in her again, and she shivered, feeling compelled to go through all her rooms, checking them, switching on lights because it was already getting dark inside. She briefly understood Fayed’s need to have closed circuit security cameras in every room. She wished for summer and the long days where the sun still shone at this hour. It was now only a little before seven but it might as well have been midnight. She went to the old carved cedar sideboard and poured herself a brandy then went to check her answering machine.
She heard a faint sound near the front door. She craned around to see what it was. Taxi was nowhere to be seen. The sound came again. It was a faint knocking.
Gemma put the phone down and went to the front door, squinting through the peephole. There was no one there. This is stupid, she told herself. Get a grip, girl. She went into her office and tried to catch a glimpse through the security grille of the entrance area, but could see no one. Slowly, she went back to the phone, dialling the number of Mike’s flat. This time Mike answered.
‘I’ve been waiting for you to ring,’ she said, ‘and tell me what happened to you. I think you owe me that at least.’
‘I followed Belinda Swann like I said I was going to,’ he said in a flat voice. ‘She was with a girlfriend and I followed them to the Hellfire Club. They were both dressed up in bondage outfits—black leather, studs, cut-outs, boots up to the crotch. Just after you rang, someone spotted me with the camera. I did what I could, but they dragged me out of the car. Three thousand dollars’ worth of camera.’
‘What do you mean, someone spotted you?’ Gemma asked. ‘No one’s spotted any of us ever before.’
‘I know how it sounds,’ said Mike. ‘I feel bad enough as it is.’
‘What about the footage?’ she heard the heartless professional in her ask. ‘Did you get any good exposure?’
‘I’ve got that,’ Mike said, sounding better. ‘And I managed to hang onto my camera.’
Gemma imagined the interest that video footage would create when contrasted against the pig-tailed schoolgirl who would doubtless appear in court. But she still felt very angry with Mike—and even more so now. None of her operatives had ever been burned like that before.
‘I was attacked last night, too, Mike,’ she said. ‘It could have been a lot worse than it was. As it is, I can’t walk properly.’
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘That’s no good. We must be the same star sign.’ The joke went flat and after a silence he asked, ‘What happened?’
She told him, feeling every ache and pain, every twinge, as she relived the assault.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I let you down.’ There was a pause. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s something I want to say. I don’t want you to think I’m saying it to excuse myself. It’s just something I felt last night when it was all going arse-up.’
Gemma waited.
‘I reckon they were waiting for me, the pricks that attacked me. I got the feeling I was set up. How else would someone know I’d be there with a camera? You know yourself our equipment can’t be seen through tinted windows. Especially when it’s dark. They knew I’d be there.’
Gemma considered Mike’s words. Maybe he was just trying to avoid responsibility. But what if it were the truth? Her blood ran cold. Someone knowing where Mike would be. Someone coming after her in a lane, someone breathing on her phone. Someone posting violent sexual email. Virtual reality stepping out from the shadows into the real world where she lived.
‘But that’s impossible,’ she said. ‘How could someone know?’
She rang off and remained sitting where she was. The wind had blown up outside and rattled the windows. She thought about what Mike had said. Maybe it was true or maybe he was just imagining it to assuage his discomfort at being sprung.
Gemma searched around for a plausible rationalisation. After all, Belinda Swann’s father was a senior police officer himself: he’d expect this sort of move from the defence. Maybe he had his own people on his daughter. He could know what to look for in the traffic. Counter-surveillance could be quite simple; just a matter of getting a mate to tail you, to see if anyone else was doing the same. Maybe her attacker, the cyberstalker, Mike’s attacker and even the breather were just a series of unfortunate, but random events.
She was limping to her bedroom to get a warmer jumper when she heard another sound outside. She grabbed a coat instead, pulled it on and hobbled to the window. Everything seemed more threatening now that she was handicapped. The sound seemed to be coming from the northern side of her place, outside her bedroom. She listened. She could hear rustlings and movements that were not just the windows shaking under the gusts from the south. There was definitely someone out there. She put the window up a little, grateful for the strong wrought-iron lace bars that protected her.
‘Who is it?’ she yelled outside. ‘What do yo
u want?’
The sounds stopped and Gemma started to feel foolish. No one answered. Maybe it was just the creator of Disneyland Pompeii next door pottering about, adding more sentimental goddesses to his pantheon. But the sounds she’d heard were not the sort a confident householder makes and it was already dark. This was a creeper. A stealth fiend. Something touched her leg and she jumped, biting back a scream. It was Taxi’s whiskers as he checked her ankle. Right, she thought, angered by the sudden fright. I’m not putting up with this.
Gemma grabbed her long black torch which could double as a handy weapon and limped through the lounge area, pulling the sliding doors unlocked, stepping out onto the timber deck. The wind moaned in the recesses of the building and the heavy sea rolled beneath her, driven by salted gusts of wind. A tendril of the jasmine she’d planted near the rail of the deck whipped into her eye painfully, causing her to blink and swear. The bushes near the end of the garden showed dimly in the light from the room behind her. She saw movement to one side, as if someone or something was hiding in there. She remembered the curious disturbance she’d noted a few days before under the window of the office. Cautiously, keeping her weight as far as possible on her good leg, she stepped down onto the winter grass, following the torchlight ahead of her like the holy grail. She followed its beam to the edge of the garden where the stunted masses of coprosma and native heath formed a natural boundary. Below this rugged vegetation was the incline to the rocks.
She hobbled closer to the dense coprosma bush, frowning in concentration, shining the torchlight on something that looked like paper or fabric under the bushes. With hesitant steps, and keeping her eyes peeled for any peripheral movement, Gemma approached, flicking the torch sideways to take in the total scene, making sure she wasn’t missing anything. She thought she could hear the tiniest sound. Something breathing. Maybe an animal. There were possums about, she knew, but possums didn’t behave like this. She peered closer. Now she could see padded fabric, newspaper. Litter. Don’t tell me, she thought with relief. It’s a poor bloody dero’s nest. It’s not some dirty stalker, it’s a fringe-dweller sleeping rough along the coastline, using people’s hoses and taps and outside showers. She recalled the hollowed-out area she’d found earlier under her office window behind the bushes. Now she gingerly prodded at what she realised was the corner of a dirty sleeping bag with the toe of her injured foot. Still wary, she prodded harder.
Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing Page 17
