‘I don’t believe it,’ she said finally, throwing the photos down onto the marble table. ‘I can’t believe you found this . . . this . . . trash’—she paused, distressed—‘in my husband’s safe.’
‘I can assure you I did,’ said Gemma. ‘And we need to talk about it.’ The saintly philanthropist image was well and truly undone now.
‘If you did, so what?’ Minkie was rallying fast. She jabbed a contemptuous finger at the three photos. ‘A lot of men use pornography. I just didn’t think Benjamin was like that.’ She sniffed.
‘I don’t perceive these photographs as pornography, Minkie,’ Gemma said carefully. ‘To my mind, these suggest the sorts of shots a man takes of his girlfriend. If you look at this one, I think you’ll see for yourself that your husband took them.’
Minkie suddenly started sobbing, flinging herself around, away from the strewn photographs. Is this an act, Gemma asked herself, or is it real shock and anger? It was very convincing.
‘I’m sorry to have to be the one who shows you this, but if we’re going to work together, you’ve got to tell me anything you know about this woman.’ Gemma picked one of the photos up. Kneeling in the middle of an unmade bed, in a room dominated by a huge nude portrait of herself, a good-looking blonde woman, wearing nothing except a smouldering half-smile and black lace gloves, stared straight into the camera. Her hair, like the bed, was tousled. She was gorgeous. About my age, Gemma thought ruefully, but with a hell of a lot more of everything.
Minkie blew her nose. ‘Why do you say he knew her?’ she cried. ‘Maybe he just liked these sorts of photographs. Maybe she’s a professional model.’
It was, Gemma thought, a variation on the usual denials she heard when she showed people a truth they found unpalatable. Gemma studied the first picture again. Beside the woman on the bed was a cupboard with its door angled open and inside the door was a long mirror. In the mirror, Gemma could see the grainy outline of the portly, naked photographer holding the camera. She pointed a finger at the figure.
‘There’s the photographer,’ she said. ‘Do you know that man?’
Minkie snatched the photo from her and stared at it a long moment. ‘The bastard,’ she said. ‘The filthy stinking two-faced bastard!’
‘Is it your husband?’ Gemma persisted.
Minkie flung the photograph away from her, stamping away to the window. ‘My husband!’ she said. ‘My late husband. My bastard of a husband. My fucking dead bastard of a husband!’
Gemma watched the drama. If this was how Minkie reacted to a mere photo, what would she have done if she’d stumbled upon the lovers? But would she behave like this if she’d had time to rehearse it? Surely she’d be composed and not let me see what looks like completely spontaneous naked fury and humiliation.
‘The bastard,’ Minkie repeated. ‘Having me find out like this.’
Gemma had heard that or similar lines so many times from her clients that she wished she’d developed her own line in comforting them more successfully.
‘There is no nice way,’ she said finally. ‘It’s always going to be hurtful.’ She turned her attention back to the case in hand. ‘Do you know this woman?’ she asked after a pause.
‘Of course I don’t!’ Minkie snapped. ‘I have no idea who she is. And I don’t want to know.’ She threw herself down on the lounge, her face bitten with rage. ‘Oh!’ she wailed, ‘I’m just so angry! If he wasn’t already dead, I could kill him!’ She shot a look at Gemma. Her features were hard and compressed. ‘Does that shock you? What am I supposed to say?’ she challenged her. ‘Right this moment, I’m glad he’s dead.’
True love, Gemma thought. Ain’t it grand? The minute he plays hide the sausage with someone else, love flies out the window and we want his heart in a box. What would she feel like if she found out Steve had been sleeping with another woman? Steve sleeping over at another woman’s house, even if she was fat and fifty, did make her feel some sort of jealousy.
‘Minkie,’ she said to the woman who was still sitting hunched with rage, ‘you’re going to have to accept that your husband had two big secrets. And either of them could provide a motive for murder. Taken together, it doesn’t look good. So I have to ask you this: did you know your husband had a girlfriend?’
She saw something move across Minkie’s face, but instead of answering the question, there was another, noisier outburst.
‘God,’ Minkie said, jumping up, ‘it’s only going to make things worse for me.’ She swung around like a caged panther. ‘Shit!’ she screamed, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do!’
‘What’s going to make things worse for you?’ Gemma asked.
Minkie swung round, eyes narrowed to a mean green blaze. ‘This! Her! That slut! Now it’s going to look like I killed him because I was jealous of some little tart!’
‘And did you? Were you?’ Gemma pressed.
‘Of course I didn’t! I didn’t even know of her existence until you came barging in here with those damn photographs.’
‘I didn’t barge, Minkie,’ Gemma said mildly. ‘I’m investigating your husband’s suspected murder. At your invitation.’
Minkie went over to a marble-topped credenza and upended a glass, pouring herself a brandy. She was putting the stopper back in place when she remembered Gemma.
‘Do you want one?’ she asked rather ungraciously.
Gemma thought it was past time she went, so she declined, gathered up the photographs and put them away. Then she took out the scanned copies and passed them to Minkie who was sipping brandy neat and screwing up her nose in distaste.
‘I want you to start asking around,’ she said. ‘Find out if anyone knows who this woman is.’
Minkie looked at the copies. ‘How many people are going to see these?’ she said. ‘How many copies are there?’
‘Only the ones in your hand,’ Gemma reassured her. ‘I made them myself.’
‘How humiliating!’ she cried. ‘Who am I supposed to ask?’
‘Ask his friends, his staff at work,’ Gemma suggested, impatient to be gone. ‘Rosalie Luscombe may know something.’
Minkie threw her a look of disgust, then finished the brandy.
It was often the way, Gemma thought, with the wife and the secretary, the other woman in each other’s lives. The androgynous Rosalie Luscombe had referred to her boss’s wife as ‘that woman’, Gemma remembered.
‘No. I won’t.’ said Minkie. ‘It’s undignified.’
‘So’s being charged with murder,’ said Gemma a little too smartly. She hadn’t noticed anything very dignified in the woman’s reactions of the last few minutes.
‘Put yourself in my situation,’ Minkie said, working up to her topic, ‘me, the wife, going round with a photograph of that tart—asking people to tell me who she is. How would you feel? It’s unthinkable.’
‘It’s in your interests to find this woman,’ Gemma said. ‘Once the police know about her, we lose the advantage of surprising her. I’m obliged by law to pass on this evidence. I could be liable if I don’t within a reasonable amount of time.’
‘Not the police too?’ said Minkie. ‘I can’t stand the thought of them feeling sorry for me.’
Was Minkie protesting too much, Gemma wondered. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘feeling sorry for people isn’t part of police procedure.’
The conversation had come to an end and Minkie let her out of the house in silence. This time Gemma managed the path with only the slightest limp. The sense of foreboding that had surrounded her lately returned, haunting her with a sense of unformed dread. She shook it off once she was on the street, but still she couldn’t keep herself from looking around, checking every car, making sure she wasn’t the target of the insurance company’s operative sitting off the Montreau-Glass mansion across the road, checking up on Minkie and her visitors, w
riting Gemma up in a report right this very moment. It was a cool, overcast day and something about the greyness of the light infected Gemma’s mood. She crossed the road, walking right up to the T-intersection and back down the other side. All the parked vehicles were empty. No one was sitting alone pretending to read a newspaper, a street directory, or even napping. But that certainly didn’t discount someone, somewhere, with high-powered binos and a camera like her own, watching. Waiting. She thought of cyber-creep and his promise of seeing her sometime soon. She shivered and scrambled into her car. Angie’s suggestion of the semi-automatic Glock 27 seemed more and more like a good idea.
•
She drove straight to the address Peter Greengate had given her, stopping to pick up a newspaper and two sausage rolls at her favourite cake shop, hoping that the fix of fatty pastry would lift her spirits. She drove slowly past the Greengate’s marital home, a pretty Federation-style cottage with a paved front yard and geraniums hanging in baskets from the verandah roof, turned at the end of the street and came back, parking on the side opposite the cottage. ‘High! Voltage! Rock and Roll!’ screamed her radio and she automatically sang along. According to her husband, Patricia Greengate should be leaving the house soon. Gemma ate the sausage rolls and read, her eyes constantly moving above the top of the newspaper, checking the front door behind the geraniums.
•
An hour later, she was recalling all the reasons why she didn’t go out on the road anymore. The boredom and discomfort of sitting for long periods in parked cars, was making her edgy. The sausage rolls were now a regrettable lump of indigestion and she wriggled in her seat, trying to make herself more comfortable. She’d read the newspaper from front to back. She checked her Telstra shares in the finance pages and swore, then glanced at her watch. A slight sound caught her attention. Patricia Greengate was leaving the house with a shopping bag, a romantic vision in long skirt and misty shawls as she turned around from locking the door, silver jewellery shining in the light. No snakes today. Gemma waited, fingers on the ignition keys, while the woman got into her white Honda and drove off. Gemma took off after her. In a few minutes, the Honda reached Bondi Junction train station. As Patricia Greengate signalled the right-hand turn into the free parking area, Gemma considered her options. If she couldn’t find a parking place she might lose her target. Luckily she noticed a one hour spot on the road and quickly took it. Stuffing the video camera into her large carry bag, she jumped out to run across the road into the parking area. It took her a few minutes to locate the Honda in the middle section. Gemma looked around and saw Patricia Greengate moving towards the incline to the station. She hurried after her quarry, and when she got to the bottom and looked around, she saw the woman turn a corner and disappear. Gemma walked as fast as she could with her injured ankle and arrived at the same corner only a few seconds later. She looked around. Mrs Greengate had vanished. Impossible. She must be on one of the platforms. Gemma limped rapidly to check but it was soon apparent the woman wasn’t up there. There was only one platform for waiting passengers to the city because the Eastern suburbs line terminated here. Gemma retraced her steps, cursing. Maybe Patricia Greengate was surveillance savvy and had just walked right through the station area and out the other side. Gemma ran through and came out on the other side. But nowhere could she see the figure in the misty trailing shawls. Then she noticed the toilets. She must be in the loo, Gemma thought, hanging back. She waited for some minutes. Two women came out of the Ladies, a mother and daughter from the look of them, but apart from a non-descript man with an airline bag who left the nearby Gents, absolutely no one else had need of the facilities. Gemma waited and waited. She eventually went into the women’s toilet to check it out. She looked in every cubicle. There was no one there. Nor was there any other exit. She’d lost her quarry. The simplest follow and she’d stuffed up. She hurried back out and checked the City platform again. The only people there were two backpackers, poring over a map. Gemma sighed. Her leg was aching and she’d lost her target. She still had the Ratbag to deal with when she got home. It had not been a good day.
Twelve
Back in her car, Gemma stowed her camera back out of sight and left a message for Sean Wright to ring her. She felt angry with herself for letting Patricia Greengate get away. Losing visual connection like that was the problem. With her injured leg she just hadn’t been quite fast enough to keep her target in her sights. ‘Hollywood nights, those Hollywood nights’, sang the radio and she switched it off, irritated by a song that was usually among her favourites.
Her phone rang and she answered it, hoping it would be Sean. But it was a young woman’s voice. Sean was at the morgue, she was told, waiting for the PM doctor’s report on Benjamin Glass.
‘Thanks,’ said Gemma. ‘Who am I talking to?’
‘Melissa,’ came the reply and Gemma remembered the smart young photographer at the fire scene, unloading cameras, quietly taking shots, going about her business without any fuss.
‘Melissa,’ she said, ‘we’ve met. At the Benjamin Glass fire scene.’
‘I know,’ said the other. ‘That’s why I’m ringing you. You remember I did the photography for Physical Evidence, for the three high temperature accelerant fires.’
Gemma waited.
‘Sean Wright won’t tell you this, but I want you to know he found cat hairs at all three HTA sites.’
‘But Sean said there was no trace of a cat,’ said Gemma, starting to wonder why her erstwhile colleague might have lied to her.
‘That’s right,’ said Melissa. ‘But we always have a problem establishing an outer perimeter for fire scenes.’
Gemma remembered the difficulties of taping off a crime scene: where does it start? finish? how to decide how wide to tape?
‘It was only at the widest perimeters we found the animal hairs.’
‘But you said cat hair,’ Gemma reminded her.
‘The results only just came back, the animal experts are so overworked. I thought you’d want to know this.’
‘Thanks, Melissa,’ said Gemma, wondering why the photographer had bothered to inform her.
‘Sean Wright is a total prick,’ said Melissa, and Gemma wondered no more.
She put the phone down, frowning. Cat hairs at all three HTA fire scenes? An absurd image came to her—a wicked feline arsonist with a checked face.
•
She drove to Glebe through the heavy traffic, still trying to fit the cat hairs into a crime scenario that made sense. Finally she decided that they were irrelevant. Cat hairs would be found at almost every crime scene, given the nature of cats. She brought her attention back to the fact that she’d lost Patricia Greengate. I’ll have to start again, she thought to herself, hoping her weird client wasn’t in too much of a hurry. I might even offer him a reduced rate, she thought, feeling badly about losing the target.
She parked in one of the streets behind the buildings of the Institute of Forensic Medicine, walking to the back door and pressing an intercom buzzer for entry. She announced her name and was let in. Straightaway she could hear Sean’s laugh. He was approaching along a narrow hallway holding a large manila envelope and flirting with a short girl beside him.
Gemma hurried towards him, hand outstretched, cheesy grin in place. ‘Sean,’ she said. ‘I hoped I’d find you here. I’ve got something you’ll be very interested to see.’
He smiled his superior smile and the girl ducked sideways into one of the rooms and disappeared. ‘What might that be?’ he asked.
‘Come in here,’ she said, indicating a small grey and pink sitting room nearby with kitchen facilities. She ducked her head around the corner to check that it was empty.
Sean followed her in. ‘The lab rang through the DNA result,’ he said. ‘The crispy we found in the foundations was definitely part of the late Benjamin Glass.’
‘That certainly mak
es things simpler,’ she said.
‘Not necessarily,’ he said patronisingly. ‘In this case it actually makes things much more complex.’
Gemma imagined Sean in years to come, boring the pants off people, with his pathetic little power games. But she’d dealt with him in the past and instead of letting her irritation show her eyelids were almost batting as she sweetly asked, ‘How is that, Sean?’
‘I only found a partial body at the crime scene,’ he said. ‘You saw what the fire had done. The only reason we found anything of him was because he’d fallen through into the cellar section of the building when the buildings collapsed. Otherwise it would have been incinerated too. Just a section of the sacrum, the doctor told me. But it was enough.’
Gemma waited, trying to keep a pleasant expression on her face.
‘Beats me how they know which end is up,’ Sean said, in a rare moment of humility. He paused deliberately again and only the knowledge that she had a red-hot clue in the form of a photograph of a lace-gloved naked blonde in her briefcase that Sean didn’t know about kept Gemma calm. She adopted a look of rapt attention, and waited.
‘But there was enough tissue apparently,’ he went on, ‘to reveal extremely high levels of carboxyhaemoglobin.’
‘And what’s that?’ Gemma asked, sweet as pie.
‘And as well, there was no vital reaction to the effects of the fire,’ he continued, ignoring her question.
Gemma at least understood this one. ‘He was dead before the fire,’ she translated. ‘So it was murder?’
‘He was dead all right,’ said Sean smugly. ‘He’d died of carbon monoxide poisoning before the fire.’
‘And so it can’t be suicide,’ Gemma said recalling the brilliant flashes she’d seen on the video of the inferno. ‘Unless he somehow sets up a timer with the HTAs and kills himself with carbon monoxide.’
Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing Page 20
