‘Ring this number,’ said Angie. ‘Re the package we were discussing earlier.’
Gemma scribbled the phone number down. ‘He’s a registered dealer,’ Angie added, ‘but he does special orders for friends. It’ll cost you, but.’
‘Thanks, Ange.’ Gemma rang off.
‘Okay, Mike,’ she said. ‘I’ve got some business to do tomorrow morning. Then I’ll call you.’ She paused. ‘And, Mike?’
He looked up.
‘Thanks,’ she said.
•
She worked till late, driving around, pulling in favours, cruising the streets of the Cross, asking about Fayed, and in some cases, Steve. Everything was quiet. No one knew of anything unusual. There was no street talk around, just the usual rehash of what she already knew, that Fayed wanted all the parlours, that he punished people with his ‘French Connection’. None of her usual sources had anything to say. It felt ominous. Back at home she lay awake most of the night with Taxi heavy on her feet.
•
First thing in the morning, she rang the gun dealer and drove to a meeting with him, ringing Angie from his office. For five hundred dollars—a special deal because she was a friend of Angie’s—Gemma bought a Glock 27. She paid for it in cash and, when she stowed it in the car, found she couldn’t stop looking at the large black plastic box on the back seat.
Later in the morning, Angie helped her through the paperwork at the Firearms Registry. ‘You’ll need to do the Glock course at the range. Do it this morning,’ Angie urged, ‘so you can get out there and feel good.’
‘I haven’t got time to feel good,’ said Gemma.
‘I’m not letting you run loose with one of these without any training,’ said Angie, ‘and that’s that. Do as you’re told for once in your life.’
Angie drove them to a private range south of Sydney run by an ex-SAS friend.
‘It’s a beautiful weapon,’ Angie said, as they drove. ‘It’s a slightly smaller edition than the police issue Glock 19. I know you’re going to fall in love with it,’ she added. ‘It’s chambered for the venerable 9 mm Parabellum cartridge, it’s got heaps of stopping power. It’s got good sights, it’s safe, it has a very nice military matte finish. Just the thing for those sweaty situations a lass occasionally finds herself in. It has exactly the same fine qualities as its big brother. It’s chopped and channelled nicely and it’s a true pocket pistol. See? The safety engages automatically so you don’t have to worry about a misfire. Just the accessory for the well-dressed investigator.’
She looked across at her friend. None of her technical talk had raised a bite. She tried another tack.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I think you’d better tell Aunty Angie what’s going on.’
‘I did something really silly,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve compromised Steve’s operation.’
‘Shit,’ said Angie. ‘You’d better tell me.’
Gemma told her everything except the Lorraine Litchfield beauty pageant and Steve’s choice of queen.
Angie took a corner too fast and corrected the skid. ‘Sorry about that,’ she said. ‘Hey Gems, you’re really doing it tough just now.’
At the range Angie demonstrated operating and field-stripping and made Gemma do the same until she was reasonably proficient in her handling of the gun. Then they both put on safety goggles and ear muffs and it didn’t take long for Gemma to start bonding with her Glock 27. As Angie had said, it was controllable, user-friendly and reliable, recoiling straight back. And it balanced and fitted nicely into the web of her firing hand. She liked the feeling of lightness, compared to the weightier .38.
‘I’ll need a shoulder holster,’ said Gemma. ‘Have you got one?’
‘FBI carry, girl,’ Angie said, ‘that’s what you need.’ She pulled out her own Bianchi holster and rig and fitted Gemma with it so that the holster was snug against the small of her back, with the Glock’s butt facing outwards.
‘Okay,’ Angie ordered. ‘I’ll show you how you do it from there. Let’s do the Glock foxtrot. Drop your right hip a little. That’s it. That opens your jacket coat if you’re wearing one. Now hand to butt in one nice smooth movement. That’s the way. Then a neat rotation on the axis of your wrist. Don’t labour it. Just nice and easy. If you need to, you can shoot while you’re still drawing it forward through the wrist rotation. With this weapon, you don’t even have to hit a vital spot. Hit someone anywhere with one of those and the hydrostatic shock kills them stone motherless.’
Gemma practised the movement a few times without firing until the manoeuvre felt more comfortable. Then she shoved the gun back behind her in its holster. She suddenly covered her face with her hands.
‘What is it?’ Angie said.
‘Angie,’ she said, ‘I haven’t told you everything. She felt shame reddening her neck and face but kept going. ‘Lorraine Litchfield sent some brutes to pull me off the street, just like you’d pick up some little lowlife. Then she pulled out this bloody great Colt and she made Steve choose between her and me. At gunpoint. I felt sick!’
‘Lorraine Litchfield is dead!’ said Angie, grabbing her portable.
But Gemma put her hand out to block her. ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘don’t do that. I need to tread very carefully from now on. I’ve got to think of Steve. Pulling her in will only make Fayed nervous.’
She dropped her hip and practised the draw one more time, freezing with the weapon in the firing position. Here I am, she thought, ready to fire, but at what? At whom? In the dark interior of the shooting range, her sense of seeing and hearing distorted by the goggles and the ear muffs, the difficult situations of her life seemed more distant.
‘Someone hates me,’ she said as she turned around to Angie, removing the protective gear. ‘I know that attack on Mercator was personal. That means malice. That means I must know the person who sabotaged my records.’
‘Love the way you get there, honey,’ said Angie. ‘Could it be someone who feels wronged?’ she suggested. ‘Someone feels wronged by your business?’
She started to repack the weapon, then stopped. ‘You should be doing this,’ she said, passing the Glock and case over to her friend.
On the drive back to the city Angie turned to her.
‘Is there anything I can do?’
Gemma shook her head. ‘Not right now, Ange,’ she said. ‘But switch your stand-by light on, will you?’
Angie patted Gemma’s knee.
‘Gemster girl. You know it’s always on for you.’
•
Heather made a tiny incision under local anaesthetic.
‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’ she asked.
Gemma shook her head. Heather pushed the Naltrexone implant into place on Gemma’s good flank, closing the incision with a couple of stitches. She straightened up.
‘There,’ she said. ‘That should cover you for several days. It’s a slow-release design and will counteract the effects of any heroin introduced into your system. You might find you’ll get a reaction to it, though.’
‘Like what?’ Gemma asked, pulling her clothes back on.
Heather shook her head. ‘You tell me,’ she said, ‘if you start noticing anything. I’ve found people start manufacturing side effects to order if I describe them.’
Gemma started to rebutton her blouse but Heather pushed her hand aside gently, checking the bruising on her other ribs.
‘That bruising is a long while going,’ she observed.
‘And the bastard who did it is still out there,’ said Gemma. ‘But I’ve got other things on my mind just at the moment.’
‘You might get a bit of local irritation around the implant site over the next couple of days,’ said Heather. ‘Then it should settle down.’
Her gloved fingers tracked Gemma’s damaged lower rib.
/> ‘You’re a doll, Heather,’ she said.
‘More like a dill,’ said her friend.
‘I owe you one.’
‘I’ll remember that.’
•
Now, she and Spinner sat outside Skanda Bergen’s apartment block. The Naltrexone implant was behaving itself, and apart from some topical soreness, unless she leaned against it, she forgot it was there. She wondered if the strange spacey feeling she had and the slight headache around her eyes were something to do with the drug’s side effects, or whether these symptoms were simply the result of stress. ‘Someone feels wronged by your business,’ Angie had said.
‘Spinner,’ she asked, ‘can you think of anyone we’ve really offended? I’m talking about someone who might have a personal grudge.’
Spinner’s shrewd little monkey eyes widened. ‘Someone who might have a grudge?’ he repeated. ‘You’re joking! Just about every lying cheating bastard that we spring would have a grudge against us. You know what they’re like. It’s not their behaviour that lands them trouble, oh no. They never see it like that. We’re the bad guys because we record their dishonesty. You’re asking me about someone, shouldn’t you be looking at everyone?’
A silence filled the front of the Holden and she knew that Spinner was struggling to say something. They’d been on too many jobs together over the years for her not to know this particular silence.
‘Spit it out, Spinner,’ she said.
He darted a nervous sideways glance at her. ‘This is hard for me to say,’ he started.
‘Go on,’ she encouraged, rearranging the contents of her briefcase so that everything fitted neatly and her camera and mobile were within easy reach.
‘Haven’t you ever asked yourself,’ Spinner enquired ‘how come Mike Moody gets those injuries to his face the same night you kick some guy’s head in?’
Gemma looked away and out the window to where a pair of Indian mynah birds sat on a bare tree.
‘Tell me you’ve never wondered whether that bloke you kneed in the face that night was Mike.’
The silence grew, broken only by a hoon roaring past on a motorcyle.
‘That’s a question I’ve been trying not to ask too seriously for a while now,’ she finally said.
One of the mynahs squirted a nasty mess onto the footpath.
‘Why the hell not?’ said Spinner. ‘That’s not like you.’ He paused. ‘Remember that the truth shall set you free,’ he added.
‘Not in my position it won’t,’ Gemma snapped. ‘Not if I start suspecting my own staff.’
‘Boss,’ he said, ‘it’s way past the time you should start suspecting your own staff.’
She turned to him, gaunt little Bede McNamara, with his wrinkled face, grown too heavy for the gallopers, and now a rider of the highways with his laptop and his binos and his precision in reporting and connecting things.
‘Spinner, I wish you hadn’t said that,’ Gemma said after a silence. ‘I took a bloodstained handkerchief from his place,’ she admitted, ‘when I visited him. It was simply to eliminate him.’
‘Or not,’ said Spinner. ‘When will you get a result?’
Gemma shrugged. ‘We’ll know soon enough,’ she said.
Spinner picked up her mobile from where it lay, on top of her briefcase.
‘I had to bring it up,’ said Spinner. ‘It’s been worrying me stupid for days. What with all the other things that have been going down in our little camp ever since he started with us.’
‘He said he was mixed up in a brawl that night. Dragged out of his vehicle and beaten up outside the Hellfire Club on the Belinda Swann follow.’
‘So he says,’ said Spinner.
Have I made such a mess of things, Gemma was thinking, that I bring a traitor into my own camp?
‘Right now,’ said Spinner mercifully interrupting her thoughts, ‘I need to concentrate on first things first.’
He was busy with a scanner and her mobile and some arcane program on his laptop. ‘What I’m doing is tuning into your mobile’s frequency,’ he explained. ‘Mike’s not the only one who can do this sort of stuff.’
Gemma stared. Was Spinner resentful of Mike?
‘Then,’ Spinner was saying, ‘if you can get her to talk to Lorraine Litchfield, offer her your phone.’ He handed it back to her. ‘Mobile phones broadcast over airwaves just like radios,’ he said. ‘I’ll pick up any conversation on your phone and record it. She might say something useful. Something we can use at a later date.’
Gemma took the phone from him, put it in her briefcase and got down from the truck. She walked up to the front door of the building thinking about the intimate photo of Skanda and Lorraine laughing together. Gemma leaned on the button. But there was nobody home. Or at least no one was answering. Maybe Skanda is working, Gemma thought, in her spotless, oversprayed, overpolished, overdusted bedroom wearing nothing but her black lace gloves and a man.
Gemma wandered back down the path, irritated at this hold-up. She wanted to grab Skanda Bergen and shake her, force her to use her connection with Lorraine Litchfield to get closer to Steve.
‘What’s up?’ Spinner called from the Holden.
‘She’s not answering,’ Gemma called back. She walked round and climbed back into the front seat. Nothing was going her way, she thought. She felt frustrated and angry. And Spinner’s words about Mike Moody wouldn’t leave her alone. She was just about to tell Spinner to start the truck and leave, when the front door of the apartment block opened, and a well-dressed middle-aged man walked out. Something about his hunched, gaunt figure made Gemma look twice. Within seconds, she had jumped down from the Rodeo and was running after him.
‘Mr Greengate!’ she called after him. ‘It’s me, Gemma Lincoln.’
Peter Greengate turned and baulked when he saw who was calling him. She thought of the potentially explosive video footage she had back at the office with his wife as one of the stars, an R-rated piece of tape that would blow apart his perceptions of the woman he had married—if she gave it to him. Gemma remembered the weird way he’d stood on her doorstep, staring at the closed door, how she thought she’d seen hatred in his eyes. ‘Could I have a word with you, Mr Greengate?’ she said.
He stood in the street, embarrassed and angry, poised for flight. Gemma too, waited awkwardly, marshalling her thoughts, picking her words carefully before speaking to him. She needed to tell him that her business had been completely compromised, and that she would not be able to furnish him with the information she’d contracted to provide. But before she could begin, Peter Greengate stepped backwards, moving further away from her. That’s odd, Gemma thought. He’s frightened.
‘It’s not what it looks like,’ he was saying. ‘I didn’t do anything with that woman.’
Gemma was astonished. Did Peter Greengate think that because she was a PI she had some sort of X-ray vision? Or that she knew everything that went on in the area?
‘Mr Greengate,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t give two hoots what you’ve been up to. I simply want to let you know—’
‘She’s got some sort of disease,’ he interrupted. ‘It might be contagious.’
He obviously wasn’t listening to her but Gemma pressed on. This was one less phone call she’d have to make over the next few days.
‘I can’t do that job for you,’ she said. ‘We’ll sort out the money.’
‘It was a proper referral,’ he said. ‘Through the Chester Clinic.’
‘Do you understand?’ Gemma said. ‘I can’t do the work you wanted.’
‘What?’ he said.
She realised he hadn’t heard a word she’d been saying.
Then he suddenly turned and hunched down even further, hurrying away. She felt like laughing out loud. Foolish man, she thought. He thinks I’ve sprung him b
uying sex and losing the moral high ground regarding his wife. She watched him get into a car and drive away, then she waved at Spinner and hurried back to the intercom which she pressed again. This time, Skanda’s voice answered.
‘Yes?’
‘Gemma Lincoln, Ms Bergen.’
‘Fuck off!’ There was a click as the woman hung up the intercom connection.
Gemma pressed the intercom again. ‘Ms Bergen,’ she said, ‘I still haven’t mentioned your name to the authorities. If you don’t let me in now, I’m driving straight to the Sydney Police Centre and handing over your name and details to the officer in charge of the Benjamin Glass murder investigation.’
There was a long pause. Finally, the front door lock clicked and Gemma pushed through. She hurried up the stairs to Skanda’s apartment and knocked on the door. It was opened and Gemma walked straight in.
‘Lorraine Litchfield,’ Gemma said, as she entered and turned, noticing how frightened Skanda looked. ‘I want you to tell me how you know Lorraine.’
The place was smelling of bleach and disinfectants, and already Skanda had the vacuum cleaner out. She’s a total loony, Gemma thought, looking around at the insane neatness of the place, its clinical sterility. Obsessive compulsive disorder, she remembered from a conversation with Kit. Skanda pulled disposable gloves off and went back into the bedroom. Gemma saw she’d already stripped the bed and then became aware of the churning sound of a washing machine somewhere out of sight. I’d hate to have her laundry bill, Gemma thought, if she changes the bed after every mug.
‘Tell me about you and Lorraine,’ repeated Gemma. ‘Or I go straight to the detectives in Homicide.’
She watched the woman’s pretty face. Gemma thought she could see a whole range of contingency plans move through her mind. It must be hard being a liar, she thought, trying to work out which falsehood will serve best, not ever being sure when you’ll bring yourself undone by using the wrong one.
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