‘Thanks for everything you did, Mike,’ she said.
‘You weren’t too bad yourself.’ He grinned and walked into the operatives’ office. Gemma followed.
‘I’m just picking up a few things,’ he said. ‘And I also wanted to warn you,’ he said. ‘The pictures of George Fayed being eaten by the Komodo dragon are all over the Internet,’ he said. ‘Just in case someone thinks it’s funny to send them to you. The CCT frames just kept rolling on right up until the roof caved in.’
She shivered. ‘I never thought I’d get out of there alive,’ she said. ‘And I thought Steve was a goner, too.’
‘How is he?’
She shook her head and looked away from him. I can’t even think about Steve at the moment, she thought. ‘He’s still in hospital,’ she said.
‘What’s up with him?’
‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I heard there were a couple of fractures and lacerations. He was protected from the worst of the cave-in by the same pillar that saved me. It half-fell and then got wedged across at an angle. We were lucky enough to be in the corner pocket.’
‘You heard?’ said Mike. ‘You mean you haven’t visited him yet?’
She put a hand around to feel the injury on her side. ‘I don’t trust him, Mike,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe in him anymore.’
‘You’ve got to talk to him,’ said Mike.
•
I’ve got to talk to him, thought Gemma, as she drove to St Vincents an hour later. She’d been putting this moment off but Mike was right. She remembered the horrible moment of Steve’s unblinking choice, the humiliating difference between herself, dishevelled and dirty, and the beautiful swansdown powder blue vision of Lorraine Litchfield.
By the time she’d found him, sitting up on a small enclosed verandah, working on his laptop with one hand, the other awkward in plaster, one plastered leg stuck out onto a chair opposite, she’d composed herself.
He turned at her presence, moments before he could have heard her approach and his face softened into the smile she’d always loved to see. His hair was shorter than she’d ever seen it, and shaved patches on his scalp were criss-crossed with stitches.
He put the laptop aside and crookedly began to stand up, groping for the crutches angled against the chair.
‘Don’t get up,’ she said.
But he was already standing, gripping the crutches. ‘Look at me,’ he said. ‘What a pathetic figure.’ He looked into her face. ‘I didn’t think you’d ever come,’ he said, in a voice so low she had to strain to hear.
She started to move forward on automatic, then stopped and stepped back, not knowing what to say, how to start. ‘I can’t trust you anymore,’ she blurted out. ‘I don’t think I can ever trust you again.’
Steve hung between his crutches, the iron stirrup under his plastered leg scraping as he adjusted his position, his face suddenly serious. ‘I guess we’ve both got issues of trust to hammer out,’ he finally said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean. Your cyberstalker. Your chat room flirting.’ He saw her shocked face. ‘Remember how you wouldn’t tell me how it all started? Did you really think I wouldn’t work it out?’
Sometimes I forget, she thought, that my boyfriend is a highly intuitive detective.
Steve’s face was dark now, no hint of the earlier pleasure in seeing her. ‘It’s such a crap thing to do. All the lying that goes on there. A person doesn’t even have to show their face.’
‘I know it was silly,’ she said. ‘And I regretted it straightaway. Hell, Steve, I’m only human.’ She paused. ‘And you should talk. You work in lying. Your living is lying.’
With unfliching eyes locked onto his, Gemma spoke. ‘Did you do a deal with George Fayed?’
‘Yes,’ Steve said. ‘But I had my fingers crossed behind my back.’
Then he patted another chair on the verandah. ‘Sit down, Gems,’ he said. ‘It’s time we talked.’
She felt her stomach turn at the words. He’s going to call it off, she thought. He’s going to tell me he’s in love with Lorraine Litchfield and he and I are finished.
‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ he said and her heart contracted. ‘I’m going to be off work for a while with this—’ He indicated his bandaged limbs. ‘When I get out of here, why don’t we jump in my car and take a drive up the coast somewhere? Find some sunshine, take a break?’
She leaned across and gently kissed him. Her eyes were filled with tears. ‘I thought you were just about to sack me,’ she said. ‘I’d love to, but I won’t be able to afford it. I’ve got to lay everyone off and by the time I give them severance pay, I’ll be flat broke. I could take a week off, maybe,’ she added. ‘But that’s all. I’ll have to hire myself out. Become a Pinkerton’s girl, or something.’
He smoothed her hair. ‘Just so long as you don’t get into mischief again on the Net.’
‘I didn’t actually do anything except pretend to be someone else in a chat room,’ she continued and it sounded pathetic. ‘That gold Scorpio charm,’ she began, ‘it’s still somewhere at my place.’
She could tell from his frown that he didn’t know what she meant for a moment.
‘That thing?’ he said. ‘I don’t want it.’
She geared herself up emotionally for the question she had to ask. ‘I’ve got to ask you this,’ she said. ‘Have you been having an affair with Lorraine Litchfield?’
The expression on Steve’s face suddenly changed and he looked past her.
‘Oh shit,’ he said.
Gemma turned to see a vision in a fluffy white angora long-sleeved, short-skirted figure-hugging dress, knee-length white boots and a cascade of finely tuned and tousled hair approaching them. Behind her was the budgie man, still wearing the pineapple Hawaiian shirt. Lorraine Litchfield propped like a startled horse when she saw Gemma. Gemma noticed her new, thick, collagen-enhanced lips glistened wet with scarlet lipstick.
‘What’s she doing here?’ she yelled, jabbing a long purple nail in Gemma’s direction.
Gemma saw Steve get a firm grip on his crutches.
‘Lorraine,’ he said, ‘I could ask the same of you.’
Lorraine’s blue eyes narrowed into navy slits. ‘I’m here,’ she announced to the whole corridor, pouting her impossible lips, ‘visiting my fiancé. And that woman’—the purple nail jabbed towards Gemma again—‘has got no business here at all.’ Lorraine clutched a fluffy little bag and Gemma wondered if the M1911 was stashed inside and wondered also when hospitals would become more security conscious.
‘Your fiancé must be on another floor of the hospital,’ said Steve. ‘I’m having a private conversation with my girlfriend. I’d like you to leave us in peace now.’
Lorraine looked from one to the other, for a few seconds speechless with fury. ‘Your girlfriend?’ she shrieked. ‘That bitch? You chose me! You said there was no contest!’
‘That’s right,’ said Steve. He swung closer to Gemma on his crutches and they stood together, blocking Lorraine’s entry into the enclosed area. ‘And I meant it. There isn’t.’
‘Come on, Lorrie,’ said the budgie man. ‘This isn’t the time or the place. Let’s get out of here.’
‘You promised me!’ she screamed. ‘What can you see in her? She’s old!’
‘Leave now, Lorraine,’ said Steve, ‘or I’ll get security up here and have you forcibly removed.’
The budgie man attempted to steer Lorraine away. ‘You can see how things are here. This isn’t doing any good. Come on.’
Lorraine swung round on him, shoving him. ‘Piss off, limpdick!’ she yelled.
Then she turned on Gemma and her face was distorted with hatred. ‘Why don’t you tell your so-called girlfriend about what we did in Tezza’s bed
! I’ll bet you haven’t told her that!’ Her eyes had turned black with fury and her chin was lifted in triumph and somehow, the plumped-up lips had become tight and mean.
Despite feeling her heart give a great lurch, Gemma didn’t miss a beat. ‘Of course he’s told me about it, Lorraine,’ she said. ‘My boyfriend tells me everything.’ And in that moment she could feel a wave of loving gratitude emanating from Steve as he grasped her hand and squeezed it. Inspired, Gemma continued. ‘He even showed me the proof that you murdered your husband. Come near either of us again, and he hands it over to the investigating detectives. By the time you get out of Silverwater, you’ll be even older than me!’
Lorraine Litchfield’s face paled with shock. She was struck speechless. The plump lips gaped. Kosta’s source was right on the money, Gemma realised. You did kill your husband. Steve pressed the red button in the wall with the end of a crutch and Lorraine, still stunned, backed away.
‘Goodbye, Lorraine,’ Steve said.
Lorraine looked from Steve to Gemma, her gaze filled with poisonous hatred.
‘Lorrie, come on.’ The budgie man hauled her away, but she swung round, screaming. ‘You’re dead, bitch! Do you hear me?’
The lift doors opened and a nurse and a security officer hurried down the hallway as the budgie man squashed Lorraine into the lift before the doors closed on them.
‘What’s going on here?’ asked the nurse as she hurried over. The lift hummed downwards, Lorraine Litchfield’s last hysterical curse floating in the air like a bad smell.
‘Who was that?’ asked the nurse, turning round at the sound.
‘No one important,’ said Steve. He tightened his arm around Gemma.
On the drive back home, Gemma was preoccupied with two things: she wished she’d asked Lorraine why she always dressed like a matching bathroom set and she wondered how long it would take before she could completely forgive Steve.
•
When she arrived home, Mike was sitting at the desk in the operatives’ room watching the news on the small portable TV.
‘Look at this,’ he said as she walked in. On the screen, despite the blanket she was clutching over her face, Gemma saw the sharp profile of Skanda Bergen between two suited detectives, being pressed down into the back seat of a police vehicle.
‘She was refused bail,’ said Mike, leaning over to turn the set off.
‘I should hope so,’ said Gemma.
‘How did it go?’ he asked, referring to her visit to Steve.
‘I’m not sure,’ she replied, turning on her way into her office. ‘Lorraine Litchfield turned up and created a scene.’ She paused. ‘And I heard something I didn’t want to hear.’
‘Look,’ said Mike standing up. ‘Give yourself a break. And Steve. You’ve been through a hell of a lot lately. You’ve cracked a major murder investigation, you’ve been through a fire fight, you’ve been badly beaten up, you’ve only just escaped from a collapsing building, and your business has almost been destroyed by some malicious bastard. You need to take it easy for a while.’
‘I can’t afford to take it easy,’ she said, going over to her desk. ‘I have no idea how I’m going to climb back out of this hole.’ She indicated the pile of bills on the spike on her desk to Mike who stood at the doorway.
‘I had a dream,’ she said, ‘of a meteorite rushing towards me. I didn’t realise it would hit so hard.’
She ripped open the envelope Minkie Montreau had given her. ‘Here’s a bit of good news for a change,’ she said, barely glancing at the cheque in her hand. ‘I tripled the bill and rounded it up before I sent to Benjamin Glass’s widow, and she’s paid up without a squeak. Ten grand will keep me solvent for just a little while longer.’ Gemma remembered the bills that waited to be paid: credit accounts, rates, an astronomical telephone bill, the bank card.
‘I wish you’d use a decent bookkeeping program,’ Mike said. ‘I can set up a straightforward one for you.’
‘I can just afford to pay your severance payout as it is,’ she said. ‘I can’t afford any extra services.’
‘Bill me later,’ he said, ‘when things improve.’
‘God knows when that’ll be,’ she said. ‘But I’ve got to get back into work. How’s my computer system?’
Mike smiled. ‘As clean as I could get it,’ he said. ‘While you were in hospital I installed the latest virus scanner for you. You’re all cleaned up and ready to go.’
‘Can you guarantee it will never happen again?’
Mike shook his head. ‘There’s no guarantee,’ he said. ‘All we can do is keep up with the hackers. Just keep banging out incremental improvements, day by day.’
‘So any time something like this could happen again?’
‘If you never open email attachments, you can stay a lot safer,’ he said.
Gemma nodded.
‘Get your correspondents to include their information in the body of the email. Most of the problems are caused by script kiddies mucking around because they can.’
‘You said ‘as clean as you could get it,’ she quoted.
‘I want to do one more thing,’ he said. ‘It’s something I should have done right at the start.’
He sat at her desk and Gemma stood behind him, watching.
‘I’ll have to come up with a nice new business name,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been crazy about the Mercator etcetera.’
Mike leaned forward, concentrating on the screen.
‘It’s time for a name change and a new image.’
‘What about komodo dragon?’ Mike suggested, fingers still moving over the keys, running through arcane programming.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
Mike stopped work and stared at the screen. ‘Well, bugger me,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Just let me check if this is right.’
‘If what is right?’ Gemma said. ‘What are you talking about?’
Mike saved his work and leaned back in her chair. ‘Are you ready for this?’ he asked.
‘Ready for what?’
‘All the mess generated by the exposure of your password and records, the zombie, everything,’ he said, ‘distracted me from one very basic fact.’
‘What?’
‘The original security breach didn’t happen via some cyberstalker out there,’ he said. ‘The initial security breach happened right here, in this office, on this very machine.’
‘But,’ she said, ‘the only people who have access to this machine are myself and the people who work for me.’
‘Exactly,’ said Mike. ‘And I know it’s not me who broke in to your system.’
‘And I know it’s not me,’ she said.
‘That leaves only two possibilities,’ she said.
Mike made a face. ‘It’s either that self-righteous little religious fanatic or Miss Mouse,’ he said.
It took him a while but it was when he retrieved Louise’s deleted email that he found what they were looking for. ‘She was talking to the enemy all the time,’ Mike said. ‘Telling Solidere Security everything we were doing.’
‘You were right about being set up,’ Gemma said. ‘Why would she do such a thing? I should feel really angry about it.’
‘I bloody do,’ said Mike. ‘Because of her I got a thumping.’
‘Looking back now it all seems so clear,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘She always had an air of grievance. She never went anywhere. She had that wretched mother to take care of.’
‘She would have looked at you,’ said Mike, ‘and it must have seemed that you had everything going for you. Looks, brains, your own business, a boyfriend . . .’
‘That’s all gone now, just as she planned’ said Gemma. ‘She must have resented me for not giving her the jobs
I gave to Spinner and you. But she just wasn’t up to your standard. And then she said something that I wondered about later. “It’s all gone wrong,” she said. “Terribly wrong”.’
‘She hadn’t planned on the escalation,’ Mike said. ‘She probably just did some spiteful thing like giving your password out and that opened the floodgates to all the other creeps.’
‘She’s destroyed herself as well as my business,’ said Gemma. ‘I don’t know why I ever employed her in the first place.’ She paused. ‘I think I felt sorry for her.’
‘Not good enough,’ said Mike. ‘Who’s sorry now?’
•
After Mike had gone, she went out into the kitchen and made a coffee, carried it back to her desk and sat down at the computer. She opened her email program and found she had a message. Only one. From Steve. That’s odd, she thought. Steve’s never sent me email before. All her investigator’s instincts were alerted. Something unusual was happening. Something out of the ordinary. Something wrong. She hesitated. If I don’t open it, she thought, it can’t hurt me. Outside, the coprosma bush moved in a gust of wind and she went to close the window right down, pleased to have the strong grilles between her and the outside world. She came back to the screen and clicked the message open. It didn’t take her more than a few seconds to realise that it wasn’t from Steve.
‘Hullo Dirtygirl,’ she read. ‘How are things in your apartment at Phoenix Crescent? I’ve posted your address to all the men who want to help you out with your home invasions and rape fantasies.’ It was signed JollyRoger@hotmail.
Gemma stared at the screen, feeling sick. This wasn’t Louise. This was someone else. The cyberstalker. She hit the delete button as fast as she could. But it was too late. Now every perv and psychopath on the net knew exactly where she lived. All the crazy and famished creatures who believed that sex would satisfy their starving souls could drop in, park in her street, hang round her place. The little apartment that she loved so much now felt dark and menacing. Who is this Jolly Roger creep? she asked herself. Her mind was in too much turmoil to think clearly. Just pretend, she told herself, that you’re a client who’s had this happen to them. Would you think it was just some random loony out there?
Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing Page 38
