Feeding the Demons

by Gabrielle Lord

  She would go home and get her costume, go for a quick dip to clear her head, grab a coffee and a croissant and then face whatever the day would bring.

  She walked into the lounge area to retrieve the rest of her clothes, but stopped short in the doorway. A chill of fear rippled through her body as hair follicles, obeying a primitive directive, stiffened. She felt the rush of adrenalin; that explosion of icy fire. Now she understood why her clothes had looked almost laid out when she’d glanced without attention earlier.

  They’d been laid out all right. She covered her mouth with a hand as if to silence herself from making some shocked noise. Oh Jesus, she thought. Kit was right. This was not fun. This was horrible. I’ve gone to bed with a weirdo. She stood there a moment more, taking it all in, the clothes, the talcum powder, the tatters. Then she rushed to check her bag in the drawer beside the bed. Nothing was missing. The eighty dollars she remembered from last night were folded safely in her wallet, as was the business card of the man she’d picked up. The video camera was still safe in its bag. She picked it up and returned to her clothes in the lounge room. Using the slow panning technique that had been so much part of her crime scene work when she was a cop, and was still important in her security operations, she recorded every nasty detail.

  •

  Fortunately, it had been raining yesterday morning, so she was able to cover herself with the raincoat she’d been wearing and drive home. She made her way through the early morning traffic of the Cross and eastern suburbs as quickly as possible, her skirt, panties, pantyhose, blouse and jumper carefully stored in the large sheet of white paper she’d managed to beg from the hotel’s kitchen.

  As she put the key to the deadlock of her flat, Gemma noticed that her fingers were trembling. Noel had wired the front door lock and the alarm system together so that unlocking the door also disarmed the electronic shriek. A square of envelope showed under next door’s door and she wondered briefly if the Ratbag and his mother were away. She walked into her flat to the stink of flowering stocks going bad in a vase and Taxi running cross-leggedly over the polished boards to greet her, calling for breakfast, with his tail straight up in the air. She placed the wrapped-up clothes on the hall table and seized him, snuggling her chin into his marmalade fur, holding on to him for comfort. ‘Oh, you cat,’ she told him. ‘You straight-tailed, orange-flavoured cat.’ Her heartbeat was easing but he picked up her distress and struggled against her, so she let him plop heavily onto the floor again. Her mother’s beautiful face shone from a silver-framed photograph and next to that was the collection of dainty miniature porcelain dolls, seven of them, standing along the back of the sideboard like a line-up. She’d lost interest in collecting them by the seventh. I think I might give them away, she thought. But maybe, one day, I’ll have a daughter. That day seemed a very long way off. And the sight of her mother’s face renewed the guilt she was feeling about keeping secrets from Kit. She pushed the guilt away. Damn it, she was a free woman, and could do what she wished. Automatically, she fingered the silver chain around her neck that had been her mother’s, seized the vase of stocks and took them out to the kitchen, treading on huge squares of sunshine on the wooden floors.

  Beyond the lounge area, and through the locked wrought-iron lace doors of the balcony, the royal navy Pacific unfolded along the rocks and sand of Tamarama beach under a hazy powder blue sky. The sun had been up for nearly two hours and it was going to be a magnificent October day.

  The building she lived in had been an old house, divided in the ’sixties into four asymmetrical flats. She’d bought hers for under three hundred thousand four years ago, just before real estate went crazy in the area. The moment she’d moved in, the wrought-iron grilles had gone up on the doors and windows.

  Gemma wanted to ring Kit but knew this was her meditation time. ‘I get to feel at one with the universe,’ she used to say to Kit, ‘sitting in surveillance vans on cold dark nights freezing my tits off.’

  She put the kettle on in the sunny kitchen, scraped the last of a tin of pilchards onto Taxi’s plate and went through the lounge area to her pale blue office. The dining and lounge area were all blue and white, fresh as September sunshine. In the hallway, opposite the table and mirror where the vase of stocks had been, was a glazed Della Robbia Madonna and child, surrounded by fruit and vegetables and specially selected by her for its perfect blue. She looked in the mirror briefly. Where Kit had the sweet-shaped Lincoln face of their mother, and her dark hair, Gemma took after the father’s line with her strong chin and deep-set grey eyes. Currently, she was a dark blonde. She looked around her place and thought how much she loved the simplicity of polished floors, delft blue walls, white curtains, and touches of golden wood.

  In her office, the tones were more businesslike, less Mediterranean. White surfaces held the computer, printer and fax, and the shredder stood in a corner next to her white desk on the dark blue carpet. She had a music system that she rarely used apart from the radio. This room faced west, but because the old house was down below road level with a ferny garden at the front, her office was protected from the western sun. There were several messages on the answering service that would need her attention after she’d made a call on her mobile. As she dialled and waited, she glanced at the time.

  ‘Hullo,’ Lance’s voice on the answering service said, ‘the office of PAL is currently unattended. Please leave your name and number and your call will be returned.’ Paradigm was about the only private lab that did this sort of work and she didn’t want to use the Institute out at Lidcombe; couldn’t bear to think of her ruined knickers pinned out like a big square butterfly on a blotting paper board by someone who might remember her name. She knew Lance from her days in the job.

  ‘Lance,’ she spoke to the message machine, ‘it’s Gemma Lincoln. Seven forty-five, Wednesday morning. I need you to do a DNA test on some material. I’ll courier it over to you this morning. I’ll get you a sample to match it against as soon as I can. Thanks.’ She rang off and placed the wrapped up clothes in a postal bag. She rang the security courier and twenty minutes later, the parcel was collected. Gemma attended to the messages on the answering machine. The last one was from the retired Detective Sergeant living up the coast. As she dialled his number, she thought about the conversation she’d had with him over a month ago.

  ‘I remember your father’s case very well,’ Philip Hawker had said. ‘It feels like it happened last summer, not thirty years ago.’

  Gemma had taken a deep breath. ‘I want to have another look at the brief,’ she’d said. ‘I believe he’s an innocent man. I’m looking to re-open the case.’

  There had been a long silence on the other end of the line. ‘He was convicted of an extremely savage crime. The evidence was—’

  ‘The evidence was all circumstantial,’ Gemma interrupted, ‘and based on bloodstain interpretation. I want to see the brief,’ she said. ‘Do you know where it would be?’

  ‘Could be anywhere. In those days we sent the police briefs off to the office of the Clerk of the Peace, after the committal hearing. That office doesn’t even exist any more. It’s the DPP now.’

  ‘Can you suggest where it might be?’

  ‘You could start with the DPP. They might know. Or State Archives. But the brief might still be with the court papers. Or with the police. Or in somebody’s chook house.’

  ‘What do you mean “chook house”?’

  ‘I mean that quite literally. The old Hat Factory has long gone. Where the old CIB used to be. When the paperwork was transferred to the new premises, an awful lot was chucked. Briefs are supposed to be kept until a couple of years after the end of the person’s sentence. But that didn’t always happen. Sometimes, police took briefs or bits of them with them when they retired, especially if it had been their big case.’

  ‘That sounds very unsatisfactory,’ said Gemma, remembering her own experience
in the job.

  ‘That was in the olden days,’ he said. ‘I’m sure things are all in order now.’ The irony was almost undetectable.

  ‘Did you,’ asked Gemma, ‘take things with you?’

  ‘I might have a few odds and ends up here,’ Hawker had replied after a pause. ‘I’ll have a look and get back to you.’ She was hoping he’d had a look and was getting back to her when the man himself finally answered the phone.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, after the initial greetings. ‘I’ve found some things that you might be interested in. I’ve even got a copy of your father’s original statement here. The one he did on the night of the killing.’

  ‘The one he made for the police?’

  ‘No,’ said Philip Hawker. ‘I don’t know where that one is. This one’s a bit unusual. Apparently he sat down and wrote this after he’d come home from the hospital before we came to take him down to the station. He told me it was so that he could write down the events while they were fresh in his mind.’ Like writing up his case notes, thought Gemma. Some deep pang assailed her as she thought of her father, sitting down and writing up the events of that night. She blinked rapidly.

  ‘I’ve never known anyone else do that,’ Philip Hawker was saying. ‘To write something down off their own bat.’

  ‘My father was a professional man,’ Gemma said, aware of the beating of her heart. ‘He was used to writing things down. Can you fax it to me?’

  ‘Yes, but not until I go into town.’ He laughed. ‘We don’t have those sorts of mod cons in Sleepy Hollow. It’ll be quicker if I pop it in the mail. What’s your address?’ Gemma gave it. ‘Have you turned up anything else?’ Hawker asked her.

  ‘I’ve been flat out,’ she said. ‘But I’m hoping to get everything together soon.’

  ‘You should come up here for a few days,’ he said. ‘Unwind a bit.’

  ‘If I unwound . . .’ Gemma started to say, but she couldn’t think of what might happen if she did so she said goodbye and rang off.

  She had no appetite but made a cup of tea and some toast spread with Salvation Jane honey, then took them out to the balcony. Today, the sea was sapphire and diamonds in the breeze, under a powder blue sky. These sorts of details were still automatic, she realised, the result of years of contemporaneous note-making, necessary in her work, essential in the face of cross-examination. Maybe I should call the police, she thought, as the horrible discovery of this morning loomed into her imagination again. But it was not a serious thought. She didn’t have a very high opinion of many of her ex-colleagues and she couldn’t bear the thought of some smart little junior detective with his eyes everywhere taking her statement and silently drawing conclusions.

  What would happen if I unwound? she asked herself. ‘You need to take a break,’ Kit kept saying to her. ‘You haven’t had a holiday for years. You drive yourself. That is not the way to deal with the demons. You need to sit down with them. Give them a cup of tea. Let them tell you what they’ve been wanting to tell you all these years.’ And Kit would give her that look.

  ‘Don’t give me that therapiste look!’ Gemma would yell, trying to keep her tone good-natured. ‘I won’t have it! Stop big sistering me!’ Maybe it was time to own up to Kit about what she was doing. Sometimes she even spoke out loud to the large photo of a smiling Kit that hung above the television set.

  She washed her plate and cup and stacked them on the draining board, wondering when her father’s statement might arrive. In her office, she opened the bottom drawer of her desk and pulled out the envelope containing a yellowing newspaper clipping from the old Sydney Sun.

  ‘Crucial murder evidence “possibly possum”’ was the heading. Gemma read it once again, although she almost knew it by heart.

  Housewife and mother, Imelda Moresby, next-door neighbour of Dr Archie Chisholm, Northcliffe Avenue, Killara, NSW, today gave evidence of hearing a noise on the evening of Wednesday, 17th September 1967, the night of the murder of Dr Chisholm’s wife, Marianne. ‘About twenty-five minutes or so before I heard Dr Chisholm’s car returning to the house,’ Mrs Moresby, attractive mother of two, told the court today, ‘I was getting the baby ready for the ten o’clock feed when a noise made me go to the window and look into the Chisholms’ backyard.’ In answer to further questioning, Mrs Moresby said she didn’t hear or see anything else unusual that night. Dr Chisholm’s car arrived ‘about twenty-five minutes or half an hour later’.

  Dr Chisholm, well-known Sydney psychiatrist, is standing trial for the brutal murder of his wife, Marianne. Dr Chisholm told the court he found his wife dying in their home when he arrived home from a university dinner at ten-thirty pm. Under Crown cross-examination, Mrs Moresby admitted the noise she heard ‘could have been a possum’. Witnesses have confirmed that Dr Chisholm’s Rover did not return to the house until at least ten-thirty pm that night.

  Gemma put the brittle piece of paper back in its envelope. It was the only thing concerning her father she had ever found at Aunt Merle’s, in the bottom of a sewing basket, carefully folded up so that she’d almost missed it, thinking it was nothing more than a paper of pins. She had a memory, or perhaps it was only the memory of a memory, of sitting with Kit in a bay window seat, on red velvet cushions with gold tassels at somebody’s house, watching a storm coming down and looking at the rain beating against the windows, crying and wanting to go home, and Kit comforting her by making her watch the raindrops to guess which one got to the bottom of the glass first.

  Gemma made a brew of strong coffee and took a couple of painkillers washed down with Berocca, although the hangover seemed to have been eclipsed by the more serious recent events. The ring of her doorbell at 9 o’clock made her jump. Still affected by the early morning shock, she went to the door, checked out her visitor and let her in. The woman nervously looked around as Gemma ushered her into her office. Rose Georgiou was a slight woman, too thin, with a soft pretty face. She wore a dark rosewood lipstick that did nothing for her pallor. Bit by bit Gemma extracted the whole story out of the weeping woman. She suspected her husband had rekindled an old love affair, one he’d promised was over.

  Gemma automatically pushed the box of tissues towards her. Sometimes I feel like I’m doing your job, she once told Kit. People tell me their most intimate secrets. I listen. And I help them. Mostly, they already know the truth. Mercator’s report and videos are just the last nail in the coffin.

  The two-way suddenly crackled into life. ‘Tracker Three to base, copy please.’

  It was Spinner. Gemma pressed her two-way into service. ‘Tracker Three, hullo. Where are you?’ She looked across at Mrs Georgiou, who was putting a tiny hankie back in her bag and blinking her eyes in an effort to stop further tears. ‘Excuse me,’ Gemma said to her, turning back to the two-way.

  ‘I’m on the F4, travelling east,’ Spinner’s voice said. ‘Our target opened the shop and I waited to see in case she took anything out to the car before the rest of the staff arrived. Nothing happened so there’s no point in me staying here until she closes up again this evening. I’m heading back to put in a few hours on the stress-related pastry eater and then I’ll get on to the Bondi job. I’ll call you later.’ Like Noel, Spinner always had several jobs on the boil.

  ‘Okay Spinner. I’ll hear from you later.’ Gemma put the two-way down and gave her full attention to the other woman, who was anxiously frowning. ‘But what if my husband finds out? What if he knows he’s being followed?’

  Gemma shook her head. ‘It’s never happened,’ she said. It had, Gemma thought, but only once. It was almost not a lie. If a subject got wary, the operators got warier. Dropped off him for a month or more then came back with a different vehicle, different operator sometimes. More vehicle changes, more changes of operator, more changes of clothes. Spinner was an absolute genius at remaining unseen. He had a nose for surveillance work; a combination of instinct and common
sense, the sort of genius that makes a great street cop. He could sit in his utility with the tinted windows recording away on the video camera and remain completely unnoticed.

  Gemma suggested they start the surveillance straight away. ‘Our operator can pick him up at lunch time. If he’s meeting someone, we’ll know. We’ll tell you where he goes. We’ll pick him up again on Friday night after work. If we haven’t got anything by the time you’ve spent five hundred dollars,’ she told Rose, ‘we’ll review the situation. We’ll start tomorrow if that’s all right with you.’

  She was confident they’d nail him if Friday was his night for playing. Rose nodded and Gemma showed her out of the house, noticing that the envelope under next door’s mat had gone. When she returned to her office, Gemma opened a new file and was writing up the details given her by Rose Georgiou when the phone rang.

  ‘Gemma? Just got your package,’ Lance said. ‘But there’s no name with it. Whose clothes are these?’

  ‘Mine,’ she said. There was a silence.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘None of your business.’ She laughed to take the sting out of the words and again there was an uneasy silence between them.

  ‘Is it urgent?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ll get the sample over to you today.’ He rang off.

  She pulled a business card out of her wallet and phoned the man of last night. ‘Hullo, Brian,’ she said, using her bimbo voice. ‘It’s Gemma. Remember me?’