Feeding the Demons

by Gabrielle Lord

  ‘I was having a bath at about five-thirty in the morning when the door slammed shut. My companion left at ten to four. So I’m thinking he came in between then and when I woke up at five twelve.’

  ‘So he’s operated between about two and five. I’m waiting on the Physical Evidence people to get back to me. And Fingerprints. Will you send your clothes over to me? And I’ll need to talk to the man you were with. Just in case he saw or heard anything on the way out. I’ll get someone to go to the hotel, see if anyone saw or heard anything. Also check their staff. It could easily be someone who works there.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ said Gemma, handing Angie Brian Bates’s card. ‘It was on my list of things to do yesterday.’ She took another mouthful of coffee and swallowed hard. Her throat seemed to have contracted. ‘And I’ll check out the brothels as well. The girls may have heard something.’ She paused. ‘Did you notice anything about the pattern of the attack?’ she asked her friend.

  ‘Yes,’ said Angie. ‘Where he’d stabbed was the same. Your clothes, the woman’s clothes, then the woman herself.’ Gemma shuddered again. Once, in an attack, she’d had to deal with a knife-wielding offender and it had been the most terrifying incident in her police career. She remembered the police trainer telling them in a session that a person who knows how to use a knife is faster and more dangerous than a person with a gun. ‘By the time you’ve drawn your weapon,’ he had told them, ‘you’re already dead.’

  ‘You’re still white as a ghost,’ Angie said. She disappeared and Gemma sat down again. She was just starting to comprehend fully how very near the horror had come. That’s what you do, Kit had said. You leave cracks and the hell beings slip in.

  Angie returned with Gemma’s video. ‘Do you want to leave the original here?’ Angie asked. But Gemma shook her head.

  As they made their way back to the lifts, a good-looking woman in a cream suit and pearl earrings, dark blonde hair upswept in a french roll and flanked by two high-ranking officers, walked past. The woman nodded at Angie and continued along the hall, back towards the Physical Evidence section.

  ‘Who’s Sharon Stone?’ Gemma asked.

  ‘Dr Zelda someone or other,’ said Angie. ‘Visiting American expert. She’s been doing the rounds for the last few days. She’s done nothing but examine the nature and action of blood and bloodstains for the last twenty years. She’s the best in the world. On a lecture circuit.’

  Gemma suddenly deserted her friend and raced after the vanishing cream suit, catching her just as the trio were about to make their entrance into the secured office area.

  ‘Excuse me!’ Gemma called. The woman turned to Gemma.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ said Gemma. ‘I only just heard about you. I wonder if I can have your card.’

  The woman frowned. She had pale, intelligent eyes behind glamorous red-framed spectacles and full lips.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Gemma. ‘Gemma Lincoln. I used to work here five years ago.’ She extended her hand and the American shook it.

  ‘You said “used to”,’ she drawled. ‘What about now?’

  ‘I have my own business,’ Gemma said. ‘Mercator Business Services.’ She pulled out a business card. ‘I would very much like to have a contact number for you.’

  ‘You do a lot of bloodstain work?’ The American looked up from the business card, incredulous. Gemma shook her head.

  ‘But you never know,’ she said. ‘I like to keep my list of experts up to date.’

  The woman pulled a flat wallet out of her briefcase and found a card. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘That’s my address back home and my email. But I’ll be here for another two weeks. Visiting other states and Canberra. I’ll be collecting messages on this number.’ She scrawled a number on the back of the card and passed it to Gemma. Gemma saw that her surname was ‘Firestone’. On one of her fingers, large diamonds winked and Gemma noted the red ink favoured by the expert. ‘Thanks,’ she said, and the American smiled then walked back to rejoin her companions, now chatting in a group with some of the Physical Evidence staff.

  A few minutes later, Angie walked down with her to the foyer. ‘What was all that about?’ she asked Gemma.

  Gemma shrugged. ‘Private business,’ she smiled, tucking the card into her own wallet. Just before the double doors to Goulburn Street, Gemma turned to her friend, no longer smiling. ‘Angie,’ she said, ‘what if he knows who I am? He might have gone through my things.’

  Angie patted her on the arm. ‘Let’s hope the Physical Evidence people can give us something useful,’ she said. ‘Did Lance do the DNA analysis?’ Gemma nodded. ‘Then he can give the Institute a sample to match. Although there’s no doubt in my mind it’ll turn out to be the same offender.’ The doors opened automatically and Gemma left, waving goodbye.

  ‘I’ll be in touch,’ Angie called after her.

  •

  Late afternoon sun slanted through the plane trees as Gemma went back to her vehicle and drove to Potts Point and the Tusculum Hotel. She showed her ID to a bored woman at Reception. No, she was told. She’d have to come back at night if she wanted to know about the night staff. She herself only worked office hours and she’d heard nothing. Gemma left and crossed the road to the front courtyard of number 34. She rang the bell on the wrought-iron gate. A small fountain played in the tiny garden, splashing into a miniature pond. From the dark interior, an elegant woman in her fifties appeared. ‘Can I help you?’ she asked, her voice slightly forced, like a bad actor’s.

  ‘I was hoping Shelly might be here,’ said Gemma. ‘I’m a friend. Gemma Lincoln.’ The woman unlocked the wrought-iron grille door and stepped back to let Gemma inside, then relocked it behind them. ‘I’ll see. She may be with a client.’

  ‘There’s no hurry,’ said Gemma.

  The woman raised an eyebrow and smiled. ‘Take a seat,’ she said. She disappeared up a narrow flight of stairs and Gemma looked around the bar and lounge area. The large front room was comfortably furnished wth leather lounges and occasional tables, vases of flowers, ashtrays and magazines. A bad painting of a nude woman hung on the far wall.

  Gemma turned as Shelly, wrapping a shortie black satin robe and tying it with a gold rope, hurried down the stairs and came over to kiss her.

  ‘Want to earn some extra money for Christmas?’ Shelly teased.

  Gemma laughed. ‘Not right now, Shelly.’

  Shelly twisted her tawny hair up into a knot and clipped it in a tortoiseshell comb, lit a cigarette then sat back on one of the leather armchairs with her legs stretched out on a smokey glass table. Her scuffed gold sandals and the brilliant, chipped nail polish on her toes reflected in the tabletop. She cocked her head inquiringly towards Gemma.

  ‘I was wondering if you’d heard anything about a weirdo,’ Gemma asked. ‘A man who does things with women’s clothes.’ Shelly inhaled deeply and blew smoke out of her nostrils in two jets like a small dragon.

  ‘Take your pick,’ she said. ‘Most of them are weirdos. What sort of things?’

  Gemma told her about the incident at the Tusculum Hotel and the Maroubra murder. Shelly stood up, agitated. ‘You’d be better off asking around the street girls. We get a nicer type of client here.’ Her voice dripped with irony. ‘But I’ll certainly keep my ears open. I’ll ask Jasmine too. She’s working the streets now. She got busted for using and Lorraine threw her out.’ Shelly examined a spot on her chin in the mirror opposite the nude painting, and pushed some wayward hair behind her ear. She suddenly looked very young.

  ‘How’s your daughter?’ Gemma asked.

  ‘High school next year. I’m getting to the stage where I’ll have to give the game away. I tell her and the family that I’m in Public Relations, which in fact I am, but she’s a smart cookie, that one.’

  ‘What will you do?’ Gemma asked.

  ‘Not
sure yet,’ she said. ‘I’ve put some money away. My stepfather said he’d help me get something.’ Shelly squashed the cigarette out. ‘It’s the least he can do. He’s been screwing me for years.’

  The doorbell chimed. ‘That’ll be my next job,’ said Shelly. ‘I’d better run. Let him in for me, will you? Let’s have a coffee soon.’ And she ran up the stairs, leaving Gemma to open the gate. The middle-aged man looked her up and down, then smiled. Gemma pushed past him and out the gate, hurrying through the courtyard.

  •

  Silverwater Road seemed unnaturally busy and the sky above was a glaring white, hot and humid, the air stinking with diesel fumes. It felt more like a February day than October. Gemma made the turn towards the prison and then swung off the road up to the boom gate and the gatekeepers. She told them who she was and who she’d come to see. They checked their visitors’ lists and indicated where she might park.

  After parking the car, Gemma walked towards the entrance. Inmates in their dark green overalls eyed her. Although the cyclone wire fences surrounded block-style buildings that could have been a modern high school or university complex, the razor wire hooped around the barriers at the top of the fence reminded people where they really were. As she walked towards the office area, she was met by a middle-aged man wearing a Corrective Services uniform. He recognised her from previous visits and accompanied her down to the recreation room.

  ‘He’s waiting for you,’ said the officer. Gemma walked quickly down the linoleum corridor, where a couple of the inmates laboured over a mop and bucket. They stepped back to allow her to pass and she walked into the large recreation room, where tables and chairs stood around and vending machines offered chips and instant cappuccino. Gemma passed a man making a phone call from a coin-operated telephone on the wall, and another inmate looked up at her as she made her way towards the other side of the room.

  Gemma saw an old, frail man waiting for someone, sitting alone at a far window, looking out. She realised he was looking out for her, but she’d parked behind the building this time so he hadn’t seen her. This was her third visit. She paused a second, looking at him. He seemed immensely alone and sadness welled up from deep inside of her. She collected herself, then went over to him. His face lit up when he saw her and he rose quickly from the chair. They hadn’t got to the hugging stage yet, but Gemma longed to say something from a heart that was overflowing with love, awkwardness and confusion.

  ‘Hullo, Dad,’ she finally said, putting her hand out to pat his arm. Then she squeezed her lips together to stop herself from crying.

  Five

  The following afternoon, Gemma decided it was time to take her body in hand. Finishing work early, she changed into shorts, sports bra and joggers, grabbed her gym bag with its towel and toiletries, and took a jacket.

  The Seals Club at Maroubra had a gym that would never attract the lycra set, thought Gemma, and a good thing too. Right on the top of an ugly ’sixties building, it commanded stunning views of the wild and wilful beach that never made it in the fashion stakes, despite Little Patti stomping at Maroubra. The rifle range and the headland covered in low coastal scrub met the pale blue of the sky, and Gemma stood there a moment, watching the gulls riding the wind. It was always windy there and Gemma shivered, thinking of a window left open during the night in a street not far away. She walked into the club, paid her two dollars and went up in the lift, crossing the dance floor where sometimes she would have to navigate around elderly couples, the women wearing elegant, gold-strapped high-heeled sandals, and dancing to old time music.

  Gradually the rhythmic effort of pedalling the exercise bike calmed her. The visit to Silverwater had taken precedence, for the moment, over her fear. She went over the conversation she’d had with her father, the two of them looking out the window of the large, untidy recreation room to where a few inmates kicked a ball around in a caged-in area.

  ‘I’ve already been out working on day release for some months now,’ he told her. ‘It’s not as if I don’t know what the world’s like any more.’

  Part of her had longed to tell him about the awful incident of the night before last, but she couldn’t tell him that. He was still too much a stranger. In the next few days, she’d look around the real estate places for something for her father.

  Yet as she pedalled, images from Angie’s horrible crime scene video haunted her imagination. She deliberately looked around the gym to block them. It was her policy to maintain ‘safe houses’—places that were hers alone, where she never went with a man, and the Seals Club was one of them. Occasionally, men tried to pick her up as she sat in one of the lounges with a cool drink after a workout, but she had a number of friendly rejoinders sufficient to deal with any contingency. She would never take a man home from here because she would never drink alcohol here. This was strictly her space: safe and sexless.

  She pedalled harder and noticed that the weightlifter at the eastern end had been joined by a second man, a younger fellow, who was leaning against the chest high windowsill and staring out to sea. When he suddenly turned and saw her staring at him, she felt caught out and looked away hastily, concentrating on her legs. The bike was now simulating a hill climb and the demands on calf and quad muscles claimed her full attention. Sweat itched her brow and armpits. Gradually, the electronic terrain levelled out and Gemma went faster, according to the speedo of the stationary bike. It wasn’t long before she felt calmer. My house is secure, she thought. I’m not going to let some homicidal maniac take up rent-free space in my head. She pedalled harder.

  After the bike, she did the trolley weights, lifting twenty to thirty kilos depending on the work. Bench presses, the rowing machine and finally, the stepper. Up and down she went, until her legs ached and demanded a rest. Finally, she stepped down, shaky and spent. She went into the women’s change rooms, had a quick shower and slipped on her swimming costume. She went to the pool, pulled on her cap and tested the tepid water with a toe. She pulled her goggles on and stood a moment. As she hit the water, she encountered the eyes of the younger man through her misty goggles. He was pedalling the same bike she’d been on, with a ringside seat of the pool.

  No way, sport, Gemma said to herself as she swooshed to the surface, slicing the water with her arms, moving steadily towards the other end of the pool. She did two laps and rested, then another four, hauled herself up and out of the water, wrapped the towel around herself, and took her gym bag back into the change room. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the younger man swing upright from the bench press machine. She couldn’t tell if he was watching.

  She had another shower and, wrapping the towel round her, stepped into the sauna room. Stretched out along the top bench in the hot darkness, Gemma felt the water drying from her body and the surfaces of her eyes. She closed them. But the slashed body and clothes of the woman in the crime scene video kept erupting in her mind. She sat up, swearing. She couldn’t relax.

  Half an hour later she was dressed again and walking against a stiff southerly towards her car. It was still light at ten past six, and the aquamarine waves and pale sand were touched with apricot and mauve shadows. She threw her gym bag in the back, climbed into the car and started it, noticing another car doing the same some distance behind her. Gemma glanced over. It was the younger man from the gym, she was sure, driving a dark green Ford. He’s keen, she thought angrily, as she revved up Marine Parade. She noticed him settle a distance behind her, and her heart froze. Broome Street was just behind her. The image of the woman from the crime scene video flashed into her mind again. It’s him, she thought. He went through my bag. He saw my ID. He knows who I am.

  Fear surged from her heart into her arms as she swung the wheel hard left into Torrington. The fear doubled as she saw him do the same in the mirror. Calm down, she instructed herself. You’re being paranoid. He’s just a pest playing games. It’s not the killer because if he already knows
who I am, there’s no need to follow me. She signalled right and drove onto the roundabout and then, instead of taking the right-handed turn into Arden Street, she kept turning, making a complete circle back to Malabar Road. In the rear view mirror, she had the pleasure of seeing the green Ford forced to move into Arden Street with another car hard on his back bumper. Gemma memorised his registration before he vanished, shouted aloud in triumph and headed for home.

  •

  Gemma realised she was still holding her gym bag in a clenched fist. She put it down. The horror was closer now. She took a deep breath and went to the lounge room, needing a drink. She made herself a Scotch and went back to her office. Angie answered and Gemma took a deep breath. ‘Some idiot tried to follow me from the gym. I need a rego check. QGT 178, late model Ford sedan.’

  For the sake of the logging tapes at her place of work, Angie’s voice switched to professional mode. ‘I’m sorry, madam, we can’t give you any information about vehicle registration. I suggest you take your query to the Roads and Transport Authority.’ Gemma knew that Angie treated every phone as ‘off’ but nevertheless would have written the registration number down by now.

  ‘Usual place, usual time tomorrow?’ Gemma asked.

  Angie agreed. ‘By the way,’ she added, ‘Lance got a perfect match from the murder scene with the semen deposited on your clothes.’ Gemma couldn’t speak for a moment. Although it wasn’t really a surprise there was a terrible finality.

  •

  Gemma pulled up outside the West Lindfield Uniting Church as people started pouring out of the doors and onto the grassed area around the church. Spinner had told her Imelda Moresby was to speak there tonight. She glanced at her watch. It was nearly half past ten. She got out of the car and had to move against the traffic.

  ‘You’re a bit late, luv,’ said a woman wearing an orange and black printed blouse. ‘Show’s over.’