Feeding the Demons

by Gabrielle Lord

  •

  Kit was curled up with a book on the sofa in the lounge room when some tiny sound disturbed her. She looked around the room. Surely there was something moving outside.

  She put the book down, and tiptoed out of the room and down the hallway. It was in darkness and she tuned her ears. There it was again; a small sound, but this time she was sure it was outside, in the back garden. She decided against putting on a light, knowing that she was at an advantage, moving through the darkness down the hall towards the kitchen at the back of the house. In the kitchen, she stopped again. A soft ‘plop’ sound, as if someone had lightly dropped over the wall of her garden, onto his feet. Now she started to feel alarmed. Alarmed and fearful. She crept to the kitchen window and peered out, keeping well back, turning her head sideways to glance outside. She froze. The dark figure of someone—the outline suggested it was male—was clearly visible in the moonless dim night. Kit jumped in shock.

  ‘Who are you?’ she screamed through the window. ‘What do you want?’ At her words, the man seemed to leap into the air and vanish back over the wall. She heard the sound of breaking vines and somewhere a cat let out a bloodcurdling yell that made her jump again. She slammed the sliding kitchen window closed and locked the back door, standing in the darkness, panting in fright. Relax, her sensible adult voice said. It’s just some kid looking for a chance to burgle. You probably gave him a terrible fright. At this, she clutched the sideboard running along the sink, and breathed deeply. Her heart started to slow down. She went around the house, securing windows, checking doors.

  Maybe I should get a big dog, she thought. She switched on the light in her room. It was twenty past ten. She picked up the phone.

  ‘Gems?’ she said when her sister answered. ‘There was someone here,’ she told her. ‘In the garden.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know. Some prowler.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I screamed and he bolted.’

  ‘Probably just some junkie looking for money.’

  The image of Will came into her mind. ‘Probably,’ she agreed. ‘But a couple of times I’ve gone outside thinking that someone was there.’

  Gemma suddenly thought of evil stirring. She shivered. ‘Do you want me to come over?’ she asked. ‘I could stay the night.’

  ‘No. Thanks anyway. I’ll be okay. I’ve locked everything. I think he got a bigger fright than me.’

  ‘You must get grilles on the windows,’ said Gemma, thinking of Kit’s house backing onto the coastal path around the beaches. Gemma remembered from her ‘perv patrol’ days what these public areas could be like at night. ‘I’m surprised that a house in that position hasn’t already been made secure. Hang on a tick and I’ll get a card.’ Kit waited till her sister returned to the phone. ‘These people are good, and reliable.’ She gave Kit the number of a wrought-iron manufacturer. ‘Promise me you’ll give them a ring first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kit, jotting the number down. ‘I won’t be able to relax otherwise.’ She hesitated. ‘What’s up, Gems? Your voice sounds really sad.’

  ‘I’ve been talking to a street worker,’ said Gemma, ‘and I’m tired.’ She told Kit about the meeting with Bo Bayliss. Kit immediately thought of Clive Mindell’s fantasy. Someone else had the same idea, she thought.

  ‘Kit?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you ever think of Dad?’

  Kit felt the clench in her guts. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because I want to know.’

  Eventually, Kit could speak. She felt an unreasonable anger with Gemma for bringing up this subject yet again. ‘I think of him from time to time. I think of our mother, too. He took her away from us. He orphaned us with his rage.’

  ‘I don’t think he did it, Kit.’

  ‘You’ve always said that. You were only five when it happened. I remember the terrible fights. I remember his rage.’ Her anger was increasing. ‘Gemma, this is not a good time to be discussing this. I’d prefer to do it another time. We’re both tired.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ said her sister. ‘Goodnight. Sleep tight.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ Kit replied.

  •

  She didn’t sleep well. She felt claustrophobic with all the windows and doors locked up and the mention of her parents had disturbed ancient, deep layers in her mind. She was startled awake from agitated dreams of a couple quarrelling violently, and although the figures in the dream were Gerald and herself, she knew they were really her parents. Weird dreams of Will shattering into her house through broken glass woke her in the dawn. At first light, she was out in the garden, noting the broken branches of Boston ivy and the mess of torn leaves on the ground and floating on the pond. Later in the morning, she rang the wrought-iron manufacturers. They could have the job done in a week’s time.

  Eleven

  Gemma rang Mrs Georgiou, glancing at her report on the erring husband. ‘Hullo?’ she said. ‘Rose? It’s Gemma Lincoln from Mercator.’ No matter how often she said what she was about to say, it was always difficult. ‘I’m afraid your suspicions are correct. Your husband drove to a motel after work yesterday and met a woman who fits the description of Anneliese Smith. They spent an hour and a half in the motel before walking up the street for dinner. They spent more time in the motel after that and your husband finally left the place at . . .’ She checked Spinner’s notes for the exact time, ‘nine-twenty.’ On the other end of the line, she could hear the woman sobbing. ‘I’m sorry to be the one to have to tell you this. I’ll post the full report and the video. If there’s anything more you ever want done, you have my details.’ She was adding, ‘It’s always better to know the truth,’ when Mrs Georgiou interrupted.

  ‘But do I?’ she was saying. ‘They might have gone there for work. Maybe they just needed a quiet place.’

  Gemma knew this one, too. She didn’t say, ‘Look, lady. I know the work they were doing there. There’s only one reason in the world that a man and a woman book into a motel for a short time.’ But she held her tongue and waited. On the other end of the line, she could hear Mrs Georgiou adjusting to the information, making it better, more acceptable.

  ‘There’s still no real proof,’ Mrs Georgiou was saying in a brighter voice. ‘There could be some perfectly innocent explanation.’ She paused. ‘I want to see them—’ the woman’s voice broke but she cleared her throat and continued. ‘—I want to actually see with my own eyes. I can’t believe my husband would do this. Not after all the promises he made to me. He swore to me.’

  Gemma closed her eyes briefly; she didn’t sigh out loud. ‘Mrs Georgiou, we can do something for you. We can organise camera surveillance. But it doesn’t come cheap.’

  Another pause. Dump him, Rose, Gemma was thinking. Kick the bugger out, sell the house, split it fifty-fifty. Nice house like yours in today’s market will bring you a darling unit where you can live in peace without a bloody man to cause you heartache. Nice cat, nice balcony garden. Good china and fancy bathroom. An end to the drops of urine on the bathroom floor.

  ‘I’m going to visit my mother on the weekend,’ Rose Georgiou said. ‘He’ll be here by himself.’ Again, the choked sound. Gemma felt their two minds merge as each of them imagined the dark man and his blonde mistress cavorting in the marital bed, Rose safely out of the way with her mother.

  ‘We can fix something up for you. Right over the bed.’ It was Gemma who paused. ‘Are you sure you want to go through with something like that?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the woman. ‘I have to know the truth. I must know the truth.’

  You know already, thought Gemma. And your refusal to face the truth is worth another six hundred bucks to my business. ‘What’s a good time,’ Gemma asked, ‘for us to fit the camera?’

  ‘He’s at work all day. What about t
omorrow?’

  They made a time and Gemma rang off. She walked out onto the deck. Is it always better to know the truth, she wondered? Gemma leaned against the timber rail and looked out at a sea with white-tipped waves racing south. Am I the same as Rose Georgiou, Gemma thought to herself. Is that why I have to know the truth about my father? I can’t just leave it at mere belief in his innocence; it has to be proved. And that must be, she realised, because somewhere deep down I’m not sure at all. Somewhere, deep down, do I already know the truth?

  Bo Bayliss’s blue-fringed stare came into her mind and she thought again of the skinny man with the knife somewhere out there. The image spooked her so much that she hurried back inside and picked up the two-way. ‘Tracker Three, copy please.’

  He came in straight away. ‘Tracker Three, base.’ He was always there, she thought. Come in Spinner. She felt reassured and the fear subsided.

  ‘Spinner, can you fit a camera in the bedroom at the Georgious’ place tomorrow?’

  ‘Sure thing,’ he said. ‘She wants action shots? I’ll pick it up today.’

  ‘Here’s her number. You two work out the installation time. Why doesn’t she just dump the deadshit?’

  ‘What she does or doesn’t do isn’t our business, Boss. And besides that, matrimony is a sacred contract.’

  ‘Sure, Bede. And I need some sensor lights. For a job at Darling Point.’

  ‘The camera hire people won’t have those,’ he reminded her.

  ‘I’ll get them,’ she said, and signed off. She grabbed a jacket in case the weather cooled down later in the day, pushed Taxi off the hall table where he was trying to poke a paw into the vase of daisies, took a straw sun hat and her address book and was just about to leave the house for Seagull Bay when the doorbell rang. When she opened the door, all she could see was a bank of blue irises, white November lilies, golden freesias, poppies and a satin bow. The huge floral arrangement was being supported from behind by a short, almost invisible delivery man.

  ‘Miss Gemma Lincoln?’ he asked.

  ‘Who wants to know?’ she said, as the scent of the lilies almost made her faint. ‘They’re gorgeous,’ she said.

  ‘They’re yours,’ he said. ‘If you’re Miss Lincoln.’

  ‘I admit it,’ she said, wondering if Steve had suddenly been overcome by forgiveness. She took the tower of irises and lilies from him, thanked him and closed the door behind her, setting the flowers on the dining room table beside the heavy silver vase that always stood in the middle. The blooms looked glorious against the blue and white of her furnishings and the misty expanse of the sea beyond. She tore the card open. ‘You’re beautiful’, it said. She turned it over. There was nothing else. No signature. She felt a chill.

  Gemma ran out to the front door then up the steps onto the road. Nothing. Just the usual parked cars. Back inside, she checked the florist’s card again. It was a small, pale pink deckle-edged card in a matching envelope, miniature stationery that Gemma knew could be bought in just about any paper shop. There was no name or identifying mark on it. She ran back inside, frustrated and angry. It just happened in a flash and I let it happen like a lamb, she thought. Now, the cloudy pile of blue, white and gold, reflecting on the polished wood like floral tributes on a coffin, seemed ominous. Who’s done this and why? She thought again of the joker in the green Ford. She went into her office and picked up the two-way, switching it on. ‘Base to Tracker Three.’

  ‘Yes, base.’ Spinner’s voice penetrated the radio fog and crackle.

  ‘I think I’ve just been pinged,’ she said. ‘I feel like a goose.’ She told him what had happened.

  ‘Did you get a look at the geezer?’

  ‘Through a pile of lilies. Small. Fiftyish? I don’t know. Dark.’

  ‘Maybe it’s legit,’ he said. ‘You’re a good style of woman. A secret admirer.’

  ‘Sure. Maybe it was some other operator’s counter-surveillance. Maybe we’ve been burned on one of our jobs and this is a message.’ She remembered the times of sitting in the surveillance car with the suspect seemingly looking straight at her and her camera, tensely waiting for him to storm over and demand to know what she thought she was doing. It had never happened.

  ‘Possible,’ Spinner said. ‘But they’d want us to know who they were. How smart they are.’

  She rang off. The floral arrangement perfectly suited the blue and white curtains and cushions of her living area. Even the occasional touch of gold was reflected in the large poppy buds, splitting to show the densely packed petals within. They were perfect and they had to go. She picked up the flowers and carried them out of the house, to dump them on the top of someone else’s wheelie bin.

  ‘Why don’t you want them?’ Gemma turned to see the Ratbag, coming up behind her, a frown on his always serious face. ‘What’s wrong with them?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing’s wrong with them. They just don’t match my decor,’ she lied.

  ‘What’s a decor?’ he wanted to know. He had watchful eyes that seemed always narrowed and Gemma realised two things: that he would be a very handsome man when he grew up and that she’d never seen him smile.

  ‘It’s how you furnish your place. Colour schemes. Curtains. That sort of thing.’ He nodded. ‘Your mum might like them,’ she offered and his stern face lightened a bit. ‘She loves flowers,’ he said. ‘But she’d probably think I’ve pinched them.’

  ‘Do you do that sort of thing?’

  The Ratbag looked away. ‘Tell her I gave them to you,’ Gemma said. ‘She can check with me if she wants.’

  The Ratbag hoisted the arrangement off the top of the wheelie bin and started off down the steep steps, taking them one at a time like a much younger child. He stopped and turned halfway down and from Gemma’s perspective it looked as if the floral arrangement had grown a lower body and two skinny legs in school shoes. ‘You’re a private investigator,’ he said from behind the lilies. ‘Mum said that sort of work attracts a certain element. What does that mean?’

  ‘Did she now? What else did she say?’ But the lilies didn’t answer.

  ‘Have you shot anyone?’

  ‘No,’ said Gemma. ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘Do you have a gun?’ Gemma shook her head. There was no need for the Ratbag or indeed anyone to know about the licensed .38 locked in her bedside drawer. She saw the Ratbag peering through a gap in the arrangement. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘On television, all the private investigators have guns.’

  ‘Life is not like television,’ she said. ‘I don’t have any reason to carry a weapon. I used to though,’ she said, to help him out. ‘I used to be a cop.’ There was a pause. She wasn’t sure how this would go down with the Ratbag.

  ‘Why did you stop being one? Did you roll over?’

  ‘No,’ she said, laughing. ‘I didn’t roll over.’ I should’ve, she thought, suddenly serious. I should’ve rolled over and over and collected those other bastards while I was down there. She thought of Davey and Hendricks and how they were both Team Leaders now.

  ‘Well, why then?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ she said.

  His dark eye still peered through the flowers and he tried another tack. ‘Do you do martial arts?’

  Gemma shook her head again. ‘No,’ she said. ‘But I can move quickly.’

  ‘You mean in a fight?’ The Ratbag sounded more hopeful.

  ‘No,’ said Gemma, disappointing him again. ‘Away from one.’

  That did it and the pile of lilies continued wobbling down the steps. Gemma watched him struggle with the arrangement and the key as he battled to open his front door. Mrs Ratbag was something flash in the corporate world and Gemma rarely saw her. My work attracts a certain element she was thinking as she went inside; the lost, the lonely, the suspicious, the hurt.

  As
she left the northern suburbs and turned onto the Gosford freeway, her heart felt a little lighter. Occasionally, when her thoughts about Steve became too sad, she thought about the millionaire who’d flirted with her.

  •

  In under two hours, she’d arrived at Seagull Bay. This small coastal community of retired people, holiday makers and the small shopkeepers who serviced them was very different from the country around Camden way, and soon she was responding to the holiday feeling in the breeze off the ocean, the scent of suntan cream and hot chips from the shopping mall, budding frangipanis and hibiscus. Even though summer hadn’t officially begun yet, it was certainly here, in Seagull Bay, waiting to spread all over the state. The sea was aquamarine and the sky above it pale blue. It would be nice, she thought to herself, to come here with a millionaire and lease a magnificent house on the water and look out to sea, sipping gin and tonics.

  Philip Hawker was expecting her and was already sitting on the verandah in his neat cottage, shaded by palms, a Norfolk pine and a bougainvillea that would soon be covered in flaming scarlet blossom. As she walked up the slight rise to the house, the wind rustled the palm leaves and Gemma wished for a minute she could live here with Taxi and Steve, swim every day and never go out on surveillance again. Philip Hawker, leathery tan and bright in a Hawaiian shirt, offered her the wary half-smile of a long-serving police officer as he put out his hand.

  ‘Nice to meet you again.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘You don’t remember. I talked to you and your sister back then.’ His dark eyes looked straight into hers. ‘You were only a little thing. Smart as paint, though.’

  ‘I can’t remember very much about it,’ said Gemma, aware of deep disquiet stirring in her. ‘Just patches of it here and there.’

  ‘Sit down and I’ll get you a drink. Tea? Coffee?’

  ‘Coffee would be great,’ she said. ‘Black and one.’

  He disappeared back into the house and Gemma realised he was enjoying her presence as a social call as well as a matter of old business. Across the roofs of the houses over the road, she could see the haze of the ocean, ruffled with low waves. Soon would be her birthday, the thirtieth anniversary of the terrible matters she was investigating. Her birthday was like a tombstone. Philip Hawker returned with a tray and two steaming mugs. ‘You’ll have to take me as you find me,’ he said. ‘The missus stays in Sydney during the week and I batch most of the time.’ He laughed. ‘Suits me,’ he added.