Feeding the Demons

by Gabrielle Lord

  Angie swung round on her seat and pressed the Play button on the video recorder behind her, and the Maroubra crime scene came to slow life again as the camera panned over the murdered woman and her clothes. The group watched the sequence in silence until the screen hissed black and white. Then Angie placed the brand new video from that morning’s abduction into the video player. Again, the methodical, slow video, without characters, without action. Just the mise en scène of violence. Angie followed this with another tape, and Gemma’s breath caught in her throat as she recognised the grainy copy of her tape from the Tusculum Hotel. She leaned back in her seat, not wanting to watch this again, but the silent, slow-moving screen drew her and she sat, mesmerised, as the camera panned across her shredded clothes, the slashed carpet.

  ‘You were a lucky girl, not to wake up while he was there,’ said Garry Copeland, nodding and smiling and getting on Gemma’s wick, as if he himself had somehow saved her from the killer because of his brilliant, deductive mind. ‘So. You’ve all seen what the Crime Scene examiners saw. And what Gemma videoed. And now I want to run through the main points of the violent offenders’ profile with you.’ Garry’s balding head jerked with enthusiasm.

  Gemma inclined towards Angie. ‘I’m off,’ she whispered. ‘Call me if you need me.’ Gemma stood up, clutching the manila envelope, and walked out the door. Angie followed her. ‘Thanks for coming in,’ she said. ‘I appreciate it. What did you think of Copeland and his psych talk?’

  ‘He’s okay as far as he goes,’ said Gemma. ‘But there’s something bothering me, and I’m not sure yet what it is.’

  ‘About the abduction?’

  ‘About the whole business,’ said Gemma. ‘About the three crime scenes. Something doesn’t fit.’

  ‘Tell me what you’re thinking.’ Angie’s keen, polished face turned and her eyes narrowed with interest.

  ‘I will,’ Gemma promised. ‘When I’m surer of what it is.’

  •

  Gemma drove to Silverwater, parked the car in the visitors’ section and was waiting when the radio came to staticky life.

  ‘Tracker Three calling; copy please, base.’

  Gemma snatched up the two-way. ‘Go ahead, Spinner.’

  ‘I’m at Rose Georgiou’s place,’ he said.

  ‘“Rose”, is it? You were quick. Getting there, I mean.’

  ‘I’m going to put the camera in the light fitting right over the bed. Sound and movement activated. Then all we need are the principal actors to show up.’

  ‘My instincts tell me they’ll arrive as soon as Mrs Georgiou goes to her mum’s for the weekend. You should be in movies, Spinner.’

  ‘I am,’ he said. ‘Director, producer and camera man.’

  ‘Is Mrs Georgiou there?’

  ‘She’s making me a cup of coffee.’

  ‘Noel got an offer the other day. To make a revenge video. Don’t be tempted,’ she teased.

  ‘“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord”,’ Spinner quoted back at her and Gemma found she was smiling as she signed off, fitting the radio back in its housing, then she looked up and saw her father walking towards her. He was carrying a small overnight bag and a rolled-up newspaper. Gemma was reminded of a workman going home for dinner. Her heart beat hard in her chest and her mouth went dry. She got out of the car and walked round to the passenger side to open the door for him, to give herself something to do.

  ‘Hullo,’ she said, straightening up.

  Her father didn’t answer for a second. Then he put his bag down and opened his hands in a helpless gesture. ‘May I hug you?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, feeling foolish.

  He looked at her intently, picked up his bag again, and climbed into the car. ‘You’ve answered me,’ he said. ‘Maybe later on.’ Gemma climbed in and started the car.

  ‘Thank you for picking me up,’ he said. ‘It’s kind of you.’ On the phone he’d told her about the flat in Glebe he’d organised to stay at after his release, with the man who’d been his cellmate the last few years and was released earlier in the year, a solicitor who’d overreached himself and used money from a trust fund. Gemma drove towards the city. It was an overcast day with a glaring sky. She switched the radio on, finding something that she thought her father might like.

  ‘It’s hard to believe,’ he said, ‘that I’m never going back there again. That I don’t have to be back tomorrow night. That I’ll be sharing a flat with Paul like any other single man of sixty-seven.’

  ‘What will you do with yourself?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve still got some money,’ he said. ‘And with the pension I should manage all right. Paul said he could find me the occasional search to do or some research work.’ He paused. ‘I’m going to write a book,’ he said. ‘Two books, actually. I’m determined that the world will see that what I said was true.’

  ‘That’s one book,’ she said.

  ‘And I’ve been working on something else of a medical nature. But I need to research it more.’ He looked over at her, smiling in a way that revealed his large, white teeth.

  The expression on his face catapulted her back thirty years and she suddenly remembered him speaking at the university to a hall full of important doctors. Her mother, thin and nervous in a fur coat, had clutched Gemma’s hand too tight as the lecture hall filled with gentlemen, young and ancient, wearing brilliant robes with hoods and fur trim. Her heart had been bursting with pride and love because this was her father that all these important people had come to hear. But then she remembered shivering in the big square wicker clothes basket, huddled up to Kit, hearing his voice screaming at their mother. This time, she was able to remember the outline of the fight. ‘All you have to do is keep your bloody children quiet. That’s all I expect of you. No cooking, no housework, nothing like that because all of that is beyond you. But just keep them quiet! And you can’t even do that!’ and the door of his forbidden study slamming and the sobbing of their mother.

  ‘Where was it,’ she said, keeping her voice steady, ‘that you were giving some talk or other, and there were men in academic robes?’

  Her father looked out the window. ‘Oh, I did a few of those,’ he said. ‘Various universities. I was the leading light there for a while.’ And now the leading light and terrifying door-slammer was a frail old-age pensioner with thin silver hair and skin and eyes that were very like hers. Gemma’s own brimmed with tears. ‘That was a long time ago,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised you can remember it.’

  ‘Kit remembers a lot more,’ said Gemma, then wished she hadn’t.

  ‘Ah, Kit,’ he said. ‘She was always on the look-out.’

  ‘For what?’ said Gemma, surprising herself.

  Her father shrugged. ‘The first born is always more tuned in to what’s going on. More alert. I did a very good paper once on the effects of birth order in families.’

  ‘I’d like to see that one day,’ said Gemma. ‘And I’m sure Kit would, too.’

  Suddenly he swung round on her. ‘Does she still think I did it?’

  There was a shocked silence and then Gemma nodded. ‘Yes, I’m afraid she does.’

  ‘So how does she feel about you seeing me again?’

  ‘She’s not very happy about it. But she accepts that I have my own way of doing things.’

  ‘She followed in my footsteps,’ he said. ‘She’s a therapist.’ Gemma could hear the pride in his voice and she felt a twinge of jealousy. ‘Is she any good? Does she get good results with her clients?’

  ‘You’d have to ask her that. She doesn’t work like you did,’ said Gemma. ‘She’s a bioenergetic therapist.’

  ‘Bioenergetics.’ He made a dismissive sound. ‘Psychiatrists have always been able to make a lot of money out of hysterical women. I suppose she knows that mad old Reich died disgrac
ed in prison. Him and his orgone box.’

  ‘Who?’ said Gemma.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘The important thing is whether you believe I did it or not.’

  They had never talked like this before. Now, driving along in the car with the day going on around them, the traffic, the people on the streets, the ordinariness of daily life, such intimacy seemed perfectly acceptable. It was almost as if now he was out, everything else had to come out, too.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe you did.’

  She felt him relax beside her and lean back in the seat. ‘All the evidence was circumstantial,’ he said. ‘They never explained that footprint. It wasn’t mine. There was no way anyone could have said that I did it except for the bloodstain pattern interpretation. And that was always going to be controversial. The defence expert said that the blood on my jacket was consistent with what I said—that your mother coughed on me as she was being lifted onto the stretcher. There was always argument about the time of the attack. Naturally the prosecution put it at the time I got home. The defence and I knew it was earlier.’

  Gemma found herself picturing this, the bleeding woman on the stretcher, her father helping lift her mother from the dining room floor and then onto the stretcher and into the back of the ambulance, the terrible facial injuries from the black and white crime scene photographs in her mind now brilliant with blood.

  ‘These days,’ she said, ‘more and more cases are hanging on expert versus expert. I’m going to show the crime scene photographs to a visiting bloodstain expert.’

  Her father looked at her, very interested. ‘Name of?’ he asked.

  ‘Dr Zelda Firestone.’

  Her father shook his head. ‘I should know her name,’ he said, ‘but I don’t.’ He paused and Gemma noticed his head fall forward onto his chest a moment, as if he were praying or thinking deeply. ‘For a long time,’ he said after a while, ‘I did everything I could to get my case reopened. I did a lot of work on the action of blood and bloodstain interpretation. People forget that psychiatrists have a medical degree first. But time after time I was knocked back on appeal. That, and the life of a convict—’ His voice faltered. ‘—eventually wore me down. I just gave up.’ Then he swung around on her and Gemma glanced quickly at him and back at the road but not before noticing that he was furious. ‘I should never have been convicted!’ he said. ‘Things happened exactly as I told them at the time. That is the truth.’

  ‘I’m going to do everything in my power,’ she said, ‘to get your case reopened.’

  Her father seized her hand on the steering wheel, squeezed it, and let it go. ‘My daughter,’ he said, ‘my little Gemfish.’ He seemed overcome for a few moments and Gemma’s eyes blurred with tears. She swallowed hard.

  At the lights, her father looked around at the shops and pedestrians. ‘So busy,’ he said. ‘This area used to be almost rural.’ He noticed a bottleshop across the road with an advertisement for specials on Hahndorf wines. ‘Ha!’ he snorted. ‘Still a touch of the barnyard. I wonder if they’d sell as much of that wine if the buyers knew it translates as Cock Town Wines!’ This only amused him for a moment and he fell back into a brooding silence.

  ‘My story has never changed,’ he said finally. ‘I did not touch your mother that night except when I picked her up and helped the ambulance officers.’ Gemma changed lanes ready to turn onto the motorway. Her father had turned away and was staring out his window. He remained silent for the rest of the trip, brooding in some place of his own.

  Gemma briefly came in with her father to his new Glebe address, a small flat at the back of a grand old terrace that opened out onto a dark, overgrown garden. There were two bedrooms, a lounge and a large kitchen that opened out with lead-light windows onto a quarry-tiled patio before the jungle of oleanders, palms and hibiscus that barely flowered because of the lack of light. The flat itself had a subterranean feel to it and the eastern walls were sandstone, cut out of the living rock. He seemed pleased to make her a cup of coffee and show her around.

  ‘I feel very much at home now. I’ve been staying here,’ he told her, ‘on weekend release. Paul is a nice fellow. You’ll like him. I’ve told him all about my clever private investigator daughter.’ In his room, he already had a desk and small computer set up under the window next to his single bed. ‘I want to get all my papers and records out of storage,’ he said. ‘Do you know anyone with a van who’d like to earn some extra money?’

  ‘Noel,’ she said. ‘One of my operators. He’s always wanting more work. And he’s got a big van.’ She gave her father Noel’s number and he pocketed it. She wanted to ask him about Rowena Wylde, but decided to leave that until a later date. She wanted to check the woman out herself first. She agreed to come over for dinner on a night to be arranged next week, said goodbye and drove home. When she arrived, the phone was ringing and she ran to pick it up. It was her father.

  ‘You don’t know what it means,’ he said, ‘to know you believe me. I want my name cleared. And it’s not just that. I want compensation for the thirty years I spent in the hell of the New South Wales prison system. I want a fortune in compensation. I want a lot of money—not for me any more, I’m getting on. But so that I can leave it to my daughters. So that—’ Gemma heard his voice break, ‘—so that I can at last be some sort of father to my girls.’

  Gemma felt tears coming to her eyes and she quickly blinked them away by thinking like a cop. ‘Someone bludgeoned my mother to death,’ she said. There was a long silence at the other end of the line. ‘And the problem for me,’ Gemma paused, ‘is that he’s still out there.’

  Thirteen

  Gemma fiddled with the manila envelope while she rang the number Dr Zelda Firestone had given her. ‘I’m staying at a serviced suite in Liverpool Street,’ the American told her and gave her the address. ‘I would not be available to look at the crime scene photographs until an evening later in the week. What about Thursday evening? Seven?’

  ‘We’ve waited thirty years,’ said Gemma. ‘Thursday evening at seven will be fine.’ She rang off and picked up the remains of the croissants. They were in several pieces, duly chewed and spread over the kitchen floor. Pastry wasn’t Taxi’s favourite food, but he always liked to test anything he found just to make sure. She called out to him and was surprised that he didn’t come running. Outside, the nor’easter buffeted her umbrella and she went out onto the deck to fold it down. Once, it had gone flying like a crazy javelin to impale itself on a patch of ground near the brush that led down to the ocean. She called Taxi again, but no ginger shape came waddling across the grass towards her. The sea was now battleship grey under a pale apple green sky with the haze on the horizon foretelling a change.

  She switched on the television to watch the news. The abduction of Bianca Perrault was the lead story and there was footage showing the police activity around the Perrault house. ‘Women should make sure doors and windows are secure,’ said Davey, now a Superintendent, squinting because he was short-sighted, Gemma remembered, but too vain to wear glasses.

  She suddenly felt starving. In the cupboard, she found a tin of sardines and an old lemon and made herself sardines on toast. She was finishing up the last piece, walking into the lounge area with the plate under her chin to catch the crumbs, when the crumpled twist of a terrible car crash on the television caused her to stop in her tracks. ‘Police have released the name of the driver, killed instantly when her car careered out of control and collided with an oncoming semi-trailer. She was sixty-four-year-old Imelda Moresby.’ Gemma froze, mid-chew. She didn’t hear the rest of the news item. She remembered the dead woman’s strange words about everything going in twos. She recalled the words about the stirring of evil, and Kit’s warnings about old energies being aroused.

  A sickening sense of responsibility assailed her. Did I do this? she asked herself. Did I bring this violent car crash on by reo
pening some archive from the past and letting some psychic genie out of a bottle? Don’t be so silly, she told herself sternly. I’m sounding like some flakey New Ager. But she was shaken, and the fact that Taxi still wasn’t home frightened her. She looked around, expecting to see him waiting there, licking his chops. ‘Where are you?’ she said out loud, irritated by his absence.

  ‘We are karmically linked,’ Mrs Moresby had said, or something like that. So it was with more dread that she fetched the photographs again and briefly flipped through the notebooks, sitting at the table. The pages were filled with notes of interviews, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, memory aids in the man’s neat, square writing. Her eyes stopped at the name Dr Rowena Wylde, as well as her address and phone number. Underneath were other names and addresses. Names from thirty years ago. And Mrs Moresby was dead. She rang Kit and left a message to say she’d be over later.

  •

  When Clive came into Kit’s therapy room, he sat right down on the mattresses without any comment. He was more relaxed than he’d been before, Kit thought. More comfortable about being grounded and on eye level with her. Perhaps he was starting to trust her, to feel that she had no axe to grind with him, no agenda that he had to conform with.

  ‘I’ve found a new friend,’ he announced. Kit cocked her head as if to say ‘is that so’, indicating she’d like to hear more.

  ‘Yes,’ said Clive. ‘A young bloke. We had an outing together.’

  Kit waited, so he went on. ‘That probably doesn’t sound much to you. But ever since the wife left, and since this problem developed, I haven’t felt like going anywhere much at all, especially with another man. It mightn’t sound much to you, but it was a big thing for me. We went for a drive to the Blue Mountains. He has an auntie living there.’