Their father sat looking down at the closed book he’d been writing in. He coughed and cleared his throat. ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ he said, slowly getting up from the table, and Kit noted how stiff he’d become. ‘You should know that I’ve had a bit of a change of heart about that.’
There was a flatness in his voice that alerted Kit. ‘Please be clear,’ she said, ‘and tell us what your change of heart is all about.’
He stood there with the table in front of him, like a defence, looking first at one then the other. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure any more whether that’s the right way to go. To go back into all that again.’
Gemma stared in disbelief. She looked around at her sister with eyes that were as big as Kit’s had been the night before. ‘All that again!’ she repeated in disbelief. ‘What are you talking about? We talked about this only a little while ago. You were passionate about it! What’s happened? Something must have happened to change you so completely.’ She felt Kit put a hand softly on her arm.
‘Nothing’s happened,’ he said, querulous. ‘It’s a lot of work, a lot to do at my age. A lot of raking over old coals.’
‘At your age indeed! And what raking? You don’t have to do anything,’ said Gemma. ‘I’ll do it all. I’m already doing it all!’ Her eyes blazed with anger and disappointment and she felt Kit’s hand tighten on her.
‘I’ve been thinking a lot about it, about the past,’ their father said, looking down and fiddling with the corner of the book he’d been reading. ‘I don’t want it all dragged up again. Everyone’s forgotten about it. No one remembers. No one cares. I’m just an anonymous man of nearly seventy these days. If we push for an inquiry, the story will be all over the papers again. I’ll be photographed, hunted by the press. You know what they’re like. I just realised that it was a good dream while I was in gaol. It kept me going. But now that I’m out, I don’t want to go through it all again. Besides, I want to write up my research papers. I’ve been saving all this stuff for thirty years in storage.’ He indicated the open door of the flat and Gemma looked in. She could see boxes and cartons piled up in the hallway; more of them were just visible through the opened curtains of her father’s bedroom window.
‘But Dad!’ Gemma almost stamped a foot. ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this. Think what it would mean to us!’ She turned away, not wanting to even look at him right now.
Kit stepped forward. ‘Here,’ she said to him. ‘I brought you these from my garden.’
‘That’s very good of you, Kit,’ he said and she came right up close to him and looked him in the face while she gave him the tiny colourful nosegay.
‘They’re pansies,’ she said, ‘and the very last of the snowdrops and that wonderful scarlet geranium. You can put them in a little vase or a jar if you haven’t got a vase.’ Behind her, she was aware of Gemma, standing in shock. She turned round to her sister. ‘Come on, Gems,’ she said. ‘Let’s go. We’ve got things to do.’
‘Um, I wonder,’ their father said, pausing as they turned back to him. For a second, a high and youthful hope filled Gemma’s heart. It was going to be all right. He was about to say, ‘I wonder if I’m not making a terrible mistake, dropping my case like this.’ Instead, what he said was shocking. ‘Would you two, between you, be able to come up with a sum of money? A thousand dollars? I hate having to ask.’
Gemma was stunned, and it was Kit who answered. ‘Yes, I think we could do that. We’ll sort it out somehow.’
They left their father still standing awkwardly near the table and Kit steered Gemma back to the car. ‘I can’t believe this,’ Gemma kept saying as she got into the car. Kit slid in on the other side. Gemma banged on the steering wheel. ‘Damn him! He can’t just do this now. What’s made him change his mind?’ she said, almost crying in frustration. ‘And then he’s got the nerve to put the fucking bite on us!’
Her sister looked across at her. ‘Gems,’ she said, ‘you’ve got to let it go. It’s his business. His life, after all.’
Gemma started up the car. ‘But I’ve already started working on it,’ she said. ‘I’ve got new evidence. I’ve got an internationally renowned expert who will say that the blood was already clotting when my father got it on his clothes. This can only mean that his story is true. He’ll be pardoned. He’ll be an honourable man again.’ She turned back onto Glebe Point Road, heading south, narrowly missing a young woman in purple and black velvet whose ears, eyebrows and lips were adorned with silver rings. ‘Not to mention,’ she said angrily, ‘a bloody fortune in compensation. He could be rich and clear his name.’
‘Maybe,’ Kit said, ‘that’s more important to you, Gemma, than it is to him.’
Gemma drove in angry silence, taking the turns too fast, braking at the last moment, swearing at other unwitting users of the road. ‘He talked to me about leaving us a lot of money,’ Gemma said as they drove along Anzac Parade. ‘As if it was really important to him. That we were important to him. He said he wanted to be a decent father to us after all this time. So why does he do this now after all he said?’ She was suddenly furious. ‘It’s still his fucking work that’s the important thing. Even now, his bloody ego still wants to be published as the great doctor, humanity’s benevolent helper. He doesn’t want to do the other book. He doesn’t care about his daughters. He doesn’t care about us! And then he’s got the cheek to go and put the bite on us. I haven’t got any money. I’m running at a loss at the moment. I’ve had one big deposit cheque in the last month and that’s paying my people’s salaries. After that, I don’t know what’s going to happen unless business picks up. Then he goes and pulls a stunt like he did just then.’
‘I know, I know,’ said Kit. ‘It’s awful. I feel angry too, and I don’t have your investment in the situation.’ She paused as Gemma angrily shifted gears, over-revving the car. ‘I’ll send him the money,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about that. I still have some put away from the sale of the house. I haven’t got anywhere near enough to buy anything so I might as well let him have some. I must owe him some sort of debt after all these years of believing he killed our mother.’ She looked out the window at some children playing on the footpath. ‘Gems, I went up really close to him when I gave him those flowers,’ she said. ‘I looked right into his face, his eyes—’ She stopped.
‘And?’ Gemma said in a clipped angry voice, pretending she didn’t care at all.
‘And I saw what was there.’
‘Tell me!’
Kit turned to her sister. ‘His eyes were full of fear.’
‘Fear! What could he possibly fear?’ Gemma turned the wheel hard. ‘He’s got nothing to lose and everything to gain. Now he’s off and running with another project. What could he fear?’
They drove in silence until Gemma turned into Kit’s street and pulled over outside her place.
‘Do you want to come in?’ Kit asked her, but Gemma shook her head.
‘I’m too pissed off,’ she said. ‘I’d be awful company. I’ll call later when I’ve calmed down.’
‘Okay,’ said Kit, and Gemma barely acknowledged her sister, swinging back out onto the road again and taking off.
There was still no Taxi waiting for her near the front door, nearly tripping her as she came inside. She flung her coat and keys on the hall table, grabbed a fruit juice from an almost empty fridge, cursed when she realised she’d have to go shopping in a major way soon, and took the drink out onto the deck. It was a perfect spring day with fluffy white clouds in a light blue sky over a deep blue sea. She sat scowling at the horizon until something dawned in her mind. For behaviour to change, she remembered, reality has to change. Just as something had changed in the killer’s life to change his MO, something had changed in her father’s life and whatever it was, its reflection had caused him to make a complete about-face. She almost rang Kit but decided she’d try working t
his one out by herself. Under all the agitation in her mind, the memory of Steve’s rejection of her stung and she suspected that this was a contributing factor to the emotional turbulence concerning her father. She wanted to pick up Taxi and squeeze his lovely, comforting plumpness, make him grunt. She tossed the remains of the fruit juice over the rails into the garden and went into her office, hearing the two-way crackle into life.
‘Tracker Two to base, copy please.’
She pressed the two-way and spoke. ‘Yes, Noel, go ahead.’
‘I’ve got the works on that driver who’s been stealing fuel,’ said Noel. ‘He came in at three bloody am this morning. I’ve got it all on video, so will you ring the insurance people and organise a private viewing?’
‘We’ll need to bring the cops in on this,’ she said.
‘Bob Blackett at Parramatta detectives.’ Gemma grabbed a pen and scribbled down the number that Noel gave her. ‘He knows all about it. The cops have had their eye on this bloke for a while.’ Gemma underlined the Parramatta detective’s name on her notepad.
‘That means,’ said Gemma, ‘that you’ll have to stay on him.’
‘I know, I know,’ said Noel. ‘It’s all part of the job. If it’s not sitting on this bunny it’s another one. Oh,’ he said, ‘I’ve picked up the cameras we’ll need for the Cross Weld job. When do you want to do that?’
Gemma glanced at her diary and slammed it shut. ‘What about this afternoon,’ she said. ‘I’ll phone him and tell him.’
It was good, she thought, to have plenty to be getting on with. It took her mind off the deep disappointment and bewilderment about her father, the sadness about Steve. And the growing fear that this time Taxi was gone for good.
But it didn’t work for long, and after a little while she found herself connected to the Internet, punching in the phone number on the little scrap of dirty paper from Steve’s wheelie bin. She had a program, Ozziefone, that worked like a back-to-front phone book. ‘Number not listed’ said her screen. Damn, she thought. A silent number. The next step would cost her over a hundred dollars and was illegal, but in a world where information is worth money, corruption is inevitable; in certain cases, she liked to think, almost necessary. She made another phone call to the man she called her ‘Communications Adviser’ and passed the unlisted number over to him. She arranged to meet him at the Duke of Marlborough that night.
Nineteen
Kit sat in the kitchen, working on her letter to Will. ‘My dear son’, she’d written.
This letter is to tell you how deeply I regret the way I wasn’t available to you when you were growing up and especially during those difficult early adolescent years. I thought that feeding you and washing your clothes, fussing about your school grades, arguing with you, nagging you about homework and discussing books with you was relationship. I’ve learned a lot over the last few years since you went away and I’ve learned that real relationship is acceptance of the other. I was always pushing you, wanting you to ‘do well’. I couldn’t accept you the way you were. No wonder kids suicide. I know from my own experience with your father how dreadful it must have been for you to have no one you could talk to—really talk to. And no one who could listen to you. One day, maybe you will trust me enough to tell me how it was for you. I regret this failing of mine more deeply than I can say and I ask for your forgiveness. I love you dearly.
The tears came as she signed ‘Mum’ and folded it up in an envelope, writing his name in block letters on the front. Then she propped it up near the shopping list she’d made for herself. She was going to drive up to Arcadia to buy water lilies for the pond, punnets of white petunias to plant in the garden and large terracotta pots for lavender cuttings she’d been striking. She wanted to make her father a large pot of flowering annuals, maybe white and lemon petunias, to add colour to the shadowy patio outside his small bedroom window at Glebe.
The huge and surprising fact of his newly revealed innocence seemed to illuminate everything around her; she would need time to allow the new information to settle into her mind. At the moment, it agitated and excited her in a way she couldn’t have anticipated, like some new love affair. A heavy burden had lifted from her. Her body felt lighter. Suddenly, her heart was saying, I have a father. A father who wasn’t any good at the job, but nevertheless is the father life has given me, and a man who has been treated with great injustice. Where does this leave me? What do I need to do about it? She rang Alexander and made a time to see him. She even wanted to call Gerald but checked the impulse. She could feel energy swirling through her feet, fizzing through her blood like effervescence. Finishing old business like this, acknowledging her part in her son’s messy life, acknowledging the effect her father’s innocence was having on her, created new energy, completions led to new beginnings, all these things, she knew, enhanced the flow of life itself. She would buy ricotta cheese and black cherries and make a pie to share with her father.
•
Next morning, Gemma woke to the alarm at a quarter to five, and was on the road twenty minutes later. Oh Taxi, my darling old piece of pudding, where are you? I’ll start a pet security firm in your honour. I’ll locate missing animals for grieving owners. I’ll charge them heaps and they’ll be happy to pay. The thought brought her no joy at all.
At this hour, driving in Sydney was a breeze; no congestion on any of the major arteries. She’d had a vodka with the Communications Adviser, and when she shouted him and paid with a new hundred dollar bill, she gave him the change as well. In return, he’d passed her an envelope with an anonymous slip of paper in it and an address in Artarmon. Now she was driving across the Harbour Bridge and the east was streaked with apricot and lavender skies, the same tones reflecting in a choppy sea.
Gemma screwed up the piece of paper with the address and threw it out the car window. Don’t do this, one part of her mind told another. Leave it be.
At 5.35 am, she turned into Fleming Avenue, a long, tree-lined street in leafy, quiet Artarmon. A man walking a little dog looked up as her lights swung past him and she drove the length of the street, finding 112 almost at the end. She turned the corner past the address and, further down the road, did a U-turn to retrace her route, parking across the road several houses down from the target house. Magpies warbled from the trees and she leaned back, taking a deep breath. The day was lightening visibly all around her now and she saw a man leaving the house next to 112, walk to his car, get in and turn the windscreen wipers on to smooth away the heavy dew. As the wipers cut two clean interlocking arcs on his windscreen, Gemma sat up and leaned forward because someone was coming out of 112. It wasn’t Steve, but a nuggety, well-built man who walked like a cop. He also got in a car and started the engine. Then he looked over at her car and Gemma shrank as he suddenly made direct eye contact. She averted her glance, pretending to rummage in the glovebox, willing him to go. After what seemed a long moment, she heard the sound of his car pulling away, heard him do a U-turn almost in front of her. To get a better look at her? If he was a cop, he might have developed the sixth sense that told him the woman in the car over the road was out of place.
Gemma ducked right down, leaning over to pick up a nonexistent something from the floor of the passenger seat side. When she was sure he’d gone, she straightened up. She was rattled. She started the car and drove away quickly. What if he’d seen her? What if he told Steve a woman of her description had been sitting off this place? She felt the hot flush of shame cover her face and neck. This is pathetic, she thought to herself. I’m a highly skilled professional woman behaving like a bloody stalker. Then she relaxed. Men look at women. It’s part of life. It’s all right, she told herself. I’m getting paranoid. She swung the car onto the Pacific Highway and drove home.
When she got there, she felt terrible, with no stomach to do anything let alone work. She put coffee on and leaned on the sink, staring out the window at the bushes and tree f
erns that grew there. Now that her father had changed his mind and there was no great cause to channel emotional and physical energy into, a huge emptiness yawned within her. Everyone lets me down, even my bloody cat. Here I am, she thought, unable to make a lasting relationship with a man, and I’ve somehow attracted a vicious killer into my life and become involved in an investigation without even being a cop any more. I’ve risked the friendship with my sister in an effort to change history and save a man who turns out not to want to be saved after all. And so what do I do? Instead of getting on with my life I sit off the hiding place of a man who has made it very plain he doesn’t want to see me again, spying on his house like some obsessed school girl.
She jumped when the phone rang. Kit said she was going out for the day and would drop the letter she’d written to Will in Gemma’s post box. Her sister had barely hung up when the two-way came to life.
‘Tracker Three to base, copy please.’
‘Come in, Spinner,’ she said.
‘I’ve just been talking to Rose Georgiou,’ he said. ‘Oh boy. All she’d say was that the video was “satisfactory”. She’d been crying. She’s a really nice lady.’
‘And you’re a really good surveillance operator,’ Gemma said. ‘Don’t forget that.’
‘I guess we won’t be hearing any more from her,’ said Spinner.
No sooner had she signed off than the phone rang. It was Angie, her voice sharp with tension. ‘Come straight in,’ she said. ‘The killer has made contact by phone to the Perrault house.’
‘What?’ said Gemma. ‘I’m on my way.’ She switched the answering machine on and left the house. On the drive, she had to admit that horrible as it was, she was relieved that this new development on the Bianca Perrault case displaced her sense of disappointment and loss.
Feeding the Demons Page 21
