Feeding the Demons

by Gabrielle Lord

  Angie nodded absently and went back to her work. She noted that Bruno still hadn’t reported the results of the doorknock at South Coogee. Then something made her stop checking the progress reports. Liverpool. A knife. She put her pen down. The two together may mean nothing, she thought, but some instinct alerted her. She went to the door. ‘Jason,’ she called. ‘Who’s handling it?’

  ‘Mark Condon. Liverpool detectives.’

  ‘Good,’ said Angie. ‘I’ve worked with him a few times.’ She immediately rang Mark, who wasn’t available, but she heard something that made her very interested indeed. ‘We’ve got a knife here,’ the policewoman on the other end of the line told her, ‘with a very distinctive hook at the end.’

  ‘I sent out a description of a knife like that,’ said Angie. ‘In connection with the murder investigation of the woman at Maroubra.’

  ‘You know how many of those come in?’ said the policewoman on the other end. ‘We haven’t got the time or the staff to follow up our own investigations properly, let alone chase after stuff from other areas.’

  Angie knew it was true. ‘Where’s Mark?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s with the others still at the crime scene. Unless he’s gone to the morgue.’

  ‘What’s the address of the dead’un? I’ll be there,’ Angie said, scribbling it down. ‘Soon as I can.’

  •

  She picked up Gemma in her car, and in less than two hours they pulled up outside the address Mark had given her. Gemma and Angie got out and walked past the police car outside and up the side passage to the main entrance. It was a square, ugly block of four flats. Angie knocked on the door of number three upstairs. A young constable wearing disposable overalls let them in.

  ‘We’re just about to cut him down,’ said Mark, turning round to them, smiling as they walked into the flat. ‘We left him up for a while. He’s been a bit of a teaching aid.’ His squat body looked overdressed in a dark suit and tie and his hair was much greyer than last time Angie had see him. He wore pink rubber gloves rather than thin disposable ones. ‘Just about everyone’s been and gone,’ he paused, ‘except for him.’ He indicated a Crime Scene detective from Liverpool who was still squatting over his little suitcase, putting his phials and specimens away. Mark turned his attention back to the reason they were all gathered in the small flat with worn floral carpet and anonymous furniture. ‘Don’t see many deaths like this out here so I’ve been bringing people in to have a look before the contractors arrive.’

  Gemma looked over her friend’s shoulder and into the room. The grotesque figure, shocking in lace garter belt and panties, dangled right in the centre of a large square doorway, turning slightly on the rope from which he hung, his head bowed onto his chest, over a large-cupped bra. One of his stockinged legs wore a high-heeled shoe; the other lay on the floor beneath him in a pool of blood. Just behind the hanging feet, a chair lay on its side. In the middle of his chest was a deep wound.

  ‘Who is he?’ Gemma asked.

  ‘Fellow called Adrian Adams,’ said Mark. ‘He’s been in and out of psych institutions for years. The local Mobile Treatment team know him very well.’

  ‘Adrian Adams!’ said Gemma, turning to her friend.

  ‘Yes,’ said Angie. ‘The fruit loop with the baby in the bath. It’s a small world.’ Gemma remembered the boxes of photographs of Kit. ‘Another one of your sister’s clients.’ Gemma didn’t respond.

  ‘At this stage, the doc doesn’t like to say what killed him,’ Mark was saying. ‘We’ll have a better idea after the PM.’

  ‘I’m no doctor,’ said Gemma, ‘but may I draw your attention to a bloody great stab wound in his chest?’

  ‘The doc isn’t sure whether it’s suicide or something else,’ Mark explained. ‘We’re still treating it as a suspicious death at this stage.’

  ‘It sure looks like homicide,’ said Gemma. ‘What do you think?’

  Mark answered her by turning to Angie. ‘Remember that young bloke we were called out to at Padstow? The one we found with a bloody great knife sticking out of his chest and the local guys were treating it as murder?’

  Angie nodded, explaining to Gemma. ‘It turned out he’d done it himself,’ she said. ‘Mark and me found the different attempts at the suicide note screwed up in his bedroom wastepaper bin.’

  ‘When you’ve been in the game for as long as I have,’ said Mark, ‘you find that all the things they say in the books about how it’s impossible for people to kill themselves in certain ways are wrong. I’ve seen everything. Talking of stabbings,’ he added, pointing with a pale-gloved finger. ‘That’s what came out of that hole in his chest.’

  Angie walked over to a table where a bloody knife lay on a piece of fabric. She leaned closer to see it better. The serrations on one side of its blade ended in a little turned-up point. ‘That’s my knife!’ she said. ‘I’ll lay any odds that’s the one that killed Bianca Perrault.’ She felt a thrill of recognition and satisfaction that her instincts had been on track.

  ‘We can’t be sure of that,’ said Mark.

  Angie hardly heard him as he picked up his mobile to ring the contractors again. Angie tried to make sense of it. ‘We’ve got this knife here with one man, and her pink panties with another one.’ She shook her head and pulled out a cigarette. ‘Killers One and Two? I don’t know what’s going on here. The Turkish water cats start looking better.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Gemma. ‘Think about it. If this joker in the high heels is one of them, he’s Killer One, the little creep with the camera and the perving who only killed when he was interrupted. Then he teams up with someone very nasty and now they’ve split up because Amy got away. Adrian Adams has offed himself like a third of all murderers do. And the other one’s still out there.’

  ‘Don’t you contaminate my crime scene,’ Mark said as Angie lit up.

  She ignored him. ‘I want the details on that knife asap,’ she said. ‘When’s the post-mortem?’

  ‘Probably this afternoon. I don’t think we’ve got a backlog.’ He pulled his gloves off. ‘We’re talking to everyone in the building. He only had one visitor. A man who came here a couple of times.’ Angie and Gemma looked at each other. Killer Two? ‘We’re working on a description at the moment,’ Mark continued. ‘Someone’s talking to his mother, trying to get names from her. He doesn’t seem to have had any friends or acquaintances.’

  ‘No,’ said Angie. ‘He does—did—his socialising around four in the morning. Let me know the result of the PM the minute you get it.’ She considered. ‘It could be a self-administered knife blow just prior to toppling off the chair or it’s possible someone stabbed him and then strung him up.’ She considered further. ‘Or after he strung himself up.’

  ‘Not for us to say really. But look around you,’ said Mark. ‘Everything’s hunky dory. No sign of a struggle. Would you let someone do that to you without a fight?’ Gemma surveyed the place. The yellow lounge and chairs, the television, a formica table with four chairs still around it, the fifth now lying on its side near the dead man. Neat, bland, perfectly in order. Except for the extraordinary grotesque hanging from the door jamb.

  The Liverpool Crime Scene detective slipped the knife into a labelled cardboard cylinder, pressed the lid on firmly and stood up. ‘We were called out to a guy once that the water police hauled out of Glebe Bay,’ he said. ‘He’d taken rat poison, weighed himself down with chains, shot himself and then toppled off the end of the wharf.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ Angie exhaled. ‘Could it be suicide?’

  ‘Actually, no,’ said the detective. ‘He practically fell into the water police boat. They raced him to the nearest ICU and he was up and out in a few days.’

  •

  Garry Copeland walked into Angie’s office two hours later, just as Gemma was about to leave. ‘Mark Condon rang f
rom Liverpool while you were out,’ he said to Angie. ‘And I’ve just been talking to the PM doctor. There’s no doubt that the knife they found stuck in the chest of the suspicious death down Liverpool way is the same one that killed Bianca Perrault. Amy gave us a positive ID on Adrian Adams. She says he was the man she saw. Poor girl started shaking and crying the minute she saw the photograph, even when we told her he was well and truly dead. The boss wants us to wind down the investigation. We’ve got the murder weapon. We’ve got one killer accounted for. We keep looking for Clive Mindell and grab him when he shows up. It’s only a matter of time.’

  But Angie shook her head. ‘What if the doctor comes up with murder rather than suicide?’

  ‘Well,’ said Garry. ‘Funny you should mention that. The doctor said the heart can keep going for a while. That he could have got himself all rigged up in his lace, stabbed himself, and bled a lot after he’d jumped off the chair. Or that someone else could have stabbed him while he was hanging—taking advantage of the situation as it were. The angle of the injury is ambiguous—could have been self-inflicted. Or not. The only prints on the knife are his.’

  ‘In either case that’d be expected.’

  ‘Yes,’ Garry Copeland agreed. ‘But I feel we’ve broken its back. The case, I mean.’

  Gemma shrugged. ‘I’m not so sure,’ she said.

  Angie frowned. ‘The boss’s already told me to wind down the investigation.’

  On the way out of the room, Copeland stopped in his tracks. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘Mark Condon told me to tell you that they found boxes of stuff when they went through Adrian Adams’ things. Photographs of women taken with long range cameras.’

  Gemma felt the hairs on the back of her neck stiffen. ‘He had an obsession with my sister,’ she said. ‘We found boxes of her all over another flat of his.’

  ‘Maybe you should go and look through them, see if there’s anyone you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ll do that.’

  Twenty-Nine

  Kit picked up the phone. ‘Hullo?’ she said.

  ‘It’s me. Clive.’

  ‘Clive? Where are you?’

  ‘Don’t be crazy. I can’t tell you that. Please believe me when I say I had nothing to do with Bianca Perrault’s death. Or the abduction of her sister.’

  Kit waited. On the other end of the line, she could hear the distressed breathing of her caller.

  ‘I’m writing to that policewoman in charge of the case. I’m explaining how I got those panties. Maybe she’ll believe me then. I’ve been holed up like an animal for days. I can’t come to therapy. I can’t go anywhere. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Clive, how did you get those panties?’

  ‘Exactly like I said. I found them in the wheelie bin outside the girl’s house. I was there watching all the police activity the night the older girl was taken.’ His voice became more excited. ‘That’s it! I can prove it. A young policeman told me to go away or he’d charge me with something. He’ll remember that. He’ll remember me. And the wheelie bin was there in the driveway near the road. You tell that policewoman to find that copper.’

  Kit thought about it. Clive had been there, watching the police activity early that morning. It only made Clive look worse, more complicit, more involved. Even the Victorians knew that killers are drawn to the scene of the crime.

  ‘Clive. The best thing is to come forward. If you’re innocent—’

  ‘See? Even you don’t believe me.’

  ‘Because you’re innocent,’ Kit said. ‘You must come forward.’ But he’d already rung off.

  •

  The three women sat around the table in Kit’s kitchen. On a big platter in the middle was a pile of buttered home-made bread and several containers of jams.

  ‘We’ve got Killer One either suicided, or murdered, probably by Killer Two. Which means,’ said Angie, ‘we’ve still got a very dangerous man on the loose.’

  ‘Maybe it’s Killer Two suicided or murdered. Maybe Adrian Adams was the dominant personality.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Angie. ‘Killer Two is the more violent. From what I know about him, everything points to Adrian Adams being the clothes wanker. We know for sure he had an obsession with peeping. It’d be unlikely the other way round.’ She turned to Kit. ‘We’ve got some information about Clive Mindell’s CV,’ she said. ‘As far as we know, he’s never done any security work.’ She looked disappointed at this. ‘He’s never said anything about that sort of work?’ Kit shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s always been in managerial jobs. Since he was a young boy.’ He’d trained at Woolworths, Kit remembered.

  ‘American data is very different,’ Angie said. ‘But the sort of profile that fits the guy we’re looking for often mentions a background in security work. Gives them a chance to carry a weapon, beat people up, stand over people. That sort of thing. Remember this little charmer is all about domination and power.’ Kit thought of Clive and his need to dominate.

  ‘But isn’t it just as usual to find a history of unemployment?’ Gemma asked.

  ‘That’s true,’ said Angie. ‘And it’s also possible that if your operator is right with his gut feeling, the guy in the white Toyota is the one we’re looking for. He’d easily get a flashing blue light so that he could pull Amy and the dead boyfriend over.’ She stood up and went to the door. ‘Mind you, Clive Mindell could have done all those things without any background in security work. May I smoke?’ she asked Kit.

  ‘Stay by the door and you’re fine,’ Kit replied.

  ‘And another thing,’ said Angie, putting her cigarette lighter back in her pocket. ‘Killer Two might just as easily be someone in employment. Which leads me to my point. The man we’re looking for might be employed right now in the security industry. Someone like that has plenty of free range with his time. He’s on the road all day.’

  Gemma thought of Spinner and his precise, intelligent reports. Of Noel and his dogged, never-let-up-on-them determination. They called in several times a day to let her know where they were. Or she checked on them. She knew two operators in the security industry who were well and truly off the hook. ‘What is your point?’ she asked Angie.

  ‘Try this on,’ said her friend, exhaling and waving the smoke outside. ‘We only have Spinner’s word about that Toyota. What if he’s the killer? He’d worked out which unit the Perrault women were in. He could have seen Amy sneak out to meet her boyfriend. What if the white Toyota is all bullshit and Skinner just picked some innocent driver’s rego?’

  Gemma was stunned. Then she felt sick. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s just not possible. It’s a crazy idea.’

  ‘Crazy ideas are what we deal in, Gemma. Crazy people with crazy ideas that they carry out.’

  Gemma continued to shake her head. ‘I know Spinner,’ she said.

  ‘Like you know Clive Mindell?’ Angie shot at Kit. ‘Seems there’s a hell of a lot of knowing round here.’

  ‘Angie,’ said Kit. ‘I thought you were positive that Clive Mindell and Killer Two are one and the same. I got the idea the investigation was winding down because all you need to do now is pick Clive up.’ She paused. ‘So why are you conjecturing a whole new scenario?’

  ‘Because everything’s up in the air and I don’t know anything for sure,’ said Angie.

  ‘I’ve had a couple of calls from Clive,’ said Kit. ‘No,’ she said, pre-empting any question, ‘he didn’t say where he was. But he was terrified and distressed. He wasn’t cocky or triumphant at all. It’s not him, Angie.’

  Angie crushed the cigarette underfoot, picked it up and looked around for the kitchen bin. She threw it in and pushed the hair away from her face with both hands. She looked drawn and tired. ‘What do you think, Gem?’ she asked. ‘You used to be a good cop.’

  Gemma loo
ked down at a mark on the table. It looked a bit like an eye. Idly, she traced its outline with a finger. ‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ she said. ‘I think Adrian Adams was the clothes wanker who killed when he was interrupted. I think he then teamed up with Killer Two who murdered Bianca and would have murdered Amy except for her amazing guts and intelligence. I think that Killer Two then murdered Adrian Adams. He’d be a liability. Unstable, unreliable. Killer Two might even believe that Amy’s escape was because of him. Somehow—and I doubt if we’ll ever find out how—Killer Two knew what Adrian Adams liked to do from time to time in the autoerotic line. And while Adrian is least expecting it, wham, Killer Two drives that knife into his chest between the sternum and the ribs. And there you are. It looks like a suicide.’ She looked around at the others. ‘You see, he doesn’t know that we know about his existence. He’s set things up to look like we’ve got the killer the whole state is looking for. But then Amy got away and she knows there were two of them. So that’s spoiled his cover.’ She looked up at Angie, who was listening intently.

  Kit looked from one to the other. ‘What is his next move?’ she asked.

  Angie looked to Gemma, then back to Kit. ‘Hard to say,’ she said.

  ‘Amy getting away from him will be a real blow to his sense of domination and control,’ Kit reminded them. ‘He’ll be boiling to punish her for escape. He’ll be enraged over that.’

  ‘Don’t killers of that type also hang around the graves of their victims?’ Gemma asked.

  Angie nodded. ‘I reckon he’ll be very interested in Bianca’s funeral. Remember he sees himself as part of the family in some ghastly way. So I’ve managed to squeeze extra personnel out of the boss to cover that at least.’

  Gemma thought of the graveyard scene. The burial of the girl he had destroyed; the chance to get another look at the younger sister who had escaped him. ‘His’ family gathering round his handiwork. It would be very tempting for him. Especially now when he thought he was completely off the hook. If they could enhance that somehow. She suddenly remembered an overseas case she’d read about and the way a trap was baited to catch a murderer.