‘Dad? What—’ Then she screamed. ‘He’s got a gun!’
But it was too late, her father had pushed past her and into the room. ‘Put that down, Kreutzvalt,’ he commanded. ‘Put it down at once.’
‘Come out here, doctor,’ the armed man gestured. ‘Out onto the balcony. Do it, or I’ll kill your daughter.’
‘All right, all right,’ Gemma heard her father say from a long way away. Shock and sedation were making her mind waver, so that she seemed to be coming and going in waves. She steeled herself into consciousness. ‘Don’t harm her,’ her father was saying. ‘This is between you and me, Arik.’
‘It was,’ said the man with the Uzi. ‘Then she comes along and wants to reopen the case. I’ve spent thirty years putting the past behind me. I’m not going to let one mistake destroy the rest of my life. If the new evidence cleared him,’ Richard Cross swung around to Gemma, ‘you’d’ve come after me. You leave me no choice.’
‘It was you!’ said Gemma. ‘Mrs Moresby heard you breaking in half an hour before my father returned home.’
‘I was only your father’s agent. I was a patient of his. Unstable, psychotic—they were the labels in those days. I carried out the doctor’s instructions.’
Everything goes in twos, Mrs Moresby had said. Two sisters thirty years ago. Two Perrault girls. Two killers at Liverpool. Two killers thirty years ago. And here they both were. Gemma put her hands over her ears, shaking her head. ‘Tell me it’s not true, Dad,’ Gemma said, her mouth dry with terror. She was afraid she’d wet her pants. ‘Please, Dad.’
But her father said nothing, his face turned away, in some other place of his own just as she’d seen him in her car on the drive home from Silverwater.
‘Outside,’ said Richard Cross. ‘Both of you onto the balcony.’
He ushered them through the doorway. The light drizzle had stopped but the night sky was black and sheet lightning flickered on the horizon over the Heads. A strong wind had come from nowhere and swirled around them, its vortices on the balcony causing dead leaves to stir and whisper. Gemma stood close by her father. My father murdered my mother. And because I clung to the past and I believed him to be innocent, I reactivated all this dormant evil. Some huge energy uncurled itself in her. Mindlessly, she threw herself on her father, hitting him in the face with all her strength. ‘You did it!’ she screamed. ‘You did it and I believed you!’ He skidded on the slippery surface of the wet balcony, but regained his balance. ‘I believed you! You were my father!’ She kept hitting him; she couldn’t hurt him enough. He didn’t try to stop her, just cowered under her blows, arms up to defend himself from her attack, huddled against the wall.
‘Stop it!’ The hard voice of the man with the Uzi wasn’t the only factor to make her drop her arms. Gemma suddenly slumped in despair. I think my heart will break, she thought to herself, if I don’t die of fear first. He did it just as surely as if he’d wielded the hammer himself. I am the child of a murderer.
She stood still, panting, her breath coming in sobs, aware of the racing of her blood. The wind howled around the tower building and she wanted to howl, too.
‘Go to the light,’ Cross commanded her. ‘Adjust the sensor unit. I paid a lot of money to you and you’ve done a bad job. Make it work.’ She could hear the contempt in his voice.
Gemma blinked, bewildered. Her brain had stopped working. While some primitive part warned of terrible danger, her conscious mind struggled to make sense of the situation. Her father was still slumped against the wall and Gemma took a step away from him and towards the lamp, picked out by the lights from Richard Cross’s apartment. The anaesthetic, the events of the day, her exhaustion, her emotional upheaval all combined to create the blankness in her mind. She kept moving as if in a dream. Go to the light, he’d said. That’s what the dying are instructed to do, she recalled from somewhere. To go towards the light. She kept walking and raised her right hand ready to adjust the sensor unit. In this unreal and heightened state, time slowed to a standstill. She was aware of the coldness of the wet ground beneath her feet.
Just before she touched the small white sensor, she heard her father’s cry behind her, ‘No, Gemma!’ Felt something hurtle towards her, then a shocking impact that crashed her painfully to the ground. Instinctively, she’d put out her arm to break the fall and a searing streak of agony shot up into her shoulder as the gash on her arm reopened. She sprawled hard, her head cracking against the eastern wall, crashing into her father, who fell almost on top of her.
The appalling sound of gunshots at close quarters blew her eardrums into deafness. She felt a pressing blackness in her head. She twisted her neck to the side, stunned, to see her father’s wide open mouth close by her and his soundless scream. In perfect silence, he was rolling away from her, his body protecting her from the 9 mm Parabellum cartridges that should have ripped through her chest.
Richard Cross had grabbed the balcony with one hand to steady himself, firing with his right, and the buck of the Uzi kicked his firing hand against the sensor unit of the light. From her position on the ground, Gemma could now see that there was no globe under the cowling of the lamp. It could never have gone on. As his firing arm touched the sensor, she saw his face also contort and his mouth open wide. An incredible tremor surged as some huge power of the air seized him, then his face contorted in a silent scream and hurled him over the balcony rail. Through the deep silence came the whiff of burning.
Gemma scrambled to the railing and knelt there, too weak to stand. She could see through the railings. Fifteen stories down, she could just discern his still form, making a broken little swastika shape on the ground near the greenery. She turned back to her father, whose lips were moving. I can’t hear you, she tried to say. I can’t hear you. His eyes were pleading with her. She knelt beside him, taking his hand in hers because there was nothing else she could do for him now. The tears finally streamed down her face. ‘Oh Daddy, oh Daddy,’ her mouth was saying, but she could only hear the words in her mind. Go towards the light, she told him.
Wet bare feet, electricity, the sensor that Richard Cross must have rewired, disconnecting the earth, running the live wire to the sensor unit so that her touch on the small, white, lethal sensor would complete the circuit and she would die, a victim as it would seem to her own company’s incompetence. But it didn’t happen like that, because at the very last you did what a father should do. You pushed me out of the way and died in the effort. In the light that fell on him from the windows of the unit, she could see that his lips were no longer moving and that his eyes had frozen. Gemma had seen that stillness in too many other eyes to mistake it. Go towards the light, she told him in the huge ringing silence that surrounded them both, shrouding them together as if they were the only two people in the world. She knelt back on her heels, heedless of the slanting drizzle that had started up again. She wondered if her hearing was returning and if she could hear sirens or if it was simply the deep and inner wailing of her grievous sorrow. She remembered it was her birthday.
Thirty-Four
It was nearly three in the morning by the time Kit tucked her in. ‘I’d sit with you for a while,’ she said to Gemma. ‘Except I’m whacked.’ She kissed her sister on the head and then climbed into the made-up lounge bed, leaving the bedroom door open so they could talk. Outside the storm had eased. The wound in Gemma’s left arm had been restitched; the police questioning had been mercifully brief, thanks to Angie’s intervention. In his carton, the kestrel scraped and flapped.
‘What’s that noise?’ Kit asked in the dark.
‘It’s the kestrel. I think he’s ready to fly,’ said Gemma. ‘You know that Dad saved my life,’ she said. ‘He worked out what would happen when I touched the sensor. He knocked me out of the way. He died for me.’
‘Yes,’ said Kit. ‘It goes a long way towards—’ She wasn’t sure how to finish it.
‘Towards making him my father again, our father again—in spite of everything,’ Gemma said. It was a long time since they’d shared a bedroom and talked in the dark like this, Kit thought.
‘What do you want done with the SCAN result?’ Kit asked.
‘Chuck it,’ said her sister from the bedroom. Her voice was getting drowsy as the painkillers and exhaustion kicked in. ‘You can tell me about it. Did he get it right?’
‘He got it right. The language showed significant signals of concealment and deception, he told me, indicating serious involvement in the death of our mother.’
‘You always knew that, Kit.’
And a little while later, ‘God, we’re a pair. Talk about karma.’
But Kit had gone to sleep.
Thirty-Five
Gemma and Kit sat on the grass near their mother’s grave. Behind the low stone walls the gentle hills, covered in rows of broken angels and marble crosses, fell away to the edge of the coast where waves surged and smoothed themselves over the rocks, in glassy rolls, or broke in foam, running back to join themselves and surge again. Calliopsis scattered gold all over the green, in some places clumped dense as blotches of yellow poster paint, and a jogger thudded past them round the sunken path that edged the cemetery. It was a perfect afternoon. Enormous white cumulus clouds piled above the sea, empty except for one long container ship.
‘Marianne Lincoln 1931–1966’, the black lettering on the grave header stated. ‘Daughter of Malcolm Lincoln, MBE’.
Kit was adding more roses to one of the tins, pushing them in with the long slender hands that Aunt Merle had told them were their mother’s. ‘Here we are, Mum,’ Kit said. ‘You’ve always known the truth. But he did save Gemma’s life and that’s got to be worth something, don’t you think?’ Kit rested back on her heels.
Fifty per cent of me is him, Gemma thought. And fifty per cent of Kit. I’ve even got his eyes. We have to deal with this no matter how difficult it is. The cemetery seemed suddenly eerily quiet with the great silence of the dead enclosing them.
Their father’s funeral, attended only by herself and Kit, Dr Rowena Wylde and Paul Lestrange, had been a brief, businesslike affair and Kit and Gemma decided to leave his ashes to be disposed of by the crematorium. It’s all tied up now, she said to her mother. All finished. Beside her, the wild yellow daisies blew in a light sea breeze.
‘How’s your arm?’ Kit asked, looking at the bandage.
‘Still a bit stiff, but the wound is healing. You know I reopened it when—’ She felt her voice wobble. ‘—when Dad pushed me away and I fell against the cement.’ She considered, looking at the surge of the waves; hearing the subdued thunder as they struck the rocky shelves below. ‘It was so clever, so nasty. It would’ve looked as if Noel had got the wiring wrong in the most basic way. Not even a first year apprentice would make that mistake.’
‘Surely that in itself would’ve created doubt in people’s minds.’
‘Why?’ said Gemma. ‘People are electrocuted. Accidents happen. And it would have looked like Noel anyway. Not Richard Cross. He wasn’t expecting Dad to turn up on the doorstep. That changed everything.’
‘What made him show up then?’ Kit asked.
‘You know that Noel did some moving for him? They got on very well and somehow Noel ended up telling him that Cross—Kreutzvalt—wanted to know what my flat looked like inside. What colours I’d used. Noel heard from Spinner that the man you left the hospital with was Richard Cross. He told Dad. Obviously that worried him enough to come after me.’
‘That gunshot in my ear,’ continued Gemma. ‘I thought I’d never hear again. It took hours for my hearing to come back.’ Now, she heard the buzzing of bees and the whispered song of wrens in the bushes around the overgrown graves. ‘It is all so extraordinary,’ she said. ‘The way it all came together. The way all the old unfinished business came round again. And our father and Arik Kreutzvalt did what they had to do.’ She shuddered. ‘It was nearly the end of both of us,’ she said. ‘I thought I was a goner.’
‘I did too,’ said Kit, ‘when Larry Hagen was standing over me with the knife. I’ve been in some sticky situations in the therapy room but nothing like that. It focused me wonderfully.’
Gemma laughed. ‘Dear Kit. You are such a therapiste!’ She was suddenly quiet. ‘I’m sure of one thing, though, Kit. No more men in hotels for this little Sydney sheila.’ She shook her head. ‘I think I’ll give men up for a while.’ She shuddered. ‘It’s going to take me some time to get over the fact that I went to bed with a murderer. And almost my murderer as well.’
They heard a shout and looked around to see the small, sturdy figure of the Ratbag running down the hill, his blue shirt untucked, his backpack bouncing up and down as he ran. Gemma stood up and waved to him. ‘Hey!’ she called. ‘Over here.’
He came up, puffing, dragging the backpack off his back, throwing it on the ground. ‘Have you got him?’ Gemma indicated the carton and he went to it and opened the four flaps of cardboard, peering in. ‘What’ll I do?’ he asked her, holding the struggling bird down with one hand.
‘What about taking him to the edge of the path over there and just holding the box up?’ she said. ‘That way he can just fly out.’
The Ratbag did as she suggested and the kestrel appeared, flapping. It fell back once into the box as if it had lost its balance, then it launched itself off the top and flew awkwardly towards an elaborate Hellenic temple style of tomb, to perch on the top of the frieze, staring down at them with its brown eye. It fluffed up all its feathers and looked around.
‘He’s all right!’ the Ratbag said. ‘He can fly.’ He rooted around in his backpack and brought out a squashed little plastic-wrapped sausage of mince meat.
A shout made them turn around again, and there was Will walking down the path towards them. He still looked terribly thin, but his eyes were clear and his gaunt face, old before its time, broke into a huge smile when he joined them.
Gemma stood up, her heart beating with love. My family, she was thinking. There’s not that many of us, but here we all are.
Will came up and hugged his mother. Then he turned to Gemma and kissed her, tall and skinny, with long, pale hands like his mother’s. Gemma held his face and looked into his eyes. ‘Will,’ she said. ‘It’s been too long.’ He nodded, hugging her tighter. He couldn’t speak, so he blew his nose and looked away.
The Ratbag was hovering, unsure as to what to do, looking from the hawk to the group of people around the grave. Then he turned to Will. ‘That’s my hawk up there,’ he said. ‘I saved him and now he can fly again.’
Kit took a stiff white envelope out of her shoulder bag. ‘Paul Lestrange dropped this in to me as Will was arriving,’ she told Gemma. ‘It’s an IOU our father made out to him. And a letter. I haven’t looked at it yet. Paul also asked us what we want done about his things.’
‘Burn them,’ said Gemma without hesitation. Kit nodded. ‘My feelings exactly. It’s the end of the story. For him. For her.’ She indicated the grave.
Will lay back in the grass, hands under his head, staring up at the sky. ‘I’ve always been afraid because of the things done by my grandfather, but I couldn’t talk to anyone about it when I was growing up. It was such a big, dirty family secret. Heroin wiped the fear out. But then it brought new fear when it wore off.’ He rolled over and sat up. ‘I just have to accept the fact that I come from a weird family,’ he said. ‘No wonder I went off the rails. But I’m doing six NA meetings a week, so hopefully I’ll be able to help the rest of you at some stage.’
He was suddenly serious again. ‘I’ve got the feeling,’ he said, ‘that I’ve only got one chance at getting clean and straight. I can’t afford to blow it. Especially after what my mother and my aunt have been through.’ Kit leaned over and kissed him as another jogger puffed past, unnoticing, his red satin short
s dark with sweat.
Kit picked up the envelope from Paul Lestrange. ‘Do you think it’s all right to open this father business right over the grave of our mother?’ she asked Gemma.
‘I think it’s okay,’ said Gemma. ‘There are large areas of human experience where the protocols haven’t been decided.’
Will threw back his head and laughed in delight. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We’re at an interesting evolutionary stage.’
Kit opened the envelope again and a piece of paper fell out. She retrieved it, glanced at it then handed it over to Gemma. It was an IOU for thirteen thousand dollars made out to Paul Lestrange and signed by their father. Gemma’s heart sank. Where the hell are we going to get thirteen thousand dollars from, she asked herself. I’m barely above water as it is. ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Our father’s left us a nasty debt to Paul Lestrange.’
‘There’s a note here, from Paul,’ said Kit. ‘Shall I read it out?’
Gemma nodded. Kit read:
Dear Kit and Gemma. Your father appointed me executor of his will and I’m writing to you to let you know that he took out a large life insurance policy as soon as he got out and that he’s named both of you as beneficiaries. I’ve checked with the life company and they say you can expect a cheque in a matter of weeks. Your father had to borrow some money from me to make up the first three monthly premiums and I’m enclosing the IOU signed by him.
Gemma’s mind was preoccupied. Thirteen thousand is a lot of money, she was thinking as Kit continued to read. It took her a few seconds to absorb what she thought she heard, and it was Will’s gasp of amazement that really brought her attention back to the words her sister was reading: ‘As you will receive five hundred thousand dollars each from the policy, I’m sure you’ll have no problem repaying me. Yours sincerely . . .’
Feeding the Demons Page 34
